English Poetic Tradition Research Articles

A New Interpretation of the Crux aþolwarum in the Old English Maxims I 198b

ABSTRACT The word aþolwarum occurring in Maxims I 198b is a crux, and although various readings have been suggested, none of them are satisfactory: some are philologically implausible, while others do not make good sense in the context. Since it is spelled as one word in the manuscript, and since -warum has generally been interpreted as a suffix meaning “inhabitants” that cannot be used as a simplex, it has almost unanimously been believed that it is one word. However, in order to attain a more plausible reading, we should divide it into two words, namely, aþol, an Anglian variant of adl “disease, pestilence”, and warum, an Anglian variant of (or a simple mistake for) a dative plural form of wer “man”, or a dative plural form of wara “inhabitant”. According to either reading, the passage compares the strife and affliction caused and thereby spread ever since the primeval fratricide committed by Cain with a pestilence. Strife among people and a pestilence are two of the major causes of human sufferings in the Old English poetic tradition and are quite comparable, and they are both conceived as something that spread from one place to another, which also makes the comparison quite appropriate in the context of Maxims I.

Alexandros Pallis and the English Poetry for Children: An Intertextual Reading

The present article focuses on the relationship between Alexandros Pallis (1851-1935), a Greek poet who lived in Liverpool, and the English Poetry for Children of the 19th century. After briefly defining the historical context of the poet and his works, an intertextual reading of both his poems for children and the poems of English poets who were either earlier than or subsequent to Pallis is attempted. The need for such a reading is dictated mainly by the fact that a large number of Pallis’s poems have an indication showing that they are based on foreign models, in their majority English and Scottish. Although the aim of the present article is to correlate Pallis’s poetry with the English poetic tradition for children rather than identify his poems with their foreign sources, the comparative reading leads to the accurate identification of only one English poem, which Pallis actually recomposes, as well as to the very possible connection of several of his poems with English poems for children, including the verses written by Scottish R. L. Stevenson. After this comparative consideration, the European orientation of Pallis’s poetry along with his particular contribution to the renewal of the Greek poetry for children is largely emphasized.

세스티나의 강박적 구조와 마술적 미학: 엘리자베스 비숍의 시들을 중심으로

This paper investigates the poems of Elizabeth Bishop written in the sestina form and discusses how she uses the sestina''s obsessive formal logic to construct fascinatingly surreal and deeply emotional landscapes. To contextualize Bishop’s sestinas and demonstrate their unique significance, this paper will first offer a brief overview of the sestina form’s adoption and adaptation in the English poetic tradition. Bishop’s first sestina, “A Miracle for Breakfast,” is influenced by Auden’s moralized and allegorical re-interpretation of the troubadour form that originated in medieval France. Furthermore, Bishop, whose childhood struggles with a sense of dislocation, alienation, and mortality lie at the heart of her poetic universe, naturally gravitates toward the form’s intensely affective and strikingly magical force in her tour-de-force poem, “Sestina.” Through the close reading of Bishop’s two sestinas, this paper will argue that Bishop offers paradigmatic models to understand the sestina''s formal virtue and enriched potential for exploration, articulation, and expression in the context of twentieth-century American poetry.

The Skylark: A Symbol of Poetic Inspiration for Generations with Special Reference to Shelley and Hughes

The skylark is a tiny brown bird with a small crest on its head. It is slightly larger than a sparrow and is popularly known for its uninterrupted song during its upward flight. The bird is found in most parts of England and many European countries. A closer examination of English poetic tradition reveals that several English poets have anthologised this tiny bird, including famous poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley, Hopkins, Meredith, Rossetti, Rosenberg, and C Day-Lewis. The late poet laureate Ted Hughes also wrote about the skylark in our times. Even Shakespeare and Goethe have eulogised the skylark in their plays. Since Thomas Hardy has written a poem about ‘Shelley’s skylark,’ it is evident that traditionally ‘To a Skylark’ by Shelley is the most popular of all ‘Skylark’ poems. However, Hughes’s poem on skylark merits our attention because it is entirely different from the general trend of all other skylark poems written until his time. Therefore, this study explores how the skylark became a symbol of poetic inspiration for different generations of poets by analysing the two famous poems on skylark written by Shelley (1792–1822) and Hughes (1930–1998). While Shelley depicts the skylark as a pure spirit of joy, Hughes considers it an embodiment of cosmic energy resulting from the bird’s struggle for flight against the earth’s gravitational pull. Therefore, the different perceptions of Shelley and Hughes about the skylark constitute the essence of this discourse.

