Bad Poet Research Articles

We're All Bad Poets

IN OUR USE OF WORDS in ordinary life ... we are all bad (Frye, Educated 58). But we can become better poets with literary and that means in mythical thinking, especially biblical thinking, for without understanding our metaphors and their historical origin, we are illiterate. other words, it's myth of Bible that should be basis of literary training (46). So insisted our deservedly illustrious Northrop Frye in his little book, Educated Imagination. And what influence has this had on me? As a freshman at UBC, with faint hope of becoming an English professor, I had little trouble understanding that I was a bad poet (well, to be honest, I would have agreed to being inferior, but not outright bad). But when my professor, Errol Durbach, pronounced that one could not understand English without proper knowledge of its two pillars, classical mythology and and then shook his head, saying that he imagined we might fairly soon have to put a footnote to term Bible, (1) I cheered inwardly, glad to know that whatever I knew of as a Christian, would be respected in his class. (It was, but that's another story.) From then on, moving on to graduate work on John Milton with Jan de Bruyn at UBC, high school teaching, motherhood, teaching at TWU, completing a doctorate on educating moral imagination through fantasy with Kieran Egan at SFU, and continuing to teach at TWU, I have had much occasion to ponder and cite from Frye's Anatomy of Criticism and Educated Imagination. I particularly love his feminine metaphors for poet's birthing of a poem: The poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, not father of his poem; he at best a midwife, or, more accurately still, womb of Mother Nature herself ... poet ... responsible for delivering [the poem] in as uninjured a state as possible, and if poem alive, it equally anxious to be rid of him ... of his ego (Anatomy 98). Fantastic. That passage alone registers hugely on my Richter scale of de-and-reconstructing gender discourse. And Frye's insights here, of course, have much to do with his knowledge of how notions of masculine and feminine operate metaphorically in surprisingly gender-inclusive ways in Bible. As he said of his own experience, while he was not interested in doctrines of faith as such in this discussion, the Bible ... suggested [to him] a of getting past some of limitations inherent in all positions (Great Code 167, xvi). Over years, what keeps on impressing me in particular Frye's pithy and uncompromising position on centrality of biblical education. In his view, biblical literacy essential to education because Bible is a book that has had a continuously fertilizing influence on English literature (xvi). While sensitive topic of religious faith often flusters and frustrates believers and non-believers alike, Frye could, I believe, educate others in biblical without violating humane educator's mandate to honour sanctity (to use a religious metaphor) of each individual. It's Canadian way, isn't it? Robert Fulford, for another, praises Frye's way of examining Bible without formality or piety, an approach students enjoyed and admired. In striving to give his students and readers a well-trained imagination, Frye was determined to impart understanding of biblical metaphors. For example, in 1963, with shrewd hilarity Frye nails arrogance of literalism: Religious language so full of metaphors of ascent, like 'lift up your hearts,' and so full of traditional associations with sky, that Mr. Krushchev still thinks he's made quite a point when he tells us that his astronauts can't find any trace of God in outer space (Educated 54). …

The Poet’s Place: William Carlos Williams and the Production of an American Avant-Garde

