Poetic Inspiration Research Articles

György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds ed. by Louise Duchesneau and Wolfgang Marx, and: Ligeti’s Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and the Absolute by Amy Bauer (review)

Reviewed by: György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds ed. by Louise Duchesneau and Wolfgang Marx, and: Ligeti’s Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and the Absolute by Amy Bauer Péter Laki György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds. Edited by Louise Duchesneau and Wolfgang Marx. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2011. [xx, 298 p. ISBN 9781843835509. $80.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Ligeti’s Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and the Absolute. By Amy Bauer. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. [xvii, 234 p. ISBN 9781409400417. $99.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index. The year 2011 saw the publication of these two new books on György Ligeti (1923–2006), one of the most important composers in the second half of the twentieth century. György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds is an edited volume of essays bringing together an international team of scholars and composers, many of whom had a strong personal connection to the composer either as collaborator or student. One of the editors, Louise Duchesneau, was Ligeti’s personal assistant for many years; the other, Wolfgang Marx, is a German-born musicologist now teaching in Ireland. Both also appear as authors of individual chapters. The volume makes some extremely important source material available to the reader and sheds light on many issues of biography, work analysis, and musical aesthetics that were only imperfectly understood in the past. Starting at the beginning, Friedemann Sallis, an expert on Ligeti’s early works, explores the composer’s complex relationship with his teacher Sándor Veress (1907–92), one of the leading members of [End Page 767] the generation of Hungarian composers after Bartók and Kodály. Veress preceded Ligeti in emigration and settled in Bern, Switzerland, where he had a distinguished career as a composer and teacher. Sallis finds some unexpected musical connections between teacher and student, and documents their estrangement after Ligeti joined the Darmstadt circle of avant-gardists, whose music filled Veress with horror. The hard feelings, however, were all on Veress’s side; in 1993, Ligeti honored his teacher (who had passed away the year before) by dedicating “Facsar,” the third movement of his Sonata for Solo Viola, in Veress’s memory. The Viola Sonata, one of the greatest works from Ligeti’s late period, figures prominently in the second essay, by Irish composer-musicologist Benjamin R. Dwyer, who boldly connects it to the Cello Sonata, written in Hungary some forty years earlier. The two unaccompanied string works are connected by many hidden threads in spite of their obvious stylistic differences. (On p. 25, Dwyer names the popular Hora staccato by Grigoras¸ Dinicu as a precedent for Ligeti’s “Hora lungă”; this is an error, however, since the two “horas” are related only by name.) Tiborc Fazekas and Ildikó Mándi-Fazekas, a husband-and-wife team of Hungarian language specialists, review Ligeti’s connection to the great poet Sándor Weöres (1913–89), whose works, sometimes defying translation, were set to music by numerous Hungarian composers. Ligeti’s Weöres settings span the entire oeuvre, from 1946 to 2001, and the authors set out to show how this poetic inspiration “sustained Ligeti’s artistic development” (p. 62). Let it be noted briefly that the “reed fiddle” in the title of his final Weöres setting, Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel (“With Pipes, Drums, Reed Fiddles”) is not a fiddle at all, but rather, as ethnomusicologist Bálint Sárosi taught us a long time ago, a children’s toy that must be classified among the idiophones. (A more complete survey of Weöres’s influence on Hungarian music, including Ligeti, is available in Péter Laki, “Jenseits des Wortes: Die Sprachmagie von Sándor Weöres in der ungarischen Musik von Zoltán Kodály bis Peter Eötvös,” Kosmoi: Peter Eötvös an der Hochschule für Musik der Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel—Schriften, Gespräche, Dokumente. [Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2007], 115–46.) Co-editor Wolfgang Marx probes “The Concept of Death in György Ligeti’s Oeuvre” in the Requiem and the opera Le grand macabre ; the most important revelation here comes at the end of the article...

