Fellow Poets Research Articles

Hopkins' Affective Rhythm: Grace and Intention in Tension

Hopkins' Affective Rhythm:Grace and Intention in Tension Joshua King (bio) "Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all?" the Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins asks fellow poet Robert Bridges in 1877.1 Hopkins' question remains largely unanswered. I do not, however, intend yet another contribution to the eye-glazing debate over sprung rhythm's technical integrity, its viability versus impracticability; doing so would merely perpetuate the presumption, still active in most discussions of sprung rhythm since W. H. Gardner's foundational Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, that Hopkins poses his question in purely technical terms.2 Unquestionably much has been and is yet to be learned from such formal scrutiny; but the assumption that analysis of sprung rhythm should begin and end at this level is entirely questionable. Hopkins answers his own question for Bridges, and his focus is not on pure technique. He champions his prosody's preservation of "the native and natural rhythm of speech" (Letters, p. 46). To presume to have captured in poetry the native character of spoken rhythm is to presume to have captured at least some of the native character of its speaker.3 Sprung rhythm is more than a metrical novelty: in it Hopkins finds a means for apprehending and recommending to a reader kinds of affective and cognitive experience. In his earliest experiments with sprung rhythm, he connects its performance to an experience of grace. He wants to guide his anticipated reader's rhythmic voicing into an impression of grace. My use of "anticipated" recognizes the tension between Hopkins' intention for his rhythm and his inability to ensure its fulfillment. In Hopkins' theology and prosody, the intentions—meanings, designs, purposes—of poetry and the experienced world are "uttered" by a person through intensive mental engagement and received by him as stresses of affective and cognitive energy. This process requires straining inherent qualities of the speaker and what is spoken into more vigorous states, just as potential energy is converted into kinetic: the activation of sprung rhythm's intentional tension necessitates conversion of a reader's "natural" inclinations in voicing. When Hopkins' few contemporary readers resist this conversion, he is confronted by the possibility that, rather than conveying the nature of grace, his cadences evidence his efforts to shape his reader's nature. [End Page 209] II. One's Own Utterances: Hopkins' Theology of Grace "God, grant to men to see in a small thing, notices common to things great and small."4 St. Augustine comments on our experience of time and grace, "notices" of which we encounter "in [the] small thing" of listening to ourselves speak. He recites a line of Latin verse, wondering how he measures its syllables, since each is instantly passing before he finishes hearing it. He does this, he believes, because his "'present [mental] intention (praesens intentio) [intentio: a straining, a tension]'" conveys before him a sequence of mentally preserved sensations.5 A person's present intention can be drawn out of mental distension (distentio: a stretching asunder) between diverse impressions and toward God's eternal present through the mediation of the incarnate Word, Christ. Hopkins holds a similar conviction: humans are intended to interpret temporally and spatially distended impressions of the world's energies into spoken utterances, through which may be felt present, affective stresses of God's grace. He wrote his most systematic meditations on grace while on his 1881 Long Retreat, a thirty-day contemplation of St. Ignatius Loyola's Exercises observed by Jesuits. Yet, the meditations are Hopkins' exposition, with the aid of Roman Catholic theology,6 of intuitions he had been working out in poetry and prose for over a decade: these temporally disparate writings can be used to interpret each other's uniting intentions. We might begin with notes Hopkins made as an undergraduate at Oxford on the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. Parmenides believes the "is" invoked or implied by all speech acts (e.g. "blood is red") actually exists, everywhere indivisible and itself: every time we speak we can hear ourselves saying "Being is." Cotter identifies the significance of this statement for Hopkins: "The divine name of...

Michael Drayton, Literary History and Historians in Verse

In or around 1621, Michael Drayton penned his well-known assessment of fellow poet Samuel Daniel, whom he described as ‘too much Historian in verse’. This article investigates that dismissal, arguing that behind it lies a long-standing and consistent literary position. Drayton's vision was of a literature that combined both poetry and history. That vision had been presented first in the Heroicall Epistles of 1597, which opened by responding directly to Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond. The Epistles were innovative in applying the structure of Ovid's Heroides to the vernacular tradition of the Mirror for Magistrates. As a result, Drayton highlighted a newly explicit interaction between literary and historical texts. More dangerously, he also presented individual epistles as moral counsel for his patrons. These qualities made the Epistles an enormous popular success. Yet they are also likely to have caused offence, above all to the dedicatee of the first set of letters: Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Setting wider literary trends alongside Drayton's personal experience of patronage, this article offers a new perspective on the development and decline of history in verse.

Violentilla Victa

This paper explores how in Silvae 1.2 Statius provided an important precedent for later epithalamia by expanding the genre's rhetoric with epic topoi, creating a novel epithalamium of epic scope. Violentilla is bound to be tamed under the yoke of Rome, just as the power of Aphrodite brings Medea to live among civilized Greeks in Apollonius's Argonautica. Violentilla is transformed from recalcitrant widow into a subdued and Romanized bride. As friend and fellow poet, the poem's recipient Stella would appreciate the wit of his association with one of myth's most glamorous if dangerous couples.

A Monk's Tale

In his paper, "A Monk's Tale," Sam Hamill recounts his ongoing commitment to using poetry as a form of protest and explains how poetry bridges the personal and the public, weaving together the life of one poet and that of an entire globe. In late January 2003, in response to an invitation to a symposium by Laura Bush to celebrate "Poetry and the American Voice," Hamill declined to participate; a longtime pacifist, he could not in good faith visit the White House following the recent news of George W. Bush's plan for a unilateral "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq. Instead, he asked about fifty fellow poets to "reconstitute a Poets Against War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam ... to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend your names to our petition against this war" by submitting poems of protest he would send to the White House. When 1,500 poets responded within four days, he created the website Poets Against War as a means of handling the enormous, unexpected response.

