Genre Of Poem Research Articles

Moving To and Fro Between Alakā and Rāmagiri in Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta

The Meghadūta stands at the beginning of a highly productive genre of so-called messenger poems (sandeśakāvyas), in both Sanskrit and the vernaculars. The main variation between the poems lies in the nature of the messenger: beside Kālidāsa’s cloud, we have the wind (in Dhoyī’s Pavanadūta), a bee (in the anonymous Bhrṅgasandeśa) and a whole range of birds (for instance a goose in Vedāntadeśika’s Haṃsasandeśa). In the anonymous Tamil Tamiḻviṭutūtu a woman directs the Tamil language itself to the god residing in the temple in Madurai to beg him not to neglect her. The popularity of the genre in particular in the vernacular literary traditions was no doubt due to the opportunity it offered for descriptions of sites or features of the specific (imagined) linguistic regions. The present paper argues that there is no need to assume a genre of full-fledged messenger poem genre prior to Kālidāsa's work. Instead, it argues for a rich relationship between the aerial journey of Rāma and Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Meghadūta, in which Kālidāsa plays, contrastively, with the epic tradition.

Peculiarities of the Genre of Poem in the Literature of the Peoples of the North

Peculiarities of the Genre of Poem in the Literature of the Peoples of the North

Uusklassikaline luuletraditsioon varauusaja Tallinnas ja Tartus / Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin poetry in Early Modern Tallinn and Tartu

Uusklassikaline luuletraditsioon varauusaja Tallinnas ja Tartus / Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin poetry in Early Modern Tallinn and Tartu

The Poetics of “Youth” and “Maturity” in M. Stepanova’s Lyrical Poetry

From the second half of the 1980s onwards, it only takes a decade for a generational change in poetry. In its rapid development poetry is perceived as “forever young”. The concepts of youth and maturity are multifaceted: they imply a set of human qualities and stages of creative development, socio-cultural factors of recognition, and the impact on the literary process. The author proceeds from the fact that the “maturation” of a poet can be found in means of poetics, and compares the composition, stanzas, language, style, and genre of poems in two books by M. Stepanova Here-light (2001) and The Lyrics, the Voice (2010). What dominates the tonality of the first collection which is mostly made up by love lyrics, is “odic exaltation”, without some meditative elegies reducing its overriding light tone. The stanzas of the poems analysed are mostly identical, they have a traditional structure; the poet experiments with words, their sound and compatibility. The style of the book can be defined as a game and a citation. The poems of The Lyrics, the Voice are much longer, their stanzas are not homogeneous, rhyming verses are anisosyllabic, and folk poetry becomes the main source of citation. The main genre is melancholy elegy, almost every poem expresses regret for the fleeting time, pity for the deceased relatives, for the author herself on the threshold of a new phase of life. All the poems combined help create an image of the lyrical heroine, and the contents of the book can be characterized as those typical of a novel. A comparative analysis shows that M. Stepanova is a representative of the generation of the 1990s, “young” Russian poetry, a bright innovator, however, she has completed the stage of “youth” as apprenticeship, she has developed her own style and deep “mature” viewpoint.

For the Progress of “Faustus and Helen”: Crane, Whitman, and the Metropolitan Progress Poem

This essay is meant to invigorate a critical discussion of the progress poem—a genre that, while prevalent in American literature, has been virtually ignored by critics and scholars. In lieu of tackling the genre in its entirety, a project too large for just one article, the author focuses the argument through the well-known alignment between Walt Whitman and Hart Crane on the subject of the modern city. It is through the progress poem genre that Crane and Whitman’s peculiar place in metropolitan poetics can best be understood, and it is through their poetry that scholars can begin to approach the broader issue of the progress poem’s place in American literature.

