Alfred Lord Research Articles

A Comparative Study of Baghdad as a Histo-Cultural Symbol in Salah Al-Hamdani's "Baghdad, My Love" and Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Recollections of Arabian Nights"

This study examines the disparate literary representations of Baghdad by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) and Salah al-Hamdani (1951–). The romanticized and wistful longing for a more exotic and daring Baghdad of Tennyson's "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" is presented. As an illustration of a deep love for its people, al-Hamdani's "Baghdad, Mon Amour" provides a close-up look into the city's stormy past. Al-Hamdani uses powerful imagery and moving language to capture Baghdad's resiliency and eternal soul. The poetry of Hamdani and Lord Tennyson are scrutinized and contrasted in this study using an eclectic approach combining Feminism and Orientalism analysis. In order to capture the poets' literary traditions and lyrical depictions of Baghdad, two poems were chosen. The analysis demonstrates how poetry may engage with a city's complicated character and history, underscoring Baghdad's ongoing value as a literary inspiration. The investigation comes to the conclusion that, albeit using different approaches, Tennyson and al-Hamdani both successfully convey Baghdad's significance as a historical and cultural metropolis. Al-Hamdani takes a reality-based stance, functioning as an observer, whereas Tennyson highlights the value of Baghdad by incorporating its history and culture.

The Representation of the Self in Alfred Lord Tennyson's Poetry

Literary investigation of selfhood has long reflected human identity and introspection. Alfred Lord Tennyson's self-portraits are examined in this article. Tennyson's introspective lyrics illuminated Victorian consciousness during immense social and intellectual change. This article examines Tennyson's complex self-representation in selected poems. The essay places Tennyson's poetry in the context of Victorian literature and ideas, stressing selfhood's changing roles. It examines Tennyson's introspective study of emotions, wants, doubts, and fears. According to Tennyson's poems, the self's relationship to nature, society, and history is examined. A thematic analysis of seclusion, nostalgia, and existential pondering illuminates Tennyson's interest in the self's place in the ever-changing universe. It explores Tennyson's approach to memory and identity, showing how his poetic personas traverse the complex relationship between past and present identities. We conclude with Tennyson's poetics of change, where the self transforms and renews in the face of life's obstacles and uncertainties. This article illuminates Tennyson's literary language and influences on Victorian selfhood through attentive readings and critical analysis. It shows how Tennyson's verses reflect the Victorian self's complexity, inconsistencies, and existential aspirations; they resonate beyond time and invite readers to consider their identities in the ever-changing tapestry of human experience.

Falling Knights: Sir Gawain in Pre and Post Malory Arthurian Tradition

The present study traces the development of Sir Gawain’s traits in the Arthurian legend through an analysis of Arthurian literature in early medieval works, in transition, and in modern cycle. It aims to show what makes Sir Gawain a multiple character and how his plastic character has appealed to the literary, political, and social taste of the time of his creation and recreation. The focus will be upon the roles that the new characteristics of Sir Gawain should fulfil and the reasons which stand behind this transition in his character.The study examines the representation of Sir Gawain as a heroic knight in mainly three texts from the medieval and modern English Arthurian tradition: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae Sir Thomas Malory’s De Morte Arthur, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Some references are made to other contemporary texts. These texts range from literary to history, providing a broad overview of the many ways in which history and romance approaches the question of the roles of knighthood and chivalry through the figure of Sir Gawain.By exploring these narratives in their historical and social contexts, the present study explains why Sir Gawain maintains certain characteristics across a particularly eventful period in English history, as well as why certain characteristics change drastically. It will also offer new insights about public perception of medieval notions of knighthood and chivalry.All translated quotations from Historia Regum Britanniae are taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of Kings of Britain, translated by Sebastian Evans (London: Dent, 1963). All Latin quotations from Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British are taken fromWace, Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, edited by Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002). All quotations from the Arthurian Section of Layamon’s Brut are taken from Layamon, Layamon’s Arthur: the Arthurian Section of Layamon’s Brut, edited by W.R.J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001). All quotations from Idylls of the King are taken from Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the king, edited by J. M. Gray (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983).

