Lyric Voice Research Articles

Per un’etica del discorso lirico: una lettura della "Ginestra" di Leopardi

The article focuses on Leopardi’s renowned poem La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto (1836) and on the scholars who have firstly explored the ‘political’ ideas proposed by this text: C. Luporini in his Leopardi progressivo and W. Binni in La nuova poetica leopardiana, both published in 1947. This particular field of the Leopardi scholarship – which originated in the postwar years – tries to bring the ideological ‘content’ of the text to the fore. After a quick look at Luporini’s and Binni’s readings, the inquiry focuses instead on the ‘form’ of the text, and more specifically on the practice of lyric discourse, in order to outline the general ethical dynamics which underlie the lyric use of language in La ginestra: the relationship between the “I” and the flower of the desert, the potential dialogism of the lyric voice, the context of production of the text, the posture assumed by the “I” and the historical position of the critics, the truth telling as an ethical act of individual and collective resistance to crisis. By looking at these dynamics, it is possible to reconsider the political ‘ideal’ proposed by the text – in particular the «social catena» («social chain») mentioned at line 149 – in the light of its discursive practices. The article, finally, emphasizes the similarities between this interpretative possibility and the philosophical interpretation proposed by Antonio Negri in his essay Lenta ginestra. Saggio sull’ontologia di Giacomo Leopardi (1987) in a cultural context very different from Binni and Luporini’s postwar Italy.

Vasilii Petrov and The Poetics of Patronage

This article seeks to bridge the gap between sociohistorical and aesthetic readings of Russian occasional verse by arguing that patronage itself can be seen as engendering its own poetics. The author focuses on hitherto unanalyzed features of Vasilii Petrov's lyrics addressed to various patrons. The close readings of Petrov’s odes and epistles call attention to the poet’s coordinating syntax as structuring the subordinative relationships between poet and patron, and articulating discourses of friendship, community, and the public, of civic virtue, and of social and lyric interdependence. The essay ultimately arrives at a definition of the poetics of patronage, in which the poet claims agency without insisting on his autonomy (as would his successors in the Romantic period), and in which the lyric voice relies upon an other, drawing inspiration from conditions of relationship rather than isolation.

The canary in the coal mine: Tony Harrison and the poetics of coal, climate, and capital

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that Tony Harrison's poetic studies of deindustrialised Yorkshire anticipate Jason Moore's eco-Marxist critique of the neoliberal energy economy. Critical discussion of Tony Harrison's poetry has focused on the characteristic stances and techniques by which the poet first established his canonical standing, essaying his uneasy class consciousness and explosive use of regional dialect. Precious little attention has been paid to the ecological concerns that have become an increasingly integral element of Harrison's work. In the long narrative poem v. (1984) Harrison responded to the hard-fought Miners’ Strike (1984–5), protesting the disenfranchisement of the British industrial working class. In some of v.’s more speculative lines, he countenanced the possibility of coal's eventual ‘exhaustion'. In the film poem Prometheus (1998), he appraised the Miners’ Strike from the distance of a decade, anchoring the poem in the perspective of a cancer-ridden coal miner. In the image of a dying, chain-smoking, Prometheus, Harrison cast the peculiar ironies of Britain's ongoing coal dependency in particularly profound relief. This paper finds that the evolution of Harrison's lyric voice captures much of the underlying music of British society, as it confronts the legacy of industrialisation, as history closes in, unremittingly, on capital's socioecological endgame.

Metaphors Unto Themselves: Mental Illness Poetics in Contemporary Chinese Poetry.

Recently, proponents of the critical medical humanities have recommended a more discerning view of the ways in which genres and forms "speak" to and for illness, looking specifically at cultural and historical dimensions and cultural specificities of idioms of distress rather than at transhistorical and transcultural approaches. These two claims for a genre-specific critique and, in this case, a cross-cultural approach, ground my reading of the work of Chinese poets Guo Lusheng (Indexfinger; b. 1948) and Wen Jie (b. 1963), diagnosed with schizophrenia and clinical depression, respectively. The study uncovers a lyrical voice that takes shape in the poets' illness-related content, but also in the formal aspects of the Chinese poetic tradition. I argue that the delight of writing poetry lies less in the attempt to express a subjective experience than in finding the devices and forms that integrate an individual experience into a collective form of "illness poetics."

