The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet's use of the first-person plural voice--poetry's "we." Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying "I," "we" has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry--the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering "we" from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. She also takes a historical perspective, following Auden's interest in the full range of "the human pluralities" in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Costello offers new readings as she tracks his changing approach to voice in democracy. Examples from many other poets--including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens--arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called "the meaning of being numerous." Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, The Plural of Us shows how poetry raises vital questions--literary and social--about how we speak of our togetherness.

About the Author
Bonnie Costello is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and professor of English at Boston University. Her many books include Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry, and Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World. She is general editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, and coeditor of Auden at Work.

Reviews
"Winner of the 2017 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism, Robert Penn Warren Center and Western Kentucky University"
"As Bonnie Costello shows in her deft, knowledgable and consistently interesting study, Auden was drawn all his writing life to meditate just such questions, and to write poems with, as she puts it, 'a clear civil motive.'"---Seamus Perry, London Review of Books
"Although Bonnie Costello's critical monographs have been few and far between, they always prove to be of lasting stature, invariably securing a firm position within English-language literary criticism."---Grzegorz Czemiel, Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature
"I am confident that Costello's statement of pronouns' referential ambiguity and elasticity accompanied with her relentless effort to delimit the boundaries of their references is of a great informative value, but it also provides moral support. It is so because the book will keep every critic's head upright in all those moments when they feel they are drowning in uncertainty, confusion and despair about the poets' "us" and "them"."---Ladislav Vit, Svet Literatury



Book Information
ISBN 9780691172811
Author Bonnie Costello
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 595g