Comic Verse Research Articles

Evolutionary Science, Empire, and Disenchantment in May Kendall’s That Very Mab

Abstract One of the more remarkable satires of English society and thought of the 1880s came in the guise of a fairy story, That Very Mab (1885), in which the eponymous fairy queen is driven out of Samoa by imperialists and on her return to England finds it overrun by evolutionists and the proponents of modern material progress. Written by the satirist and popular Punch contributor May Kendall, That Very Mab excoriates Victorian England by satirizing its passion for explanatory frameworks, including scientific materialism, philistinism, nihilism, novel metaphysics, evolutionary progress, and imperialism, all subjects that Kendall also attacked in her comic verse (published between 1885 and 1894). Kendall has recently received critical attention for her satiric poems about evolutionary science, materialism, and modern disenchantment. While That Very Mab’s satiric concerns in many ways dovetail with those of these poems, the wider scope of its fantastic narrative allows Kendall to enact a more sustained assault on the concept of empire and its justifications from evolutionary anthropology. Highly skeptical of teleologies that promote a belief in the evolutionary progress of humankind, her fairy fantasy links evolutionary anthropology to the dishonest blandishments, corruption, and violence of imperial adventures.

The Pilgrim and the Peas and Pilgrimage by Rail: Defining acceptable pilgrimage practices in Nineteenth-Century Britain

ABSTRACT In the nineteenth century, attitudes towards Catholic pilgrimage travel became increasingly critical as newspaper reporters and writers attacked pilgrims for choosing to travel in comfort, and at speed, by train. This paper argues that the reason for this change can be pinpointed to two key things: the widespread popularity of a comic verse, The Pilgrim and the Peas, and the 1873 English Pilgrimage by rail to Paray-le-Monial. It argues that together these two factors were instrumental in shaping modern British attitudes to how pilgrimage should, and should not, be conducted and cemented the idea that a pilgrimage should be a journey of hardship undertaken on foot.

Phenomenon of the Regional Sense of humor in the Tuscan Poetry

The article considers the phenomenon of the national Tuscan sense of humour and the influence of local mentality on the poetry of the region. Quotes from the pieces of Guittone D’Arezzo, Rustico di Filippo, Dante Alighieri, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Francesco Berni and other authors of various periods, from the 13th to the 20th century, demonstrate in chronological order which part the specific Florentine irony takes in the process of formation, development and transformation of the Italian comic verse (or realistic verse). This genre arose not only as a poetical method but also as a reaction to the social and political situation. Comparative analysis of the poems allows us to follow the evolution of the Florentine poetic tradition and draw the conclusion about the cyclical nature of the literature process, confirmed by the regular return to the debunking of excessive tragedy in Italian poetry by the comic verse. In addition, the article reveals the common features of comic verse of different historical periods, which consist in the similarity not only of themes and motives but also of comic techniques based on the characteristic sceptical view of the life of Tuscans.

Obituaries: A Dead Important Genre

Obituaries are micro-narratives in which distinct conventions and tensions are at work. Humanist and historical, emotional and dispassionate, philosophical and random, obituaries have a literary nexus that encompasses reverence, irreverence, grief and (in some cases) relief. My analysis starts with broadsheet obituaries of the late twentieth century, and models of reading the genre, which I re-read through counter-establishment Private Eye’s comic verse obituaries. Pet memorials adopt and adapt obituary, creating distinct subcultures of animal relations in genres of human mourning. The obituaries discussed span the ideological reproduction of essentially respectful obituaries, to comedy’s counter-cultural critique, to an expansive embrace of selected animal companions seen as part of human families, to an articulation of the value of life forms lost to climate emergency. In these and other contexts, obituaries are alive and well.

Fundamental Study of the Legendary Bibliophile Edition

The article presents the analysis of the new book of the famous bibliophile, researcher and populariser of rare books and bibliophilism, the Chairman of the National Union of Bibliophiles M.V. Seslavinsky about the history of creation, specific aspects of publishing and art design of the famous bibliophilic edition “Cantata” by A.A. Sidorov (Moscow, 1921). Comic verses of the future famous bibliologist and art critic, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR became the text for the first edition of the Russian society of the friends of books (1920—1929), the largest Association of booklovers of the 1920s. Two small runs totalled only 20 copies. The study is based primarily on the copies of “Cantata” preserved in the state collections (the Russian State Library, the State Tretyakov Gallery) and private collections, including the M.V. Seslavinsky’s one. The discovery of new documents on the history of the publication allowed restoring the list of owners of the autographed copies. Using the copy-by-copy method, the researcher succeeded in describing the numerous design options of the rarity of bibliophile publishing. The use of art-historical methods allowed to finally establish that the prototype for the image on the engraving “Bibliophile in 1920” (artist N.B. Baklanov, engraver I.N. Pavlov) was A.N. Benoit, the famous painter. The author introduces into circulation the handwritten poetic epistles of A.A. Sidorov to the owners of the autographed copies and other unique materials about preparation for printing, distribution and provenance of “Cantata”. In general, it can be concluded that M.V. Seslavinsky’s approaches to the analysis of “Cantata” can become basic in the study of bibliophile book as a special cultural phenomenon and trend in book publishing.