DECONSTRUCTION OF DEATH IN ALFRED LORD TENNYSON’S IN MEMORIAM

This study discusses the deconstruction of death in “In Memoriam” written by Alfred Lord Tennyson. This study tries to challenge the centralized meaning of the book of poetry “In Memoriam”, death is a scary experience for human. The author uses the deconstruction theory developed by Derrida. This deconstruction theory tries to replace the centralized-meaning contained in a literary work. There are three stages to apply the theory of deconstruction in this research. The stages are the reconstruction stage, the deconstruction stage, and the reinscription stage. The method used in this research is a qualitative method. The data that has been found comes from quotation in the poetry book "In Memoriam". The result of the deconstruction reading is the discovery of "another meaning", the author finds death is the beginning of immortality. This "another meaning" succeeded in refuting the position of centralized meaning in "In Memoriam".

The Lotos-Eaters: A Study in the Perspective of Victorian Society

This paper illustrates and essays the uncertainty of the time of Victorian era as presented by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem ‘’the lotus-eaters’’ the researcher will decipher the main components and characteristics of life in then Victorian period like Victorian consciousness, advancement of science, lack of responsibility, fragile concept of faith and the treatment of nature .The arena which Tennyson portrayed in his poem is brimful of uncertainty, gullibility and unpredictability- albeit scholastically and with a with an astute pen of artist pictured in the poem. In addition, the despondency vested in the heart of people of the time. Moreover, the covetous desire of withdrawal from the mayhem and chaos of world either to realm of death or, more often, to an ideal dream. Subtlety, the paper will elucidate the contrast of lethargic and surreal state of mariners with the Victorian people as presented in poem.

How Wild Can It Be?

How Wild Can It Be?

“… Use and Name and Fame”: Happiness and Utility in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Merlin and Vivien

"“… Use and Name and Fame”: Happiness and Utility in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Merlin and Vivien." ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 35(2), pp. 128–129

Stylistics analysis of "The charge of the light brigade" by Alfred lord Tennyson

Stylistics relative to interpreting literature shows how an author created the literary piece. It identifies the ways a writer chooses the language in weaving the text. Further, it works on the premise that without language, there can be no literature. The stylistics analysis of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” provided a deeper understanding of the specific messages of the poem and broader knowledge of the language in general. It identified the usage patterns used by Alfred Lord Tennyson in writing the poem which resulted to a more competent appreciation of the literary work. The analysis revealed how cleverly he weaved each line on the poem that changing the arrangement would ruin the beauty of the poem.

Church and state in the nineteenth century and the revival of Thomas Becket

ABSTRACT The legend of Thomas Becket was recovered in the nineteenth century in the context of debates after the Oxford Movement concerning the relation between Church and State. In the literature of the period Becket was, accordingly, either the saint or the villain. He featured largely in Robert Southey’s Book of the Church (1824) and in numerous novels and plays, including works by the High Churchman J.H. Neale, and the Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson. A hagiographical ‘biography’ by Robert Hugh Benson brings Becket into the twentieth century long before T. S. Eliot’s celebrated play.

The Psalmic Oral Formula Revisited: A Cognitive-Performative Approach

Abstract In the wake of Milman Parry’s and Alfred Lord’s groundbreaking discovery of oral composition in Homeric epics, biblical scholars analyzed the formulaic language of the biblical Psalms with a view toward establishing a similar compositional function. This approach met with little success. Among the many recent refinements to the Oral-Formulaic theory is the distinction between oral composition and oral conception, a distinction which allows for identifying oral features of a “text” which do not necessarily reflect composition in performance. The goal of this article is two-fold. First this article proposes a new model for identifying oral formulas based on the theory of prototypical categorization developed within the field of cognitive sciences, particularly cognitive linguistics. Second, this article argues that the psalmic oral formulas are best understood as linguistic registers which evoke a performance arena, a feature of orally derived literature described most extensively by John Miles Foley.

