Lyric Form Research Articles

Poetry and Sociality in a Global Frame

Poetry and Sociality in a Global Frame Walt Hunter (bio) Dowdy, Michael. 2013. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. $30.00 sc. 296 pp. Furani, Khaled. 2012. Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $55.00 hc. 312 pp. A formidable hermeticism has long held sway over Anglophone poetry criticism. While criticism of other literary genres expands its grasp, most notably into new sociological approaches to literature, knowledge of the tropes and schemes of poetry serves as a border check for those interested in poetic criticism, slowing contemporary poetry’s reception, inhibiting pedagogy, and operating in general like a canon of revealed truths. Generally speaking, to read poetry means to learn the history of poetic devices and to recognize the various appearances (or absences) of this history in an individual poem: why a line break works the way it does, why a metaphor appears where it does. But these claims about poetic design do not only represent a neutral language specific to literary study or a convenient mechanism for distinguishing between traditional and avant-garde strands of poetry. By attributing a private and individual, rather than global and material, foundation to the aesthetics of poetry, such claims also prevent poetry from being recognized as a social form. As a result, canonical notions of line, verse, and enjambment are theorized as though poetry developed and continues to develop in monastic seclusion from the political economies and emergent precarities of modern global capitalism. [End Page 129] No sustained analysis exists in which the history of poetry and poetics is reread in the light of the history of globalization. Books on Anglophone poetry in particular have been cautious in adopting a postcolonial, global, or transnational critical perspective and, in general, complacent in upholding the immutable value of a small set of formal devices and traditions. Within this tradition, however, there are critics who are moving toward a global and socially attuned poetics. Jahan Ramazani’s The Hybrid Muse (2001) and A Transnational Poetics (2009) link poetic tropes of metaphor and figures of irony with theories and themes of hybridity, migration, and exile in postcolonial Anglophone poetry. After Ramazani, the Jamaican poets Claude McKay and Louise Bennett can no longer be treated as marginal, neither to postcolonial studies nor to poetry, while the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott, who are already the subjects of a voluminous critical corpus, appear newly relevant. Focusing on the late nineteenth century, Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) calls attention to the processes by which a variety of poetic genres had been “lyricized” into a single, dominant genre, at the same time that it incites new histories of poetic subgenres, genealogies of American poetry, and compelling defenses of lyric as a collective voice (Costello 2012) or the “performance of an event” (Culler 2009, 887). Meanwhile, Stephen Burt’s many accessible reviews of contemporary poets bypass altogether the retrenched arguments for conceptual and lyric forms. The cultivation of a catholic taste for multiple, often discrepant styles in poetry, rather than buttressing a single framework of value, makes Burt a welcome voice in the wake of Language and post-Language scuffles over the politics of poetic form and political identity. Most recently, the poetics of precarious life under neoliberal conditions has been the object of attention by a scattered group of leftist poets and thinkers, including Anne Boyer (2014), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), Jasper Bernes (2013), Christopher Nealon (2011), Joshua Clover and Keston Sutherland (2013), Franco Berardi (2012), Judith Butler (2013), Chris Chen (2013), and Rob Halpern (2013). If we place this work alongside emergent, innovative work on post-war Anglophone, Russian, and Nigerian poetry by critics as diverse as Jennifer Ashton (2013), Marijeta Bozovic (2014), and Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (2013), it becomes immediately apparent that the entire field of poetry and poetics has taken on a new urgency and a pluralism of method. There is no reason why more work on poetry cannot wager the ambition, strength of argument, accessibility, and cross-disciplinary reach of groundbreaking books on globalization and culture such...

“Schöpft des Dichters reine Hand . . .”: Studien zu Goethes poetologischer Lyrik by Sebastian Kaufmann (review)