Robert Southey: entire man of letters

In his lifetime Robert Southey was very much the equal of his fellow 'Lake poets', Coleridge and Wordsworth. But since his death his reputation has been overshadowed by their success. In this new biography W.A. Speck argues that if Southey's poetry is no longer considered as significant, his other writings were more salient and his political views far more influential than those of his fellow poets. He was, as Byron conceded, England's 'only existing entire man of letters'. The book engages with Southey's voluminous publications, weaving discussion of them into the narrative of his life. It shows how he moved from self-confessed republican and admirer of the French Revolution in the 1790s, to 'the most powerful literary supporter of the stories' by the 1820s. Speck has explored Southey's full correspondence, not simply that which appeared in the editions edited by his descendants. They reveal a man of considerably greater emotional complexity than previously assumed. Far from a happily married man, Southey sought intellectual and emotional fulfillment outside a tepid marriage, first from Mary Barker, and then from Caroline Bowles who became his second wife. The first fully rounded life for sixty years, Speck's account sets Southey in historical context and restores him to the map of English literature.

Correspondance générale

This is the most comprehensive collection of Verlaine's correspondence to date, and represents a major scholarly undertaking. Michael Pakenham has not only assembled all available letters but has also worked extensively on original manuscripts. He has refined earlier transcriptions, dated some letters more accurately, and pieced together reconstructions of letters quoted in other sources. All of this work is carefully documented in the volume, which has an extensive critical framework. The letters are set clearly in context, as they are interleaved with references to key events in Verlaine's life, indications of letters known to exist but unavailable, important replies from his correspondents, and reviews of his poetic works. The volume is presented lavishly, and contains a large number of reproductions of the humorous sketches with which Verlaine illustrated his letters, as well as early versions of poems which were included in many of them. There is a full index and a helpful bio-bibliography for each of the correspondents, who are mainly friends, editors and fellow poets. Many letters are known not to have survived; there is only a tantalizing handful to Rimbaud and to his wife Mathilde, and none at all to his mother. Pakenham's chronology helpfully records many of these gaps and ensures a narrative thread (although this inevitably becomes harder to follow during some of Verlaine's more unstable episodes). Despite the absences, there is ample material to convey a vivid sense of his contradictions, and much is made of the available texts. Each letter is annotated with footnotes which explain references to a myriad of intriguing poets and reviews, and also decipher the jokes and colloquialisms which characterize Verlaine's often informal style. He was not writing with an eye on posterity, and the telling alternations between playful banter and raw recriminations reveal much about ‘l'homme’, if rather less about ‘l’œuvre'. There is much about the practical difficulties of publishing, but only fleeting reference to aesthetic issues. The period covered by this volume is an eventful one. In the 1860s he writes reverently to Victor Hugo, is involved with Le Parnasse contemporain, and receives plaudits for his Poèmes saturniens. In the 1870s, the endless changes of address reflect his itinerant existence after the collapse of his marriage. The presence of Rimbaud on his travels is often felt only indirectly — the first descriptions of London are some of the most charged passages in the entire volume, although his companion is barely mentioned. Following his shooting of Rimbaud, letters are Verlaine's only link to the Parisian world of letters, as he writes from prison and then from England where he spent several years teaching. In the 1880s, he engages more closely with the literary scene, producing Les Poètes maudits and writing to Mallarmé. The correspondence as a whole is meticulously produced, and contributes to the growing body of research on Verlaine's lesser-known works. It will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the poet's life or surveying the literary milieu of the period.

Remembering Bishop, Bishop Remembering

Far off thou art, but ever nigh; I have thee still, and I rejoice; I prosper, circled with thy voice; I shall not lose thee though I die. --Tennyson (In Memoriam 130: 13-16) Nature repeats herself, or almost does: repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise. --Bishop (North Haven, Poems 188) On 1 March 1978 Elizabeth Bishop gave a reading at Harvard in memory of friend Robert Lowell. Some 18 months later, Bishop died of a stroke, ironically on the night before she was scheduled to read again at Harvard, with poet Mary Lavin. That poetry reading became an unrehearsed tribute to Bishop, and on the following day, 21 October 1979, Bishop's friends and colleagues gathered in the Agassiz Ballroom at Harvard University to remember her. Unfortunately, the reading for Bishop was not recorded. However, Bishop's Lowell commemoration and the 21 October memorial service in honor were. What Bishop scholars might make of those recorded memorials--what literature scholars might make of such recordings generally--is the subject of my essay. In the following pages I will examine two forms of poetic memorial as they appear in Bishop's works and reception: the familiar elegy for the poet, a subgenre that Lawrence Lipking, following Mallarme, has designated the tombeau (138); and the memorial service, specifically public services carried out by fellow poets and friends. As I will show in a close analysis of drafts of Bishop's North Haven, elegy for Robert Lowell, Bishop struggled with the fine balance between loving tribute and critique, accurate representation and artful remembrance--a struggle among artist, text, and memory that actually began in public, when Bishop read at Harvard to commemorate Lowell. I will argue that just as Bishop's commemorative reading was a prelude to composition of North Haven, the memorial service for Bishop anticipates posthumous reception, in which the intersection of life and poetry has been a principal concern: as Dana Gioia put it in a recent review of two decades of Bishop criticism, her work responds to, indeed often seems to demand, autobiographical readings (24) despite skepticism toward confessional verse. Moreover, I hope to show the value of treating recordings of events such as Bishop's Lowell reading and the memorial service as texts, specifically as annotated selections of a poet's work. Bishop remembering In the year following Robert Lowell's death, Elizabeth Bishop offered two public remembrances of the poet and their friendship: a reading at Harvard on 1 March 1978 and the publication of North Haven, first on illustrated broadside, then in the 11 December 1978 New Yorker. I want to compare these two literary events and link them with Bishop's private ruminations on how to remember Lowell in North Haven. In effect, this series of events constitutes a short chapter of literary history. The theme of the Lowell reading, I will argue, is remembering--we see it in Bishop's choice of poems and commentary. More to the point, Bishop begins a public dialogue with late friend on the question of why and how to remember, a question that will be central to North Haven. Reading aloud, whether for a poetry reading or a studio recording, had always vexed Bishop. In first letter to Lowell (14 August 1947) she mentions the dreadful results of being recorded at Harvard, though she jokes about the process--she is like a fish being angled for with that microphone--and writes admiringly of Lowell's recordings (One Art 147). While Bishop's reading could never be fairly described as stammering elocution (Bishop, Poems 5), it is often flat and breathless, the latter an effect of asthma brought on by anxiety. The public reading, unlike the studio reading, took away the possibility of revision, and in an academic setting, it exposed the poet to the scrutiny of scholars. …

