How do poems remember What kinds of memory do poems register that factual chronological accounts of the past are oblivious to What is the self created by such practices of memory To answer these questions Uta Gosmann introduces a general theory of poetic memory a manner of thinking that eschews simpleminded notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subjects intricate relationship to a past that it cannot fully know. Gosmann explores poetic memory in the work of Sylvia Plath Susan Howe Ellen Hinsey and Louise Glck four American poets writing in a wide range of styles and discussed here for the first time together. Drawing on psychoanalysis memory studies and thinkers from Nietzsche and Benjamin to Halbwachs and Kristeva Gosmann uses these demanding poets to articulate an alternative nonempirical model of the self in poetry.