Paul Jaussen is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan. His research covers nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, with a particular focus on poetics and literary theory. His essays and reviews have appeared in New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, the Journal of Modern Literature, William Carlos Williams Review, Jacket2, and The Volta.

'This extraordinary book shows us exactly how the dynamics of the long poem enable the form, in Pound's phrase, to 'include history.' Jaussen develops a suite of basic concepts that make possible revelatory readings of key works, and a new understanding of modern poetry's most ambitious project.' Michael Clune, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, and author of Writing Against Time (2013) and American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 (Cambridge, 2010)

• 1. Introduction: the poetry of emergence; 2. Emergent America: Walt Whitman's enactive democracy; 3. Emergent vocabulary: Ezra Pound's translation machine; 4. Emergent history: Charles Olson's housekeeping; 5. Emergent midrash: Rachel Blau DuPlessis glosses modernism; 6. Emergent sounds: Nathanial Mackey's 'post-expectant futurity'; 7. Conclusion: emergent poetics and the digital.