Intellectualist Poetry in Eccentric Form: John Ashbery, French Critical Debate, and an American Raymond Roussel

When Koch showed the book to friends and fellow poets back in America, they were astounded. Ashbery in particular felt an immediate rapport with the eccentric genius (Lehman 148), even though he did not understand French very well. Soon after this first encounter, Ashbery reports that he decided to go to France and learn the language better, if only to find out what [the poem] could possibly be about (Other Traditions 46).1 While in France, Ashbery's enthusiasm for Roussel led him to study the French writer and his body of work in depth. And over time, he has become Roussel's most important American advocate.

Poetry and Faith: The Example of Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) is pre-eminent example of writer whose Christian faith and denominational allegiance to Catholicism are repeatedly explored in her over almost fifty years. (1) Although she was reluctant to discuss her own work (I do not like writing about my she commented. Poems, if they succeed at all, are autonomous, they stand alone; no contemporary poem should require footnotes. [Brown and Paterson 132]), her study of religious poetry, Every Changing Shape (1961), contains insights and ideas on her subjects which, retrospectively, may be seen to have abiding relevance to her own writing. Here, she locates particular power of poetry in its capacity to name, and thereby to illuminate, and describes all as a participation in eternal act of creation (22, 30). Her phrasing implies notable confidence in capacity of language--in its stability and potential to communicate shared meanings--far removed from shifting ironies of post-modernity. Significantly, too, she writes of correspondence she sees between training of poet and priest with their common emphasis on ... self-mastery, ability to discard what is inessential, patient waiting during times when poems cannot be written, terrible dark night of senses in which everything seems plunged in meaninglessness and obscurity. (Every Changing Shape 107) From this perspective, poet, like priest, is mediator, wo/man metaphorically set aside and ordained to utter words that are transformative and repeatedly point to reconciliation and acceptance that Christians also believe are very essence of mystery of Eucharist. In this context, Michael Schmidt's observation that for Elizabeth Jennings Poetry is not exorcism but sacrament, sharing, seems particularly apt (Schmidt 802). Furthermore, proposed affinity between poet and priest and specific emphasis on vital discipline of patient waiting are notably similar to views of Jennings's fellow poet who was also priest, albeit in different denomination, R. S. Thomas. (2) However, poet and priest are not linked only in this privileged and positive way but also, Jennings suggests, in their particular susceptibility to feelings of spiritual dereliction and abandonment that may be inescapable other side of vocation and of gifts and graces of creativity and ministry. This, too, was an aspect of experience on which Elizabeth Jennings was as well-qualified to pronounce as on art of because of her own mental health problems. It is perhaps fair to suggest that these two factors--Jennings's abiding and deepening religious faith and her experience of mental illness--were crucial in determining kind of poet that she became and focus of much of her best work. She was first noticed as only woman popularly, and somewhat improbably, linked with so- called poets such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and Donald Davie in 1950s; and, as Blake Morrison argues, she was stylistically influenced by their common aspiration for carefully crafted verse and less florid vocabulary than neo-romantics had used (Morrison 22). However, she was also significantly different from her contemporaries, and her life and work followed their own trajectory. While the Movement writers tended to come from homes in which religion was still treated as matter of seriousness and importance, Elizabeth Jennings alone was practicing Christian (Morrison 227). Her early poems on secular themes never incline to skeptical or cynical as one finds on occasion in Amis or Larkin, and even in poems expressing doubt or uncertainty of faith she is never irreverent. Following her nervous breakdown in early 1960s, and influenced by American dealing with similar experience, for time Jennings addressed trauma and pain of mental disorder in ways that were at odds with Movement's rejection of the idea that and madness are closely allied in preference for style of writing that was rational and controlled (Morrison 278). …

