SOURCE: Diggory, Terence. Review of Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State, by Tom Paulin. College English 55, no. 3 (March 1993): 328-33.

In the following review, Diggory compliments Paulin's reading of poetry in Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State, despite objecting to the volume's “heavy-handed” political commentary.

In keeping with current trends in literary studies more broadly, recent studies of poetry focus on the various conditions that determine or at least constrain the acts of writing or reading. Practitioners of this approach agree in rejecting the assumption, grounded in the identification of poetry and lyric, that the poetic voice is timeless, universal, transcendent—in other words, free of constraint. However, there remains considerable room for disagreement about the source of the constraints on poetic voice and about their consequences. Of the four books under review here, those of Tom Paulin and Peter Makin focus on the external constraints of society, whereas...