Eugene O’Neill and John Masefield: The Hounds of Heaven and Hell

This article argues that the English iambic pentameter (EIP) has other important features in addition to the five parameters identified by Hanson and Kiparsky’s (1996) parametric theory ( position number and size, orientation, prominence site and type). One of these features is that EIP contains a mixture of pausing (French) and running (Italian) lines, as determined by whether the syllable in position 4 is word-final. A study of the frequency with which the Italian line is used in the two centuries after Chaucer’s death reveals that Hoccleve and the Scots poets, Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, adhered fairly closely to Chaucer’s EIP verse design. On the other hand, several generations of English poets, Lydgate, Wyatt, Surrey and Sidney, experimented with alternative types of line that might well have developed into the canonical English long-line metre. Ultimately, however, the examples of Spenser and Shakespeare proved decisive in ensuring the victory of Chaucer’s metre. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats and Browning were among the major poets who consolidated that victory and exploited the Italian line in order to accommodate their own or their age’s choice of diction. The mixture of French and Italian lines in decasyllabic verse is one of the distinguishing features of EIP. Although other factors affect the proportions in this mixture to a small extent, they are primarily the result of individual poets’ aesthetic choice. Significantly, all the English poets after Spenser whose verse is analysed in this article have favoured a more evenly balanced mixture of French and Italian lines than the random deployment of their lexicon would have produced.

Journal Article WILFRED OWEN AND THE GEORGIANS Get access DOMINIC HIBBERD DOMINIC HIBBERD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXX, Issue 117, February 1979, Pages 28–40, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXX.117.28 Published: 01 February 1979

John Masefield's first published work was Salt-Water Ballads, a book of poems which portray the events of life at sea from the perspective of an ordinary seaman. It draws on oral tradition of folklore and practical wisdom, those kinds of poetry which might be called non-literary. The book's prevailing mood is one of romantic adventure. Meanwhile, Dauber revealed Masefield was still worried by the relationship between artistic sensibility and the physical world, but here he found a solution. Although Masefield continued to write until his death in 1967, interest centred on his early career because it shows how his pragmatic commitment to literature, designed to curb the excesses of imaginative indulgence, governed his development and because his theme is an indication of the pressures inherent in Edwardian literature.

Over a decade before he would confront the purgatorial shade of James Joyce and other revenants of his cultural and literary inheritance in the magisterial lyric sequence "Station Island" (1985), Seamus Heaney began to free himself from the contending voices of his earliest poetic masters by engaging them from a safe distance with the measured, analytic instrument of prose. He took on Wordsworth in "Feeling into Words" (1974), Hopkins in "The Fire i' the Flint" (1974), Kavanagh in "From Monaghan to the Grand Canal" (1975), and followed suit with Yeats, Mandelstam, and Lowell. There was one imposing shade, however, who seemed destined to remain "unappeased and peregrine" and who was denied a significant place in these early essays of self-definition (CPP 141). He is wholly excluded from the list of "nurturing" literary influences that Heaney mentions during his 1977 interview with Seamus Deane and is even indicted as one of the aloof modern poets that seemed "far beyond the likes of me" several years afterward (Deane 66; Randall 14). Reflecting on the formative years of his literary life in a 1988 lecture at Harvard, Heaney admits that T. S. Eliot hovered over his early work like "a kind of literary superego" rather than a source of inspiration, an "overseeing presence" that he strove to escape rather than to assimilate into his repertoire of lyric voices (FK 39). His apparent resistance to Eliot as one of the pale, unsatisfied monarchs of modernism has been for the most part accepted among scholarly circles,1 and Heaney himself contributed to this impression as recently as October 2004, when he claimed that grappling with "the large demands and costive style of the master" created in him an "inner Eliot," an authoritative and judicious voice he wielded against his earliest antagonists ("In the Light" 14). [End Page 152] But over the course of his early career, as we shall see, his "inner Eliot" became much more than a badge of literary and cultural authority. In the months before the highly anticipated publication of North in 1975, Heaney chose to remove the epigraph he had originally used to preface part I of the volume from Eliot's Little Gidding (1942), a verse to which he would repeatedly return in the following years as its personal and literary resonance for him deepened. Postcolonial scholars have tended to focus on Heaney's attention to matters of politics, regionalism, and cultural identity, leaving relatively unexplored his intellectual allegiances to major modern poets besides Joyce and Yeats. The discovery of the unpublished epigraph offers us the occasion to rethink Heaney's literary debt to Eliot, whose influence on his early work has gone unnoticed. My aim is to examine the evidence of his earliest tutelage under Eliot in the three volumes he published before 1975—Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), and Wintering Out (1972)—and then to suggest the ways in which Eliot's understanding of memory as a generative principle of love and self-renewal influenced him (both personally and poetically) as he began to experiment with the mythologies that structure part I of North. Heaney turned to Eliot at a critical moment in his career with urgent questions about the proper "use of memory"; the answers he received helped him to recreate himself as an artist, to balance political violence and artistic imagination, and to trust in memory's generative, transfiguring potential to lead the mind toward what Eliot calls "love beyond desire" (CPP 142). I Eliot was not the only influence Heaney had hoped to escape. In a 1979 interview with Robert Druce, he admits to adopting a similar strategy to brace himself against Yeats's persistent daemon. In response to the question "How do you face up to Yeats?" he exclaims: "I don't face up to him: I turn my back...