The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Société

The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Société Lee Behlman (bio) What is light verse? The term first appeared in a book title in 1902,1 with Anthony C. Deane’s A Little Book of Light Verse, and it gained in popularity later in the twentieth century, appearing in the titles of well-known Oxford University Press collections edited by W. H. Auden (1938) and Kingsley Amis (1978), as well as American collections from William Harmon (1979) and Russell Baker (1987), and even one edited for the Library of America by John Hollander (2003).2 The notion that light verse is essentially comic arrived late, in 1978, with Amis’s introduction to his revisionary collection, in which he emphasizes the subversive and anarchic force of its humor. While Amis allows for other, earlier conceptions of light verse, for him light verse at its best is comically low: It “prefers forms incompatible with decent seriousness. . . . It deals with low matters, with subjects, scenes and concerns that are either poetically or morally unsuitable for high consideration. . . . Its chief weapon is impropriety” (viii). In a 1997 essay on Dorothy Parker, John Hollander follows Amis in equating light verse with comic verse, and he unfolds in greater detail the operations of its most characteristic jokes: it uses “verbal trickery, such as unlikely rhyming . . . and the building up toward a pun that can retract the agenda that had led up to it.” Light verse has, for Hollander, a “dependence on [literary] conventions,” even, as with Amis, as it upends social conventions, and “at best” it plays “only a single trick or so.”3 The comedy arrives headlong through clever but one-dimensional jokes and other surface-level effects. While such firmly comic conceptions of light verse have been dominant since Amis, the form was conceptualized quite differently in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Humor was never excluded, but the common descriptor for light verse was “vers de société”—that is, verse set in the milieu of refined upper-middle-class and upper-class English society and narrated by a usually male speaker who is a participant in the scene.5 Vers de société, which was commonly described by critics as “light,”6 was restricted to this elevated social setting and an associated set of attitudes, including a polished, polite humor. As Adam Mazel has recently observed, nineteenth-century vers de société was thus kept walled off generically, both by critics and by the authors of the [End Page 477] verse themselves, from the higher form of poetry, with its heavier intellectual content and less restrictive formal patterns.7 And as a “society” genre narrated from within its elevated confines, there were limits to the subversive potential of this verse. But it would be wrong to suggest that nineteenth-century light verse or vers de société was simply a retrograde form of clever, elite scribbling: its critical construction was considerably more complex. In this essay, I make two related claims: first, as theorized by critics and collectors, vers de société dwelled in a conceptual middle ground defined by balance and detachment—emotional, formal, even philosophical. For a set of diverse figures whose writing on this subject I will explore—including the late-eighteenth-century critic Isaac D’Israeli and the mid-Victorian poet and anthologizer Frederick Locker-Lampson—vers de société occupies, variously and sometimes in combination, the following middle states: an Enlightenment-era aesthetic of poised, “polished” form; an emotional tenor set between raucous humor and tragedy; and a philosophic position of detachment from and acceptance of life’s suffering. In its twentieth-century incarnation, as “light verse,” this poetry shifts to occupy other middle states, including a political position of liberal compromise and a remove from the intense self-consciousness that haunts the modern lyric. As I will demonstrate, in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, light verse is a form that has been deliberately circumscribed by critics and poets between extremes, making it the quintessential genre of modal perfection.8 My second claim about light verse is that for several nineteenth-century critics, including the late-Victorian writer Andrew Lang, the project...

“To Admire and Do Otherwise”: Hopkins’s Modified Translations of Shakespeare’s Casket Song