Poets in Exile MODERNITY'S grand narratives institute their own radical dismantling (510). Susan Stanford Friedman's conception of in the previous sentence captures in miniature what many other critics noted: is overreaching, unstable, and, above all, contradictory.1 Friedman's conception of also leads to understanding modernism as a form of critical which suggests rather than being the sanctioned aesthetic of modernity, as we might assume from its name, that modernism is modernity's active, and radical, antagonist (Somigli 5). As Astradur Eysteinsson says in Concept of Modernism, modernism is attempt to interrupt the that we live and understand as a social, if not 'normal,' way of life and is thus a concept [ . . . ] signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt, beginning in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world (6, 2). Luca Somigli narrows Eysteinsson's definition by arguing that modernism developed as a response to the fallen condition of the poet in modernity (9). In making this argument he refers to the example of Charles Baudelaire, and in particular Baudelaire's prose poem Lost Halo - a text Somigli argues provides an allegory for the cultural crisis that poets faced in the latter half of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.2 With the triumph of capital ist and positivist science and the entrenchment and institutionalization of their attendant grand narratives, individuals who found themselves outside of those narratives were made to wonder who, what, and where they were (Somigli 7). Modernity, after all, if it is understood as a grand narrative (or multiple grand narratives), would seem to be offering solutions to the problems of history. Modernity's solutions, however, are necessarily exclusive. Baudelaire brings to the surface what these Utopian projects suppressed in their rise to ideological dominance, and what has ultimately been left out of their final solutions. exclusion most significant for Baudelaire, of course, is that the poet, or at least the poet as he had been historically understood, seems to no place in the projects of modernity.3 Baudelaire allegorizes the predicament of the modern poet with a story of a poet who loses his halo while crossing a busy boulevard. Another man, recognizing the halo-less poet in a house of ill fame, drinking quintessences and eating ambrosia, addresses the poet, and eventually asks whether or not the poet, in an attempt to get his halo back, will put out a notice or have the police advertise for it. poet replies, Good God no! I'm fine here. You're the only one who recognized me. Besides, dignity irks me. And I'm glad to think that some bad poet will pick it up and insolently stick it on his head. Make someone happy, what a delight! And especially a happy someone I can laugh at! What about X, or Z! Right! Wouldn't that be funny! (Baudelaire 113) Somigli argues that what Baudelaire lays bare in this text is that the loss of the halo, the symbolic insignia of the poet's social status and function, is the result of a transformation that pushes him to the margins of capitalist economy (9). In Walter Benjamin's terms, the poet, a remnant of precapitalist society, is evacuated of his aura. This has real benefits according to Baudelaire, in that the poet is now able to come into contact with cultural realms from which his halo had previously kept him apart; however, these contacts come at the price of his public voice. No longer do poets an exalted place from which to speak; lacking their haloes, nothing now sanctions their voices other than that which sanctions everything in modernity: money. Baudelaire's prose poem thus enacts in miniature, as Marshall Berman points out, the historical development that Marx and Engels describe in Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked to with reverent awe. …

The Psychological Benefits of Bad Poetry

The author was the founder and secretary pro-tem of the Bad Poets Society at Princeton Theological Seminary. This distinction does not appear on his official resume. The Society did not have meetings but it had a newsletter that came out several times a year comprised of bad poetry written by members of the faculty and staff. These poetic works included reflections on institutional matters. This article contains bad poetry by the author relating to such matters. This poetry illustrates Sigmund Freud's (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Norton, New York, 1960) view of humor as saving in the expenditure of painful emotions, costly inhibitions, and difficult thinking. The parasitical nature of bad poetry is also noted and illustrated with the author's own poems.

Grotesque Bodies: Insulting Conversos and Women in the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa

Grotesque Bodies: Insulting Conversos and Women in the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa Barbara F. Weissberger Louise O. Vasvári In his 1999 book of essays titled Cogitus interruptus, Juan Goytisolo criticizes the Spanish literary canon created in the late nineteenth century by “ideólogos retrocastizos” like Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and the generation of ‘98 (123). In particular, he laments the exclusion from that canon of Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa, a popular sixteenth-century collection of satirical poetry. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’s prudish judgment that the verse contained therein is “cínico, grosero y soez” (126) has led to its unjustified critical neglect.1 Goytisolo rightly points out that the sexual and ethnic vilification that fills the pages of that cancionero is an hilo conductor that leads directly to the picaresque, the poetry of Quevedo, and other works [End Page 259] enshrined as masterpieces of Spanish literature (130–31). This essay responds to Goytisolo’s call to give the aggressive “dissing” contests of the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa (= Burlas) their cultural due.2 Burlas was first published in 1511 as the final section of Hernando del Castillo’s monumental Cancionero general. Despite–or because of–being relegated to the back of the book, the inventive invectives of the Burlas section proved to be very popular. It was reprinted, with various additions and deletions, in subsequent editions of Cancionero general throughout the first half of the sixteenth century and was published separately in 1519. It is this edition that I will focus on here.3 Most of the satirical poems included in Burlas were occasional compositions by noblemen, courtiers, and professional poets associated with the court of the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1504). Like the invenciones, a courtly genre created for tournaments, and also assiduously collected by Castillo in his Cancionero general, the insult contests were no doubt first recited at festive court celebrations or entertainments.4 They were by no means simple escapist [End Page 260] entertainment, however. Rather, like the lyrics written in a higher register in the same cancionero, their composition and performance served a very serious purpose, namely the production and maintenance of masculine identity and status. As Julian Weiss has discussed, in the highly competitive environment of the royal court, demonstrating one’s ability to versify elegantly and wittily was an important means toward gaining social standing among one’s peers and possibly winning favors from the monarchs. Love lyrics are privileged vehicles for the creation of such a prestigious self-fashioning (“Álvaro de Luna”; The Poet’s Art). Written in a provocatively, at times shockingly, low register, the insults traded back and forth in Burlas by some of the very same poets who write eloquently of love, serve a similar function of building social status by disparaging others. Given that roughly one third of all pieces in the cancioneros involve one poet writing against one another, what Mark D. Johnston has called the “fundamentally oppositional character” (249) of such verse cannot be ignored. Although, as he points out, it is difficult to construct five centuries later all of the social, economic, and political distinctions that operate in and around each occasional lyric, we can study the broad categories these literary antagonists use as strategies of “positioning” (251). Of the many categories deployed–ignorant peasant, bad poet, sexual deviant, among others–I will deal with two of the most frequent: “Jew” and “whore”. Medievalists Kathleen Biddick and Steven F. Kruger have persuasively demonstrated the intersection of categories of identity such as gender and sexuality with others such as ethnicity and race in the discursive stigmatization of undesirable others. Biddick situates gender within a “theory of borders” that enables us to talk about the historical construction and maintenance of sexual boundaries that in turn help create cultural categories in the Middle Ages. Her theory historicizes gender in relation to other engendered categories given as “natural” in medieval discourses and hitherto taken for granted by historians. Critical studies of medieval gender would use these tools to work simultaneously as histories of other foundational categories imagined in the invention of Europe, especially “Christendom”, Corpus Christi...