Introduction: Imaging Technology

This forum, “Technologies of the Visible World,” addresses the technological shifts that made attention to vision a crucial index of both modernity and subjectivity in the nineteenth-century United States. These essays do not overlook, for example, the delicacy of the lyric voice as implicated in the world of vision, but rather ask, once photography has emerged on the page as a means to reproduce sight, what is the format for establishing an intimacy between reader and viewer? Does it depend on language or on sight? Even as the world that might be constituted through questions of visibility in the nineteenth century often privileged whiteness, the pages examined here raise the question of how images reflect readers, as the daguerreotype once reflected the face of the viewer.

A Companion to George Eliot

A Companion to George Eliot

Women Writers, Nineteenth Century Nursery Rhyme and Lyric Innovation

AbstractFrom “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” to “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, some of the most recognizable children's verse in the English language was written by nineteenth century women poets. A close look at this tradition of original nursery rhyme reveals that it is surprisingly experimental and that it enhances our understanding of the ways in which women writers from this period negotiated the relations between gender, genre and authorship. Indeed, children's verse constitutes important evidence of a tradition of generic innovation and lyric experimentation by women writers, who use juvenile poetry to expand the formal potential of the lyric, adapting the conventions of oral verse to develop a new poetic voice for women. More specifically, women writers of juvenile verse develop a lyric voice capable of expressing the complexities of one of the central aspects of nineteenth century female experience: motherhood. The tradition of original nursery rhyme is dominated by mothers. This is not to say that all women who wrote children's verse were literally mothers but that children's poetry from this period has both a maternal context – women reading to preliterate children – and is voiced by maternal speakers. Through an examination of the collaborative Romantic‐era poets Ann and Jane Taylor and the American poet Eliza Lee Follen, the maternal speaker emerges as of central importance to women's poetry. Not only do women writers use maternal speakers to authorize their entry into the commercial literary marketplace, but these writers also use various aspects of maternal experience, including voice and sound, to push the boundaries of the lyric.

Students are moving towards god of knowledge, pursuing for the truth: On children's poetry by Vladislav Petkovic Dis

This paper is on the insufficiently analysed poems for children by Vladislav Petkovic Dis. They are being enlightened in the context of the magazine they were published in (Mala Srbadija) and biographical data from life of Dis. Poems are observed from the context of development of Serbian poetry for children, focusing primarily at the particularities of their expression and authenticity of the view of children. In a few poems for children by Dis, there were different poetical possibilities in forming certain topics and motifs in connection with the children's world. This is why in the poems for children by Dis, there is a child as a lyrical voice or an adult addressing children not with the purpose of teaching them, mocking them, but gives advice, directs them and favours them in comparison to the world of adults. Very clear picture of the school is particularly expressed, representing learning, knowledge, dominantly warm, almost idealized notion about the child given by the poems about nature or poems about national identity.

“A Regime of Small Kindnesses”

