Taking Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as its primary subjects, "Surface Tension" reveals how these later Victorian poets repeatedly imagine the aesthetic moment-charged, variegated, intensely focused-as capable of birthing a new, and newly redemptive, culture. Turning to contemporary experimental poets and theorists of poetry, such as Andrew Joron, Lisa Robertson, Christopher Nealon, and Joan Retallack, it goes...