Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Subjectivity, Dissonance, Transcendence (Bloomsbury, 2023), Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche (2017), and The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (Bloomsbury, 2015).

• Note on TranslationsIntroduction: “That Key That You Must Always Keep on Losing”1 Knowledge, Truth, and Ignorance in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Hugo and Baudelaire)2 Saying the Ineffable: Poetry is Poetry (From the Romantics to Valéry)3 Non-knowledge, Limit, and Productive Impossibility (Bataille and Blanchot)4 “Moving forth from uncertainty all the same” (Jaccottet and Maulpoix) 5 Poetry, Community, Relation NotesBibliographyIndex

In a study that is at once thorough and highly engaging, Acquisto convincingly demonstrates how poetry has come to transform modern doubt into a creative force--an endless movement toward understanding that, in refusing certitude, is the richer for remaining open to possibility. His concluding reflections on the potential for fostering community are especially timely in this regard, in an era of informational impatience and deadlocked political discourse.