Colluthus' ‘Homeric’ Epyllion

Poetaster, plagiarist, parrot, and so on. During the last two centuries, Colluthus has been widely reputed an utterly bad poet by both amateur readers and professional scholars: his reputation is not much better than that once enjoyed by, say, Eudocia or Dioscorus of Aphrodito. It is therefore unsurprising that the literary features of his poem have won very little attention from the res publica philologorum. Efforts have been made to emend its (very badly transmitted) text, and much ingenuity has been devoted to the study of its sources and its diction; but few scholars have tried to analyse the Rape of Helen as a literary work. The present paper hopes to be a first step towards such a goal. Let me say from the very beginning that I am not concerned at all with Colluthus' inspiration, skill or the quality of his poetry. This is not what I mean by speaking of a ‘revaluation’ of our poem. Nor am I trying to follow in the steps of Giangrande, who once made a sustained effort to demonstrate that Colluthus was fond of learned allusion in an almost Alexandrian way—Giangrande rightly pointed to Colluthus' irony, but his interpretations of single passages and phrases were for the most part ill-founded, and it was quite easy for Livrea, in a spirited reply to Giangrande, to dispose of them. My concern is a simple one: what was the aim of the Rape of Helen? Are there any ‘signs of life’ in those 394 hexameters—to put it in other words: are we sure that Colluthus aimed at a slavish rewriting of the story of Paris and Helen with the bare addition of some Nonnian flavour, or rather may we suppose that his poetical project was slightly more ambitious?

Woman Poets of the Nineteenth Century, and: Swinburne, and: Arthur Hugh Clough (review)