“To Admire and Do Otherwise”: Hopkins’s Modified Translations of Shakespeare’s Casket Song Elizabeth Howard (bio) Classical studies formed the core of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s curriculum at Oxford, and Hopkins and his peers spent a considerable amount of time translating from and composing in Greek and Latin. To demonstrate a command of verse for the Moderations examination in literae humaniores, for example, students translated English verse into Latin hexameters, elegiacs, and lyrics and into “Greek iambics, hexameters, comic verse, and anapests” (Ox. Ess., p. 76). Several graduates then went on to publish translations of Virgil or Livy, while those with particular skill navigating the classical languages displayed their knowledge by publishing English lyrics translated into Greek and Latin. The best of these also attempted to do so with Shakespearian verse.1 Hopkins himself was asked to translate “Sonnet 32” into Latin elegiacs for his Moderations examinations during the Michaelmas term of 1864 (PW, p. 467). Nevertheless, when Hopkins composed a string of translations of Shakespeare’s songs, including Greek and Latin variations of Portia’s “casket song” (“Tell me where is Fancy bred”) from The Merchant of Venice (3.2.63–72) two decades later in 1886, he was hardly completing an exam exercise. Although he was certainly grading plenty of classics exams at the time for the Royal University of Ireland, his own compositions display a facility with classical verse forms exceeding that of the pedagogical exercise.2 Not only did Hopkins use obscure and even inventive Latin and Attic forms, but he also significantly altered the forms of Shakespeare’s songs in more than one instance as he set them in the classical languages. Hopkins’s version of “Tell me where is Fancy bred” is a text in translation alive to the possibilities within Shakespearian verse for poetic play. Hopkins’s translations from English into Greek and Latin, therefore, serve as a sketch pad for some of his experiments in poetic form outside the confines of English prosody. Examining Hopkins’s adaptive translations as more than merely studies in metrics, this essay considers how Hopkins’s additional lines in his Latin verse underscore the ironic tragedy of love’s death [End Page 181] and how his Greek variant clarifies Shakespeare’s ambiguous voices in the song from The Merchant of Venice. In light of Annmarie Drury’s recent work on the relationship between Victorian poetic translation and experimentation, Hopkins’s texts prove an important case study. Rather than transferring an artistic artifact out of its native language and into English, Hopkins furthers the afterlife of Shakespearian songs by antiquating them.3 In so doing he gives attention to the intricacies of the narrative ambiguities within the songs themselves while bending English verse to classical forms.4 Hopkins’s Work in the Classics Even as an undergraduate, Hopkins showed more than an average proficiency in the classical languages. While at Balliol, he described to his mother his studies under many acclaimed classicists of the day. For example, in a letter dated April 1867, Hopkins complained about the two days of practice exams, set by his tutor Benjamin Jowett, that he found “most trying” (Corres., 1: 143).5 His efforts, at least for Jowett, were noticed; Hopkins’s first biographer, Gerald Lahey, S.J., describes Jowett’s referring to Hopkins as “the star of Balliol.”6 By the time he completed his degree in June 1867, Hopkins had achieved a “first” in Moderations and a “first” in literae humaniores in Greats. Hopkins’s knowledge of Greek and Latin made teaching an excellent possible career path. Despite his acute disappointment and exasperation with teaching students of various ages at the Oratory School in Birmingham, then in Roehampton and Stonyhurst, his name did come up for a double appointment in Dublin: as a classics professor at University College Dublin and a fellow of the Royal University of Ireland (RUI). While noting his “eccentricity,” both the English assistant to the Jesuits’ superior general and the English provincial of the Society of the Jesuits praised his “cleverness” and “training” in classics (DN, p. 233). Hopkins moved to Dublin in February 1884; he began examining for the RUI almost immediately, and he began...

On the Discovery of a Sequence of Constance Naden’s Notebooks: Finding Her Voice, 1875–1879

On the Discovery of a Sequence of Constance Naden’s Notebooks: Finding Her Voice, 1875–1879 Clare Stainthorp (bio) 1 Oh for the poet’s glorious thought, The painter’s gift divine!Why for their semblance have I sought, When they can ne’er be mine? 2 Though I can copy, line for line, The fairest flowers that blow,Though I can write, as thousands do, In lines that softly flow, 3 Though all of this, & more, is mine Yet vainly I aspire,To draw a stroke, to write a line, That glows with living fire. 4 For all my childhood’s dreams are fled, And I may plainly seeThe wreath that crowns the poet’s head Shall ne’er be twined for me. 5 Ye will not visit me again, Sweet simple thoughts of fame,Fond hopes, by pencil & by pen, To win a lasting name. [End Page 233] 6 Yet will I write my simple lays My pencil shall not rest,For it is sweet to win the praise Of those I love the best.1 It is thus that Constance Naden (1858–1889) conceived her artistic ambitions in a newly discovered notebook titled “Poems; by Constance C. W. Naden. 1875–6–7.” Naden went on to publish two well-received volumes of poems during the 1880s, but here she lacks confidence in her poetic ability: she may have common skill, but she does not possess the flame of genius. Titled “A Lament,” this poem also demonstrates Naden’s worries about being derivative—she is aware of her youthful tendency to copy rather than create. This familiar stage in a person’s writing career is “natural,” Christine Alexander asserts; she goes on to argue that “young writers will experiment by impersonating different voices and imitating different genres” and that this “major characteristic of youthful writing . . . is often misunderstood.”2 Imitation was an acknowledged part of the development of the poet during the nineteenth century. For example, in Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has Aurora explain, And so, like most young poets, in a flushOf individual life I poured myselfAlong the veins of others, and achievedMere lifeless imitations of live verse.3 This is a rather negative portrayal of the process that led Naden to test many different poetic forms and genres and to try on a variety of voices. While not her most consistently innovative or uniformly successful works, the previously unknown poems in “Poems 1875,” “Poems 1875–6–7,” and “Untitled Notebook 1878–79” demonstrate both Naden’s range—from Petrarchan blazon to extended medieval narrative, testing the conventions of common meter to those of comic verse—and her burgeoning skill.4 The connecting thread across the notebook poems is their vitality; these manuscripts illuminate the lived experience of a young Victorian woman who aspired to write, demonstrating the influences and ideals that converged upon an intelligent adolescent of the 1870s. To read these three notebooks is to encounter Naden’s voice anew; her poems express a depth of thought and feeling that is at turns serious and sentimental, comedic and cutting. This article describes in detail the context, form, [End Page 234] and contents of the notebooks, before exploring the impact of this discovery on our understanding of Naden’s life and works. I begin with new insights into her approach to composition, paying attention to moments that reveal her poetic process, and then consider how Naden conceived the figure of the poet, showing how the development of her poetic voice occurs in dialogue with Romantic ideals of the poet genius. The article proceeds by tracing Naden’s characteristic comic style, familiar from the 1887 “Evolutional Erotics,” through these newly discovered writings; such poems illuminate her critical perspective on the role of poets and the position of women in society. I conclude by turning to the biographical insights that these notebooks provide, showing how these open up a previously unknown facet of Naden’s young life. Situating Naden’s Notebooks During the 1880s, Naden established herself as a poet, philosopher, and student of science. Critics have primarily discussed her work in relation to women’s literary engagement with Darwin and the...

