Bad Poet Research Articles

Aldhelm’s Fandom: The Humble Virtues of Boniface’s Riddles

Abstract St Boniface, the eighth-century scholar, missionary, and eventual martyr, is generally characterized as an important historical figure but a bad poet. In part it is because his verse is so strongly marked by direct borrowings from Aldhelm that it is easy to assume he did not possess the creativity or ability to write for himself. Here, we seek to rehabilitate Boniface’s collection of Latin riddles about the personified Virtues and Vices, engaging especially with Humilitas Cristiana (‘Christian Humility’), Virginitas … humilium (‘Virginity of the Humble’), Superbia (‘Pride’), and Vana gloria iactantia (‘Vainglorious Boasting’). We examine Boniface’s riddles through the lens of fan studies, arguing that fandom and fan fiction provide insights into group-identity formation and gift-giving that reframe Boniface’s debt to Aldhelm, as well as his entire creative project. Like a writer of fan fiction, Boniface creates new characters based on his reading of Aldhelm’s De virginitate (‘Concerning Virginity’) and, through them, he develops Aldhelm’s warning against taking pride in virtue. However, Boniface’s riddle-subjects speak an encoded message that only a true fan of Aldhelm could appreciate. Distance from this fandom has led to scholarly neglect of a fascinating poetic collection, but we hope to bridge the gap.

Flirting with the Muse of Thomas Moore

‘Mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different’, T. S. Eliot wrote. If Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered , Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso , and John Hookham Frere’s Pulci imitation Whistlecraft influenced Don Juan ’s style, Thomas Moore’s Fudge Family in Paris was also determinative in subtle ways. Byron transformed Moore’s epistolary Fudge Family into vernacular ottava rima . Moore’s poem about the sweetness and sourness of post-Napoleonic Europe (fudge, cherries, banquets) is also remarkable for its blending of Judaic themes (clothing, feasts, and appetites), motifs that appear in Byron’s allusions to Psalm 137 (‘If I forget thee’) as well as Julia’s letter in Canto II of Don Juan . Recent scholarship on food and food studies provides insight into Moore’s poem. Roland Barthes’ psychosociology of food, for example, can be applied to Byron’s ‘poetics of spice’ as adumbrated by Timothy Morton, thereby enhancing our appreciation of Byron’s satire of consumption and Moore’s influence upon it.

Art, Music, & Mashups: A View from the Bench on Creativity and Copyright

Creativity has captured human fascination for centuries. It has been said that “[t]here is little that shapes the human experience as profoundly and pervasively as creativity.” But what is creativity? Is it pure originality? Divine inspiration? Clever assimilation of existing ideas? Despite creativity’s central role in human progress, the term eludes finite definition.
 To Plato, creative inspiration was divine. In contrast, Kant thought that creative geniuses were not divinely inspired but born with a particular quickness of mind that fostered brilliance and innovation. T.S. Eliot recognized the critical role of borrowing in creative work, quipping, “[i]mmature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take; and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
 In psychology, a leading theory of creativity requires inspiration from existing concepts. In his “associative theory” of creativity, Sarnoff Mednick posits that most of us have predictable, stereotypical associations with a given stimulus, while the creative among us are able to retrieve remote associations. For instance, although most associate “table” with “chair,” the creative might proffer “leg” or “food.” Defining creativity as a framework of novel associations between existing concepts, Mednick distinguishes originality from creativity, finding the former of little import.
 However different theorists and disciplines might define creativity, its outcomes are varied, enduring, and ever evolving. Creativity has brought us everything from Rodin’s sculptures and Van Gogh’s paintings to Newton’s scientific discoveries, from musical scores and movies to computer code.
 Where, then, does the law intersect with creativity? The United States Constitution directs Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Born from that critical clause is the American approach to copyright. Recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as “the engine of free expression,” copyright law enriches “the general public through access to creative works.”
 To illustrate how copyright law fulfills its aims through the lens of art, music, and “mashups,” I invite you to accompany me on a short tour of copyright law’s dance with creativity by offering select examples from federal appellate decisions and a view from the bench.

The American Short Story and Me

The American Short Story and Me

The case for academic plagiarism education: A PESA Executive collective writing project

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal University, PR ChinaImmature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something ...

