Complete Poems Research Articles

Nigel Leask Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century ScotlandRobert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland. Nigel Leask. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv+368.

<i>Nigel Leask</i> Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland<i>Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland</i>. Nigel Leask. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv+368.

Césaire at the Crossroads in Haiti: Correspondence with Henri Seyrig

Césaire at the Crossroads in Haiti: Correspondence with Henri Seyrig

Madame X by Darcie Dennigan (review)

Reviewed by: Madame X by Darcie Dennigan Melissa Barrett (bio) Darcie Dennigan . Madame X. Canarium Books. Madame X is a sprawling book written by a poet with a palate for recklessness, irony, and wordplay. Words are dramatically built up to and then omitted; poems arrive in clumsy blocks, broken by neither stanzas nor line breaks but ellipses—punctuation that underscores Darcie Dennigan's already breathless and skittish voice. Interestingly, this is punctuation the poet once thought to avoid. From an interview with West Branch: "But to speak specifically of my failures: ellipses. I have been using ellipses in poems—instead of line breaks, instead of finishing thoughts, instead of giving any complete utterance the kind of finality a period would, instead of a lot of things. And this has mostly met with not much success." One can only wonder why she changed her mind, but we should be thankful she did. Dennigan does best what most poets do not dare. Madame X begins with birth and ends with a funeral; in between are poems of drought, apocalypse, and terrorism. Each poem has its own good-intentioned yet wacked-out narrator, eager to give you a tour of psychological wreckage. There is the former church employee guilty of drinking holy water and eating communion wafers at work, the head nurse at Bethany Home Hospice who attempts to shield her patients from a nuclear holocaust, and the girlfriend who thinks her boyfriend is a genius because he believes that aliens built the pyramids. Dennigan's characters have the problem of being loquacious when nervous and blasphemous when loquacious. "I too would like to imagine sex and have my own Jesus," she writes in "Catholic School Reunion." In a later poem, the speaker describes a series of modern-era Pietàs, including one that features "the Virgin mourning Christ as a miscarriage." Nothing is off limits to Dennigan—she even does that unholy, unforgiveable thing of mocking Rilke. (Rilke!) He got out his megaphone and said the whole poem, the wholething, and I'll say it for you here now but I'll hurry it up . . . We cannot know his legendary headwith eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torsois still suffused with brilliance from inside,like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams etc. Otherwisethe curved breast could not (etc. etc.) nor couldlalalala placid hips and thighsto that dark center where (etc. etc.) ....................stone...............defaced(tatatatatatatata)wild beast's fur: [End Page 158] (etc.) (picking it up again now) for here there is no placethat does not see you. You must change your life. Another character (it is hard not to call them characters) sprays Sappho's only existing complete poem with balsamic vinaigrette. This is a book of freaks—those types who timidly yet purposefully stir up trouble. Often this trouble is grounded in sexual deviancy, with any idea of purity stripped down to its socks and laughed at. A sacristan claims, "Even if I believed the Word became flesh, well— / I'd probably just want to have sex with it." Angels and St. Augustine are pitted against the more carnal poet: "This is me typing—Darcie. I am human. / At least, when I am not a monster, with boobs and mouth and fingers." The same poem ends with a promise: "But angels, burns are totally worth the pleasure of giving a light saber a blow job." Dennigan seeks to defile what is immaculate; she wants a world that is as human and raw and subversive and vulgar as she is. But if you are lucky enough to see Dennigan read her work, you will encounter someone with a girlish voice and bashful eyes—someone who is short and slight and shifts her weight from foot to foot as she reads. Her voice hardly fills up the room. The difference between Dennigan on the page and Dennigan in person is awesomely mystifying. Perhaps the secret lies in the poem's epigraph: "I advance, pointing to my mask." Just who is this Madame X? At the very least, she is Dennigan's alter ego: obsessive and funny and unforgiving and violent...

