An Extended Argument in Verse

I am not qualified to review Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry. It’s not clear to me that anyone is, given Ruby’s stated goals: his book-length poem attempts to explain the history of poetry and poetics, “retracing the steps we’ve taken to get here” from “the palaces of late Bronze Age kings” to our current all-too-online moment, focusing first on classical antiquity, then on the European Middle Ages, then on French and English. The last book I read to succeed at a project this big was probably Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). It’s a high bar.