V. Joshua Adams is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisville, USA, as well as being a published poet, translator and critic.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Emily Dickinson’s “It”: Privacy and Non-Conceptual Content2. T.S. Eliot and Other Minds 3. Impersonality as Anti-Philosophy in Monsieur Teste 4. Elizabeth Bishop, Dramatic Monologue, and the Art of Impersonating Your Self 5. No Puzzle: The Self in James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation” ConclusionBibliography Index

What if one’s experience were merely personal––unshared, incoherent, and sealed off from meaningful engagements with things? Joshua Adams shows how major modernist poets have responded to this all too natural skeptical fear by producing shareable, intense animations of experience, thus achieving poetry in the service of human life.

V. Joshua Adams is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisville, USA, as well as being a published poet, translator and critic.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Emily Dickinson’s “It”: Privacy and Non-Conceptual Content2. T.S. Eliot and Other Minds 3. Impersonality as Anti-Philosophy in Monsieur Teste 4. Elizabeth Bishop, Dramatic Monologue, and the Art of Impersonating Your Self 5. No Puzzle: The Self in James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation” ConclusionBibliography Index

What if one’s experience were merely personal––unshared, incoherent, and sealed off from meaningful engagements with things? Joshua Adams shows how major modernist poets have responded to this all too natural skeptical fear by producing shareable, intense animations of experience, thus achieving poetry in the service of human life.

V. Joshua Adams is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisville, USA, as well as being a published poet, translator and critic.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Emily Dickinson’s “It”: Privacy and Non-Conceptual Content2. T.S. Eliot and Other Minds 3. Impersonality as Anti-Philosophy in Monsieur Teste 4. Elizabeth Bishop, Dramatic Monologue, and the Art of Impersonating Your Self 5. No Puzzle: The Self in James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation” ConclusionBibliography Index

What if one’s experience were merely personal––unshared, incoherent, and sealed off from meaningful engagements with things? Joshua Adams shows how major modernist poets have responded to this all too natural skeptical fear by producing shareable, intense animations of experience, thus achieving poetry in the service of human life.