The Heat of Beowulf

The Heat of Beowulf develops a new approach to the aesthetics of Beowulf by engaging with the work of twentieth-century poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, whose avant-garde poetics were informed by a serious encounter with the poem in the seminar of medievalist Arthur G. Brodeur. By considering Blaser's and Spicer's poetics as they were shaped by their encounter with Beowulf, the book is able to open up questions about the non-representational poetics of the poem, rebooting a mid-century approach to aesthetics on a new critical trajectory.

The book considers the poem’s aesthetics through relationship translation theory, as well as early medieval discourses of sensory-affective experience and twentieth-century phenomenology. The Heat of Beowulf reexamines the scholarship on Old English poetics from the mid-twentieth century as it intersected with post-war avant-garde poetics, and how understanding these critical histories can reshape how we read Beowulf now.

The book argues that the aesthetics of Beowulf, understood as a process of a perceptually translative, non-representational poetics, entangle vulnerable human corporeality in the non-human world, rendering perceptible what otherwise remains insensible. With implications for translation theory, ecopoetics, and the relationship of aesthetics to disability, the poem's aesthetics emerge as a kind of sensory prosthesis that deforms the human sensorium—not with the stability, solidity, and balance sometimes assigned to the poem, but with kinetic, unstable, and interruptive activity.