Critics and Commentators: The "Book of Poems" as Classic and Literature by Bruce Rusk

Reviewed by: Critics and Commentators: The "Book of Poems" as Classic and Literature by Bruce Rusk Peter Ditmanson Bruce Rusk. Critics and Commentators: The "Book of Poems" as Classic and Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 300. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 978–0674067011. What did the word shi 詩 mean over the course of Chinese history? How was the term defined? What prosodic or interpretive rules applied? Bruce Rusk's thoughtful study shows us that the question is a complicated one and that definitions and categorizations of shi were strikingly fluid over time. At the center of the discourse on shi was the canonical Book of Poetry (Shijing 詩 經), and Rusk argues that the evolving principles of exegesis of this classic were intertwined with the shifting discourse on "secular" poetry (for lack of a better term). The larger implications, as Rusk notes, are to see classical studies in the Chinese tradition as "developed not atop but within and against different modes of intellectual activity" (p. 13). To this end, the book examines the processes of interpretation and analysis of poetry and the Book of Poetry from the earliest recorded comments in Warring States texts down to the May Fourth era. The chapters are thematically rather than chronologically arranged. The first examines early rhetoric on poetry and the Book of Poetry. The second, third, and fourth explore the evolving meaning of poetry, the use of the classic as a model, and the evolution of annotations on poetry and the Book of Poetry, respectively. The fifth chapter is centered around the rise of a forged set of commentaries that arose in the Ming, while the last chapter reflects on twentieth-century re-interpretations of the classic. This thematic structure makes good sense, but the chapters challenge the reader as they shift back and forth across the centuries. In early texts, shi were defined largely in terms of their moral and ritual import and social usefulness. In the Analects, for example, the disciples of Confucius proved themselves worthy of deeper conversation with the master through their grasp of lines of poetry. The authorship of the poems themselves was not emphasized, and notions of prosody and style were confined to terse [End Page 237] references to tone and harmony. Theories of rhyme and meter would not emerge until the Period of Division. The Rites of Zhou (Zhouli 周禮) and the Mao Prefaces offered the early interpretive principles of fu (賦) "exposition," bi (比) "likening," and xing (興) "stimulus," by which the poems were analyzed and categorized. The Han period saw significant shifts in the meaning of shi poems and the Book of Poetry. Proponents of the Songs of Chu (Chuci 楚辭) presented its purported author Qu Yuan 屈原 as having successfully drawn upon the moral features and compositional elements of the Book of Poems to create a work that stood as a worthy successor and a veritable classic itself. This then marked the initial phase of linking the canonical work with later poetic composition. From here, Rusk turns to the late Han, in which writing poetry began to emerge as a gentlemanly avocation. In inscriptions and later in prefaces, the poetic endeavors of writers in the Han, the Period of Division, and the Tang were praised for carrying on the work of the Book of Poems both as a moral enterprise and as a literary treatment. The fu (賦), as an emerging genre of poem, was traced back to the poems of the classic. Attempts were made to construct lost poems of antiquity, for which only titles survived. Thus the Book of Poems was not only a classic to be venerated, but also served as a template and precursor for later poets. By the Period of Division, anthologies like Xiao Tong's 蕭統 Wenxuan 文選 and Wang Tong's 王通 Xushi 續試 had established the composition of shi and fu as post-canonical continuations of the moral and literary enterprise of the Book of Poems. Anthologies raised further interpretative problems: what about other pre-Qin poetry, such as the Stone Drum inscriptions unearthed in the seventh century? What was the connection between these pieces and those of the canon? Could it be that Confucius never saw them? Rusk deftly explores the reformulation of the exegesis...