Wright’s Poetic Prose Epic

While G.S. Fraser sees good free verse as “verse which does not scan regularly but seems always on the verge of scanning regularly” (1970, 74), I argue that Alexis Wright’s epic prose in Carpentaria sounds as if it were verging on poetry from the English tradition, blended with a local Indigenous oral tradition and Waanyi language. Using structuring devices occasionally borrowed from the English poetic tradition as well as from Waanyi, her prose achieves mnemonic functions, inscribing the novel as a memorial epic in a new epic diction, and glorifying the act of writing, as well as the use of orality.

Direct speech in Heliand and Otfrid von Weissenburg's Evangelienbuch: a shared vernacular tradition?

ABSTRACT This paper compares Heliand (Old Saxon) and Otfrid von Weissenburg's Evangelienbuch (Old High German) with each other and with several Old English poems to determine the extent to which those poems partake of a common stylistic tradition as regards their handling of direct speech. Particular attention is given to the location and form of the inquit and to terms of address. Close examination of those features confirms the well-known fact that Heliand uses a style that is very close to the Old English poetic tradition, whereas the Evangelienbuch is much more innovative stylistically. However, it also reveals significant differences between Heliand and Old English poetry that go beyond matters of dialect or metre. Conversely, it shows that, for all its innovation, the Evangelienbuch is not entirely exempt from traditional features characteristic of West-Germanic alliterative poetry.

Мотив сна в поэзии Элизабет Барретт Браунинг

The study aims to determine the role of the dream motif in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry and creative philosophy and to reveal mechanisms of its realisation. Scientific novelty of the research lies in expanding understanding of thematic range and artistic significance of E. B. Browning’s poetry, since her creative work remains little-studied in the Russian literary criticism. As a result of the research, motivation for and principles of the dream motif formation are determined, E. B. Browning’s own interpretations of the dream phenomenon and ways of its poetic interpretation are considered. Multi-aspect realisation of the dream motif is examined in connection with autobiographical and social factors that defined E. B. Browning’s special role and place in the English poetic tradition.

Charles d’Orléans’ English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics, and Style of “Fortunes Stabilnes.” ed. by R. D. Perry and Mary-Jo Arn