T.S. Eliot: the making of an American poet, 1888-1922

Contents Preface Note on Sources Introduction Part 1. 1888-1906: Origins 1. Eliot's Louis and Head of the 2. Sons and Lovers: and Satan 3. Frail Youth, a Bookish Boy 4. Early Landscapes, Later Poems Part 2. 1902-1914: Early Influences 1. Eliot at Fourteen: Atheistical, Despairing, Gloomy 2. Poetic Beginnings: Merry Friars and Pleading Lovers 3. Missourian, New Englander: Double Identity 4. Soul's Paralysis: Denying the Importunity of the Blood Part 3. 1906-1911: Harvard: from Under 1. Prologue: Problematic Student 2. Bohemian Boston at the Turn of the Century 3. Bohemian and Isabella Stewart Gardner (Mrs. Jack) 4. Fellow Poet: Conrad Aiken 5. A Very Gay Companion: Harold Peters 6. Practicing to Be a Poet: From Omar's Atheism to Laforgue's Masks 7. Poems Written 1906-1910 Part 4. 1906-1910: Influences: Teachers, Texts, Temptations Teachers: 1. Irving Babbitt: Human Imperfectability 2. Barrett Wendell: The Inexperience of America 3. George Santayana: Philosopher of Reason 4. William Allan Neilson: Poetic Theorist Texts: 5. Dante and Eliot's Persistent Concern with Sex 6. Petronius's Satyricon: Serene Unmorality 7. Symons/Laforgue: The Ironic Mask 8. Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion 9. John Donne: Thought as Experience Temptations: 10. The Lure of Europe: Brooks's The Wine of the Puritans 11. S. Eliot, the Quintessence of Harvard Part 5. 1910-1911: T. S. Eliot in Paris 1. The Primacy of Paris, 1910-1911 2. Jean Verdenal: Mon Meilleur Ami 3. Matthew Prichard: Blurred 4. Henri Bergson: Brief Conversion 5. Charles Maurras: The Action Francaise 6. Finding the Personal in the Poem: Drafts of Portrait and Prufrock 7. Poems Written 1911-1914 Part 6. 1911-1914: Eliot Absorbed in Philosophical Studies 1. Prologue: The Rise of Harvard's Philosophy Department and the Santayana Controversy 2. The Decline and Fall of Philosophy in Eliot's Day and After 3. Eliot and Oriental Philosophies and Religions 4. Psychology as Philosophical, Religion as Psychological, Mysticism as Magical 5. Eliot and the Elusive Absolute 6. Epilogue: The Eliot Controversy, Part 7. 1914-1915: American Chaos versus English Tradition 1. Philosophy in Marburg, War in Europe 2. London Interlude: Pound and Russell 3. Oxford, 1914-1915: Reconsidering Philosophy 4. New Friends and Old: Culpin, Blanshard, Pound, Lewis 5. The Mystery of Emily Hale: Aspern Papers in Reverse Part 8. 1915: Inexplicable Marriage and the Consequences 1. Sudden Marriage at the Registry Office 2. Who Was Vivien? 3. Flurry of Correspondence, a Day of Decision 4. Unhappy Visit Home (Gloucester, July 24-September 4), a Disastrous Honeymoon (Eastbourne, September 4-10) 5. Bertie Russell's Friendship 6. What I Want Is MONEY!$!GBP !! We are hard up! War! 7. Hallucinations, Heavenly and Hellish Poetic Visions: St. Sebastian and St. Narcissus 8. Poems Written 1914-1915 Part 9. 1916: Making Do, Finding Means, Expanding Connections 1. Most Awful Nightmare of Anxiety Pegasus in Harness 2. The Triumph of Poetry over Philosophy 3. Reviews and Essays, Teaching and Lecturing: Total Immersion 4. Widening Circle of Friends and Associates, Writers and Artists Part 10. 1917-1918: T. S. Eliot: Banker, Lecturer, Editor, Poet, Almost Soldier 1. Eliot the Banker: March 19, 1917-November 1925 2. Eliot the Extension Lecturer 3. Eliot as Eeldrop 4. Eliot the Assistant Editor: June 1917-December 1919, 5. Eliot the Poet, 6. America Enters War: April 6, 1917-Armistice Day, November 11, 1918 7. Writing . . . Again: The French and Quatrain Poems 8. Poems Written 1917-1918 Part 11. 1919-1920: Up the Ladder, Glimpsing the Top 1. Death of a Father 2. Banking, Teaching, Editing, Writing: Money and Power 3. Friendships and Relationships: Deeper and Wider 4. Voice from the Past An Encounter of Titans Moving Again 5. Three New Books: Poetry and Prose 6. Gerontion: Return of Fitzgerald's Omar 7. Poems Written 1918-1920 Part 12. 1919-1921: Notable Achievements, Domestic Disasters, Intimate Friends 1. Prologue: Paris and the Pension Casaubon, Paris Again in the Spring 2. A Long Poem . . . on my Mind for a Long Time 3. Family Visit: Mother, Brother, Sister-Wife 4. Room of One's Own, Wearing Makeup, Confidante Virginia Woolf 5. Roommates, Renowned Pederasts: Kitchin, Senhouse, Ritchie Part 13. 1922: Over the Top 1. Uranian Muse, The Waste Land, and il miglior fabbro 2. Publication of The Waste Land 3. Out into the World: The Waste Land Reviewed 4. Pound's Financial Scheme for Eliot: Bel Esprit 5. Birth of The Criterion Part 14. Glance Ahead: The Making of an American Poet 1. T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman 2. American Poet Discovers His American-ness References to Works by T. S. Eliot References to Works by Other Authors Index