Creating a film poem with stylistic analysis: A pedagogical approach

A film poem is a cinematic artwork that takes a written, often canonical, poem as its stimulus. Many are imaginative and arresting performances of poems, going far beyond the likely intentions of the poet into something completely new. However, with this genre, the poem’s stylistic detail is largely irrelevant to its visual realisation. I highlight how this limitation can be addressed by bringing film poems into stylistics teaching and assessment. After providing background on the film poem genre, I model an assignment where students draw on their cinematic literacy to dramatise a poem imaginatively. As with other film poems, the student creates a series of cinematic images and connects them to the poem’s lines, activating new meanings in them. In contrast with the traditional construction of film poems, the procedure involves another stage – the student also connects the images they have created to the poem’s stylistic detail. In turn, as I show, this extra connection helps drive the film’s narrative, adding to the creativity of the film. This staged procedure is different from established (pedagogical) stylistic practice where interpretation and stylistic analysis of a poem are simultaneous, with the stylistic analysis providing support for the burgeoning interpretation. To model this student assignment, I produce a film script of Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘Wants’. The script depicts the activities of a serial killer; some readers may find the script graphic.

The Encrypted Prospect: Existentialist Phenomenology, Deconstruction and Speculative Realism in “To Autumn”

Despite critical interrogations of the mastery communicated by both the prospective view and the prospect poem genre, the explicit prospect continues to suffer from accusations of imperialism, class privilege and labor exploitation. I show how Keats's “To Autumn” anticipates this critique by instancing an implicit, encoded or encrypted prospect. The irrealization, sublimation or aestheticization of nature and the local by culture and poetic media at the heartland of the encrypted prospect produces, however, as many epistemic, epistemological and existential problems as it solves. Keats's poem proleptically undertakes this problematization in relation to the interpretative potential of deconstruction by placing it in interaction with its existential-phenomenological inheritance and its present-day inheritor, the philosophical movement known as Speculative Realism. The end result is a becoming-slimy of the Romantic (media) ideology that insists upon a Modernist-New Critical poetics of difficulty as a (formal) window opening onto the (global) world.

Intended and Actual Meanings: The Case of Public Signs in the Composition Classroom

Intended and Actual Meanings:The Case of Public Signs in the Composition Classroom Peter Kratzke In his well-circulated-on-YouTube "slam poem" titled "What Teachers Make," the experienced secondary teacher Taylor Mali emphasizes that he "make[s] them [students] show all their work in math / And hide it on their final drafts in English" (Mali). The moment breezes along in the poem's overall, wonderfully emotional content, but the question of purposeful process ("math") versus detached product ("English") gives pause, especially in terms of pedagogical discussions about reflective practice. Is it "all good" in writing classes when, for instance, we ask for an argumentative essay but get a beautifully written personal narrative with no documented source materials? Short answer: no, but the longer answer leads us straight to what former CEA President Dr. John Shawcross calls, in another context, the "thorny question of authorial intent . . ." (18). This question is crucial in the writing classroom to what Amy Devitt calls "genre awareness" (191 ff.), but good, quick examples of genre that show the formative role played by intentionality are hard to find—until, that is, we realize that good examples are all around us. To be sure, the issue of authorial intentionality is a kind of Forbidden Zone for literary analysis and appreciation, one that makes teachers wave copies of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's "Intentional Fallacy" as an invocation. I recall, in fact, how I myself was scolded by Dr. Shawcross for my facile agreement with Helen Gardner that, in Gardner's words, John Donne's "The Ecstasy" "smells a little of the lamp" (306). I argued, in other words, that Donne had intended to write one genre of poem but failed because he did not meet my generic expectations. Dr. Shawcross quickly disabused me of this idea: although we may infer an author's intention from rhetorical situation and biography, he said, we must be cautious in presuming too much based on such information. After all, "the proof of the pudding," as the proverb begins but then is rarely completed, "is in the eating." Most of the time, "the eating" attends to (often ideologically considered) matters of the text itself, the context of the text, or the reader's response. At the same time, a text must start somewhere, and in that point we have the continuum from intention (Point A) to text (Point B) to context (Point C) to reader (Point D), a continuum that may be usefully coupled in sets: writers have intentions, given which they produce texts; subsequently, contexts motivate how readers read. A great deal of scholarship in literary studies over the last decades has attended to the interplay between texts [End Page 66] and contexts (Points B and C); meanwhile, rhetorical approaches to genre have, effectively, brought matters back to the causal relationship between what writers intend in terms of how they want readers to respond (Points A and D). In a 1980 article for the College Composition and Communication about intentionality, C. H. Knoblauch brings the matter to the classroom: "writers' behaviors and what stimulates them are at least as valuable as generated texts. Indeed, in writing courses those behaviors are primary, since one concern is to reduce disparities between what writers set out to do and what their completed discourses actually achieve" (155). To illustrate such disparities, we have the case of public signs—and I do not mean "signs" in the way of semiotics but actual, physical signs. Examples include placards, billboards, road signs, banners, and so forth. Why signs? They at once are ubiquitous in our lives and instantiate a rhetorical approach to genre. Signs involve the emblematic interplay of numerals, icons, and words. Signs direct our physical lives. Signs define, direct, and delimit us. Without signs, chaos would come again. Yet, even while we need signs, we are annoyed by them and, in subtle ways, continually evaluate them. Consequently, we often feel a slight resistance to signs that is registered with an insistence on denotative precision. We are caught, in short, between what we know signs would have us understand (their intentions) and what we demand as their subservient readers. As the Canadian group Five Man...

