The Poetry of the Possible challenges the conventional image of modernism as a socially phobic formation, arguing that modernism’s abstractions and difficulties are ways of imagining unrealized powers of collective self-organization. Establishing a conceptual continuum between modernism and contemporary theorists such as Virno, Hardt, Negri, and Badiou, Joel Nickels rediscovers modernism’s attempts to document the creative potenza of the multitude.