Reviewed by: Woman Poets of the Nineteenth Century, and: Swinburne, and: Arthur Hugh Clough Anna Barton (bio) Emma Mason , Woman Poets of the Nineteenth Century (London: Northcote House, 2006), xi + 148 pages, paperback, £12.99 (ISBN 0 7463 1001 3); Catherine Maxwell , Swinburne (London: Northcote House, 2006), xiv + 144 pages, paperback, £12.99 (ISBN 0 7463 0969 4); John Schad , Arthur Hugh Clough (London: Northcote House, 2006), xiii + 105 pages, paperback, £12.99 (ISBN 07463 1166 4). Writers and Their Work, the series of critical introductions to authors and poets, published by Northcote House and the British Council has a well-deserved reputation for its concise, accurate evaluations of individual authors (a rare commodity in the current academic publishing market, where trends tend against single author studies) that have an eye to current critical tastes; and for this reason it provides a valuable starting point for the reappraisal of the literary landscape of a particular period. Three nineteenth-century titles recently added to the series are Arthur Hugh Clough by John Schad, Swinburne by Catherine Maxwell and Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century by Emma Mason. Of these three, [End Page 326] only Emma Mason's study of Felicia Hemans, Dora Greenwell and Adelaide Anne Proctor introduces authors to the series for the first time. Isobel Armstrong (up until very recently the general editor of the series) is the author of the original introduction to Clough (London: Northcote House, 1962) and Swinburne was the subject of an earlier edition by Ian Fletcher (London: Northcote House, 1973). In the cases of Clough and Swinburne, some significant differences between the first and second editions indicate that over the past three decades each writer has become a more established member of the canon. While the earlier editions attempt to make the case in favour of Clough and Swinburne, arguing for their inclusion in the canon and defending them against accusations of eccentricity, Schad and Maxwell are much more confident in their subjects. Maxwell does not attempt to excuse Swinburne's peculiarity; instead she excuses, or at least explains, his neglect during the first half of the twentieth century as part of a useful summary of the poet's reception history, which begins with his reputation as a poet's poet during his lifetime and ends with his return to prominence in recent decades through studies that have focused on representations of gender in his work as well as his poetic style. Throughout her book, it is Maxwell's project to broaden the possibilities of Swinburne studies and she succeeds in this through a chronological survey of Swinburne's major works that uses relevant contextual material to frame suggestive close readings of particular poems. The Swinburne that emerges is a less marginal, more modern Victorian: a writer whose work merits renewed attention. The publication of Jerome McGann and Charles Sligh's 2004 edition of Swinburne's Major Poems and Selected Prose (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004) has made his writing (particularly his prose, which Maxwell identifies as having been largely neglected in the past) newly accessible to students of Victorian literature and Maxwell's introduction, which itself includes the previously unpublished poem, 'Parsiphae', makes a valuable companion to this collection. John Schad's study of Clough begins with Swinburne's assertion that Clough was a 'bad poet'(1). References to Armstrong's earlier edition within the work suggest that Schad is not so much reappraising Clough as continuing his study of the poet from where Armstrong left off. For a straightforward introduction to Clough it would perhaps be better to read the earlier edition before coming to Schad's study, which is the least conventional of the books under review. Armstrong's study identifies thinking, or the intellectual consciousness, as a focus of Clough's work. This is Schad's starting point. Clough, Schad states, is a bad poet because of his own poor opinion of poetry: his belief that 'words … are [End Page 327] merely the rubbish that is left over from the main event that is thinking' (1). Schad organizes his study around Clough's thoughts: thoughts of God, thoughts of history and thoughts of...

The Character of Consciousness

Over years, Amiri Baraka has repeatedly demonstrated his generosity to other poets. Some established poets think of themselves as gatekeepers or godfathers--I'm thinking of someone who perhaps is a chancellor at the Academy of American Poets--and such people like to dole out opportunities to students or proteges. Then there are poets who are genuinely helpful and generous. first kind of folks are usually bad poets. They may be famous and well-connected, but they are still bad poets. On the other hand, the really generous people frequently fit the category of great. They do not do favors with an attitude of bogus noblesse oblige that obligates the recipient to kiss the fake godfather's ring. And it is not a matter of false modesty, either. It is simply about gracefulness and openness and real-ness. Anyway, I'm thinking of a particular moment when several of us got into print because of Amiri's connections. There was a journal published in Paris called Revolution. And one of the issues, I think it was Spring 1964 number, included a special section called Five Young African American Poets. editors had, in fact, asked Baraka some of his poems, and it was his idea to expand that invitation to include several others. I was, as you might imagine, pleased that he asked me to contribute some of my own work. I was still in college at the time and had only published a few things in Umbra and a couple of other places. Thinking back on it now, the section called Five Young African American Poets was quite exciting. There was powerful work there. section had a brief introductory note and included Joe Johnson's terrific poem If I Ride This Train; a set of poems by A. B. Spellman, including zapata & the landlord and for my unborn & wretched children; and poems by Sonia Sanchez, including a powerful piece titled slogan. When I picked up the magazine, I thought, Hey, I'm in good company! When I sat down and read it, I realized it was more like I was in water over my head. Then there were Baraka's poems.... Now, this was truly terrifying! He is represented in the magazine by four brand-new poems: Cant, Kenyatta Listening to Mozart, The People Burning: Mayday! Mayday!, and Letter to E. Franklin Frazier. As Richard Wright might have said, LAWD TODAY! Amiri was only about 30 at the time but--as he put it in a poem called Numbers, Letters--he was strong from years of fantasy / and Needless to say, when I read his selection of poems in that magazine, I knew it was time me to get down to some very serious study. For real. unselfish generosity that Amiri Baraka demonstrated in 1964 by sharing his opportunity with younger, developing writers--giving us a chance to be heard--is one of the engines that made the Black Arts Movement an important, nationwide resurgence of African American creativity and artistic accomplishment. …