Visual Itineraries of a Literary Form: Dutch Baroque Printmaking, a Source of the French Prose Poem

This article examines the role of baroque printmaking techniques in Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, the text that in 1841 launched the prose poem genre in France. In his work, Bertrand relates the prose poem to the visual arts and references Rembrandt van Rijn and Jacques Callot as his direct sources. While scholarship on the prose poem has acknowledged the presence of visual elements within the prose poem genre, less has been said about the nature of such visual elements. Indeed, the majority of studies have based their approach to the visual components of the prose poem genre on methodological standpoints introduced by the Enlightenment. In this article, I turn to seventeenth-century printmaking in order to argue that the dual reference to Rembrandt and Callot serves to reinforce Bertrand's emphasis on the printmaking technique itself. That is, through a turn to Rembrandt and Callot, Bertrand's prose poems highlight the etching technique specifically. My analysis of the use of line and tonality in prints by Rembrandt and Callot highlights the developments in etching that the two artists introduced. I conclude that the distinction between the échoppe and the chiaroscuro techniques provides Bertrand with a model for joining together elements of prose and poetry in Gaspard de la Nuit.

Pastoral Elegy into Romantic Lyric: Generic Transformation in Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis”

history of English elegy is a pouring of fresh tears into ancient vessels.--John D. Rosenberg, Elegy for an Age (1) It is a commonplace that Arnold is an elegiac poet, but not everyone would agree on what is meant by this phrase. --A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason (2) What kind of a poem is Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis? The answer has seemed self-evident ever since it was published in 1861: it is an elegy, more specifically a pastoral elegy, occasioned by the death of Arnold's friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough five years earlier in Florence. Thyrsis is the third of the three great pastoral elegies in English poetry, the other two being Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais. is Thyrsis a pastoral elegy in quite the same way that Lycidas and Adonais are? Over forty years ago, Richard Giannone was not sure that it is: is something of an anomaly among pastoral elegies, he wrote. One could justifiably call it a pastoral elegy manque in so far as Arnold stops considerably short of the kind of complete shaping of the poem according to the pastoral conventions one finds, say, in Spenser's November eclogue or Astrophel, or in 'Lycidas.' (3) Yet no one has followed up on Giannone's questioning of the poem's genre, which continues to seem self-evident to critics. In his still influential study of Arnold's poetry, A. Dwight Culler distinguishes Thyrsis from ScholarGipsy, to which it is frequently compared, by stressing its different generic identity: Scholar-Gipsy, he says, is primarily a Romantic dream-vision which creates an ideal figure who lives outside of time, whereas ['Thyrsis'] is an elegy about a human figure who lived in time and was thereby destroyed (p. 250). David Riede discusses Thyrsis along with Scholar-Gipsy under the heading Pastoral and Elegy, (4) and in the most recent commentary on the poem, Patrick Connolly reiterates the poem's dependence on the long ancestral of pastoral elegy: As a poem 'Thyrsis' falls within the pastoral elegy form, though this may not be obvious at first reading. Consequently it is dependent on a ancestral line of such poetry from Shelley and Milton to Moschus and Theocritus. (5) This unproblematic classification of Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy has ensured that critics, by never looking at the poem from an alternative generic perspective, see only what they habitually expect to find in pastoral elegies instead of seeing what Arnold actually wrote. often think of genre