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

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

Quand Platon faisait l’éloge de la folie

In the Phaedra, written around 418 BC, Plato, rejecting madness as being always a calamity, differentiates four kinds of benevolent madness: The first one is the gift of divination. The Pythia in Delphi was able to predict the future because she was in a state of “modified consciousness” inspired by Apollo. Thus, she was connected with the “world of Ideas” and received instructions directly from the gods. The second one is the so called “telestic madness”. This kind of madness refers to the feeling of guilt coming up in a person, when a crime has been perpetrated in the previous generations and compels him to retaliation (this was the case in the Atrides family). Only a witch doctor, inspired by Dionysos, can cure this very peculiar kind of troubles because, like the Pythia, he is able to communicate with the outer world. We would call it today a chamanistic approach of the disease. The third one is easier to understand nowadays. It is the poetic inspiration. The poets themselves often admit being influenced by a muse (generally a beautiful woman in a white dress!) and even are able to be talking with her (so did Alfred de Musset in the “december night”). The last one is the “love madness”, inspired by Aphrodite ad her son Eros. Socrates explains the origins of this kind of madness in a myth, according which our soul is like a coachman trying to tame two horses going in opposite directions, a white one drawned towards the Good and the Fair, a dark one towards the Evil and the bad instincts. Love, to avoid turning into madness, must stay in the middle.

The German Joyce

In August 1919, a production of James Joyce's Exiles was mounted at the Munich Schauspielhaus and quickly fell due to harsh criticism. The reception marked the beginning of a dynamic association between Joyce, German-language writers, and literary critics. It is this relationship that Robert Weninger analyzes in The German Joyce. Opening a new dimension of Joycean scholarship, this book provides the premier study of Joyce's impact on German-language literature and literary criticism in the twentieth century. The opening section follows Joyce's linear intrusion from the 1910s to the 1990s by focusing on such prime moments as the first German translation of Ulysses, Joyce's influence on the Marxist Expressionism debate, and the Nazi blacklisting of Joyce's work. Utilizing this historical reception as a narrative backdrop, Weninger then presents Joyce's horizontal diffusion into German culture. Weninger succeeds in illustrating both German readers' great attraction to Joyce's work as well as Joyce's affinity with some of the great German masters, from Goethe to Rilke, Brecht, and Thomas Mann. He argues that just as Shakespeare was a model of linguistic exuberance for Germans in the eighteenth century, Joyce became the epitome of poetic inspiration in the twentieth. A volume in The Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound's Poetic Renewal

Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound's Poetic Renewal

Vittorio Alfieri's Natural Sublime: The Physiology of Poetic Inspiration

This essay examines Vittorio Alfieri's representation of the natural sublime in his autobiography, Vita scritta da esso (1804), and situates it in the context of the eighteenth-century philosophical discourse on the aesthetics of the sublime. A comparative analysis of its relation to Burke's physiological sublime, as opposed to Kant's rationalistic model, shows how Alfieri's description of the sublime is in line with the body-centered Burkean system. In fact, Alfieri's natural sublime is a corporeal experience that stresses the primacy of the senses at the expense of reason. Following Longinus, however, Alfieri poses the question of the sublime in terms of poetic inspiration and describes a physiology of creativity that involves both the bodily passions and the imagination. By situating Alfieri's sublime in a wider European context, the essay provides a conceptual framework to comprehend more fully Alfieri's ideas about the psychology of literary inspiration and the creative process. Finally, Alfieri's treatment of the natural sublime points to a non-Kantian line of development for the Romantic sublime and sheds light on the complex nature of late-eighteenth-century aesthetic theory.

“내 생애의 첫 산물”: 「비너스와 아도니스」와 시인의 탄생

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is a narrative poem depicting the birth-pangs of a new poet in the English Ovidian tradition. In the rhetorical debate of the epyllion Venus the goddess of love tries to persuade the young fondling Adonis into her carnal desires. In the poem Venus wants to break and over-sway the unbroken wild horse of Adonis by commanding all the flourishes and ornaments of the then prevalent Ovidian and Petrarchan languages of love, though she seems to apparently subvert the given gender roles of the Petrarchan convention: she is too virile and aggressive. One of the outstanding characteristics of Venus is that she is talking and talking, even stopping Adonis’s mouth by kissing him when he tries to talk back. Venus wants Adonis the young adolescent to be immersed in the Ovidian tradition of love poems. However, to Adoniss stubborn ears, the honey-tongued rhetorical figures of Venus are like a Siren song composed in order to trap and effiminate him into old and well-wrought tradition of Ovidan love poems. When Venus recommends Adonis to hunt for Wat the hare instead of a wild boar, she is really entombing him in the womb of lust by divesting him of his vigour and dangerously untamed originality. Adonis wants the initiation of manhood of a strong poet, even it means his death, when he refuses to hear the old and mouldy tales of love Venus pours into his ear-holes. The young poet as a green orator seems to be defeated in his pursuit of a new poetics of love in the last part of the poem. However, his apparent defeat is paradoxically redeemed by his metamorphic resurrection into a white and red anemone. The breath of anemone represents the poetic inspiration of a new poet. Through Adonis Shakespeare succeeds in placing himself as an autonomous poet in the serious art of poetry, though he joins quite late in the early 1590s in the well-established tradition of English Ovidian love poems.

Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn (review)

Reviewed by: Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn Emilie Savage-Smith Keywords jinn, Islam, pre-Islam, Sufism, angels, magic, poetic inspiration Amira El-Zein . Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009. Pp. xxiii + 215. The actions of the shape-shifting jinn found in Arabic and Persian literature (most famously, perhaps, in The Thousand and One Nights), and the methods by which their malevolent influences could be curtailed or their beneficent energies channeled, have been the topic of considerable medieval and modern speculation. Yet surprisingly few monographs are devoted to this [End Page 124] complex topic. The present volume surveys both the historical and the modern role of jinn in the Muslim (and to a large extent Sufi) view of the universe, in which there is constant renewal of the universe by the Creator and a fusion of the mental and physical realms. In this context, the jinn are the bridge between the seen and unseen worlds, constantly reminding humans that physical reality is not the only reality. To understand this world of the jinn, one must understand the traditional Islamic hierarchical view of the cosmos, in which the universe is composed of three realms: the celestial realm, the intermediate or imaginal realm, and the terrestrial or material realm of human existence. The jinn occupy the intermediate or sublunary realm, and while they cannot trespass into the celestial realm above them (the realm of angels), they can operate in the terrestrial realm. Jinn are usually invisible, but can be invested with a physical corporeality, often taking the forms of animals or even humans. There could in fact be love affairs between humans and jinn, and the author devotes an entire chapter to this fascinating topic. Presenting a range of stories to illustrate this jinn activity, for the most part taken from The Nights, El-Zein characterizes the actions of the jinn as a "game of shape shifting" (p. 109) in which the swift metamorphosis of the jinn bewilders the human partner. The jinn, who were created before humans, were forbidden to bear news from heaven to Earth, for that role was left to the angels. Considerable space is devoted to the relationships and similarities between jinn and angels. Both are of the invisible realm, but angels are made of light and jinn of fire. Both are disembodied spirits. Both are "shape-shifters," but angels appear only in beautiful forms while jinn can take any possible form, even ugly ones. Angels are immortal, while the jinn can die. Before considering the effect of the advent of Islam on attitudes toward jinn, El-Zein discusses angels, gods, and jinn in the pre-Islamic period. She argues convincingly (p. 35) against Toufic Fahd, who had asserted that pre-Islamic Arabs were entirely ignorant of the concept of angels.1 This reviewer would have liked for her to address the ideas and attitudes of Joseph Henninger's study of pre-Islamic and early Islamic belief in spirits and jinn2—a [End Page 125] study that seems to have completely escaped the author's attention, although an English translation has been published in a book cited elsewhere in this volume. With the advent of Islam, the jinn (or at least some of them) were made subservient to the One God. In the Qur'ān it is twice said that jinn listened to the Prophet Muhammad, heard the Qur'ān, and accepted the revelation. The jinn were described as mere shapes, wrapped in blackness. These passages generated controversy as to whether the Prophet actually saw the jinn, or only heard them, but they were generally interpreted as asserting the submission of jinn (or some of them) to God. It was the jinn who had not converted to Islam that were dreaded by humans, for they could be malevolent spirits. Because the jinn could exist in both the invisible and visible realms, they could intervene and interfere in the daily lives of Muslims at any time and at any place. They could enter houses, roam the streets, even get into food and drink. People turned to magical techniques to provide protection. El-Zein reviews some...

Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the PoetsThe Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets. Winthrop Wetherbee. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Pp. xi+304.

<i>Winthrop Wetherbee</i>, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets<i>The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets</i>. Winthrop Wetherbee. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Pp. xi+304.

