Individual Poems Research Articles

Automatic Poetic Metre Detection for Czech Verse

Metrical analysis of verse is an essential and challenging task in the research on versification consisting of analysing a poem and deciding which metre it is written in. Thanks to existing corpora, we can take advantage of data-driven approaches, which can be better suited to the specific versification problems at hand than rulebased systems. This work analyses the Czech accentual-syllabic verse and automatic metre assignment using the vast and annotated Corpus of Czech Verse. We define the problem as a sequence tagging task and approach it using a machine learning model and many different input data configurations. In comparison to this approach, we reimplement the existing data-driven system KVĚTA. Our results demonstrate that the bidirectional LSTM-CRF sequence tagging model, enhanced with syllable embeddings, significantly outperforms the existing KVĚTA system, with predictions achieving 99.61% syllable accuracy, 98.86% line accuracy, and 90.40% poem accuracy. The model also achieved competitive results with token embeddings. One of the most interesting findings is that the best results are obtained by inputting sequences representing whole poems instead of individual poem lines.

The poetry of Maria Konopnicka in the context of belarusian-polish literary connections.

The purpose of the article is to study the artistic features of the lyrics of Maria Konopnicka, analyze the ideological and aesthetic foundations of her creative method and poetic style, as well as scientific understanding of the place and role of this bright representative of Polish positivism literature within the Belarusian cultural and historical paradigm. The introduction substantiates the novelty and relevance of the study of the poetic heritage of M. Konopnicka in the context of Belarusian-Polish literary ties. In the main part, on the example of individual poems, the ways of artistic comprehension by the poetess of a number of aesthetic, philosophical and socio-political ideas that are relevant both among the Polish and Belarusian creative intelligentsia are shown. This fact led to the emergence of literary followers, translators and interpreters of M. Konopnicka’s work, one of which is Yanka Kupala, the first national poet of Belarus. Also, the genuine interest of Belarusians in the Polish writer is explained by common cultural and historical values and traditions, a similar orientation towards representatives of the previous era (Adam Mitskevich, Juliush Slovatsky and some other Polish-Litvinian romantics). In summary, conclusions are formulated about the ideological and aesthetic searches of M. Konopnicka, as well as about the place of her poetry in the system of realism and the context of Belarusian-Polish literary ties.

Poetry of G.A. Levin on the pages of Saratov publications in the 20s of the XX century

The purpose of this article is to analyze the poetic works of the Saratov poet G.A. Levin, published on the pages of the periodicals «Artistic Saratov» and «Sarrabis» in Saratov in the 20s of the past century. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact for the first time the poems of G.A. Levin «The air shines with a blessed blue», «I know, a dark, beloved voice», «Chernyshevsky’s Monument», «The early coolness has been drained to the dregs», «Shakespeare» are mentioned. The article focuses on the aesthetic side of these poems, emphasizing their extreme lyricism and abundance of figurative means. In addition, this study notes the relevance of the poetry of G.A. Levin on the pages of these publications not only because of their external artistry, but also because of their ideological expressiveness. The editorial board of the magazines «Art Saratov» and «Sarrabis» considered the poems of G.A. Levin worthy of understanding, since the goal was to instill good taste in the Saratov reader of the 1920s and teach him to appreciate genuine literary works. As a result, the following was revealed: (a) G.A. Levin gives the images greater ideological and artistic capacity and expressiveness; (b) the poet uses metaphors and epithets not only as conventional methods of expressiveness, but also as forms of holistic knowledge of the essence of the Universe; (c) the poet paid special attention to love lyrics, intertwined Russian and Italian themes in individual poems, and resorted to Shakespearean heroes. The article notes the versatility of the poetic image, and the analysis of the poems is carried out taking into account the influence of the lyrics of famous poets of the Silver Age on Levin’s poetry.