designation as one of the last acts a reader performs-and to some extent it is true that a work's precise generic placement is often unclear until we have finished reading it, says Peter Rabinowitz in Before Reading. But some preliminary generic judgment is always required even before we begin the process of reading. We can never interpret outside generic structures: 'reading'--even reading of a first paragraph-is always 'reading as.' (6) No poem, least of all one assumed to belong to so conventional a form as the pastoral elegy, stands entirely outside generic structures, and so when we read Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy, it is difficult to avoid succumbing to the force of generic conventions, the recognition that it is one of a family of similar poems, and thus to be led very quickly from what the individual work is actually saying to what we assume the generic structure to which it belongs is saying through the work. On the other hand, there is no possibility of not reading intertextually, since no work exists outside generic conventions. So the question Thyrsis presents, then, is not whether to read it intertextually-there is no choice other than to do so-but rather what poems constitute the most relevant and illuminating inter-texts? Or, to pose the question another way: what kind of poem is Thyrsis and in what generic tradition(s) does it participate? Without denying its indisputable affiliations with the pastoral elegy (with Lycidas as its most influential English representative) and with the broader pastoral tradition that Scholar-Gipsy participates in, I propose to argue that the exclusive classification of Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy has prevented us from recognizing that it is, in fact, a generically mixed lyric that combines the conventions of the classical pastoral elegy with the new kind of poem we now identify as distinctively Romantic, the lyric genre that M. …

РОССИЯ И НАПОЛЕОН В ПОЭМЕ ГОГОЛЯ "МЕРТВЫЕ ДУШИ"

The fact that «Dead Souls» belongs to an ancient and medieval epic poem genre about wars and wanderings (including in the other world) is the author’s initial position. Both Chichikov’s adventures and the war theme in its various aspects are immanent parts of the text. Chichikov is the bearer of the foreign, non-Russian frame of mind which interferes with Russian reality, and thus the parallels between Chichikov and Napoleon can be drawn all throughout the poem’s text.

‘Paper Frames’: Lucy Hutchinson'sElegiesand the Seventeenth-Century Country House Poem

This essay won the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section. The last three decades have witnessed rich discoveries in early modern women's writing, especially manuscript poetry. Lucy Hutchinson was a seventeenth-century Puritan and republican whose corpus is now believed to include a translation of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, an unfinished Biblical epic Order and Disorder, a parody of Waller, her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson and twenty-four Elegies. These Elegies (written in manuscript and now edited by David Norbrook) mourn both the death of Hutchinson's husband in prison in 1664 and the couple's hopes for a Godly republic. Hutchinson reverses certain conventions of the country house or estate poem genre; hospitality, social harmony and the fertility of the natural world are replaced with political isolation, republican disillusion and a Biblical rhetoric of grief and shame. This article compares Hutchinson's poems with two country house poems, Ben Jonson's ‘To Penshurst’ and Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Description of Cooke-ham’, and also shows the diversity of allusions, including to John Donne's ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ and Sidney Godolphin's translation of Dido's passion for Aeneas. The Elegies reveal Hutchinson as a Puritan Parliamentarian influenced by royalist literary traditions, and an educated and talented woman poet transforming genres in subtly allusive and politically radical ways.