Reviewed by: Charles d’Orléans’ English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics, and Style of “Fortunes Stabilnes.” ed. by R. D. Perry and Mary-Jo Arn Olivia Robinson R. D. Perry and Mary-Jo Arn, eds. Charles d’Orléans’ English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics, and Style of “Fortunes Stabilnes.” Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp., xiv, 293. $99.00 cloth; $24.99 e-book. This insightful and timely book directs new critical attention squarely toward an understudied but fascinating body of fifteenth-century English verse: the English-language poetry that Charles d’Orléans, poet, prince, and prisoner, left behind him when his twenty-five-year captivity in England came to an end in 1440. Charles’s French-language body of work, [End Page 338] which he took back to France with him on his release, and which he added to over subsequent years, has long been the subject of detailed critical inquiry and justified appreciation: its formal, linguistic, philosophical, and social complexity is well known, as is the iconic “personal manuscript,” begun in England and continued throughout Charles’s life, in which it is preserved. It is fair to say that the English-language poetic sequence, surviving now in one manuscript copy (London, British Library, MS Harley 682) and fragments of another (the “Oxbridge” manuscript, consisting of leaves found in two different books), and partially (though not fully) based upon parts of Charles’s French-language corpus, has been far less systematically approached and understood. This collection of essays forms an important and necessary step toward remedying that lacuna: focusing entirely upon the English poetic sequence (dubbed Fortunes Stabilnes by Arn in her 1994 edition), its contributors draw on an extremely welcome range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches to push our understanding of Charles’s English poetics, and their at times problematic critical reception, into new and productive areas. The impulse, shared by many of the contributors, to situate Charles’s English-language work within and in conversation with fifteenth-century English poetic production and dissemination, whether that be geographically, linguistically, formally, or bibliographically, is particularly welcome. It is very clear how the specific, and fairly unusual, circumstances of Fortunes Stabilnes’s composition have allowed it to be thought of as an “outlier” or something of an oddity within an English poetic tradition. Indeed, the work is maybe best known for some of its highly unusual linguistic coinages and forms. This book conclusively and excitingly demonstrates the extent to which that critical position limits our understanding and appreciation of the cultural work undertaken by this text. Taking full advantage of recent shifts in approaches to the Franco-English political, literary, and linguistic connections and entanglements, it opens up a raft of new questions about the complex poetic artistry of Fortunes Stabilnes, its responsiveness to earlier forms of poetry in English and in French, and its place within an early fifeenth-century English literary context and tradition. (Indeed, one thread that runs through the book, evoked by many contributors—and to which there are, from the evidence presented here, complex and contradictory answers—is the extent to which Charles might be considered a “Chaucerian” poet, and just what Fortunes Stabilnes’s deliberately constructed aesthetic and thematic debts to Chaucer, in particular, might be.) [End Page 339] The volume’s editors divide the contributions loosely into two groups: those that marshal and analyze linguistic, metrical, and formal evidence from the poem (or a sample corpus from it) to provide “systematic accounts of practices” (R. D. Perry, “Introduction,” 20–21; chapters by Eric Weiskott, Ad Putter, Richard Ingham, and Jeremy Smith), and those that engage with style, compositional practice, transmission, and content more widely, in order to open up new approaches to the text (chapters by John Burrow, Elizaveta Strakhov, Jenni Nuttall, B. S. W. Barootes, Andrea Denny-Brown, Simon Horobin, and Philip Knox). This results in a very varied set of approaches that allow for multiple routes into analyzing Fortunes Stabilnes to be addressed and explored, and to be set in conversation with one another. The accounts and analyses of Charles’s technical poetic, grammatical, and linguistic practices in particular will provide readers in different disciplines with...

The city and the beloved witness: Mapping cityscapes of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry

The reputation of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, as a poet of exile is well established. Much of his poetry deals with themes of loss, lamentation, and longing where he speaks in a powerful voice about the plight of people of Kashmir. Shahid’s personal memories are not only of Kashmir but also of Delhi, the city where he was born, studied, taught, and published his first collection of poems. In his poems about Delhi he revisits both old Delhi and New Delhi: he roams around the city, listens to Qawwali at Saint Nizamuddin’s mausoleum, meets Muslim butchers, remembers his parents, remembers Shahjahan, and recites Bahadur Shah Zafar’s poem. This article investigates the representations and recollections of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s poems and explores the city’s centrality in understanding socio-cultural history, the importance of particular individuals, and spatial specificity. It studies how the poet explores the city in relation to its languages, histories (the Rebellion of 1857, Partition, post-Partition), and cultures (Mughal and modern). I further investigate how Ali’s literary cartography of Delhi is influenced both by indigenous genres such as Shehr Ashob and the modern English poetic tradition, and how certain Indo-Islamic tropes become central to the poet’s literary memorialization of India’s capital city.

Synonyms for Man, Warriorr in LaaamonnS Brut and Old English Alliterative Poetry

Laȝamon’s Brut is well-known for being a transitional stage between Old English and Middle English alliterative poetry. On the one hand, it preserves some traces of the Old English poetic tradition, such as, for instance, certain poetic words. On the other hand, even those traces that seem to be similar to Old English undergo significant, though subtle, changes. To trace these changes, this paper explores Middle English predominantly poetic lexemes for ‘man, warrior’ in the Caligula manuscript of the Brut, namely, Middle English simplexes haeleð, kempe, scalk, seg, rink, as well as their Old English counterparts haeleð, cempa, scealc, secg, rinc in the verse section of the DOE Corpus.

Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Imagination

In this essay, the various lines of Shakespeare that involve philosophical and “pre-scientific” notions about imagination are analysed, showing how often the technical knowledge and theoretical features of specialized issues underlie his words in a more diverse and sophisticated way than frequently supposed. Certainly, some of those ancient learned opinions on fantasy were previously assimilated into European and English poetic tradition that in turn are taken up and transfigured by the Bard. This matter has multiple facets and covers medical, philosophical, and theological speculations, and many passages in Shakespeare’s works display a plausible acquaintance with those concepts that are studied in this article: the problem of the organic location of imagination, its relations with the eyes and other organs (brain, heart, and liver) in psychophysiological processes, active fantasy’s ability to change one’s own body and another’s body, altered states of consciousness which were attributed to a physical disorder or a supernatural agency, the mental representation of the self and the other; also an analysis of Duke Theseus’s famous speech on the lover, the madman, and the poet is included, along with other references to the inner senses and the artistic creation. All these topics are presented to show the wide and subtle knowledge of this subject possessed by one of the finest imaginations in history.

Laȝamon’s Dialogue and English Poetic Tradition

ABSTRACTThis article investigates one of Laȝamon’s most significant transformations of his source material, namely his greatly expanded use of dialogue. This is discussed in the context of Old English literature to examine what it might teach us about Laȝamon’s literary heritage. Many different theories have been proposed for Laȝamon’s connections to earlier English literature, but, in terms of dialogue, it is classical Old English poetry, particularly the saints’ lives and heroic verse, which most closely resembles Laȝamon’s work. The use of dialogue is one of a number of major divergences between Laȝamon and the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and, in light of this, arguments linking Laȝamon to the Chronicle poems in particular are critically reviewed.

Dying for a Drink: “Sleeping after the Feast” Scenes inBeowulf,Andreas, and the Old English Poetic Tradition

Dying for a Drink: “Sleeping after the Feast” Scenes in<i>Beowulf</i>,<i>Andreas</i>, and the Old English Poetic Tradition

Rhythm and meaning: "Rhythmical deviations" as italics

English iambic pentameter allows rhythmical deviations that occupy three (seldom four, more often two) adjacent metrical positions. These deviations, though metrical, are noticed by the listener or reader. Starting from the first quarter of the 16th century, poets (Surrey) have used rhythmical deviations to emphasize ("italicize") semantically important segments in the line. Such rhythmical deviations have become part of the English poetic traditions. It has turned out that rhythmical deviations used to italicize meaning are filled with recurring rhythmical and grammatical structures and repeated lexicon. M. L. Gasparov used a special term to denote the recurring rhythmicalgrammatical structures: "clichés"; while calling clichés incorporating recurrent lexicon "formulas". I have discovered that formulas are part of the English poetic tradition: the same formulas recur in poetic texts of the 16th–20th cc. They are not plagiarisms, allusions or reminiscences; they are a common basket of goods that belong to all English poets, used by all and owned by none. The recurrent deviations usually occur on metrical positions "weak-strong-weak-strong" and as a rule contain a monosyllabic (rarely – disyllabic) verbpredicate followed by a monosyllabic grammatical word (e.g. an article), an adjectiveattribute and a noun – a direct object to the verb. The recurring lexicon includes verbs of motion, particularly verbs of fast, aggressive motion, an action directed downwards or causing an injury or death, and recurring nouns referring to moving objects or agents (hands, arms, wings; spear, sword). I term such recurring formulas "rhythmical italics".

