Poet's Life Research Articles

My Tuesdays With Morrie

Mitch Albom's book, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man and Life's Greatest Lesson (1997), entered the poet's life during a time when death and terminal illness were affecting her immediate family and one of her closest friends. This life-affirming case study, the result of a series of taped conversations between Albom and his beloved undergraduate professor, the late Morrie Schwartz, represents good art in the Deweyian sense because it flows from everyday life experience. It inspired the poet to interact with the book through her own hybrid African American cultural lens and create new work.

World enough and time: the life of Andrew Marvell

The life of poet Andrew Marvell (1621-78) has often seemed puzzling and enigmatic. In this biography, he emerges as an important figure in the political as well as the poetic life of his time. Marvell lived through one of the most turbulent periods in English history and, after the Civil War and the Commonwealth, he became a Member of Parliament at the Restoration, serving the town of Hull until his death nearly two decades later. These political events enter his poems, sometimes directly, as in the famous Horatian Ode on Oliver Cromwell, sometimes indirectly as in his deceptively formal pastoral and lyric verse. This biography attempts to present an integrated portrait of Marvell the poet and the politician, and to show that for Marvell, poetry and politics were not opposed activities. Drawing on recent advances in knowledge about the poet, this life of Andrew Marvell explores his complex and elusive personality.

Dickinson's Bawdy: Shakespeare and Sexual Symbolism in Emily Dickinson's Writing to Susan Dickinson

The idea that Emily Dickinson's sexually charged love lyrics might have been written for a woman shocked the academic community when Rebecca Patterson published The Riddle of Emily Dickinson in 1951. Patterson argues that the primary love and poetic inspiration of Dickinson's life was female friend Kate Anthon--a thesis that provoked some scathing critical responses. (1) Now, five decades later, scholarly elaboration on Patterson's breakthrough revelation has made the homoeroticism in Dickinson's letters and verse impossible to ignore. Most Dickinson scholars will concede that at least one of the loves and poetic inspirations of Dickinson's life was indeed a woman; however, the focus has shifted from Kate Anthon to Dickinson's sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, as the primary object of Dickinson's desire. (2) At this point, John Cody, Lillian Faderman, Vivian R. Pollak, Paula Bennett, Judith Farr, Ellen Louise Hart, and Martha Nell Smith have all argued convincingly that Susan was one of t he central, if not the central erotic relationship in the poet's life. The recent publication of Hart and Smith's Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson should eliminate any doubt as to the life-long intimacy between Emily and Susan Dickinson and forever put to rest the myth of an unreconciled rift between them after Susan's marriage to Austin Dickinson in 1856. (3) How we should characterize Dickinson's desire for Susan still incites debate almost as passionate as the love lyrics themselves, however. Many critics continue to reject the term lesbian' preferring to place Dickinson's homoerotic feelings under the rubric of friendship. They maintain that female friendships of Dickinson's era were often passionate and even erotic, but ultimately free of both sex and self-consciousness. (4) Faderman has been the most influential proponent of this classification because Dickinson remains a centerpiece of friendship thesis. (5) Despite the inclusion of Dickinson in anthology of literature, she writes in the headnote, Perhaps [Dickinson] was somewhat self-conscious about this poetry, not because she formulated it specifically as lesbian (she would have seen it as an expression of romantic friendship), but because it revealed so much of her (Chloe Plus Olivia 44). Similarly, Farr likens Dickinson's for Susan to that of a lov er, but carefully qualifies claim in a note that reads, I do not mean to suggest, as some recent critics have, that this affection was distinctly though Dickinson's wistful delight in both Susan's appearance and kisses have their measure of eros Dickinson's 'Engulfing' Play 237,249 n16). Pollak suggests, Within some letters and some poems, Dickinson probably views herself as a suppressed lesbian, but she continues, Carnality ... was not a major focus of relationship with Sue, and adds shortly thereafter, Lesbianism, for Dickinson, was one of the roads not taken (79-80). Other critics, more liberal in their interpretations of Dickinson's sexual allusion and willing to use the term or homosexual, have been reluctant to confirm conscious use of sexual imagery and metaphor, often qualifying their claims of homoeroticism in letters and poems with the suggestion that it was probably produced unconsciously. For example, in second book on Dickinson's imagery, Patterson titles chapter on the sexual Geography of the Unconscious, and she asserts, [Dickinson's] mind dwelt obsessively on certain deprivations, and the images plucked from that mind betrayed obsessiveness in clusters of genital symbolism (Emily Dickinson's Imagery 45). Cody's psychoanalytic biography discusses Dickinson's bisexuality at length, but he also views it as largely repressed. Cody argues that the Austin-Susan-Emily triangle was, in essence, a revival of the old oedipal dilemma, and he suggests that Dickinson suffered from split identifications (with both Austin and Susan), which produced an unconscious fantasy of sexual consummation with each of them as a means of displacing infantile longing for both parents (254-56). …