The monosyllabic opening of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), My name is Ruth, immediately conjures up Melville's brash invitation, Call me Ishmael! (25). Yet her own haunting spondaic rhythm serves as a quiet drum roll for funereal list of family members that follows, until style metamorphoses within a page, in Ruth Stone's account of her grandfather's westering to a land of uncountable (4). Abruptly, time and space pull asunder as Fingerbone Lake floods family home, with Ruth scrambling descriptive tenses, gently echoing herself, swelling lyrical in a recollection of then and now, there and here: seems there was a time when dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of margins, as between mountains as they must have been and mountains as they are now, or between lake as it once was and lake as it is now. Sometimes in spring old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping threshold, stairway gone from sight after second step (4-5). The puzzling margins of things are first temporal limits, as past and present collide (former mountains, older lake), before she veers into a future tense (One will open) that paradoxically strains temporal limits, anticipating novel's resurrection of ordinary (18). It is as if flooded basement itself provoked emergence of a lyrical voice (wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping threshold), with water, air, vegetation, basement, all commingling, outdoors and in, while tableau slips and slides among descriptive registers. This forms a baffling dislocation of setting as well as style before we realize how fully novel celebrates things out of place, not merely in scenes that defy conventional household management but in a narrative voice loosely constrained by figurative forms of housekeeping. Robinson's title refers to more than just house, then, becoming a trope for strategies of imposition and order as well as for gestures of restoration and accommodation. The very word registers this ambivalence: the maintenance of a household; management of household affairs, but also keeping of a good table--hospitality (Shorter OED). In turn, hospitality is cited as the reception and entertainment of guests or strangers with liberality and goodwill. The tension between these polarities structures Ruth's efforts to assuage her feelings of abandonment, imagining lost voices of her grandfather, grandmother, mother, and sister as she plucks from memory shards of a past that might help shape a tolerable future. Yet she does so in a mixed mode, both stylistically and narratively, defined by twin poles of housekeeping: she grants guests of her fragmented life a hospitable hearing, as she structures her account to ensure a suitable order. This ambivalence is evoked toward end in a telling simile when Ruth concedes that even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams (207), acknowledging ineffectiveness of too one-sided housekeeping in very breath that fosters its restorative psychological analogies. And her narrative style pays tribute to her grandmother's striving for domestic harmony and order, as she models herself on her aunt Sylvie's eccentric discombobulations by shifting registers, entertaining anomalies, embracing paradox and contradiction. (1) In fact, novel bridges very tensions of its title, cherishing recuperative possibilities of both housekeeping and narrative as if conceived reciprocally--of housekeeping as a form of imaginative accommodation akin to narrative, restoring a tentative order that nonetheless keeps ambiguity alive, paradoxically defying closure yet knitting a fragile resolution together. As Robinson elsewhere reminds us, at a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which together, make world salubrious, savory, and warm. …

Morris, Paul D. Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice (review)

SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 748 to Zamiatin’s archives and especially his voluminous correspondence has resulted in a full, balanced and meticulously detailed account of his life and work. Of particular value to scholars of this period are accounts of Zamiatin’s friendships and collaborations with Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Fedin, Annenkov, Kustodiev, Chukovskii and many other figures in Russian modernism. The photographs and illustrations included in the book add significantly to the story Curtis tells in this volume. It is a story that expands and enriches our understanding of early twentieth-century Russian and Soviet culture as a whole. Stetson University Karen L. Ryan Morris, Paul D. Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2010. xxv + 447 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Vladimir Nabokov’s poetry was highly appreciated by many Russian émigré critics in the 1920s, yet only a small number of critics today believe that Nabokov’s lyric poetry matches his prose for ingenuity. In his book, Paul Morris challenges Alexander Dolinin’s opinion that ‘the verse exercises of the young Nabokov played an important role in the formation of his narrative style’ (p. 88) and aspires to demonstrate the centrality of poetry to Nabokov’s body of writing. Morris claims that ‘the lyric sensibility Nabokov developed in his verse pervades all of his writing’(p. xvii). As Morris indicates, the aim of his study is twofold: ‘to offer a comprehensive view of Nabokov’s poetry’ and to identify the role of the lyric sensibility in Nabokov’s drama, short fiction and novels (p. xvi), especially in The Gift (1937–38), in which many poems were written by that novel’s protagonist, and in Pale Fire (1962), which opens with a 999-line iambic pentameter poem in rhymed couplets. The book comprises the Introduction/chapter one that outlines the evolution of Nabokov as a poet and six chapters. Chapter two examines the reception of Nabokov’s poetry written both in Russian and in English; chapter three discusses in great detail Nabokov’s lyric voice and focuses on the presence of metaphysical traits in his poetry and identifies major themes used in his verse, including such topics as poetic inspirations, love, cosmic synchronization, encounters with the otherworld and the poeticization of everyday life; chapter four describes the lasting effect of poetry on Nabokov’s drama; chapter five explores the employment of Nabokov’s lyricism in short fiction, and chapters six and seven focus on Nabokov’s novels The Gift and Pale Fire. The strength of Morris’s study lies in its thorough investigation of Nabokov’s lyric consciousness and Morris’s awareness of its thematic and structural REVIEWS 749 complexitythatenhancesanunderstandingofthewritingsofNabokovaffected by that complexity. Yet Morris’s exploration of Nabokov’s poetic persona is far from being exhaustive. While Morris rightly detects several important allusions in Nabokov’s verse to the poetry of Keats, Blok, Fet, Tiutchev and Belyi, they are not explored in depth. The role of Nabokov’s parodies and translations of Russian poetry in the development of his narrative style is not mentioned at all. Some of Morris’s statements appear superficial and unsupported by references. For example, the statement that Nabokov’s short story ‘A Guide to Berlin’ ‘seems to be more a prose poem than a short story’ (p. 260) is not supported by any references to the tradition of prose poems as had been developed in Russia and in France. It would be appropriate at least to compare the above story to Turgenev’s prose poems which were inspired by Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose. The latter marked the beginnings of the genre in the 1860s. While Turgenev the fiction writer sought to enhance and heighten the ideas of his earlier prose narratives in his prose poems, it can be argued that the fragmentary and impressionistic style of Nabokov’s story, ‘A Guide to Berlin’, develops some of the mnemonic imagery of his verse written in emigration. Many references to Nabokov’s links with Russian Symbolism are not given adequate consideration and are mentioned in passing. A good example of lumping Nabokov together with major European and Russian poets can be...

