«Richard A. Nanian's study of poetic language and its energies is an original and bold attempt to conceptualize both the anatomy and history of modern poetry that has the philosophical sweep, critical sophistication, and elegant clarity of a Northrop Frye or a Kenneth Burke. Dr. Nanian's rejection of the ‘artifactual’ model of the poetic text for a dynamic one of its language acting upon the reader, coupled with his core premise of the two opposing directions of poetry culminating in the experience of the sublime at the limits of language, makes for a revisionary mapping of the landscape of Anglo-American poetry from the Romantics to the Modernists. The first and theoretical part, his innovative paradigm of poetic energies in terms of the plerosis/kenosis binary, is clearly and cogently articulated. The ensuing close readings of individual poems in support of his thesis of a shift from the plerotic Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, to the kenotic Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens, are eye-opening in their striking combination of probing insight and artful appreciation. This thoughtful, ambitious, and lucidly written study of the nature and language of poetry deserves a wide audience.» (Eugene Stelzig, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English, SUNY Geneseo)»