“[Minor poets are poets] who may have a strong personal appeal to certain readers. . . This poet may not be very important, you should say defiantly, but his work is good for me.” –T. S. Eliot

This roundtable will consider the place of minor poets in our scholarly biographies and critical practice. We invite discussants from a variety of methodological approaches to present a 5-to-7-minute flash talk on a minor poet of their choosing. With “minor poets,” we cast a wide net: we would be delighted to include, among others, poets who have been traditionally considered minor but hover on the cusp of majorness (Anne Southwell, Richard Barnfield); major playwrights who nonetheless strike us as minor poets (Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton); and poets overshadowed by their more renowned writerly relatives (Jane Cavendish, Eleanor Davies, Robert Sidney). 

Using these intimate studies of individual poets as a starting point, we will devote the rest of our roundtable to meditating on what their examples may teach us about minor poetry more generally. What makes a minor poet minor? Is it a question of form (sonnet, epyllion, verse epistle) as much as canonicity? Does the work of your minor poet anticipate minorness or resist it? A minor poet is not necessarily a minoritized poet (à la Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature”): what dynamics of gender, class, race, religion, nationality, or language are involved in poetic minorness? How do media forms  (print, manuscript, digital) shape the creation and reception of minor poets? What might it mean to read a minor poet like a major one? Is there virtue in preserving a poet’s minorness–in acknowledging their value without canonizing them? 

Please send 200-word abstracts to Margaux Delaney (mrd239@cornell.edu) and Arya Sureshbabu (aryasureshbabu@berkeley.edu) by July 1st.