Major English Poets Research Articles

William Blake in the desolate market

Experience taught William Blake that Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy. His brilliant achievements as a poet, painter, and engraver brought him public notice, but little income. William Blake in the Desolate Market records how Blake, the most original of all the major English poets, earned his living. G.E. Bentley Jr, the dean of Blake scholars, details the poet's occupations as a commercial engraver, print-seller, teacher, copperplate printer, painter, publisher, and vendor of his own books. In his early career as a commercial engraver, Blake was modestly prosperous, but thereafter his fortunes declined. For his most ambitious commercial designs, he made hundreds of folio designs and scores of engravings, but was paid scarcely more than twenty pounds for two or three years' work. His invention of illuminated printing lost money, and many of his greatest works, such as Jerusalem, were left unsold at his death. He came to believe that his business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes. William Blake in the Desolate Market is an investigation of Blake's labours to support himself by his arts. The changing prices of his works, his costs and receipts, as well as his patrons and employers are expertly gathered and displayed to show the material side of the artistic career in Britain's Romantic period.

Historical Milton: manuscript, print, and political culture in revolutionary England

John Milton's Commonplace Book is the only known political notebook of a radical polemicist writing during the English civil war, and the most extensive manuscript record of reading we have from any major English poet from this period. In this rethinking of a surprisingly neglected body of evidence, Thomas Fulton explores Milton's reading practices and the ways he used this reading in his writing. Fulton's close study of the Commonplace Book suggests that this reading record is far from the haphazard collection of notes that it first appears but is instead a program of research which had its own ideology that responded to the reading habits and practices of Milton's contemporaries. Created mostly in the late 1630s and during the overthrow of the Stuart government in the 1640s, Milton's reading notes yield a number of surprises, the most fundamental being a highly structured commitment to political history. Fulton explores the relationship between the manuscript author and his polemical persona, placing the Commonplace Book, the manuscript Digression to the History of Britain, and some wartime poems in revealing contrast to the printed political texts of this period.

Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's 'We' by Brett Cooke (review)

558 Reviews Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's 'We'. By Brett Cooke. Evanston, IL: North? western University Press. 2002. ix + 221 pp. ?59.50. ISBN 0-810-11873-4. In his new study of Zamiatin's We, Brett Cooke addresses through the prism of what he terms 'biopoetics' the novel's central concern, the human spirit's indomitable resis? tance to totalitarian ideology, and the manifestation of that spirit in the creation of art. Rationalizing utopian systems deny mankind's essential spirit, which can be defined according to sociobiology or evolutionary psychology as a dystopian impulse towards spontaneous gestures, manifested in the ways we treat food, sex, art, and so on. Cooke explores in successive chapters the ways in which these issues are raised in We. In Chapter 2 he considers how utopian schemes forthe consumption of food provoke dystopian resistance: the communal eating of the One State is contrasted with the spontaneous sharing of forbidden drinks and food outside the Green Wall. Chap? ter 3 comments on Zamyatin's prescience in foreseeing the rise of cults of personality within totalitarian ideologies. Chapter 4 develops an article on the mathematics of We which Cooke firstpublished in 1988 (in Zamyatin's 'We': A Collection of Critical Es? says, ed. by Gary Kern (Ardis: Ann Arbor)). Here he highlights some inaccuracies in the mathematical calculations made by D-503, in order to counter the prevalent crit? ical opinion that the Single State is based on perfect, rational mathematical precepts. Chapter 5 considers how our need forhumour and play confounds utopian schemes, and suggests that We is a deliberately playful text, designed to free the ludic spirit within the reader. Chapter 6 looks at the ways in which masochistic, self-destructive tendencies hinder attempts at rational social engineering, clearly following on from Dostoevskii's Underground Man. Cooke also argues here that the ending of We is deliberately ambiguous, and should not necessarily be read in an entirely pessimistic sense. Chapter 7 examines the familiar topic of the ways in which the Single State's attempts to regulate sexuality and reproduction are subverted by the erotic impulse. Chapter 8 returns to the subject of diet to consider the common human desire for variety in food, even where this can lead to nausea or revulsion. In the final chapter, Cooke considers how artistic creativity characterizes resistance to totalitarian regimes, as well as, in the case of We, providingthe fictional author with a form of psychotherapy which enables him to discover his true identity. The book suffers from a writing style which often distracts from the points that Cooke is raising about the novel. As we dart from topic to topic in what Cooke de? scribes as an 'island-hopping campaign through the cognitive structure of Zamyatin's We*(p. 22), the author constantly indulges in trivial asides: 'Someone probably paid forthe book you are now reading. Thank you, whoever you are' (p. 29); 'Stolichnaya, anyone?' (p. 33); 'We is software for the mind. [. . .] And truly,it is a game scholars love to play. Who needs Nintendo, now that we have We}' (p. 104). We are given trite reflections on child-rearing, Agassi on how to be successful at tennis, the Bobbit castration case, Colin Powell's possible candidacy for the American Presidency, and history's inflation of Columbus's status ('Zamyatin should have known better' (p. 50)). The Soviet system's defining characteristic is repeatedly described as 'sloppy thinking' (pp. 63, 78, 96, 165); better editing might have saved this potentially inter? esting book from the same fate, even in the land of the free. Wolfson College, Oxford Julie Curtis Keats and the Russian Poets. By Sonia I. Ketchian. (Birmingham Slavonic Monographs , 33) Birmingham: Birmingham University. 2001. vii+ 308 pp. ?25. ISBN 0-7044-2293-x; ISSN 0141-3805 (pbk). John Keats is among those major English poets who have gone relatively unappreciated in Russia. In Sonia Ketchian's view Keats has, however, been more readily ...