Sebastian Kaufmann, Schopft des Dichters reine Hand . . Studien zu Goethes poetologischer Lyrik. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011.525 pp.Kaufmann's meticulously researched volume is a lightly edited dissertation, and the genre is perhaps to blame for the relatively minor flaws in his otherwiseconvincing and wide-ranging study of Goethe's poetological poetry. By poeto logical Kaufmann understands poetry that undertakes reflection (in Goethe's case, more individual than universal and more descriptive than normative) on the role or identity of the poet, the process of writing poetry, or the nature of poetry in general (14-15). Kaufmann advances the claim that, contra the scholarship's divisions of Goethe's work into Sturm und Drang, classical, and postclassical periods, Goethe's poetological poetry exhibits a striking thematic consistency in treating poetry as a genre concerned with the symbolic representation of the divine or absolute. Kaufmann argues that Goethe's conception of the divine remains pantheistic throughout his career; poetry's primary task is thus the uncovering of the offenbarles] Geheimnis (342) of the divine in nature. While Kaufmann supports this thesis fully in its most abstract form, the volume underdifferentiates between the periods of Goethe's work with regard to the role of the subject in the constellation of Kunst/Gott/Natur: there are significant differences between, say, the oscillations between ecstatic dissolution into nature and depressive isolation from it in Goethe's works from the 1770s and the self-observing observation matched by poetic self-reflection in, say, the West-ostlicher Divan. Two other, more minor flaws somewhat obscure but do not detract significantly from the book's argumentation: first, Kaufmann's own claims are frequently hidden by the long engagements with scholarly controversies that begin each reading, and second, the majority of the poems treated are not reproduced in full anywhere in the volume. For anyone reading the volume in a research library, this is a small inconvenience, but it reads as somewhat disingenuous to include only the lines or strophes of each work that advance Kaufmann's argument.The positive contributions of the volume are far more significant: in addition to tracing a convincing continuity across Goethe's career, Kaufmann provides succinct and powerful discussions of the cultural import of lyric forms, in particular the ode (treated in chapter 2, on Wandrers Sturmlied) and the elegy (in chapter 5, on Romische Elegien), although he does not always follow his insights into the material features of individual poems. He likewise does a masterful job of connecting the poetologies worked out in specific poems to Goethe's more discursive texts (principally essays, letters, and maxims) from each period. Perhaps even more impressively, his conclusion takes on the question of why Goethe's discursive work fits better with the poetologies of the lyric texts than it does with his novels or plays and suggests convincingly that this fit derives from Goethe's treatment of the lyric as a paradigmatic genre for literary production as such (476). The volume acknowledges that this valuation of poetry over prose is somewhat anachronistic even by Goethe's own lights, but it suggests that although Goethe recognizes the modern era as prosaic and even (in Kaufmann's view) anticipates Hegel's thesis of the end of art (484), his poetological poetry insists on the Dominanz des Asthetischen (485). …

“NOW I GET It!”

This contribution to a symposium on “lyric philosophy” argues that there is much in Jan Zwicky's work that should make it attractive to literary critics, in particular her insistence that form and content are inextricably bound up with one another. Lyric compositions should not be assessed by reason and logic alone, she holds, and they should not be understood solely in terms of their propositional content. She acknowledges that full understanding employs the imagination and takes account of metaphor. However, some critics may be less willing to accept Zwicky's suggestion that there is a world, and an experience of the world, that is available to us without linguistic mediation and structuring. This article questions whether there a kind of meaning (the “it” of “Now I get it!”) that can be understood preverbally and intuitively. The discussion concludes with a consideration of Zwicky's comments on Rainer Maria Rilke's sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Contrary to her own principles, she offers a prose summary of the poem that does not take account of its lyric form and thereby misses some of its most enigmatic features. Whereas Zwicky would have it that the reader of such a poem can achieve a preverbal intuition of its meaning, the article suggests that, when we attend carefully to the words of the poem, we will be intriguingly perplexed.

