Ideal Poet Research Articles

Orpheus the ideal poet: Notes on the interpretation of the mythological and biblical representations of the Orpheus casket mounts from Intercisa, southeastern cemetery, grave 1023

Orpheus the ideal poet: Notes on the interpretation of the mythological and biblical representations of the Orpheus casket mounts from Intercisa, southeastern cemetery, grave 1023

Specialties of Tamil in Vaanidasan's Works

Poet Vaanidasan can be admired as "poets are born not made". Poet Kannadasan has mentioned in Thentral magazine that if his works are translated into English, he may win the Nobel Prize. In the history of twentieth century literature, he is distinguished as an ideal poet and influenced by poet Bharathidasan. He is Bharathidasan's first student. He has received all the special titles like Tamil Kaatha Pudumai kavinar, Poet of Nature, Bhavalar Mani, Kavinareru Bhavalar Mannan. Awarded "Chevalier" by the French Government. All his poems are about Tamil language, Tamil people, it's culture, features and so on. He gave importance to nature. A poetic voice for the advancement of women. This article aims to highlight the special features of Tamil that are revealed in the works of Vaanidasan.

Shelley’s Poet-Birds

IN ‘TO A SKYLARK’, Shelley wonders how to understand the bird he observes: ‘What thou art we know not; / What is most like thee?’1 The same question might be asked of poets, we realise, when Shelley swiftly makes the skylark ‘like a poet’ that is ‘Singing hymns unbidden’ (ll. 36, 37), a singer of such sincerity and feeling that it might seem a model for the poet. Shelley was fascinated by the identity and responsibility of the poet. Wordsworth asks, ‘what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him?’2 Shelley’s approach is more oblique, his prose and poetry strewn with similes rather than bound by definitions. Conjuring the ideal poet as a combination of legislator and prophet, A Defence of Poetry imagines one who ‘essentially comprises and unites both these characters’ (MW, p. 677). In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley complements this abstract though thoughtful description with brief portraits of figures such as Dante and Plato, who provide examples of the nature of the poet. But in his poetry Shelley returns to the more figurative idea of the poet as a bird, granting himself the freedom to conceive multiple ways of seeing or imagining the poet via an avian counterpart. Strengths and weaknesses are drawn out through the parallels: the poet-bird, sometimes standing in for a particular poet, at other times representing the poet as an unspecified figure, lets Shelley muse upon the reality and the ideal of the poet’s role.

Mythologies of Miswriting: Emerson, Stevens, and Blanchot

Mythologies of Miswriting:Emerson, Stevens, and Blanchot Paul Kane I I WANT TO BEGIN by noting something George Santayana, the renowned philosopher and poet whom Wallace Stevens knew at Harvard, said of Ralph Waldo Emerson (who, famously, was banned from Harvard for thirty years): He was like a young god making experiments in creation: he blotched the work, and always began again on a new and better plan. Every day he said, "Let there be light," and every day the light was new. His sun, like that of Heraclitus, was different every morning. (219) I'm interested in Santayana's use of the unusual word "blotch," which, in this context, looks like a portmanteau word combining "botch" with "blot," wherein the failure referred to is not quite a botch but a bit more than a blot. Marie Borroff, in her essay "Wallace Stevens's World of Words," addresses such "blotches" because they also show up in Stevens's poem "A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream" (CPP 321). She suggests that the term owes something "to an obsolete word plotch" (44), which the OED defines as a "spot" or—indulging its own pleasures of merely circulating—a "blotch." I find Santayana's use of the word intriguing because it echoes Emerson's own sense of the way all creations, all poems, are blotches, or, as he says in "The Poet," "miswritings": For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. (Essays 449) [End Page 41] To me, this notion of miswriting (blotching the work) is central to Emerson's poetics and poetry, and I think it has bearing on Stevens's work as well. The movement from Emerson to Stevens is by now a well-worn track, but I'm going to take a more circuitous path by way of interpretation. And while I'm not sure this is a "new and better plan," or that I'll be able to say "Let there be light" (I'm hardly a "young god"), it is nonetheless intended to be in the spirit of Emersonian experiment. To continue with Emerson: in his essay "The Poet" (one of his longest1), the transvaluation of poetry is so extreme that it becomes clear Emerson's ideal poet does not exist and never has, except as an idealized or mythologized being, such as Uriel or Seyd (Saadi) in the poem "Uriel" (the "greatest Western poem yet," according to Robert Frost—another trans-valuation2). In that poem, the archangel poet gives his "sentiment divine" as follows (Essays 1065): "Line in nature is not found;Unit and universe are round;In vain produced, all rays return;Evil will bless, and ice will burn." (1065–66) This apostasy leads to a chaos of confusion and the cosmic poet forever withdraws, though on certain occasions "Uriel's voice of cherub scorn" can be heard, shaking the gods, they know not why (1066). This veiling of divine poetry leaves us bereft of its highest manifestations. It's akin to saying, in response to the complaint that there's no justice in the world, that of course there isn't, Astraea left in dismay a long time ago. But Emerson is nonetheless keen to detail in "The Poet" the process of making poems, and I think we can hear something of his own practice adhering in his remarks. In particular, there is this well-known assertion: For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. (Essays 450) I want to linger over this passage because I find it...