KODIRANJE LJUBAVI U DJEČJOJ POEZIJI

Children’s poetry is oriented towards the child’s experience of the world, encompassing themes of play, nature, homeland, emotions, and others. It follows the emotional, interest, and cognitive development of the child, and themes and motifs in children’s poetry are incorporated differently depending on the age of the implicit readers, as observed in poetry with themes of love. Children’s love poetry includes various manifestations of love, from so-called partner love, through thematizing family emotions to love for friends, animals, homeland, etc. In the study, Luhmann’s communication concepts of love coding were applied to the selected corpus of Croatian children’s and adolescent love poetry that thematizes so-called partner love, and the models of love coding were observed as idealization, paradox, incommunicability, and romantic coding of love. The idealization model recognizes beauty and virtue as what attracts lovers, but it also extends to accepting imperfect aesthetic characteristics and flaws. The paradox as a communication model implies communication models that provoke contradiction by displaying emotions in unexpected and inappropriate ways or by diminishing the lover’s abilities and comparing love to illness. Lyrical subjects demonstrate the inability or avoidance of expressing emotions, which can lead to communication breakdown or its absence, and such a communication model is observed as a model of incommunicability. Codes of romantic love tend towards the privacy of lovers and encompass gestures and occasional verbalization. Different codes can intertwine and complement each other in individual poems.

Bioautonomia a zawieszenie (między)gatunkowej wspólnotowości. "Pokarm suweren" Kacpra Bartczaka wobec filozofii suwerenności

The article, which is an analysis of Kacper Bartczak’s poetry collection "Pokarm suweren" ["Food Sovereign"], presents the characteristics of the title figures (food and sovereignty), their interdependence and their significance for the issues addressed by the poet. The interpretation is built against the background of the concept of sovereignty as understood by Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Readings of individual poems aim to demonstrate that Bartczak’s lyrical subjects, in the course of experience, attempt to approach a (neo)vitalism tailored to their world-feeling, and thus initiate the objective imperative of the power of biology, deriving this necessity from the idiomatically seen poetic language – a source of order located outside the system of technopolitics and arbitrary law, but deeply connected to life.

Constructing a Poetics of Connections: From Network to Relation in Pandemic Poetry Performances from South Africa

This essay analyses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on poetic production in South Africa to theorize connection as a dominant motif in contemporary poetry. In South Africa, poets compensate for the lack of state or market support for the arts through community organizations and collaborations. Under lockdowns, in-person events like open mics were replaced by digital programmes hosted on corporate-owned public platforms like Facebook Live, as artists sought to transmute social capital into material support. Performance poetry, in particular, exploded in popularity, offering comfort and connection amidst isolation. With the turn to the digital, spaces for community formation increasingly reflect the neoliberal logic of the network. The South African literary organization Hear My Voice raised a “Poetry Relief Fund” to pay honoraria for weekly poetry performances on Facebook Live. At the same time, poet and playwright Siphokazi Jonas reconceived her politically urgent poem-play #WeAreDyingHere as an international call to arms, reaching new audiences around the world. These events, alongside international festivals like Zukiswa Wanner’s Afrolit Sans Frontières, created new possibilities for understanding connection within the creative economy. But what kind of community is instantiated through those platforms? Who, specifically, is supported, and under which terms? And how does poetry itself mediate those relationships? I analyse both individual poems and the media platforms in which they are embedded to argue that, if relationality and networks represent two different models of sociality, connection offers a paradigm that acknowledges the ascendance of network modes of production without acceding to their logics.

“Pain of Speaking”: Language and Environmental (In)justice in Ofelia Zepeda’s Where Clouds Are Formed

Ofelia Zepeda, an enrolled member of the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation (formerly Papago), is one of the most acknowledged Native American poets of her generation. Zepeda’s creative writing can be characterized as eco-poetry, for it is deeply connected with the natural environment of the Tohono O’odham traditional tribal territory in the Sonoran Desert of the American Southwest. The present paper focuses on the motif of language and speech as it is presented in Zepeda’s latest collection of verses Where Clouds Are Formed (2008). The paper maps the diverse forms in the work and in studies of individual poems (some of which are bilingual: English and Tohono O’odham), the significance of the traditional language within the context of so-called environmental (in)justice is explored.