The Uneasy Orthodoxy of St. Erkenwald

The central crux of the alliterative St. Erkenwald is what it means for a hagiographic miracle to coincide with the performance of one of the Church's sacraments. A consideration of the poem's representation of baptism reveals a tension between the story the poet tells and the poem's genre and status as representational art. Many critics have highlighted the poem's orthodoxy; this essay argues instead that while the poem registers an awareness of religious controversies current in late medieval England, it remains deeply unresolved on contemporary theological and ecclesiological questions.

An Essay Of Bibliography About The Studies On A Specific Genre Of Poem Named ‘Şehrengiz’ In The Classical Ottoman Poetry

An Essay Of Bibliography About The Studies On A Specific Genre Of Poem Named ‘Şehrengiz’ In The Classical Ottoman Poetry

Study on the new modern poem genre in the mobile age - focused on -

Study on the new modern poem genre in the mobile age - focused on -

Surgical Imprecision and the Baudelairean poeme en prose

Though Baudelaire's Dedicace Arsene Houssaye provides a dubious manifesto of the prose poem genre, (1) it more importantly builds a network of repeated images and allusions from which, along with the other prose poems in the collection (Le Spleen de Paris or Petits Poemes en prose, 1869) the reader may piece together the prose poems' poetics. Of these, the presence of the snake, and the invitation to perform multiple surgeries on it, are among the most intriguing. Now exceedingly familiar to readers of Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire's serpent might be considered, in literary circles at least, a dead metaphor. Yet by reading beyond the anticipated symbolic power of the snake (the power of evil, the power of the phallus), and of surgery (a masculine vocation, an act of precision), one begins to understand the serpent as not just an ambiguous simulacrum of the prose poems, but a simulacrum of the prose poems' ambiguity. In Le Spleen de Paris, modulations of recognizable and ostensibly masculine acts and images not only erode articulations of gender throughout the prose poems' narrative, thematic and metaphorical systems, but in so doing, accentuate the genre ambiguity implicit in the poeme en prose. Baudelaire's serpent has become a well-known figure in the French literary menagerie, playing a crucial, metaphorical role in the characterization of would-be textual operations in Le Spleen de Paris: Mon cher ami, je vous envoje un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu'il n'a ni queue ni tete, puisque tout, au contraire, y est la fois tete et queue, alternativement et reciproquement. Considerez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodites cette combinaison nous offre tous, vous, a moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper ou nous voulons, moi ma reverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture; carje ne suspens pas la volonte retive de celui-ci au fil d'une intrigue superflue. Enlevez une vertebre, et les deux morceaux deette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister a part. Dans l'esperance que quelques-uns de ces troncons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j'ose vous dedier le serpent tout entier. (OCI, 275) (2) The versed reader has already encountered sundry endangered species in Baudelaire's metaphorical bestiary, among them the tortured albatross, the displaced swan, the mentally imprisoned cat (Miner 1997, 105) and the disoriented bat. It is tempting at first to rely upon this serpent, passively waiting to be clinically segmented and reattached by the reader cum surgeon, as a viable if vulnerable analog of the prose poem collection. Baudelaire's serpent appears to embody vital signs for reading the genre and the text. In fact, the characterization of the serpent and reader is at first so convincing, one easily forgives a zoological inaccuracy: while some small worms (planaria) will regenerate if cut lengthwise, no snake could survive the sort of vivisection Baudelaire prescribes. Poetic license justifies such biological imprecision, yet the figure of the serpent still conceals the anatomy of the prose poems. For the reader who approaches Le Spleen de Paris as a group of poems, the metaphor of the serpent seems in itself superfluous, more a decoy than a model for reading the collection. While Baudelaire did specify in a letter to Vigny that the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal had a beginning, an end, and a lexical order, (3) readers do not necessarily feel bound to follow poetry collections methodically from the first poem to the last. Baudelaire's references to the serpent and to the interminable thread of a superfluous plot represent a rejection of the boundaries normally imposed upon prose, not poetry, specifically the narrative prose of the novel and the short story. Even if we consider each element in the collection to be a short prose piece, the suggested dynamics of surgeon and snake, reader and text, are not obvious. …