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text: A Case Study in the Victorian Illustrated Novel. By Richard J. Hill.

Stevenson's FIrst illustrated texts were not novels but his two accounts of journeyings: An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey (1879), each of which had a frontispiece after a design by Walter Crane. Richard Hill introduces them to show from the start that the writer had a lifelong interest in the business of illustration which can be found in childhood drawings, in early essays, in his mingling with the artistic community at Grez (where he would meet Fanny and Lloyd Osbourne) and in his correspondence with Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, and others directly on the subject of work on his own books. (There are many references throughout to the eight volumes of the Booth/Mayhew Letters.) Hill also spends time on the author's own experience as an illustrator, round about the time he was working on Treasure Island, when he wrote the comic verses to be printed as ‘chapbooks’ by young Lloyd Osbourne and illustrated with woodcuts which he made himself (‘I cut them with a knife out of blocks of wood’). Hill rightly judges this to be an important experiment for Stevenson, ‘establishing theories of the potential of marrying image and text within a single work of art’.

Deformity Poems and Other Nasties

This essay discusses two categories of eighteenth-century comic verse that were mainstream in their time but are now almost forgotten. They have little or nothing to do with the satiric traditions that dominate critical attention. Part 1 explores a mass of comic verse tales, direct descendants of the medieval fabliau. In the process, it explores a best-selling anthology of them, the Noble brothers' The Muse in Good Humour (1744–85), and the career of Matthew Prior, the greatest contemporary producer of this genre and by far the most prominent English poet between Dryden and Pope. While often offensive in content, eighteenth-century verse tales remain quick and colloquial, still leaping off the page after 250 years. Their easy tetrameter couplets and plain diction remind us that neoclassical strictures only stretched so far. Part 2 introduces a stranger and less-appealing set of texts: cruel poems about physical defects and disabilities. Few texts could be more alien to current norms about the eighteenth century as an Age of Sensibility. Yet these “deformity poems” were produced in vast quantities and in every conceivable form, from epigrams about squinters, to long and absurdly sentimental tales about hunchbacks in love. Both professionals and amateurs seem to have used them as technical exercises—as a way of amusing themselves and showing off their skill at mimetic versification. As such, deformity poems illustrate the everyday uses of verse in this culture: they were written by everyone, circulated in and out of print, and constantly adapted to new audiences and new occasions.

La controverità delle madri: la ballata «à la manière de Villon» tra Sanguineti e Pasolini

The aim of this study is to show that, in the early Sixties, the Italian poetry, with Sanguineti and Pasolini, tried to use comic forms. In fact, among the many reuses of the metrical forms during the Twentieth century, the ballad by Villon created a curious event: in 1961, Sanguineti published Ballata delle controverita (Ballad of countertruth), a Villonian parody, and Pasolini wrote the Ballata delle madri (Ballad of mothers), a satirical text dedicated to the mothers of journalists that vexed him, taken from a metrical pattern of the French poet. Through a historicistic investigation, this work tries to show that the use of comic figures is determined, in large part, by the influence of Brecht, who had used texts by Villon in his Threepenny Opera. The survey made it possible to detect that these attempts to write comic verses, made in the case of Sanguineti in a parodic tone and in the case of Pasolini in a satirical tone, have determined, as a way to balance the comical figures, the adoption of stanzaic forms and rhyming schemes.

Radici comiche di Machiavelli poeta

The publication of the latest volume of the Edizione Nazionale of Machiavelli’s complete works together with some recent findings provides a new perspective on the Florentine Secretary’s poetry. In addition to many confirmations, such as the key role played by comic verse and in particular the influence of Burchiello and Pulci on his work, there also emerge some new developments. With regard to his obscene poems and those dedicated to malicious gossip, while further evidence is presented to support the attribution to Machiavelli of a work discovered by Antonio Corsaro in 2009, an obscene madrigal actually written by Aretino is shown to have been erroneously attributed to Machiavelli early on in a 16th-century manuscript. As for humanistic poetry, this article aims to demonstrate that Machiavelli actually penned one of a number of unpublished epitaphs written by Florentine writers in memory of a dog.