Seam by Tarfia Faizullah (review)

Reviewed by: Seam by Tarfia Faizullah Susan Cohen (bio) Tarfia Faizullah. Seam. Southern Illinois University P. From the opening lines of Tarfia Faizullah’s singular, eloquent collection Seam, chosen by Chad Davidson for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, it is apparent she’s a poet who feels tremendous empathy and who takes risks to express it. “In West Texas, oil froths / luxurious from hard ground / while across Bangladesh, // bayoneted women stain / pond water blossom,” Faizullah begins, immediately letting readers know she dares to confront a horrific history in a lush and lyric voice. Faizullah succeeds because, while her language is beautiful, she never prettifies the urgent story these poems tell about the mass rape of Bengali women during East Pakistan’s 1971 War of Independence. Also, she acknowledges the question that hangs over her enterprise: what justifies making art from horror. Seam begins with an epigraph by Paul Celan: “Everything is near and unforgotten.” Survivor of Nazi labor camps, Celan famously distanced himself from his best-known mournful and intensely musical poem “Death Fugue,” fearing he had poeticized the Holocaust. That Faizullah invokes Celan, both in the epigraph and again in a crown of sonnets called “Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum,” demonstrates how well she understands the ethical complexity of her work. She probes the lines between witness, appropriation, and exploitation. [End Page 167] Seam revolves around the campaign West Pakistan waged against civilians in East Pakistan, which seceded and fought to become Bangladesh. More than three million people were killed in this war according to Bangladeshi sources, Faizullah tells us, and two hundred thousand women raped. Two hundred thousand! After liberation, the government of Bangladesh proclaimed the women war heroines, or birangonas. Still, many remain stigmatized and ostracized, even by their families. These events occurred before Faizullah was born in Brooklyn and then raised in West Texas. Her parents emigrated from Bangladesh in 1978, and she portrays herself as an unobservant Muslim. Yet, the underreported story compelled her to travel to Dhaka to interview some of the birangonas and to make poetry from her experience and from theirs. Eight poems, all of them titled “Interview with a Birangona,” form the central portion of the book, each a persona poem in which the woman speaks, each rendered in deceptively gentle couplets as if to slow them down and not overwhelm with their brutality. Here is the first: I. What Were You Doing When They Came for You? Gleaming water sweeps over Mother’s feet. Bayonets. Teeth. My green and yellow Eid sari flaps damply between two palm trees. Grandfather calls to me: mishti maya. Girl of sweetness. Aashi, I call back. I finish braiding my hair, tie it tight. I twine a red string around my thigh. That evening, a blade sliced through string, through skin, red on red on red. Kutta, the man in khaki says. It is only later I realize it is me he is calling dog. Dog. Dog. Braided in and around these devastating poems are others in the voice of the interviewer, who also asks difficult questions of herself, including whether she’s morally justified when she urges the victims to relive their rapes. In “The Interviewer Acknowledges Grief,” Faizullah puts it directly: “Because you / can’t reassure me I have / the right to ask anything / of women whose bodies won’t / ever again be their own.” In a masterful poem titled “The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame,” she describes how the interviewer—back in a hotel room after videotaping women “unlocking the desiccated coffins of their grief”—touches and sexually satisfies herself. “She doesn’t feel shame’s / dark-circled tightening after waking,” Faizullah writes, ending: [End Page 168] It’s later: when she arrives back at a borrowed flat, begins to strip off travel-pungent clothes and smells her own body’s resinous musk. It’s when she sits down naked at the desk to rewind and fast-forward through all the pixelated footage of the women’s kerosened lives. It’s when she begins to write about it in third person, as though it was that simple to unnail myself from my own body. What might be voyeurism...