West-East Divan: The Poems with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues (review)

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, West-East Divan: The Poems with Notes and Essays: Goethe's Intercultural Dialogues. Martin Bidney, trans. Notes and Essays translation assisted by Peter Anton von Arnim. Binghamton, NY: Global Academic Publishing, 2010. 474 pp. This is an unusual scholarly book, a delightful combination of solid research and poetic inspiration, as befits a project whose major purpose is to offer a contemporary translation of Goethe's West-Ostlicher Divan. Before the book was published, Peter Anton von Arnim unexpectedly died. He had assisted the author in translating the prose essays entitled Notes and Essays, which Goethe had written to accompany his poems. Martin Bidney 's tribute to Arnim is a lovely sonnet that appears in the prefatory pages of the book. He also proffered a sonnet to his mentor, Katharina Mommsen, and acknowledged his indebtedness to her in other parts of the text as well. What is unusual about this translation is that all of the author's notes to accompany Goethe's Divan poems are also in poetry, creating an interesting dialectic between author and interpreter, expressed in different and mutually complementary kinds of poetry. Goethe's are firmly rooted in his times and imitative of their Eastern counterparts while Bidney's are contemporary, of course, but also delicately respectful of their antecedent. One of the most surprising facts about the project is that Goethe's own Notes and Essays have never appeared in English before. Some readers may not know how advisable it could be to read both together or assign both to advanced students. Students without an excellent reading knowledge of German will be particularly grateful for this translation. Certainly, contemporary students can be expected to have a more vivid interest in Goethe's west-eastern understandings and intentions than readers from earlier times. Scholars, too, will welcome these competent translations of poetry and notes together. Goethe himself well understood that he might have to wait for an appreciative authence for this undertaking; yet his admirable foresight and lively interest in the subject remain one of many hallmarks of his genius. Bidney explains that Goethe wrote these extensive notes and essays in order to facilitate access to his main poetic work. Goethe's commentary begins with short chapters about ancient peoples like the Hebrews and Persians. He discusses history, offers remarks about Muhammad (190-92), Persian poets, and technical aspects of their poetic tradition. Goethe includes some of his own poems as well as original Persian texts. He writes a brief segment entitled Exchanging Flowers and Symbols, rather more extensive notes about a future Div an, and some brief comments about other scholars or travelers interested in this area. …

Griboedovedenie: An Introduction

In his Crimean travel notes of 25 June 1825, Alexander describes an animated, magical landscape where he and his fellow travelers are mere observers: A pink stripe across gloomy clouds, the play of the evening sun; pike shows blue in the distance; ship in seems to hang in the air; the sea blends into the sky. We find sheepfold on the eastern heights, facing south. Whey to eat; the air is cold; I warm myself. I lie down on my horse's blanket with the saddle at my head, listening to the bleating of goats and sheep whose pen hangs over the rapids. In the night I rise, the moon swims over the sea between the two capes. A star emerges from behind black cloud. Another careens above me. What genius has caught it? (1) These romantic descriptions of the Black Sea region in June of the year that will end with the Decembrist Revolt in St. Petersburg include views of Bakhchiserai, of Chatyr-Dag, Sably, and Alupta. Regardless of political rumblings and events in his personal and professional life, took the time to sketch these mountains and their people, the valleys, the relationship between sky and water; he strove to capture in words the contrasts of light and color, air and altitude, of physical sensation and the stirrings of imagination. Like Mickiewicz, who wrote sonnets to Alushta in the Daytime, Alushta at Night, and Aiudag, among others, was captivated by the scenery along the coast. It seemed veritable font of poetic inspiration. Of itself wrote: whole place is surrounded as if by an amphitheater, the spurs of Yail and Chatyr-Dag-whose summits reign over this valley--reach to the sea. (2) Traveling around the Crimea today, one encounters sites, museums, monuments, and memorials to writers from all eras: from Adam Mickiewicz to Anton Chekhov, from Maxim Gorky and Lev Tolstoy to Ivan Shmelev and Sergei Sergeev-Tsensky. But the pride of the peninsula remains the two Alexander Sergeeviches: and Pushkin. The central square of features bust of the former; towering tree called cypress still graces the garden of sanatorium in nearby Gurzuf. The cluster of articles gathered below represent the first installment in new section for the Pushkin Review. Pushkin's Contemporaries. The parallel travels and shared acquaintances and friendships of many writers from the Pushkin era make for fascinating juxtapositions and comparisons, and we hope that articles in this rubric will complement articles on Pushkin, deepening and broadening our understanding of his era. I started this essay with notes on Crimea because I recently returned from there: in at the end of May 2012 scholars gathered from all over the world to explore the topic of Griboedov and Contemporary Times. Some of the biggest names in Griboedovedenie were there: Sergei Fomichev, who has done more than anyone in the history of Russian literary scholarship to foster the study of Alexander Griboedov; Ludmila Orekhova, who specializes in the role played by Crimean topography in life and work; Nadezhda Tarkhova, who has written on Griboedov's Homes and Haunts, to use the Library of Congress designation; Vyacheslav Koshelev, whose books on Pushkin and nineteenth-century poets make him an expert on the other Alexander Sergeevich as well; Herbert Lembke, who has explored translations of Woe from Wit into German and whose foundation, Ad Infinitum, funded the recent publications of the Encyclopedia (3) and the long-awaited third volume of the authoritative Complete Works of A. S. Griboedov, (4) A refrain that began to sound in the halls and courtyards of the Ethnographic Museum, where the conference took place, was a gde molodezh? (Where are the young scholars who will take studies into new era?) There were, in fact, several young people--two or three graduate students and recent kandidaty--present, but I submit that the readers of the Pushkin Review are benefiting from that new generation, which appears to be thriving in the United States. …