© Gareth J. Wood 2012. All rights reserved. This is a book about translation and literary influence. It takes as its subject Spain's most important contemporary novelist, Javier Marías (1951), who worked as a literary translator for a significant portion of his early career. Since then, he has maintained that translation had a crucial impact on the development of his writing style and his literary frame of reference. It examines his claims to the influence of three writers whose works he translated: Laurence Sterne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Vladimir Nabokov. It does so by engaging in close reading of his translations, examining how he meets the linguistic, syntactic, and cultural challenges they present. His prolonged engagement with their prose is then set alongside his own novels and short stories, the better to discern precisely how and in what ways his works have been shaped by their influence and through translation. This study begins by asking why Marías should have turned to translation in the cultural landscape of Spain in the 1970s and how the ideological standpoints that animated his decision affect the way he translates. His translation of Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is set alongside his pseudo-autobiographical novel Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark Back of Time), while his translation of Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial is then analysed in tandem with that produced by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Subsequent chapters examine how Browne's prose has shaped Marías's thinking on oblivion, posterity, and time. The final chapters offer an analysis of the partial translation and palimpsest of Lolita he undertook in the early 1990s and of his most ambitious novel to date, Tu rostro mañana (Your Face Tomorrow), as a work in which characterization is underpinned by both literary allusion and the hydridization of works Marías has translated.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was one of the most influential authors of the nineteenth century. His satirical essays and perceptive historical biographies caused him to be regarded for much of the Victorian period as a literary genius and eminent social philosopher. These volumes, first published in 1882, form the first part of Carlyle's official biography, describing his early life and literary work in Scotland. Carlyle's early career was spent as a teacher and part-time writer before his move to London in 1834. Written by Carlyle's close friend James Anthony Froude (1818–1894), this candid and controversial biography describes in vivid detail Carlyle's early literary influences and the sense of isolation he felt during his frustrating years as a schoolmaster. This revealing work broke traditional Victorian biographical conventions, and is considered a classic for its critical analysis of Carlyle's actions and character. Volume 1 covers the years 1795–1827.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was one of the most influential authors of the nineteenth century. His satirical essays and perceptive historical biographies caused him to be regarded for much of the Victorian period as a literary genius and eminent social philosopher. These volumes, first published in 1882, form the first part of Carlyle's official biography, describing his early life and literary work in Scotland. Carlyle's early career was spent as a teacher and part-time writer before his move to London in 1834. Written by Carlyle's close friend James Anthony Froude (1818–1894), this candid and controversial biography describes in vivid detail Carlyle's early literary influences and the sense of isolation he felt during his frustrating years as a schoolmaster. This revealing work broke traditional Victorian biographical conventions, and is considered a classic for its critical analysis of Carlyle's actions and character. Volume 2 covers the years 1828–1834.

Experience taught William Blake that Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy. His brilliant achievements as a poet, painter, and engraver brought him public notice, but little income. William Blake in the Desolate Market records how Blake, the most original of all the major English poets, earned his living. G.E. Bentley Jr, the dean of Blake scholars, details the poet's occupations as a commercial engraver, print-seller, teacher, copperplate printer, painter, publisher, and vendor of his own books. In his early career as a commercial engraver, Blake was modestly prosperous, but thereafter his fortunes declined. For his most ambitious commercial designs, he made hundreds of folio designs and scores of engravings, but was paid scarcely more than twenty pounds for two or three years' work. His invention of illuminated printing lost money, and many of his greatest works, such as Jerusalem, were left unsold at his death. He came to believe that his business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes. William Blake in the Desolate Market is an investigation of Blake's labours to support himself by his arts. The changing prices of his works, his costs and receipts, as well as his patrons and employers are expertly gathered and displayed to show the material side of the artistic career in Britain's Romantic period.

