Modern American Poets Research Articles

The Influence of Chinese Boudoir Poem on American Modernist Poet Williams’ The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

The Influence of Chinese Boudoir Poem on American Modernist Poet Williams’ The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

Possessed by Poe: Hart Crane’s Tribute to il Miglior Fabbro in a Symbolist-Modernist Context

The article explores the ways in which Hart Crane, Stéphane Mallarmé and Mina Loy pay homage to Edgar Allan Poe in their respective poems. A comparative exegesis of the tributes in question reveals the connections as well as the differences between the ways the two American modernist poets and the French symbolist approach the legacy of their eminent American predecessor. A critical juxtaposition of Crane’s, Mallarmé’s and Loy’s poetic texts seems particularly worthwhile in view of the fact that Poe is regarded as one of the fathers of both French symbolism and American modernist poetry, which, in turn, are strongly interconnected. Consequently, the analysis undertaken in the present article results in broader conclusions concerning what, in the context of American and French literature, may be referred to as the symbolist-modernist continuum.

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

The Impact of Elizabeth Bishop’s Tragic Experiences on her Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the most renowned modern American female poets. Her early life was characterized by some tragic events. However, she overcame all such saddening happenings and established herself as a major twentieth-century American writer. The paper investigates how some of the important topics handled in the author’s poetry can be traced back to her biographical background. The significance of the study is that it brings to light the role played by the tragic incidents in the poet’s life in the formation of her poetic production; which could enable her readers to understand some of her most famous poems better and enjoy them more. The method applied is the Biographical Critical Approach. By applying this approach, the researcher aims to indicate how the poet depended on her memories of actual events which took place in her life to author a number of her well-known poems. The study reaches some significant findings through the analysis of the selected literary texts. The researcher, for instance, draws attention to the way Bishop tackled the idea of death when she encountered it for the first time in her life. Moreover, the effect of the loss of the literary figure’s parents, especially the mother, on the under-discussion literary works is illustrated. Further, the study demonstrates how the writer expressed a lot of wisdom and stoicism in the face of destiny after reaching maturity. The analyzed literary texts evidently immortalize certain tragic events in Bishop’s life.

«EVERYDAY LIFE» IN THE WORKS BY W. C. WILLIAMS AND J. JARMUSCH: FROM POETRY TO POETICS. INTERMEDIALITY

The article examines William Carlos Williams’ works that focus on the everyday, mundanity, and poetize daily life which was common in modernist literature. In our time, Williams’ poetry inspired director Jim Jarmusch to make a poetic film «Paterson» about everyday life and the poetic potential of ordinary routine life. The director reinterprets Williams’ ideas and makes a complex, postmodern film about everyday life in the small town Paterson, where he depicts the routine life of his main character, a bus driver. This life, despite its external simplicity and triviality, encourages the hero named Paterson to read modernist literature and write his own poems whose themes and images are intertwined with the work of the well-known Paterson resident, William Carlos Williams himself. In particular, we examine the intermedial interaction of Williams’ works («Paterson» and «This Is Just To Say») with the film and the indirect transition of one sign system into another. In addition to the more or less direct and explicit influence of literature on film through allusions or quotations from the work of the American modernist poet, Williams’ poetry becomes a precedent for the stylized poems of the film’s main character, written by a contemporary American poet Ron Padgett («Another One», «The Run», «Love Poem») and Jarmusch himself («Water Falls»). In this article, we also compare Padgett’s and Jarmusch’s poetry with some of Williams’ poems («Blizzard», «To A Poor Old Woman»), to demonstrate the similarity of motifs and imagery. Thedirector’s work can be interpreted as a manifestation of the idea of looking for poetry in the everyday, or that everyday life is already poetry. Jarmusch’s film about everyday life provides a possible answer to the question of literary anthropology «why is literature as a medium important in people’s lives» – creativity is the very meaning of life. This penetration of one art form (poetry) into another (cinema) gives grounds for speaking about the relevance of the themes of modernist poetry in the context of modernity and about the meaning and value of simplicity for creativity in general.