"Unboastful Bard": Originally Anonymous English Romantic Poetry Book Publication, 1770-1835

IN THE 1770S SIXTY PERCENT of all poetry books were published anonymously, but by the period's final decade from 1826 to 1835 only twenty-five percent were. As the reading public grew larger, and as improved printing technology allowed for the production of more and cheaper books, a few poets could become independent of patronage, could support themselves through their poetry, and could aspire to become professionals in a developing print culture. 1 But to be a bad poet was as embarrassing and unrespectable as ever, especially for a gentleman or a lady. In the late eighteenth century this meant that, while young gentlemen or young ladies might write poetry, publishing secretly at first was usual because no one wanted a reputation as a laughably awkward poet. One could test one's poetic wings in print and see if others thought one was soaring magnificently astride Pegasus or rocking ridiculously aboard a hobby-horse. And if disappointed, an anonymous author could abandon hopes of poetic fame without enduring public humiliation.

Going Around Hungry: Topography and Poetics in Martial 2.14

Going Around Hungry: Topography and Poetics in Martial 2.14 Richard E. Prior Martial paints a social and physical portrait of Flavian Rome unlike those from other periods of the city’s history. A signal feature of Martial’s epigrams is representation of his physical world which often manifests itself through a wealth of topographical references. Through attention to detail, he lays the city of Rome out and illustrates the actual function of each place in the daily lives of his contemporaries, thus becoming an invaluable aid to topographer and social historian alike. Unfortunately, topographers usually read Martial’s epigrams literally, as maps, not as poems. Those few scholars who do read him as a poet pay little or no attention to his use of topography. To use Martial as a mine for Roman topography, one must understand how he approaches the features of the city and employs them in poetic discourse. Likewise, to understand Martial’s poetry, one must have knowledge of Roman topography. The aim of this paper is to explore the social issues and topographical questions involved in a single epigram of Martial, namely 2.14, which details the circuit of a certain Selius who is frantically searching for a dinner invitation. After discussing the social phenomenon central to the poem, dining, I will walk through Selius’ route, pausing at each of his stops to comment on the place itself and Martial’s treatment of the site in this and other poems, showing how neglect of topographical or literary dimensions has led to misguided conclusions and strained topographical evaluations. Martial could see potential for an epigram in nearly any incident, and he appears to have had a short list of behaviors which, whenever observed, were almost guaranteed a place in his poems. Since he depended on daily life for inspiration, it is not surprising that eighty-five poems, nearly an entire book’s worth, relate to so quotidian an experience as dinner—not just any meal, but the cena in particular. 1 His anecdotes graphically reveal the important functions of this meal (beyond alimentary [End Page 121] concerns) in Roman society, and its significance to both host and guest alike. At the most concrete level, an invitation to dinner represented an opportunity for free food. For the poor, this was not a question of gluttony, rather one of survival, or at least a respite from cabbage and pulse. For the niggardly, free food was just that—free. It also served as an opportunity for theft. Martial’s dinner thieves are not content, as are those of Catullus, with merely absconding with linen; they fill the linen with board from the table to sell the next day. 2 Invitations to dinner represented a tangible manifestation of the existence of some social alliance. The unimportant or unconnected were never invited; thus, those wishing for connections (and thereby import) scrambled for invitations as marks of social connection. Since dinners reveal a host’s standard of living through both fare and presentation per se, they easily become vehicles through which hosts can display their wealth and self-proclaimed erudition. An invitation to dinner also becomes a mode of exchange. Bad (but monied) poets can buy a flattering audience for the evening; social climbers use promises of dinner to augment their retinue as they go about their daily affairs; hosts even extend dinner invitations in exchange for sexual favors. With such abuses and torments heaped upon guests as the price of admission, one may well wonder whether a willing guest existed at Rome. They did . . . in abundance. The efforts of these connection-hunters, especially when their designs are frustrated, are sources of great humor to Martial. Nor does he leave himself out of the fray. At 2.18.1, for example, he confesses his own participation in this ritual, albeit with chagrin: Capto tuam, pudet heu, sed capto, Maxime, cenam. (I keep trying to get a dinner out of you, Maximus, I’m ashamed to say, but I keep trying.) Given the importance of dinner invitations, then, the process of wheedling for them was bound to become something of an institution, and in some cases, a virtual science. The agent of the...