“Lift This New Glimpse That You Found“: The William Stafford Path Lake Oswego, Oregon

30 World Literature Today photos : kim stafford 5 poetry trails january–february 2013 • 31 W illiam Stafford was born in Kansas in 1914 and lived many places, but he spent his last thirty-six years in Lake Oswego, Oregon, where he died at home in 1993. All but one of his sixty books of poetry and prose were published while he lived in Oswego. After his death, a retired English teacher on the city council started advocating for some recognition for my father and his poetry, and he prevailed . Beside the Willamette River east of town, at a place that felt a bit like Kansas (cottonwood trees, lazy river, an old railroad bridge, and lots of sky), the powers that be decided to cut a series of individual lines of poetry, and one complete poem, into a ring of nine basalt columns—a little Stonehenge of poetry. And the gravel path along the river to this quiet spot was to be named the William Stafford Path. Great idea, but it took a sculptor with a brawny mind to pull it off, and Oregon artist Frank Boyden was called to make this happen. Frank went to the source, a basalt escarpment three hundred miles away, in the dry country of eastern Washington, near Moses Lake, where a giant machine could pluck the nine individual stone spires a dozen feet tall from where they had crystallized over ten million years ago into hexagonal columns that had weathered to a rusty brown. These columns, eight to ten feet tall, were transported to the site and set upright in a ring with a diameter of three long steps. The space is a kind of room with no roof, a learning place, a silent symposium. On-site, individual lines from William Stafford’s writing were sandblasted onto the column facets: At first it’s not much of a river. Water is always ready to learn. What the river says, that is what I say. One column was left blank (to represent silence, the source), and one featured the installation ’s only complete poem, a mysterious text my father had written a few days before he died. The poem is a warning and an invitation. Many who walk there tell me the poem keeps calling them back to the river path. As one said, “Those words changed my day, if not my life.” You Reading This, Be Ready Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life – What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? Portland, Oregon Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, and author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft (University of Georgia Press) and, most recently, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared (Trinity University Press). He also serves as literary executor for the estate of William Stafford. “Lift This New Glimpse That You Found” The William Stafford Path | Lake Oswego, Oregon Kim Stafford ...

Fair Copy by Hazelton, Rebecca, and: The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems by Legault, Paul (review)

Reviewed by: Fair Copy by Hazelton, Rebecca, and: The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems by Legault, Paul Christina Pugh (bio) Hazelton, Rebecca. Fair Copy. Columbus: Ohio State University UP/The Journal Award in Poetry, 2012. $16.95. Legault, Paul. The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2012. $11.56. Taking her work as their inspiration, Fair Copy and The Emily Dickinson Reader show both the rewards and risks of contemporary poets’ sustained engagement with Dickinson’s poetry. In Fair Copy, Rebecca Hazelton adapts a series of Dickinson’s first lines as acrostics for her own poems. These acrostics offer form and limit to a collection whose tone tends to be both whimsical and evasive, whose handling of line is often astonishingly virtuosic, and whose material is only “personal” in the coyest and most mercurial of ways. Some of these claims can characterize notes in Dickinson’s oeuvre itself; it is unsurprising, then, that Hazelton describes the book as “a conversation” with Dickinson’s poetry. Hazelton’s choice of acrostic lines also depended on an element of chance: “On my 29th birthday, I began a formal experiment with Emily Dickinson’s work. I took my copy of The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson and selected the first line of every 29th poem” (56). Such a method does not have the urgency of, for example, Anna Rabinowitz’s Darkling (2001), a book-length poem that acrostically spelled out the entirety of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” throughout a family narrative involving the Holocaust: in the peripheral visitation that acrostics provide, Hardy’s melancholic scene becomes eerily prescient of genocide during the Second World War. In contrast, Hazelton’s counting may initially seem an under-theorized or even self-indulgent approach to gathering lines for acrostic use. But the poems in Fair Copy can often feel satisfying in an almost subterranean way, as if this poet’s [End Page 100] interrogation of Dickinson were taking place along pre-verbal or even arterial channels. Take, for example, the opening of “[I gave myself to Him—]”: I thought it something small. Everything was. Girling from one party to another—I was the prettiest abbess, my wimple crisply folded, my cocktail habit vaccinating me against all thought. Amor vincit omnia engraved the length of my thigh (5) What compels here is the tonal estrangement between Dickinson’s inaugural line and the weird scene narrated in Hazelton’s stanza—which goes on to uncover, letter by acrostic letter, some previously inchoate textures in Dickinson’s declarative itself. The enjambment separating “prettiest” from the surprise “abbess,” with its wink of near-rhyme, is a snapshot of Hazelton’s lyric deftness and density, qualities that she uses to strong and sometimes even thrilling effect in the collection. The microscopically plotted shape-shifting of the tattooed, “girling” monastic is also typical of the book as a whole—which, in Dickinsonian manner, turns on shocks of identity that are inhabited and lost by speakers both contemporary and anachronistic: some women, some men. Hazelton’s linguistic agility is a distinct pleasure in the collection, yet the passage also shows one of her rhetorical temptations: a strong proclivity for anthimeria, or the substitution of one part of speech for another (for example, “girling”), which comes across as too much manner after a while. Also, a yen for repetition culminates in the word “pretty” being repeated six times in a poem near the end of the book, an entire section of which leans too heavily on the word and concept of “world.” This knee-jerk abstraction looks like a grasping at gravitas, which the collection has no need to do. To Hazelton’s credit, however—and perhaps ultimately to Dickinson’s— these impulses do not take over the work. Dickinson’s hand seems nearly “living” here, in the Keatsian sense: it functions as a curbing limit that, in the guise of acrostics, constrains an ever-hovering specter of excess as rhyme and meter might do in other contexts. Dead people’s startlingly “living” hands—and sexy nuns, for that matter...