^-HE PRESENT DAY REEVALUATION of Richard Wrights' importance to the j black literary tradition in particular and American literature in general continues apace. After being relegated in the 1950s and 1960s by Baldwin and Ellison to the trashbin of because of his tendencies, Wright now emerges as the seminal figure in modern black fiction. Workshops treat his literary influence; seminars feature his works; critics explore his fiction for archetypal symbolism. But his essential importance for our time emerges not so much out of the literary qualities of his work as significant as they may be as out of the tendencies which these literary qualities act out in symbolic form. More precisely, his essential importance emerges out of his literary identification with a specific sociological vision of the life and destiny of black people in particular and human kind in general, a vision with which he consciously identified himself in his early literary career and from which he never strayed throughout his later fiction and nonfiction.' What I wish to do in this essay, then, is to examine this vision interpretatively as a philosophy, as a historical trend in American culture, and as a personal and ideological commitment forming the thematic context and center of Wright's key works. In the process it is hoped that the reader will form some insight into what, I believe, is the philosophical basis of the key movement emerging in the contemporary black struggle. This sociological vision is the great force of human history and the primary shaper of human destiny. For want of better terms I shall call this vision social humanism and its operation as ideology and as practice the Radical Tradition.2 Radicalism usually means to the layman any eccentric or extreme opposition to the status quo whether from the right or from the left. This is an incorrect definition. Denotatively, radical means root, from the Greek word radix. Connotatively, it refers to leftist doctrines in political throught not right wing ones. However, in order to define the Radical Tradition correctly and more conceptually, it is necessary to present a brief description of the comprehensive vision of humanity and society lying behind the Tradition, a vision which the Tradition expresses in specific theories and ideas (ideology) and in down-to-earth acts and programs growing directly out of those ideas (praxis). This Tradition, social humanism, has been expressed in many

Reviewed by: The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance by James Smethurst John Lowney James Smethurst . The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. 264 pp. $65.00 cloth/$26.95 paper. James Smethurst's The African American Roots of Modernism is an impressively thorough and provocative account of the impact of African American literature on modernism in the United States. While previous scholarship has addressed the [End Page 258] importance of African American culture, and especially language and music, on the development of modernism, this book emphasizes the influence of African American writers on the understanding of modernity in the U. S. Smethurst identifies "the African American roots of modernism" with the establishment of the Jim Crow system of segregation, beginning with the "separate but equal" system of the South and continuing with the segregation of urban space throughout the U. S. African American artists and intellectuals who wrote between Reconstruction and the New Negro Renaissance not only conceptualized the "sort of fragmented subjectivity and urban alienation that became a hallmark of modernism in the United States," they also were "among the very first to imagine, represent, and promote a U. S. artistic bohemia linked to an 'American' new literature" that was distinctively interracial (215). Although not as comprehensive as Smethurst's magnificent The Black Arts Movement (2005), The African American Roots of Modernism is perhaps more likely to transform perceptions of African American literary history. The chapters of this book are organized thematically, but they also follow a chronological trajectory of two "waves" of African American writers. The first group includes Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, and Booker T. Washington, who grew up after emancipation but became active as writers as Jim Crow superseded the ideals of Reconstruction in the 1890s. The second features James Weldon Johnson, Fenton Johnson, and William Stanley Braithwaite, whose early literary careers coincide with the extension of Jim Crow segregation in northern cities in the 1900s and 1910s. The first chapter of The African American Roots of Modernism examines constructions of African American dualism that responded to the intensification of Jim Crow segregation by the turn of the century. This chapter incisively explains how concepts of dualism articulated in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Washington's Up from Slavery, James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Chesnutt's conjure stories, and the poetry of Dunbar and Fenton Johnson not only respond specifically to the political and cultural questions of the Jim Crow U. S., but also have a lasting resonance in U. S. modernism. While Du Bois's concepts of "double consciousness" and "the veil" are the best-known figures for African American dualism, Smethurst emphasizes the dialogue about black subjectivity and culture in which they emerged, the dialogue compelled by the Jim Crow "dual status" of African Americans as "citizens and subcitizens" (63). He furthermore argues for the greater literary influence of Dunbar's concept of "the mask," which is comparable to the veil but is more assertive in showing "the act of concealment and its coerced motivation, underpinning militant and historically pointed social criticism" (34). Dunbar's influence as a poet and novelist is paramount throughout The African American Roots of Modernism. His underappreciated importance is also evident in the second chapter, which documents how the trope of the black Civil War soldier evolved as a figure of "black modernity in which African American citizenship would be a key constituent of the new reconstructed nation" (19). With the development of the Jim Crow system, the figure of the black Civil War veteran becomes one of betrayal, of regret, of melancholy, or of "an existential validation of African American humanity adrift in the fogs of an American political limbo" (20), a figure comparable to subsequent African American literary portrayals of World War I, World War II, and Vietnam War veterans. The next two chapters address the literary and cultural implications of the Jim Crow system in urban centers, especially Northern cities such as Chicago and New York. The chapter on the early...

