English Poetry Research Articles

Review: Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, by Elizabeth K. Helsinger

Review: <i>Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry</i>, by Elizabeth K. Helsinger

USE OF WEB-BASED POETIC DEVICE TOOLS AS A LEARNING MEDIA FOR CREATIVE WRITING OF ENGLISH POETRY

This research is entitled "Use of Web-Based Poetic Device Tools as a Learning Media for Creative Writing of English Poetry" The benefits of this research are both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, this study can be used to learn more about how to teach English poetry and creative writing using Web-Based Poetic Device Tools. Practically, to develop abilities in the use of Web-Based Poetic Device Tools as a medium for original English poem creation. The urgency of the research's findings will be able to expand the use of English poetry tool sites in general E-Learning implementation and can enhance the language industry, particularly innovative English poetry composing. The method of this research is Research and Development used to produce certain products, Models for Creative Writing of English Poetry Using Web-Based Poetic Device Tools and Simulation of the effectiveness of these products. The concept of scientific knowledge of poetry and poetry writing, the recognition and application of the use of web-based online poetic tools, the model, method, and steps of web-based poetic device tools in poetry writing, and English poetry writing simulation are the four findings that will be discussed in detail in the discussion.

The Glorious Rise of Early Indo-English Poetry in Pre-Independence Epoch – A Sublime Study

Poetry is a written verse which expresses the feelings, emotions, and ideas of a poet in his literary work and in own style and rhythm. In Ancient Indian tradition, Kavya (Poetry) is hailed as equivalent to fifth Veda. Indians have a vast history of traditional arts and have a long directory of poems from various prolific writers which resonates in modern Indian English literature. Indian English poetry has come into the play around 150 years ago, and well matured in this era. The Indian English literature has bifurcated into three phases, and they are Imitative, Assimilative and Experimental. Very few poets in India were well educated before to independence, and they were affected by Victorian and Romantic era works, beginning to repeat the works of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, and others. The approach and tactics of Byron and Scott were echoed by great pioneers such as V Derozio and the Dutt family, respectively. The topic of Indian poetry was heavily dependent on the environment, cultural heritage, nationalism, and so on i.e., highly anthropogenic, and self-styled and were highly nostalgic among themselves of their works in the comparisons to predecessors works. Indian Poet also thought of indigenous reader, so it ought to have a desi appeal which was favorable to all, for them the feature of Indianness made it eye catching. The poet tried to remain natural and honest. Indian English poetry is a mixture of all anglicized variety of different ethnic culture across the globe. This paper shall focus on the Indian English Poetry during the Pre-Independence epoch and conglomerate them and brainstorm their works in details.

David Hopkins and Tom Mason: Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century: The Father of English Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

David Hopkins and Tom Mason: Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century: The Father of English Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

The Chinese Character as an Interface for Artistic Creation: Re-Cognition of Graphics and Phonetics

ABSTRACT This article examines two modern artistic explorations of the Chinese character. It takes Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy and Jonathan Stalling’s Sinophonic English Poetry as examples and investigate how contemporary art reimagines and reconstructs the “potential” of Chinese characters and what ideological and political implications these processes may have for transcultural communication in today’s world. Situating the production of both works in Xu’s and Stalling’s respective creative experiences and larger sociocultural conditions, this article shows how both works, which deploy the graphics and the phonetics of the Chinese character as interfaces, engage in the politics of transcultural art creation and communication, and achieve their generative effects. Through this investigation, it hopes to illuminate the critical power of the Chinese character used as an interface in challenging linguistic, ideological, and cultural “norms” and questioning racial, national, and political prejudice.

성경적 관점에서 바라본 매리언 무어의 「물소」와 「아홉 개의 승도복숭아」

This study aims to reinterpret Marianne Moore’s “The Buffalo” and “Nine Nectarines” from a Biblical perspective, unveiling her obscure poetic vision by repositioning her in the tradition of English poetry as a poet of a ‘line of vision’ including Sidney, Spenser, Milton, and Blake. Moore, well-known as one of the representative modernist poets alongside Pound and Eliot in the early 20th century, has long been recognized as a poet of the ‘line of wit,’ encompassing Donne, Dryden, and Pope, a viewpoint that Eliot advocated particularly fervently. However, considering the critical influence exerted by Blake on her identification as a poet, it becomes necessary to reconsider Moore as one of the visionary poets and analyze her work through the lens of the Bible. Just as the work of visionary poets can be understood through the great code of their art, the Bible, so can the work of Moore. Therefore, this paper attempts Biblical interpretations of Moore’s two poems “The Buffalo” and “Nine Nectarines,” which have been criticized from various perspectives, even to the extent of confusion and abstruseness. Both of them, which depict a wild Indian buffalo and nine wild nectarines as their respective poetic objects, are based on the Christian creationism, asserting that all of nature as ‘the work of God,’ reflects the invisible qualities of the Creator and His son, Christ. Firstly, “The Buffalo” praises not only the great power and prudent charity of the Creator but also the self-sacrificial service of Christ through the wild extinct Indian buffalo. Secondly, “Nine Nectarines” deals with such main themes of Christianity as immortality, faith, and the virtue of the Savior, through the main poetic images, nine wild nectarines as well as the ‘kylin.’ It is expected that this study will raise the significance of Biblical study in Moore’s poetry, expand the boundary of its interpretation, and delve into her profound poetic vision, which has not yet been clearly explored.