Shelley’s Utopian Seascapes

MANDY SWANN Shelley’s Utopian Seascapes These are the spells by which to re-assume An empire o’er the disentangled Doom. To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent: This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.1 I N THE UTOPIAN MONODRAMA PROMETHEUS UNBOUND DEMOGORGON’S final speech is famously contradictory. Percy Shelley’s figure for the es­ sential principle of the universe invokes the enduring power of gradualist progress but also the lasting threat of oppressive violence, and therefore the potentially endless need for revolutionary defiance. At the same time, Demogorgon declares the ultimate success ofa blend of defiance (“To defy Power, which seems omnipotent”), and endurance (“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite”). How can society achieve a state of long-lasting peace filled with endless hope, love, and freedom if society is also always capable of reverting to states of war, despair, hate, and tyranny? How can society defy oppression and also endure it? Shelley explores answers to these questions in his depictions ofparadisiacal sea-isles. The imagery ofthe island paradise is crucial to Shelley’s descriptions of universal utopia, and depictions of sea paradises in Queen Mab and “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” in particular reveal contradictions similar to those evident in Demogorgon’s final speech. “A Vision of the Sea” addresses and solves these contradictions, demonstrating a cyclical view of human history that ultimately undermines Shelley’s utopian visions. I. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in The Poems of Shelley, eds. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest, vol. 2, 1817-1819 (London: Longman, 2000), 4.568-78. All further quotations of Prometheus Unbound cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number as Prometheus. SiR, 52 (Fall 2013) 389 390 MANDY SWANN Drawings of island idylls with lush trees, calm seas, and a sailboat in the shallows perfuse Shelley’s notebooks, and poetic images of flowering is­ lands amid oceans of love define his utopias. His fantasies of perfection focus on material achievements: intellectual, socio-political liberty and progress for mortal humans. People still die in Shelley’s utopias. His utopian sea-isles also demonstrate the workings ofa material principle, Necessity. In their emphasis on material perfection, Shelley’s utopian seascapes revise tra­ ditional conceptions of utopia. They confirm his enduring faith in the hu­ man potential for perfection. Nevertheless, they also evince his increasingly cyclical view of human history and his recognition of the impossibility ofthe utopias he describes. In this essay, I discuss Shelley’s representation of the sea in the utopias that appear in Queen Mab (1813), “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills” (1818), and Prometheus Unbound (1820). I also touch briefly on the non-universal utopian sea-isle in Epipsychidion (1821) and conclude with an analysis of the poem fragment “A Vision of the Sea” (1820). The repeated presence of the sea-isle paradise, marked out by almost identical features in sketches, poem fragments, and more completed poems, makes its symbolism and ideological underpinnings fundamental to an as­ sessment of Shelley’s utopian thinking and underscores the important role played by the sea in Shelley’s constructs of utopia. The sketch shown here (see Fig. 1) visually corresponds to Shelley’s poetic depictions of utopia. It comes from the front pastedown of “one of Shelley’s notoriously difficult rough-draft notebooks,”2 3 now known as Bodleian MS. Shelley e. 4. Inter­ preting Shelley’s various sketches is a complex task. Nancy Moore Goslee notes that they could be anything from what she calls “kinetic rituals to keep the ink and thoughts flowing” to “direct or symbolic illustrations of thoughts or lines written” on the page or following elsewhere in that note­ book or others.4 Since their features—the boat floating on a glassy sea and the island abundant with trees and shrubs—are repeated in Shelley’s visions of utopia, the recurrent sea-isle sketches best...