Roman History in Hewitt, McGuinness, Friel, Heaney

Roman History in Hewitt, McGuinness, Friel, Heaney Brian Arkins Reception Studies is a major growth area in Classics.1 The past has an impact on the present in an active rather than a passive way. T S Eliot explains: ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different’.2 Marina Carr cites the example of Shakespeare: ‘he took from everywhere but look what he did with his plunder’.3 But this is not a one-way street. Eliot asserted that it is not preposterous ‘that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’.4 Accordingly, Louis MacNiece states about his poem ‘Autumn Journal’ (1939): ‘Far from being objective about the Ancient Greeks I sent them here in the light of the mood induced in me by Munich’.5 Shakespeare crops up in this regard in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places. An academic says to a young man: ‘You could precisely quantify the influence of Shakespeare on T.S. Eliot’. The young man replies: ‘But my thesis isn’t about that … It’s about the influence of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare’.6 For our purposes, what counts are the links, real and imagined, between the Roman and the British empires with Ireland subject to Britain.7 Whole books were written in the nineteenth century about the similarities between the two empires;8 this paper covers a later version of that. Francis Haverfield (Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford) stated in 1911 that ‘Roman history seems to me at the present day the most instructive of all histories … it offers stimulating contrasts and comparisons. Its imperial system, alike in its differences and similarities, lights up our own Empire, for example in India, at every turn’.9 The Roman Empire and the British Empire were, at their peak, very large. That of Rome covered 1.5 million square miles, with a population of about 60 million people. It stretched from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and included all territory bordering the Mediterranean, mare nostrum, ‘our sea’. Studies • volume 110 • number 439 315 The British Empire, the world’s sole superpower, covered over 13 million square miles, with a population of 500 million people. These two empires relied on military power to subdue other countries. Rome had a massive army, Britain a major navy. Both countries gained economic advantage from empire. From Macedonia and Syria, unheard of wealth flowed into the city of Rome. Britain’s empire played a very significant role in establishing global capitalism. Both empires furthered the interests of local elites. They presided over a diverse range of cultures, religions, languages, some of which they might seek to suppress. And so to Ireland. Ireland was not conquered by the Romans (as Britain was), but was conquered by Britain. But political writing about Ireland can invoke Britain and Rome. As Horace Walpole said, the British ‘had become the heir apparents of the Romans’. Not least in disingenuous accounts of how this happened. Livy held that the Romans conquered the world in ‘selfdefence ’. J R Seely claimed that the British Empire came about in ‘a fit of absence of mind’.10 In a variety of different ways, Irish writers explore the matter of the two empires: John Hewitt sees Northern Ireland as a Roman colony. Frank McGuinness and Brian Friel trope Ireland as the city of Carthage, conquered by Rome. Seamus Heaney invokes Tacitus on empire.11 The poets John Hewitt and John Montague toured Northern Ireland twice (in 1970 and 1971) to read poetry.12 Under the rubric, ‘The Planter and the Gael’, they aimed to promote community relations between the binary opposition of native versus settler. Hewitt as settler can be ambivalent both about the natives and the local elite: ‘My trouble is I stand between the opposites with only 400 years of Irish earth on my bones, and I am a disaffected person to Stormont bullies’.13 But for Louis MacNeice, Dublin is ‘Augustan capital of a Gaelic nation’.14 Hewitt’s poem called ‘The Colony’ does not name the colony...

A Brutal Hack: Tyranny, Rape, and the Barbarism of Bad Poetry in Ovid's Pyreneus Episode

AbstractPoet-figures in Ovid'sMetamorphoseshave been the object of much study, especially those silenced by the powerful, but little attention has been given to Pyreneus. Immediately before the famous contest of the Muses and Pierides, the former briefly narrate their attempted rape by the usurping Thracian tyrant Pyreneus and his precipitous death while trying to fly after them. The few critics who have touched on this episode have tended to focus exclusively on one aspect, be it the poetic, sexual, political, or religious. None has provided a holistic interpretation which does justice to the complex interplay of these four dimensions or to Ovid's witty and characteristic reification of figurative language.Pyreneus is simultaneously an invading usurper, an attempted rapist, an impious theomach, and, on the poetic plane, a talentless plagiarist or derivative imitator, who tries to appropriate others’ work but bathetically and disastrously fails. The interrelation of these four roles, each troping the others, throws light on all, and Pyreneus needs to be contextualized among theMet.'s other tyrants, rapists, and theomachs, as well as its poet-figures. The episode itself, derivative and overstuffed with Ovidian motifs, is mimetic of the sort of narrative bad (would-be) poets like Pyreneus produce.