Coleridge and the Pleasures of Verse

IN THE CONTEXT OF A RECENT REVIVAL OF INTEREST IN ROMANTIC LITERARY form, (1) this essay hopes to demonstrate that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is among most purposeful practitioners of verse as verse in his era. The essay suggests that, along with his deep engagement with shifting political scene and with philosophical and religious disputes, he cherished particulars of willed poetic craftsmanship, and was quick to criticize in his own work and in that of others lapses in sound, whether from haste to express opinions however true or false, from lack of training, from a natively faulty sense of rhythm or weight of vowels, or from erroneous views about equivalence of poetry and prose. Amid his many ardent defenses--of sanctity of human soul, of trinity, of clerisy, and of method--his defense of ancient art of musical perfection in words was similarly ardent and his insistence on its purpose--pleasure--decisive throughout his life. Mellifluous and varied metrics was his darling study. (2) New volumes of The Collected Coleridge have revealed more and more contexts in which Coleridge expressed his thoughts about value of meter, demonstrated his practical expertise in meter, criticized meters of other poets, and admonished fellow poets not to forget meter in excitement of disputation. Coleridge's preoccupation with meter occupies many pages of Collected Notebooks, Collected Letters, Biographia Literaria, Lectures 1808-1818, Table Talk, Marginalia, and Shorter Works and Fragments. (3) He was interested not only in meter as a topic in itself but also as a discipline that touches many of his other interests. Meter, for him, is chief vehicle for achieving aim of poetry, which is pleasure; it quickens passions; it demands technical skill and knowledge of other and older languages. Meter pulls Coleridge back from chasm of idealism to vivacious body that his spirit filled. Meter draws its power from both disciplined will and body's rhythmical energy; it spans intersection of mind and body and reconciles head and heart, specifically heart-beat. Coleridge's contemporaries recognized his passion for prosody; his own criticism of other people's verse harps on meter and errors of meter as politely as possible, given his fear that a crucial skill risked being lost to poetic tradition; his definitions of poetry stress energy and movement rather than belabored distinctions between primary and secondary imagination; and his practice as a poet at its best fulfills his own requirements for verse, promoting this purpose, for instance, in Christabel. Throughout, he demonstrated in his own acts and in his praise or detraction of others a belief in carefully weighted sound as true measure of poetic excellence. In 1832, trying to capture as much of essence of his failing father-in-law as possible, Coleridge's nephew described Coleridge's unusually intense passion for versification: Mr. Coleridge has almost from commencement of his poetic life looked upon versification as constituting in and by itself a much more important branch of art poetic than most of his eminent contemporaries appear to have done. And this more careful study shows itself in him in no technical peculiarities or fantastic whims, against which genius of our language revolts; but in a more exact adaptation of movement to feeling, and in a finer selection of particular words with reference to their local fitness for sense and sound. (Table Talk 1.564) Merging his own impressions with his uncle's remarks in a conversation on 31 March 1832, Henry Nelson Coleridge goes on to describe Coleridge as a musical poet rather than a pictorial one, for the whole man is made up of music; and yet Mr. Coleridge has no ear for music, as it is technically called. He compares exquisite versification of conclusion to Kubla Khan to an outburst or crash of harps in still air of autumn. …