An Interview with Clare Cavanagh

Evanston, Illinois 18 July 2000 W. MARTIN: There are rumors that you are also a poet. Is this true? And do you consider translation to be a creative practice? CLARE CAVANAGH: Yes, and I'm not a poet. I'm a former poet. I feel like translating is the right place for me, rather than my own poetry. I think it is a creative enterprise in a different way than being a poet is. way I think of it is more like being an actor or a musician, where somebody else composed the lines for you, the music for you. You feel like you've got the one interpretation, but of course, if it's a work of art at all worth looking at it's worth looking at more than once, in the same way a great work of music can have five different interpretations that can be quite at odds with each other. But I still pretend that I'm doing the definitive one, you know. But that's what I think it's like. WM: You've written one book on Eastern European poetry and you're currently working on another about poetry and politics. Could you talk a little about that? CC: Sure. My first book was on Osip Mandelstam,' it was exclusively on Russian poetry, which is technically my field, but I've gone off on a deviation that's taken over my life. second book' reflects more of where I actually am in terms of my day-to-day work. It's sort-of half-Russian, half-Polish, and half-Anglo-American- it's got too many halves. It's a series of case studies on the relationship between the Romantic tradition of the poetic bard and twentieth century Eastern European politics, specifically with the totalitarian, or the Soviet, landscape, and what that does to the tradition of the poetic bard. So the first half deals with Russia from around 1905, what some historians consider the beginning of the Russian revolution, the failed uprising of 1905, and I start with Blok and Yeats, who are working on how the poet-prophet places himself in relation to national upheaval in interestingly comparable ways, even though politically they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. And then I have a chapter on Whitman and Mayakovsky. There was a huge cult of Whitman in Eastern Europe, and Mayakovsky clearly saw himself in competition with Whitman and was trying to create himself as a kind of bard. And then a chapter called The Death of the Book a la russe that's challenging post-Structuralist and post-Derridean ideas about writing based on an Eastern European model in which writing itself became an endangered model, or an impossible model, for the poet. Derridean idea of orality is based on a Western, bourgeois model in which you have means of printing on hand all the time and nobody is shutting down the presses on a regular basis, let alone shooting you for running the press, or putting you in jail. In Stalinist Russia the cult of the oral poem, the spoken poem, became this dominant model, where people like Mandelstam and Akhmatova were composing poems that either were not written down at all or written down and destroyed. Mandelstam was sent to a camp for a poem he never wrote down; he wrote it down for the first time under interrogation. He recited it to a group of friends, and it got to Stalin that way. So he was demonstrating the power of the oral voice in a country in which speech was regulated beyond all comprehension. And then Akhmatova wrote her Requiem as part of her genre of Poems for the Ashtray -poems that she would write, memorize, have a group of friends commit to memory, and then bum. So, what I'm trying to do is challenge a lot of Western notions of poetry, language, politics, and so forth, because none of them fit the Eastern European model. I have another chapter on Pound, Mandelstam, and Khlebnikov, on ideas of the poet as legislator and the poet as master-builder. And then I switch over to Poland after the importation of Soviet rule, late forties, early fifties. I have a chapter on the cult of Mayakovsky in Poland-which poets took up willingly, they didn't have crammed down their throats, right after World War II. …

The country house poem: a cabinet of seventeenth-century estate poems and related items

This is a new collection of estate poems of the 17th century. Reproduced mainly in their entirety, the poems include ten from Mildmay Fane's manuscripts. Besides the texts, Professor Fowler includes full notes explaining difficult passages, and relating them to their biographical, social and political contexts. There is a substantial introduction, a comprehensive bibliography, and a listing of visual sources. Containing evidence for architectural and art-historians as well as for literature scholars, this collection should clarify the estate poem genre.

