English Poetry Research Articles

Symbolic Meaning of Black and White in Contemporary English Poetry

Symbolic Meaning of Black and White in Contemporary English Poetry

Philip Hobsbaum and British Poetry Anthologies at the End of the Twentieth Century

Philip Hobsbaum and British Poetry Anthologies at the End of the Twentieth Century

Intertextuality and Sociolectal Differentiation in Old Saxon and Old English Verse: A Stylometric Analysis Using N-grams

This essay examines the relationship between Old Saxon and Old English poetry using computational stylometry, specifically n-gram analysis. The shared n-grams indicate that the two verse corpora are so closely related that they can be considered expressions of the same poetic language. The Old Saxon Heliand and Genesis bear greatest resemblance to the West Saxon Meters of Boethius and Genesis B. These similarities derive from the poems’ common derivation from a Saxon verse sociolect, a poetic subtradition analogous to a language dialect. There are at least two more sociolects in Old English verse, whose members correspond to the “Beowulf plus Caedmonian” works and the “Cynewulfian” poems. This is confirmed by a network analysis that treats individual Old English and Old Saxon poems as system components and models their relationship by means of a force-directed graph. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the literary histories of both poetic traditions.

Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

Linguistic and Aesthetic Constraints in Literary Translation: Phonic Considerations in Translating Śabda-śakti-mūla dhvani

By outlining two features of language termed ‘lexical drift’ and ‘linguistic clogging’ and employing certain explanatory concepts of classical Indian aesthetics, this study addresses the question of how phonic elements of language constrain or smooth the ways of translation. Linguistic clogging, the study argues, constraints translation of expressions with śabda-śakti-mūla dhvani, SSMD (phonic-based suggestion) , in two ways. As a semantic constraint, the presence of SSMD in source expressions impedes translation if unsatisfied with target expressions. Secondly, as an aesthetic constraint, it curtails the aesthetic pleasure for readers even if the semantic constraint is satisfied by paraphrasing the source expressions. This study, analysing verses in English, Sanskrit, and Malayalam languages with SSMD, illustrates that if the constraints are not satisfied in the target expressions, they bring down the quality of translation. Nonetheless, satisfying both these constraints, by recovering the literal and suggested meanings where possible, can improve the quality of translation. Śabda-śakti-mūla dhvani (SSMD) is a sub-variety of dhvani where a figure of speech is suggested because of the inherent power of words. The meaning that is different from literal and metaphorical is termed “dhvani” (suggested meaning). Around the ninth century CE, Ānandavardhana articulated the philosophy of aesthetic suggestion and systematically theorised the concept of dhvani (suggestion) in his magnum opus Dhvanyāloka (Light on the Doctrine of Suggestion). He argues that the significative power of words is of two types, vācya (literal) and pratīyamāna (suggestive). SSMD is generally translated as “word-based suggestion”. In this paper, the author has translated SSMD as “phonic-based suggestion”, as sound elements distinguish SSMD from other varieties of dhvani.

Early Stuart Clergyman Poets: A Prosopographic Approach

This essay is a prosopographic study of the group of published poets, born between 1570 and 1610, who were employed as clergymen. It argues that this period saw an important shift in the organization and occupational structure of the church, which helped to produce a generation of university-educated, high-status clerics who were also accomplished versifiers. Poets such as George Herbert and John Donne were not anomalies but part of a wider trend that profoundly shaped English verse conventions. The essay thus makes a case for considering institutional history as an important influence on literary history.

HARMONY OF TRADITION AND NOVELTY IN ENGLISH POETRY

The harmony between tradition and innovation, the combination of individuality and imitation is one of the main problems that arise when analyzing the work of each artist. Especially when we talk about such a complex artistic process as the beginning of the ХХ century, our attention is drawn to the emergence of an individual author's style, new ideas and themes. The article analyzes the gradual development of various trends in English poetry of the ХХ century, the relationship between tradition and innovation from the point of view of artistic movements. In addition, the works of such poets as E.Pound, T.S.Eliot and W.B.Yеates are analyzed from the point of view of tradition and innovation.

Capitalism, Colonialism, Morality Renovation in John Keats’s Isabella or The Pot of Basil

This paper aims to interpret the capitalist economy and class polarization in John Keats’s narrative Isabella. The authors analyzed primitive accumulation of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, the division of social status and consciousness between bourgeoisie and proletariat, bourgeois ideological crisis, namely the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the authors endeavor to interpret the aesthetic poetic solutions that Keats tentatively found to realize the bonding of Lorenzo and Isabella and the salvation of the transcendental soul, in order to reveal the inhuman exploitation of the capitalist mode of production and Keats’s criticism of the moral decay of the bourgeoisie. Instead of complaining and lamenting about the misery and degradation, John Keats pinned high expectation onto the salvation power of Greek civilization and British poetry.

