Changing Voices:
The Modern Quoting Poem

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. xx, 196 pp.

Changing Voices considers the consequences of incorporating into one’s poetry the unchanged writing of another, and argues that the great innovation of modern poetry — the modern quoting poem — can best be understood not so much as a lyric poem as dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense. Addressing questions of voice and originality, the book also looks at the movement from modernism to postmodernism (an issue that surfaces again in The Difficulties of Modernism). Ultimately, the book articulates a prosody of high modernism, and that prosody’s relation to the reader.