Evaluating rhyme annotations for large corpora

Abstract Recent methods have been proposed to produce automatic rhyme annotators for large rhymed corpora. These methods, such as Baley (2022b) greatly reduce the cost of annotating rhymed material, allowing historical linguists to focus on the analysis of the rhyme patterns. However, evidence for the quality of those annotations has been anecdotal, consisting of a handful of individual poem case studies. This paper proposes to address the issue: first, we discuss previously proposed metrics that evaluate the quality of an annotator’s output against a ground-truth annotation (List, Hill, and Foster; 2019) and we propose an alternative metric that is better suited to the task. Then, sampling from Baley’s published annotated corpus and re-annotating it by hand, we use the sample to demonstrate the lacunae in the original approach and show how to fix them. Finally, the hand-annotated sample and source code are published as additional data, so that other researchers can compare the performance of their own annotators.

Translingual Poetry by Bakhyt Kairbekov

The article is devoted to the analysis of a translingual literary text, which is a methodologically complex object of study due to its belonging to two (or more) linguocultural fields. The theory of translinguism is an actual course of interdisciplinary research, the problems of which affect the features of the creation and functioning of a text created by the author in a language that is not ethnically primary for him. A brief review of theoretical works devoted to the scientific concept of “translingualism” is given. On the material of individual poems by B. Kairbekov from the poetic collection “Towards the Sun”, individual elements of translingual poetics are identified and characterized.

ON THE QUESTION OF CLARIFYING THE NAME OF ZHU DA (1626–1705) AND ITS ORIGIN

Zhu Da (1626–1705) was a famous Chinese artist who lived during the late-Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty. He was born in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province. Zhu Da was related to the imperial house of Ming. After the fall of this dynasty, during the reign of the Manchus, he was forced to hide, became a monk for some time and reached heights in the study of Buddhism, after which he returned to worldly life. Zhu Da and his work were significantly influenced by the classical texts of Confucianism, the philosophy of Cheng-Zhu, Buddhism and Taoism. His poetic captions for paintings and individual poems are extremely symbolic and have a special artistic style. Zhu Da became a reformer of traditional literati painting (wenrenhua) and raised it to new heights. Subsequently, he had a great influence on the painting of representatives of the Four Monks and the Eight Eccentrics from Yangzhou, as well as on the style of such 20th century masters as Qi Baishi and Xu Beihong, who worked at the end of the Qing period and the beginning of the Republican period in China. The last fifty years have become the most fruitful period in the field of studying the work of Zhu Da. The research moved outside of China, publications by foreign scientists appeared about the artist, and the name of Zhu Da (Bada Shanren) gained worldwide fame and recognition. The scientific works and articles devoted to him are conventionally divided into the following three thematic areas. The first one is the study of Zhu Da’s pseudonyms (names), his life and contacts with artists and poets, his contemporaries. The second area is the study of Zhu Da’s creative thought and artistic achievements. The third one is a study of the influence of Zhu Da’s painting style on later artists and related comparisons. The article analyses publications and scientific works devoted to Zhu Da’s creative work, published over the past half century. Among them, those related to clarifying the pseudonyms (names) of Zhu Da, his pedigree and biography are especially highlighted; various approaches of Chinese and foreign scientists to the study of the creative work of the outstanding Chinese master and his artistic heritage are considered.