Gaspara Stampa, The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the "Rime," a Bilingual Edition

Gaspara Stampa, The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the "Rime," a Bilingual Edition

Victoria Moul, Jonson Horace and the Classical TraditionJonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition. Victoria Moul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. vii+248.

Victoria Moul, Jonson Horace and the Classical TraditionJonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition. Victoria Moul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. vii+248.

John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner. Judith Thompson.

Judith Thompson, John Thelwall in Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) xvi + 313 $90.00 Judith Thompson's John Thelwall in Romantic Circle sometimes comes close to replicating standard satirical representation of academic rhetoric, claim that the continuing neglect of X by serious scholars is nothing less than scandalous. But sometimes this is true, as I am persuaded that it is in case of John Thelwall. Thelwall has not been comprehensively ignored, but good work that has been done on his life and works (by E.P. Thompson, Michael Scrivener, Gregory Claeys and Nicholas Roe, among others) has yet to result in a widespread recognition of his significance to big picture of British Romanticism. With this book, one hopes that balance may at last be tipped. Its claims can sometimes seem obsessive, but Thelwall deserves an obsession on someone's part if we are to reckon seriously with his place as something other than a silenced partner in a canonized conversation. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, there are in hand well-funded multi-volume standard editions; most of Thelwall's writings have not been reprinted at all and there is almost nothing that has been standardized. Working from 1000page Derby manuscipt of Thelwall's complete poems, among other sources, Thompson argues that his influence on Wordsworth circle was both profound and extended, going beyond early 1790s and well into 19th century. Thelwall, she proposes, haunted imaginations of these major poets as they matured away from their radical years into a more complicated and conflicted staging of relations between politics and aesthetics. It is to Thompson's credit that she avoids predictable calling-to-account that would render sidelining of Thelwall an index of incremental apostasies of Wordsworth and Coleridge; on contrary, she finds that his haunting of their creative imaginations is a constructive one, making them better writers (9) rather than mere establishment sell-outs. Not for first or only time, doubt and even bad faith make for good poetry. Thelwall, it is suggested, provided a benchmark for political certitude against which his better-known contemporaries could measure themselves. His conviction that ills preying upon land could be attributed to capitalism, industrialization, and monopolization of land and wealth (118) was explicit and consistent, a powerful position open to being both refined and sidestepped by his fellow writers. Coleridge, as Thompson reads him, distanced himself further from Thelwall than did Wordsworth, and two seem to have competed more or less openly for lecture audiences in 1811-12 and again in 1818 (89). Unfortunately no one (as far as is known) took trouble (or risk) of transcribing Thelwall's deliveries, but Thompson deduces from ancillary texts that they were emphatic about social role of theater at just those points where Coleridge was playing up his metaphysical method. What were Thelwall's most important and largely unacknowledged contributions to spirit of age and interpersonal dynamic with two of its most famous authors? Thompson here specifies a technique of circumspection ( 20) developed under pressure of government censorship, a mode of indirect direction that would appear refurbished as Wordsworthian ambiguity or irony; a full embrace of public rather than private address, involving a crucial focus on spoken word and on importance of elocution in conception and delivery of poetry, which thus becomes a literal and explicit instance of a man speaking to men; and a career-long dialogue in print with Wordsworth and Coleridge, many of whose most famous works function as overt or covert addresses and responses to Thelwall. …

REFERENCE BACK: The Complete Poems. By PHILIP LARKIN. Edited by ARCHIE BURNETT

REFERENCE BACK: The Complete Poems. By PHILIP LARKIN. Edited by ARCHIE BURNETT

The Maker of Martyrs: Narrative Form and Political Resistance in Ryleev's “Voinarovskii”