Mrs Dalloway’s Party Poopers: A Quarrel on Cue

Virginia Woolf’s novelMrs Dalloway, published on 14 May 1925, depicts upper-middle-class society in the aftermath of the Great War (1914–18). The significance of fifty years is gathered up through description of a single day.1 In the evening there is an awkward meeting of minds at a party when Professor Brierly and ‘little’ Jim Hutton quarrel over the poet and polemicist John Milton (1608–74).2 This short scene generally escapes attention from Woolf’s editors and critics while the author herself describes it as ‘an attempt at literary criticism’.3 Its interest and its importance justify its inclusion in full: For there was Professor Brierly, who lectured on Milton, talking to little Jim Hutton (who was unable even for a party like this to compass both tie and waistcoat or make his hair lie flat), and even at this distance they were quarrelling, she could see. For Professor Brierly was a very queer fish. With all those degrees, honours, lectureships between him and the scribblers, he suspected instantly an atmosphere not favourable to his queer compound; his prodigious learning and timidity; his wintry charm without cordiality, his innocence blent with snobbery; he quivered if made conscious, by a lady’s unkempt hair, a youth’s boots, of an underworld, very creditable doubtless, of rebels, of ardent young people; of would-be geniuses, and intimated with a little toss of the head, with a sniff – Humph! – the value of moderation; of some slight training in the classics in order to appreciate Milton. Professor Brierly (Clarissa could see) wasn’t hitting it off with little Jim Hutton (who wore red socks, his black being at the laundry) about Milton. She interrupted. She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond between them, and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that Mrs Dalloway was far the best of the great ladies who took an interest in art. It was odd how strict she was. About music she was purely impersonal. She was rather a prig. But how charming to look at! She made her house so nice, if it weren’t for her Professors. Clarissa had half a mind to snatch him off and set him down at the piano in the back room. For he played divinely. ‘But the noise!’ she said. ‘The noise!’ ‘The sign of a successful party.’ Nodding urbanely, the Professor stepped delicately off. ‘He knows everything in the whole world about Milton,’ said Clarissa. ‘Does he indeed?’ said Hutton, who would imitate the Professor throughout Hampstead: the Professor on Milton; the Professor on moderation; the Professor stepping delicately off.4

Literary Intertextuality of Tomas Venclova‘s Poetry

Borrowing from poetry which belongs to another literary epoch or is written in another language is a constituent part of poetic action. According to Thomas Stearns Eliot, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” In semiotic terms, this can be described as transformation of another poetic language. Algirdas Julius Greimas said: “Meaning is nothing else but transposing one level of language into another level, or one language into another, a different one.” This paper aims to describe the traces of interaction of poets who wrote in different languages and to discuss the direction of transformation of poetic language.The most authoritative teacher of the young Tomas Venclova was Boris Pasternak. The early poems of the Lithuanian poet remind us of Pasternak’s poems from his collection Above the Barriers in their metric variations, rhyming schemes, and alliterative clusters. Two poems by Venclova dedicated to the memory of Pasternak were written in 1960 and 1961. What Venclova ‘steals’ from Osip Mandelstam is mostly semantic figures. In a number of poems, Venclova gets very close to the polyphonic language of this Russian poet. Joseph Brodsky is another constant dialogic partner of Venclova. Sometimes Venclova quotes or paraphrases Lithuanian poetic texts. His poems integrate Lithuanian history of the 20th century, and touch upon the themes of the Holocaust, partisan movement, and the victims of the occupational regime.The values paradigm in Venclova’s poetry is supported by Dante and Shakespeare, as well as a number of 19th and 20th century poets, such as Keats, Baudelaire, Rilke, Apolinnaire or Dylan Thomas. Cyprian Norwid’s “A Funeral Rhapsody in Memory of General Bem” and Czesław Miłosz’s “Ars Poetica?” are also used as poetic subtext. In his later period, Venclova wrote five poems on Biblical stories.Venclova’s connections with the Lithuanian poetic tradition can be defined as hyponymous relationship of belonging: the language and the historical memory. The poetic meanings created by Venclova are actualisations of subtexts of poetry written in many languages. Therefore we can consider Venclova to be a European poet who writes in the Lithuanian language.