La vida es sueño, Autos and Comedia : God, Segismundo, and Calderón

Although much has been written concerning Calderón's comedia, La vida es sueño , little scholarship exists on his full-length play in relation to the two autos sacramentales of the same title. Those who have undertaken such a study customarily find some slight affinity in the plots and themes of the three plays or a correspondence among the human and allegorical dramatis personae . A few have dismissed the effort to compare by concluding that there is very little, if any, connection. The present study illustrates that there is a close affinity among the comedia and the sacramental plays. Central to the comprehension of Calderón's two autos is the author's focus on God as the main protagonist, and not man, as traditionally held. This is particularly true of the second rendition of the auto in 1673, in which the playwright portrays the full complement of the Trinity with the introduction of three God figures, Poder, Sabiduría, and Amor. These three allegorical figures, which represent one God, always interact onstage in unison, in every phase of the salvation-history story of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption. The role that Poder, Sabiduría, and Amor play in the second version is consistent with another Catholic doctrine, which reflects God's nature: Intelligible Emanation. In accepting Segismundo as the comedia 's main protagonist, critics have focused much of their attention precisely around the themes of power, knowledge, and love. Finally, this essay offers a suggestion as to why Calderón chose to return to the theme of "life is a dream" a third time, in the latter part of his career. Calderón viewed dreams as vehicles for poetic inspiration and divine revelation. Furthermore, he perceived himself as being divinely inspired by the Creator to help in bringing about man's salvation by accepting his role as priest and dramatist to instruct and enlighten the vulgo through his dramatic art.

‘Estas rotas raíces’: landscape, memory and identity in Rafael Alberti's Baladas y canciones del Paraná

Rafael Alberti's collection of short poems, Baladas y canciones del Paraná (1953–1954), was written in exile in Argentina and inspired by his discovery of the Paraná River and its vast marshlands. This article examines how his relationship with the South American flatlands evolves throughout the three chapters of Baladas. The first section studies his initial attempts to relate to the Paraná fen country. It considers how he uses key features of the landscape in order to explore and symbolise his feelings of displacement in Argentina. The second section concentrates on the book's later chapters in which the exiled poet superimposes memories of Spain onto his immediate surroundings and questions the purpose of his poetry in a foreign land. The paper contends that, as Alberti gradually develops a deep spiritual bond with the American countryside, he discovers new sources of poetic inspiration and gains considerable insight into his exilic condition and his identity as a nomad.

Heritage od James George Frazer in the Work of Robert Graves

The works of Sir James George Frazer had an outstanding influence on the literature of modernism. Among those who benefited from Frazer’s ritualism were W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Mary Renault, Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves and many others. Robert Graves was known for his famous adaptation of Frazer’s concept of the sacred king who is sacrificed for the benefit of his subjects thus forming the narrative frame for the one of his most controversial novels. The dying king is also identified with the poet striving to attain the favour of the Triple Muse Goddess - who represents the embodiment of true poetic inspiration. The aforementioned concept is not the only thing that Graves inherited from his famous ancestor. In our analysis we laid stress on the customs, rituals, magic symbols and deities both authors dealt with. We also observed a striking resemblance of the style Greves and Frazer developed and their euchemeristic approach to myths as well. &#x0D;

“Eorlas arhwate eard begeatan”