This essay examines the synergy of narrative form and political function in Ryleev's last and best completed narrative poem, “Voinarovskii” (1824). The poem is designed to foment rebellion, to persuade readers to fight tyranny even in the face of failure and certain death. To recruit self‐sacrificing fighters for the cause of freedom, Ryleev creates a sophisticated narrative apparatus, a chain of conversion narratives where one martyr recruits another in perpetuity. While representing his characters’ conversions, Ryleev also strives to engulf his readers in this “chain reaction.”“Voinarovskii” unfolds in a series of nested narrative frames, where each frame contains a story of a character's conversion to freedom's cause; each story helps convert another character in the next frame. The poem's beginning and ending are designed to blur the boundary between characters’ and readers’ lives. They invite readers to emulate the poem's characters and add a story of their own transformation to the “chain reaction” of conversions, which can continue indefinitely, thanks to framed narrative's inherent expandability. Potentially endless replication of conversion narratives creates a sense that the community of rebels transcends time and death; fallen heroes are vicariously reborn in the next generation. This narrative effect gives readers a powerful psychological incentive to join the community of selfless fighters, promising them a symbolic victory over death. Ryleev's aspiration to transform readers into martyrs for freedom may seem hopelessly naïve; however, reader responses, particularly testimonies of revolutionary radicals such as Vera Zasulich and Nikolai Ogarev, suggest that the poet succeeded beyond probable expectation. By exploiting inherent properties of framed narrative (its potential to blur the boundary between life and art and its capacity to expand indefinitely), Ryleev created an effective instrument of political propaganda, a tool for keeping the spirit of resistance alive despite defeat until, for better or for worse, revolution could finally succeed.

Remembering Anne Sexton: Maxine Kumin in Conversation with Diane Middlebrook

When diane middlebrook began the research for her biography of anne sexton (1928–74), she interviewed maxine kumin twice. Kumin and Sexton had been great friends and collaborators, and Kumin wrote the introduction to Sexton's Complete Poems (1981). The excerpt below is based on Middlebrook's typed transcript of a recording of a conversation that took place in Kumin's home on 9 October 1980. I abridged the transcript and submitted it to Kumin for her approval. The ellipses are part of the transcript, but the bracketed interpolations are mine. The complete interviews Middlebrook conducted for Anne Sexton: A Biography will be deposited in the Feminist Theory Archives of the Pembroke Center at Brown University.

ROBIN ROBBINS (ed.), The Complete Poems of John Donne

THE book under review is a re-issue, in single-volume paperback, of Robin Robbins's original two-volume hardback The Poems of John Donne (2008). Published in the celebrated Longman Annotated English Poets series, this edition is destined for undergraduate reading lists, and so is in direct competition with other affordable single-volume editions of Donne's verse (like John Carey's volume in the Oxford World's Classics series). Robbins's paperback edition is, as the imprint tells us, ‘revised’. It is also retitled to The Complete Poems of John Donne. The revisions remain unspecified, and so appear to pertain only to the fact that two volumes have been conflated into one, and so the necessary bibliographical matter had to be changed accordingly. It appears that the first and revised editions are, in all other aspects, identical. Given the complicated textual history of Donne's poetry and the ultimately unsettled nature of his canon, the notion of a Complete Poems is a fantasy, ironically underwritten by the fact that the first of Robbins's Dubia (or poems of uncertain attribution), ‘Sappho to Philaenis’, is a poem that was treated as canonical by Grierson in his landmark edition of 1912. If this renders the retitling of the paperback somewhat unfortunate, Robbins's edition is otherwise sensitive to the bibliographical complexity of transmission of Donne's verse. Indeed, Robbins set himself the task ‘for each individual poem’ to start ‘from the manuscript version which presents, judging from what is known of Donne's preferences, the cultural influences of the time, and the nature of that manuscript, the most likely text of that poem’ (p. xvii). This situates Robbins somewhere between Carey's edition, which disregards manuscript complexity almost entirely, and the bibliographically rigorous but also mind-bendingly complex Donne Variorum edition that is still in progress. In Robbins's words, ‘the recording of every vagary and mistake of every scribe of every manuscript’ is a ‘hopeless task’ (xviii); instead, Robbins stays close to the three groups of canonical Donne manuscripts, picks his best text, and (following the Longman house-style) imposes modern spelling and punctuation. Other reviewers of the first edition (for example, Helen Wilcox, RES, lxi (249), (2010), 296–9) have observed how Robbins's general refusal to edit eclectically results in some surprising renditions of much loved lines of Donne; or how the changing of titles, like ‘To Christ’, will confuse generations of readers more familiar with ‘A Hymne to God the Father’ (in this edition, p. 575). This is a valid criticism, yet it may conversely be argued that Robbins's reliance on his chosen manuscript copy-text presents the modern reader with just a flavour of the early-modern manuscript variance that defines the Donne canon.

