"Ross Chambers's argument is an appropriately murky one that centres on Baudelaire's awakening to 'noise' - 'alienating din, steady background hum, unruly disorder bordering on chaos but also a certain intriguing strange-ness' - as the defining characteristic of a fallen or historical world." -- -Ned Denny Times Literary Supplement "The title of Ross Chambers' brilliant work encapsulates its central paradox: it defines poetry not as music, but as noise; not as formal order, but as what cuts against it: its atmospherics." -- -Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck Vassar College "The book, moving seamlessly between close analyses of poems and broader theoretical contextualization, is a model for scholarship in the rigorous and delicate attention it pays to the texture of poems; the ease of move between singular details and universal categories; the depth and clarity of thought expressed in precise prose; deep erudition condensed into concise footnotes that keep to the essential, and the inventive receptivity toward texts that presents a new interface with one of the most canonical authors of the Western culture." -- -Claire Lyu University of Virginia
