Riddle Me This, Batman: Basquiat3 as a New CODEX © to Poetic Form

Previous articleNext article Free“Whate’er These Words Cannot Express”: In Memory of Michael O’Neill Michael O’Neill, Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence: New Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 352 pp. US$85.00.Mark SandyMark SandyDurham University, United Kingdom Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePublished posthumously in April 2019, the sheer range, elegance, and command of Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence testify to Michael O’Neill’s eminence as a scholar of Romanticism, as well as to his acute sensitivity to the subtleties of poetic meter, form, and meaning. Until his death on December 21, 2018, Michael O’Neill was Professor of English at Durham University, where he taught for nearly forty years. During that time he served for two terms as Head of Department and as Acting Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham.Over his life-long career at Durham, Michael’s prolific publications as a scholar and editor of Romanticism established him as a world-leading authority in the field. He published widely in numerous books, articles, and chapters on Romantic poetry, especially the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and on a vast range of eighteenth-, Victorian, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century poets. Although Michael will be remembered first and foremost for his scholarship on the poetry of Shelley (including Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life [Macmillan, 1989]), his knowledge of, and commitment to, poetry was extraordinary, ranging from Dante to the contemporary. Fittingly, the dust jacket of Michael’s majestic study of Shelley and “new relations” reproduces John Flaxman’s The Meeting with Statius that, depicting the convergence of three poets, Virgil, Statius, and Dante from the Purgatorio, speaks to Michael’s concern throughout his distinguished career with questions of poetic self-consciousness, literary achievement, dialogue, and influence. Poetic form (rhyme, meter, verse, allusion) was, for Michael, the means by which poetry was self-consciously, even self-reflexively, engaged in conversations about its past origins, present moment, and possible future reception.Accordingly, Michael’s Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence is divided broadly into three discrete but interrelated sections. The first of these focuses on the foundational aspects of Shelley’s poetic thought and poetry formed out of the “triple pillars of his cultural inheritance” (22): the classical world (particularly Plato), the Renaissance (represented by John Milton and Edmund Spenser), and Christianity (the Bible and the notion of deity). Shelley’s engagement as a poet, essayist, and translator with Plato is foundational and, according to Michael, “influenced not only [Shelley’s] thinking but also his prose style, and not only his poetic style, but his development of an original poetic prose” (28). Michael champions Shelley as an innovator of a poetic prose that shares with Plato “a reluctance simply to jettison the sensuous in favour of the idea” (31) and “delights in Plato’s idealizing,” but Shelley remains constantly “aware of what is at stake in the act of idealizing” (44). If Shelley’s immersion in Plato produces a reinvention of the prose form, then Spenser and Milton, to varying degrees, play a crucial part in assisting Shelley in “fashioning a sophisticated vision of art and experience” (45) through a re-visioning of the genres of romance, lyric, and epic. Shelley naturally swerves away, as Michael observes, from “Spenser’s Christian Platonism” but, at every turn, in The Witch of Atlas and Adonais, Shelley “persuades the reader that he has absorbed Spenser deeply into his imagination’s bloodstream” (53). With Milton in his sights in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley urges both “its readers to engage with subversive Miltonic energies” and “to adapt those energies to the humanist ideals of love, freedom, and justice advocated in the lyrical drama” (61). From Shelley’s harnessing of “Miltonic energies,” the final chapter in this section turns to Shelley’s complex views of religion and its relation to poetry. Michael resists oversimplifying the situation and does not “see Shelley as a child of Enlightenment thought, scoffing at the superstitious follies of religion” (67). To describe more accurately “Shelley’s fluidity of attitude” toward questions of faith and religion, Michael neatly proposes a new category of “believing unbelief, or unbelieving belief” (69). Michael precisely illustrates how Shelley’s poetic expressions of disbelief about religious matters, rather than giving into disillusionment, enact a “‘re-enchantment’ of the world” (70).With their focus on imaginative interactions (negative and positive) with William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats, chapters 4–12 form the second segment of Michael’s remarkable book and illuminate “new relations” between Shelley and his contemporaries. Shelley shares some imaginative sympathy with the largely antipathetic Lamb but, ultimately, finds him “a poet who is too much preoccupied with theories and nostrums” (80). Hazlitt, too, may have objected to the egotism and “self-centredness” (91) of Shelley’s poetry, along with the writings of Wordsworth, Byron, and Southey, but, as Michael deftly shows, Shelley exceeded the poetic and political vision of Hazlitt as critic and revolutionary. The virtue of the intersecting legacies of Shelley and Hazlitt rests with the way that they “transform the terms of contestatory debate in light of an imaginative drive for betterment” (92). Michael recalibrates the importance of the unseen in “Wordsworth’s poetry [which] haunts