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Mosaic of Interpretations by Edwin H. Miller (review)

118Rocky Mountain Review rigor mortis gives the sensually and politically threatening dark woman of the East a statuesque pose that can be beheld without further threat to New England moralities" (211). This interpretation exemplifies what is most exciting about Luedtke's program, for here we step beyond the moralistic thematics of the light and the dark to discover a culturally sophisticated writer. Ofcourse Luedtke's analyses are not consistently provocative or complete. For instance, I found his treatment of The Scarlet Letter more suggestive than compelling. Luedtke does not retheorize Hawthornian romance either, a surprise given the study's title. But Luther Luedtke's Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Romance of the Orient forces us to reread those familiar Hawthorne stories and novels with a keener appreciation for their Oriental subtexts. Ultimately, Hawthorne himself seems one of Dickinson's pards, afflicted by a longing for an Asia of innocence, sensuality, and freedom he can never recover. KEN EGAN, JR. Rocky Mountain College EDWIN H. MILLER. Walt Whitman's "Song ofMyself": A Mosaic of Interpretations. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. 179 p. In an attempt to gain control over the 52 sprawling sections ofSong ofMyself," one commentator (Henry Wells) divides it into five lyrical acts (xx). Another (Malcolm Cowley) discovers nine sequences in Whitman's narrative (xxi). Walt Whitman's lengthy poem is a didactic construction about the growth of the self and creative power and moves through four phases (Roy Harvey Pearce); it "delineates the poet's struggle to free himself from didacticism" and has seven distinct structural units (Howard Waskow, xxii). Over twenty ways of structuring Whitman's poem, with emphasis on varied thematic concerns by commentators from the late nineteenth century to this decade, are offered in the introduction to Edwin Miller's book. With its philosophical questioning, bold and sometimes wild assertions, catalogues and more, "Song of Myself" would seem to elude the grasp ofreaders who desire some semblance ofa unified construction. And it does. Whitman's poem, Miller acknowledges in his introduction, "has been tested by all kinds of methodologies, without achieving a breakthrough to a widely acclaimed consensual reading" (xxviii). The poem's resistance to a critical consensus makes Miller's book especially useful. In addition to the "search for structure" summarized in the introduction, Miller briefly details various attempts to establish the poem's genre. The 1855 version ofthe poem then follows. The heart of the book is 100 pages of section by section commentary, "the mosaic of interpretations." Not all sections are treated equally. Some are dealt with in a brisk paragraph, while others provoked interpretations so illuminating or controversial that pages ofMiller's summary can only suggest their complexity. For example, section 5—"Loafe with me on the grass"—is examined by classifying the thematic issues into Mysticism (God), Sexuality (Man), and Art (Poet). With many sections Miller summarizes or quotes from a variety of approaches, sometimes complementary Book Reviews119 but more often not: mystical, Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, socialhistorical , literary historical, and biographical. Will this gathering together of discordant voices leave the reader dizzy? Consider some responses to the longest ofthe catalogues, section 33. Here the speaker adopts multiple roles and expresses an understanding of a heroic skipper at sea, a "hounded slave," and others in distress and extreme circumstances, and reaches a climax with these lines: "All this I swallow and it tastes good .... I like it well, and it becomes mine, / 1 am the man .... I suffered .... I was there." The poets Randall Jarrell and John Berryman praise the power of these lines. In contrast, Denis Donoghue thinks he has caught the whiff of a sham: "It is one thing to suffer and it is another thing to sympathize with the suffering of others, and these experiences are not identical, no matter what Whitman's equations say" (113). Sparks can fly when no author intervenes to approve, disapprove, or correct the critics' claims. Rather than a sense of dizziness, though, the reader's insight into and appreciation of the poem's ability to sustain widely divergent views can be renewed through a reading of the "mosaic of interpretations." This is not to suggest, though, that Miller is the neutral...