The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820

IT IS ONE OF THE IRONIES OF THE LONG HISTORY OF POPULAR AND CRITICAL reception of William Wordsworth's poetry that a writer so remorselessly addicted to travel, to movement of and within self, should have come to epitomize importance of sense of place in English literature. Identified in popular mind with English Lakes, Wordsworth's traditional but long-derided categorization as a nature poet has had a new lease of life in recent years with rise of ecological literary criticism, and with growing interest in geographic and spatial contexts of romanticism and relative autonomy of regional cultures of period. The considerable attention being given to domestic politics of Wordsworth circle has to some extent underscored this emphasis on local, bounded quality of poet's imagination. At their best, these trends have restored material depth and human complexity to criticism of Wordsworth and provided a welcome corrective to theoretical excesses of seventies and eighties; at their worst, they have risked caricaturing Wordsworth studies as a curious and risible offshoot of heritage industry. But however important local landscapes, sensibility of place, and settled domesticity are to an appreciation of Wordsworth's creativity, antithetical investments in freedom of movement, itinerancy, and travel of a poet described by one of his best critics as having a gypsy in his soul (1) should not be underestimated. Before his resettlement in Grasmere at end of 1799, Wordsworth's adult life had been one of continual displacement, between Cambridge, France, London, Dorset, Somerset, Germany, and numerous more temporary residences. It is a mistake to assume that return of native celebrated in writing of Home at Grasmere in 1800 quelled this restlessness: in addition to his constant wandering among his dear native regions, Wordsworth was regularly taking off to various destinations in England in second half of his life, and with members of his family undertook significant tours of Scotland, Isle of Man, and countries in western Europe. I have argued elsewhere for powerful influence of Wordsworth's compulsive pedestrianism on generation of his early poetry up to The Prelude of 1805; on a different tack, Kenneth Johnston has interestingly noted coincidence of Wordsworth's periods of creativity on his unfinished lifetime project, The Recluse, with transitional phases in his domestic existence--when his roots were being disturbed. (2) These are just two indications of close link between writing and mobility in this poet's literary life. The area of Wordsworth's life and work that is least studied in this connection are tours he undertook in second half of his life. As Alan Liu has pointed out, Wordsworth considered itinerary poems produced out of these tours sufficiently important for him to have breached psychological principles underpinning arrangement of 1815 collected edition of his works with this broad and heterogeneous middle zone of topicality: (3) in later collected editions memorials of two tours in Scotland and of two tours on Continent, plus other travel sequences such as Duddon sonnets and Yarrow Revisited, distinctively subvert leading principle of classifying poems according to the powers of mind predominant in production of them. (4) It is remarkable that, until publication earlier this year of John Wyatt's Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, (5) no sustained critical treatment had been made of these groups of poems; indeed, no full-length study of importance of travel and travel literature to Wordsworth generally had been offered since Charles Norton Coe's in 1953. (6) In this paper I want to focus on just one of late tours--the Continental tour of 1820--and to begin to evaluate significance of genre which Wordsworth developed to leave a poetic trace of his itinerary, memorial tour sequence. …

A queer chivalry: the homoerotic asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a practitioner of strict asceticism in its broadest definition - the refusal of physical pleasure or comfort in the interests of moral or spiritual gain. As a result, his commentators have felt obliged to take a stand approving or disapproving of this rigorous self-discipline. Many idealize his allegiance to the Society of Jesus as motivated by his determination to conquer his attraction to other men, and thus as the source of the spiritual strength from which his eucharistic and Christological verse derived. Others decry his monasticism as the regrettably oppressive regimen from which he was able to escape only occasionally through his sensuous, sometimes overtly homoerotic verse. Julia F. Saville uses Lacanian theories of sublimation and courtly love to reconfigure this long-standing rift in the field of Hopkins criticism. This study displaces hagiographic interpretations of the poet's life, arguing that Hopkins's poetics of homoerotic asceticism shaped his work in such a way that his career should be viewed not as a steady linear progression but as an ongoing process of negotiating his desire. It also constitutes a map tracing the alternating practices of self-discipline and self-indulgence, self-expression and self-silencing performed by Hopkins's verse. The result is a reading of asceticism that does not advocate or condemn its practice. What is needed, Saville argues, is a reading that explains first the dialectic capacity of asceticism both to constrain and to liberate, to cause discomfort and to give satisfaction, and second, the ethical value of recognizing and encouraging this dialectical operation.

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Cecil Y. Lang.THE LETTERS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD: VOLUME III, 1866-1870. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