Interview

Interview Ilya Kaminsky (bio) On April 2, 2019, the poet Ilya Kaminsky gave a reading as the Margolies Visiting Writer in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Afterward, he spoke with the poet Dora Malech, and this interview is an edited version of their conversation. Dora Malech: You're someone who has both translated and been translated a lot, and you've talked in the past about what is translatable—what remains versus what gets lost in translation. You've mentioned image as something that can survive in translation, and possibly metaphor and rhythm as elements that can come across in a translation. And I would perhaps add narrative and drama to that list. Music can get lost in translation, and cultural context can get lost in translation. In reading your new book, Deaf Republic, with its compelling narrative and imagery, I kept thinking about those elements as ones that might survive translation. I began to make much of this and wonder if you purposefully wrote a book with the ability to move beyond one language, but I'm happy to be corrected. Do you see these translatable elements as an inherent strength or even a moral imperative, or do you want to push back and say, "No, that wasn't my intention at all?" Ilya Kaminsky: Do you believe you have a soul? Can you tell me where in your body it is? Well, translation is the art form that thrives on that kind of certainty/uncertainty. Translation is necessary: without it, in English, we wouldn't have the Bible, we wouldn't have Homer, we wouldn't have Dante. Or, in Russian: we wouldn't have Shakespeare, Milton, and so forth. [End Page 341] It's a necessary art. But it is also impossible. Which is why every single year we get another Dante, or two or three Dantes, published. It is an ongoing conversation, it is an attempt to summon the spirits via our very primitive tools, so to speak. What tools? I would argue that image is perhaps the most useful tool. It is far easier to translate poetry that is heavy with imagery. Tone is also easier to translate, which is why Mayakovsky, who is a far inferior poet to, say, somebody like Mandelstam, is far more accessible in English, because Mayakovsky is all about tone. I'm not saying he's a bad poet; he's a wonderful poet, but Mandelstam = tone + 55 other things. And that is much harder to bring across. How are we to translate somebody like Hopkins—"The world is charged with the grandeur of God"—when so much depends on the alliteration and assonance. Think about Blake—"Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night"; people remember it from lullabies or from kids' books, but it is also a Metaphysical poem. "What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?" He's having a Metaphysical crisis in the middle of the poem. You translate the poem into Russian, and it will be a poem about a big cat. So much depends on the music of the poem—music that is very specific to the language in which it originates. Now, rhythm can be translated. I can go like this . . . [Walks around the room quickly and lightly]. Or I can walk like this . . . [Marches heavily and slowly]. You can imitate another human being's gait. You can feel rhythm. Syntax is a whole other category that is extremely helpful, and actually, that is where translation is very useful. I just mentioned Hopkins, and there are wonderful poets and critics who say that Hopkins became the great poet that he is because he tried to adapt Greek grammar to English, Greek syntax to English. Louise Bogan believed that, for instance. Or, here is another case: Paul Celan is an amazing poet, who according to every law we know, should not be available in translation at all. He is so rooted in his [End Page 342] relationship to (and assault on) the German language of his time. And yet he is very moving to us in English. This is partly because of what he does to...

Forner against Laviano: the Carta de Marcial in its context (the erudite answer to the “Bad Poets” of 1783)

In this paper, we edit and comment the Carta de M. V. Marcial a Don Manuel Fermin de Laviano, a satire written by Juan Pablo Forner. First, we read the text in its context: the development of the theatrical career of Manuel Fermin de Laviano between 1779 and 1783 and the regal celebrations of August and September 1783. Second, we edit the Carta, after we have compared its two manuscript testimonies. Third, we comment this text as a result of an erudite answer of rejection against the strategies of self-representation as an author made by Laviano, in order to expose himself as a cultured writer. At last, we focus on the relevance of this Carta as a testimony of the Spanish literary controversies from XVIIIth century, which are characterized by the neoclassical paradigm that rules over the writing process as an access to the cultured literary circles.