Тополектизация поэтического текста в годы формирования китайской «новой поэзии»

The paper explores the infiltration of topolect into the poetry of Liu Bannong and Crescent Moon Society authors, induced by the Folksong Collection Movement, often labeled as introducing vernacular into poetry. The language of Liu Bannong’s New Poetry presents a complex hybrid between the emerging literary norm, local Beijing vernacular and his native lect of the northern Taihu region. Many contemporaries noted his poetry’s merits and his invaluable contribution to New Poetry development, greatly facilitated by Liu Bannong’s professional linguistic training. Following Liu Ban Nong’s footsteps, the Crescent Moon Society suggested experimenting with a new poetic language through the prism of the vernacular. Theorizing was supported by poetic practice: the authors of the Crescent Moon Society included topolect vocabulary in the texts abundantly, and directly marked individual poems as colloquial. In addition to inlaying topolect vocabulary or including large fragments of text written in topolect, topolectization was also carried out through rhyming. Despite the fact that further influence of this topolect poetry remained underestimated, the emerging connection between topolect and the authentic embodiment of the idea of a national language has become important for any discussion about language reform in the new China.

Memory of the Holocaust in Henryk Grynberg’s volume of poetry "Dowód osobisty" [Personal ID

Virtually all of Henryk Grynberg’s work is devoted to the subject of the Holocaust. In the 2006 volume entitled Dowód osobisty, individual poems require not only knowledge of the Shoah but also of the author’s biography and other work. In many, the lyrical subject is endowed withthe poet’s own characteristics. Another modality of presenting the world - one seldom employedin poetry - is through the utterance of a collective subject (the lyrical “us”, which may be identified with the Jewish nation), in which the focus shift from the personal, individual experience to a more general and objective scope. Also, numerous poems feature indirect allusions to Grynberg’s earlier work. Hence, their interpretation is contingent on the reader’s literary experience.

Robert Frost: Poems in Books, Poems against Books

In Robert Frost’s oeuvre the poetry book or volume is an important unit or scale for the composition, reception, and interpretation of poetry, but its formal parameters and generic conventions have been understudied. Focusing on the arrangement of poems within Frost’s first five books, and then their eventual derangement in his first Collected Poems, I examine Frost’s conflicting convictions on the question of the independence of each individual poem versus the coherence of several in an integrated collection.

Teaching poems by authors of colour at key stage 3: categorising what is taught

ABSTRACT This paper draws on a survey conducted in 2020–21 in which 163 secondary English teachers in England named a total of 68 individual poems by poets of colour from the global majority which they taught in Key Stage 3 (students aged 11–14). Using the concepts of framing and mental schemas, we categorised these poems by considering which was the most likely frame or theme under which they would be taught. The largest category was Identity (15 poems), followed by War and Conflict (12 poems) and Racism (11 poems). War and Conflict, together with Love and Relationships (7 poems) are categories which reflect GCSE groups of poems. We suggest that poems by global majority poets which are incorporated into the curriculum are likely to be largely framed as being about race or related issues. The exception is the “strong” framing of the GCSE clusters. We argue that this is a shortfall in the ways in which the curriculum is being diversified. We note the long shadow of “Poetry from Other Cultures” and suggest that we need both more poems from global majority authors and more variety in the themes which they explore.