Classical Arabic literature: a library of Arabic literature anthology

A major achievement in the field of translation, this anthology presents a rich assortment of classical Arabic poems and literary prose, from pre-Islamic times until the 18th century, with short introductions to guide non-specialist students and informative endnotes and bibliography for advanced scholars. Like many pre-modern Arabic anthologies it aims at being both entertaining and informative. It ranges from the early Bedouin poems with their evocation of desert life to refined urban lyrical verse, from tender love poetry to sonorous eulogy or vicious lampoons, and from the heights of mystical rapture to the frivolity of comic verse. The prose contains anecdotes, entertaining or edifying tales and parables, a fairy-tale, a bawdy story, samples of literary criticism, and much more. With this anthology, distinguished Arabist Geert Jan van Gelder brings together well-known texts as well as less familiar pieces that will be new even to scholars in the field. Many recent studies and anthologies of Middle Eastern literatures are primarily interested in Islam and religious matters - an emphasis that leads to the common misconception that almost everything in the region was and is dominated by religion. Classical Arabic Literature instead brings to life the rich variety of pre-modern Arabic social and cultural life, where secular texts happily coexisted with religious ones. This masterful anthology, in English only, will introduce this vibrant literary heritage to a wide spectrum of new readers.

Writing on the Brocken, on the Brocken: The Poetry of the Inn’s Albums

The Brocken visitors’ books were public albums in which walkers recorded their poetic responses to climbing the Brocken Mountain in Northern Germany. The original albums were kept in the Brocken inn and exist in published form, dating from the 1750s to the 1850s. Literary critics have never taken the Brocken visitors’ poetry seriously because of the predominantly comic rhyming verse and parodies of the work of more ‘serious’ or canonical poets, and because it was written by members of the public who wrote poetry recreationally. The poems reveal interesting relations between literature, folklore, and location, between professional and amateur writers, and it highlights the trends in the cultural meanings of the Brocken. The Brocken inn became a dynamic site of reading and writing that gave literary agency to women and amateur writers, and encouraged the performance of the memorialization of landscape and the self.

William Strode’s The Floating Island: Play and Political Propaganda

In August 1636 Charles I, accompanied by his queen, nephews and Court, decided to pay the University of Oxford a three-day visit. In the previous seven years Archbishop Laud, Chancellor of the University since 1629, had made a number of important improvements to the University, including the building of a new quadrangle at his own old college, St John's; this royal seal of approval showed recognition of Laud's achievements and gave the impression that he had come to possess influence at the highest level. Officially the King was the guest of the University; it was the Public Orator, William Strode, who gave the speech of welcome when the royal party arrived, and the University who footed most of the bill; but it was the Archbishop who masterminded the whole affair.1 Among the entertainments provided for the guests were three plays. Two romantic comedies performed on the second day of the visit were well received, but William Strode's allegorical play The Floating Island, acted at Christ Church on the first evening of the visit, was a failure. What the royal party made of it is not recorded, but the Earl of Northumberland's chaplain thought it 'fitter for schollers then a Court', and Lord Carnarvon, less restrained, considered it the worst play he had ever seen except for one at Cambridge.2 A dedicatory poem which the author later attached to the play makes it plain that there was considerable barracking at the first performance (the second, staged for the university once the royal visit was over, was more successful). For the playwright the evening had clearly been a disaster, and the prologue quickly written a few days later for the repeat performance, to replace that addressed to the royal couple, shows his ruffled feelings:We hope to find Spectatours, and we may,For you'l not act the Humours of the Play;Or fret at Passions e'er you read them calm'dIn the next word. Your stomacks feele no QualmRising through smell of rude Philosophy:Nor shall you finde much more then to descryAn Academick birth.3Plainly for Strode the fault was in the audience, not in the play. Laud's opinion was similar: the play was 'very well penned, yet did not take the court so well'.4Later judgements of The Floating Island have, with justification, been less kind. The genre - half morality play, half masque - has been seen as an unfortunate choice, and the characters, representing various humours or 'Passions', as stilted and wooden. The plot, in which the Passions revolt against the benign rule of King Prudentius, but later realise their mistake and welcome his return, is hardly gripping, and attempts to enliven it with episodes of comedy are not successful. The dialogue attempts to be lively, but the sequence of events is too inconsequential and unmotivated for it to be convincing. The play is laboured, and patently produced with little sense of the dramatic.5Its author, William Strode, was at this time a man in the early stages of what appeared to be a promising career. Like several of his colleagues at Christ Church, he had been schooled at Westminster, where the writing of poetry was encouraged,6 and it was as a lyric poet that he first made his mark. He had arrived at Christ Church in 1617 at the age of fifteen or so;7 only two years later he was a contributor to the volume of Latin verse with which Oxford mourned the death of Queen Anne in March 1619,8 and he continued to contribute Latin verse to University publications for the next two decades. His contemporaries doubtless paid more attention to the poems in English which he produced throughout the 1620s. His love-poetry, elegies, comic verses, occasional pieces, parodies, satires, or 'posies' for necklaces and rings were copied widely in the University and further afield, and his songs were not only transcribed but sung on convivial occasions. Meanwhile he followed the normal academic and clerical course; in the summer of 1624 he had reached the stage of taking his MA, and by 1628 must have passed through the diaconate, since in December of that year he was ordained priest. …