Epigram

Epigram Irina Dumitrescu (bio) The epigram is the chihuahua of verse forms, silly and charming until you feel its teeth sink in. The epigram leaves a trail of paper cuts, thin with a long-felt sting. The epigram preserves the petty quirks of everyday life: this is the genre of cigarettes and miniskirts, figs and wigs. Incompetent doctors, loose women, and bad poets fill its cramped space, jostling for a drink or a wink. Irreverent and irrelevant, epigrams are fated to be misunderstood. Some of their punchlines lose their edge after centuries, but most were dull to begin with. The general quality of epigrams may be one of the few points of agreement between critics and poets. Most are dashed off, occasional, bad. Yet the good ones are memorable, and the best so lyrical that they lose the name of "epigram" altogether.1 Edward Phillips claimed the epigram "consists rather of conceit and acumen of wit than of poetical invention. Yet it is more commendable to be a Martial in Epigram, than Juvenal's Codrus in heroic poetry."2 That was in the epigram's heyday, when poets strove to render Martial's pointes in the vernacular. By now the epigram is burned out, its savage wit about as welcome in polite society as a heavy smoker. Early epigrams had higher pretensions. The ἐπίγραμμα was an inscription. It commemorated the maker of a work of art or the body in a sepulcher. (It also branded slaves' foreheads and served as a bill for damages, strangely in keeping with its later uses.)3 The funereal aspects so present in the Greek Anthology have not disappeared. Epigrammatists like Ioan Pop still dwell on final moments, on the obscure beyond: MoarteaÎntuneric în contextDe nimicnicie, prafṢi pretextDe epitaf. DeathDarkness for the vexedWind to blow away the chaff [End Page 375] And a pretextFor an epitaph.4 If the Greek tradition is known for being commemorative and the Roman satirical, then it is not surprising that so many epigrams combine these two energies by poking fun at the profession most efficient at ushering us into the grave. Here is the physician John Coakley Lettsom: On Dr. Lettsom, by HimselfWhen people's ill, they comes to I,I physics, bleeds, and sweats 'em;Sometimes they live, sometimes they die.What's that to I? I lets 'em.5 Poetry reminds us of death and offers itself as the antidote. Soft pipes play on, freezing the lover in his chase, the beloved in her endless, numb beauty. Lyric promises immortality, but the tiny epigram applies modest medicine: it is not a cure but a tonic, a refreshing draught for the exhausting business of living: EpigramaO pilulă sceptică,Glumă antiseptică,Pentru vechi năravuri leac,Numai pentru critici … fleac! The EpigramA skeptical doseAntiseptically jocoseFor old habits, a shotBut to critics—a naught!6 As Eugen Pop's quatrain here reveals, the epigram is obsessed with its own brevity. The challenge it poses to the poet is to squeeze the maximum amount of observation into the smallest possible space on the page. At its best, it is exquisitely economical, without an ounce of filler or added sugar. While critics struggle to define the genre, weighing each specimen to see if it has too many lines or too little wit, epigrammatists like Cornelius Enescu reflect on the condensed power of a miniscule genre: EpigramaO strofă mică, mică foarte,O picătură într-o carte;Când spiritul e pe măsură,O carte într-o picătură. [End Page 376] The EpigramA tiny verse was all it took,A drop alone in one large book,But spirit foamed over the top:I found a whole book in the drop.7 In its attempt to define itself, the epigram begins to resemble its Greek sister, the enigma. Like her, the epigram takes pleasure in observing ordinary creatures from a new perspective, setting objects into motion. Where the riddle draws out the enchantment of quotidian life, however, the epigram sharpens its claws: EpigramaE un demon vesel carePrada-n loc şi-o ţintuieşteŞi—proptit...

