Saying Yes at Lightning: Threat and the Provisional Image in Post-Romantic Poetry

Saying Yes at Lightning explores how four poets - Gerard Manley Hopkins, H. D., Osip Mandelstam, and William Carlos Williams - use imagery to confront that which is most deeply threatening to them. In showing how risky subject matter is matched by stylistic risk, the author sheds light on a previously unexplored, but quite significant, dynamic in post-romantic poetry - the pervasive use of provisional or destabilized images.