The ever-shifting parameters of the public and private spheres have exerted strong, though often subtle, pressures on modern life. This collection of 14 critical essays analyzes how British poetry has interacted with the public/private divide since the middle of the twentieth century. It investigates how British poets have consciously, or even self-consciously, addressed the current split between private and public spheres often taken for granted in contemporary society. In its approach to this central but contested aspect of modern life, this book suggests not only new ways of approaching a poem, but of thinking about what gives a poem its linguistic, textual, and performative singularity.