The third of a projected six volumes, this handsome and necessary book covers five momentous years in Matthew Arnold's life. Among his great contemporaries none attempted such extraordinarily diverse projects as Arnold set his hand to in these years. The range and the achievement are, on any estimate, simply stunning. This volume opens with Arnold preparing the lectures he would publish in 1867 as On the Study of Celtic Literature. It ends (nearly) with a letter to T. H. Huxley in which he hopes that his great friend will read aright the presentation copy of St. Paul and Protestantism (1870) that is on its way to him. In between these attempts to carry light from the Celts to his countrymen and throw light for his countrymen on the poetics of Scripture, Arnold had a go at reviving his poetic life (New Poems [1867]), wrote a masterpiece of Victorian sagacity (Culture and Anarchy [1869]), and turned his employment as a school inspector into an occasion for composing a model educational report (Schools and Universities on the Continent [1868]). For an encore, he brought out second editions of both New Poems and St. Paul and Protestantism and he did sustained (but, alas, not completed) work on a sort of handbook to Greek poetry. All of this he accomplished while keeping his day job, battling toothache, worrying about money problems, suffering the deaths of two of his children, moving from London to Harrow (partly because of the money problems), writing an array of contributions for various periodicals, and keeping up his affectionate relationships with his family and friends. Only someone highly serious would attempt so heteroglossic a life.

Horace and His Fathers: Satires 1.4 and 1.6

Fere nulli alii sunt homines qui talem in filios suos habent potestatem qualem nos habemus. --Gaius Institutiones Iuris Civilis 1.55 No other ancient poet offers the sense of affectionate intimacy which Horace's "autobiography" in the Satires grants to his readers. 1 It is consequently with some initial regret that readers recognize that Horace tells us very little about his life, 2 and that furthermore the "information" he supplies is motivated by its poetic context, rather than by the impulse which Horace beguilingly alludes to, of confessing his life to his books. Satires 1.4 and 1.6 are the well-known loci of Horace's upbringing by his father, told in the context of Horace's relation to Lucilius, his satiric forebear, and to Maecenas, the man conventionally known as Horace's patron. All four figures--father, son, satiric predecessor, and patron--are artifacts of the poet's generic construction, dramatis personae structured to provide a definition to Horace's satiric art. The freedman father who so famously raised his son, by hand as it were, serves to organize the relation between Horace and the two figures Horace makes to loom in his poetic life, Lucilius and Maecenas. Paired in their respective poems with Horace's father, Lucilius and Maecenas are given a fatherly relationship to Horace only to be displaced by the biological parent. More remarkably, Horace's biological father emerges from the poems as Horace's poetic father too, and this leaves Lucilius and Maecenas deprived of the poetically crucial role which they seemed bound to assume in the satire and life of the poet. These paternal maneuvers [End Page 93] in Satires 1.4 and 1.6 make the persona of Horace the poetic cause of his art, make the constructed "self" of Horace the unshakable source of his poetry, and secure a particular disposition for his satire. Although Horace appears to subordinate art to life, extracting the causes of his persona and his poetry from his father's training and social status, the eventual outcome works in reverse, and it is the poet's life which is subordinated to his art. Satire 1.4: Who is the Father of this Genre? It is especially important to recognize the artful selectivity of Horace's self-portrait in the Satires, because the satirist's persona emerges as a crucially defining element of the genre of satire for Horace. In Satire 1.4 he uses his own persona to explain, justify, and limit the satiric poetry he writes. Although he begins the poem by distinguishing himself from Lucilius stylistically, what evolves in the course of the poem is a contemplation of human character in which poetic style is only one outcome of that character. Horace's defense of his satire in 1.4 rests on a self-description couched in ethical, not poetic, terms. The merging of poetic style and personal character produces a picture of the satiric genre which is identified with the poet himself; the poetry is the inevitable outcome of the man. When Horace asks whether his poetry is justifiably suspectum (1.4.65), he answers by telling us who he is; the poet is the answer to the question about the genre. Style and ethos are thus made indistinguishable. That art can be wholly identified with its human source is in some sense a radical view, but it is nevertheless congenial to satire, a genre peculiarly fixed in the ordinariness of life, whose muse is, as Horace says later, pedestris. 3 Satire constantly finds its wisdom, parody, or bite in ordinary material reality, so Horace's strategy of equating the poem with its material cause, the poet, is perfectly consistent with the genre's [End Page 94] orientation. It is a genre, after all, whose name is derived from a food, the stuff (so to speak) of life. 4 If the portrait of his father that Horace gives to us...