Ovidian Lyric Voice in the Iberian Baroque

The present study is an analysis of the ways in which Ovid’s account of the myth of Echo and Narcissus ( Metamorphoses vv. 357–401) serves as a foundation for models of sonority and voice within Iberian Baroque aesthetics. In more specific terms, I argue that these models enabled seventeenth-century Iberian (and Ibero-American) poets—especially Luis de Góngora and those poets in dialogue with his work—to make strategic use of gendered discourse at both the semantico-referential and pragmatic levels of signification. Grounding my analysis in a close reading of selected works by Luis de Góngora, Sóror Violante do Céu, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, I point to the implementation of specific poetic elements (such as hyperbaton, enjambment, and rima abrazada ) which constitute a mode of poetic composition that works in large measure to foreground prosody over semantic and syntactic order. The result is a “poetics of Echo” that draws from a specific conception of Echo’s linguistic presence in the Ovidian version of the myth. I argue that a particularly Ovidian intersection of body, textuality, and voice emerges during the early seventeenth-century Ibero-Baroque poetry that I consider.

Idiocy and Aberrancy: Disability, Paul de Man, and Wordsworth’s “Idiot Boy”

This essay approaches Wordsworth’s “Idiot Boy” by way of juxtaposing disability studies scholarship with deconstructive readings proposed by Paul de Man.

Material Voices

This article takes up the intersection of AIDS testimony, lyric poetry, and gay male sexuality in Frank Bidart's poetry. Using Douglas Crimp's discussion of the politics of AIDS aesthetics as a starting point, I focus on Bidart's 1997 collection of poems, Desire, to consider how lyric voice engages the complexities of queer sexuality in the context of AIDS. I argue that Bidart's lyric dramatizes the relationship between apostrophe and the queer body, drawing attention both to the rhetorical dimensions of embodiment and to the material dimensions of rhetoric. Read in relation to Leo Bersani's analysis of gay male desire and subjectivity, Bidart's work illuminates that the self-present human voice on which testimony seems to rely is itself a rhetorical figure whose grounding in the body can never be fully located or made distinct from its own figural status. Through this simultaneous reliance on and challenge to lyric voice, Bidart engages the specific demands that the AIDS crisis places on testimony while reminding us that desire undermines even as it sustains testimony's imperatives. His poetry thus complicates both the centrality of voice in lyric studies and the seemingly necessary association between voice and transparent subjectivity that has emerged as a subject of contention in American poetry studies.

The Redemption of History: A Reading of Geoffrey Hill's A Treatise of Civil Power

Geoffrey Hill practices a kind of esthetic austerity of style in A Treatise of Civil Power (2005/2007) that in the end must be reckoned a part of its meaning, its vision of the body politic, power, and culture.1 Three elements combine in this respect: difficulty (so called), the constraining or tamping down of the lyric voice, and subject matter. In relation to Hill, “difficulty” is a hoary trope, and should not be exaggerated. A good number of the thirty-one poems present only a modest level of difficulty to the patient reader; others, however, such as “On Reading Milton and the English Revolution” and “A Précis or Memorandum of Civil Power,” are challenging, and their challenge, a deliberate recalcitrance to easy-going assimilation, is one element of what the volume as a whole is telling us. In a fallen world—and we will see how much Hill has to say about the Fall later—false communication rides easily on subtle and not so subtle lies, distortions, evasions, self-interests, and self-deceptions. The torque of a complex style, elision, sometimes contorted nuance and exactness, are ways of trying to take language back in the direction of an original honesty—which is not to say that there isn’t a lot of esthetic joy, fun even, buried deep down. There is, we might say, a kind of negotiation between this austerity and this joy, so that occasionally an exquisite lyric fullness breaks out even though much of the time Hill is writing what he has called elsewhere “treatise-poems.”2 In a self-reflexive manner, within the volume, he speaks of writing “recitatives” rather than “arias,” of his desire to “unmake / all wrought finalities, become a babbler / in the crowd’s face,” or, as he expresses it in another poem, to write “spare strophes that yield almost nothing / to the knowledge /outside them raw with late wisdom.”3 As a philosophically learned poet, he is writing something like a treatise of politics and poetics which is prepared to live in the reader’s mind not as some wholesome affirmation, but in a self-conscious brokenness, a symbolic enactment of the ever-recurring nature of human failure. His theological positions—putting a lot in a short space—are overwhelmingly orthodox, so that the self-emptying of God in Christ lies at the heart of his religious understandings.4 Moving forward into the esthetic realm from these kinds of depth, we could say that what he is doing here is practicing a deliberate ascesis of thought and word in relation to often tragic subject matter.