Shelley’s figurations and imaginings” (97) from “The Two Spirits: An Allegory” to the final, incomplete The Triumph of Life. If Shelley’s verse could not exorcise Wordsworth’s concern with the hidden and seemingly unimportant, it equally exhibits a “responsiveness to Coleridge’s fascination with wholeness and coherence” that, diverging from Coleridge, emphasizes “the gap between poetic utterance and non-linguistic reality” (115). In the writing of an early poem, Queen Mab, Shelley emerges as an “ironic revisionist” of Southey and then as a mature poet discovers, Michael elegantly argues, in Southey a poetic pathway to offering “comparable combinations through ‘fictions’ that allowed for pursuit and redefinition” (144). Through their fascination with the fluidity and fixity of selfhood and their poetic treatment of identity, Byron and Shelley find affinity in “an endless force of inspiration [that] materializes itself, over and over, in an enabling cage of words” (157). As with Dante, Byron and Shelley place “the poetic self at the center of a poem, not to indulge ego, but to record experience, especially experience that can be called visionary” (193). Further striking touchstones emerge between Shelley’s poetic vision and Turner’s painterly depiction of Venice as both “creators [are] fascinated by process” as they experience “a pull towards potentiality even as they keep their eye on present glories and imperfections” (217).Before turning to a coda on the legacies of A. C. Bradley’s twentieth-century views of Shelley, the third section focuses on questions of reception in the writings of nineteenth-century writers. Through the works of Thomas Beddoes, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Alfred Tennyson, and Algernon Swinburne, Michael traces the subtle continuities and discontinuities of Shelleyan modes of thought and poetic form in these later writers. Beddoes feels the allure of “Shelleyan indeterminacy” (230) and is fascinated with the “Shelleyan quest” to which he gives “his own self-divided inflections” (231). Those ghosts and their half-lives that dwell in Beddoes’s poetry Michael reads as refracted through the figure of “some lone ghost” summoned up by the narrator of Shelley’s Alastor “to render up the tale / Of what we are” (Alastor, lines 28–29). Subtly alert to the quest motif and gendering of the self in Shelley’s Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, and Prometheus Unbound, Hemans, for Michael, “is often artfully dialectical in her dealings with Shelley” (244) and sometimes, through her use of anonymized epigraph, “clandestine” in her manner of “cueing influences” (246) of Shelleyan origin. For her part, Landon’s presentation of selfhood, choice of image, rhyme, and tone is invariably distinctly and openly Shelleyan. Self-consciously and deliberately, Michael claims, Landon seeks to align herself “with a Romantic company of poets, all of whom win artistic recompense from experiential loss” (267). Tennyson, too, possesses, as Michael beautifully draws out, a “kindred readiness to subject orthodoxy to questioning, albeit of different kinds” and an “uncanny ear for Shelley’s darker tonalities” (281) that voice existential uncertainties about poetry, meaning, and life. Despite his self-confessed decadence, Swinburne’s meta-poetic mode of “self-witnessing recognition of its capacity to be” (297) is only made possible by his quietly distinctive adaptation and absorption of Shelley’s poetic techniques and thought.Thirty years before the publication of Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence, Michael’s first monograph, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Clarendon, 1989), examined in Shelley’s writing the intricate relationship between poetic thought and form. For Michael, Shelley’s poetry resists easily resolved certainties and derives from the conflict at its center its imaginative power and shape. Shelley as a poet is consciously alert to, as Michael’s perceptive readings demonstrate, the limitations of his chosen medium of language and constantly (deliberately) disclosing the fictive nature of its assumed forms. His subsequent book-length study, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Clarendon, 1997), reevaluated familiar and less familiar writings by William Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats through a critical sensitivity to the varying modes of shifting self-awareness and their importance to Romanticism’s reassessment and elevation of the status of poetry itself. The ambit of Michael’s study of poetic self-consciousness extended to how the post-Romantic inheritance of creative self-awareness played itself out in the poetry of W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, and Amy Clampitt. Vital to Michael’s nuanced analysis of the delicate operations of poetic self-consciousness are significant questions of aesthetic value, literary production, as well as those of imaginative exchange and influence.Michael’s preoccupation with dialogue and legacy, especially with the Romantic bequest and inheritance, resulted in his breathtaking study The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (Oxford, 2007), which wears the breadth and depth of its knowledge lightly and without ever sacrificing attention to the details of its readings and their wider ramifications. Michael’s study throughout exhibits masterly, measured, and original readings of a dazzling, diverse array of poets, ranging from W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, through Auden, Stephen Spender, and Stevens, to Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Geoffrey Hill, and many others. Michael’s subtle critical sensitivity to how post-Romantic poets imaginatively reconfigured, resisted, or else sought to disavow their Romantic inheritance opened up a new and