Allegories of quotation: Seeing, citing and the sublime in Louis Zukofsky's 'Bottom: On Shakespeare'

In this book I argue that the American modernist poet Louis Zukofsky's neglected work Bottom: On Shakespeare is most productively read as a textbook of poetics, which indirectly addresses his own poetry through an analysis of Shakespeare's works and through the quotation of others on Shakespeare's work. Though this is the prose of a poet it is also a work of critical thinking that attends to its own writing; it analyzes as it redeploys the quotations of "others letters."; I read Bottom as an allegory of Zukofsky's poetic identity in terms of his writing practices. In doing this I perform a reading of his work that mimics his own reading of Shakespeare's, with the proviso that the concept of mimesis is read through an Adornian lens in that the language changes both the subjectivity of the writer and the "subject" of language.; Adorno's Aesthetic Theory provides the theoretical armature for this work because it posits an aesthetics that allows for philosophical concepts to inform poetic particulars in a non-predatory relation, thus preserving the autonomy of the artwork. In adapting Adorno's major claims concerning the modernist artwork to the case of Louis Zukofsky, I argue that the artwork also serves as a cipher of poetic identity at precisely threshold of quotation.; I explore the key issue of the function of quotation in modernist poetics by focusing on the possibility of a genetic, rather than mimetic, poetics of quotation, which makes it possible to probe the genetic code of an artwork by imitating that code. Quotations in Zukofsky's work provide the limit case for originality in relation to the apparent tautology of imitation, for to cite means to imitate the mechanism of citation rather than any particular citation.; The final chapters of Allegories of Quotation show how Zukofsky "cribs and drinks" from his sources, by examining his tactical maneuvers in confrontation with his source texts as part of an overall strategy which attempts to vindicate his own poetic methodology, whose mechanism can be traced, through its "inner law of form," back to his practice of quotation as an allegory of letters.