Past and Present in Dryden's "Fables"

a more general revival of interest in political history on the part of literary scholars. Recent studies have pointed out many levels of partisan expression in the works of Dryden's final decade, when the old poet, cast out of the laureate's post and living by his wits, contrived to communicate his Jacobite principles by devices ranging from subtle mistranslation to overt defiance.' I have embraced this mode of interpretation by tracing the political aspects of Dryden's translations of Juvenal and Persius and by arguing for the presence of Jacobite innuendo in King Arthur.2 My topic here, however, is history in a larger sense. Always aware of parallels between past and present events, which he dramatized in the biblical and mythical allusions of all of his court panegyrics and in the sustained typological narrative of Absalom andAchitophel, Dryden in his final years took comfort in imagining history moving in grand cycles. Without necessarily claiming deep belief in typology or in the cyclical nature of history, he selected for translation and included in his original poems a number of passages in which the end of a life, a century, or an age resembles its beginning. In Fables, these patterns include the poet's own life and poetic career, the politically tumultuous century just coming to its end, and the whole of Western literary history.

From the Editors

New beginnings give us the opportunity to do better “the next time.” In the rush to welcome the new millennium, it is fitting to take time to look more thoughtfully at issues not adequately covered in decades past. Robert Frost's musing about less traveled roads gives poetic life to the theme of this CQ Special Section, exploring some of the all too unknown territory between doctors and patients.

Chaucer A to Z: the essential reference to his life and works

An encyclopedic guide to the fourteenth-century poet's life and works examines Chaucer's language, historical events, and literary influences in his work.

Walt Whitman: the song of himself

Whitman: The Song of Himself is the first full-length critical biography of Walt Whitman in more than forty years. Jerome Loving makes use of recently unearthed archival evidence and newspaper writings to present the most accurate, complete, and complex portrait of the poet to date. This authoritative biography affords fresh, often revelatory insights into many aspects of the poet's life, including his attitudes toward the emerging urban life of America, his relationships with his family members, his developing notions of male-male love, his attitudes toward the vexed issue of race, and his insistence on the union of American states. Virtually every chapter presents material that was previously unknown or unavailable, and Whitman emerges as never before, in all his complexity as a corporal, cerebral, and spiritual being. Loving gives us a new Poet of Democracy, one for the twenty-first century.Loving brings to life the elusive early Whitman, detailing his unhappy teaching career, typesetting jobs, quarrels with editors, and relationships with family and friends. He takes us through the Civil War - with Whitman's moving descriptions of the wounded and dying he nursed, the battlegrounds and camps he visited - demonstrating why the war became one of the defining events of Whitman's life and poetry. Loving's account of Whitman's relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most complete and fascinating available. He also draws insights from new material about Whitman's life as a civil servant, his Lincoln lectures, and his abiding campaign to gain acceptance for what was regarded by many as a 'dirty book'.He examines each edition of Leaves of Grass in connection with the life and times that produced it, demonstrating how Whitman's poetry serves as a priceless historical document - marking such events as Grant's death, the completion of the Washington monument, Custer's defeat, and the Johnstown flood - at the same time that it reshapes the canon of American literature. The most important gap in the Whitman record is his journalism, which has never been completely collected and edited. Previous biographers have depended on a very incomplete and inaccurate collection. Loving has found long-forgotten runs of the newspapers Whitman worked on and has gathered the largest collection of his journalism to date. He uses these pieces to significantly enhance our understanding of where Whitman stood in the political and ideological spectra of his era.Loving tracks down the sources of anecdotes about Whitman, how they got passed from one biographer to another, were embellished and re-contextualized. The result is a biography in which nothing is claimed without a basis in the factual record. Whitman: The Song of Himself will be an invaluable tool for generations to come, an essential resource in understanding Leaves of Grass and its poet - who defied literary decorum, withstood condemnation, and stubbornly pursued his own way.

A gift imprisoned: the poetic life of Matthew Arnold

Dr. Arnold of Rugby Crabby in Childhood Schooldays Oxford First Poems Days of Llia and Valentine Lansdowne, Clough and Marguerite The Strayed Reveller, Obermann and Marguerite, Once More Marriage to Miss Wightman Empedocles Renounced This for our wisest! A Professor of Poetry Last Poems.

The Emily Dickinson handbook

In this text, students of Emily Dickinson can find a source of accurate, up-to-date information on the poet's life and works, her letters and manuscripts, the cultural climate of her times, her reception and influence, and the current state of Dickinson scholarship. Written by a distinguished group of contributors from the United States and abroad, the 22 essays in this volume reflect the many facets of the poet's oeuvre, as well as the principal trends in Dickinson studies. Topics include Richard Sewall on Dickinson's life, Agnieszka Salska on her letters, David Porter on themes (or the lack of them) in the poetry, Judith Parr on Dickinson and the visual arts, and Roland Hagenbuchle on the poet and literary theory. Contributions from newer scholars range from Kerstin Behnke on translation and Martha Ackmann on biography to Marietta Messmer on the poet's critical reception and Paul Crumbley on her dialogic voice. Each essay presents an historical overview of the subject under scrutiny and offers detailed discussion of the most relevant issues. They should prove useful not just to beginning students, but also to established scholars looking for a review of areas of Dickinson studies with which they are less familiar.