capacious approach to reckon with questions of literary authority and influence that did not simply invoke Bloomian ratios. Romantic influence emerges, then, as a complex, multidirectional, imaginative traversing of Romanticism and post-Romantic poetic thought and form; an ever shifting and multiplying series of transformative (whether accepting or reactionary) encounters with Romanticism’s inheritance.Without recourse to constraining theoretical models, Michael possessed an unnerving ability to articulate the means by which poetry has the power to know itself in ways that astute readers often felt but rarely could express. Michael’s incisiveness as a literary critic was inseparable from his careful attentiveness as a textual editor. His editorial work on Shelley included collaborating with Donald H. Reiman on a volume (1997) in Garland’s The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics fair-copy series, an edition of Shelley: The Major Works for Oxford University Press (2003, with Zachary Leader), and more recently, as associate editor on the multivolume Johns Hopkins University Press edition of Shelley’s poetry, the third volume of which (published in 2012) received the 2013 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship.Michael’s editorial skills extended to being an encouraging, generous, and sympathetic editor of others. Like so many of Michael’s achievements, there is not space enough here to list all of the many editorial projects that he so skillfully executed while always exhibiting great patience and kindness to his contributors. These include Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Clarendon, 1989), the landmark Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010), and John Keats in Context (Cambridge, 2017), as well as the coedited Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell, 2008, with Charles Mahoney) and The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013, with Anthony Howe). As director and founding member of the “Romantic Dialogues and Legacies” Research Group at Durham, Michael coedited, with Mark Sandy and Sarah Wootton, several critical collections, including Venice and the Cultural Imagination: “This Strange Dream upon the Water” (Pickering & Chatto, 2012) and The Persistence of Beauty: From the Victorians to the Moderns (Pickering & Chatto, 2015). Such collaborative enterprises were indicative of Michael’s unfailing intellectual generosity, which is equally reflected in his membership of many editorial boards (including Romanticism, Romantic Circles, and The Wordsworth Circle) and serving as chair of organizations such as the Wordsworth Foundation Trust and the International Byron Society.He received many awards for his criticism and poetry, including a Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America for 2018, an Eric Gregory Award in 1983, and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 1990. Michael published five collections of poetry, the two most recent collections of which are Return of the Gift (Arc, 2018) and Crash & Burn (Arc, 2019). His first poetry collection, The Stripped Bed (Harvill, 1990) was followed by the publication of Wheel (Arc, 2008) and Gangs of Shadow (Arc, 2014). Writing of the poems collected in Gangs of Shadow, Conor Carville, in London Magazine (April/May 2015: 38) remarked, “The lyric poem’s concern to construct voices and selves is evoked here in a manner that reminds one of O’Neill’s day job as an important scholar of Romanticism.” As the comment intimates, Michael’s passion for poetry as an art was there right from his early days as an academic at Durham University, where he cofounded and edited Poetry Durham from 1982 until 1994.Michael possessed a rare critical and creative mind that could think with, and through, literature. Michael’s commitment to poetry as a literary critic and poet recognized, as did Shelley, that the poetic mode is a way of knowing and understanding the world, even if its power resides in its fragile, momentary, incandescent, illumination: “A Power / Girt round with weakness” (Adonais, lines 281–82). This sense of the power of literature comes to the fore when, in a touchingly personal poem, “Those Days,” from The Return of the Gift, Michael declares “I couldn’t think without literature.” He is thinking here about how literature, poetry in particular, is helping him through his illness and is able, at least, as he puts it, to provide him with kinds and modes of response, a series of, as the post-Romantic poet Stevens averred, necessary fictions as a means of encountering existence and that which might otherwise be unbearable. With a hint of irony, Michael’s poem goes on to question the validity of these necessary illusions or fictions, but without ever dismissing them out of hand.Such hopeful ideal aspiration pitted against guarded skepticism recalls the skeptical-idealist dynamic that shapes many of Shelley’s poems and how they are so often attuned to the ways by which “Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (Prometheus Unbound, IV, lines 573–74). Michael’s literary criticism was so wonderful at articulating this Janus-like aspect of Shelley’s poetics, but Michael as a poet, too, was alert to this interplay between the positive energies of idealism and those skeptical, negative, darker forces. A wintry January poem, “Janus,” its title alluding to the Roman god of doorways and the month named after him, does precisely that by looking in two directions at once. Catching in its diction something of Hart Crane’s “wind flaking sapphire” (“Repose of Rivers”), Michael’s “Janus” realizes this double take by attributing both a steely coolness and a brittle fragility to a sliver of silver moon in a winter’s night sky:1Scimitar in the January sky—it starts again,the moon as resurgent emblem.