Women Poets

Women Poets Alison Chapman (bio) Publications in 2012 on women's poets (excluding Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who are addressed in other Year's Work reviews) continue to cement the importance of women's poetry to Victorian literature. In particular, new book-length studies underline the complexity and sophistication of the engagement of women's poetry with religion and with the lyric form. Two major new studies on prosody and on recitation incorporate important material on women poets, and other articles and chapters on individual poets continue to enrich and deepen the field of Victorian women's poetry. Catherine Robson's fascinating, intelligent, and lively new monograph Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), a major new study on the readers of nineteenth-century poetry, features an extended discussion of Felicia Hemans. Eschewing analysis of the poets and poetry in favor of the text's consumers (although there are some sharp close readings nonetheless), Heart Beats uncovers the history of the pedagogical afterlife of three popular poems, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Felicia Hemans' "Casabianca," and Charles Wolfe's "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." Despite the limited range of poems, the book is wide and capacious in its scope, beginning with a first section that examines the history of poetry in nineteenth- and twentieth-century elementary schools in Britain and America, and the relation between widespread recitation [End Page 431] practises and nineteenth-century debates about prosody. The argument examines how meter is internalized within the body of the anxious and excited child, as he or she is compelled to recite a poem in the schoolroom. The analysis is carefully based on scrupulous cultural and historical research into a wide array of sources, including educational acts and commission reports, school anthologies, manuals for teachers, school report cards, and individual recollections. But the methodology also involves a degree of speculation, most strikingly exemplified by the introductory paragraphs to Part 1, in which the experiences of two school children in Wisconsin and West Riding are imaginatively re-created and juxtaposed. Robson explicitly acknowledges the practice of conjecture as a way "to create a more expansive discussion of some the unquestionably estimable benefits of memorized poetry than straightforward documentation would seem to allow" (p. 12). As compelling and convincing as thus approach is, the speculation nonetheless sits uncomfortably with the more conventional approaches of cultural, educational, sociological, and reception history. And yet, the uneasy pairing of historicism and speculation that Robson exploits makes for some of the best moments in the study. This approach so self-consciously adopted, and so eloquently delivered, seems to strike at the heart of what most Victorian scholars do, and to ask us to question the division between academic critique and biographical conjecture. I am not sure that this provocative approach is entirely successful, but the outcome nonetheless is compelling and audacious, and hopefully it will spark continued debate about our practices as Victorianists. The chapter on Felicia Hemans' "Casabianca" will interest scholars of women's poetry the most. A re-working and expansion of Robson's much-cited article on the poem in PMLA (120 [2005]: 148-162), this chapter argues that Hemans' popular poem exemplifies the intimate connection between meter and the body of the reciting child. The pedagogical practice that required children to memorize and recite poems that have a pronounced metrical regularity, Robson argues, also re-shapes the poem's metrical afterlife. "Casabianca," "the nation's favourite performance piece," is paired with Elizabeth Bishop's parody to tease out the "uncanny alliance" between the theme of Hemans' poem and British pedagogical practices of recitation. In a closely argued, sophisticated, and witty reading, the metrical pulse of "Casabianca" is seen to be performed and interiorized by the "mesmeric state of the reciter," a union between the poem's beat and the reciter's heart beat that, Robson speculates, Hemans may have anticipated. The popularity of "Casabianca" as a performance piece illustrates that "when an era's people learned poetry by heart . . . , their relationship to measured language—and especially to regular meter—carried a distinct, corporal [End Page 432] difference from...

Swinburne and the Möbius Strip: Circumvented Circularity in A Century of Roundels

Although Algernon Charles Swinburne and his later works have begun to receive more critical attention, (1) his cycle Century of Roundels (1883) is frequently neglected. The strict, eleven line and topics poems discuss often cause them to be dismissed as uncharacteristically domestic and simplistic compared to his more bombastic, bawdy works: Edmund Gosse believed they were merely an exercise self-discipline ... to curb his Pegasus with rigidly-determined fixed form, (2) and Jean Fuller remarked they are a charming series of rather slight pieces. (3) Behind placid facade of poems, however, Swinburne's incorporation of medieval lyric forms reveals linguistic pyrotechnics aplenty. He created his roundel by appropriating elements of rondeau, rondel, and triolet, all forms he learned from studying one of his literary idols, fifteenth-century poet Francois Villon. Villon's influence can also be seen Swinburne's style, since both poets value puns, paradoxes, and oxymorons and structure their poems by circumventing expected meanings. Throughout this poem cycle, Swinburne consistently subverts circularity inherent both roundel and cyclical Century, playing on repetition with twist. Karen Alkalay-Gut has associated Swinburne's poetic subversion with M6bius strip, curious topological loop formed by band twisted and connected to itself. (4) This mathematical concept, first articulated by August Ferdinand M6bius 1858, has remarkable property that, although it appears to have two sides, it fact only has one. Starting on one and following loop results return to starting point, but on side of surface; what was becomes inside. Alkalay-Gut has shown this topological surface is perfect illustration of Swinburne's paradoxes and oxymorons, since both techniques involve two opposites uniting while simultaneously being separate, as well as of structure of some of his seemingly circular poems (p. 151). However, although she applies this illustration to some works from Poems and Ballads and Laus Veneris, she omits an examination of Century of Roundels, instead saying such poems, and A Roundel particular, are so circular they cannot be considered representative of Swinburne's work other than in sense that they acknowledge the significance of form (p. 142). fact, these works subvert expected circularity, and her suggestive mathematical parallel can also illuminate overall structure of Century of Roundels, structure of individual roundels themselves, and Swinburne's method of appropriating both medieval subject matter and lyric forms; each functions as Mobius strip, ending by returning to its beginning with an inverted perspective. The most intricate examples of circumvented cyclicality are individual roundels themselves. The refrain of roundel, drawn from first word or phrase of first line, repeats at end of first and last stanzas. This verbal pattern would seem to lead us circle, back to ideas of beginning. Instead, Swinburne alters refrain, using repetition subversively, characteristic second part of first poem volume, In Harbor, clearly demonstrates: Outside of port ye are moored in, lying Close from wind and at ease from tide, What sounds come swelling, what notes fall dying Outside? They will not cease, they will not abide: Voices of presage darkness crying Pass and return and relapse aside. Ye see not, but hear ye not wild wings flying To future wakes from past died? Is grief still sleeping, is joy not sighing Outside? (5) Since word outside, poem's refrain, delineates strict boundary, one might expect outside to be stable term. Instead, question mark follows refrain when it appears again at end of first stanza, making word change tone from confidence delineation to uncertainty. …

