A Post-Apocalyptic Search for an Elusive Poem in ‘What We Can Know’
On one of these archipelagoes, a literary scholar named Thomas Metcalf searches through historical archives for a copy of a legendary poem, composed by a 20th-century poet, Francis Blundy, honoring his wife, Vivien. For reasons never made entirely clear, the poem—a 15-sonnet sequence—becomes a wildly popular staple of early 21st-century culture.