On Seamus Heaney by R. F. Foster

Reviewed by: On Seamus Heaney by R. F. Foster Jeffrey Meyers (bio) On Seamus Heaney, by R. F. Foster (Princeton University Press, 2020) 228 pp. In contrast to the manic and often suicidal modern American poets from Berryman and Jarrell to Plath and Sexton, Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) led a sane, stable and happily married life. When a friend asked, "Are you really as nice as you seem?" he wittily replied, "I have been cursed with a fairly decent set of impulses." His sweet voice and Irish accent, his charisma and charm, made him a great reader of his poetry—the dramatic equal of Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg. Heaney's dazzling technique and poignant content provide another striking contrast to most contemporary poets, hatched in creative writing courses, who produce little more than banal prose in broken lines. Heaney believed "the main thing is to write / for the joy of it." Emphasizing the poet's art, he added, "when a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life." He offers a startling airborne view of "transatlantic flights stacked in the blue," and describes black patent-leather hats of the sinister Spanish Guardia Civil that "gleamed like fish-bellies in flux-poisoned waters." His subtle rhyme and powerful simile suggest the loss of Eden in "Outside the kitchen window a black rat / Sways on the briar like infected fruit." He was also a perceptive literary and cultural critic. While concisely aligning himself against the preciosity of fashionable poets, he observed the trendy cultural change when Lowell fell from favor and his shy rival emerged triumphant: "The fashion shifted, the culture favoured a less imperious style, the gender balance needed adjusting, the age of Merrill and Ashbery arrived, chamber music and cabaret rather than orchestral crash were in favour, and the time was propitious for the perfect pitch of Bishop." Despite his prodigious talent, Heaney's poetry has its limits. He lacks Ted Hughes' high-voltage diction, Philip Larkin's sophisticated wit and Geoffrey Hill's philosophical explorations. Heaney's dominant themes include Catholicism, with its soutanes, scapulars, and shrouds (he even [End Page 150] went on a youthful pilgrimage to Lourdes); archeological bogs: bones, exhumations, and mud-men; and violent Northern Irish politics during the Troubles, with its publicans and Republicans and excrement smeared on prison walls. I remember hearing an Irish bomb explode in the Hampstead shopping center in north London in 1973 when I was writing only a mile away. An Irish-Catholic priest told me about a Protestant infant paraded in a pushchair and celebrating King William's victory over the Catholics in the Battle of the Boyne. Swaddled in patriotic Orange, he was adorned with an Orange ribbon across his little chest that read: "Damn the Pope!" R. F. Foster, the biographer of Yeats, who should have written Heaney's life, is good on the effect of his winning the Nobel Prize in 1995. Though Heaney had a lifetime of adulation and harvest of honors, he couldn't resist dragging himself around the world from Cambridge and Grasmere, through Oviedo, Madrid, Delphi and Denmark, to Krakow, Prague, Petersburg, Moscow and Hong Kong. Heaney called his spectacular literary success "as irrational and undeniable as sexual attraction." But he also lamented his surrender to fame and self-alienation: "[I've been] pushed to the edge of my own life. All I do nowadays is 'turn up'—I'm a function of timetables, not an agent of my own being." Looking at his painted portrait, he saw his physical decline and remarked, "It's more like me than I am." The predictable results of all this frenetic self-exhaustion were strokes in 2005 and 2006, and the fatal rupture of an arterial blood vessel in August 2013. Foster uses Heaney's diaries, drafts and letters, discusses his reviews and relations with sometimes-jealous Irish writers, but his short book would also benefit from a chronology of Heaney's life and list of his books. Foster's extensive quotations of the poems are often longer than his commentary. He twice prints a 14-line section...

The Philosopher’s Poet: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on Wallace Stevens

This article investigates how the relation between poetry and philosophy is developed in a sample of reflections on the philosophical qualities of the American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens’s work. It offers a critical presentation of a handful of twenty-first-century published responses to Stevens’s poetry emanating from two different quarters: fellow poets and philosophers. The five selected poets (David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips, Stanley Plumly, and Carol Frost) collectively pondered Stevens’s philosophical qualities in a recent issue of the New England Review, while the responses by philosophers Alain Badiou and Peter Hare were published in collections of their essays. The two different angles are investigated precisely because they fall outside mainstream literary criticism on Stevens and help to dramatize several of the difficulties confronted by poets and philosophers seeking to find common ground. By pitting the voices of poets against those of philosophers, the article allows the reader to observe empirically how poets are often wary of addressing Stevens’s philosophical weight except by noting the formal and stylistic enactment of mental activity in his verse, while philosophers sometimes fail to acknowledge the intrinsic nature of lyric thinking, and thus do not always manage to contribute to a deeper understanding of the poetry as such.