The Hauntings of Fernando Pessoa

The Hauntings of Fernando Pessoa Jerome Boyd Maunsell (bio) The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was inhabited by so many conflicting voices that his only solution was to turn himself into an entire school of different writers. One of the most individual of writers, he also contained a host of individuals within himself. Of his time and place—mostly Lisbon in the early decades of the 20th century, after a crucially formative education in Durban, South Africa—but also eerily beyond it, he was a one-man Modernist movement or series of movements, who aimed not merely to write individual books, but to "convert himself into a literature,"1 creating an ever-increasing constellation of personas that is said to number at least 75 different imaginary writers or "heteronyms." Pessoa also helped invent at least three movements—Paulismo, Sensationism, and Intersectionism—taken up by other writer friends in Lisbon, all of which, as his editor and translator Richard Zenith writes, became "the instruments by which Pessoa and his compeers brought Modernism to Portugal."2 Unusually, Pessoa's heteronyms also commented on each others' work, and engaged in promoting and criticising each other in ways reminiscent of other Modernist movements. But Pessoa also wanted to engage with the wider sphere of Modernism outside Portugal, and despite his relative isolation from the currents of Modernism elsewhere in Europe and America, his work resounds with extraordinarily close unconscious echoes and prefigurings of other contemporary writers. In sum, his oeuvre reconfigures the given narratives of international Modernism, as well as providing ghost or shadow Modernisms of its own. Because he published little in his own lifetime, however, and because translations of his work have only emerged in English [End Page 115] relatively long after his death, Pessoa has not yet been fully integrated into the story of Modernism outside Portugal. The relatively sparse corpus of English-language criticism of his work continually notes this neglect. In a 2007 collection of English-language essays on Pessoa, Anna M. Klobucka and Mark Sabine remark on how Pessoa's body of work has been well covered by Portuguese and Brazilian scholars, and has an internationally acclaimed standing, "even as it remains relatively underrecognized in English-speaking countries, where the limited scope of Pessoa's work available in English translation could, until recently, be blamed for this lack of acknowledgment."3 Klobucka and Sabine refer to Pessoa's "ghost-like presence on the contemporary canonical scene of modern Western literature,"4 and the image of Pessoa as a phantom presence is indeed apt. The moments they refer to when Pessoa took "occasional centre-stage prominence on the Anglo-American scene"5—a New Yorker piece by George Steiner of 8 January 1996, and Harold Bloom's inclusion of Pessoa in The Western Canon (1994) and Genius (2002) —offer glimpses rather than full-bodied assessments of his work. In her much more sustained English-language monograph on Pessoa, from 2003, Irene Ramalho Santos traces Pessoa's international presence in English in more depth, beginning with a 1955 essay about him in Poetry, while noting that "substantial Pessoan scholarship and critical interpretation in English are not yet abundant."6 "This is surprising," Santos writes, because "the Anglo-American poetic tradition could actually claim Pessoa as one of its finest poets... Furthermore, the roots of his poetic theory and practice reach almost equally into Portuguese literature and the Anglo-American literary tradition."7 Santos argues that an understanding of Pessoa's work is essential for a wider understanding of Anglo-American Modernism in general, and that Pessoa's strongest links are with Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Emily Dickinson in particular. George Monteiro, meanwhile, has traced many of Pessoa's earlier influences up to the 20th century, persuasively situating him within an English poetic tradition leading from Shakespeare and the metaphysicals through to the Romantics and Robert Browning,8 all of whom Pessoa read in English and often studied in great depth. Darlene Sadlier has analyzed the heteronymic poetry in terms of Barthes's and Foucault's ideas of authorship.9 A recent study of Pessoa from 2010 by Patrícia Silva McNeill traces Pessoa's affinities with and differences...