The Turkish Table

There is a long tradition of humour in Turkish oral and written literature, ranging from slapstick to satire. Forms include anecdotes, jokes, riddles, comic verse, nonsense rhymes, humorous narrative, and witty debates characterized by plays on words, insight into human nature and a keen sense of the ridiculous. Within this tradition, food and food culture figure widely; not because food is intrinsically funnier than any other subject, but because of its deep-seated role in society. This paper concerns how humour has played a part in a particular type of occasion, known as a Helva Party, where guests participate in making this pudding as well as describing other instances where food and humour converge in literature and folklore.

Darwin's Dharma

Darwin's Dharma Barry Wallenstein (bio) Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie Philip Appleman Illustrations by Arnold Roth Foreword by X. J. Kennedy The Quantuck Lane Press http://www.quantucklanepress.com 96 pages; cloth, $24.95 Philip Appleman is a multifaceted person of letters—poet, novelist, co-founder of the journal Victorian Studies, and editor of both Norton's Malthus on Population (1976) and Darwin (1970). His ongoing interests in science and society have fed his work from the beginning. Alongside this new book of satirical verse, Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie, I have Appleman's first book of poems, the 1967 Kites on a Windy Day. Thematic and even stylistic unities extend from that early book through eight collections, as does his technical achievement. In 1984 when reviewing his fourth book of poetry, Darwin's Ark, I found his work to be among the most alive in the US, as well as being socially responsible, as it looked out beyond the self. Nonetheless, the sensual individual informs everything as the poems delve into the larger universe of our shared evolutionary history. The fact that Appleman is a master of fixed forms—the sonnet, the rhymed epigram, and more—further enhances the poetry as his art moves beyond its ideas or intellect. This new book is an elegant production with nicely chosen epigraphs from Herodotus and T.S. Eliot, both authors making a case for humorous and irreverent poetry that delights with rhymes, puns, and wit. The buoyant forward by poet X. J. Kennedy paraphrases E. B. White when he states "a writer of comic verse works just as hard as a serious poet." Arnold Roth's pen and ink illustrations match Appleman's satirical verse perfectly. They are as lusty and rollicking, and they vary from literal renderings of the writing to imaginative take-offs. Kennedy, a person of faith, almost forgivingly understates the case: "Several of the poems wax skeptical about established beliefs and observances, and smack of secular freethinking." Indeed, in its opposition to blind faith, Appleman's work is atop the anti-religious wave that includes other recent authors attacking theisms: Bart Ehrman, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher's documentary film, Religulous (2008). Appleman's poems in Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie are solidly within the satiric tradition, rhythmically and consistently lambasting the current state of warfare backed by religion. The risk always with unashamedly didactic verse taking on either religion, the engineers of war, or capitalism, or any ism, is that the prime audience for such stuff is already on the poet's side, and while the verse might urge readers towards action or at least a change of mind/heart, most will simply nod their heads in agreement. Thus, the success of such poetry lies exclusively in the originality and inventiveness of the poet rather than his or her attitudes or point of view. Only occasionally does Appleman fall short of that necessary unique expression. Often, another necessity with poetry of social protest is a cross current of something quite dissimilar to the poem's argument. Here, this requirement is happily satisfied by an erotic filament that lights up the work and transforms it from instruction into something more encompassing and touching. This erotic awareness includes all measures of love as the poet's humanity informs most every shout of protest. Appleman's love of the generative life, the life of the senses, his not wanting to give any of it up, is what makes him so angry toward the forces of war, moral certitude, and negation. At the same time, there is an equanimity beneath the palpable anger—a paradox residing peacefully under the biting satire and his raunchy sexuality. Walter Kerr (1913–1996), wonderful theater critic for The New York Times for many years, has commented: The timing of satire is a ticklish business…[the satirist] is always in danger of being severely burned. Let him strike a moment too soon—before the audience is ready to share his malice—and his satire will be resented, driven off the boards. Let him strike a moment too late and he will be laboring the obvious or flyting the already forgotten. He gets a...

In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007 (review)