Thinking with Birds: Avian Song and Psychology in Old English Poetry

Thinking with Birds: Avian Song and Psychology in Old English Poetry

AI Ekphrasis: Multi-Modal Learning with Foundation Models for Fine-Grained Poetry Retrieval

Artificial intelligence research in natural language processing in the context of poetry struggles with the recognition of holistic content such as poetic symbolism, metaphor, and other fine-grained attributes. Given these challenges, multi-modal image–poetry reasoning and retrieval remain largely unexplored. Our recent accessibility study indicates that poetry is an effective medium to convey visual artwork attributes for improved artwork appreciation of people with visual impairments. We, therefore, introduce a deep learning approach for the automatic retrieval of poetry suitable to the input images. The recent state-of-the-art CLIP provides a way for multi-modal visual and text features matched using cosine similarity. However, it lacks shared cross-modality attention features to model fine-grained relationships. The proposed approach in this work takes advantage of strong pre-training of the CLIP model and overcomes its limitations by introducing shared attention parameters to better model the fine-grained relationship between both modalities. We test and compare our proposed approach using the expertly annotated MiltiM-Poem dataset, which is considered the largest public image–poetry pair dataset for English poetry. The proposed approach aims to solve the problems of image-based attribute recognition and automatic retrieval for fine-grained poetic verses. The test results reflect that the shared attention parameters alleviate fine-grained attribute recognition, and the proposed approach is a significant step towards automatic multi-modal retrieval for improved artwork appreciation of people with visual impairments.

Semantics of European poetry is shaped by conservative forces: The relationship between poetic meter and meaning in accentual-syllabic verse.

Recent advances in cultural analytics and large-scale computational studies of art, literature and film often show that long-term change in the features of artistic works happens gradually. These findings suggest that conservative forces that shape creative domains might be underestimated. To this end, we provide the first large-scale formal evidence of the association between poetic meter and semantics in 18-19th century European literatures, using Czech, German and Russian collections with additional data from English poetry and early modern Dutch songs. Our study traces this association through a series of unsupervised classifications using the abstracted semantic features of poems that are inferred for individual texts with the aid of topic modeling. Topics alone enable recognition of the meters in each observed language, as may be seen from the same-meter samples clustering together (median Adjusted Rand Index between 0.48 and 1 across traditions). In addition, this study shows that the strength of the association between form and meaning tends to decrease over time. This may reflect a shift in aesthetic conventions between the 18th and 19th centuries as individual innovation was increasingly favored in literature. Despite this decline, it remains possible to recognize semantics of the meters from past or future, which suggests the continuity in meter-meaning relationships while also revealing the historical variability of conditions across languages. This paper argues that distinct metrical forms, which are often copied in a language over centuries, also maintain long-term semantic inertia in poetry. Our findings highlight the role of the formal features of cultural items in influencing the pace and shape of cultural evolution.

Tearas Feollon: Tears and Weeping in Old English Literature

This contribution surveys the range of images of weeping in Old English literature, concentrating particularly on weeping due to suffering, grief and unhappiness, and on tears of compunction, but examining other types of weeping as well, including supplicatory and sympathetic weeping (these latter are found in prose but not in poetry). Taking account of contemporary theory, the study understands weeping to be a physical manifestation of distress, but also to function as a social gesture, as reflected in the circumstance that most weeping in Old English is public rather than private. It is noted that saints do not normally weep in the literature despite the suffering they typically endure, and also that in traditional Old English poetry weeping is seen as not appropriate for men, or at least for men in the prime of life. Some of the most interesting instances of weeping in Old English, however, are to be found in episodes that appear to contradict or problematize such expectations, as is illustrated by the examination of a number of relevant examples. The references to weeping cited in this study are in the majority of cases based on Latin models, and reflect the wider Christian literary tradition in the early Middle Ages, rather than being specific to Anglo-Saxon England; but, in both religious and secular works, Old English writers are shown to be thoughtful and imaginative in their treatment of weeping and to deploy images of it to forceful emotive effect.

A Study of Translating English Poetry into Chinese from the Perspective of Steiner’s Fourfold Hermeneutic Motion: A Case Study of Guo Moruo’s Selected English Poem Translation

The four steps in translation put up by George Steiner, i. e. , trust, aggression, incorporation, and restitution, explain the hermeneutic process of translation, and broaden the research field on translation. This paper aims to apply Steiner’s theory to Guo Moruo’s Selected English Poem Translation, to explore the essence and process of translation, hoping to provide a theoretical basis for translating English poetry into Chinese.

