How does modern poetry from Donne to Ashbery provide occasions for rethinking the scope and limits of the literary canon? This question is not simply concerned with literature in English but addresses the problem of how texts transform the reader's experience of literature in the wake of modernity. This study shows how an experience of absence is the starting point for a reversal that occurs whenever reading transforms an engagement with the world. The eight chapters that comprise this study offer revisionary readings of key poetic works and a new way of understanding the modern canon.