POETRY IN REVIEW

1 6 7 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R Elizabeth Bishop’s body of work, like that of Stéphane Mallarmé, was once known for its slender excellence. She published four compact volumes of poems at a regular rate, more or less one a decade (North & South in 1946, A Cold Spring in 1955, Questions of Travel in 1965, and Geography III in 1976). It is as though her career had four seasons and began in winter – for Mallarmé, ‘‘la saison intellectuelle créatrice.’’ The subtle early verse, like the ‘‘Imaginary Iceberg’’ looming over the first book, was ‘‘self-made from elements least visible,’’ and poems as di√erently and intricately crafted as ‘‘The Map,’’ ‘‘A Miracle for Breakfast,’’ and ‘‘Roosters ’’ seemed to cut their ‘‘facets from within.’’ ‘‘A Cold Spring’’ began the second volume colorfully with ‘‘a violet . . . flawed on the E l i z a b e t h B i s h o p a n d T h e N e w Yo r k e r : T h e C o m p l e t e C o r r e s p o n d e n c e , edited by Joelle Biele (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pp., $35). P r o s e , by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Lloyd Schwartz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pp., $20 paper). P o e m s , by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pp., $16 paper). P r o s e a n d P o e m s , by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 896 pp., boxed set, $75). 1 6 8 Y E N S E R Y lawn’’ and ‘‘a grave green dust’’ settling over ‘‘big and aimless hills’’; the birth of a calf (who forthwith, in a phrase more resonant now than it was then, though its current import predates Bishop’s poem, ‘‘seemed inclined to feel gay’’); and a magnificently buoyant toast, as fireflies came out, began ‘‘to rise: / up, then down, then up again: / lit on the ascending flight, / drifting simultaneously to the same height, – / exactly like the bubbles in champagne.’’ Ostensibly a topographical poem, ‘‘A Cold Spring’’ is also an erotically tinged love lyric (in context, those hills have a bathycolpian look), and so is the little song that closes this second book, ‘‘The Shampoo .’’ (The preternaturally discreet New Yorker, we learn from Joelle Biele’s edition of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, would not publish ‘‘The Shampoo’’ because of its possible overtones, though as Bishop justly objected, ‘‘It’s just about washing [her lover’s] hair.’’) By the time of Questions of Travel, Bishop has moved to the southern latitudes, and her poetry is in full, flamboyant flower in the ‘‘Brazil’’ section. Geography III, an assemblage of just ten poems including ‘‘In the Waiting Room,’’ ‘‘Crusoe in England,’’ ‘‘The Moose,’’ ‘‘Poem,’’ ‘‘One Art,’’ and ‘‘The End of March,’’ might remind us in its utter autumnal fullness of the last period in Keats’s life, when he produced ‘‘The Eve of St. Agnes’’ and the odes. My factitious summary ignores the remarkable poems that followed Geography III – ‘‘Santarém,’’ ‘‘North Haven,’’ ‘‘Pink Dog,’’ and‘‘Sonnet’’portendedanotheroutstandingvolume–butitserves to suggest the short but almost miraculously sweet text that Bishop ’s oeuvre seemed to constitute. Then came the posthumous proliferation of publications and the all-too-lifelike muddling of boundaries between multiplied categories. The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (1983) interposes ‘‘Uncollected Work [1969]’’ between the third and fourth volumes, and then follows up Geography III with ‘‘New Poems [1979],’’ ‘‘Uncollected Poems’’ (including a subsection , ‘‘Occasional Poems’’), ‘‘Poems Written in Youth,’’ and finally ‘‘Translations,’’ from twenty-six Portuguese, French, and Spanish poems by eight authors. The Library of America’s Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008), in addition to adding prose, presents ‘‘Uncollected Work [1969]’’ as ‘‘from The Complete Poems’’ and turns ‘‘New Poems’’ into ‘‘Late Poems,’’ expands ‘‘Uncollected Poems ,’’ creates ‘‘Unpublished Poems and Drafts’’ to accommodate P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1...