“Renewal,” so its tacit lunar hummight be saying with mirthless irony,“beckons.” Well, why not wax as well as wane?2… Scimitar in the frost-clear skyseeming to cut its own shape stroke by strokeuntil it hangs there, aboveus, staring down likea painting by a cold-eyed master-monsterwho has foreseen morethan we can, without flinching, bearto contemplate the thought of.Michael’s poetic diptych enacts Shelley’s observation about poetry, from A Defence of Poetry, that it “spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things” (533). Poised between playful rumination of the given and serious contemplation of the unknown, Michael’s poem (as do all new years) offers the prospect of new beginnings, renewals, fresh starts, the possibilities of new relations and friendships. But it also stares bleakly at the ends of things, of the breaking-up of communities, of the loss of connections between people, of the final severing of individual lives and the speaker’s own. The moon’s “Scimitar” makes us feel as keenly the precarious frailness of human existence as it does our incomprehensibility when confronted by individual loss.Michael, “whose light adorned the world” (to borrow from Shelley’s Alastor, line 715), has sadly passed, but his poetry, criticism, and scholarship remain constant luminaries: a critical and creative voice that will continue a conversation with readers for many ensuing years. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 50, Number 4Fall 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707041 Views: 115 © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Catalina Cariaga is often referred to as a poet because of her language-centered poetics and experimentation with poetic form. Rather than a retreat into what might seem to be a self-indulgent language game, Cariaga's is resolutely situated in social, historical, and political. Her interrogation of language and form shares with many Filipino American poets an investigation of colonized subjectivity in relation to cultural imperialism, particularly imposition of Spanish and English on Filipinos. Part of this investigation entails poets' exploration of possibilities of using colonizers' language to tell another tale (Abad 3). While Catalina Cariaga's first book of poetry, Cultural Evidence, engages similar issues, experimental poetics reveals a new phase in development of Filipino American in both thematic concerns and technical strategies, especially in use of language to subvert ways in which of racialized and gendered Other are produced through a binary scheme of representation. Like many Filipino American poets such as Gemino Abad, Michael Melo, Fatima Lim-Wilson, Jessica Hagedorn, and Virginia Cerenio, Cariaga undermines English as institutionalized instrument of colonization and as model of official language of culture to which Filipinos and Filipino Americans must conform in their process of assimilation. (1) But Cariaga also seeks to master English in a way that explores alternative strategies for using language to disrupt what Susan Howe refers to as total systemic circular knowledge (28). Employing a poetics of what has been called Language-centered or poetry (Perloff 173), Cariaga subverts naturalized representations of race, gender, class, and culture in seemingly natural, authoritative language. Rather than relying on a conventional mode of narrative or contemplation by lyric speaker to tell another tale from perspective of colonized, Cariaga explores possibilities of collage juxtaposition while developing a language-centered poetics which enables her to accomplish more than what is possible in form of conventional lyric. By insisting on confronting ways in which language is used to colonize, racialize, and commodify Other, her poetics of collage opens up poetic space to multiple voices and languages and to disjunctive histories, allowing different perspectives, utterances, and words to resonate, generate, or undermine one another. Cariaga's poems thus enact a politics of writing by foregrounding structure, materiality, and signifying process of language in a way similar to deployment of language by Language poets, who seek to make the structures of meaning in language more tangible and in that way allowing for maximum resonance for medium as Charles Bernstein asserts (114). Cariaga's experiments with language and poetic form are a salient aspect of postmodern poetry, which Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue note, distinguishes itself from modernist by its refusal to naturalize language of text. Hinton and Hogue further note in their introduction to We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics, that Postmodern poetics foregrounds text's ability to explore material and signifying possibilities of language medium. Interrogating politics of postmodern poetics, Hinton and Hogue call critical attention to relationship between avant-garde writing and dominant structures of power, of white, class, and or gender privilege (2). It is precisely these possibilities of postmodern poetics that Cariaga explores in her poetry. She participates in and contributes to contemporary postmodern feminist poetics through her search for a new poetic language and form to articulate Filipino American and Asian women's multifaceted experience in contexts of intertwining histories, cultures, and raced, gendered power relations. …

In this paper, the pattern of the poetic image structure was classified. First of all, the idea 'Position of the code' was instituted. Next, the combination of 'Position of the code' and 'Poetry pattern of the image' was considered. And, the pattern of the combination was called 'Poetic form'. 12 "Poetic forms" were found existing from the poetic image structure investigation. 2 new forms found through! consideration and it was shown that at least 14 forms exist.