Between Poetic Voice and Silence: Hart Crane, Yvor Winters, Metapoetics and Emily Dickinson’s Legacy

The article is a comparative study of the ways in which two American modernist poets bound by a literary and human connection, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, dealt with Emily Dickinson’s legacy in their own works. My study is an attempt to place Crane within the legacy of the American Renaissance as represented not by Walt Whitman, with whom he is customarily associated, but by Dickinson, and to examine the special place she holds in Crane’s poetry and in his thinking about poetry and the world at large. Crane’s poetic take on the Amherst poet is set against and complemented by his friend Yvor Winters’s ambiguous relationship with Dickinson’s heritage: troubled by an anxiety of influence, Winters, the poet-critic, vacillates between his reverence for the female poet and his skepticism about certain aspects of her œuvre. In the close readings of the poems in question undertaken in my study, the focus is on their metapoetic dimension. Particular emphasis is laid on the dialectics of silence, which plays a key role in both Crane’s and Winters’s works under discussion, as well as on the related themes of blankness and absence, poetic plenitude and perfection. Attention is also given to the problematics of death, time and timelessness. While Winters concentrates mostly on metapoetics in his exploration of the Dickinsonian tradition, Crane goes further, considering the fate of female artists and gender issues, thereby transcending poetic self-reflexiveness and addressing farther-reaching community concerns, with particular emphasis on anti-patriarchal and feminist ones.

Canal Zone Modernism

AbstractThis essay is a narrowly drawn exercise in comparison at a narrow passage of marine transit—the Panama Canal Zone. It argues that the spatial typology of the “zone” might supply one of the figures for a tropological history of comparative modernism at sea. The essay follows disparate works—by the Swiss avant-garde poet Blaise Cendrars, the West Indian writers Claude McKay and Eric Walrond, the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, and the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens—into the space of conflicts and disparities that characterizes the Canal Zone as a peculiar choke point of maritime globalization.

КАРНАВАЛИЗАЦИЯ ОТНОШЕНИЙ «УЧИТЕЛЬ-УЧЕНИК» В АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНЫХ ДЕТСКИХ СТИХОТВОРЕНИЯХ О ШКОЛЕ

The article is devoted to the analysis of carnivalization as one of the main mechanisms for metaphors creation in children’s poetry in the cognitive aspect. The paper uses a relatively little-known, but promising method for analysing metaphors in language and text using semantic bases. The main objectives of the work are the classification and analysis of the contexts for carnivalization use in the poems of the modern American poets about school. As a result of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that in children’s poetry, in addition to the purely aesthetic function, the use of the metaphors based on the carnivalization principle performs didactic, psychotherapeutic and socializing functions.

NARRATIVE DIFFUSION IN THE PROSE BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

The present article examines the narrative models in short stories by William Carlos Williams, a prominent American modernist poet and physician, whose prose legacy has been left out of literary critics’ attention up to the present. The aim of the article is to an alyze the narrative features of literary works by the physician writer. The material of the research is «The Doctor Stories» collection of short fiction written between 1932 and 1962. The study relies on the methods of narratological analysis, reception theory and hermeneutics. The material under consideration provides an efficient incorporation the author’s experience as a medical practitioner and its artistic rethinking. «The Doctor Stories» reveal a unique outlook of the author who was able to observe people in the most complicated and intimate situatons of their lives — in the moments of suffering, hopelessness, grief, loss and death. In Williams’ short fiction, the efficacy of treatment depends on the patient’s communicative readiness for cooperation with the narrator, whereas the disclosure of the profound intentionality of a literary work requires the reader’s receptive readiness for engaging in a joint creative process with the author. Each short story is presented through the prism of homodiegetic narration: a fictional doctor gives an account of his encounters with patients, and shares his thoughts and feelings about each particular medical case. The dominant feature of Williams’s prose work is the technique of narrative diffusion, which impels the reader to engage in the receptive process as an active participant and equal partner. The doctor’s and patient’s narratives are deliberately given in a continuous flow of story without any syntactical borders in order to erase the boundaries between the narrative «I» and the receptive «You». In such a manner, the reader is required to apply a considerable amount of interpretative abilities, and thus to assume a part of receptive responsibility. The prospects for further research are in the study of literary and medical discourse by the US physician writers, which enables us to deepen the understanding of the American national literature and its historical and cultural context.

Translating iconicities of classical Chinese poetry

Abstract In the history of translating classical Chinese poetry, there are two kinds of translators. The first kind translate classical Chinese poetry “by way of intellectual, directional devices” (Yip, Wai-lim. 1969. Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 16). What these translators are concerned with most is the coherence of their translations. They give little attention to the ideogrammic nature of Chinese characters. I call them traditional translators. These translators include those in the history of translating classical Chinese poetry from its beginning to the first decade of the twentieth century, although there are still some who translate classical Chinese poetry in this way later. The second kind of translator is highly interested in the images created by ideogrammic Chinese characters and tries to convey them in target language. We call them modernist translators. These translators are represented by some American modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Florence Ayscough, etc. From the point of view of iconicity, modernist translators’ contribution lies in their concern with the iconic characteristics of Chinese characters. But they did not give enough attention to syntactical iconicity and textual iconicity in classical Chinese poetry.