Reviewed by: In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007 Stephen Kampa (bio) X. J. Kennedy, In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 205 pp. Perhaps the greatest danger for In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus arises from the ductility of the poet’s talent: X.J. Kennedy has managed to thread himself through so much of the tapestry of twentieth-century literature with his achievements in verse, children’s verse, children’s fiction, and translation while also working as an anthologist (for both children and adults), an editor, and a textbook author. The concurrent publication of a selection of comic verse entitled Peeping Tom’s Cabin (BOA Editions) points to Kennedy’s own sense of the diversity of his work. If anything, his selection of “less contemptible verse from previous collections” along with the “rasher of items not collected before” (from the first paragraph [End Page 645] in his Notes) runs the risk of being overlooked in light of everything else Kennedy has accomplished. “Less contemptible” is certainly a modest way of describing these witty, musical, poignant poems, which range from mordant satires of contemporary culture to elegies for childhood friends, former students, and vaudeville performers. I had thought of Kennedy primarily as an epigrammatist and a humorist, so I was surprised to discover his thematic and tonal range: many of the poems use Kennedy’s characteristic wit to probe matters of faith, as in this example with its clever syntactic transmutation of an ostensible verb into an adjective—“I thought my hangdog soul abhorred / In the fierce eyeball of the Lord” (“Flitting Flies”)—and other poems present moments of startlingly sudden violence, as in the following lines from “Loose Woman”: Someone who well knew how she’d toss her chin Passing the firehouse oglers, at their taunt, Let it be flung up higher than she’d want, Just held fast by a little hinge of skin. Two boys come from the river kicked a thatch Of underbrush and stopped. One wrecked a pair Of sneakers blundering into her hair . . . For a poet often associated with children’s verse and light verse, these outbreaks of violence seem particularly stark, but they also remind one of the Bunyan lines, “Some things are of that nature as to make / One’s fancy chuckle while his heart doth ache . . .” Kennedy has written a number of elegies—some serious, some sly, and some a bit of both. In the process of writing them, he sometimes grows impatient with artistic pretensions: Oh, let us do away with elegiac Drivel. Who can restore a thing so brittle, So new in any jingle? Still, I marvel That, making light of mountainloads of logic, So much could stay a moment in so little. The number of trochaic words, especially those ending in the liquid consonant l (drivel, brittle, jingle, marvel, little), lends an almost overwhelming music to the final stanza of “On a Child Who Lived One Minute,” and the slant rhyme of “elegiac” and “logic” testifies to the poet’s enviable linguistic resources and expert ear; if he wishes to “do away” with art, it is in a superbly artistic stanza that he has said so. A similar suspicion about art animates “Poets,” with its daydreaming Mallarmean swans frozen in ice and requiring rescue, and “Artificer,” a delightful response to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: [End Page 646] Blessing his handiwork, his drawbridge closed, He sabbathed on a hill of hand-tooled wax. On stainless steel chrysanthemums there posed Little gold bees with twist-keys in their backs. Kennedy concludes his depiction of this artificial world with the sentence, “All night the world he’d locked outside / Kept thrusting newborn rats under his door.” Try as he might, the artist cannot keep the real world from invading the one he has constructed; reality’s vivid reminders come squirming in through the cracks to contrast brutally with the artist’s impeccable but inanimate family: Increase perfection! So he shaped a wife, Pleated the fabric of her chartered thigh, Begot sons by exact strokes of a knife In camphorwood. He told them not...

Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability, by Gowan Dawson

Reviewed by: Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability Rebecca Stott (bio) Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability, by Gowan Dawson; pp. 282. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, £50.00, $90.00. In 1854 Thomas Huxley began a savage review of the still anonymously authored tenth edition of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) with a line from Macbeth: "time was, that when the brain was out the man would die," implying, of course, that the "pretentious nonsense" espoused by the book should have been long dead. Huxley was especially creative and effective in his use of Shakespeare to disparage his opponents. Literature was part of his armoury as well as part of his theatrical, rhetorical effects. Gowan Dawson's book shows us again and again that Huxley was not alone in his use of literary allusion as gunfire and cannon-shot. The history of what one 1871 contributor to the Edinburgh Review described as the "storm of mingled wrath, wonder and admiration" created by Darwinism has been scrupulously documented. Books on the reception of Darwinism and its assimilation and transformation into various cultural forms now fill shelf after shelf of the history of science sections of great libraries. This makes it all the more remarkable that the terrain chosen by Dawson in Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability constitutes a dark and fascinating corner in the Darwin industry, one that is dimly lit if not unlit. Dawson begins by examining the widely accepted claim that Darwinism, unlike some previous incarnations of transmutation, depended for its acceptance on the impeccable respectability of its principle exponents. Dawson doesn't challenge this claim, but rather sheds new light on the great struggle that took place to establish and maintain that respectability. He documents the long-running campaigns to discredit Darwinism and other forms of materialism mobilised by a wide range of opponents, drawing on a broad range of sources including journalism, scientific books and lectures, sermons, radical pamphlets, aesthetic and comic verse, and even pornography. Dawson reads the reception of Darwinism—and scientific naturalism more broadly, including the work of John Tyndall and W. K. Clifford—in new and interesting ways. He is concerned with strategies and boundaries, with the fashioning not of individuals but of intellectual respectability and its obverse. He asks about the strategies of Darwin's opponents: how did they seek to discredit these big and bold new ideas? Which methods of discrediting [End Page 339] worked and which didn't work? He follows these questions by looking at how the supporters of Darwinism played out their own strategies to realign their ideas with respectability. For the Victorian opponents of Darwinism, of course, it wasn't enough to say Darwinism heretically challenged the Biblical record. To be certain of the mud sticking, Darwinism's opponents worked hard to associate it with an additional range of seriously disreputable ideas: paganism, promiscuous and unrestrained sexuality, and all things French. A. C. Swinburne and later the poets of the aesthetic movement proved especially useful for their associations with all three: Dawson shows us reviewers, essayists, and lecturers repeatedly disparaging scientific naturalism, materialism, and Darwinism by association with Swinburne and aestheticism. Dawson also reveals the efforts of Darwinists to uncouple Darwinism and scientific naturalism from the transgressive excesses of aesthetic literature and art. In making this case, Dawson advances two other significant arguments. First, he challenges uncritically celebratory readings of the discursive interchanges between literature and science (informed by Robert M. Young's schema of the loss of an erstwhile "common context" brought about by the increasing specialisation of science) by showing that not all such alignments and interchanges were creative and mutually beneficial: literature could be used to discredit science and science to discredit literature. Secondly Dawson claims that "from the late 1860s attention shifted increasingly from general concerns with political propriety to specific anxieties over sexual respectability, and it was actually Darwin's surprisingly recurrent connection with sexual immorality . . . which emerged as perhaps the most significant impediment to establishing a naturalistic worldview as a morally acceptable alternative to earlier theological outlooks. These iniquitous associations, moreover, would prove remarkably difficult to shake off" (4). This branch of cultural history is an...