Drög að réttarsögu orðlistar á Íslandi

Medieval Icelandic law contains no provisions about copyright. Authors used without hesitation narrative texts by others, but poets were paid for composing laudatory poems about kings and narrators for telling stories at their courts. The art of storytelling became a speciality of Icelanders, who were also hired to write biographies of Norwegian kings. It was considered reprehensible to use the poetry of others as one's own work. Two Norwegian poets may have got the cognomens skáldaspillir (Destroyer of poets?) and illskælda (Bad or Evil poet?) for plagiarism. An Icelandic poet composed a laudatory poem about a woman but changed it to fit another one, receiving a bitter revenge. In Icelandic sagas stanzas occur frequently and, unlike borrowings in prose, their authors are usually named. In the medieval law of Iceland it is forbidden to compose about people not only derogatory but also laudatory poetry. Conceivably it has been considered to give the author some kind of power over the person who was the subject of the poetry. Proper copyright, though, does not occur in Icelandic law until the beginning of the twentieth century.

Plagiarism and the Problem of Author Formation

필자는 최근에 발생한 신경숙의 표절에 관한 논쟁에 개입하려는 의도로 이 글을 쓰게 되었다. 필자의 주장은 다음과 같이 요약될 수 있다. 표절을 단순히 문학적 절도 행위로 단죄하기 이전에 그것이 작가가 자신의 주체를 형성하기 위해 문학 전통과 갖는 관계, 즉 표절의 의미를 검토해야 한다는 것이다. 표절을 단순히 도덕성의 결여나 상상력의 결핍, 무능력 등으로 폄하하는 것은 지나친 단순화이다. 이것은 특히 콜리지나 라슨처럼 문학적 성취가 이미 증명된 작가의 경우에 더욱 그러하다. 이들은 작가로서 자신의 한계나 결함을 보완하기 위해서 표절에 의지했던 것은 아니다. 이들에게 표절은 자신이 대타자로서의 문학과 관계를 맺도록 만들어 주고 그렇지 않아도 불안한 주체성을 안정화하는 매개로서 의미를 가지고 있다. 콜리지가 문학적 자서전(Biographia Literaria)에서 언급했던 정신적 위기로서 “기운이 없는 힘”과 흑인이지만 백인처럼 살아야 했던 경험을 서술한 라슨의 패싱(Passing)에는 그와 같이 작가가 문학적으로 자신의 주체를 형성하는 과정이 잘 나타나있다. 한편에 소타자로서 개별적 문학 작품이 있다면, 다른 한편에는 대타자로서 문학이 있다. 콜리지와 라슨에게 표절은 작가가 대타자인 문학과 관계를 맺는 방식의 하나였다. 개별 작품의 관점에 서서 표절 여부를 판단하는, 즉 저작권이나 독창성, 근대적 작가론의 관점에 입각해서만 표절 여부를 판단하는 것은 태도가 잘못되었다는 것은 아니다. 다만 표절에 대한 논의가 작가와 개별 작품의 관계가 아니라 작가와 대타자인 문학의 관계라는 관점으로 확대될 필요가 있다는 것이다.What is plagiarism? The literary world of Korea in the last half of 2015 was abuzz with discussion about Sin Gyeong-suk's plagiarism. For she was one of the most exceptional writers who won both popular and critical acclaim, such an exposure of her plagiary was a big shock. But amid harsh accusations of her literary stealth, the question concerning the nature of her plagiarism was not seriously asked. It was T.S. Eliot who declared that the distinction between plagiarism and creation is impossible: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. Bad poets deface what they take." The difficulty of drawing such a differentiation more increases if we consider the post-modern theories of textuality, authorship, hybridity, and so on. From such a post-modern perspective repudiating the notion of origin, I will suggest that plagiarism in the cases of Samuel Coleridge and Nella Larsen was the last resort for them to form their subjectivity in conjunction with literary tradition. Larsen, who had never been recognized by her white biological mother as daughter, found a substitute mother in the figure of Keye-Smith and sought to gain recognition by writing over her work. She entered into a kind of renewed mother daughter relationship through plagiarism Coleridge’s case presents the (un)conscious mechanism of plagiarism. For him, literature, not writer, is the real author of literature, for it unfolds itself through the medium of the writer. If the writer copies the text of literature’s self-revelation, the divorce of creation from plagiarism is not sustainable. It means that Larsen and Coleridge may not be accused of moral failure or of intellectual incompetence. We have to take precaution in order to prevent a prematurely stigmatizing a writer on the ground of plagiarism. Sometimes, though not always, the so-called plagiarism should be understood in terms of a writer’s unconscious way of self-formation as an author, which can be realized only by earning a membership in the republic of literature.