In a recent comparative confrontation between the Peloponnesian war and the Polynesian war, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins asked for the agents of history: individuals? communities? the social classes? the economic structures? the social structures? Actually, for the American anthropologist, “no history without culture.” But the question is to focus on the different discursive forms which transforms the events of history in historiography, in a (referential and not fictional) story; these different (often poetic) forms of historiography shape a collective and cultural memory. The Greek case is particularly significant under that point of view as far as historiography is always situated between oral tradition and written tradition (Jack Goody), between poetic forms and forms of prose, with an important political, social, religious, and ideological impact.

We live in an age that has begun congratulating itself on being a great age for translation. This self-congratulation is premature: we live, actually, in a time when Homer and Virgil are translated into prose. That is something the great Elizabethan translators never did: attend to the words of poems and not the forms. This discussion will be an attempt to inoculate the reader against this destructive and self-defeating practice. We may think we know what 'translating' means, but perhaps 'poetic form' is a bit mysterious to us. My favourite image for poetic form is the competitions of international gymnastics. There are three distinct competitions: the parallel bars, the vaulting-horse, and the free display on a large square of carpet. Now, the athletes who work on the parallel bars simply could not do those amazing and thrilling gyrations without the bars; the bars are like the poetic conventions: not a hindrance, but a necessity for producing that particular kind of athletic magic. The vaulting-horse gives us a different kind of aerial dance, which results from a run, a trajectory, and a landing. Substituting a net for the landing-mat would make the exercise quite different: different dangers, different limits; different limits, different content. We might think that the free display on a large square of carpet is a less formal matter: it might seem to offer as much 'freedom' as 'free verse'; but the carpet with its uncrossable edge is also a condition set by someone other than the gymnast: it forms a frame of a certain size that must be sensibly filled and made use of. Now, if we were to describe a gymnastic competition to somebody who had never seen one, the very first thing that we would have to do would be to explain these rules. We would not start with 'She did two somersaults and a side twist' unless the other person already understood the circumstances; if talking to a Martian on Mars, we would have to go still further and explain the strength of our earthly gravity. I believe, then, that translators are similarly bound to give some account and preferably inside the translation itself, not in a note of the limits and conventions chosen by the maker of the original poem. I shall never forget the shock

Texts taught in a typical, contemporary academic philosophy curriculum include a wide variety of genres. While philosophers today are primarily taught to write academic articles and monographs, philosophers have historically experimented with a much broader range of literary forms, including dialogues, aphorisms, personal essays, confessions, epistles, meditations, autobiographies, and commentaries, in addition to treatises. Some Western philosophers, perhaps most famously Lucretius and Boethius, expressed their philosophical thinking in poetic form. For many philosophers, their chosen literary form is not merely one among several possible ways of clothing their thinking, but is essential to their thought. Consider Plato’s dialogues, Montaigne’s essays, Kant’s treatises, or Nietzsche’s aphorisms: in each case, the philosophy is inherently connected to the literary form and would be different if embodied in another genre. A similar diversity of literary form appears in Indian philosophical traditions, which have also included treatises, commentaries, dialogues, narratives, and poems. Much Indian Buddhist philosophy was written according to models of Sanskrit verse. Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, and Śāntideva, for example, and many other prominent Indian Buddhist philosophers, wrote some of their most important works following Sanskrit poetic forms and integrated elements of dialogue. Thus, in some sense, many Indian Buddhist authors can be considered “poet philosophers.” The poet philosophers we consider in this part, however, are poetic in a stronger sense: their philosophy is not merely articulated in verse but embodied in song and narrative, and their poetic and literary forms do important philosophical work.

