Poetry in a World of Things argues that the Renaissance underwent a decisive shift toward an empiricist world view, privileging objective forms of experience—as expressed in an increasing interest in the material world and its objects—over subjective, imaginative experience. Poetry registers this shift while simultaneously serving as a “complex repository” of the “partially renounced subjectivity” (3). Drawing on Adorno's modernist aesthetics, Eisendrath sees the work of art as resisting forms of closure and gesturing beyond itself. It is in ekphrasis—here employed in its classical sense as detailed description, not in its modern understanding as verbal representation of a visual representation—that the Renaissance's new interest in the world's objective materiality finds particular expression. Eisendrath makes her point in four case studies: Petrarch's discussion of the Roman ruins, book 3 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece. A coda sketches forms of female resistance to the aesthetic reification studied in the previous chapters.

These are Eisendrath's main arguments. Due to his new empiricist sense of antiquarian history, Petrarch replaces the medieval mode of the ubi sunt topos with a historicized interiority. In Spenser's Faerie Queene an old subjectivity is supplanted by a new objectivity, a stance of detachment from the things described, especially from grotesque art. Grappling with a shift from “subjective imaginative immersion to objective detachment” (77), the poem refuses to establish a stable core of meaning, remaining instead “in a state of internal conflict and irresolution, calling for our ongoing involvement” (81). Hero and Leander responds critically to a post-Augustan aesthetic of stasis and reification as embodied in the works of the fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus. Rejecting the aestheticized thingliness of late antique literature's excessively detailed descriptions and endless poetic lists, Marlowe explores poetic creativity as a self-critical, open-ended process. Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece is modernist avant la lettre, drawing on an aesthetics of fragmentation as it “presciently explores problems of objectivity that were just emerging in the late sixteenth century” (150). The coda shows female voices resisting the reification of women as images of history and depicts Don Quixote as suffering from similar anxieties.

This is an interesting book addressing some of the most important issues in Renaissance literature. Eisendrath's obvious enthusiasm for her period resonates all through the text, making for entertaining reading, and there are some impressive observations, like the one on Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, where the veins in a statue's marble evoke the veins of the person represented. There are, however, a number of points on which critics might disagree. Intended as a sensibly pragmatic move, Eisendrath's staunch refusal to define her use of the terms objectivity and subjectivity ultimately proves counterproductive. Not only does she cut herself off from the vast scholarly discussion of premodern forms of subjectivity, but she also employs the word subjectivity in different ways, ranging from something like complex interiority to a view of the world not based on observable fact. Eisendrath's commitment to Adorno frequently results in normative aesthetic judgments—such as those on post-Augustan literature—that deny the historical artifact an aesthetic value of its own, accepting it only if it conforms to the modernist principles that inform Adorno's perspective. The book's underlying historical narrative is teleological in an almost triumphalist Western manner that recent voices from postcolonial or feminist criticism would consider problematic. A more detailed discussion of early modern aesthetic theory and philosophy in general could have provided a more nuanced view of the role of the imagination in Renaissance poetics and epistemology. By using ekphrasis in the sense to be found in ancient rhetoric, Eisendrath avoids some of the aesthetic essentialism potentially inherent in paragone-style debates, but she also ignores the ways in which the traditions of ekphrastic poetry—in the sense of verbal representations of visual representations—have, since the days of Homer, themselves generated some of the interesting effects Eisendrath is prone to attribute to a supposed shift toward an early modern interest in objectivity and materiality.

These objections notwithstanding, Eisendrath convincingly demonstrates the importance, complexity, and ongoing fascination of early modern ekphrasis.