How peculiar is evaluative morphology?

Many languages possess morphological rules which serve to express diminution or augmentation, endearment or contempt; examples are the Breton rule relatingpotr‘boy’ topotrig‘little boy’, the Shona rule relatingchibikiso‘cooking tool’ tozichibikiso‘huge cooking tool’ and the Italian rule relatingpoeta‘poet’ topoetastro‘bad poet’. Because of the possibility of interpreting diminution and augmentation in affective rather than purely objective terms (Wierzbicka, 1980: 53ff.; Szymanek, 1988: 106ff.), morphological expressions of diminution or augmentation are not always discrete from those of endearment or contempt; that is, diminutives and augmentatives are frequently used as expressions of endearment (such as Italiansorella‘sister’ →sorellina‘dear little sister’,donna‘woman’ →donnotta‘fine, stout woman’) or disdain (Italianuomo‘man’ →uomicciuolo‘contemptible little man’,donna→donnona‘overgrown girl’).

Two Notes on Horace, Epodes (10, 16)

Epode 10: the Mystery of Mevius' CrimeHorace's tenth Epode, an inverse propempticon, calls down dire curses on the head of a man named Mevius as he leaves on a sea-voyage.1 Scholars have naturally been interested in what Mevius had done to merit such treatment, but answers have been difficult to find, for nothing explicit is said on this topic in the poem; as Leo noted, ‘[Horatius] ne verbo quidem tarn gravis odii causam indicat’. This is in direct contrast with the Strasbourg epode usually attributed to Hipponax (fr. 115 West), which served as Horace's model in this poem; there it is clear that the similar curses on a departing sailor are caused by his breaking of oaths to the poet and betrayal of their previous friendship (15–16 ⋯ς μ' ἢδίκησε, λ⋯ξ δ' ⋯π' ⋯ρκίοις ἔβη, τò πρίν ⋯ταῖρος ⋯ώμ ). One might expect Horace to give some kind of indirect suggestion of the nature of Mevius’ offence, but even this is despaired of by Fraenkel: ‘There is no hint at the sort of crime which Mevius is said to have committed, nor is anything said about the man himself; he remains an entirely shadowy figure’. The best that scholars have been able to do is to follow the ancient commentary of Porphyrio in suggesting that Horace's Mevius is to be identified with the poetaster attacked by Vergil in Ecl. 3.90 ‘qui Bavium non odit, amet tua carmina, Mevi’. Though it is pleasant to think of Vergil and Horace, perhaps by now friends in the circle of Maecenas, ganging up on a luckless hack, there is, as Fraenkel points out, no mention in the tenth Epode that Mevius is a poet, and his literary incompetence, assuming he is Vergil's poet, does not seem to underlie or indeed warrant the bitter imprecations of the poem: Catullus might wish a dire fate on the works of a bad poet (e.g. Volusius – 36.18–20, 95.7–8), but to long for their author's shipwreck and consumption by gulls might indeed seem excessive.

Translatio Lupae: Du Bellay's Roman Whore Goes North

In 1609 Gervase Markham, England's leading authority on horses, Sir John Harington's cousin, and not a truly bad poet, invited readers ofThe Famous Whoreto give the prostitute “a kind welcome out of Italy.” According to the headnote of this long poem, the elderly woman who here makes her “lamentable complaint” was “Paulina the famous Roman Curtezan, sometimes M[istress] unto the great Cardinal Hypolito of Est.” Since Markham seems so confidently to direct our eyes to Rome, it is understandable both that the entry on him in theDictionary of National Biographyposits an unknown Italian model and that neither the modern bibliography of his works nor the revisedShort Title Cataloguecan identify his source. In fact, Markham's work is a fairly close imitation of Joachim Du Bellay's’ ‘Vieille courtisanne,'’ first published in 15 5 8 as part of a collection somewhat misleadingly entitledDivers jeux rustiques.

