This paper reads P.K. Page’s “After Rain” in terms of its treatment of labour and its relationship to an aesthetic experience of “beauty.” Arguing against a tendency to read the poem as depicting a Modernist crisis of subjectivity whereby the poet’s desire to sympathize with a suffering other is compromised by a poetics of depersonalization, the paper proposes we consider “After Rain” as exemplary of Page’s life-long commitment to an aesthetic philosophy that defines itself in contradistinction to the world of work. If “After Rain” embodies a crisis, that crisis is institutional rather than personal, philosophical rather than stylistic, one brought about by the destabilizing presence of a worker in the garden of art.
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