Homer by Barbara Graziosi

Reviewed by: Homer by Barbara Graziosi Bruce Whiteman Barbara Graziosi. Homer. Oxford University Press, 2016. No one knows precisely when or even if Homer lived, nor when exactly the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed, nor if the same poet wrote both epic poems. An old joke among classicists has it that Homer demonstrably did not write the poems, that it was some other guy named Homer. Since Friedrich August Wolf ’s Prolegomena ad Homerum of 1795, and with the examination during the early twentieth century of the oral composition of epic poems in eastern Europe by Milman Parry and Alfred Lord, many scholars have come to believe that the Homeric texts are conglomerations of stories by many “writers” or story-tellers, and that “Homer” is just a convenience for publishers, since a name has to go on the almost infinite number of editions and [End Page 33] translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey that have appeared since the Greek text was first published in 1488 in Florence. There is rough agreement that the poems date from the late eighth or early seventh century BCE; by the classical period they were already the central texts of Greek culture and were being studied assiduously by textual scholars and philologists, not to mention schoolboys. Their influence on western literature has been profound and continues. Homer Simpson is not called Homer Simpson for no reason. Like editions of the poems, the literature on Homer is also immense. The vocabulary, dialect, and style of the poems have been extensively analyzed. Heinrich Schliemann, famously taking the poems as truth rather than fiction, discovered the remains of Troy in present-day Turkey and revolutionized how we read Homer. Victor Bérard, more contentiously, sailed around the Aegean and Adriatic Seas in an attempt to determine the exact locations of all of Odysseus’s adventures. Scholars continue to write dissertations on Homer (over a hundred in English during the last decade alone), and they and others write both specialized studies and books for the general reader. Like the literature on Dante and Shakespeare, the Homeric literature is so vast that it would be the work of several lifetimes to read all of it. Barbara Graziosi, who has a PhD from Cambridge and is a professor of Classics at Durham University in the north of England, has added a brief and useful book to the Homeric shelf in her Homer, a book that could easily fit into Oxford University Press’s growing “Very Short Introduction” series, and perhaps will at a later date. In four introductory chapters, Graziosi genially explores the Homeric Question (Analysts, who see the poems as a quilt of stories by different hands and even from different eras, in one corner, Unitarians, arguing from style and cohesiveness for a single “Homer,” in another); the evidence from the text itself (how, for example, the Homeric epithets like “wine-dark sea” support oral composition); the evidence from archaeology, with the complications that inhere in the fact that, while probably composed not “much before 700 BCE,” the story itself takes place 500 years earlier; and what she calls “The Poet in the Poems,” including the importance of Demodocus, an actual poet or singer in the Odyssey, whose blindness may have contributed to the contention that Homer himself was blind (“And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,” as Pound put it in Canto 2). There follow three short chapters each on the Iliad and the Odyssey. (The Homeric Hymns get only a passing mention, and the Batrachomyomachia, like the hymns, falsely attributed to Homer, gets none at all.) In “The Wrath of Achilles,” Graziosi explores Achilles’s evolution from sulky warrior benched on his own recognizance, caring more about survival than glory and angry with Agamemnon for stealing his girl, to fully engaged hero more concerned about revenge than death itself. “A Poem About Troy” examines death and the shortcomings of leadership on both sides in the Trojan conflict. Graziosi notes how every fallen soldier in the poem is named (a fact which the English poet Alice Oswald embraced for her remarkable Iliadic poem Memorial), and how graphically the deaths are described. The last of the...

The Struggle for Confiscation: An Imperialistic Look at Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Poem “Ulysses”

The power of imperialism ascended during the Victorian age, when both the sense of nationalism and industrial revolution concurrently took place. Imperialism in its kind is the sense of domination of one group of people over another, or to a great point, it’s the domination of one country to other countries to confiscate its properties and belongings. Here in the poem written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet tries to ironize the situation by showing and focusing on such an old king (may be the king of England), who has recently come back home from his travels and has complained about his “idleness.” This “idleness” for the king is equal to ceasing the kind of power, namely, if he does not move and battle, he has nothing for his country, and even he does not record a name for himself in the history of England. Thus the aim of the present paper is not only limitedto the relation between power and the sense of imperialism, a relation that leads to malicious and destructive behavior but it also condemns that kind of relation. However, it is done implicitly, as once the poet did in his poem, by showing the negative use of power in hands of some, like the king of England, who has done his best even at his death’s door to continue again and conquer wherever he sees that brings benefits to him. Not surprisingly; the poem also implies to the battle of Troy in the sense of imperial actions.