Once, a well-respected professor of English, when told that I was doing some work on Robert Browning, replied, "I've always found Browning just so hokey, in that Victorian way." Unfortunately, in recent decades such dismissive attitudes toward Victorian poetry have been quite common among literary scholars (even if the honesty to admit them so openly has not), and many students of literature have had so little contact with Victorian poetry that they can muster no opinion at all. Scholars of Victorian poetry are now, however, in an excellent position to counter this dismissal and neglect. We are witnessing the beginnings of a new trend in literary criticism, one that respects both the formal structures and the social contexts of poems. Perhaps in the coming years, we will also see a blend of poetic theory with narratology. Both trends would be especially well-suited to highlight the strengths of Victorian poetry and to earn the attention of students and scholars.

This paper reexamines the first translations of Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece’ by Liang Qichao, Ma Junwu, Huang Kan and Hu Shi to highlight an essential facet of Chinese literary modernity – namely, the recourse to traditional poetic language and forms, which, though often dismissed as outdated and incapable of representing modern reality in the dominant narratives of Chinese literary history, nonetheless reflects a growing sense of urgency to find a new voice during the late Qing and early Republican periods. With considerable emphasis placed on the poetic form and narrative mode of both the original and its translations, this study facilitates a productive textual investigation into the temporal–spatial paradigm of progression and evolution of early modern Chinese poetry as well as modern Chinese literature from a historical perspective. The findings suggest that the poetic manipulations by the respective translators were in line with the nationalist discourse of the day and that their act of rewriting poetic tradition to integrate the legacy of the past into a new vision of the present established a far-reaching basis for the construction of Chinese literary modernity.

Dell Hymes's ethnopoetic project offers ways of thinking about shifts in poetic and rhetorical form in situations of colonialism and expropriation. In this essay I explore changes in poetic form among the Apache communities of the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, arguing that they are in part the result of influential theologico-linguistic agendas of the Lutheran missionaries called to the community since the late nineteenth century. I discuss this in light of the missionary work of the Uplegger family, missionaries in San Carlos for three-quarters of a century. I argue that Hymesian ethnopoetics and the Upleggers' missionary work both partake of an ethical argument about the relationship between poetry and truth extending back to the Middle Ages. A commentary to this essay by Charles L. Briggs appears later in this special issue.

The article considers the history of the poetic versions of the plot of “The Enchanted Monk” in the Russian poetic tradition. These versions were not previously subjected to a special study. In the article, the poetic versions of the plot are arranged in chronological order among the entire corpus of literary and folk texts, a brief historical commentary is provided to each text, the verse of each text is analyzed, and a picture of the history of the plot in its poetic form is presented. The methodology of the research includes the elements of the “Russian method” (quantitative assessment of verse parameters, rhythmical analysis, etc.). In certain cases, a semantic interpretation of the meter is used. The metre and rhythm of the poetic versions are considered in the historical and cultural context, against the background of the poetic tradition. The main points in the poetic history of the text are as follows: literary syllabic verse (17th century); transitional poetic and prosaic forms (18th century); the first trochaic literary imitations of a folk verse (18th century); classical iambic tetrameter (19th century); free iamb in a literary translation with a predominance of five-footed lines (20th century); four-footed amphibrach in the folk tradition (20thcentury). An attempt is made to identify the literary source of the origin of the four-footed amphibrach in folk verse: such a source was probably the Russian ballad verse at the beginning of the 19th century.

This article examines poetic phenomena—rhymes, alliteration, puns—that appear in the introspective reports of people who have taken part in a psychology experiment. We argue that these phenomena are a form of discourse poetics identified in conversational data by Sacks and subsequently discussed by Jefferson, among others. We extend earlier research, first, to identify how the organization of these introspective narratives facilitates a range of poetic and rhetorical forms more commonly associated with the study of classical literary and religious texts; and second, to provide evidence that these poetic forms are not happenstance but are pragmatic achievements.