The impersonal personified: Emerson’s poet

ABSTRACTIn her analysis of the impersonal in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, not only does Sharon Cameron identify Emerson’s poet as a ‘practitioner of the impersonal’, she also notes that a double voice is at work throughout ‘The Poet’. This article intends to take on the exploration of the links between the impersonal and Emerson’s poet, to argue that the impersonal voice of the essays may refer back to the ideal poet. Doing so, I suggest that the poet can be conceived of as Emerson’s heteronym.

King Lear: A Negatively Capable Outsider

Negative capability, John Keats’s coined term, defines the ideal poet as being capable of being in uncertainties and mysteries without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. He insists that poets let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, by holding no fixed identity but metamorphic identities. Although Keats finds the ideal quality of a poet in Shakespeare the poet, it does not appear far from logical to investigate it in the characters of his plays, specifically king Lear, as he undergoes changes throughout the story and cuts across his enclosed self to enrich his receptivity to the actual vastness of life experience after he is estranged and labelled as an outsider in his erstwhile kingdom. In the present study I will employ the ongoing vigor of negative capability to take a step further ahead of its theoretically stipulated implications and investigate it on the character of king Lear.

Keats’s Epistles and His Claims for a Poetic Career

Of the ten surviving letters by Keats from the period before the publication of his first volume, Poems, in March 1817, five are directly linked to Poems. Three of those five are the epistles included in Keats’s first volume. In the epistles, Keats expresses his doubts as he stands at the beginning of his poetic career, contemplates specific aspects of that career, and addresses individuals who each play a role in his poetic development. Keats presents himself as a poet by defining the skills and responsibilities of his ideal Poet and in subsequent passages showing himself as possessing the skills of the Poet and meeting those responsibilities.

To the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew and Dryden's View of an Ideal Poet

To the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew and Dryden's View of an Ideal Poet

Wordsworth's Poetics of Speech and Language Acquisition in "Lyrical Ballads"

the cold, lonely winter of 1799, Wordsworth complained Coleridge, acquired more french in two months, than I should acquire German in five years living as we have lived. Wordsworth continued. In short[,] sorry am I say it I do consider myself as knowing any thing of the German (EY 255). He believes that conversation with native-speakers would help: should be perfectly contented if we could find a house where there were several young people some of whom might perhaps be always at leisure converse with us. We do wish read much but should both be highly delighted be and chatter'd to, through the whole day (EY 254). But the inhabitants at Goslar are inhospitable, petty tradespeople; in general a low and selfish race; intent upon gain, according Dorothy. They cannot find in their hearts ask of a stranger a fair price for their goods, she continued (EY 245). Similarly, William dismissed the inhabitants of Goslar as grocers and linen-drapers,...a wr etched race; the flesh, blood, and bone of their minds being nothing but knavery and low falsehood (EY 249). And, as Dorothy explained Christopher, their lack of funds prevented their entry into the better society of the place. Their best conversant, according William, was dear kind creature whose deafness and poor teeth made their conversations a jolly lesson in talking at utter cross-purposes. With bad German, bad English, bad French, bad hearing, and bad utterance you will imagine we have had very pretty dialogues (EY 249). Learning a language, Wordsworth observes, is not merely the knowing that 'Liebe' is German for 'love', and 'darum' for 'therefore' c words are a mere dead letter in the mind (EY 249-50). Literary emolument is even dust in the balance. If I had had the opportunities of conversing I should have cared much if I had read a line, he wrote Coleridge (EY 254-55). 1791, however, within two months of his arrival at Dieppe, passing through Paris settle in Orleans, Wordsworth found himself chattering and being chatter'd to in French through both days and nights. Virtually no English speakers lived in Orleans in 1791, Kenneth Johnston notes, and Wordsworth entered into the lives and language of a diverse group of French speakers. Indeed, as early as December 19, less than a month after his arrival, Wordsworth told his brother, Richard, that he thought economize engaging a French master, for he could do nearly as well without one (EY 70). Looking back on his stay in France, Wordsworth describes the experience of stepping out of English ways and leaving English words behind as a growth and expansion into a new, vital world. His attention was engrossed by novelties in speech,/Domestic manners, customs, gestures, looks,/And all the attire of ordinary life. His rapt interest in the strange life around him kept him tranquil almost, and careless as a flower/Glassed in a green-house, or a parlour shrub/That spreads its leaves in unmolested peace,/While every bush and tree, the country through,/Is shaking the roots (Pr 1805 9:82-4, 87-91). The Royalist officers at Orleans kindly indulged his half-learned speech (Pr 1805 9:195). I--who had been else/Shunned and tolerated--freely lived/With these defenders of the crown, and talked,/And heard their notions, Wordsworth writes (Pr 1805 9:196-199). Wordsworth also met Michel Beaupuis, whom Johnston calls a military version of the 'man speaking men' of Wordsworth's ideal Poet (304). Words worth remembers tromping through the countryside with Beaupuis discussing government, chartered rights/Allegiance, faith, and laws time matured/Custom and habit, novelty and change (Pr 1805 9:331-333). …

Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism by Ewa M. s> Thompson (review)

REVIEWS 515 The last three articles are all comparative. Liudmila Kovnatskaia draws some fairly superficialparallelsbetween Shostakovich and Britten (the latter was convinced that there was an affinitybetween them, or, at least, that they came from common musical stock).Caryl Emerson in a short but substantial essay writes on the Tsvetaeva song cycle, op. I43, placing the poems in the wider context of the, for Russians, eternal and culturally mythologized question of the appropriate life and death for poets; she also makes a comparisonwith Musorgskii'sdiametricallyopposite Songs andDancesofDeath. Emerson draws an intricate web, comparing the despair of Musorgskiiand the tradition of resistingthe tsar, ambiguous in Pushkin,with Tsvetaeva the poet's totally individual attitude to life and death. Her belief in eternity for poetry and concomitant indifference to her own corporeal existence makes her, in Emerson's view, an ideal poet 'to prolong the music' (p. I98). In 'Shostakovichand Chekhov',Bartlettexploresthree aspectsof the composer's attitudeto Chekhov:hisrole asa writerand moralexemplarforShostakovich; thecomposer'screativeexperimentswithChekhov'stexts;and the significance of Shostakovich'sown important and original contribution as a critic to the study of narrative construction in Chekhov, in particular his perception of 'sonata form' in TheBlackMonk.She does, however, concede that 'many of Chekhov's writings, short stories as well as plays, could be interpretedfrom the point of view of sonataform'(p. 2I7). There are a few editorial glitches: the 'simplified'(p. x) transliterationis inconsistent, as is the provision of translations of texts and of titles and citations; worse, note 29 has disappeared from Taruskin's article (p. I6). Nonetheless, thiscollection makesaveryworthwhilecontributionto Shostakovich studies, for the brilliance of some of the contributions, for the new information,and for the excellent photographicillustrations. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN University College London Thompson, Ewa M. ImperialKnowledge. RussianLiterature and Colonialism. Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 99. Greenwood Press, Westport,Connecticut, and London, 2000. Viii + 239 pp. Notes. Bibliography .Index. $59.95. EDWARD SAID has well and truly arrived in Russian studies. Several recent books and articles have been devoted to the subject of Russia's appropriation political and (especially)ideological of itsvariouscolonies. Among these studies Ewa M. Thompson's book stands out for being exceptionally hard-hitting. It argues that Russia's colonial adventureswere no less (and if anything, more) violent and destructive of indigenous societies and cultures than those of otherimperialpowers;that theywere given strongand enduring discursivesupport in literature,journalism and scholarship;and that, unlike Westernformercolonialist nations, Russia has to thisday not begun to reflect in earnest on the part it has played in its own painful imperial legacy. The seriousness of these failings, Thompson contends, has been exacerbated by the West's readiness to take Russia at its own estimation as an international 5I6 SEER, 79, 3, 200 I political force. It has been all too widely accepted that Russia's historical destiny requires expansion to the south and east (and even to the west);and the grave abuses committed by Russia as an imperial power have been obscured by its geographical contiguity with its colonies and by the sheer awfulnessof itsown twentieth-centuryhistory(whichhasenabledthe Russians to claim victimhood with some plausibilityand moral impact). Thompson's interestsand sourcesare spreadwidely as she strivesto expose the ideological fictions of Russian Orientalism: she presents material on Russian Romanticism , WarandPeace, Solzhenitsyn,villageprose, Russianhistoricaland literary scholarship,the Nazi-Soviet pact, post-Soviet school textbooks, and contemporary women's writing (with particular reference to Liudmila Petrushevskaia). Anyone familiarwith the political discourseof the two Chechen campaigns of the I990S would find it hard to begrudge Thompson the conviction (even passion)with which she arguesher case. Russia is stilla countrythat struggles to achieve the slightest degree of self-awarenessin assessing its own role in international affairs.And although Thompson seems at times to exaggerate the extent of Western acquiescence in Russian self-aggrandizement, it is certainly true that Russia has pulled off some prodigious (and egregious) discursivefeats. Foremostamong these, surely,is the appallingappropriation of Siberia as an emblem of Russianness (and never mind the appalling oppression -followed latelyby total neglect of the indigenouspeoples). Yet, despite the sympathy one feels for the basic thrust of Thompson's argument and for many of her observations, her book is flawed in several ways...