Lettres à José-Maria de Heredia

In the absence of a complete edition of his correspondence, this volume usefully fills the gap between the only two collections of Leconte de Lisle's letters, those of the years from 1838 to 1840 to his friend Julien Rouffet, and those of the period between 1885 and 1889 to his cousin Émilie Leforestier. The sixty-nine letters here reproduced, written from 1863 to 1894, are of special interest for the insight they offer into the relationship between the leader of the Parnassians and the fellow poet who was both his closest friend and favourite and most fervent disciple. There are, for example, strikingly detailed commentaries on the poems which Heredia religiously submitted to his mentor before publication. As the thorough footnotes attest, de Lisle's criticism of obscurity, both syntactic and semantic, awkward sound patterns and various prosodic uncertainties in ‘Le Serrement de mains’ (letter xxix) is all taken on board; similarly, de Lisle does not hesitate to point out the superfluous, the vague, or the excessively abstract in certain lines of ‘Blason céleste’ (xxxii), but his suggestions are tempered with what seems a genuine admiration for the whole. In one of the few known replies, the relevant sections of which appear in the footnotes, Heredia expresses his gratitude for these ‘bons avis sans lesquels il me semble de plus en plus impossible de mettre mon nom sous un alexandrin’ (p. 118). Elsewhere, the letters of 1871 provide a valuable first-hand account of the siege of Paris, juxtaposing a surprising aesthetic reaction to the bombardments (‘le tout ne manquait pas d'une sorte de beauté farouche’) with dry understatement: ‘il est fort agaçant de se laisser massacrer sans pouvoir riposter’ (xvi). Indeed, these dozen letters, describing the destruction of Paris, the starvation of its inhabitants, and political and social tensions, would give students of the period a useful primary resource. De Lisle is an engaging correspondent, turning his withering scorn on countless targets, from the ‘bandits monstrueux’ and ‘infects idiots’ of the Commune (xxi), or the squabbling hordes of both republicans and monarchists, to his fellow Parnassians Sully-Prudhomme and Banville. We even find an amusing parody of Coppée's ‘Petit Épicier’: ‘Bref, cet épicier n'était pas heureux. Voilà’ (xxvii). Yet while the humour, affection and self-deprecating tone which characterize much of the correspondence belie the poet's reputation for austerity, we also find the familiar disdain for ‘la vie active’ (xi) and utter dedication to Poetry, ‘la seule chose sérieuse qui soit en ce misérable monde’ (xlvi). The volume is meticulously annotated and clearly presented, with an index of names, chronological bibliography of both poets and an appendix featuring four of Heredia's interviews and speeches dedicated to his friend. The reader's only regret is that, although the modernization of the spelling of various proper names is no great loss, the poet's capitalization of certain nouns and adjectives has been corrected. Despite the editor's assurance that de Lisle indulges in this quirk ‘sans aucune régularité’ (p.19), it is a pity that it could not be left to the reader to judge the interest of these idiosyncracies.

The Poetics of Flight: Futurist "Aeropoesia"

In 1931, Marinetti published a Manifesto of Futurist Aeropoetry, in which he urged the Futurist poets to emulate the aeropainters. During the next thirteen years, he and his colleagues celebrated the advent of aviation in poem after poem, some of which were paired with Futurist paintings. Evoking the physical and psychological sensation of flying, Marinetti and his fellow poets described not only what they felt but also how it affected them. Attempting to describe what they saw from their aerial perspective, they indulged in verbal pyrotechnics and experimented with various visual effects.

T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (review)

Reviewed by: T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews Frank J. Kearful Jewel Spears Brooker , ed., T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xliii + 600 pp. Thomas Stearns Eliot just won't go away. There are in fact two Eliots still on offer, the good avant-garde early Eliot and the bad reactionary later Eliot. Recently, the good avant-garde early Eliot has also become, thanks to Marjorie Perloff's 21st-century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (2002), a founding member of the twenty-first-century avant-garde. Meanwhile, Eliot the proto-fascist and antisemite has not gone away either, and ongoing debate about this Eliot must now take into account Jason Harding's The "Criterion": Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (2002), which puts issues at stake in previously neglected contexts. Debate about Eliot is nothing new. He has always been controversial, has always provoked vehement put-downs, and his critical reputation among the cognoscenti has undergone radical ups and downs. Through it all, in the popular mind Eliot remains the founder of "modern poetry" as much as Picasso does of "modern art," or James Joyce of the modern novel, or Igor Stravinsky of modern music. Jewel Spears Brooker's new collection enables us to relive battles as they were first fought and to review positions as they were first staked out. One congratulates critics like Conrad Aiken or Edmund Wilson who "got it right" right away. And one can boo the philistines and one-eyed critics who made such fools of themselves. William Carlos Williams, a special case, is a pleasure to read for his downright incorrigible hostility to his fellow poet. Then there are the many conscientious, not merely cautious, critics who in their reviews debate both sides of the case and gain our respect. Although it can pride itself on being "the most comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of T. S. Eliot's work as it appeared," thus leaving behind it in its dust Michael Grant's T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage (1982), Jewel Spears Brooker's six-hundred-page collection remains a "selected" rather than a "complete" edition. What one does not get one is at any rate told of. The checklist of reviews which did not make the cut for the section on The Waste Land runs to thirty-seven items, rendering the twenty-three reviews which are included at least [End Page 197] numerically a minority report. Similar checklists are provided for each of Eliot's separately published volumes, including the plays and prose, making anyone's task easier who might one day seek to break the record by giving us a "complete" edition of the contemporary reviews. It would have to include critical responses to a few brief pamphlets of Eliot's, to his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, and to late collections of previously published works, but above all longer review essays, notably of Four Quartets, which sometimes ran to more than twenty pages. Then there is the thorny problem of the Empire, and of lands and languages beyond its pale. We are informed that "[w]ith rare exceptions" no reviews emanating from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are included, while reviews in languages other than English are entirely ignored. On the other hand, an American bias to the edition may annoy some, as it did Frank Kermode writing on the edition in The New York Review of Books. The fact that Brooker's collection appears in the American Critical Archive series naturally foreordains an American slant. Thomas Inge puts it this way in his Series Editor's Preface: "When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a comprehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases the United Kingdom, as the writers' careers were in progress. The volumes open a window on the patterns and forces that have shaped the history of American writing and the reputations of the writers. These are primary documents in the literary and cultural life of the nation." The awkwardly inserted "and in some cases the United Kingdom" is a bit more expansive than "[w]ith rare exceptions" and grants a certain license to include...