Reading England: pastoral, elegy and the politics of place in Richard Caddel and Harriet Tarlo

Ric Caddel's poem ‘Fantasia in the English Choral Tradition’ (1987) owes much to the idea of a poetics of place that feels peculiarly English. Its delicate rhythms and musical cadences explore a poetic here-and-now that recalls the there-and-then of a lyric, pastoral tradition (both musical, as in Vaughan Williams' evocation of Thomas Tallis, and poetic, as in the range of English nature poets to which it alludes). This essay argues that Caddel's attention (in this poem, as well as more generally) to things at hand, to living both ‘in’ and ‘for’ poetic ‘contact with the world’, performs an argument about the vital importance of the poet's place in that world. His work asserts, that is, that all things are contingent, that poetic experience is indispensable, that ‘there is no “away”/to sling things to’. Caddel's sense of the place of the poet is, however, not without irony, and it is this sense that the essay further explores in relation to another poet whose work has received very little attention, Harriet Tarlo. Like Caddel, Tarlo's poetry, and especially her sequence ‘Love/Land’ (2001), tests, poetically, the space(s) we occupy. Tarlo's work is written in response to the (Northern) English countryside yet, like Caddel's, its sense of place is complicated – ironized – by the fact that it has learned much about the poetics of place from ‘away’, from American poets such as Pound, Williams and, most particularly, Niedecker. This essay considers, therefore, the implications of this upon the place that poets such as Caddel and Tarlo occupy within an English poetic tradition. It suggests, finally, that their place outside (away from) the English poetic mainstream, and the sparse critical notice they have received, is precisely – and ironically – an index of the attention their poetry gives to very English senses of place and of dwelling poetically.

New Old English: The Place of Old English in Twentieth‐ and Twenty‐first‐Century Poetry

AbstractThis article begins by noting that the narrative coherence of literary history as a genre, and the inclusions and exclusions that it is forced to make, depend on the often unacknowledged metaphors that attend its practice. Literary history which is conceived as an unbroken continuity (‘the living stream of English’) has found the incorporation of Old English (also called Anglo‐Saxon) to be problematic and an issue of contention. After surveying the kind of arguments that are made about the place of Old English as being within or without English literary tradition, this article notes that a vast body of twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century poetry, oblivious to those turf‐wars, has concerned itself with Old English as a compositional resource. It is proposed that this poetry, a disparate and varied body of work, could be recognized as part of a cultural phenomenon: ‘The New Old English’. Academic research in this area is surveyed, from the 1970s to the present, noting that the rate of production and level of interest in New Old English has been rapidly escalating in the last decade. A range of poets and poems that display knowledge and use of Old English largely overlooked by criticism to date is then catalogued, with minimal critical discussion, in order to facilitate further investigation by other scholars. This essay argues that the widespread and large‐scale reincorporation of an early phase of English poetic tradition, not in contiguous contact with contemporary writing for so many centuries, is such an unprecedented episode in the history of any vernacular that it challenges many of the metaphors through which we attempt to pattern texts into literary historical narrative. It is suggested that the weight of evidence in this area strongly suggests that in recent decades we have been living through ‘The Anglo‐Saxon Poetic Renaissance’.

