Moving beyond accounts of poetry that assert its ‘natural’ bent towards the transformative and the epiphanic, my
project challenges the great cliché: that poetry must make the ‘ordinary’ ‘extraordinary’. Against dominant
ideologies of 'poeticity' as transmutation and elevation, my aim is twofold: to articulate the problem of ‘poetizing’
the ordinary and to propose a new critical account of poetic attention that brings poetry closer to everyday life,
rather than privileged moments of consciousness. I focus on 19th- to 21st- C French poetry, but my work draws
on, and has implications for, poetry and poetic theory more broadly.
