The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology by Nathaniel Tarn

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.