„No pasaran“ – Lyrik, Kulturpolitik und Sprachdifferenz bei T. S. Eliot, Paul Celan und Rolf Dieter Brinkmann

AbstractThe poems of T. S. Eliot, Paul Celan, and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann treated in this article engage language difference in order to highlight poetry’s distinctive modernity. This involves them, and modern poetry in general, in a politics of culture which we can analyze on two levels: in terms of formal qualities, especially meter, and in terms of the programs and strategies the poems develop for themselves and for culture. The need to regard lyrical form as an enactment of cultural-political strategies becomes obvious in poetry’s use of language difference, not only between distinct langues in the sense of Saussure but more generally between any different standardizations of language. Lyric poetry builds on language difference, and since all language differences are culturally significant, lyric poetry is a genre of genuine cultural politics.

Stella P. Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700.Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.

<i>Stella P. Revard</i>, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700.<i>Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700</i>. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts &amp; Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.

Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse

Many critics have tried to find explanations for why Shakespeare’s sonnets and Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepheard seem to have been unpopular on their original publication, whereas other equally explicit works exploring homoeroticism, such as Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander or Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night , were well received by readers and audiences. This essay argues that these critics have overlooked the significance of the lyric form in their investigations. Lyric is more fluid, open-ended, and overtly performative than either narrative verse or drama, and this made it a more dangerous literary form for expressing controversial sexual sentiments.

Turning Sonnets into Poems: Textual Affect and John Benson’s Metaphysical Shakespeare

Recent scholarship on John Benson’s notorious 1640 Poems Written by Wil. Shake-speare Gent. has recuperated the volume as a savvy remaking of the 1609 Shakespeares Sonnets . Rather than focusing on Benson’s disruption of the Sonnets, however, this essay first recovers a striking gentleness in his editorial practice. Widening our analytic perspective from the level of the individual sonnet to that of the collection, it shows that Benson took the local order of the 1609 publication as intrinsic to the meaning of the gathered sonnets. The essay then uses this sensitivity to an intratextual poetics to reconsider how the 1640 Poems transformed Shakespeare’s lyrics. The material form of the small octavo collection, as well as the poem and volume titles, the layout of the pages, and the form of the lyrics all suggest that Benson was responding to John Donne’s popular verse collection, Poems by J.D. (published in 1633 and 1635). In turn, this new bibliographic paradigm adjusted the erotics of Shakespeare’s collected lyrics, as the dualities of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence coalesced into longer poems and gave rise to a metaphysical poetics of desire. Together, these dual influences on the 1640 Poems Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent. propose that, as a publisher, Benson was sensitive to how collections informed the interpretation of gathered poems and that, as an editor of Shakespeare’s lyrics, he was responding creatively to that intersection of textual and poetic form. Benson’s gentle editing demonstrates that the textual structure of the book was foundational to the production of poetic affect.

The Year in Poetry 2012: Shifts and Folds of Consciousness

This article surveys recently published French-language poetry, with emphasis on the shifts and folds of consciousness it formally and thematically inscribes. A first analytical grouping considers Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jude Stéfan, Victoria Xardel, Franck Venaille, Cécile Mainardi, Richard Rognet, and a cross-section of writers in the collective volume À partir d’un rien. Condensed reviews then address varied lyrical forms, distinctively less conventional methods, interart discourse, titles perhaps useful for teaching, and critical studies. The myriad works signal contemporary poetry’s dialectical tensions, genre crossings, and compelling focus.

“Soul-Talk”: Networks of Political Poetry in a Trans-Channel Literary Triangle

During the mid-Victorian decades poets, like novelists, were embedded in political and formal networks. Many harnessed nationally inflected lyric forms to triangulate French and British exchanges with the marginalized perspective of Risorgimento Italy. An especially lively debate of the early 1870s concerned Louis Napoleon, in his third and final exile in Britain after his defeat by Prussia. For Robert Browning, who saw poetic forms like the dramatic monologue as means to animating ethical choices, the effects of Louis’s actions on the French and Italian peoples demanded rigorous accounting. This Browning undertakes in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871), voicing civic-republican “soul-talk”: poetry’s feminized counterpart to the discourse of manly character. In doing so, Browning demonstrates his own immersion in overlapping republican and liberal political networks.