Middle English Manuscript Collections of Verse Romances

ABSTRACT This article considers those manuscripts that either are or include collections of Middle English verse romances. They form a small proportion, no more than eleven manuscripts, of the romance manuscripts that survive. The article seeks to assess the factors involved in the creation of these collections and to place them in the wider contexts of surviving manuscripts that include verse romances.

Satire, Performance, and English Rustic Comedy in Harley 2253

ABSTRACT The scribe of Harley 2253 evidently had access to something more than just other manuscripts, culling matter also from a swirl of ephemera like loose leaves, rolls, perhaps even scrawled remnants of performance, or from authors themselves. The presence of five colorful English verse satires in Harley invites questions of performance not just of specific pieces, but also of sequenced entertainments seguing from one style, genre, and/or language to another and targeting for ridicule the monoglot English. In the phenomenon of the mocked English rustic in Harley 2253, we may glimpse a sophisticated style of entertainment in medieval halls that emerges later in the fine manner of comic low humor prevalent in Tudor and Elizabethan drama.

Translation-Poems: Blurred Genres and Shifting Authorship in Contemporary English Verse

One of the most interesting tendencies in contemporary English poetry which arguably will develop further and mark the next decades of writing in England, are works which I would call translation-poems, i.e. texts which problematize the distinction between translations and original works, as well as between authors and translators. One could mention here such books as Jo Shapcott’s Tender Taxes (versions of Rilke’s poems), Alice Oswald’s Memorial (a translation of Homer’s The Iliad), and Lavinia Greenlaw’s A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (a version of Chaucer’s poem). All three books have been advertised as authored by these English poets; it is only their names that appear on book covers. Significantly, this type of translating, or adapting poetry comes now largely from women writers. Trying to define the blurred genre they are working in, they call it variously: versions, excavations, extrapolations, remixes, etc.

Forms of Sequentiality in Contemporary English Poetry: Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell

This article discusses the sequential devices which structure lyric poems. The sequentiality of poems is usually given little systematic attention to in poetry analysis. The main focus tends to be on speaker, imagery, theme and prosody. But a central aspect of the meaning of any poem is the manner in which the progression of the poetic utterance is organised. One such device, widely used in traditional and contemporary poetry, is the schema of the narrative. This article briefly sketches a theoretical approach to the description of the sequential extension of poetic texts and applies it to examples from the work of two prominent contemporary English poets, Simon Armitage, the present poet laureate, and Glyn Maxwell.

An Analysis of Tea Culture in Chinese and English Poetry and the Promotion of Chinese Tea Culture

To read and enjoy Chinese and English poetry, one must deeply understand the writing and historical background of the poet, analyze the language characteristics of Chinese and English poetry, and explore the differences in tea culture connotations; Extracting the characteristics and consensus of Chinese tea culture will be beneficial for the dissemination and promotion of Chinese tea culture. The evolution and development of Chinese and English poetry and tea culture require us to have a progressive thinking perspective. From the dimensions of time, culture, and language characteristics, extract the differences and consensus between China and the UK in tea soup taste, tea drinking etiquette, hospitality, and expressing emotions through tea. This paper has played a good promoting role in the dissemination of Chinese tea culture.

Old English hæleð and the authorship of The Dream of the Rood

ABSTRACT This article identifies and analyzes new evidence for the theory that The Dream of the Rood is a product of composite authorship. An examination of the attestations of the word hæleð in the corpus of Old English poetry reveals that vocative uses of this word are found only in The Order of the World, Judith, Andreas, Elene, and the second half of The Dream of the Rood. The restriction of the vocative use of hæleð to these works is shown to substantiate the theory of composite authorship for The Dream of the Rood and associate the poem’s second half with the Cynewulfian school of poetic composition.