The Changing Same: Recursivity, Reification, and <em>Reaping</em>

The Changing Same:Recursivity, Reification, and Reaping Ivy G. Wilson (bio) For one of its 1882 spring issues, the Southern Workman published a notice on the "Death of the Poet Longfellow." The encomium praises the aesthetics of Longfellow's "simple words," the "commonness of some of his verses," and the politics of his practice as a "poet of the people" (52). In this monthly periodical that was published out of Hampton University (then still Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute), the author evinces that "there is no class of people in this country who should cherish Mr. Longfellow's memory more tenderly than the freedmen should." Yet, the author begins the column by quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850): "If, as Tennyson beautifully says of him, he 'sings / To one clear harp in divers tones,' the tones are always those which echo in every heart" (52). As a transposition whereby Tennyson's lines—written for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died decades earlier in 1833—are presented as ostensibly for the recently deceased Longfellow, even this cursory quotation illustrates Daniel Hack's observation that "nineteenth-century British literature was woven deeply into the fabric of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture" (2). Indeed, "transposition" is part of the critical lexicon, including "engagements," "repurposing," and "recontextualizations," among other terms, that animates Hack's readings throughout Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) (21). The most important of these, however, is the "afterlives" of Victorian literature, an idea already symbolically signaled by the writer of this 1882 issue of the Southern Workman, and marked with the word "echo." [End Page 87] Hack's governing claim in Reaping Something New is that the centrality of Victorian literature to the production of African American literature demands that the latter be considered for how it functions as an "important archive for the study" of the former (2). In reading Reaping Something New, Victorianists will encounter subtle analyses of works, such as George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), that have received comparatively little attention; African Americanists will be rewarded by Hack's exemplary archival research, particularly with questions around periodicals and print cultures. Informed by literary critics such as Laura Doyle, Elisa Tamarkin, and Elizabeth Young and their efforts to render the black and white, the English and American nineteenth centuries strangers no more, Hack is also indebted to Henry Louis Gates's signature scholarship culminating in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), whereby Hack's "reaping" amounts to a cognate of "signifyin's" repetition and revisionist impulses. He meticulously illustrates the ways in which African American writers took up the Victorians for the particular needs of their own political conditions as well as the desires of their aesthetic ambitions in different spaces if not times, a practice that Hack calls "close reading at a distance." In one respect, Reaping Something New is not dissimilar to the broader field of reception studies, which seeks to glean information about how the circulation and recirculation of previous histories and cultures—especially literary—are trafficked in the present, something that is evident, for example, in recent scholarship on black reception of the classics. Inasmuch as Hack is preoccupied with how African American culture has engaged Victorian literature, another latent concern that Reaping Something New stages is the problematic between time, genealogy, and history. Much of the book proceeds under the assumption that because nineteenth-century African Americans and English Victorians occupied roughly the same chronological time, they can be said to share similar cultural genealogies, even if their literary histories have often been understood as separate and discrete. In this sense, Hack assumes a diachronic approach to limn the possibility of a reconstituted history of African American and Victorian literatures that binds them as part of the same epochal moment, save for instances where he takes up the contemporary, as in the examples of the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Percival Everett's 2001 novel, Erasure. What might be called Hack's binocular approach in Reaping Something New—with one eye visualizing the hyperlocal in the first half, and...

