Ryan Ruby Boeken

Exploring the multifaceted role of poets throughout history, this work delves into their influence on society, technology, and aesthetics across various eras, from ancient Greece to modern Silicon Valley. The author skillfully weaves academic disciplines into a blank verse analysis, illustrating the dynamic relationship between poets, publishers, and audiences. By highlighting how poetic language anticipates societal shifts, the book positions poets as vital figures for understanding the future's impact on the present, all while maintaining an engaging and accessible narrative style.

Literary critic Ryan Ruby uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom. Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet—from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into his blank verse study of poetry, Ruby traces the always delicate dance between poets, their publishers, and their audiences, and shows how, time and time again, the social, technological, and aesthetic experiments that appear in poetic language have prefigured radical changes to the ways of life of millions of people. It is precisely to poets to whom we ought to turn to catch a glimpse, as Shelley once put it, of the “gigantic shadows futurity casts on the present.”