The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb

Reviewed by: The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb Langdon Hammer The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens. By Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. If a poem is like a picture, it is like an object, with the manifest presence of a thing. To say a poem is like music is to say it is like a process or performance, an event happening in time, and therefore fugitive. While pictures may or may not be mimetic, music rarely is, and that lack of external reference adds to the impression of fugitivity. When we look at a picture, we stand in a frontal, focalized orientation to an object at a certain distance from us. When we listen to music, even when we are seated in a hall, we are surrounded by an ambient phenomenon with no fixed location. Music sweeps over and through us. Arguably, because sound waves physically enter the body via the ear canal, music is present as much inside as outside of the listener. To judge from the number of books and articles on the two subjects, criticism finds it easier to discuss poetry’s relationship to visual art than its relationship to music, although, in the primacy it gives to sound and the way it unfolds in time, poetry has demonstrably more in common with music than with visual art. Stevens scholarship is not an exception, having been more focused over the years on the poet’s relationship to modern painting and visual art than on his relationship to music. Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb’s The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens adjusts that balance with the first monograph overview of the subject. Rather than a sustained argument, the book is structured as a series of semi-independent chapters exploring diverse topics, including music and memory, melody, birdsong and the sounds of nature, and Stevens’s relationship to modern European composers. Despite this variety of approach, a unified view of Stevens emerges. Stevens’s poetry, the co-authors write, is “an art of textual performance that invites open-ended interpretive processes and embodied experiences” in the service of a “musical aesthetic of transience, ephemerality, and affective intensification” (2). This view is not entirely new: it is consistent with the American pragmatist poet represented in philosophically oriented accounts of Stevens. But the focus on music, by putting Stevens into the company of modern European composers, makes for a rich recontextualization of his aesthetic thinking and fresh reference points for the reading of individual poems. Eeckhout and Goldfarb invite us to read “Of Mere Being,” for instance, with Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in mind. “Im Abendrot,” the last of the songs, concludes with a pair of flutes imitating birdcalls at dusk (an unusual moment of unmistakably mimetic music). The co-authors suggest that Stevens, a longtime admirer of Strauss, “might have been haunt[ed] . . . —in whatever manner: consciously, unconsciously, semiconsciously—” by those “warbling” flutes (117) when, in his last poem, he imagined a “gold-feathered” [End Page 114] bird singing “Without human feeling, a foreign song” (CPP 476). The link between Stevens’s poem and Strauss’s song is nicely worked out, but the conditional “might have been” raises questions about the status of the connection. When Eeckhout and Goldfarb go on to propose that Stevens might have been in the audience when Gustav Mahler conducted his First Symphony in New York, and that music might have informed his poem “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,” some readers will balk at so much speculation. But the coauthors’ aim is less to insist on direct influence than to put Stevens’s poetry into conversation with modern orchestral music. There is no doubt Stevens tried to create poetic equivalents of certain musical effects. Referring to the presentation of the silver rose in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, he wrote, “The glancing chords haunt me and sometimes I try to reproduce the effect of them in words” (L 744). Did he perhaps imagine orchestral composers as part of the audience for his poems? He did on at least one important occasion. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” was commissioned for the sesquicentennial...

Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty

Reviewed by: Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty Magdalena Kay WOMEN, POETRY AND THE VOICE OF A NATION, by Anne Varty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 248 pp. $110 hardback; $105 ebook. Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty is a ground-breaking book that engages with the work of four laureate poets of the United Kingdom and Ireland: Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead, and Paula Meehan. The book’s discussion focuses largely on the poets’ prose comments and manifesto-style pronouncements, looking at the ways they have made themselves visible in public space. Varty explores how these authors gained access to a poetry establishment dominated by men, how they critique prevailing representations of the home nation, and how they have gone from liminal positions to central ones. It also contains moments of close reading of individual poems in chapters devoted to each poet, as well as a chapter on their negotiations with William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and William Butler Yeats. Although feeling the need to seek permission to use one’s voice is, of course, not unique to female poets— even after winning the Nobel Prize, Seamus Heaney speaks of feeling the need to ask permission to undertake his acclaimed translation of Beowulf (1999)—this book centers on a gendered sense of exclusion. Varty does a wonderful job of presenting the foundational energies animating female poets in the twentieth century. The desire to make space for women’s voices is perhaps a given, but the ways in which poets take energy from their re-conceptualizations of the poetic voice is a phenomenon well worth reading about. The notion of “vitality arising from resistance, subversion and opposition” is intriguing (p. 6). Indeed, the book is not unified around any orthodoxy. For example, the question of national identity has the potential to be vexing for women writers who may feel, like the Irish poet Eavan Boland, that their voices are “outside history.”1 Other authors may argue that this issue does not hinge on a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion but rather upon recognition of various modalities for expressing collective identity, which may not hew to heroic or even public models for expressing national belonging. While this book focuses on the United Kingdom and Ireland, it is alive to the fact that influence is transnational. Sylvia Plath is positioned as an enabling voice that allows British women to feel that someone is listening, while the influence of Gary Snyder upon Meehan is sensitively recounted (p. 7). Varty is also aware that some of the poets represented here have a complex relation to the United Kingdom as a multi-national entity (indeed, it is hard to think of Boland or Meehan seeing themselves as poets of the United Kingdom). The book’s interest in laureate positions focalizes these concerns but also runs the risk of attaching overmuch importance to a role that some writers view as near-anachronism. Potential readers, though, may be drawn to this book precisely for its attention to public recognition. [End Page 176] Varty views these poets in terms of their participation in the “creative culture” of their home places, simultaneously recognizing that such culture is not often unitary (p. 94). For a poet such as Lochhead, whose “alignment of Scotland with woman” is widely recognized and serves her purpose of self-assertion, this approach makes sense (p. 104). For Duffy, the approach foregrounds one aspect of her legacy yet runs the risk of scanting her own refusal to engage in identity politics—regarding the identity-driven conversation surrounding the New Generation Poets, Duffy laconically comments, “the whole thing ‘misses the point’” (p. 125). In her chapter on Duffy, Varty recognizes that “the ‘edge’ has been presented entirely in terms of content and identity politics,” yet for practicing poets, their verse-craft may well be the real point, and the poet’s consciousness may not readily ally itself with available labels (p. 126). Perhaps not all the poets Varty studies would agree with the book’s focus on community—a reading of its individual analyses tempts us with the question of whether and when they have ever...