Vulnerable Households:Cold War Containment and Robert Duncan's Queered Nation

His early essay The Homosexual in Society (1944, revised 1959), same-sex erotica of his early collection Caesars Gate (1972, origi nally published 1955), and his undaunted use of homosexual themes throughout his oeuvre concretize Robert Duncan's formidable contribution to gay male American literary tradition. As friend and fellow poet Thorn Gunn remarked in 1979, he should be regarded as chief originator of a way of speaking about homosexuality even though he produced the work of poet, of homosexual poet only secondarily (159). Gunn s observations give an insightful point of entry into what is especially remarkable about his friend's poetry and its commitment to representations of homosexuality: it is secondary concern. What Duncan pioneers, then, is capacity for American letters to include and frankly address homosexual content without elevating it (or deni grating it, depending on one's perspective) to motivating force behind his poetics. Rather than sexuality, per se, his work brings to light significance of erotic attachment and relationships, no matter form they may take. Gunn cites Duncan's homosexual themes as proof of inclusiveness that makes modern poetry suitable for providing evidence of many ways in which people live their lives, of many available ways in which people or fail to love (159-60). Universalism is suggestively equated with revolution in consciousness promulgated by poetic discourse. Despite topicality of same-sex in much of his work, Duncan continuously disidentified with gayness. Decades before Stonewall and subsequent gay liberation movement, his essay The Homosexual in Society was written for journal Politics as an espousal of anarchism and universal

Hopkins and Whitman

In a letter to his friend Robert Bridges, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that ‘I have always felt in my heart that Walt Whitman’s mind was more like my own than any other man’s living’; my essay considers what he could have meant by this. This is the first work to identify and consult the books in which Hopkins read Whitman, together with their annotations. This answered several facts about where Hopkins read Whitman, but questions of the cultural place of sexuality and homosexuality were crucial to the interpretation of Hopkins’s letters about his fellow poet. Most commonly read as ‘confessions’ to homosexuality, his discussions of Whitman reveal not just anxieties about sexuality in the nineteenth century but also about religious prejudice, politics, and Hopkins’s perceived parallels between his and Whitman’s (downtrodden) poetic fates. The likeness of ‘mind’ he identifies I traced not just to specific allusions but to lexic coincidences. I reconstructed the cultural state of Hopkins’s Oxford with Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds and others’ interest in the intersection of art criticism and sexuality centered around the writings of Winckelmann and examined John Henry Newman’s portrayals of anti-Catholicism as a means of setting the complex hinterlands of Hopkins’s statements. ‘Hopkins and Whitman’ is the first chapter of a larger work on the interrelation between nineteenth-century philology and poetic technique, Extreme Language: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Philology, begun at the University of Cambridge with the help of four national grants. My book examines the ways in which new discoveries about language, its genesis, and its structure, influenced poets, specifically amateur philologists such as Hopkins and Whitman.

Sergei Esenin i russkaia dukhovnaia kul'tura by O. E. Voronova Poiut Esenina by Iurii Volkov Ia prostilsia s soboi, / Chtoby vstretit' sebia: Iunosheskie stikhi 1970-1977 gg by Boris Orlov Zhenshchiny, liubivshie Esenina by Boris Gribanov (review)