Préfigurations de Médée

Medea is undoubtedly one of the key figures in Apollonius Rhodius’ epic poem of the Argonauts. The description of her falling in love with Jason will be, among others, the model of Virgil’s Dido in the Aeneid. If the third book of the Argonautica is frequently considered as the most beautiful part of the poem, it is nonetheless important to analyze how the poet, in the first two books, uses characteristics of Medea in anticipation of her appearance, and how, once she appears, and until the end of the poem, he prefigures what will happen to her after the segment of her legend that is comprised in the Argonautica. This gives us the opportunity to observe how a character is integrated within the complete poem (according to Aristotle, what can be removed without damage is not part of the whole) as well as to observe an attempt to include the totality of Medea’s legendary fi gure into a text that reports only a part of her legend.

&lt;i&gt;John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: The Poems and “Lucina’s Rape,”&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: The Poems and “Lucina’s Rape,” Jeremy W. Webster John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: The Poems and “Lucina’s Rape,” ed. Keith Walker and Nicholas Fisher. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Pp. xxxiv + 260. $104.95. The late Mr. Walker’s edition of Rochester’s poems (1984) served as a useful, old-spelling alternative to David M. Vieth’s dated Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1968). Yale reissued the Vieth edition in 2002, so it is not [End Page 128] surprising that a newly revised and updated version of Mr. Walker’s edition has now appeared as well. Mr. Fisher, who has remained true to the spirit of Mr. Walker’s edition, hopes to make “Rochester available to students and scholars in versions that were read in his lifetime.” He has retained the general shape and organization of Mr. Walker’s original introduction, updating it with new information. In the section on editing the texts of Rochester’s poetry, for example, Mr. Fisher incorporates the discoveries of Harold Love’s recent, authoritative The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1999). Where Mr. Love chose to use the “Hart-well” manuscript of the “politer” poems, now at Yale, Mr. Fisher has chosen to use the lesser known of these two new collections, the “Harbin” manuscript at the British Library, as the foundation of this edition “in order to bring an equally significant manuscript into the wider domain.” Mr. Fisher has added a very helpful chronology of Rochester’s life that usefully places his biography in historical context using a two-column method: the left-hand column delineates events in Rochester’s life—such as his birth, travel, marriage, court appointments, children’s births; the right-hand column lists major historical events such as the Interregnum, the Restoration, Charles II’s major declarations and political activities, and the production of other writers’ major works. Like Mr. Walker’s original edition, two Indexes are organized, one by proper names, and the other by titles and first lines of poems. Although Mr. Fisher has retained the titles of Mr. Walker’s original “genres”—”Juvenilia,” “Love Poems,” “Translations,” “Prologues and Epilogues,” “Satires and Lampoons,” “Poems to Mulgrave and Scroope,” and “Epigrams, Impromptus, Jeux d’esprit“—he has reordered many of the poems within these sections to reflect the current thinking on their chronological order. He has also extensively updated Mr. Walker’s section on “Poems Possibly by Rochester” and renamed it “Poems Less Certainly Attributed to Rochester.” Following the computational analysis of John Burrows, Mr. Fisher has moved “Tunbridge Wells” from “Satires and Lampoons” to this section, for example. “Seigneur Dildoe” also appears in this section, as do “Timon. A Satyr,” “An Allusion to Tacitus,” and “Verses put into a Lady’s Prayer-Book.” Mr. Fisher has omitted all of the poems originally included by Mr. Walker in the “possible” category. The inclusion of Rochester’s adaptation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s early seventeenth-century tragedy is the most significant addition this edition makes to the teaching of the earl’s works. Of particular note is Mr. Fisher’s boldfacing of Rochester’s additions to and revisions of his source, an editorial device that successfully makes Rochester’s contributions readily apparent. While early scholarship on The Rape of Lucina, or The Tragedy of Valentinian dismissed Rochester’s revisions as insignificant, Mr. Fisher accurately notes that a closer look at the text confirms that “Rochester’s originality extends well beyond straightforward imitation and replication” of the source. Highlighting Rochester’s additions enables the reader to see at a glance where the Earl lightly revised and where he has added pages of dialogue. The result is an edition readable and scholarly. Mr. Fisher has also provided clarifications and short glosses that might trip up undergraduate readers. The helpful placement of glosses at the bottom of each page is also used throughout the poetry section, which reproduces the text of Mr. Walker’s original edition along with his original notes. Each poem [End Page 129] is also followed by a summary of evidence for its attribution to Rochester, its estimated date of authorship, the copy-text...