Tilling Two Cultures

Tilling Two Cultures Irene Tucker (bio) Daniel Hack's Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) is a book in two parts, notable for its coherence. Over the course of his book, Hack traces "the citational and appropriative" acts by which nineteenth-century African American writers and activists recycled and transformed some of the central texts of their British Victorian contemporaries. In an opening half that follows the literary repurposing of writings by central Victorian figures including Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and George Eliot as they cross the Atlantic, Hack engages in what he calls "close reading at a distance," a practice of granular juxtaposition in which he reads local moments of British canonical texts in relation to the occasions in which they are recontextualized, edited, and rewritten by African American writers who stand beyond the Victorian writers' envisioned audiences. Hack is careful to distinguish his methodology from both reception studies and scholarship on the "Black Atlantic," even as he acknowledges his indebtedness to both. While reception studies often abandon engagement with the local details of literary texts in order to offer contextualizing descriptions of their reception, Hack commits himself to textual afterlives that are themselves literary texts. Positioning himself in relation to discourses of the "Black Atlantic," he "seeks to nuance and move beyond two common ways of describing, and implicitly justifying, a Victorian—or, more broadly, British or European or white—presence [End Page 80] in African American literature" (8). The justifications beyond which he seeks to move are those that would understand canonical British texts merely as occasions for "subversive appropriation," as well as those that would seek to use white literature as an opportunity for "politically symbolic acts of cultural positioning" of the sort designed to refute the notion that black cultural expression is necessarily inferior to that produced by whites (8). For Hack, the force of these encounters lies in the fact that their use of canonical British texts is not predictable in advance. "The gap between original and new contexts serves as a measure of creative agency," he explains (10). Nowhere is the complexity of these relations of agency on better display than in the book's second chapter, "(Re-)Racializing 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,'" in which Hack examines the surprisingly heterogeneous and often internally contradictory African American afterlives of Tennyson's poem. Nestled between chapters on Bleak House (1852–53) and Eliot's often-ignored poem, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), the history Hack offers takes up the question of the historicity of literary production itself. The central issue driving the use and re-use of "The Charge" is the degree to which a poem inspired by a specific historical event—in this case, the Crimean War—must remain legible in terms of that event. British Poet Laureate Tennyson first published his poem in the London Examiner on 9 December, 1854, a mere five weeks after the catastrophic event it evokes. When abolitionist Frederick Douglass reprinted the poem early the following month in his eponymous Frederick Douglass's Paper he positioned it as one among a series of poems and essays about the Crimean War. In Douglass's framing, the Crimean War ought to be understood as a world-historical event akin to the anti-slavery movement: a front in the international battle for human rights. Douglass presents "The Charge" as relevant to his own paper's anti-slavery readership "not because the poem transcends its occasion," Hack explains, "but rather because its occasion, properly understood, transcends the particular time and place of its setting" (49–50). Moreover, elsewhere in the same January 1855 issue of Douglass's paper, Tennyson's poem is subjected to an even less anticipatable historical recontextualizing. In the piece in question, "Our New York Correspondent," James McCune Smith, writing under the pen-name "Communipaw," makes the case that the poem's refrain, "Cannon to the right of them, / Cannon to the left of them, / Cannon in front of them / Volleyed and thundered," is itself an unacknowledged rhythmic and sonic appropriation of a Congo chant, "'as old as—Africa': 'Canga bafio te, / Canga moune de le, / Canga do ki la, / Canga li'" (qtd. in...

The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon by Laurence W. Mazzeno

Reviewed by: The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon by Laurence W. Mazzeno Michael Kim Roos The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon. By Laurence W. Mazzeno. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2015. 283pp. $85.00. After more than 90 years and countless numbers of books, essays, and articles on Ernest Hemingway, we ought to pity the poor student beginning serious inquiry into the master’s works for feeling an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. Where does one begin? Yes, the primary sources, of course—a growing list itself, both published and unpublished, daunting enough in size. But these works have also spawned a hoard of secondary sources, multiplying annually with seeming abandon and no sign of letting up. It’s not just the beginning student who needs help with this; we all do. Thus, the real necessity for a tertiary level of Hemingway book—that is, a book about books and articles (as well as the necessity here of another kind of tertiary: a review of a review of reviews). Laurence W. Mazzeno’s The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon more than fulfills its mission. Even a very dull book in this genre might be warmly welcomed and forgiven; readers can hardly expect such an effort to be the stuff of a cozy or thrilling afternoon of reading. Practicality is the first order of business in such a volume. Readability is a bonus. Any scholar who undertakes the monumental task of reviewing all that has ever been written by and about such a colossus of literature and culture as Hemingway should be applauded merely on the basis of pluck. It is no easy task to make entertaining what could easily turn out to be little more than a catalogue, but Mazzeno has succeeded in generating an engaging and highly readable—yet also very useful—narrative, for which we can all be grateful. [End Page 111] Part of the Camden House series Studies in American Literature and Culture: Literary Criticism in Perspective, the book offers in its 283 pages (including works cited and index) a broad sweep of the complicated history of Hemingway commentary, from its beginnings to the present. While Mazzeno admits that the book is necessarily selective and not intended to be a complete annotated bibliography of Hemingway commentary, the author intrepidly covers nearly all the high points, with only a few notable omissions. One strength of the book, I believe, is that Mazzeno, as he readily admits, is not “part of the community of Hemingway scholars that has devoted its professional life to studying and writing about him” (9). President Emeritus of Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania, and author of other books in the Camden series on Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Updike, and Matthew Arnold, Mazzeno brings to the task plenty of pertinent experience in the genre, as well as an outsider’s perspective that allows more objectivity in representing the disparate viewpoints on Hemingway’s work. Mazzeno wisely chooses to structure the book chronologically, since, he explains, his aim is to place each individual commentary in the context of its time as part of an ongoing communal dialogue among critics and scholars. The chronological approach also allows him to trace the risings and fallings of trends in Hemingway criticism, as well as to lead his readers toward an understanding of Hemingway’s place in the broader cultural context. As he notes in his introduction, his intent is to “focus as much on the critics as […] on Hemingway” and in the process, provide a “critique of their assessment in order to identify the principles, predilections and biases shaping their judgments” (6). Although Frank Ryan, Susan Beegel, Peter Hays, and Henry Claridge have done some of this work before—a fact Mazzeno acknowledges—their work had different and more limited aims than his book. Three chapters cover commentary during Hemingway’s lifetime: “Spokesman for the Lost Generation (1924–1932),” “Writing on His Own Terms (1932–1952),” and “The Critics’ Darling (1952–1961).” Naturally, much of this has been covered before, but Mazzeno includes insightful discussion of important early critics like Virginia Woolf...