Mitdenken: Paul Celans Theorie der Dichtung heute ed. by Evelyn Dueck and Sandro Zanetti

Reviewed by: Mitdenken: Paul Celans Theorie der Dichtung heute ed. by Evelyn Dueck and Sandro Zanetti Pamela S. Saur Evelyn Dueck and Sandro Zanetti, eds., Mitdenken: Paul Celans Theorie der Dichtung heute. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2022. 181 pp. In the introduction to Mitdenken: Paul Celans Theorie der Dichtung, the editors, Evelyn Dueck and Sandro Zanetti, discuss the theoretical basis of the poetic oeuvre of Paul Celan (1920–1970). His theories are explicated in various texts, notes, conversations, letters, and speeches, particularly those made upon receiving prestigious literary prizes. Analyses of these scattered texts offer no coherent overarching theory and only a few detailed interpretations of individual poems. Rather, they are exploratory pieces about Celan himself as a creator and his poetry in different eras, such as his own present, after the Shoah, and in light of an unforeseeable future. The development of his richly [End Page 97] evocative thoughts on poetry from the end of the 1940s to the 1960s does not conclude in a closed or systematic theory. Accordingly, the essays collected in this book do not amount to an attempt to mold Celan's theories into one unitary message. Each scholarly author pursues a different line of analysis, and their conclusions are generally compatible rather than contradictory. All have a theoretical bent; the pieces vary in the degree to which these discussions incorporate lines of poetry within their arguments. Several of these authors enhance their essays with references to ideas of philosophers such as Derrida, Heidegger, and Adorno or more recent or contemporary poets or critics such as Osip Mandelstam, Ann Cotton, and David Wills. The introduction presents a key concept of the volume, "Mitdenken," which is named in the title. The word is found in an early epigraph, taken from a 1958 letter by Celan: "Heißt es anspruchsvoll sein, wenn man sich—als Autor—wünscht, der Leser möchte mit dem Gedicht mitdenken?" (7). Dueck and Zanetti go on to say, "Zu dem, was wir 'mitlesen', 'miterfahren' und 'mitdenken' können, wenn wir Celans Dichtung lesen, gehören auch die zahlreichen Theorien im Bereich der Literatur, der Philosophie und der Kritik, die sich auf Celans Dichtung und nicht zuletzt auf deren Theorie eingelassen haben" (11). This volume contains nine excellent essays by well-established scholars with international academic backgrounds. Although under 200 pages, the book is dense in content and thoroughly researched and documented. Because it is highly theoretical and emphasizes advanced, even erudite research and commentary, its most appropriate audience is Celan specialists rather than students or poetry lovers interested in a basic introduction to the work of Celan. Among the subjects addressed are voice, the uncanny, the body, multilingualism, poetic language, openness, and laughter. A sense of the scope of the essays' contents may be provided here by highlighting a few discussion points. Among her other topics, Barbara Wiedemann emphasizes "Stimme," commenting, "Stimme ist von Celan immer positiv konnotiert, ist Ausdruck eines einmaligen Menschen mit seinem einmaligen Schicksal; Stimme ist das, was auch dann im Gedicht erhalten bleibt, wenn der Urheber aus seiner 'Mitwissenschaft' entlassen ist" (30). In a section of her essay, subtitled "Körper: Die Grundlage des Sprechens," contributor Yvonne Al-Taie writes, "Der Hiatus zwischen Sprache und außersprachlicher Wirklichkeit wiederholt sich im menschlichen Körper selbst und der doppelten Funktion [End Page 98] einiger seiner Organe—Augen, Mund, Lippen, Ohr, Hände, Haut—, die in ihrer physiologischen Funktion sowohl die Grundlage der organischen Lebensprozesse bilden als auch der verbalen und nonverbalen Interaktion mit den Mitmenschen dienen" (62). Al-Taie presents and interprets several lines by Celan that incorporate significant mention of these body parts. Ralf Simon's piece on "Vielstimmigkeit" presents a close reading of Stimmen, Celan's cycle of eight poems. It also brings out Celan's poetic confrontation with Nazi crimes and his own experiences of them: enduring forced labor and grieving the murder of his parents in the Shoah. Simon identifies eight voices in the eight poems: traumatic cries, collective voices of the dead, voices heard by the poet, voices of the murderers named but not permitted to speak, voices of forced laborers, sympathy associated with the biblical Jakob's voice, voices of murder victims...