Robert Browning’s Homesickness

Robert Browning's Home-Thoughts, from Abroad is conventionally known as one of the most patriotic poems in the English language. Although the poem in its original print context is the first of three dramatic monologues, it is invariably seen in popular British culture, as well as in the history of its print circulation in the nineteenth century, as a stand-alone lyric poem celebrating the best of English nationhood. poem has attracted surprisingly little attention from critics, perhaps because of difficulty with placing its apparent expression of English nationalism within the context of Browning's more uneasy investigations of the construction of nationhood and of cosmopolitanism. This essay argues that Home-Thoughts, from Abroad is a deceptively simple poem that in fact interrogates the very patriotism it has been taken to celebrate. Furthermore, the poem is an important part of Browning's experimentation with the dramatic lyric form, and particularly the concept of voice in relation to proximity and distance. Home-Thoughts, from Abroad reveals the importance of reading Browning's poems as expressive and interrogative at the very same time. In addition, the complex hybrid genre adopted in the poem participates in nineteenth-century discussions about the relation between England and Europe, in a way that recalls Mary Louise Pratt's concept of over-determined social spaces where cultures encounter one another, and jostle for position, often within asymmetrical and complex power structures. poem's fundamental dynamic between home and the foreign suggests the importance of border crossing, a movement within and between contact zones, across frontiers and boundaries that are geographical, cultural, political and textual: a movement that, I argue, structures the very concept of the lyric poet itself, always a vital concern for Browning. In a recent and hugely popular endeavor by the British Broadcasting Corporation to record major poems by famous actors, the actor Geoffrey Palmer reads Home-Thoughts, from Abroad with music playing softly in the background. (1) choice of the Largo section (second movement) of Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony is important, especially to British ears, because it cites a previous and famous use of this section as the soundtrack (arranged for brass band) to a series of well-known television advertisements for bread, directed by Ridley Scott, and much replayed. advertisement was voted in 2006 the most-loved advertisement in Britain, for the nostalgic portrayal of a northern town with a small boy pushing a bike up cobbled streets and carrying loaves of Hovis, associating the packaged bread with what is quintessentially English. (2) In fact, the popular commercial Classic FM station in Britain reported that it was inundated with requests for the Hovis music, originally composed to commemorate the discovery of the Americas (see Byrne). It might seem peculiar to associate Robert Browning with a loaf of brown bread. But the BBC recitation of Home-Thoughts, from Abroad chose a canny patriotic soundtrack. Subtitled The greatest poems, the finest voices, glorious music, the Words for You series of recited poems can be purchased as a CD and seen on YouTube (where it has its own TV channel)) Palmer is perhaps at first glance an unlikely choice, known for his deadpan humor and stuffy, middle-class buffoonery, as his Wikipedia entry puts it, in portrayals of such popular British sit-com characters as Reggie Perrin's brother-in-law in Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin and the phlegmatic husband in Butterflies. (4) But Browning's poem suits such an actor perfectly, for like all Browning's dramatic lyrics, Home-Thoughts, from Abroad is in fact supremely ironic. In the nineteenth century, the poem was seen as a quintessential expression of English patriotism. It was reprinted, for example, in Mary Isabella Lovejoy's Poetry of the Seasons anthology of 1898 as exemplary of spring. …

Prison Prologues:

ABSTRACT This article surveys medieval Jewish prison writings from Provence, Catalonia, and Orange, spanning the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth centuries. It asks what we can learn of the conditions of Jewish imprisonment and the types of literature it produced. While prison conditions varied greatly, prison writing unanimously expresses a commitment to the values and training that characterized its intellectual authors. The autobiographical prologues are assertions of “self” related to but distinct from the lyric and confessional forms of Christian prison literature. Jewish prison writers enlisted the prologues of technical works to relate their stories; examples of prison lyrics are few and idiosyncratic. Later writers were aware of contemporary enthusiasm for Boethius, as attested by two nearly contemporary Hebrew translations, one the result of the translator's imprisonment in Aragon. Further study of this literature is in order.