Review: A Life of Matthew Arnold, by Nicholas Murray; Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life, by Clinton Machann; A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold, by Ian Hamilton; and Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue, by Matthew Arnold and Donald D. Stone

Review: <i>A Life of Matthew Arnold</i>, by Nicholas Murray; <i>Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life</i>, by Clinton Machann; <i>A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold</i>, by Ian Hamilton; and <i>Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue</i>, by Matthew Arnold and Donald D. Stone

The Epigrams of Philodemos: Introduction, Text, and Commentary

This edition collects all the epigrams attributed to Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemos of Gadara (c.110-40 BC). In editing these epigrams, Sider has re-examined several manuscripts of the Greek Anthology. Thirty-eight epigrams (three only doubtfully Philodemean, and two spurious) are printed in the original Greek and in English translation, with full critical apparatus and commentary. Sider also includes the text of a recently edited papyrus containing fragments of many known and newly discovered epigrams by Philodemos. In addition to the usual issues involved in editing a Classical poet-i.e. the poet's life, his use of meter, the epigrammatic tradition, and the place of the epigrams in the Greek Anthology-Sider's introduction considers the relationship between Philodemos' philosophy and poetry. He explains how the epigrams fit into the literary views expressed in Philodemos' On Poems and how they clashed with the Epicurean stance against the writing of poetry.

The Artist's Escape from the Idyll: The Relation of Werther to Sesenheim

ELIZABETH POWERS The Artist's Escape from the Idyll: The Relation of Werther to Sesenheim ERDMANN WANIEK'S INSIGHTFUL STUDY of Werther as a reader and of the readers oÃ- Die Leiden des jungen Werthers contains a statement that, while delineating contemporary misreadings of the novel, throws light on a transition that was occurring in eighteenthcentury aesthetics: "Werther ist kein Tugendabriß, sondern ein Mensch mit all seinen schwer faßbaren Widersprüchen." 1TlUs Statement deserves some attention for, despite the tendency of Goethe's contemporaries to identify with (or indeed to emulate) him,Werther is a literary character, not a human being ("Mensch").That the novel Werther had made this distinction problematic is sounded in Matthias Claudius's assessment of the novel—"Weiß nicht, ob's Geschieht oder 'η Gedicht ist . . ."2 Our present tendency as critics to speak of figures in novels as if they were "real" human beings (e.g., Werther as a melancholic), which has by now become fairly naturalized, shows how complete is this transition. The change in eighteenth-century aesthetics—from the separation of the realms of art and life to a conflation of the two—is accompanied by a closely related contemporary reaction to Werther, namely, to detect in the fiction the decisive influence of the poet's life. Kestner, for instance, writing to August von Hennings, mentioned similarities between the people in Wetzlar and the characters in Wahlheim—"In Lotte und Albert hat er von uns, meiner Frau und mir, Züge entlehnt" (HA 6:527)—and many details of his account of Jerusalem's suicide, in a November 1772 letter to Goethe, were taken over literally in the description of Werther's suicide. Yet, the matter of Goethe's relationship to Werther is felt to go deeper than such superficial borrowings of events and local color. It was assumed, for instance, that Goethe's relationship with Lotte Buff reflected Werther's with "his" Lotte and that Goethe's feelings and mental state mirrored his hero's, an assumption nicely summed up in the reac- 48 Elizabeth Powers tion of Moses Mendelssohn: "Ach, ich verstehe; Goethe fand es poetisch schön, sich zu erschießen, und zog es vor, in richtiger Person am Leben zu bleiben!"3 Goethe's own comments have strengthened the commonplace that he endowed Werther with his own motivations. In 1779, for instance, he wrote to Charlotte von Stein about suggestions that had been made that he write another Werther: "Gott möge mich behüten, daß ich nicht wieder in den Fall komme, einen zu schreiben und schreiben zu können" (HA 6:534). As late as 1812, Goethe used a phrase in a letter to Karl Friedrich Zelter (3 December), in response to the suicide of the latter's step-son, that he also used to describe the genesis of Werther in that portion of Dichtung und Wahrheit on which he was then working: Wenn das taedium vitae den Menschen ergreift, so ist er nur zu bedauern, nicht zu schelten. Daß alle Symptome dieser wunderlichen, so natürlichen als unnatürlichen Krankheit auch einmal mein Innerstes durchrast haben, daran läßt "Werther" wohl niemand zweifeln. This affective view of the source of Goethe's creativity is at the basis of Barker Fairley's writings on Goethe: Readers of Goethe are agreed that his works are deeply involved in his experience.The translation of life into literature, observable in varying degrees in other writers, is in his case so immediate, so habitual, and so complex as almost to place him in a class apart. He,more than any,is the empirical poet who must go through things in person before he can find in himself the means of expressing them.4 Fairley is articulating what has become a deeply entrenched modern critical assumption: that poetry is "personal utterance" and that "the poet must base his fictions on personal experience," as Marjorie G. Perloff has expressed the matter in her essay "Yeats and Goethe."5 These views resonate with countless interpretations of Goethe's work that see it as a decisive break with the earlier poetic practice of imitating models—indeed, almost as a transformation in human nature.6 So...