Keats and the Russian Poets by Sonia I. Ketchian (review)

558 Reviews Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's 'We'. By Brett Cooke. Evanston, IL: North? western University Press. 2002. ix + 221 pp. ?59.50. ISBN 0-810-11873-4. In his new study of Zamiatin's We, Brett Cooke addresses through the prism of what he terms 'biopoetics' the novel's central concern, the human spirit's indomitable resis? tance to totalitarian ideology, and the manifestation of that spirit in the creation of art. Rationalizing utopian systems deny mankind's essential spirit, which can be defined according to sociobiology or evolutionary psychology as a dystopian impulse towards spontaneous gestures, manifested in the ways we treat food, sex, art, and so on. Cooke explores in successive chapters the ways in which these issues are raised in We. In Chapter 2 he considers how utopian schemes forthe consumption of food provoke dystopian resistance: the communal eating of the One State is contrasted with the spontaneous sharing of forbidden drinks and food outside the Green Wall. Chap? ter 3 comments on Zamyatin's prescience in foreseeing the rise of cults of personality within totalitarian ideologies. Chapter 4 develops an article on the mathematics of We which Cooke firstpublished in 1988 (in Zamyatin's 'We': A Collection of Critical Es? says, ed. by Gary Kern (Ardis: Ann Arbor)). Here he highlights some inaccuracies in the mathematical calculations made by D-503, in order to counter the prevalent crit? ical opinion that the Single State is based on perfect, rational mathematical precepts. Chapter 5 considers how our need forhumour and play confounds utopian schemes, and suggests that We is a deliberately playful text, designed to free the ludic spirit within the reader. Chapter 6 looks at the ways in which masochistic, self-destructive tendencies hinder attempts at rational social engineering, clearly following on from Dostoevskii's Underground Man. Cooke also argues here that the ending of We is deliberately ambiguous, and should not necessarily be read in an entirely pessimistic sense. Chapter 7 examines the familiar topic of the ways in which the Single State's attempts to regulate sexuality and reproduction are subverted by the erotic impulse. Chapter 8 returns to the subject of diet to consider the common human desire for variety in food, even where this can lead to nausea or revulsion. In the final chapter, Cooke considers how artistic creativity characterizes resistance to totalitarian regimes, as well as, in the case of We, providingthe fictional author with a form of psychotherapy which enables him to discover his true identity. The book suffers from a writing style which often distracts from the points that Cooke is raising about the novel. As we dart from topic to topic in what Cooke de? scribes as an 'island-hopping campaign through the cognitive structure of Zamyatin's We*(p. 22), the author constantly indulges in trivial asides: 'Someone probably paid forthe book you are now reading. Thank you, whoever you are' (p. 29); 'Stolichnaya, anyone?' (p. 33); 'We is software for the mind. [. . .] And truly,it is a game scholars love to play. Who needs Nintendo, now that we have We}' (p. 104). We are given trite reflections on child-rearing, Agassi on how to be successful at tennis, the Bobbit castration case, Colin Powell's possible candidacy for the American Presidency, and history's inflation of Columbus's status ('Zamyatin should have known better' (p. 50)). The Soviet system's defining characteristic is repeatedly described as 'sloppy thinking' (pp. 63, 78, 96, 165); better editing might have saved this potentially inter? esting book from the same fate, even in the land of the free. Wolfson College, Oxford Julie Curtis Keats and the Russian Poets. By Sonia I. Ketchian. (Birmingham Slavonic Monographs , 33) Birmingham: Birmingham University. 2001. vii+ 308 pp. ?25. ISBN 0-7044-2293-x; ISSN 0141-3805 (pbk). John Keats is among those major English poets who have gone relatively unappreciated in Russia. In Sonia Ketchian's view Keats has, however, been more readily MLRy 99.2, 2004 559 assimilated directly into the writings of Russian poets than into the consciousness of the general reader. The subject is fascinating. Sadly, though, this lengthy account is often unpersuasive. Two brief chapters on early reception...

