Utopias always fail, unless they only consist of one person. Even then, though they can be perfect, they come at a cost. Utopias of One (Princeton University Press) by English professor Joshua Kotin examines how writers Henry David Thoreau; W. E. B. Du Bois; Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam; Anna Akhmatova; Wallace Stevens; Ezra Pound; and J. H. Prynne construct their own individual utopias within modernity’s attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests.
