Matthew Kilbane is the Glynn Family Honors Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (2024) and editor of the forthcoming collection, Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures (2025).
Matthew Kilbane
Contributions
Plastic Paris
Despite its speaker’s early resolution to “go slowly,” Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (1919), an exuberantly frenetic work, rarely lets up.[2] There is one moment, however, just after Mirrlees evokes the Russian Revolution in the dreamt specter of “giant sinister mujik,” when this noisy poem draws to a temporary calm and reflects, or so it seems, on the limits of art (Mirrlees, Paris, 15):