In Memoriam Humor: Julia Moore and the Western Michigan Poets

Julia Moore was a bad poet. But as far as we know she did not intend to be funny. If history remembers her at all, it is because of a relatively obscure allusion to her work in Mark Twain's Following the Equator and because in all probability Julia Moore's poetry served as the model for Emmaline Grangerford's famous Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd. in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In case you have forgotten, Twain's climactic stanzas read:

Phillis Wheatley and the Poetical Legacy of Eighteenth-Century England

Phillis Wheatley and the Poetical Legacy of Eighteenth-Century England CHARLES SCRUGGS Although we have learned a good deal in recent years about Phillis Wheatley's life and literary career, we have rarely attempted to dis­ cuss her poetry as poetry.1 As America's first important black poet, Phillis Wheatley has been treated less as an artist and more as a curi­ osity. For instance, right at the outset, American responses to her poems remained tied to racial debate. When her first and only book of poetry—Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral—appeared in 1773, Abolitionists rushed to herald her artistic efforts as a symbol of deserved equality for the Negro; whereas pro-slavery critics poohpoohed her poems as objects beneath their contempt.2 This non-aesthetic approach to Phillis Wheatley continues in our own time. Her art is still a locus for political controversy, but the terms of the argu­ ment have shifted. In the 1970s, some feel that Phillis Wheatley has evinced a genuine concern for her race in her poetry; whereas others believe that the slave poet had a low opinion of her fellow bonds­ men.3 Whenever her poetry has been discussed as poetry, a "Romantic" bias has determined her critical reputation. Even in the twentieth century, criticism of her poetry has been shaped by prejudices inher­ ited from the Romantic period. To listen to her modern critics, "neoclassicism " was the bete noire of her brief poetic career. Saunders Red­ ding talks of the "chill ... of Pope's neo-classicism upon her," and M. A. Richmond complains that "neo-classicism" was responsible for 279 280 / SCRUGGS her artificiality. "Neo-classicism," says Richmond, encased Phillis Wheatley within the "tyranny of the couplet" and crushed her talent under "the heavy burden of ornamental rhetoric."4 The kindest thing that has been said of "neo-classicism" is that it taught her regularity.5 _ Thanks to Donald Greene (The Age of Exuberance) and others, we have become somewhat suspicious of the word "neo-classicism." Not only was this word invented by the nineteenth century but the con­ cept itself cannot possibly encompass the richness and complexity of eighteenth-century art. Even when the term "neo-classicism" makes sense within a limited context, no student of the eighteenth century today would treat it as though it were synonymous with the contem­ porary meaning of "artificiality." In fact, as all students of the eigh­ teenth century know, the word "artificial" presents an interesting his­ torical irony. The eighteenth century ordinarily did not use the word "artificial" in a pejorative sense—although it could be used that way. Usually "artificial" meant "artful, contrived with skill."6 That many of Phillis Wheatley's poems are "contrived with skill" is the basis of my argument in this paper. We are told that Phillis Wheatley was a bad poet because she lived in an age uncongenial, even hostile, to the true poetic sensibility. If she had been planted in better soil, such as the fertile ground of the Romantic period, then we would have had a real poet instead of a hothouse flower.7 Eigh­ teenth-century poetry, these critics insist, was impersonal, stylized, and ornate; and the poetical fashions of this period were dictatorial and absolute. Thus in imitating the literary conventions of her day, Phillis Wheatley wrote poetry which is artificial and insincere. This view is wrongheaded because it fails to understand those literary conventions which it deplores. More precisely, it fails to take into account that eighteenth-century aesthetic thought made a distinction between artifice and artificiality, and not between sincerity and arti­ ficiality.8 Because Phillis Wheatley's critics have refused to recognize the artifice of eighteenth-century poetry, they have not seen the com­ petent craftsmanship of Phillis Wheatley's poems. Not seeing the for­ est, they certainly cannot be expected to see the trees. I When Phillis Wheatley visited England in 1773, she was received there with more fanfare than she would ever receive in her lifetime in America. This reception is significant, because it tells us something about mid-eighteenth-century aesthetic taste. Arriving in London Phillis Wheatley I 281 with her owner Susannah Wheatley...