The making of Sir Philip Sidney

Does a poet make himself, or do his culture and his fiction make him? Sir Philip Sidney is one of the most popular and enduring of Elizabethan authors, and one of those most preoccupied with the relationship between self, society, and art. Edward Berry's The Making of Sir Philip Sidney explores how Sidney 'made' or created himself as a poet by 'making' representations of himself in the roles of some of his most literary creations: Philisides, Astrophil, and the intrusive persona of the Defence of Poetry. Focusing on the significance of these and other self-representations throughout Sidney's career, Berry combines biography, social history, and literary criticism to achieve a carefully balanced portrayal of the poet's life and work. This is a book that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Sidney, and is likely to appeal to both students and scholars of Sidney, as well as to those wishing to understand the cultural events that shaped this central figure of the English Renaissance.

A Leak in the Silence: The Poetry of Hans Faverey

A Leak in the Silence: The Poetry of Hans Faverey Francis R. Jones (bio) Life and Work Hans Faverey was born in Paramaribo, now the capital of Suriname, in 1933. He moved to Amsterdam as a boy, where he lived until his death in 1990. Alongside his poetic work, he was a lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Leiden. He was married to the Croatian poet and comparative literature scholar Lela Zeckovic. Faverey’s poetic reputation grew slowly. His first collection, Gedichten [Poems] of 1968 gained cautious critical acclaim: it was awarded the Amsterdam Poetry Prize but was seen by some as “difficult” and “hermetic.” Though mysterious, neverthless these poems have an icy inner coherence of theme and mood. To quote one of them in full: Een lek in het zwijgen: noise—. A leak in the silence: noise—. Welke codes? welke filters? (De 1e druif: pets! de 2e druif: pets! What codes? what filters? (The 1st grape: splat! The 2nd grape: splat! de de- The th- Gedichten II, which followed in 1972, was similar in both content and reception. The third volume, Chrysanten, roeiers [Chrysanthemums, Rowers] of 1977, however, which gained the Jan Campert Prize, met with undiluted praise. The poems are indeed more accessible, though they retain a sense of mystery and paradox. They are also slightly longer, setting a tone and format which he was to retain for the rest of his poetic life: [End Page 458] De chrysanten, die in de vaas op de tafel bij het raam staan: dat The chrysanthemums which are in the vase on the table by the window: these zijn niet de chrysanthen die bij het raam op de tafel in de vaas staan are not the chrysanthemums which are by the window on the table in the vase. De wind die je zo hindert en je haar door de war maakt, The wind which is annoying you so and making a mess of your hair, dat is de wind die je haar verwart; het is de wind waardoor je niet meer gehinderd wilt worden als je haar in de war is. this is the wind which is messing up your hair; it is the wind you no longer want to be annoyed by when your hair is in a mess. Faverey’s reputation was confirmed and strengthened by the volumes which followed: Lichtval [Lightfall] (1981), Zijden kettingen [Silken Chains] (1983), Hinderlijke goden [Troublesome Gods] (1985), and Tegen het vergeten [Against Forgetting] (1988). By the time of his last collection, Het ontbrokene [Default] (1990), Hans Faverey was generally recognized as the Netherlands’ most eminent poet. Shortly before his death in 1990, he was awarded the prestigious Constantijn Huygens Prize for his whole oeuvre. Events and Landscapes These are the biographical details. But what reflection do they have in his work? The answer is precious little, at first glance anyway. As the poems quoted above show, Hans Faverey’s poetry avoids easy messages and conventional forms. There are no simple landscapes or narratives, presented for their own picturesque sake or in order to mirror the poet’s emotional state. As Faverey said in a 1988 interview: “You can’t see from my poetry what I’m like in daily life.” But he continued: “The autobiographical in it is piecemeal, is assembled on it or sneaks inside, through associations, through ideas.” And when we look closer, we can indeed sometimes see traces of his work as a clinical psychologist, for example. As in this poem (from Chrysanthemums, Rowers) prompted by his seeing the encephalogram of a dying man: [End Page 459] Nu het uur stil staat Now the hour is standing still, ademt alles afscheid uit en stokt. Deze of gene mond lijkt nog te zuigen everything breathes out parting, and stalls. This mouth or that still seems to be sucking op een tong die nauwelijks meer iets terug kan doen. Wat te doen? Verspreidt de stilstand zich met onmogelijke snelheid? at a tongue scarcely able to do anything in return. What is to be done? Is standstill spreading at an impossible speed? Is dit nog riet dat daar wuift? Are these still reeds waving there? Of wordt er alleen nog gewuifd...