This article argues that quantitative verse can be no more than an intellectual exercise in English because of the language’s strong dynamic accent and tendency towards stress-timing. The case focuses on Tennyson’s experiment entitled ‘Hendecasyllabics’, which he described as being ‘in a metre of Catullus’. The article offers a detailed comparison of the supra-segmental features of Tennyson’s poem and its model and concludes that the English poem lacks an essential component of the Latin metre: a variable relationship between ictus and accent. As a result, Tennyson unwittingly composed lines with a regular accentual configuration, one that English poets had been studiously avoiding for 500 years. In contrast, poets of the Southern Romance languages have cultivated this type of line assiduously, and the article pursues the historical reasons for the divergence. It concludes that the difference is almost entirely due to individual aesthetic choices, and that this line structure, known as the endecasílabo melódico, is a viable option as a verse design for English poets.

‘‘Paths of Long Study’’: Reading Chaucer and Christine de Pizan in Tandem Theresa Coletti University of Maryland Consider the following. Thomas Hoccleve translated Christine de Pizan’s L’Epistre au dieu d’Amours into Middle English as the Letter of Cupid, a poem that invoked Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary authority and circulated alongside his courtly writings in important fifteenthcentury anthologies such as Bodleian Library MSS Fairfax 16 and Tanner 346. Despite its clear debt to Christine’s poem, Hoccleve’s Letter found its way into the Chaucer apocrypha and subsequently appeared in Renaissance editions of the poet’s collected works.1 The triangulation of texts and writers illustrated by the case of the Epistre and the Letter of Cupid instances a pattern that elsewhere marks the relationship of ChauEarlier versions of this essay were presented at the Biennial Conference of the New Chaucer Society, University of Colorada, Boulder; the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland; the University of Pennsylvania; and the University of Michigan. I am grateful to my interlocutors at all these venues for their helpful commentary. I also want to thank Anne Coldiron, Richard Emmerson, Lynn Staley, and Sarah Stanbury for their suggestions and encouragement and Frank Grady for astute editorial advice. 1 For editions of the two poems, see Poems of Cupid, God of Love, ed. and trans. Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990). An early discussion by J. A. Burrow treats Hoccleve’s Letter solely in terms of homage to Chaucer and The Legend of Good Women, but a more recent analysis corrects the prior neglect of Hoccleve’s source text. See ‘‘Hoccleve and Chaucer,’’ in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 54–55; and ‘‘Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets,’’ in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 36. For detailed considerations of this triangle of authors, see Roger Ellis, ‘‘Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Hoccleve: The Letter of Cupid,’’ in Essays on Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Catherine Batt (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 29–54; and Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 45–75. PAGE 1 1 ................. 16094$ $CH1 11-01-10 14:03:24 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER cer and Christine de Pizan in late medieval England. Two important texts of the Chaucer apocrypha, the anonymous Assembly of Ladies and The Flower and the Leaf, exhibit thematic and narrative features that point to the influence of Christine de Pizan’s Dit de la Rose and Livre de la Cité des Dames.2 A shared commitment to promoting the good wife’s prudent counsel produces complex textual connections between Chaucer ’s Tale of Melibee, Philippe de Mézières’s Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, and Christine’s Livre des Trois Vertus.3 In 1526 Richard Pynson decisively linked the woman writer and the English laureate: his edition of The Boke of Fame, made by Geffray Chaucer: with Dyuers other of his Workes included in that diversity Anthony Woodville’s fifteenthcentury translation of Christine de Pizan’s Proverbes moraulx. The texts and careers of Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan crisscross each other with dizzying complexity. Although the woman writer holds a place in the reigning critical narrative of Chaucer’s relationships to his literary influences and his contemporaries, she has yet to lay claim to the prominent position in it that is warranted, I contend, by her extensive rhetorical, historical, and cultural affiliations with the English poet.4 This essay sketches a provisional map of those affiliations. 2 Jane Chance, ‘‘Christine de Pizan as Literary Mother: Woman’s Authority and Subjectivity in ‘The Floure and the Leafe’ and ‘The Assembly of Ladies,’’’ in The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmerman and Dina De Rentiis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 245–59. 3 See Carolyn P. Collette, ‘‘Chaucer and the French Tradition Revisited: Philippe de Mézières and the Good...