Reading One Poet in Light of Another: Herbert and Frost

James Boyd White Reading One Poet in Light of Another: Herbert and Frost In this paper I wish both to draw certain connections between Herbert and Frost and at the same time to say something in a general way about the process by which such connections can be made. It is with the latter question that I begin. Once the relation between two writers would have been thought of mainly in terms of "influence." And one might indeed argue that Herbert did have significant influence on Frost's poetic practice — if not directly, for Frost was not a great reader of Herbert, then indirectly, through Emerson, who was in many ways Frost's master and who read Herbert with admiration throughout his life.1 But I am not now interested in advancing that line of argument, in part because the more I think about it the less clear I am about what such a claim of influence could really mean. I wish rather to look at the connections between these poets from the point of view of the reader, as an instance of the way in which one's prior experience of reading shapes one's present responses to a particular text or series of texts. For we cannot help placing what we read in contexts of our own making, defined by our educations; these contexts in turn give meaning to what we read, as certain features are highlighted or obscured by the expectations we have formed. The connections so established can be chronological, as one brings one's reading of Donne, say, to Yeats; or antichronological , as in my own reading of Frost and Herbert, for I was familiar with Frost, who was to me very much the ideal poet, long before I read Herbert with any care. In this paper, then, I shall briefly approach Herbert with the eyes, or perhaps more properly listen to him with the ears, of one whose sense of poetry was in considerable measure shaped by Frost. 60James Boyd White What I say has an irreducibly autobiographical element, but I do not apologize for this; it is part of my point that all of our readings have such elements and that it would be good to make them more explicit than we often do. The poem is not an abstract art-object to be examined "objectively," after all, but a text made by one mind reaching out to others; and what it means to any one of us is in part shaped by the history of his or her own mind. In my own case, an important part of this history was the training in reading I received at Amherst College in the late 1950s.2 This was a world in which, as I saw it, the English department ruled supreme. English was widely regarded as the most demanding and rewarding field of study, with an almost mystical power, and close to the center of that field was Robert Frost. He was Amherst's poet, we felt: he had actually taught there many years before and he still visited the campus for a week or two every year, and sometimes even more frequently. And he was of New England, at least by transplantation — as we were of New England too, at least by transplantation . More even than Eliot he was the exemplar of what a poet could be. Part of this was his interest in form; part that he seemed to speak in ordinary language, the virtues of which were the subject of the great freshman composition course that transformed the minds of so many of us. Frost could be seen, as Reuben Brower and others argued, as a poet of voices;3 and "voice" and "tone of voice" were essential elements of our vocabulary, not only in the reading of poetry, but in thinking about our own writing; for we were taught that in writing we defined ourselves and acted on others, and that writing itself was in this sense a radically ethical activity. The heart of what it has meant for me to come to Herbert by way of Frost, to read Herbert in light of Frost, is that the reading...

Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove

When Emerson, in 1840s, imagined an ideal American poet, he confessed his difficulties even with models of Milton and Homer; one he found too and other too literal and (Whicher 239). As with other of his pronouncements, Emerson leaves this one suggestively unexplained. I take him to mean that his ideal poet will be equally faithful both to what we call art and to what we call history, and that even in great poets, these fidelities are not easily reconciled. Czeslaw Milosz also drew attention to poet's divided loyalties in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1981-82. Milosz defined poetry as a passionate pursuit of Real(56), and then acknowledged, indeed insisted, that poet's motives are necessarily mixed.(1) In act of writing, Milosz said, every poet is making a choice between dictates of poetic language and his fidelity to real (71). But, he quickly adds, two operations cannot be neatly separated, they are interlocked (71). Adapting Emerson's terms, I want to explore way both literary and literal make themselves felt in work of three contemporary poets: Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove. Each of these women is a member of a different American minority, and work of each exhibits pressures of particular, historical reality, and of poet's need to witness what is. All three of these writers experience what Milosz calls way events burdening a whole community are perceived by poet as touching him in a most personal manner (94-95). Yet work of these poets is shaped not only by their cultures but also by a passion for language's possibilities, for creative and experimental energy of poetry itself. At times this passion can seem to separate them from very communities of which they are a part; sensuous appeal of poetry may seem irrelevant to those who live amidst more pressing and immediate concerns. The poet's formal, literary education and her fluency with written language may also separate her from her cultural community. And while beyond scope of this essay, important issue of a poet's fluency in English, when her experience is multicultural and bilingual, further complicates this matter.(2) What, then, would faithfulness both to power of literary (with its creative use of language, its love of design, its connectedness to other writing) and to power of literal (with its material reality, its resistance to design, its relation to history) mean for poets like Cervantes, Song and Dove? This question must be grappled with in immediacy of particular poems, where imaginative transformations of language meet resistance to transformation that Emerson calls literal, or history, and that Milosz calls the real. 2 It was never in planning, in life we thought we'd live together, two fast women living cheek to cheek, still tasting dog's breath of boys in our testy new awakening. We were never way they had it planned. Their wordless tongues we stole and tasted power that comes of that. We were never what they wanted but we were bold. (16) These lines are opening of For Virginia from Lorna Dee Cervantes's powerful and accomplished first book, Emplumada (1981). In making this poem my starting poInt, I choose a work explicit about poet's double loyalty. For Virginia Chavez negotiates connection and difference between poet-speaker, whose access to literature and whose power with words separates her, to some degree, from Chicana world she grew up in, and girlhood friend to whom poem is addressed. As she explores her relation to Virginia Chavez, Cervantes also thinks through relations between poetic language and direct experience, between activities of poetry and of ordinary life. She begins For Virginia Chavez with pronoun we, asserting girls' mutual rebellion against their cultures' expectations for them. …

The Reference Librarian as “the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures”

That librarianship has become, in the words of the cliche, a world of “bits and bytes” is itself a cliche. Librarians who admit that they were originally attracted to the field by the librarian's proverbial love of books — a world of imagination and poetry — have been embarrassed into silence. The day belongs to information managers rather than to bookmen, a term held doubly archaic since in this case the book is secondary to its bibliographic control and since the alleged inherent sexism of the term offends the sensibility of librarians more concerned about politics than about language. Until recently, a reference transaction ended invariably at a codex rather than at a terminal. At such a time as the present, therefore, the suggestion that the ideal reference librarian should model himself (or, needless to say, herself) on the ideal poet is likely to be greeted by many with incredulity and by some with derisive laughter.

Emerson and the Bardic Tradition

Emerson saw in the art of poetry a process veiled in mystery, and no one fully acquainted with his writings is unaware of the manifold ways in which Emerson approached that mystery in an attempt to explain it. As early as 1838, he began what he hoped would be a long poem on the poet and his art. Occasionally returning to the composition over a period of some years, in the end he left only fragments of his original plan. The essay entitled “The Poet”, published in 1844, integrated more fully many of the conclusions to which Emerson had come on the subject. But still he was apparently unsatisfied. Further early experiments in suggesting the function of the poet are revealed in four poems in the 1847 collection of verses. In “The Problem”, “Saadi”, and “Bacchus” Emerson viewed in different ways the origin of the artist's and poet's power. And in the last poem, entitled “Merlin”, he turned back, for the embodiment of the ideal poet, to the ancient bard.