Paternal Instincts

Paternal Instincts

Education

One of the great things about studying and teaching mathematical sciences is that many themes, methods, and concepts resurface in new areas with increasing complexity and depth. Notions such as algebraic operation, function, and solutions of systems continue to expand and deepen as students move through a standard mathematics curriculum and perhaps on into graduate school. In his poem “Ulysses,” Alfred Lord Tennyson penned the sentiment perfectly. Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. John Boyd, this issue's contributor, points out that rootfinding often stops with a few “favorites” such as bisection, Newton's method, or Brent's algorithm. In “Finding the Zeros of a Univariate Equation: Proxy Rootfinders, Chebyshev Interpolation, and the Companion Matrix,” he presents Chebyshev-proxy rootfinding (CPR), which brings together several disparate mathematical topics to yield a robust scheme for solving a nonlinear holomorphic equation $f(x)=0$ on a closed interval. The term proxy refers to the fact that one replaces the original function with a Chebyshev polynomial approximation $f_N(x)$. Then one finds the roots of Chebyshev polynomial by finding the eigenvalues of its Chebyshev--Frobenius companion matrix. While the algorithm is more complex than something like bisection, specialized mathematical software now makes implementation much more accessible, and, of course, CPR is more accurate and robust. The style of presentation in this article makes it an excellent addition as a module in a course on numerical methods. Before introducing the nuts and bolts of the algorithm, the author surveys the notion of proxy functions as a way of unifying other rootfinders conceptually. As the author carries the reader through the algorithm, he confronts the details that require most of the hard work that goes into any effective algorithm. For instance, naively creating a proxy adaptively can be very expensive, so he points out that there are clever ways to reuse information from a coarse Chebyshev grid when constructing a refined one. In fact, the discussion of the algorithm is only about half the paper. The other half includes additional examples and covers techniques for extending the method to functions that are not smooth or to functions on unbounded domains. In short, this issue's Education feature synthesizes several distinct mathematical concepts and focuses them on rootfinding, which is one of the most fundamental quantitative problems. It offers a great way to liven up an introductory numerical analysis course, or provide depth to a more advanced methods course. In doing so, it provides us all with a way to expand our mathematical horizons.

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE And South Africa's Very Own Pony

The story of the cavalry charge which I shall relate might have been forgotten by now had it not been immortalized by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade.' Two stanzas from that work appear in this article.The Crimean War (1853-1856) was so named because nearly all the fighting took place in the Crimea, a peninsula north of the Black Sea. Russia was a large country with few seaports. The Black Sea lies to the south of Russia, but part of the shores of the Black Sea belonged to Turkey and the Turks could keep the ships of other nations away from their shores. For this reason Russia planned to take possession of Turkey and offered to divide it, when conquered, with Britain. But Britain was not interested, and also did not want Russia to gain too much power. In the Crimean War the Allies consisted of Turkey, France, Sardinia, and Britain. The war was ended by the Treaty of Paris in 1856.