Charmides and The Sphinx : Wilde's Engagement with Keats

From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century was primary object of myth-makers' attentions, its history as well as its mythology fodder for the imagination: ligature exemplified by Oscar Wilde's Theatre at Argos (1877), sonnet written in situ, Where once the Chorus danced to measures fleet; / Far to the East purple stretch of sea, / The cliffs of gold that prisoned (ll. 5-7). (1) The mythical Danae is given ontological status equal to that of the historical poet and chorus who would have enacted her story in the theater, thus acknowledging that Greek history, like Greek myth, survives now as an aspect of the individual imagination. But throughout the nineteenth century, as archaeology relocated Greece in the stones and soil of small Levantine peninsula, pushing it back into its chronological container, its potency as fictive realm was inevitably diminished. This essay examines the confusion of the old mythical and the new archaeologically determined in Wilde's long poem Charmides (first published in Poems [London, 1881]), attributing it in part to Wilde's imitation of older models no longer tenable in the changing climate of classical scholarship: in this instance, Keats's Endymion and Lamia. I conclude by reading The Sphinx (published London, 1894, perhaps begun 1874) as reworking of Ode on Grecian Urn, an advance on Charmides in that it maintains dialectical and critical relationship with its host text rather than purely imitative one. I begin by summarizing two recent critical accounts of Keats's Hellenism, those of Martin Aske and Helen Vendler, since they both chart movements that have repercussions in Wilde's work. Moreover, since my reading of Charmides depends on Wilde's appropriation of Keats's treatment of topography and chronology in Endymion and Lamia, I will consider these poems in detail. In Keats and Hellenism, Aske proposes that antiquity offers for Keats reservoir of validatory fictions, fictions which, because of Keats's ignorance of Greek, are refracted through the poetic voices of Spenser, Chapman, Milton, and Shakespeare. (2) Antiquity itself is an absence or lack, around the edges of which the English literary tradition clusters (p. 4). Keats stood on the poets' side of the rift that began to widen at the beginning of the nineteenth century between classical scholarship and Hellenist-inspired art: Classical does not present itself [to Keats] as language to be mastered, or text to be edited, but as supreme fiction, an ideal space that might yield host of fine poetic imaginings (Aske, p. 35). But Keats's anxiety at his belatedness in the English poetic tradition and at the unrecoverability of the classical world (an unrecoverability made overt to him and personally magnified by his ignorance of Greek) mean that his Hellenist works are creative expressions of failure. Borrowing term from Derrida, Aske submits that Endymion in particular, with its narrative incoherence and apparent linguistic incontinence, should be seen as parergon, literally by-work, here meaning an ornamental appendage detached from notional primary structure, like parasite without its host. Endymion, in this reading, is an arabesque drawn over the blank space left by the loss of antiquity, while the fragmentary Hyperion represents the failure to put together whole out of the scattered remnants of the classical tradition (pp. 5-6). Helen Vendler, by contrast, offers reading of the Ode on Grecian Urn that emphasizes the increasing confidence of Keats's encounter with antiquity: the poet, confronted by silent artwork, passes from archaeological interrogation (What men or gods are these?, l. 8) through assimilation (the poet's identification with the young lover in the second and third stanzas) to a generous loss of self in the other. (3) The final scene described on the urn, the procession and sacrifice, represents religious sensibility for which there is no modern equivalent. …

Daljit Nagra, Faber Poet: Burdens of Representation and Anxieties of Influence

This article examines Daljit Nagra's recent poetry collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! in relation to the idea of the burden of representation placed upon minority writers. While Nagra has been lionized as “the voice of British Asian poetry”, his verse actually serves to question the homogenization of diverse individuals and communities implied within such labelling. The collection consists of a mix of confessional poetry and dramatic monologues, and is marked by repeated quotation from and parody of the English poetic tradition as well as a linguistic inventiveness in portraying the voices of British Punjabis: the article suggests that each of these aspects can be seen as part of Nagra's attempt to engage with his anxieties of influence. Crucially, these anxieties must be understood not only in the Bloomian sense of the writer's relation to tradition, but also as formed by the discursive expectations of a society structured by racialization.

BRITISH IDENTITIES AND THE POLITICS OF ANCIENT POETRY IN LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

This article examines the scholarly recovery and popular reception of ‘ancient poetry’ in later eighteenth-century England, with a view to elucidating the relationship between cultural primitivism and more overtly politicized discourses of national identity. The publication of the poems of Ossian, in the early 1760s, gave a new prominence to the earliest cultural productions of Celtic antiquity, and inspired the attempts of English literary historians, such as Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, to provide an alternative ‘Gothic’ genealogy for the English literary imagination. However, both the English reception of Ossian, and the Gothicist scholarship of Percy and Warton, were complicated by the growing strength of English radical patriotism. As popular political discourse assumed an increasingly insular preoccupation with Saxon liberties and ancient constitutional rights, more conservative literary historians found their own attempts to ground English poetic tradition in some form of Gothic inheritance progressively compromised. The persistence of ancient constitutionalism as a divisive element of English political argument thus curtailed the ability of Gothicist literary scholarship to function as an effective vehicle for English cultural patriotism.