“Things to address directly”: Border Politics and Contemporary British Poetry

Cet article propose une lecture de quatre poèmes britanniques récents, composés explicitement en réponse au Brexit, à la résurgence du nationalisme britannique et à un discours politique se proposant de créer un « environnement hostile » à l’immigration. Ces poèmes de Patience Agbabi, Inua Ellams, David Herd et Simon Smith se confrontent à la question du politique selon plusieurs modalités, du témoignage envisagé dans sa simplicité essentielle à la mise en scène performative et au discours critique. À chaque fois, les poètes concernés affichent leur foi en l’idée que la poésie « fait advenir quelque chose » (n’en déplaise à W.H. Auden) ou, à tout le moins, pour citer David Herd, trouve à « affronter directement » des enjeux complexes, tels que la « géographie politique ». La question de l’efficacité sociale du discours poétique révèle de profonds écarts entre les mots et le monde, qui eux-mêmes façonnent et sous-tendent notre appréhension des frontières nationales et des formes d’appartenance.

Did Old English Verse Have a “Morphological” Metre?

The revision of the four-position theory of Old English metre by Yakovlev (2008) has had a considerable impact, both for its simplification of Sievers’ (1893) metrical principles, and for its supposed shift to a “morphological” rather than an “accentual” metrical type. I contextualize Yakovlev’s important contribution to metrical theory, highlighting that his main innovations are to eliminate the principle that every verse should have two lifts, and to collapse the metrical notions of “lift” and of “half-lift” into a single type of unit, the “strong position”. These major and thoughtful innovations are unconnected to the supposed “morphological” aspect of Yakovlev’s system, which consists of arbitrary and unmotivated stipulations of certain classes of syllables as inherently strong or weak. Calling the metre “morphological” on this basis is at best misleading, placing too much emphasis on a marginal component of the system. Moreover, the definitions of strong and weak positions are better explained with reference to linguistic stress: elements bearing some degree of stress (primary or secondary) are strong, while those bearing no stress are weak. Such a reframing leads to a slight revision of Yakovlev’s theory to incorporate the “rule of the coda” (Fulk, 1992). The result is a version of Yakovlev’s theory which is both theoretically simpler and more descriptively adequate, but in which the label “morphological” lacks even the limited and inapt validity of the original version. This reintroduction of stress into the system does not, however, make the theory “accentual”, and it remains better characterized as an “alliterative-syllabic” view of the metre (Cable, 1991).

Living for Translation: An Interview with Professor Zhang Zhizhong

In his rich career as a translator, Professor Zhang Zhizhong has formed a unique aesthetics on translation based on his own experience: spirit over form, prose enjambment to rewrite Chinese poetry into sterling English poetry. In Professor Zhang’s opinion, the English translation of Chinese poetry, broadly speaking, is divided into two schools: metrical school and liberal school, and there are poems translated in metrical style and liberal style, mixed with both good and bad ones. Being poetic, or poetry itself, is the most important point. In the interview, Professor Zhang expressed his hope to be friends with the students majoring in translation and make joint efforts in the globalization of Chinese culture and literature. It is his belief that the English translation of Chinese poems shall be poems themselves, and excellent poems in the English world, which, ideally, are published by the prestigious publishing houses in Western countries, hopefully, to exert influences on the readers. This is the ultimate goal of the globalization of Chinese culture and literature.

Andreas and the Cynewulfian poetic sociolect

ABSTRACT This essay situates Andreas in relation to the Cynewulfian sociolect, a sub-tradition of Old English verse whose other members include the signed poems of Cynewulf, Christ III, Guthlac A and B, and The Phoenix.

‘My name is Death/But be na' fley'd’: Bishop Percy and the Ghosting of Robert Burns in Ireland

Recent decades have seen much scholarly exploration of Robert Burns’s impact on Irish writers, particularly those connected with the province of Ulster. Less explored is the antagonistic and opportunistic response to Burns in Ireland by a number of poets, editors and patrons. This article will chart Thomas Percy (1729–1811) and his literary circle’s responses in the Dromore area of County Down to Burns’s roles as poet, song collector and literary celebrity. It will argue that Percy and his associates reacted to Burns’s work and literary afterlife with a two-pronged strategy. First, they sought to emulate Burns through publishing or providing financial assistance to a number of texts of poetry and song. Secondly, they sought to establish a network of patrons and authors who employed literature as a means to portray a stable and loyal Ireland after the Union of 1800/1. As well as a heavily revised edition of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1795), the group created platforms for a variety of poets including Thomas Stott, Hugh Porter and Patrick Brontë. This strategy sought to invoke Burns directly as an influence, but also implicitly to exclude his legacy from shaping the writing of the circle. This article suggests that the strategy was not fully successful. Despite the generally good reception of Percy’s fourth edition of the Reliques, the other authors in the circle did not always receive praise for their work, and writers like Stott were criticised for their weak, sycophantic verse. It will claim that for some of this circle, such as Hugh Porter, Burns’s influence played a major role in shaping the promotion of their writing careers. However, for many, there was an attempt to manage the trajectory of the writer’s work and career that minimised the agency and reach of the author. Ultimately, notwithstanding the attempts to quell and minimise Robert Burns’s impact in County Down, his inspiration remained powerful and difficult to contain.