In Dedicatory Epistle with which he prefaced first volume of his Collected Poems in 1904, A. C. Swinburne laid down law about poetic form. Law, he proclaimed, lawlessness, is natural condition of poetic life; but law must itself be poetic and not pedantic, natural and not conventional. (1) This pronouncement asserts that poets are subject to some kind of law, a striking claim to make about very poems that had shocked reading public four decades earlier by violating poetic and social taboos. But Swinburne then qualifies claim, invoking a Romantic tradition in which both law and poetry, two presumably conventional things, are alike natural. He insists paradoxically that law must bow to poetry, thing that it is supposed to govern. At very moment that he invokes law, conjuring its existence for his reader, he also commands it, setting forth strictures about what it must do or, rather, what it must be. My main goal here, in exploring this paradoxical attitude, is to consider way Swinburne's poetry and criticism together contribute to a larger nineteenth-century discourse in which poets, critics, and metrists sought to work out laws of English verse both in theory and through practice. Unlike Kirstie Blair and Jason Rudy, who align Swinburne with a somatic or physiological understanding of meter, I pursue a less materialist approach here. (2) I argue that Swinburne's implicit metrical theory relies on a concept of law that extends, for him, from poetics to politics. Though my approach is primarily formal and contextual, I claim that for Swinburne form has wider implications. More specifically, concept of law that grounds his poetic theory derives in part from politics he espoused, while also gratifying masochistic sexuality that his most recent biographer has characterized as rooted in his temperament. (3) In Swinburne scholarship, commitments and sexual investments have generally been regarded as at odds with each other. Critics often proceed either by emphasizing oppositional potentialities of his sexual politics at expense of his republicanism or--less often--by isolating republicanism from eroticism. Richard Dellamora, in his study of Swinburne's sexual politics, dismisses explicitly political, Songs before Sunrise (1871), successor to Poems and Ballads (1866), as disappointing. (4) Isobel Armstrong, responding primarily to Atalanta in Calydcm (1865) and Poems and Ballads, similarly argues that the real political centre ... is in poetry of desire, consuming, exhausting desire, which needs to be ever stimulated and ever expanded. (5) More recently, Stephanie Kuduk Weiner has turned to Songs before Sunrise in her study of Swinburne as a poet, defending book's as well as political value by arguing that its poems enact formally aesthetic that they articulate. (6) Julia F. Saville's account of Swinburne as a cosmopolitan republican stands as an exception to this tendency to cordon off commitments from eroticism, particularly in her superb reading of Les Noyades. (7) I wish to bring these aspects of his work together at level of poetic theory and form. I return to Poems and Ballads, which does not form a part of Kuduk's analysis, and to criticism Swinburne wrote in 1860s, to argue that his prosodic theory and practice are partly grounded in his politics, represented by his admiration for Giuseppe Mazzini. I trace implicit connections between political, aesthetic, and erotic in poems that experiment with some form of hexameter and in criticism in which he comments on prosodical matters. What interests me is way Swinburne's ideas about poetics, expressed in his criticism and enacted in his poetic practice, are inflected by both his political and his erotic investments. …

Questions of Possibility:Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form Willard Spiegelman Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form. David Caplan . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 165. $35.00 (cloth). The wars among rival poetic factions in the U.S. raged more fiercely a decade ago than they do now, but David Caplan's judicious, sensible, and perceptive study of poetic form is as welcome and important today as it might have been during the so-called culture wars. In this maiden speech, a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation, Caplan takes on the problems of tradition and inherited forms, and the ways in which a quite various selection of contemporary poets have handled their inheritance. Between a wise introduction that sets the terms and categories of his argument, and an equally wise conclusion ("Prosody After the Poetry Wars"), Caplan sets himself the task of examining the contemporary scene with specific reference to four traditional poetic forms: the sestina, the ghazal (a recent import to the States although long established in Islamic culture), the sonnet, and the ballad, as well as the heroic couplet (this last not so much a form as a style for other forms). The sanity of Caplan's argument and analyses is bolstered by the surprising catholicity of his taste. Rather than allying himself with the so-called "new formalists," a self-appointed band [End Page 597] of semi-reactionaries who have felt for several decades that only a return to metrical verse will signal a return to poetic essence, he picks as his main subjects for review the work of people often quite unlike one another. The first chapter ("The Age of the Sestina") has the usual suspects: Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, Rita Dove, and Donald Justice—a fairly conventional choice of sestina-writers. Then the surprises begin. "The Ghazal in America" focuses on Adrienne Rich, Jim Harrison, Agha