The Text of Dryden's Poetry The Poems of John Dryden Paul Hammond John Dryden

Since 1965 the Longman Annotated English Poets series has been providing, in the words of its founding editor, F W. Bateson, university students and teachers, and the general reader with complete and fully annotated editions of the major English poets, in modernized texts edited by prominent specialists. This is the policy to which Bateson's successor as general editor, John Barnard, still adheres, and it is reprinted at the front of each new addition to the series. Understandably, the series has, since its beginning, enjoyed an importance among modernized editions (most of them modest paperbacks of selected poems for the undergraduate classroom) that entitles the volumes to serious comparison with their unmodernized rivals, and in fact invites it, since Bateson envisioned the series as a demonstration of the inherent superiority of modernized editions.' The publication of the first two volumes of Paul Hammond's edition of The Poems ofJohn Dryden (to be completed by another two volumes) marks the first appearance in the series of a Restoration poet (if, as is customary, we exclude Milton from that category) and offers an exceptional opportunity for considering in detail the problems of modernization as they apply particularly to the texts of Dryden and his contemporary poets.2 Most modernized editions with any claim to serious consideration (such as the complete works of an early modern author) have for some time now carried an introduction in which the editor attempts to justify the modernization of the

Conversion Psychology in John Donne's Good Friday Poem

John Donne's “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” is justly regarded as one of the finest devotional poems of the English Renaissance period. It is likewise significant for what it reveals about the theology of a major English poet and divine and, more broadly, for what it reveals about the spiritual psychology of his time. The personal nature of the poem, which was written during the troubled years before his ordination in 1615, underscores the force of its ideas for Donne. At the thematic center of the poem is a necessary connection between Godgiven corrective affliction and the sinful soul's turning to God.

THE PEARL-POET AND JOHN MASSEY OF COTTON, CHESHIRE

WITH I N the last few years, several pieces of evidence have been brought forward which strongly suggest that a man with the name 'J. Massey' was the author of the Middle English Pearl and of the alliterative saint's legend, St. Erkenwald. As the Pearl-poet is widely considered to be the poet of the other poems of MS. Cotton Nero A. x, Cleanness, Patience, and Gawain and the Green Knight, the identification, if correct, gives us the name, at least, of a major English poet, a man who hitherto has been persistently anonymous. The evidence for this identification has been based in part on the discovery of a poetic reference by Thomas Hoccleve to a contemporary named, simply, 'maister Massy' and who was, according to Hoccleve, greatly skilled in the arts of poetry. At the same time that this reference was noticed, an anagram was found in the Pearl which, unravelled, yielded the signature J. Massi. It was conjectured from the fact that the proper name 'John' yielded theJ of the anagrammatic signature that John may have been the poet's Christian name. This anagram was later confirmed by the discovery of the same signature in St. Erkenwald (sometimes attributed to the Pearl-poet) where it is built into an anagram based strictly upon the numerology of the Pearl anagram. In St. Erkenwald, the anagram again contains the initial J.I The short poem by Hoccleve which devotes 18 of its 27 lines to Massey is included as an envoy in a mid fifteenth-century manuscript of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (B.M. MS. Royal D. xviii, f. Ioor). The only other known manuscript of the poem (one which presents a somewhat better text) is headed: 'Ce feust mys en le livre de monseigneur Johan, lors nommez, ore Regent de France & Duc de Bedford.'z Together the two texts