The poetic insert known as &lt;i&gt;The Battle of Brunanburh&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;i&gt;Anglo-Saxon Chronicle&lt;/i&gt; 937) constitutes by no means one of the most interesting texts for the building of the Old English heroic geography. Its author, as Marsden states (2005: 86), “builds a sense of national destiny, using style, diction and imagery of heroic poetry”. There are many interesting issues to deal with when you want to revise how the elements Marsden quotes are used in the construction of a poem that uses history as a narrative device to build the inner story of the poem experimenting with the topics (style, diction, imagery) of heroic poetry. If the poem constitutes such a crucial text, if its emphasis is on “English nationalism” in an historical perspective rather than on individual heroics, as Marsden points out (2005: 86), it seems most evident that a careful consideration of these topics has to be made when translating the text into other languages. The aim of this article is to revisit the poem and its topics and to see how that careful consideration has been accomplished in several important English (Treharne 2004, Hamer 1970, Rodrigues 1996, Garmonsway 1953, Swanton 2000) and Spanish (Lerate &amp; Lerate 2000, Bravo 1998, Bueno 2007) translations that consider the poem in isolation, in the context of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or as an excuse for poetic inspiration, i.e. the case of Borges’ 1964 and 1975 poems and Tennyson’s 1880 text.

The Poets "Perplext": Southey and Robinson at Work on the "Morning Post"

must contribute, wrote Robert Southey, in his charming lyric Poet Perplext, addressing not only his brain but also the rigors of composing original poetry twice a week for Daniel Stuart's Morning Post and Gazetteer. Poet Perplext first appeared in the Morning Post of June 24, 1799 and provides some insight into the challenge of running the Poetical Department for Stuart--of meeting the regular demand to fill the designated space in the paper when it was available. Southey wrote it when more than a year into his position as Stuart's principal poetry contributor, a position he called, perhaps facetiously, his first laureate-ship. When he left for Portugal in December, 1799, Stuart hired the celebrated poet and novelist Mary Robinson to replace him. As chief poetic correspondent or contributor, each was responsible for amusing the paper's readership with a variety of short poems, which they did using various pseudonyms and forms. When she succeeded Southey, Robinson produced during the final year of her life nearly a quarter of the total number of poems in her entire oeuvre, proving that, despite her periodic, infirmity, her mind was fertile and vigorous and her sense of humor was intact. Undertaking the poetical department of the paper, Southey and Robinson were not the editors of a section of the newspaper so much as they were the entertainers of its readership. The position required improvisational wit and speedy and prolific composition--thus, in Poet Perplext, Southey comically exhorts his brain to work. This poem, however, is more than a self-reflexive study in writer's block; it is also a reminder that newspaper poetry of the 1790s served a purpose much like that of the comics section in today's newspapers. These poems were meant to be consumable and literally disposable. The demands of writing them were all on the poet. As any comedian knows, laughter is more difficult to achieve than other affective endeavors, which is why newspaper poems often opt for the erotic, maudlin, or patriotic. Here Southey manages to be funny while ruminating on the difficulty of being so: BRAIN! thou must work! begin, or we shall lose The day, while yet we only think upon it The hours run on, and yet thou will not chuse The subject, come, Ode, Elegy, or Sonnet. You must contribute, Brain! in this hard time; Taxes are high, food dear, and yon must rhyme. 'Twere well if when I ruhb'd my itchless head, The fingers, with benignant stimulation, Could thro' the medullary substance spread The motions of poetic inspiration. But scratch, or knock, or shake my head about, The motions may go in but nought conies out. The nat'ral head, consider, good my brain, To the head politic bears some allusion; The limbs and body must support your reign, And all, when you do wrong, is in contusion. But CAPUT mine, in truth I can't support A head as lazy as if born at Court. The verse goes on, and we shall have, my friend, A Poem, ere the subject we determine-- But ev'ry thing should have some useful end-- That single line it-self is worth a sermon. The moral part, as obvious is as good, So, gentle BRAIN! I thank thee, and conclude. (Southey 2004, 5: 354-55) What other poem by Southey is as perfect as this one in the way that it sets up its own terms and then flawlessly meets them? Each stanza provides a laugh, from its silly augmented rhymes in the first to its ridiculously pretentious diction in the second to the hilarious Latin pun in the third evoking the decapitated Louis Capet and, finally, to its good-natured conclusion, which facetiously remarks on the newspaper poem's utility, which ideally might be a sermon but is, in reality, filler. Southey regarded it as one of the poems too good to perish with the newspapers in which they are printed (Robberds 1: 239), so he reprinted it in the second volume of The Annual Anthology with the signature Byondo, a comically self-effacing anagram for nobody. …