LONG VACATION PASTORALS: CLOUGH, TENNYSON, AND THE POETRY OF THE LIBERAL UNIVERSITY

In the opening passage ofA Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf catches herself, and is subsequently caught out, in a moment of reflection on the banks of a river, within the grounds of a barely fictionalised “Oxbridge University”:Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. (6–7)In this fictional account of her trespass on university property, Woolf forges a close association between the environment in which she does her thinking and what she thinks, so that body, mind, and text are shown to be engaged in the same work. Her thoughts, she suggests, have a physical weight: they bow her head to the ground. The landscape bows with her so that a momentarily surreal vista of flaming leaves and long-haired trees is at once the place she is sitting and the space of her imagination, and the “reflections” through which the undergraduate oars take on a double meaning as the boat floats through her consciousness and back out again. The interruption of the beadle causes her to lose her train of thought: it is a fish that jumps and then disappears back into the river. This reverie, which rehearses the lecture's central argument concerning the material conditions required for gender equality, identifies the university as a case in point. Oxbridge is experienced by Woolf's fictional avatar as a place where intellectual freedom is achieved within a series of carefully regulated spaces, and her essay balances the attraction and acknowledged value of these exclusive spaces against the experience of her own exclusion. As so often in her work, the geography of Woolf's prose is haunted by the Victorians, whose lyric voices she can only half hear as she sits at a college window. Her essay therefore invites a return to nineteenth-century accounts of university life that pay attention to the material, or formal, delineations of the university.

Elusive Shores: Lamartine’s Méditations and the Art of Poetry

A quels bords irai-je porter mes reveries et mes malheurs? --Lamartine to A. de Virieu, 5 Oct. 1811 When referring to his first Meditations Poetiques (1820), Lamartine often portrayed his lyric voice as free melody detached from consciousness: Je veux me laisser aller ou me portera la fantasia (Dec. 1818 [18-73]). (1) Persona notwithstanding, this paper aims to nuance the traditional view of Lamartine as purely inspired lyricist through an analysis of specific changes in his concept of poetry as they are reflected in specific poems and prose commentaries. Lamartines so-called inattention to form is actually, to use Maurice Blanchot's words, purete that reflects the will and methode of the poet: La facilite est sa principale rigueur. (176) Others have highlighted the same purposeful restraint when it comes to the poet's language and rhetoric: Ce n'est pas par negligence ou paresse que Lamartine s'est peu corrige,--et il s'est plus corrige qu'on ne l'a cru jadis (Bruneau 154). (2) More recently, Mary Ellen Birkett has lent refreshing counterpoint to the view of Lamartine as an instrument played upon, to demonstrate the poet's artful use of a kaleidoscope of poetic expressions, creating beautiful, everchanging patterns from pieces which are already supplied (40). (3) The Meditations invite further study of Lamartine's poetic process. Though the towering Chateaubriand had pointedly omitted poetry from his recent overviews of modern French literature in Conservateur, Lamartine asserted the French lyric's relevancy through slim volume of elegies. Charting chronological path that aligns the poet's correspondence with developments in several key poems reveals Lamartine to be highly self-conscious, lucidly experimental poet who tempers feeling with compositional restraint: N'as-tu pas quelquefois chante pour toi seul dans ta chambre ou dans les bois? C'est le meme sentiment involontaire qui me force composer; composons donc (to Virieu, Corr Dec. 1818 [18-73]). (4) Lamartine was aware when publishing the Meditations that he was cultivating new poetic style, one rooted in protracted meditation on the art of poetry making. Alain Vaillant has already made compelling case that the hard evidence of versification in Lamartine is more at stake than philosophy, psychology, or abstract discourses on music; but while Vaillant limits himself to Le Lac and the hermeneutics of its echoing structure, I propose fuller reading of the overall volume as the story of Lamartines own developing ars poetica. The first section of this paper will highlight how the poet, reconnecting with the experiential and expressive self, reinforced poetry through surprisingly non-sentimentalized confrontations with as well as through an explicit resistance to the genre of prose. Next, through chronological reading of select poems that enact his discourse on poetry in his correspondence, I will trace the poet's figurations of water in the Meditations to show how they reflect critical stages in an evolving poetic process. Lamartine's elusive shores will serve as metaphor for the way he continually reassesses, effaces, and resituates the limits of poetry. The Poetics of Prosaic Landscapes In surprising contrast to the pale and nebulous depictions of scenery that appear throughout the Meditations, Lamartine's comments to close correspondents indicate that he found inspiration in ordinary, unadorned but vividly illuminated natural surroundings: je ne me sens aucune curiosite pour tout ce qui n'est pas du soleil et de la belle et pure nature (to Virieu, Corr Aug. 1818 [18-44]). Informed by English poetry at young age, Lamartine, who sought to emulate what he described as Alexander Pope's fused role as poet, philosopher, and bon ami, also picked up on Mme de Stael's connection between what she considers the superiority of the English imagination to English poets' propensity for capturing sensory experience: ils ont l'art d'unir intimement les reflexions philosophiques aux sensations produites par les beautes de la Champagne (De la litterature II: 220). …