Culpability and the lyric in Tadeusz Borowski's Selected Poems

This article argues that Tadeusz Borowski's poems have been unjustly neglected in Holocaust studies. One reason for this comprises Borowski's uncomfortable engagement with the culpability and complicity of former inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, his rejection of the notion of the ‘sacred survivor’, and his intense distrust of lyrical forms in the context of the camps. Borowski's most striking (but unknown) poem written in Birkenau is ‘October Sky’: this poem constitutes a dialectical anti-lyric in the sense that it ‘hates tradition properly’ – according to Theodor Adorno's definition in ‘Minima Moralia’ – because it rigorously examines and challenges traditional forms without rejecting them entirely. In contrast, Borowski's post-war poems become journalistic, mimicking the style of prose testimony in their attempts to respond to daily events. A more practical reason for Borowski's neglect can be explained by the lack of translations: only three poems are readily available for English readers, in Hilda Schiff's popular anthology ‘Holocaust Poetry’. This fact demonstrates that canons of Holocaust literature are bound up with the availability of translations as much as literary merit: Borowski's ‘October Sky’ deserves to read alongside the ‘classics’ of Holocaust poetry, such as Paul Celan's ‘Todesfugue’, Nelly Sachs's ‘O the Chimneys’ and Primo Levi's ‘Shemà’.

Piers Plowman’s Lyric Poetics

This article explores how the lyric forms and themes incorporated into Piers Plowman direct the poem’s investigation of the proper epistemological foundations of vernacular making. Lyric varieties such as the chanson d’aventure, which Langland periodically invokes, serve as more than mere stylistic embellishments; rather, these lyric passages model experiential modes of composition and lectio that Piers Plowman repeatedly contrasts with more authoritative textual traditions. This tension between sensory and revelatory forms of textual engagement is particularly pronounced in the poem’s third and fourth visions, where Langland’s lyric interpolations pair with Will’s epistemological inquiries to make a case for the didactic and ethical efficacy of sensory and extraclergial forms of literary ‘making’: vernacular poetry’s potential, in other words, to supplement and direct a life guided by Christian ideals.

Narrating Lives and Contemporary Imaginaries

Good evening, colleagues and friends. Tonight I have the honor of talking with you about my decided passion, narrating lives.Emerging from dispersed global locations, circulated for difering purposes, life narration moves along predictable and unpredictable routes to publics and to archives near and far. High forms and low forms. Long forms and short forms. Lyric forms and documentary forms. Narrated lives in the irst, second, third, and plural persons. Life stories in print, comics, photography, ilm, and Second Life.

Responses to the Holocaust in Modern Irish Poetry

This essay examines twentieth and twenty-first century responses by Irish poets to the Holocaust. It argues that, despite the illiberal tendencies of the Irish state towards Jewish immigration during and after the 1939-1945 war, recent commemorative activities in Ireland have included the Holocaust and are part of a wider commemorative ‘opening up’ in Ireland towards twentieth-century historical events. Important contemporary Irish poets have written Holocaust poems of notable merit including: Seamus Heaney, Harry Clifton, Derek Mahon, Pearse Hutchinson, Paul Durcan, Paul Muldoon, Thomas Kinsella and Tom Paulin, all of whom are discussed here. These poets are noted as second-generation Holocaust poets, more at home in the lyric form and less troubled by communicative dilemmas than their precursors such as Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett whose resemblance is briefly discussed. The essay concludes by arguing that Giorgio Agamben’s arguments about testimony after Auschwitz are strikingly pertinent to some of the poems under discussion. It also suggests that the historical essays of Hubert Butler may have acted as an unseen influence on some of these writers.