A New Mnemonic for the Date of Easter

For obvious reasons, the need to determine the date of Easter each year with precision has occupied British clergy from Bede and before. One result was a proliferation of short mnemonic poems rendering a rule-of-thumb computus for this essential calculation.1 A New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) lists twenty-three versions of these.2 Unsurprisingly, examples in Latin exist also, sometimes in combination with the verses in Middle English.3 MS Q.II.6, an almost unknown manuscript produced in East Anglia ca. 1320–1330, now in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial in Spain, contains a Middle English Easter mnemonic thus far neither published nor cited. Only Lucy Freeman Sandler has discussed this manuscript, but as an art historian her chief concern was the many splendid images it contains.4 She does not mention the presence of the little mnemonic poem:

Supremacy of Imagination in Romantic Poetry

Imagination is one of the pertinent characteristics of Romantic poetry. Romantic poetry is subjective and extrasensory. The subjectivity and extrasensory instinct are rejuvenated due to heightened imagination. The prime purpose of this brief article is to elucidate how imagination plays a significant role in Romantic poetry. For this purpose, poetic works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats are analyzed. The writer has extracted some verse lines from some of the poems of these poets and has mentioned concisely how these verse lines signify the supremacy of imagination in their poems .This article is fruitful to the teachers and the students who are actually interested in studying English poetry.

The Ability in Writing Narrative Text by Using English Poetry at The Students of Al Asyariah Mandar

The students’ skill in writing narrative text is really needed to be improved. The implementation of English Poetry in the current research was aimed to improve the students’ writing narrative text of the students in the 2nd semester of the Islamic Economic Law study program, the faculty of Islamic Religion. The study applied quantitative method in light of pre and post-test of writing narrative text to both of control and experimental groups and distributing questionnaire to the experimental group to gain their perception upon the English poetry. A total of 34 students from control and experimental group were involved. Analytical scoring profile was used to measure the students’ writing narrative text.The result shows that students under the guidance of English poetry performed significantly better than students in control group with conventional way of teaching in which, the experimental group shows score of post-test was greater than control group by gaining mean score 78.25 and control group gained mean score 61.62. The analysis of questionnaire results reveals that the implementation of English poetry helped the students to be easier in writing narrative text. Most of the participants gave positive response to the use of English poetry in teaching writing narrative text.

Michelle O’Callaghan. Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation.

Scholarship on English Renaissance poetics has tended to centre on formal literary-critical treatises and rhetorical handbooks from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. Yet, as Michelle O’Callaghan’s meticulous, compelling study argues, an alternative but equally vibrant site for debates about what constitutes poetic making is found in the poetry anthologies that emerge in the latter sixteenth century as a recognizable and distinct kind of printed book. In their contents and paratexts, printed lyric anthologies theorize and materialize competing kinds of lyric making, understood here as a manual craft, a learnt and evolving skill not restricted to the creative labour of single authors but instead performed by a host of other agents—compilers, editors, and printers—who develop their craft ‘through pragmatic modes of imitation’ (p. 12) and whose creative design in organizing poetic parts into composite wholes manifests a techne analogous to the poet’s inventions (pp. 43–4). The lyric craft of these anthologies is ‘recreative’ (p. 3) in the dual sense of a pleasurable, reinvigorating pastime (the reader’s recreation) and an artisanal process of making again in new contexts beyond the confines of the physical anthology, in households, commonplace books, songbooks, and the ballad trade (the poem’s re-creation). English poetry anthologies of this period are invitingly multimodal, ‘embodied through re-creative performance’ (p. 19) that cuts across class and gendered readerships: lyrics are embodied on the page but re-embodied as soundscapes in new, often more evanescent settings—to be imitated and parodied, vocalized as speech, sung to a tune, or performed in plays (Vaux’s ‘I lothe that I did love’ is famously reanimated on stage by Hamlet’s gravedigger). So, this monograph is a study both of practices of crafting and habits of reading: singing, browsing, and commonplacing are all manifestations of a ‘recreational poetics’ (p. 228).

Memory in Written Record: Memorial Practices at Work in Middle English Copyings of Flyleaf, Marginal and Added Verse

Abstract This article focuses on the memorial practices evidenced in Middle English copyings of flyleaf, marginal and added verse—‘flyleaf verses’. These texts, typically added by later readers or book-users, are often characterized as errant incursions into the book’s organization, ephemeral traces of aural memory, mere scribbles copied without care and preserved only by chance. However, closer study reveals a variety of memorial processes underlying flyleaf verse copying, ranging from the casual jottings from memory that dominate existing scholarly perspectives, to using book-space for the deliberate practice of memorization, to copying purposefully to collect and preserve verses. This article surveys 523 records from the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV) that contain at least one witness of a text added in a flyleaf, margin, or other blank book-space, as well as several digitized and facsimile copies of the manuscripts in which they appear. These records complicate understandings of memory’s active use in flyleaf verse copying, offering us insights into the mental processes behind medieval readers’ engagement with the marginal spaces in their books.