Louise Glück's Twenty-First-Century Lyric

This essay examines a contemporary poetics that implicitly challenges prevailing critiques of lyric as asocial, monologic, and naively self-expressive. Louise Glück practices a lyric mode whose plainspoken surface and emotional immediacy belie its metalinguistic and metafictional complexity. Her poems' illocutionary structures and their attunement to everyday grammatical nuance convey an understanding of language as situational, context-dependent shared action, an understanding that chimes with the insights of ordinary-language philosophy. The perspectives offered by Glück's work can fruitfully complicate dominant models of lyric and binary narratives of American poetic history that set lyric voice against philosophical ambition and linguistic innovation.

Vocal Tract Configurations in Tenors' Passaggio in Different Vowel Conditions—A Real-Time Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

The role of the vocal tract in registers is still unclear. Professional western classically trained tenors may reach their top pitch range by modifying vocal register functions. The aim of this study was to analyze the influence of vowel conditions on vocal tract configurations in different register functions. Dynamic real-time magnetic resonance imaging of 8 frames per second was used to analyze the vocal tract profile in four world-leading tenors (one oratorios/classical song, one light lyrical, one young dramatic, and one Heldentenor), who sang an ascending scale between C4 (261Hz) and A4 (440Hz) on the vowels /a, e, i, o, u, ae/. In one condition, they performed the scale to include their register transition from modal register to falsetto and, in another condition, sang with the continuation of stage voice across the passaggio. The tenors show some vowel independent modifications with respect to registers. In contrast to falsetto, stage voice was associated with an increase of lip and jaw opening and a lower larynx position for most conditions. However, some articulators such as the pharynx width showed different progressions depending on the vowel conditions. In general, the dramatic voices have been found to show stronger articulatory changes than lyrical voices. The vowel condition might, in part, affect vocal tract modifications due to register functions.

Fantasies of “Woman”: Hemans's Deconstruction of “Femininity” in Records of Woman

This essay counters the abiding view of Hemans's gender essentialism by examining its two principal sources: first, the critical conflation of Hemans's personal and poetic voices, which takes Hemans's third-person narrator, female characters, lyric speaker and dramatized voices to be variations of Hemans's self; second, Hemans's repetition of images of domestic femininity throughout her poetry, which, for some critics, essentializes “woman” as a universal essence. The author argues instead that Hemans challenges both the conflation of poet and persona and the essentialist view of “woman” through this very repetition of voices and images. Through her construction of narrative, lyric and dramatized voices in Records of Woman (1828), the collection that established her reputation as the “poet of womanhood”, Hemans deconstructs the illusion of a gender essence and dramatizes the ways in which that illusion is performatively produced.