MYTHS IN THE POETIC WORLD OF LINA KOSTENKO: PROJECTIONS OF THE AESTHETIC IDEAL

The article analyzes the intertextual connections of Lina Kostenko's work (in particular, her novels "Marusya Churai" and "Notes of the Ukrainian samashedshego", as well as individual poems) with world myths - ancient, biblical and literary. Such intertextuality gives rise to an artistic world where the individual and the collective, the human and the divine, the everyday-practical and the unspeakable-unexplainable, the national-historical and the eternal, the material and the spiritual, the rational and the irrational, interact. Allusive echoes of the texts of the Ukrainian poetess with the ancient Greek myths "Orpheus and Eurydice", "Hyacinthe", myth about the androgyne, biblical myths about St. John the Forerunner, Lilith and Eve, literary myths of Dante, M. Kotsyubynskyi are analyzed. All these myths are based on moral and philosophical maxims: love, creativity, immortality, beauty, responsibility, memory, integrity, compatibility of souls, dignity, spirituality, and chivalry, which are signs of the author's aesthetic ideal. The myth enriches her poetry with cultural codes that are most fully and adequately revealed only in the light of universal, not socio-historical or class criteria. It is proven that in the novel "Marusya Churai" Lina Kostenko created an alternative vision of the image of the poet, an important point of which was the position of "artist and love". Imitating Dante's myth about the journey through hell, Lina Kostenko in the novel "Marusya Churai" presents her vision of hell during her main female character's journey through war-torn Ukraine and sets her own priorities in matters of "sinfulness" and punishment of her characters. The article also examines the philosophy of androgynism interpreted in the poetess's work as a spiritual union of lovers and the poetess's attitude to the gender concepts of "strong man" and "strong woman". The interpretation of Lina Kostenko's work in a mythological way will contribute to the awareness of her universal sound, which is not subject to temporal and political changes.