Proustian Closure in Wallace Stevens's "The Rock" and Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III

What it sought so frenetically? What at the bottom of these infinite efforts? Can we say that all lives, works, deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain? When in a well-known passage described the hour that most his own, he did it in such a way that everyone can find it in his own existence. We might almost call it an everyday hour; it comes with the night, a lost twittering of birds, or a breath of dawn at the sill of an open window. - Walter Benjamin, Image of Proust (203) Shaped by awareness of impending death, Wallace Stevens's final gathering of poems, published in his 1954 Collected as The Rock, Elizabeth Bishop's last original collection, published in 1976 as Geography III, enact the cycle of relinquishment familiar to readers of T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding: a time when attachment to self to things to persons alternates with detachment / from self from things from persons (Eliot 142). For each poet, the nearing of death the consequent closing of their canons prompted sequences that embodied the necessary exchange negotiation with the imminence of mortality. Death, because it so sharply distinguishes between representation reality, rescripts the relation between poet work, translating the oeuvre into the enigmatic Bishop anticipates in At the Fishhouses, where continuity rests in the narrative rupture of history: and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, flown (Bishop, CP 66).(1) Preparation for this cycling of mortality into immortality requires ponderous speculative mediation between the private public spheres as the poet prepares a final collection or a collected poems. The material acquisition of a final, public wholeness requires the diminution of the individual poet, the literal disappearance of the body, in favor of the aggrandizement of the text. For both Stevens Bishop, literary celebrity as well as an increased sense of readership compounded complicated their approaches to canonical finality. The Auroras of Autumn (1950), Stevens's most recent previous collection, had won the National Book Award inspired the respectful reviews accorded a major poet. And yet, as critic Helen Vendler notes, Stevens was not really famous until the 1954 publication of his Collected Poems (Vendler, Part of Nature 14).(2) Bishop's Complete (1969), also a National Book Award winner, likewise consolidated her position as a leading poet and, by bringing her early work back into print, exposed her to a fresh generation of readers. So thoroughly had Bishop defined her niche in American letters that her publication of Geography III seemed remarkable, perhaps even superfluous. Vendler's reception of Crusoe in England suggests the valedictory nature of the collection as a whole: A poet who has written this poem really needs to write nothing else: it seems to me a perfect reproduction of the self in words (Part of Nature 349).(3) Dealing with the onset of mortality the fixing of the canon in the presence of relatively wide assuredly respectful audiences presented distinct problems. The similarities engendered by the positioning of these sequences in each poet's life life's work (heightened by Bishop's awareness of Stevens's lingering aesthetic presence) loom large, but the differences between them demonstrate that this is not a simple case of Stevens becoming a fixed to Bishop's wandering star. Stevens in his mid-70s approaches his canon making with a sense of finality,(4) while Bishop, 10 years younger, approaches hers with tentative gestures, unwilling to accept or uninterested in finality or the notion of that will have flown.(5) Such a total totalizing design, imposed on the canon by the demands of mortality, posits a closure that will ultimately negate the poet. …