John Keats, Physician and Poet

Readers do not generally realize how short the writing life of J John-Keats actually was. It is well known, of course, that he died of tuberculosis when only a few months more than twenty-five years old; but the extent of his works, as large as that of most poets with a normal age span, might suggest that he began, like his contemporaries Shelley and Byron, at some precociously early age. This is far from true. The ranks of Keats's poems are notably not swelled by juvenilia, and for a very simple reason. On well-attested authority, he did not write a line of original English verse until probably the spring of 1813, shortly after his eighteenth birthday. How comparatively late this was for the first utterance of a major English poet may be seen by reflecting that, at almost this exact moment, Alfred Tennyson, the major poet of the next generation, was

Keats and Zen

SELF-ABANDONMENT to something larger than one's self, whether to God or Nature, including a loss of self-identity, has been described by several writers as an important romantic characteristic. Indeed, taking his cue from Rousseau, L. A. Bisson proposes that this phenomenon fundamental romantic experience.' Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., believing Bisson's conclusion justified, also stresses importance of this phenomenon in romanticism.2 And Hoxie Neale Fairchild further emphasizes importance of this matter by an analysis that goes beyond Bisson's and Lovell's. Fairchild, however, does believe that major English poets achieved a true loss of self-identity. Although conceding that experience of selfabandonment a prominent feature of imaginative life of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, he contends that any consequent loss of self-identity in this experience more apparent than real. In his view, selfannihilation for these romantics did actually mean the suppression of self, but removal of all that hinders self. What they really aimed at was a limitless expansion of their egos. In other words, to Fairchild, essential dualism of ego versus world was in fact maintained. He remarks of Blake that, although he preaches the casting off of he not only temperamentally but on principle, an egotist and a solipsist.3 Fairchild also notes that Wordsworth usually enlarges his personality by absorbing Nature into himself, while Shelley prefers to achieve same end by projecting his mind outward into Nature in order to share, with enhancement rather than with loss of selfhood, benign energy of west wind and skylark and cloud.4 For Coleridge too, he observes, self-annihilation is another way of saying 'boundless self-expansion.' ,

Browning's Yankee Medium

ROBERT BROWNING NEVER visited America, but his American associations were hardly less intimate than those of Dickens. The fifteen years of Browning's married life with Elizabeth Barrett were spent in a happy exile in Italy, where he came in almost daily contact with a variety of American artists and tourists. In his later years, he became increasingly interested in American publishing arrangements and his critical reception in America.' Indeed, Browning had closer ties with this country than did any other major English poet of his century, and we may regret that only once, and then in a bitter mood, did the poet turn to America for subject matter. Browning's single poetic flight across the Atlantic-and into American speech-is Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium,' which appeared in Dramatis Personae (1864). Mr. is a fierce attack on spiritualism, at that time a recent American import to Europe. The setting of the poem is Boston, the speaker a charlatan Yankee medium named Sludge, who confesses his duplicity to his wealthy, gullible benefactor, one Hiram H. Horsefall. Mrs. Browning was sympathetic to spiritualist claims, and Browning made no secret of the fact that he thought his wife, and others like her, were being cynically exploited by tricksters. In particular Browning thoroughly detested the most celebrated medium of the entire nineteenth century, the Scottish-American wizard, Daniel Dunglas Home, with whom he had had an unpleasant experience at a s6ance in 855 .2 There can be no doubt that Browning's Yankee medium Sludge was inspired by Home, though what concerns me here is not Sludge's identity but his speech. For Browning's poem is a thousand-line monologue in what he apparently intended to be American English. Few American readers of Mr. have found Browning's Bostonian setting or his medium's lingo very convincing. William C. DeVane says, As for the curious Americanisms which Sludge uses in his speech, it is to be

Alexander Pope, The Poetry of Allusion.

One has to look back to Mark Van Doren's momentous John Dryden for a study of a major English poet which is as ambitious in intention and as convincing in execution.--New Statesman. Will send the reader back to his Pope with an enriched appreciation.--Times Literary Supplement. The paperback reissue of a long out-of-print classic, this volume examines how allusion works in Pope, allowing the modern reader to feel the presence of Virgil, Horace, and Homer much in the way that Pope and his contemporaries felt it and giving readers a concrete sense of the poetic voices that Pope heard as he wrote.