"Your Tiny White Vests, Unworn": Contemporary Elegies of Maternal Loss.

This essay asks whether poetry can articulate the experience of maternal loss, paying particular attention to questions of form. Focusing on two British poetry collections, Rebecca Goss's Her Birth (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf's An Aviary of Small Birds (2014), I argue that the contemporary elegy is currently being reshaped to explore the grief of losing a baby, and to bear witness to a life briefly lived. Drawing on Caroline Levine's emphasis on the affordances of form, the essay first examines these elegies' aural qualities thorugh the motif of the echo. Next I attend to the shaping of the poems, and how their word placement gives weight to the experience of baby loss. Finally, I consider how the modes of address at the end of the two collections negotiate the possibility of moving forward.

Çağdaş İngiliz Şiirinde Antroposen’in Posthüman Poetikasi: Mario Petrucci’nin Bosco Eserinde Ekomerkezci Yankılar

This study aims to question the discursive construction of the hierarchical order attributed to the human/nonhuman dichotomy through an ecocentric reading of Mario Petrucci’s Bosco (1999). Bosco consists of poems that represent catastrophic consequences of deforestation, and it demonstrates how the more-than-human world reacts to egocentric schemes of humankind via its delineation of the agential faculties of the trees. In the collection, trees can no longer remain silent about the desolation that has been wrought upon nature, and they start addressing humankind to make them realise that they have long turned the planet into a barren space. Although it is too late to mitigate the ecological loss, Bosco explores the self-annihilating capacity of the anthropocentric mindset and warns against the imminent extinction that threatens all life forms. Given the increasing impact of the human imprint on Earth, therefore, it is seen that cultural modes of representation are bound to re-evaluate the undercurrents of the dialogue between human and nonhuman agents. In this manner, the Anthropocene functions as a material-discursive foundation that raises questions not only about the ecological crises triggered by humankind, but also about the exceptional status of the human ‘subject.’ Relatedly, it can be argued that traditional ‘nature’ poems fall behind in representing the complexity of human-nonhuman, culture-nature relations in the Anthropocene, and that contemporary ‘nature’ poetry needs a more inclusive dictionary that is devoid of egocentric insinuations. In this way, it will be possible to deal comprehensively with the multi-dimensional and intricate features of human-nonhuman relationship(s) in contemporary British poetry. While such terms as environmental poetry and/or ecopoetry have been used to denote a less anthropocentric position, none of them has been able to exhibit a well-developed ecocentric stance that can address the entanglement of human and nature thoroughly. Thus, the term ‘posthuman poetry’ is presented as an alternative tool that does not flatter the egocentric hubris of humankind but keeps the necessary aesthetic distance between humans and nonhumans by putting neither of them in the centre or in the periphery. Within this perspective, this study argues that, exploring the nonhuman agent’s inherent capacity to counter the negative consequences of egocentric mindset, Bosco serves as an ecocentric critique problematising the rationale for human authority over the more-than-human world in the Anthropocene.

Towards a Problematic Canon: Indian Poetry Anthologies and the Construction of Modernism

The history of modern Indian poetry in English as evidenced in anthologies is riddled with many modernist tendencies, both linguistic and political. Within anthologies, poetry becomes not merely literary and artistic pieces, but agents in a larger narrative. To establish an argument for Indian poetic modernism (post-1950) in anthologies requires an inquiry into the processes in which editors, through the paratextual matters, (titles, prefaces, introductory notes, headnotes, endnotes etc.) help create a persuasiveness about newness or modernity. With more than 200 Indian poetry anthologies published since 1950, there is also the problem of selecting an authoritative volume that reflects the national canon. By juxtaposing Gérard Genette’s (1991) paratextual theory and Ramond Williams’ (1977) epochal theory of classifying the dominant, residual, and emergent cultural tendencies, this paper attempts to understand poetry anthologies as commodities and cultural vehicles constantly striving for dominance. An argument is made that any canon – modernist or otherwise – is a sub-product of this cultural and material struggle. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to provide an alternate understanding of the arrival of modern Indian English poetry canon as a form of construction that occurs within the pages of anthologies.