The Charlemont Library, the Sotheby Warehouse Fire of 1865, and the Vexed Provenance of British Library MS Egerton 1994

Abstract This article discusses the book collection of James Caulfeild (1728–1799), first earl of Charlemont in the Irish peerage, with particular reference to his holdings of early English drama and poetry. After the death of Charlemont’s son the library was consigned to Sotheby’s for anonymous sale in July 1865, but was in large part destroyed in the Sotheby warehouse fire of 19 June. The second part of the article explores the provenance of one surviving item, a volume of fifteen manuscript plays composed over four or five decades before 1644, now British Library, MS Egerton 1994. It is among the most interesting survivals known from the slender corpus of pre-Restoration English stage documents. Charlemont’s principal London agent for early English books, the Shakespeare editor Edmond Malone (1741–1812), has long been viewed as the source of the volume. The history of this speculation is traced and disproved.

Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott

Reviewed by: Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott Nicholas Myklebust eric weiskott, Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 297. isbn: 978–0–8122–5264–4. $79.95. Scholarly books on metrics rarely see the trees in the forest, let alone the forest. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, Eric Weiskott offers a stunning example of metrical inquiry at its finest in a study of a neglected genre that, from its modest corner of the literary world, poses daring and difficult questions about how we organize knowledge in a 'virtual field of play both constraining and responsive to the continuous history of cultural decision-making' (p. 10). In the process, Weiskott presents an alternative history of literature free from the warping effects of periodization. Gracefully blending Bourdieuan theory with linguistic and archival evidence, Weiskott recenters a marginalized genre—the political prophecy—among intersecting metrical cultures in England from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Exquisite codicological analysis complements precise philological reasoning in a probing audit of the methods of historical-literary scholarship. Through three parts and eleven chapters, Weiskott mounts an erudite, even soulful interrogation of the limitations of periodization on our understanding of, and relationship to and with, the dynamic practices of early English metrical communities. His project aims to 'renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history between roughly 1350 and 1650' (p. 3) as it tracks '[p]atterns of metrical affiliation and metrical avoidance' (p. 58) in which 'competing meters stake out different futures for the English metrical line' (p. 197), each encoding 'a distinct experience of historical time' (p. 206). At the core of his inquiry lies political prophecy, a 'future-oriented genre spanning the twelfth to the seventeenth century in multiple forms' (p. 4). As Weiskott observes, 'political prophecy had a differential effect on the English literary field according to metrical tradition' (p. 58). In Part One, Weiskott uses political prophecy to model the historical relations between two metrical cultures, the alliterative line and the tetrameter. A poem such as the Ireland Prophecy (1452–1453) offers insight into early English metrical thinking, as the choice to write in alliterative meter intimates 'a different modernity . . . from the one we now know to have transpired' (p. 68) and 'recommends . . . a metrical future that is only contrafactual for belated readers like us' [End Page 103] (p. 71). Moreover, shorter lyrics such as 'A windy summer a wet harvest' and 'When Father Blithe the beggar can say two Creeds' that take earlier alliterative works (Vision of William Banastre and Piers Plowman, respectively) and translate the source meters into tetrameters yield 'direct evidence of cross-pollination' (p. 78). Weiskott also deftly considers the paucity of prophecies written in pentameter, noting that 'the pentameter tradition and the prophecy tradition had little literary-cultural common ground on which to meet in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries' and therefore 'appeared largely incompatible to writers, readers, and compilers' (p. 95). In Part Two, Weiskott traces 'multiple sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manifestations of the perception that [William] Langland practiced blank verse' (p. 106) and mines undervalued sources, such as George Gascoigne's Steele Glas, to show that although 'historians have nearly always understood early blank verse as the beginning of the metrical future . . . its first practitioners and readers understood it as the recovery of the metrical past' (p. 149). The decision to compose prophecies in unrhymed pentameter reveals 'a historically specific point of crossing between English metrical traditions' (p. 106) precipitated, in part, by manuals of versification entering the literary field and aligning grammatical paradigms of Greek and Latin with emerging metrical canons in the sixteenth century. Part Three 'queries the teleology that leads from Chaucer to modernism by reorienting his literary practice toward the past' with compelling evidence that the model for Chaucer's metrical line lies less with French or Italian influences than the English tetrameter (p. 153). This is a marvelous reconfiguration of metrical categories that explains how 'Chaucer's meter gradually withdrew from active negotiations in the English literary field and became the field itself' (p. 193). Through this prism, Weiskott refracts the decussate cultures of alliterative...