Robert Frost and the Drama of Encounter

Robert Frost and the Drama of Encounter Baron Wormser (bio) Among the numerous startling perceptions that those Englishmen and women who "settled" New England must have experienced was that they were in a wilderness that was utterly new to them. This intuition became knowledge during the endless skirmishes and forays that went with the taking of the land and that produced dread, terror, and curiosity. This awareness, one that is reflected in the name of the region—an England that is new and hence not at all another England—was the seedbed of the drama of what has come to be called America. The name implied the conflict between what should be here—pious white folk—and what was here—heathen Indians, wolves, fierce winters, skunks, poison ivy, and other deadly elements. It suggested confidence and hope, but it signified the siren of the new also—that which was not known and could not be measured. No wonder the settlers shook with anxiety and trepidation before their God even as they praised His mercies. Given the locale they found themselves in, He had better be merciful. The search for a mercy that might dwell in the very landscape distinguishes a broad range of American poetry in diverse modes: declarative, lyrical, didactic, anecdotal, vatic, imagist, epiphanic, elegiac, and narrative—for starters. More than one such poem has sought to meld the political sublime, the vision of a just democratic society, with the poetic sublime, the vision of a world that accepts the poetic imagination as a good in itself. Realizing this vision is a search that has distinguished poets as different as Poe and Stevens, Hart Crane and Donald Justice (and painters from Thomas Cole to Mark Rothko) and speaks to the American belief in a destiny, be it political or aesthetic, that can face down any conflict. The longing for a natural (yet God-given) comity is one that seeks the resolution of whatever dwarfs and waylays the merely human—that broad highway of misdemeanor and achievement that, as Henry James delighted in noting, older, more settled, less visionary and implicitly wiser societies, possessed of "a complex [End Page 76] social machinery," have taken for granted. The aggregate of all those individuals pursuing happiness is a vast yearning feeling—a voice that is great within us, to allude to the title of Hayden Carruth's anthology of American poetry. At its extreme the apprehension of the democratic sublime can turn an individual such as Walt Whitman into a multitudinous aggregate. Or so he proposed. The dramatic mode does not leap to the fore of any such consideration. It is even easy to forget there is such a mode. The story of America is supposed to be one of inevitable harmony—progress and religion working hand in destined hand. Poetry, particularly in the form of the personal lyric, testifies to the individual's unassailable, self-proclaiming worth, and is a complement to this vision, however hard it may be to make its metaphorical self heard above the commercial din. Yet there is a strain of American poetry that is stoutly dramatic and revels in what can't be resolved, what assails and doesn't back off. Its chief proponents are Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Though one may find risible the vision of these two people sitting in the same room together, much less talking to each other, I think they would have understood one another quite well. Each of them spoke for the integrity of conflict and against the lies that so frequently underlay resolution. In choosing drama, each spoke for a mode that was perfect for facing up to whatever the poet found in his or her way, however quizzical or slantwise that facing up might be. Each recognized that, as a method, drama derived sustenance from the intractability of other people and creatures, and did not seek to avoid history. Each poet accordingly had little use for suavity (the legerdemain of Wallace Stevens that Frost so disliked), preferring instead the often wasteful ardor of encounter, incomprehension, and confrontation. Each sometimes delighted in mockery, a form of verbal sparring. (Both had tart tongues.) As dramatists these poets were glad...

The Lyric Encyclopedia: Citation and Innovation in Matfre Ermengaud's Breviari d'amor

The Lyric Encyclopedia:Citation and Innovation in Matfre Ermengaud's Breviari d'amor Mary Franklin-Brown Matfre Ermengaud began his Breviari d'amor ca. 1288, towards the end of two significant literary movements of the later Middle Ages. One was led by the troubadours, who had begun composing their lyric at the end of the eleventh century and would continue to do so through the mid thirteenth, when, for reasons that are still debated, the number of troubadours waned. Paradoxically, this decline occurred at the same time that the great chansonniers (large lyric anthologies) began to be compiled, as if the mise par écrit were a response to the loss of vitality in the movement. The other, scholastic encyclopedism, was not yet in such dire straits.1 Supported by strong twelfth-century precedents, it produced over the course of the thirteenth century four major Latin encyclopedias and a few in the vernacular. By the mid fourteenth century, however, most encyclopedic work would involve copying, revising, or translating existing texts, rather than drafting new ones. The creation of a new encyclopedia was a daunting task, and most readers seem to have judged the earlier texts sufficient to their needs. Matfre clearly did not take such a view; his Breviari constituted an unprecedented attempt to wed the highly allusive and formally complex love poetry of the troubadours to the exhaustive but prosaic erudition of the encyclopedists, partly through direct quotations of the lyric.2 [End Page 389] It must have been difficult to harmonize two such different genres, so the strangeness of the Breviari should not surprise us. Perhaps because of it, the text has not appealed to a great many modern scholars, as a comparison of the bibliography on the Breviari to that on any one of the major troubadours attests.3 Nonetheless, Matfre's text had a modest success just after its publication: it is the only Occitan text treating courtly subjects to have been copied in numbers approaching those of the chansonniers and in volumes of comparable dimensions.4 The text's manuscript history thus indicates its importance to the literary circles of its time. The Breviari d'amor is indispensable if we are to understand the paradigms that shaped late medieval reading. In the present article, I should like to consider one such paradigm, citation, for Matfre could only weave the lyric into his text through a peculiar, hybrid form of this practice.5 The encyclopedia was always a bookish genre, well adapted to the visual strategies of scholastic reading. Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264), for example, details in the prologue to his Speculum maius the difficulties posed by the placement of attributions on the page (ch. 3). On the other hand, prior to the creation of the chansonniers and the Breviari, troubadour lyric had been experienced aurally, and so it lacked the determinate visual components of the written text.6 Even the makers of the chansonniers failed to visually represent the lyric form, for they set out the strophes as paragraphs in which each metrical line follows the last without a return to the left margin. This mise en page suggests that readers such as Matfre were still pronouncing the lyric aloud as their eyes scanned the page. Accordingly, the troubadours practiced a different kind of citation. Yet broad theoretical [End Page 390] investigations of citation and intertextuality have tended to approach these phenomena as beginning and ending with written text, on the page.7 I should like to suggest here that a fuller understanding of acoustic citation makes it possible not only to (partially) demarcate the quotations in the Breviari, which are visually obscured by this text's own mise en page, but also, and especially, to discern the degree to which lyricism permeates this most erudite of texts. Scholars of Occitan lyric have shown that the troubadours developed exquisitely subtle forms of citation, particularly in the genre of the sirventes, which came to maturity in the work of Bertran de Born (ca. 1150-1215) and was practiced in the thirteenth century by such notable troubadours as Peire Cardenal. Sirventes were frequently based upon the rime or metrical structure or melody of a pre-existing song...