ROSSZ KÖLTŐK TÁRSASÁGA Az epigonizmus és dilettantizmus természetrajza a 19. századi magyar irodalomkritikai gondolkodásban

<p>Terjedelmi okokból csupán első harmada jelenik itt meg egy nagyobb kritikatör- téneti dolgozatnak, mely a 18. század közepétől a 20. század elejéig járja körül azt a kérdést, hogy az európai és a magyar irodalomban mely korszakban mit tekin- tettek rossz költészetnek. Míg Horatiustól kezdve Winckelmannon és Wielandon át, a 18. század végéig a nagy mestereket és poétikai szabályokat csupán külsősé- gekben követő, ún. „szolgai utánzók” költészetét értékelték le, a 19. század elejétől, az Edward Young által kidolgozott eredetiségprogram jegyében már lényegében mindenfajta szövegkapcsolódás utánzásnak, s ily módon rossz költészetnek bizo- nyult. Az 1830-as években, az eredetiségfogalom vulgarizálódásával egyidőben terjedt el az utánzó költőkre alkalmazott <em>epigon </em>jelző. Az 1850-es évek végén Arany János az ars poeticaként is értelmezhető <em>Zrínyi és Tasso </em>című tanulmányában dolgoz- ta ki a modern értelemben vett szövegkapcsolatok elméletét, melynek alapján az eredetiség és utánzás kérdése irrelevánsnak bizonyult. Ekkor újult meg az a kérdés, melyet a 18. század végén Goethe és Schiller vázlatban dolgozott ki: amennyiben vannak utánzó, de jó, és eredeti, de rossz költők, akkor melyek a rossz költészet poétikai ismérvei. A másodvonalbeli költők szövegeiből Arany János és Erdélyi János a magyar irodalomban szinte egyedülálló módon hozta létre a rossz költészet eszköztárának, hibáinak katalógusát. A Goethe és Schiller által bevezetett dilettáns- fogalom az 1860-as évektől a századfordulóig fokozatosan, több szakaszban terjedt el, és kezdte jelölni a hivatásos, de nem elsőrangú művészt.</p>

Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser

Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser

What makes a good poet according to Someśvaradeva?

In 13th-century Gujarat, the court of the Caulukya emperors in Aṇahilavāḍa-Pāṭan offered patronage and employment to a highly learned group of individuals. These men also wrote poetry and drama in their spare time — for their amusement, as a mark of culture and to comment upon the events of their times. Within this group, Someśvaradeva, royal chaplain to the Caulukya monarch Bhīma II and his Vāghela successors Lavaṇaprasāda and Vīradhavala, was renowned for having written a composition in only one and a half hours. He offers us in his writings a wealth of historical information on his political circumstances, along with subtle reflections on the ethics of poetry. Who is a good poet? Who is a bad poet? Is a good poet a virtuous individual (sajjana)? Is a bad poet a rogue (durjana)? Who are the models of poetic propriety? Such are some of Someśvaradeva’s concerns. These frequently satirical commentaries on standards of poetry and the ideal poetic disposition appear in the preambles to his two epic poems, th...

Horace, Catullus, and Maecenas

This essay argues that the scenario of Horace’s Epode 3 is modeled upon that of Catullus 14. In each case the speaker protests against a practical joke played by a friend; the obvious programmatic stance of the latter poem, moreover, casts light on the operations of the former. In c. 14, Catullus threatens to respond to Calvus’ gag volume of doggerel with his own collection of no less awful verse. Suffering heartburn from a dish primed with garlic, Horace meanwhile wishes garlic breath upon his host Maecenas should he try the same trick again. Both malefactors will thus be repaid in kind. Like the anthology of bad poets, the garlic arguably has metapoetic significance, and an allusion to Catullus 13 at the close of the epode suggests that Horace is poking fun at Maecenas’ fondness for composing verse in the neoteric style. Fragments of Maecenas’ own hendecasyllabics addressed to Horace support that possibility.

