Stewart Cole is Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, USA, where he teaches courses in modern British and Irish literature, literary criticism, and the environmental humanities. He is also the author of 2 poetry collections, Questions in Bed and Soft Power.

A lucid, carefully argued and insightful reading of two of the towering figures of British poetic modernism that raises productive questions about issues rarely raised at all – most vitally about the relationship between poetics and the utopian impulse, as well as about the often conflicting and complex relationship between modernist disenchantment and utopian desire

• Introduction: Shadows of FuturityChapter One: “Ever new and ever ancient”: The Pastoral Utopias of Early YeatsChapter Two: “History is very simple”: Desire and the Meanings of Utopia in Later YeatsChapter Three: “The Good Place has not yet been”: The Pursuit of Unity in Early AudenChapter Four: “The ungarnished offended gap”: Utopia and Negative Poetics in Later AudenChapter Five: Draped in Black: Ekphrasis and the Ends of Utopia

Stewart Cole is Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, USA, where he teaches courses in modern British and Irish literature, literary criticism, and the environmental humanities. He is also the author of 2 poetry collections, Questions in Bed and Soft Power.

A lucid, carefully argued and insightful reading of two of the towering figures of British poetic modernism that raises productive questions about issues rarely raised at all – most vitally about the relationship between poetics and the utopian impulse, as well as about the often conflicting and complex relationship between modernist disenchantment and utopian desire

• Introduction: Shadows of FuturityChapter One: “Ever new and ever ancient”: The Pastoral Utopias of Early YeatsChapter Two: “History is very simple”: Desire and the Meanings of Utopia in Later YeatsChapter Three: “The Good Place has not yet been”: The Pursuit of Unity in Early AudenChapter Four: “The ungarnished offended gap”: Utopia and Negative Poetics in Later AudenChapter Five: Draped in Black: Ekphrasis and the Ends of Utopia