REVIEWS 725 Voronova, 0. E. Sergei Esenini russkaia dukhovnaia kul'tura. Uzoroch'e, Riazan', 2002. 505 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Priceunknown. Volkov,Iurii.Pojut Esenina. Moscow, 2002. I70 pp. Priceunknown. Orlov, Boris. Ia prostilsias soboi, / Chtobyvstretit'sebia: Iunosheskie stikhi 1970-I977 gg.Izdatel'stvoBukovskogo,St Petersburg,2002. 64 pp. Price unknown. Gribanov, Boris. Zhenshchiny, liubivshie Esenina. TERRA-Knizhnyi klub, Moscow , 2002. 303 pp. Illustrations.Priceunknown. OVER the past decade Ol'ga Voronova (born in I958) has emerged as an outstanding young scholar in the field of Esenin studies. Her first short monograph,Dukhovnye iskaniia Sergeia Esenina: Kniga dliauchitelia (Riazan', I995, 98 pp.), sought to breaknew ground by exploring Esenin'sspiritualevolution in relation to the Russian spiritual'renaissance'duringthe firstquarterof the twentiethcentury,and to suchcategoriesas 'thenew religiousawareness','the Russian idea', and 'Russian cosmism'. This somewhat embryonic study (which broached such topics as the figure of Christ in Esenin's early work, biblical motifsin his longer poems of 19I7-1 9, and Esenin'sown appearance as a penitent prodigal son in his verse of the 1920S) was soon followed by a fullerassortmentof ratherdisparatearticles,Dukhovnyi put'Esenina.Religioznofilosofskie i esteticheskie iskaniia(Riazan', 1997, 287 PP.). In that second book Voronova clarified the religious and philosophical meaning of individual works (notably, 'Mikola' and 'Pevushchii zov'), offered an 'existentialist' analysisof 'Chernyi chelovek', and commented sensiblyon a variety of other topics. Voronova's promising earlier work now comes to magnificent fruition in her thirdbook, Sergei Esenini russkaia dukhovnaia kul'tura, which stems from her doctoral dissertation,defended in Moscow in April 2000. In this meticulously annotated and copiously illustratedmonograph, ProfessorVoronova displays an exemplary breadth and depth of scholarship.Coherently and lucidly, she providesa many-sidedand perhapsdefinitiveevaluationof Esenin'spersonality (or 'mentality') and poetry as an embodiment of Russia's complex and frequentlycontradictoryspiritualtradition.Eight richly informativechapters illuminate the religious and national aspects of Esenin's work in its chronological development. The scholar offers a multitude of sensitive, persuasive and precise insights into the reflection in Esenin's work of Slavic pagan mythology, religious and ritual folklore, Orthodox icon-painting and liturgy, popular religious heresies, the traditions of the Old Believers, Old Russian and Russian classical literature, Russian religious and philosophical thought, and such forms of behaviour (or 'anti-behaviour') as palomnichestvoand strannichestvo, iurodstvo, riazhen'e and skomoroshestvo. Professor Voronova declares that Esenin is the most striking representative of Russian national consciousness (p. 3), a 'Russian national genius' (p. 50 i), with a 'peasant-Christian soul' (p. 221). Voronova's investigation into such highly topical and potentially 'nationalistic' subject-matter (Esenin and Russia's spiritual culture) is, in essence, laudably objective. Yet, to this nonRussian reviewer, it sometimes seems that many Russians are excessively 726 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 preoccupied with Russia's special place in world history and the divine scheme, Russia'sMessianic spiritualand historicalmission(pp. 323, 335). Are the particularattributesof the 'Russian Christ' (such as compassion, mercy, pity, humility, meekness,pp. 156, 159) uniquely and exclusively 'Russian'?Is it not misguided to emphasize a parallel between the blue-eyed, fair-haired, youthful Esenin and the Christ Child (illustration on the front cover and between pp. 448 and 449, see also pp. i8o-8i)? Perhaps,at times, Voronova tries too hard to exonerate Esenin from any possible charges of blasphemy and self-aggrandizement(pp. 3'', 345-46, 465) or a misspent, unworthylife (pp. 447, 463). Yet, despite these occasional misgivings, various minor misprints, and the regrettable lack of any indexes, 0. E. Voronova's Sergei Esenini russkaia dukhovnaia kul'tura is an outstandingworkof scholarship. Iurii Aleksandrovich Volkov (born in I948) has steadfastly and singlemindedly devoted his life to the writing of poetry and the quest to convey his spiritualand moralvision of the world. Receiving virtuallyno encouragement from professional colleagues or financial sponsors, Volkov since I989 has publishedeleven volumes of verse, largelyat his own expense. His tenth book, Epokhi zvezdnyi chas(Moscow, I997 [issued 2000]), presented a summation of his poetry and outlook, a combination of lyrical and philosophical verse, indebted to Christianityand Orientalmysticism. Volkov's eleventh book, PojutEsenina,is specificallydedicated to a fellow poet, Sergei Esenin, whom Volkovportraysas an eternallyyouthful, pensive, tender magician, 'the greatest lyric poet of our planet' and the source of Russia'smorality(p. 8). Aspiringto...

Anglicanism and the Poetry of John Betjeman

The critical fate of John Betjeman is a sharply divided one. His work endures the dubious distinction of being enjoyed by millions of readers, many of whom would never read poetry. spite of his popularity, which earned him the laureateship in 1972, Betjeman has been for the most part either ignored or disdained by critics, although this neglect is palliated by praise for Betjeman from many of his fellow poets, including W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin. (1) The astonishing paucity of scholarly attention to Betjeman is attributable in part to his popularity. It is an ugly truth, and one most critics prefer to hide, that there is an innate prejudice against a successful poet, and even more so against one who used the medium of television so adroitly to advance his favorite causes. (2) If the masses approve, the poetry must be inferior, or so goes a way of thinking since T. S. Eliot. Prejudice also exists against modern poets who so openly eschew the tenets of modernism, and Betjeman's verse is certainly traditional. Instead of innovating with meter and form, he preferred to cast his poems in molds successfully employed by Victorian poets and hymnodists. Although in structure Betjeman was an avowed anti-modernist, he was clearly engaged with his culture, and his language is informed by the sensibility of modernism. tone Betjeman is frequently a prophet of doom. Like many of his fellow poets, Betjeman rejected the popular fantasy of endless progress and advancement, using poetry as a vehicle to excoriate society for its cultural, spiritual, political, and aesthetic failures. A further explanation for his rejection by critics is that Betjeman was a religious man. Critics have little trouble coping with the religious poems of seventeenth-century writers, poets who lived in what was still an age of faith, but what should we do with a troublesome twentieth-century poet who persisted in believing the tenets of Christianity despite the overwhelming counter-claims of science and philosophy? Betjeman's faith was public knowledge, and he often spoke fervently of his beliefs, as in this letter written on Christmas Day, 1947, acknowledging his philosophical and theological distinction from other poets: Also my view of the world is that man is born to fulfil the purposes of his Creator i.e. to Praise his Creator, to stand in awe of Him and to dread Him. this way I differ from most modern poets, who are agnostics and have an idea that Man is the centre of the Universe or is a helpless bubble blown about by uncontrolled forces. (qtd. in Hillier, John Betjeman 400) Indeed, Betjeman was committed not just to Christianity but to the Church of England. His poems describe the perils of faith and the struggle to believe; they celebrate the social and cultural significance of the Church of England; they reveal the intersection of architecture and faith, of aesthetics and the spirit; and they also demonstrate the social and spiritual failure of the Church, particularly the snobbery and hypocrisy of its clergy and parishioners. Betjeman could be a brilliant ironist, but he could also be sentimental about the Church of England; and even though he was never an unabashed apologist for his church, his rejection of skepticism may be perceived by critics as an intellectual weakness. However, it is the remarkable fact of Betjeman's studied faith in an age of skepticism that makes him interesting and worthy of critical attention. To appreciate Betjeman's complex and contrasting stances toward religion, let us consider In Westminster Abbey and Sunday Morning, King's Cambridge. (3) These poems are set in two of the most aesthetically and socially important centers of Christian worship in England, though the former has political and the latter academic significance. Together the two poems epitomize the tonal are between outrage and affection that typifies his verse about the English Church. …