Dislanguaged: David Ferry’s Orphic Turn

Dislanguaged: David Ferry’s Orphic Turn Martin W. Michálek (bio) David Ferry is one of America’s most accomplished poets and translators. In addition to his contributions to English verse, his translations of Horace’s Odes (1997), Virgil’s Eclogues (2000), the Georgics (2005), and the Aeneid (2017) have considerably swayed our modern, Anglophonic appreciation of Augustan poetry. While much has been said about Ferry’s original poems and translations, the extent to which they depend upon each other, and the meticulousness with which Latin informs his English (and vice versa) merit further consideration, particularly from classicists. As Ferry nears his eleventh decade of life, now seems as fitting a moment as ever to reconsider some of this poet’s classically influenced work. Make no mistake, Ferry has no shortage of recognition. In 2012, he received the National Book Award for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, a slender volume written in the wake of the death of his wife, Anne.1 Original poems blend with translations from Catullus, Cavafy, Horace, Martial, Virgil, and the Anglo-Saxon Bible, as though a retinue of poets— who have come before, who speak other languages, who have suffered loss and put it into poetry—can aid David’s efforts to confront death in verse. This is precisely what we find in a sonnet near the collection’s end called “That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember.” Where did you go to, when you went away?It is as if you step by step were goingSomeplace elsewhere into some other rangeOf speaking, that I had no gift for speaking,Knowing nothing of the language of that placeTo which you went with naked foot at nightInto the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed,Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking. (1–8) [End Page 33] Like Dante, the poet wanders in a wilderness. The further afield he goes, the more disoriented the poet seems. The poem, in content and form, reflects this disorientation. His question, “where,” is answered by “someplace elsewhere”—words that will not orient someone who is lost. The steady iambic pentameter of the opening line is disturbed by trochees (“Someplace elsewhere”), pyrrhics, and dactyls (“into some other range”). By his own admission, language begins to fail the poet. The despair of the scene (the bed bereft, the wilderness of uncertainty) prompts the following avowal: I have been so dislanguaged by what happenedI cannot speak the words that somewhere youMaybe were speaking to others where you went.Maybe they talk together where they are,Restlessly wandering, along the shore,Waiting for a way to cross the river. (9–14) A dazzling volta—the near-midway turn in a sonnet, in this case a Petrarchan sonnet, when the octave that introduces a crisis (“Where did you go to when you went away?”) yields to the sestet, which seeks closure. Ferry’s sestet moves the lover’s initial query not toward an answer, but rather acceptance of the uncertainty surrounding death (a duplex of “maybes”), and an agnostic consideration of ancient ideas about the afterlife. “That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember” seems like the zenith of Bewilderment—with the wild from the collection’s name briefly appearing in the poem’s title. That title, however, Ferry has taken from a verse penned by the sixteenth-century court poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt: They fle from me that sometyme did me sekeWith naked fote stalking in my chambre.I have sene theim gentill tame and mekeThat nowe are wyld and do not remembre . . . (1–4) [End Page 34] In Wyatt’s poem, the poet looks back at past lovers with shades of fondness and frustration. In her book, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (2001), Anne Ferry reads multiple versions of Wyatt’s poem, noting how various editors have changed its spelling, edited its punctuation, and added words to make the lines of uniform syllables. These are not superficial changes, Anne argues, but augmentations capable of undoing the poem’s “powerful immediacy” and the “bewildering resentment of pain, anger, and bereavement” felt by Wyatt for the lover who no longer...

Roth and the Poets

Beginning with a survey of the key poets in Philip Roth's personal library—there are over eighty—this essay considers the function, style, and value of poetry in his work. At many of the most intense moments in Roth's fiction, a poetic lyricism dominates, whether it is Mickey Sabbath at the Jersey shore or the final paragraph of The Human Stain (2000). From the start of his career, Roth found a place for poetry—whether in his earliest short stories or in his most successful fiction, notably Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Sabbath's Theater (1995), or American Pastoral (1997), although its function shifted from the explicit sexuality of "Leda and the Swan" in Portnoy's Complaint to the meditative pastoralism of Indian Hill camp in Nemesis (2010). Its presence constantly reflects Roth's literary grounding originating in his undergraduate and graduate readings supplemented by contact with poets at Chicago, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Princeton, and Penn. Specific remarks on individual poems will reflect their use in individual novels with Donne, Milton, and Keats featured.