Civic and other public planting in ancient Greece

The Western tradition of civic planting originates in ancient Greece, and especially in ancient Athens. Civic planting — the planting of the public spaces of a city for the benefit of all the citiz...

Guido Cavalcanti: Complete Poems. Translated by Anthony Mortimer. Pp. 176. Richmond: OneWorld Classics, 2010. Pb. £10.99.Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti: A Critical English Edition. Edited and translated by Simon West. Pp. 193. Leicester: Troubadour Italian Studies, 2009. Pb. £13.95.

<i>Guido Cavalcanti: Complete Poems.</i> Translated by Anthony Mortimer. Pp. 176. Richmond: OneWorld Classics, 2010. Pb. £10.99.<i>Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti: A Critical English Edition</i>. Edited and translated by Simon West. Pp. 193. Leicester: Troubadour Italian Studies, 2009. Pb. £13.95.

The complete poems: the 1554 edition of the rime, a bilingual edition

The complete poems: the 1554 edition of the rime, a bilingual edition

Living with the Irreparable. A Critique of Derrida's Theory of Forgiveness

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Jacques Derrida's eulogy for himself, read at this burial by one of the his sons, translated into English by Gila Walker, Critical Inquiry 33: 2, Winter 2007, p.462 2 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Fundamentalism and Terror’, in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.28. 3 If my hypothesis is right, this universal victimization could bring to an end the possibility that witnessing violence from a distance increases the spectator's sense of personal safety. This was Kant's optimistic conclusion when he claimed that the impact of devastating natural violence onto a viewer does not necessarily amount to an increase of fear. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.129. ‘Seized by amazement bordering on terror, by horror bordering a sacred thrill,’ Kant wrote, ‘the spectator would not feel actual fear’. To the contrary, it is precisely his ability to register ‘that very power's might and connect the mental agitation with the mind's state of rest’ that reveals human superiority to nature. 4 Although this Manichean set of oppositions has by now been abundantly debated and denounced in its inappropriateness for political use, its normative impact is still pervasive. Suffice to mention the ‘accusation’ of affiliation with the Islamic faith moved during the 2008 Presidential Campaign against Barack Obama. 5 Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’, in Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p.42. 6 Giovanna Borradori, ‘The Culture of Terrorism’, in Philosophy Today, Winter 2005, pp.397-407. 7 Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’, p.28. 8 Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’, p.28. 9 With good reasons, there has been considerable debate on how each brand of the Abrahamic lineage worked out the terms of divine forgiveness. Robert Gibbs points out, for example, how the Jewish notion of Teshuvah, or repentance, literally means ‘returning’, assumed as a turning around back to God and the neighbour who has been offended. For Gibbs, the Jewish tradition concentrates more on returning than forgiving, which entails that a premium is placed on the offer of an apology that grants one's return, rather than on the act of accepting the apology, which grants the sinner re-acceptance and re-entry in the community of faith. See Robert Gibbs, ‘Returning/Forgiving. Ethics and Theology’, in Questioning God, eds. John Caputo, Mark Dooley and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp.73-91. 10 Derrida, ‘To Forgive. The Unforgivable and Imprescriptible’, in Questioning God, p.53. 11 In conditional forgiveness Derrida does not differentiate between enabling conditions, including remorse and reparation, and instrumental conditions, such as personal salvation and political reconciliation. Whereas the enabling conditions make forgiveness depend on desert, the instrumental conditions make predicate it to a finality that transcends completely its transformative power. On this basis, it seems to me that instrumental conditions should be separated out from the enabling conditions. (see, Ernesto Verdeja, ‘Derrida and the Impossibility of Forgiveness’, in Contemporary Political Theory 3:1, April 2004, pp. 23–47). 12 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Forgive. The Unforgivable and Imprescriptible’ p.32. 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’, p.39. 14 Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’, p.55. 15 I owe this crucial distinction to Kelly Oliver, who articulated it in her book, Witnessing Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). For a concise version of her argument see ‘Witnessing and Testimony’, in Parallax, vol.10, n.1 (2004), pp.78-88. 16 Duma Kumalo, Theforgivenessproject.com [3/10/2010]. 17 Duma Kumalo, Theforgivenessproject.com [3/10/2010]. 18 Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’ p.59. 19 Anna Akhmatova, ‘Requiem’ in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Brookline MA: Zephyr Press, 2000), p.384.