How Keats Falls

KEATS'S HYPERION POSITS HUMAN FINITUDE AS THE BEGINNING RATHER than the end of aesthetic work. By finitude I mean not simply the awareness of death that informs Keats's writing, but more widely the poet's sense that the experience of traumatic historical change can beget a new kind of imaginative life. Hyperion's fall emblematizes this paradoxically generative condition, shaping both the content and form of the poem in such a way that the text comes to signify a major shift in literary history. Just as the titan's bodily suffering enables his status as an epic figure, the poem's drive toward narrative fragmentation not only performs but embraces epic poetry's historical outmoding. In both cases, the expectation of traumatic loss initiates an anticipatory imagining--Hyperion's, the poet's--that eschews recompense or consolation in Favor of an affective experience of that loss. Moving his poem toward rather than away from epic's demise, toward rather than away from the political and social circumstances that occasion that demise, Keats demonstrates that progressive historical narratives have become impossible in his contemporary moment. Yet this impossibility makes possible a new poetics--a lyric that emerges from epic's dissolution--and indeed a new mode of living amidst unrelenting political and social upheaval. Two decades of scholarship have presented us with a deeply political Keats, but one whose aesthetic engagements remain ascribable to the historical particularities of England's early-nineteenth-century political scene. Studies by Nicholas Roe and Jeffrey Cox have placed Keats squarely within the traditions of English political dissent and its Cockney variations. (1) In response to both the Harvard Keatsians' triumphal personalism and to early New Historicism's negative critique of Keats's poetics, this strain of inquiry necessarily deemphasized the ways in which Keats's aesthetic project remains committed to imagining a human life that by definition cannot be reduced to such contexts. (2) Arguing that Hyperion's highly figurative language counters without overcoming the representation of historical trauma commonly associated with the poem, I wish to reassert an approach to Keats's writing that explores how, for Keats, human identity emerges from the imagination's necessarily incomplete attempts to comprehend the fullness of its historical experience. With the term historical, I refer not solely to the events and material circumstances surrounding a text's composition and circulation (the politicized publishing scene of Regency England, for example), but also to the narratives (poetic, scholarly, or otherwise) that attempt to make sense of those events and circumstances. Keats's poetry asks its readers to consider alternatives to the kind of imagining that produces historical narratives, even as it expresses a deeply felt response to actual events. By exploring this dimension of Keatsian writing, I mean not to align Keats with that model of willful ahistoricism we have called the Romantic Ideology, but rather to consider how his poem's marking of imagination's limits--and its related commitment to feeling--is itself an historically concerned endeavor. (3) Such a consideration may in turn help Keats scholars to reexamine the affective value of poetic form, focusing on how poetry represents feeling in particular historical moments and, more vitally, how it produces feeling readers. Recent approaches to Keats have attended closely to the ways in which the poetry is suffused with feeling that registers, as strictly cognitive thought cannot, the poet's historical condition. Thomas Pfau, most compellingly, sees Keats as the paradigm of late Romanticism's affective relation to a bewildering historical life-world. For Pfau, Keats's melancholic mood continues and modifies the project of Romantic lyric developed by Wordsworth, in which lyric form aims to awaken romantic subjectivity from its dormant state and to its perilous historical situatedness, all while sheltering (at least partially) the subject of such awakening from the traumatic impact of the knowledge so produced in the cocoon of aesthetic form. …