Augustus and Pope

WHAT DID Pope think of Augustus in Imitations of Horace? In conventional panegyric English poet praised London of Anne as Augusta, capital of a land renowned for Arms and Arts; now, in satire, he inverted Horace's celebration of his ruler to ridicule George II. The general tenor of argument at first seems clear, for George, inglorious, surrounded by flatterers and bad poets, a type of stupidity and corruption destroying nation, is antithesis of an English Augustan monarch. A satiric (or panegyric) device, however, is not same thing as a historical judgment, which may be more complex and skeptical. It need not necessarily follow from use of figure of Augustus in Imitations that Pope wanted such a ruler in England. In same decade he was instrumental in publishing Bolingbroke's vision of an ideal monarch, The Patriot King, and there Augustus is represented as a tyrant and Horace as his flatterer. Does this represent a division of opinion among friends, or can it be shown from a close reading of Pope's Horatian poetry that Pope too, like Bolingbroke, reservations about Rome's great man? There seems no intrinsic reason to accept a simplistic reading of Imitations of Horace in an age which seen publication of that searching work of skepticism, Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire. Horace's own attitude to Augustus was known to be complex. He fought against ruler at Philippi as a tribune in ranks of republican hero Brutus and, abandoning his shield, fled when virtue was broken (II Od. vii.l i). For this espousal of cause of republic, Warton was to praise his high spirit of liberty and independence before he had an opportunity of flattering AUGUSTUS, and Warburton, annotating Pope, claimed that Roman poet remembered the cause of Freedom and of Brutus in his satires and apologized to his ruler for this liberty.' There can be little doubt that Pope's circle would likewise have stood among the last of Romans at Philippi, for Brutus was ideological heir of Cato, whose daughter he married, and Pope declared himself likewise a disciple of this hero when he joined forces with Addison in Cato (1713) to defend pristine British liberty and virtue before threat of tyranny. That story has been told elsewhere.2 Bolingbroke, who delighted in being compared with

Two Translations Attributed to G. B. Gelli: Porzio's De Mente Humana and Plutarch's Apophtegmi

T WO TRANSLATIONS ATTRIBUTED TO G. B. GELLI: PORZIO'S DE MENTE HUMANA AND PLUTARCH'S APOPHTEGMI* B BY ARMAND L. DE GAETANO , Among the members of the Florentine Academy there was no more ardent advocate of the Florentine language than Giambattista Gelli-a very bad poet, an interesting prose writer and Dantist, and a proud shoemaker contemporary of Hans Sachs. Gelli would not tolerate the pompous Latinist who scorned modem languages as primitive means of communication. He was incensed by the traditional practice of administering both secular and religious education in a language people no longer understood. Very few could afford to spend from ten to fifteen years just learning to read. Yet if one did not, there was very little he could learn during the first half of the sixteenth century, for Humanism had opposed the late medieval trend of adopting the vernacular as a literary medium, and it was still common practice to write serious works of learning in Latin.

Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola on the Conflict of Philosophy and Rhetoric

In April of 1485 Ermalao Barbaro wrote to Pico 1 a letter in which he sharply criticizes the scholastic philosophers as being rude, dull, uncultured, barbarians. He did not deny them genius and learning, though his concession is grudging. But he categorically denies them immortality as authors, for it is a shining and elegant, at least a pure and chaste style, which confers immortal reputation on an author. He did not doubt but they dealt with good subject matter; but this would not save their reputations, unless indeed bad poets should be honored as Homers and Virgils because they had the same matter of song. Barbaro's criticism takes up about a third of his letter-a fact which he had apparently forgotten when he wrote his long reply to Pico. In this reply he complains that Pico has pounced on some things he had said, in a mere corner of his letter, about contemporary barbarian philosophers. It is, however, quite possible that he had not considered his criticism of the scholastics an important part of his letter, and that the heavier burden of it was a criticism of Pico. While complimenting him effusively Barbaro drops remarks which betray dissatisfaction with his style. The attack upon the scholastics may have been a mere elaboration of remarks on the importance of Greek letters; it may also have been intended as a way of holding up a mirror for Pico to see himself as he will be if he is not careful. I am more inclined to favor the latter view. Thus the letter would declare the scholastics as passe-despite their matter-because they did not produce a literature in classical form; and Pico is warned that he is headed for oblivion for a similar reason. This would account for the nature of Pico's famous letter of June, 1485. On the one hand, its style is in the best literary tradition; it