A Spanish View of Modernist Poetry in American Periodicals (1925)

A Spanish View of Modernist Poetry in American Periodicals (1925)

Do Not Read This Review

Do Not Read This Review Davis Schneiderman (bio) Keyhole Factory. William Gillespie. Spineless Books. http://www.spinelessbooks.com. 410 pages; cloth, $28.00. Stop. Stop reading this. There's nothing this review can tell you about Keyhole Factory, the stupendous, mind-bending new work by Spineless Books impresario William Gillespie, a book reminiscent in its boundary-exploding praxis of Steve Tomasula's fantastic VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2004), that wouldn't be better conveyed by immediately experiencing the novel. Now. Stop. Reading. This. Seriously. No matter that this review may be able to communicate some small quintessence of Keyhole Factory's intersecting narrative structure drawn ostensibly from the "webwork" plot composition method of all-but-forgotten mid-twentieth century writer Harry Stephen Keeler. No matter that this review can tell you that Keyhole Factory's first sustained section ("The Bad Poet") offers what appears to be a fierce academic satire of overstuffed conferences keyed into the argument between earnestly literary poetry (good poetry) and the "mechanical approach to the art" (bad poetry). No matter that the latter is more akin to the generative and formal innovations that mark much of Spineless Books's output. No matter that this review can go further in its explanations, for were "The Bad Poet" section to be the core of Keyhole Factory—and not merely the set up for an elaborate near-future catastrophe involving a text-bending "Morpheus Biblionaut" (re: poet astronaut speeding to Alpha Centauri and back, also offered on a delightful CD-ROM companion); a perhaps Monsanto-sponsored super-virus that liquefies like something out of Naked Lunch (1959); crazed test monkeys escaping from their cages; a convict who remembers the future and so becomes a test subject for the virus, dubbed "Pandora"; an inoculated population of scientists and government elites who spend the post-apocalypse inside a Blade Runner-like pyramid city; and a society of free farms operating on near-Luddite socialist models, terrorized by a distraught killer from the inoculated elite, exiled from the pyramid, who makes "art" through his elaborate staged murders of the commune dwellers—even if "The Bad Poet" were prime thesis and not merely a theme, the reader would be held in a rapt trance at the book's ability to so convincingly [End Page 11] juggle these other multiform narrative perspectives. No matter that this review can tell you that Keyhole Factory dazzles in each of it's twenty-two sections. In "Keep the Change," the six-page narrative splits into an additional column on each succeeding page, tracing six initial victims of Pandora. Here is a section—an exemplar of Gillespie's site-specific prose poems, from the middle column of the third page. They seemed uninterestedin our other products.Our bioweapons,in particular, madethem chuckle. No matter that in "Wildfire Vectors," short bursts of text detail the outbreak atop a Mercator-style 2D world map, with text placed roughly atop geo-locations. Near eastern China, but too far north, for instance: The Shanghai pimp speaks reassuringly to an adolescent sex slave en route to Kabul. And no matter than in "Retreat," a group of survivors watch as a pack of bandits attacks their cabin and makes a prisoner of their obnoxious friend: One of the men who stood over Mike was apparently also lost in reverie, looking down at his new friend, wearing a leather vest for a shirt, one of grandad's homemade beers wrapped in a hand. The other hand wiped a knife on his jeans. No matter that this review can demonstrate how other clever texts appear in bubbles of varying sizes ("Bubbles"), lineated overhearings ("Election Day"), and cigarette-worshipping tobacco prose ("Butts"). No matter at all. Just stop reading this review. For it simply cannot communicate that as wonderful as Keyhole Factory's individual sections, the most fascinating aspect of this book is not the proliferation of micro-narratives themselves nor the author's obvious facility with this polyphonic cacophony of interwoven story—for the same sense of post- or quasi-apocalyptic terror can be found in everything from the best J.G. Ballard to even the comparatively linear Oryx and Crake (2003) by...