Martial presents a critical problem. On the one hand, there was his undeniable popularity and literary influence on European literature from the Renaissance to at least the end of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, there is the obvious embarrassment he presents to modern literary historians.The two viewpoints are easily contrasted. Pliny the Younger in the famous letter written about 102 had expressed doubts about Martial's literary survival, but gave him generous credit for his talent, sharp wit, candour, and mordancy. (Erat homo ingeniosus acutus acer, et qui plurimum inscribendo et satis haberet etfellis, nec candoris minus, Ep.3.21.1.) Nevertheless Martial's work survived the wreck of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages handsomely, and with the Renaissance, he came into his own as a poet. Angelo Poliziano described him asingeniosissimus, ‘very talented’, andargutissimus, ‘clever’ (Miscellan. 6); such judgements were echoed by Jovianus Pontanus (De sermone3.18) and Julius Caesar Scaliger, who claimed that many of his epigrams weredivina, praising theirsermonis castitas, ‘purity of speech’ (Poet.3.126).Festivissimus, ‘most witty’, andlepidissimus, ‘charming’, were the adjectives used by Adrianus Turnebus (Advers. 8.4; 13.19). Only a few critics, such as the censorious Andrea Navigero and Raffaele Maffei (Volaterranus), objected to him on moral grounds. His reception among English poets was equally enthusiastic. Sir John Harington stated firmly ‘that of all poems, the Epigram is the pleasantest, and of all that write epigram, Martial is counted the wittiest.’

The first detailed introduction to the entirety of Seamus Heaney’s work This study will enable readers to gain clearer understanding of the life and major works of Seamus Heaney. It considers literary influences on Heaney, ranging from English poets such as Wordsworth, Hughes, and Auden to Irish poets such as Kavanagh and Yeats to world poets such as Virgil and Dante. It shows how Heaney was closely attuned to poetry's impact on daily life and current events even as he articulated a convincing apologia for poetry's own life and integrity. Discussing Heaney's deep immersion in Irish Catholicism, this book demonstrates how faith influenced his belief system, poetry and politics. Finally, it also considers how deeply Heaney's artistic endeavours were intertwined with politics in Northern Ireland, especially through his embrace of constitutional nationalism but rejection of physical force republicanism. Key Features Includes sections on biography, historical, cultural and political contexts, poetry and other genres, as well as a concluding section on primary works and secondary criticism Pays special attention to the marriage of form and content in the poetry and how they work together to express subtle shades of meaning Offers close readings of Heaney's canonical poems throughout his career, including the early seminal poems such as Digging, the ‘bog poems’, and his many elegies, such as Casualty, Station Island, and Clearances Draws on drafts of the poems and prose at the Heaney archives at Emory University and the National Library of Ireland

In this revisionary study of Dryden's thought, David Haley argues that Dryden was the first English poet after Shakespeare to engage in historical reflection upon his own culture. Addressing an audience for whom literature was bound up with religion and politics, Dryden exercised the moral integrity of a public poet and brought home to his readers the meaning of their historical experience. Haley has made an original synthesis of literary and cultural history, examining Dryden's works before Absalom and Achitophel and showing that throughout this period the Great Rebellion remained the matrix of Dryden's thought. Cromwell, who had inspired the regicides but then abolished the Commonwealth, was the one man able to control the army, and he became Dryden's model of authority. Cromwell's death, however, unleashed republican radicals who threatened to bring in tyranny by the people. At the Restoration, Dryden looked to Charles II and his brother to prove that their authority was no less providential and effective than Cromwell's had been. Dryden's religious and literary opinions evolved likewise out of his tumultuous early career. Haley finds that as late as 1682, Dryden, a Puritan who had yet to convert to Catholicism, failed to see that the radical freedom of the republicans was cousin to the freedom of thought he always championed against spiritual tyranny. Dryden's belief in private judgment drove him finally to reject the most subtle tyrant of all, the Restoration Church of England. In similar fashion, Dryden wrestled with the problem of freedom in his heroic plays, whose subjectivity reflects the morally irresponsible imagination. By 1680, the poet had grown alarmed at a moral relativism that promised, like republicanism, to lead to anarchy, and he took refuge in satire.