Whitman's Columbia: The Commemoration of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in "A Thought of Columbus"

From moment intent to host World's Columbian exposition of 1893 was announced in 1890, whole country was eagerly talking about it.1 The event was intended to reflect America's new-found promi- nence on world stage by celebrating four centuries of progress since Christopher discovered Americas, and hardly any publication lacked some mention of event. While exposition was being planned many readers of poems like passage to india, song of exposition, and prayer of Columbus thought that Walt Whitman should have been involved in some direct way. For instance, Illustrated American thought he would make an ideal representative for fair, publishing in 1891 an anonymous editorial criticizing exposition planners' request of a commemorative poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson. The editorial questions choice of Tennyson and argues instead for an American, ideally Whitman:But best of all would be an American poet. The children of new World, which Colum- bus revealed to Old, are best fitted to celebrate glories of new dispensation.Walt Whitman would be ideal choice. He is an American, a democrat in largest and best sense of word, a son of soil. He could give us a splendid chant, full of virility and breadth and wisdom. But have not yet reached ideal stage where can appreciate him at his true worth.2Later same year, George Horton of Chicago Herald requested in a letter that Whitman write an exclusive poem for his paper to com- memorate exposition. Horton indicates that he had approached several other prominent poets, but flatteringly adds that any list of con- temporary poets would be incomplete without Whitman. Appealing to Whitman's penchant for self-promotion, Horton promises that the West is anxious to hear from you on subject, and The Herald reaches West very widely (WWWC, 8:446). similarly, a souvenir collection of thoughts on and america published in 1892 to commemo- rate Exposition quotes Reverend Myron Reed, who insists, we shall remember Walt Whitman, if only for line, ? America! We build for you because you build for world.'3 Closer to home, Horace Traubel had tried numerous times to impel Whitman to write something for fair. Traubel reports on november 11, 1891, that a san francisco paper was warmly advocating W. as poet for Columbian Exposi- tion (WWWC, 9:138). Yet Whitman complained time and again that he was unable to write any more poems. it did not matter to him how many requests he received (WWWC, 9:126). Traubel records that on september 11, 1891,Whitman said to him, have had fully half a dozen applications for poems lately-poems for public occasions-to none of which have i even replied (WWWC, 8:499). putting matter firmly to rest, Whitman died seven months prior Exposition's dedication ceremonies, and he was never formally recognized by Exposition's planners and promoters. As a result, links between Whitman and Columbian Exposition have gone unexamined. However, reading last poem Whitman wrote, AThought of Columbus, within context of vast promotions that wed Columbian discovery to American progress since 1492 suggests that Whitman's final poetic statement was dedicated to spirit of fair. Read in this light, A Thought of Co- lumbus takes on a greater resonance.Whitman's abiding interest in American progress was well under- stood as America took stock of itself in twilight of nineteenth century, and it is clearly on such grounds that Whitman's contemporaries drew a connection between him and objectives of Columbian Exposition. indeed, Exposition would have been perfect vehicle for situating Whitman in central place in American letters to which he had aspired throughout his career. America had assumed a greater prominence on world stage by 1893, thus validating Whitman's faith in abundance of land, strength of democracy, and growth of what he termed Western character in A backward glance o'er Travel'd Roads. …

Gardens of misery and perfection: introducing an annotated bibliography

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 2. My general contention that fictional gardens shadow our understanding of real gardens owes much to the inspiration of Gina Crandell, who explains how the developments of the visual arts changed forever the way we experience real landscapes in Nature Pictorialized: ‘The View’ in Landscape History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Crandell shows how culture influences our perceptions of landscape as much as the survival-driven determinants considered by such texts as Jay Appleton's Experience of Landscape, rev. ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996) or the functional considerations addressed by almost any office-generated project description. 3. (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 37. 4. Scott Elledge further explicates Milton's description of Paradise in the second Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 472. This edition includes Frank Kermode's essay, ‘Adam Unparadised’, which discusses Milton's sources for the Garden of Eden. Quotations are from Elledge's edition. 5. Ibid., p. 599. 6. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), p. 41. Frye points out that: • Milton always externalizes evil and internalizes good (p. 109); • the Miltonian paradise is Arcadian and pastoral, not Utopian and historical, that is, not a social construct where man can live a better life (p. 114); and • the goal of mankind is the recovery of identity, ‘not the feeling that I am myself and not another, but the realization that there is only one man, one mind, and one world’ (p. 143). 7. (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 12. 8. For the terrible consequences of this garden rendezvous, see Maud in Alfred Lord Tennyson, Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 231ff. 9. See Hugh Haughton, introduction, Carroll, pp. lxxvi ff. 10. A Whistling Woman (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2002), pp. 139–140. 11. The Virgin in the Garden (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 128. 12. Still Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 9. 13. Babel Tower (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 522.