Victorian Poetry as Victorian Studies

It has become almost customary to begin discussions of Victorian poetry with a lament. Whether the occasion is formal or simply that of everyday conversation among colleagues, we tend to bemoan the low profile of the field, the misunderstandings and inadequate attention to which Victorian poets have been subjected, and the tyrannical dominance of the field's neighbors, Romantic and modern poetry and the Victorian novel. (1) Although many of the intellectual movements that initially gave rise to this lament have passed (clearly we no longer feel the need to argue with T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks), the mood of pessimism has proved remarkably resilient. Today, that structure of feeling is driven not by a widespread criticism of the aesthetic value of our subject but rather by a curious incongruity: while Victorian poetry was central to the life of the Victorians, it remains marginal to the study of modern Britain. We need to claim for Victorian poetry a vital, pivotal place within the larger field--and to make good on that claim, not by adopting the methods, hermeneutics, and debates developed within the study of Romanticism or the Victorian novel but instead by reshaping them. Victorian poetry itself, and its presence in every arena of Victorian culture and society, points the way forward. To say poetry permeated Victorian life is to insist upon a fact doubtless endorsed by most if not all the readers of this journal, but it also is to remind ourselves about the deep texture of the world we are engaged in trying to understand and describe. Claims about the autonomy of the aesthetic realm notwithstanding, we know that poetry and ideas about poetry were fundamental to the time. This is true not of canonical verse alone but of all poetry, canonical and forgotten, high and low, avant garde and conventional, hortatory and anti-didactic, philosophical and psychological. To recognize this is to see that the importance of Victorian poetry to British studies rests not so much upon the popularity or the intellectual reach of its finest writers as it does upon the way they and their fellow poets together helped create their age. The Victorian social whole was often imagined as a congeries of interconnected spheres, as a house with as many nooks and crannies and hidden staircases as the architectural style that took its name. The study of Victorian poetry can enter all these spaces of Victorian life. To do so, we need to develop the interdisciplinary and trans-generic methods that are beginning to flourish in our field and to understand them in a new way. The value of interdisciplinary work resides in its dialectical processes, its capacity both to enrich our analysis of a particular literary text and to complicate our understanding of the topics, discourses, and modes of expression upon which it bears. The outward movement represented by interdisciplinarity is most effective as an extended visit: for instance, when a study not only brings ideas about geology to the analysis of In Memoriam but also brings Tennyson's ideas to the history of scientific thought. Of course, this is easy to say and excruciatingly difficult to do. Yet studies of Victorian poetry in particular have had a tendency toward a narrow and inward-looking conceptualization of their aims and ends, not to mention an occasional stance of dogged resistance to the trendy preoccupations motivating work elsewhere in Victorian and British studies. These tendencies no doubt emerge from, as they reinforce, a sense of the marginality of the field. To the extent that this is the case, a simple reorientation in perspective and ambition alone may enable a richer engagement with larger debates. Victorian poetry scholarship deserves an expanded sense of the conversations in which it participates and a more capacious understanding of the aims to which it is directed. (2) Recent studies of aestheticism might serve as a model in this regard. In Linda Dowling's foundational Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle (1986), as in more recent works such as Yopie Prins's Victorian Sappho (1999), Talia Schaffer's Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000), and the pieces in Schaffer and Kathy Psomiades' collection Women and British Aestheticism (1999), poetry figures centrally in a scholarly project geared toward the reconceptualization of Victorian culture from the 1860s into the 1890s. …

William Blake's Milton, John Birch's "Electrical Magic", and the "falling star".

In 1804, the celebrated English artist, printer, and poet, William Blake, published an illuminated book entitled Milton. A poem.1 This complex and enigmatic work, which includes the famous lyric Jerusalem, concerns the metaphysical relation of man to God, and the mystical union of Blake's spirit with that of his fellow poet Milton.2 But does the work also contain an allusion to Blake's own experience of 18th century medicine?

Mind Your Tongue: Autobiography and New French Lyric Poetry

~W~ et us go then, you and I. ... will propose here that we read opening line of T. S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred ^ ^ Prufrock1 as gesture?simultaneously familiar, ironic, and theatrical?in which a certain twentieth-century poetry, restless heir to Mallarm?, plucks at sleeve of autobiography, urging it to come along for a companionable foray into ordinary life, in all its personal and social aspects: a life whose very triviality guarantees authenticity of experience, a life of disenchantment (as says of mermaids, I do not think that they will sing to me [LS 126] ). The speaker who sets out with a companion through certain half-deserted streets (LS 4) to occupy bourgeois interlude [b] efore taking of a toast and tea (LS 34) is no longer Baudelairean figure of solitary dandy who, having dropped his halo into gutter, can bravely recuperate its loss into allegory. Whereas Baudelaire's dandy can still distinguish himself from mediocre fellow poet who will retrieve halo and don it, is such a mediocre man among his fellows: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons (LS 52). Autobiography, which, as Eliot's friend Conrad Aiken2 noted early on, produces a peculiar form of introspective curiosity in Eliot's poetry, does not imply that poet and persona he adopts are identical. Prufrock, by virtue of his name, exemplifies what Kate Hamburger, in The Logic of Literature, terms a feigned lyric I.3 The poem contravenes bipartite system of genres that Hamburger uses to distinguish lyric poetry, in which subject of enunciation is identical to enunciator (Shelley's I fall upon thorns of life, bleed), from narrative fiction, in which narration and enunciation are separated by a strict limit. Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock thus belongs to category of special forms governed by the feigned, which also marks first-person narration. Autobiography, too, derives from this category,