News and Comments

News and Comments Bart Eeckhout, Glen MacLeod, and Natalie Russell Click for larger view View full resolution Left: Cultural medallion at 441 West 21st Street, Manhattan. Right: Poet Susan Howe and the president and vice president of the Wallace Stevens Society, Lisa Goldfarb and Glen MacLeod, at the ceremony to unveil the medallion. Photographs courtesy of Harold Steever. On July 11, 2018, a small ceremony was organized on the doorsteps of 441 West 21st Street in Manhattan to unveil a cultural medallion dedicated to the memory of Stevens. The medallion was an initiative of the Wallace Stevens Society and is supported by the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center, which seeks to mark sites where notable individuals in New York City lived, worked, and created. It reads as follows: Wallace Stevens October 2, 1879–August 2, 1955 441 West 21 Street, Manhattan Born in Reading, PA, poet Wallace Stevens attended Harvard University and graduated from New York Law School. He lived here, with his wife Elsie, between 1909 and 1916; during those years, he wrote "Sunday Morning" and "Peter Quince at the Clavier," both published in Harmonium (1923). While pursuing poetry, Stevens began his career as an insurance lawyer; by 1914, he was vice president of Equity Surety Co.'s New York office, and in 1916, left New York to live in Hartford, CT, where he would become vice president of The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. in 1934. Stevens was an extremely inventive writer who can be gaudy or elegant, humorous or meditative, ironic or philosophical by turns. He is now acknowledged as one of the great American modernist poets of the twentieth [End Page 290] century. His Collected Poems (1954) won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. During the sidewalk ceremony, the audience was addressed by the president and vice president of the Wallace Stevens Society, Lisa Goldfarb and Glen MacLeod, as well as the poets Susan Howe and Deborah Garrison. Howe, who also read three stanzas from "Sunday Morning," was moved by the occasion and testified, "I turn to Stevens these days almost as a form of prayer." A video recording of the ceremony will be made available through the HLPC website. ________ The sixth John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Gül Bilge Han for her contribution entitled "The Poetics of Relational Place-Making and Autonomy in Stevens" (Fall 2016). The award was judged by a committee of one former and two current members of the Editorial Board (George S. Lensing, Natalie Gerber, and Juliette Utard). It was officially presented at the 2018 MLA Convention in New York City. Please join us in congratulating the author. ________ The 2017 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, a $100,000 lifetime achievement award "for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry," went to Jorie Graham. ________ According to Joshua Barone reporting for The New York Times, Matthew Aucoin's opera Crossing, which tells the story of Walt Whitman's time as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War and had its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in September 2017, resorted to two of Stevens's sentences about Whitman for the final chorus: "Nothing is final. . . . No man shall see the end" (CPP 121). [End Page 291] ________ The 55th Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program at the University of Connecticut featured Joy Harjo, the author of eight books of poetry and a renowned musician. She read from her own poems on two successive days: on March 28, 2018, at UConn Storrs, and on March 29 at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. This annual event is sponsored by the Hartford Financial Services Group to honor Stevens as a former company executive. ________ The website of the Fulbright Program in Russia reports that the Philological Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University hosted a presentation on December 8, 2017, of a Russian translation of Harmonium, which appeared with the publisher Nauka in Moscow as part of a Literary Monuments series in 2017. The presentation included readings of Stevens's poetry in Russian by the...

Oriental Pearls: Adaptation of Ghazals in Modern American Poetry

Ghazal poetry is a poetic genre which expresses the pains of loss and separation as well as the beauty of the beloved. The form is ancient, originating in Arabic, Hindu and Persian poetry. Ghazal poetry has been introduced into modern American poetry since the midst of the twentieth century after translating some Ghazal poems by the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. This paper examines the American adaptations of Ghazal poetry by outstanding modern American poets since the second part of the twentieth century. It argues that “transcultural Orientalism”, which is the product of integration between orientals and occidentals in cross-cultural societies, is a key factor that illustrates the reason behind the American adaptation of Ghazal poetry. Adaptation of Ghazal poetry, by modern American poets intensifies an attempt to dominate the “other” through revisiting the literary trends of its exotic culture. These poets also attempted to create a cultural dialogue through imposing a cross-cultural poetic genre. They introduced Ghazal poetry in a new context which suits more the contemporary issues. However, many American Ghazal poets fell in the trap of infidelity since they viewed it through an outsider’s eyes, ignoring its artistic value and its intellectual substance.