Shahid Ali—the late Indian-Kashmiri-American poet who popularized the form during the past decade—and several younger poets whom Ali included in his 2000 anthology of the ghazal (Ravishing DisUnities): John Haag, Heather McHugh, Daniel Hall, and Carole Stone. The chapter on the sonnet wonderfully treats the experiments in this once-dismissed form by gay poets (Marilyn Hacker, Henri Cole, and Rafael Campo), and thereby proves that a conventional poetics, at the hand of a gay poet, can become a radical or transformative act. In discussing the couplet ("Why Not the Heroic Couplet?" indeed!), Caplan skirts the predictable James Merrill, focusing instead on Thom Gunn, Derek Walcott, and Derek Mahon, none of whom (interestingly and importantly) is a native American. Looking at the ballad, Caplan includes the traditional Dana Gioia, and X. J. Kennedy, a man always associated as a father figure to the new formalists, but he also considers Rosemary Waldrop and the African-Americans Dudley Randall and Marilyn Nelson, as well as the left-leaning Charles Bernstein who has always eschewed aesthetic and political conservatism as being somehow equivalent. Caplan's summary of Bernstein's own "Rivulets of the Dead Jew" epitomizes his broadmindedness: "When Bernstein uses metrical verse forms familiar to the English literary history, he generally parodies them. His most interesting poems, though, draw an oddly moving resonance from the forms they mock" (120). Imitation, in other words, is indeed a form of flattery. This book succeeds on both the local and the more general level. It is a sign of Caplan's sanity and literary acumen that he can be both lucid and provocative at once. The book has a persuasive rhythm to it—ebbing and flowing between historical and theoretical speculation on one hand, and astute close readings on the other. The author begins by re-examining, and persuasively refuting, the various claims put forth over the past fifty years (and going back still further to Williams and Pound) that try to equate poetic formalism with political repression or social irrelevancy. He says that "our current understanding of poetic forms, especially contemporary metrical verse remains inadequate" (9–10), and, although he doesn't quote it, he would agree with Wallace Stevens's famous pronouncement that "all poetry is experimental," not merely that which...

Why care about poetic form and its intricacies, other than in nostalgia for a bygone era of criticism? The purpose of this book is to refresh today this care for criticism, applying a historically aware formalist reading to poetic form in Romanticism and showing how in theory and practice Romantic writers addressed, debated, tested, and contested fundamental questions about what is at stake in the poetic forming of language. In the process, it suggests the importance of these conflicted inquiries for contemporary critical discussion and demonstrates the pleasures of attending to the complex changes of form in poetic writing. After an introductory chapter on the controversies about poetic form and formalism from the Romantic era to our own, succeeding chapters consider particular instances in Romantic poetry in which experimental agendas or unsettled traditions promote an awareness of new textual possibilities. The author shows how Blake's Poetical Sketches predicts many of the key issues of Romantic theory and practice, and how Coleridge's ambivalent engagement with simile impels him to address the very foundations of poetic form. A chapter on Wordsworth's revision of an episode in The Prelude demonstrates how a repeated reworking of form virtually characterizes the work of autobiography, and the dilemma of self-formation is also the focus of a chapter on Byron's seemingly perverse choice of the heroic couplet in The Corsair. Keats, too, is shown to wrestle with the issue of self and form at the end of his career in his personal lyrics to Fanny Browne, which subverted the formalism of the "Great Odes" of 1819, the celebrated icons of New Criticism. A final chapter describes Shelley's investment of poetic performance with social agency in two seemingly opposite but related modes—the political exhortation of The Mask of Anarchy and the intimate addresses to Jane and Edward Williams. In an afterword, the author reviews recent attacks on formalist criticism and argues for the specific value of shaped language as one of the texts in which culture is written and revised.

This paper analyses the rhetorical strategies of Aleksandr Veselovskii's 'Historical Poetics' — the most significant body of Russian literary theory before the Formalists. The paper focuses on the way in which Veselovskii negotiated the autonomy of literary studies as an academic discipline, both explicitly, in methodological texts, and implicitly, in his theories of literary evolution and poetic signification. It depicts Veselovskii's discourse as engaged in complex conceptual manoeuvres around five key boundaries — those of 'poetics', 'language', 'poetic form', 'metaphor', and 'tradition', which symbolically delimited the boundaries of literary scholarship itself.The paper relates Veselovskii's construction of particular 'dynamic models' of poetic evolution and signification with the problem of legitimating the autonomy of literary studies as an academic discipline. Although Veselovskii's priority seemed to be to ensure stable boundaries for literary studies, his model of autonomy is exposed as a complex of metaphorical re-descriptions and conceptual doublings that in performative fashion and through rhetorical play continuously both constructed and problematized the autonomous identity of literary studies.