Depression and creativity — The case of the german poet, scientist and statesman J. W. v. Goethe

Background Goethe was one of the most creative poets, scientists and statesmen ever existing. Since the age of fourteen, he suffered from severe mood swings. His descriptions of feelings, emotions, and mental states related to temperamental and poetic melancholy, depressive episodes, dysthymic phases, and creativity are unique in respect to their phenomenological precision and richness. Furthermore, his (self-) therapeutic strategies and his self transformation in literature remain interesting until today for psychopathology, psychotherapy and creativity research. Methods Goethe's self-assessments in his works and letters as well as the description of him by others are analysed by phenomenological and hermeneutic methods from the perspective of current psychiatric classification and psychotherapeutic knowledge. Results From a modern scientific perspective Goethe's mood swings are not to be regarded as expressions of a “poet's melancholy” in fashion at his time but as symptoms of depressive episodes. Several distinctive depressive episodes can be diagnosed which were characterized by long lasting depressive mood, lack of drive, interests and self-esteem combined with social retreat and physical illness. Moreover, Goethe described a mood disorder which fits into the modern concept of “driven dysthymia” or Bipolar II disorder. Goethe's depressive moods were associated with eminent poetic creativity whereas in times of scientific and political productivity Goethe seemed to be protected against depressive episodes. Limitations Phenomenological and hermeneutic analysis cannot offer causal explanations but only reasons for understanding and communicative action. Conclusions In Goethe's life poetic incubation, illumination and elaboration seemed to be associated with psychic labilisation and dysthymia, sometimes with depressive episodes in a clinical sense. Thus, creative work was on the one hand triggered by depressive and dysthymic moods and served on the other hand to cope with depressive moods as well as with suicidal tendencies. In line with modern empirical results Goethe's scientific and social activities and achievements were associated with personal well-being, but also with lack of poetic inspiration.

Junqueira Freire e as contradições do heroísmo

In this study, Junqueira Freire’s poetry is interpreted in view of the heroic attitude that is inherent to it. Heroism, here, means laceration: the heroic character, which the poet discovers in his religious vocation, is akin to the heroic character that shows itself in the poetic inspiration. Inclined, on one hand, to religious life and, on the other, rejecting such vocation in name of another, neither more sincere or legitimate than the former – which should take the place of it and question its meaning –, but in conflict with it, the poet finds himself exposed to the contingencies of a higher contradiction, which announces and questions the meaning of any vocation. In this double trend, the problem of vocation turns out to be a problem of poetry, which cannot be seen from outside the instance in which literature and religion meet each other.

Modernism and poetic inspiration: the shadow mouth

Shadow Mouth The Murmur Drawing a Blank: Episodes in the Poetics of Unworking Poetry's Voice-Over Gendering the Muse Medusa's Gaze, or Traveling in the Dark 'When the Mind Is Like a Hall': Places of a Possible

Le ,verità nascoste‘. Consapevole appartenenza a un genere, autoinvestitura e bugie metapoetiche in [Mosco] III.

The present paper investigates the poetics of the Epitaph for Bion, principally focusing on the self-referential attitude displayed by its anonymous author and the metapoetic devices he exploits. Striking is the growing awareness of genre, which is expressed through a self-conscious use of pastoral terminology, in particular of the adjectives ,Sicilian‘ and ,Doric‘ (ll. 12; 18; 96; 122), and the self-referential image of the poet-βουκόλος (ll. 11 e 65). Close attention is also paid to the metapoetic poignancy of the appeals to Arethusa (ll. 1; 10 e 77), to be read as reiterated allusions the poet makes to his own poetic inspiration, and of the two cameos of nightingales and swans which are ordered by the poet to pass on the news of Bion’s death to Arethusa (ll. 9–12) and the Nymphs and the Muses (ll. 14–18). The metapoetic interpretation of these elements, where nightingales and swans stand for the poet and Arethusa, the Nymphs and the Muses for his poetic inspiration, allows reading ll. 9–18 as a twofold manifesto of implicit poetics through which the poet portrays himself in the actual act of composing the Epitaph. In addition, a new exegesis is suggested for the statements attested at ll. 93–97; 115–119 and 125–126: against the commonly accepted interpretation, [Moschus] is not acknowledging his poetic inferiority to his master Bion; he is rather presenting himself as the new Bucolic, Orpheus-like poet.