“Lebensmärchen”: Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit als poetischer und poetologischer Text (review)

Reviewed by: “Lebensmärchen”: Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit als poetischer und poetologischer Text Catriona MacLeod Gabriele Blod, “Lebensmärchen”: Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit als poetischer und poetologischer Text. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2003. 335. pp. Borrowing her title from Goethe's 1811 reference to the first books of his autobiography as "Lebensmärchen," a comment that is far from isolated among [End Page 223] Goethe's remarks on Dichtung und Wahrheit, Gabriele Blod argues in her excellent study that it is the product of a sustained literary co-operation between the genres of autobiography and fairy-tale. Both genres, as she points out, emerge as increasingly "literary" over the course of the eighteenth century, and interrogate, though from different standpoints, the following dualisms subtending Goethe's autobiography (as of course its title evinces): orality versus textuality, truth versus fictionality, femininity versus masculinity. Blod's central concern is to reread Dichtung und Wahrheit as a thoroughly poetic text, not as a poeticized rendering of a life. If Dichtung und Wahrheit began to receive sustained critical attention only in the 1970s, this is, as Blod shows, the outcome of a shift in definition of the autobiography itself, as a fictional rather than a factual genre. Blod's investigation opens with a chapter reviewing the history of criticism of autobiography in relation to questions of truth and authenticity, a tradition that has assumed Dichtung und Wahrheit's paradigmatic status. This book situates itself against earlier readings of the work that take referentiality for granted, such as that by Wilhelm Dilthey, and also takes issue with Philippe Lejeune's definition of the "autobiographical pact" made by an author with his or her reader to secure the book's meaning in the world. Lejeune anchors referentiality in the self-naming by the author: but Blod brilliantly shows the fragility of the pact by demonstrating the strategic evasiveness of self-naming (along with other apparently stable references such as dates, places and historical figures) in Dichtung und Wahrheit. As she points out, Goethe only inserts his name once, in the middle of the book, when it appears in a comic verse by Herder that identifies the origins of the name as "von Göttern," "von Goten," or "vom Kote." Another significant name for the work is Goethe's grandfather's name, Textor, with its connotations of weaving and textuality. (Blod herself refrains from referring to the autobiographical persona as Goethe.) Rather, in response to the school of autobiographical criticism inspired by Derrida, Blod argues that across several different levels of this work the notions of truth and authorship are under fictional construction: Goethe's is a poetic challenge to the reader, not a pact. Reviewing the place of the fairy-tale in Germany around 1800, Blod emphasizes the identity of the Kunstmärchen with aesthetic reflexivity. It is the fairy-tale, she concludes, that opens up the possibility of reading the autobiography as a fictional text. A particularly rewarding section of the book, which draws productively on Gérard Genette's narratological concept of the paratext, is devoted to Goethe's open-ended and reversible title; to the preface, in which Goethe stages himself as both sender and recipient of a letter occasioning the autobiography; and to the mottos. Close readings of several fairy-tale incursions into the text follow, with a focus on the role of the body, art, and ideology. The inset fairy-tale "der neue Paris," putatively the creation of a precocious seven year old, receives deserved attention and is positioned as Goethe's response to the contemporary debates on mythology. Far from a straightforward appropriation of the Homeric narrative, Blod suggests, the story of the "new Paris" blends elements of antique myth, biblical narratives, and oriental fairy-tales with references to Werther and the Farbenlehre and to artistic disagreements (with Heinrich von Kleist). Elsewhere, personal and historical events in Goethe's life are also conjoined under the sign of developmental phases termed "Märchen" ("Knabenmärchen," "Jünglingsmärchen," etc.) A second focal episode in the text, the Sesenheim idyll, is described in Dichtung und Wahrheit as a "Märchen" transforming art (The Vicar of Wakefield, [End Page 224] "der...