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.