T. S. Eliot and the Literature of Fascism

This article examines T. S. Eliot’s review-essay of five seminal studies of Italian Fascism and critically interconnects the key arguments put forth in each book. Published in 1928 in the Criterion, the poet-critic’s influential literary magazine, the omnibus book review constitutes his most sustained, if skeptical, exploration of the radical political movement, still a rising phenomenon at the time. Although Eliot presents himself as politically naïve, he exhibits a surprisingly cogent and nuanced understanding of Fascism’s political economy, mass psychology, and mythico-heroic apparatus. Contrasting his Christian-inflected antifascist political and cultural thought with the Fascist commitments of Ezra Pound, his one-time collaborator and fellow American modernist poet, the present article argues that Eliot advocated a tradition-based separation of church and state as a hedge against all forms of totalitarian ideology.

Word, Colour and Sound: John Gould Fletcher’s Hybrid “Colour Symphonies”

The paper undertakes as its subject the problem of complexity in the composition of a cycle of poems called “Colour Symphonies” written by an American modernist poet John Gould Fletcher in the first decades of the twentieth century. The uniqueness of composition of the entire cycle as well as its separate “colour” parts consists in combining visual representations with diverse sonic effects in a joint effort of creating in this way a singular poetic verbal equivalent. Such hybrid-like compound becomes in turn a carrier of emotional states which the poet attempts to render in successive parts of the cycle. Fletcher’s sequence of colour symphonies is a supreme example of modernist hybridity of composition so characteristic for its numerous poetic groups like for example Imagism.

Творчість Рози Ауслендер періоду американської еміґрації

The article deals with the collection of English poetry by German-Jewish poet Rose Ausländer “The Forbidden Tree”, written between 1947 and 1956 during these exile years in New York. Among literature researches there are several versions about the reasons for the shift of language by the author, these versions are post-war trauma, loss of her mother or practical approach in positioning of her poetry in a new language environment. English poetry by Rose Ausländer is considered to be a transitional link between traditional pre-war and free verse poems written after 1957. In this publication there are examples of stylistic influences on Rose Ausländer’s writing by M. Moore, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, W. Stevens and other American Modernist poets. Generally speaking, in her English poetry Ausländer gradually loses rhyme, the rhythm becomes free, the author experiments with poetic forms a lot, until she decides for the free verse poetry and continues to write quite so in German. Like E. E. Cummings, Pose Ausländer tries different forms and usage of punctuation; like Marianne Moore, she addresses meditative poems with high attention to details. We can observe direct correspondence in dedication of some poems to the American modernist poets. Poetry written by Rose Ausländer during this period, was published in 1995 Helmut Braun in a collection entitled “The Forbidden Tree”. There are 190 poems in this poetry collection, placed in the alphabetical order.

William Carlos Williams: A Letter to Sonia Raiziss

SONIA RAIZISS was born in Germany but raised in Philadelphia. She earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, where her father, a bio-chemist, was a member of the faculty. She died in 1994 at the age of 85. Raiziss is now best-remembered as the long-time editor of the literary magazine Chelsea and as the translator of poetry from the Italian, notably that of Alfredo de Palchi, the author of Scorpion’s Dark Dance, published in 1994. Her own poetry was published in Through a Glass Darkly, a volume issued in Paris in 1932 while she was a student at the Sorbonne, and in Buck County Blues, published in New York in 1977. In the intervening years her poems appeared in numerous small magazines, as well as the Saturday Review and the New York Times. At the end of the 1940s, in a survey of poets, she is reported as saying that she earned ‘only about $100 a year from her poetry’. She also published a critical study, The Metaphysical Passion: Seven Modern American Poets and the Seventeenth-Century Tradition, in 1952.1

‘A TWILIGHT SMELLING OF VERGIL’: E. E. CUMMINGS, CLASSICS, AND THE GREAT WAR

The opened door showed a room,about sixteen feet short and four feet narrow,with a heap of straw in the further end. My spirits had been steadily recovering from the banality of their examination; and it was with a genuine and never-to-be-forgotten thrill that I remarked,as I crossed what might have been the threshold : ‘Mais,on est bien ici.’A hideous crash nipped the last word. I had supposed the whole prison to have been utterly destroyed by earthquake,but it was only my door closing....Here, in a passage taken from the novelized version of his own imprisonment in France in 1917, the American modernist poet E. E. Cummings describes the moment of confrontation with the first of his prison cells. He had volunteered for ambulance service in France during the First World War, but his service lasted only a few months before he and his friend William Slater Brown were arrested and incarcerated – wrongfully suspected of espionage – in a brutal French detention camp at La Ferté-Macé.

Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets

Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets