Major Poems Research Articles

Poetry and the Sensitive World: A Comparative Perspective on the Poetic Course of Sohrab Sepehry, Arthur Rimbaud & William Blake

Drawing on the method of thematic critics, Gaston Bachelard and Jean-Pierre Richard, this article offers a comparative analysis of some of the major poems of Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake and the Iranian poet, Sohrab Sepehry. The discussion is divided into three parts: Literary Elements and Images; The Return to Myths and the Voyage into the Unknown; and Painting, Music and the Language of Silence. The study illustrates how, in spite of different cultural and religious backgrounds, one can trace striking similarities between the imaginary universes of the three poets, an affinity that might be termed an ‘alchemical fraternity’ in favour of poetry. By means of a fusion of ego with poetic cosmogony and a setting aside of the traditional categories of logic and perception, each poet builds his imaginary universe. The work of all three also effects a synthesis of ego with language: they write as if they breathe. I will argue, therefore, that, in addition to painting, music and literature, the most sublime art for our poets is the creation of a new and original language, namely the language of silence. By expressive cuts, suggestive alliterations and contrasts between the terms of ordinary language, our poets create a pure poetry that fuses the realities of nature with the imaginary spectacle. It is here, like a conjunction point, that these three imaginary universes meet.

Milton Scholarship and theAgonoverSamson Agonistes1

Milton's “dramatic poem”Samson Agonistes has been justly described as a “major site of contestation within Milton studies.” The contest referred to concerns the status of Samson: is he a true or a false hero; should the reader approve or abhor his final act? The traditional view is that Samson, through a process of repentance and renewal of spirit charted through the poem's major episodes, becomes enabled for the role to which he had been dedicated by angelic promise, that he “should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver” (line 39). The revisionist view is that Samson is a false hero, intended by Milton to be contrasted with the true heroism of the Son in Paradise Regained. The critical argument has been more urgently interesting because within the lifetimes of today's critics, it has been impossible to discuss Samson Agonistes without an awareness of “terrorists” and “freedom fighters.” In this paper I chart the course of this controversy from 1969, with occasional references to earlier work, to 2001 and conclude that the revisionist case has never been convincingly argued. Revisionist critics fail to observe E. D. Hirsch's important distinction between a work's meaning and the significance that work might have for them as twentieth-century readers. Reading their own values back into Milton's work, they have denied the Samson of the poem his biblical role as justified freedom fighter, and re-labelled him as a terrorist. Such readings derive their plausibility from the fact that Samson Agonistes is the major poem of Milton's we must try to understand without the prompting of a narrative voice. I agree with those critics who take the view that the meaning of Samson Agonistes is both in principle and in fact recoverable, from an examination of the work itself and of its context within Milton's developing thought.

The discovery of the antiplatelet effect of aspirin: a personal reminiscence

The discovery of the antiplatelet effect of aspirin: a personal reminiscence

The endless kingdom: Milton's scriptural society

David Gay, The Endless Kingdom: Milton 's Scriptural Society. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002. $47.50, £34.00.In The Endless Kingdom: Milton 's Scriptural Society, David Gay examines the importance of the Bible in Milton's late poems, especially the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament and its parallels in the 'sayings' and Gospels of the New Testament. This is not a study of Milton's hermeneutics or biblical sources, however; rather, developing insights from James Williams's studies of Proverbs and Northrop Frye's readings of Blake and the typological structure of biblical symbolism, Gay focuses on the condition of the Bible as a 'cultural, political, and textual entity' in Milton's works. Unlike Christopher Hill, who argued in The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993) that the Bible was of limited use for truly radical reform because it was 'a huge bran tub from which anything might be drawn' by radicals and conservatives alike, Gay argues that the Bible's discontinuous, aphoristic textuality and the contrasting, dialectical perspectives that it evokes - qualities found most clearly in Wisdom literature - encourage the prophetic vision and critical perspective necessary to imagine a truly liberated society. Like Hill, however, Gay considers the political significance of the Bible mainly as a site of strenuous opposition, and this has several consequences. The broad agreement among early modern Protestants on the continuity of the Bible and on 'things necessary for salvation' is underplayed, even though this agreement underwrites the debate about 'things indifferent' and Christian liberty that characterizes the dynamic society imagined in Areopagitica. If seventeenth-century readers like Milton turned to the Bible for political wisdom and vision, it was because they were already committed to it as God's book, and this complicates the Bible's textual condition enormously.Milton first explores his view of the Bible as a model for political renewal in Areopagitica, where readers are active in piecing together fragments of truth in the process of forming the scriptural society; in fact, as Gay makes clear, 'the Bible is the real subject of Areopagitica. It is also the subject of the three major poems as Milton develops the typological analogy between the central, sacred text and the society it could project and reform' (p. 101). In the late poems Milton revises his view so that poetry, like the Bible, becomes the inward possession of each reader, creating a critical perspective and 'paradise within' detached from the cycles of revolution that dominate human history, and liberating the subjects of scriptural society in the textual space of reading. In the late poems, Milton 'did not merely insist on his own version of political truth', but recreated the biblical condition of tension and opposition of which his views formed a part (pp. 1 1, 31). While it isn't clear how Milton transcends the contrasting perspectives and binary opposites of his biblical culture, especially if we compare the political use of the Bible to form Royalist textual communities during their period of exile, The Endless Kingdom offers a profound explication of the tensions arising from Milton's understanding of the Bible and biblical poetry as the material conditions of a spiritual of readers gathered together during the dark times of the Restoration.Gay begins by carefully explaining how the aphoristic texts of Proverbs were used by Restoration apologists like John Spencer, George Morley, and Matthew Griffin to argue that political wisdom inheres in the king alone through God's authority, thus conflating earthly and heavenly kings. Milton, on the other hand, in the Christian Doctrine, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes locates the source of wisdom in the double scripture, the individual conscience, and spiritual perception, the cornerstones of 'an endless kingdom conceived and sustained in the elementary community formed in the textual and critical space of reading' (p. …

The Case for Comus

MOST DISCUSSIONS OF Comus focus on its political or religious implications, and its status as a precursor to John Milton's ethical and revolutionary thinking in his prose pamphlets and major poems. I am concerned here, on the contrary, with its implications specifically as a private work, a family affair; these are what seem to me most significantly Miltonic. I focus on three questions: Why is Milton's ethical masque about three lost children trying to get home? What is wrong with Comus—why is he a villain? How happy is the ending?

Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible: At the Interface of Prosody and Structural Analysis . Volume Two: 85 Psalms and Job 4-14 (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCIII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2003) 653-660 J. P. Fokkelman. Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible: At the Interface of Prosody and Structural Analysis. Volume Two: 85 Psalms and Job 4-14. Studia Semitica Neerlandica 41. Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000. Pp. vii + 550. Fokkelman opens Chapter 1 with a statement on prosody: "Prosody is about the pains a poet takes about proportions. And proportions is the thing for which the poet has developed a special sense, at all levels of the text" (p. 9). Thus, according to Fokkelman, the one who assumes the task of interpreting poetry takes on the task of studying the "proportions" of poetry and striving for precision to the smallest detail. Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible, vol. 2 is exactly that. It is a monumental undertaking. Fokkelman , through a method of detailed and meticulous counting of the syllables of words, cola, and strophes, presents a prosodie and structural analysis of eighty-five psalms and eleven chapters of the Book of Job. He describes his approach: ". . . to present a short description for every poem, by way of accounting for three manifestations and levels of prosody: syllable totals, colometric division, and structure or composition of the poem as a whole" (pp. 42-43). He says he will not give interpretations of the texts: "I am aiming at a compact description, and renounce my ambition to provide text interpretations. I will have to limit myself and will concentrate on prosody and its various levels" (p. 43). The book has three chapters. Chapter 1, "Syllables, Colometrics, and Structural Analysis," gives an overview of Fokkelman's theory and method, and the problems inherent in counting pre-Masoretic syllables and determining the boundaries of cola. It explains how syllable counting can reveal the structure of the poem. Chapter 2, "A Structural and Prosodie Description of 85 Psalms (83 poems)," is a 270-page analysis of chosen psalms. The psalms are given classifications according to those whose average is a round number, without any change in the BHS text, those whose average is a round number "after the text has undergone a minimal correction in the Massoretic tradition" (p. 48), those with a round average after slight changes were made based on linguistic, structural, or poetic grounds, and those that do not have a round number of syllables per colon. A round number is the number of syllables divided by the number of cola, which come to an average without decimals or fractions. Chapter 3 performs a similar type of analysis of the poems of Job 4-14. There are three appendices. The first and major appendix presents a comprehensive compilation of the syllable count for each word, colon, verse, strophe, stanza, section, and poem, and the average number of syllables per colon. As the student of Homer's epics needs to be aware of dactylic hexameter and the reader of Shakespeare's sonnets iambic pentameter, so too, 654THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW Fokkelman says, must the student of Biblical Hebrew poetry be aware of its prosodie pattern. However, Fokkelman works from the premise that the poem's prosodie pattern does not lie in its meter, but that syllable counts were used as a structural device: "The poets of the Psalms and Job counted their syllables. They did not put the totals (or words, cola, verses, and strophes) at the service of metrics, but rather used these structurally, in interaction with the construction of the poem, so that the figures often form patterns at the levels of colon, verse, and strophe, and sometimes even at the level of the poem as a whole" (p. 383). It is not by coincidence, the author claims, that when one counts the syllables in the poems of the psalms and divides them by the number of cola, one comes up with averages of seven, eight, or nine syllables. The figures are not always round numbers. Some are averages with decimal points. However, Fokkelman has found that more than half the psalms have an exact integer. About half of this group has 8.00 as the norm; the other half has either 7.00 or 9.00. The norm for Job is...

Radical Myths: Eliza Keary's Little Seal-Skin and Other Poems (1874)

ELIZA HARRIET KEARY (1827-1918) WAS A YORKSHIRE POET WHOSE MAJOR work, a remarkably varied collection of poems running to one hundred and eighty-five pages, warrants far greater critical attention than it has received. Little Seal-Skin and Other Poems (1874) appeared almost out of nowhere and thence returned. Published in London by George Bell and Sons, it was never reprinted in the nineteenth century and is today only available online, courtesy of the Indiana University Victorian Women Poets Collection, or, in book form, in very few libraries. The British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the Bailey-Howe Library, University of Vermont, each hold a copy. The Athenaeum's damning remark that Eliza Keary had "no claim to be reckoned among writers of poetry," 1 as well as probably affecting sales of the collection, was perhaps more discouraging than Keary could bear. There seems to be no evidence of her having published any poetry beyond 1874, other than some verses for children. The 1881 census' listing of Eliza Keary as "lady help," an official seal of domesticity, further contributes to the image of her as a strikingly promising and important female poetic voice that was tragically muted. Keary's significance as a Victorian poet, however, is increasingly being recognized. Christopher Ricks's edition of The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987) included one of her minor poems. In 1996, Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Isobel Armstrong, Joseph Bristow, and Cath Sharrock, reprinted six of her poems. This last selection, together with Naomi Hetherington's recent entry on Eliza Keary in volume 240 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets" (2001), 2 perhaps heralds a phase of modern critical interest in her work. Isobel Armstrong has already written on one of Keary's major poems, "Christine and Mary. A Correspondence," 3 but there has so far been no substantial critical evaluation of Keary's 1874 collection, Little Seal-Skin and Other Poems.

An Illustrated Dictionary of French Similes by Keith Foley (review)

MLR, 97.4, 2002 955 critics is second-rate, as Solecki would have us believe. Certainly not all of it had 'politicized culture to make it do the work of identity politics' (p. 24). Yet asking the question why contemporary Canadian critics have so frequently ignored the classics from previous generations is important, a sort of rescue waking call. Solecki is absolutely right when he insists that a tradition cannot be devalued, glossed over, simply because it was created by our ancestors who operated within a differentideological framework. A far more rewarding part of Solecki's study for the general reader, for those who will come to it because of their interest in the poet, is the second one. Here, with an infectious enthusiasm and admiration Solecki discusses the influences that shaped Purdy's life and his poetic genius. For the firsttime, to my knowledge, the reader can follow an intelligent and extensive discussion of how the poet's voice was forged and how it came into its own. Through close textual exegesis, Solecki documents the influences of Bliss Carman, Layton, and D. H. Lawrence on Purdy's initial stage of development, pointingout how these men helped open up Purdy's genius, rather than close it into a slavish gesture. Solecki's various explanations of Purdy's major poems in terms of literary traditions and conventions are particularly illuminating and will most certainly extend the reader's understanding and appreciation of one of Canada's most authentic and autochthonous poets. Libera Universita degli Studi, S. Pio V, Rome Branko Gorjup An LllustratedDictionary ofFrench Similes. By Keith Foley. Lewiston, NY, Queenston , Ont., and Lampeter: Mellen. 2000. vi + 335pp. $99.95. 'Comparaison n'est pas raison'; comparisons are odious. No, they are not. French treats similes and metaphors even-handedly, English divisively. Comparisons of any kind obviously seek to bridge gaps, and to provide mind-opening collocations (or, in the case of cliches, mind-numbing repetitions). Keith Foley's claim that his book, warts and all, is unique cannot seriously be gainsaid. He does not distinguish between inventive and shop-soiled similes, for he holds that 'even hackneyed similes may be considered as fossilized poetry'. Faced with the problem of what to include, then, Foley fruitfully adopts the ecumenical approach: standard comparisons are given alongside creative examples, which so often take off,trampoline-fashion, from stock items, subverting, recycling, or extending them. Thus he has cake and eats it, like a horse, or like four as French puts it. He occasionally provides notes on the more mystifying likenings (e.g. 'degringoler comme des capucins de cartes'). As he notes, many similes are puns (which Swift said get everywhere, like fleas), for instance, San Antonio's phrase for 'very drunk', 'beurre comme toute la Normandie', or the anonymous 'lacher quelqu'un comme un pet'. Some of San Antonio's prostheses are pleonastic (e.g. 'une question, plus epineuse qu'un cactus pas rase'), though of course the tack-on makes a joke of the whole business of paralleling. Others' inventions, like 'bander comme un Carme', for a monumental hard-on, set the imagination to work. The literary examples are mainly but not exclusively from the twentieth and nineteenth centuries. Longish illustrative quotations put the analogies in context. Among useful additions to similes strictly defined are adjectival phrases such as 'une taille de nymphe'. Foley is expert at unearthing English counterparts, while recognizing that these are not invariably true equivalents: for example, Colette's 'chambrer comme un Corton', for which he suggests 'to wind someone up like a watch'. He calls comparisons by opposites 'ironic similes' (such as 'gai comme un enterrement'). His excellent sense of humour works against the pedantry threatening the whole enterprise. The reader feels incited to join in the hunt. For San Antonio's 956 Reviews 'je me sens aussi a l'aise [. . .] qu'un scaphandrier sur un pur sang', I would supply the snappier Scouse 'as comfortable as a cow on a bike'. Foley rightly mocks Dylan Thomas and his probably hypocritical and apocryphal statement that 'comparing one thing with another is like comparing Milton to Stilton'. His dictionary is a splendidly researched, thought-out, and organized work of...

‘IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING’: T.S. ELIOT'S THE WASTE LAND AND AFTER

ABSTRACT The publication of The Waste Land established Eliot's reputation as a major poet. The poem was written out of an experience of emotional ‘breakdown’, and its innovative free associative form conveys a sense of psychological fragmentation. While Eliot emphasized the necessary distance that must be achieved between personal experience and successful creative expression, all his major poems were written out of periods of personal crisis and growth, and remain intensely personal. This paper explores links between Eliot's personal emotional experience and the poetry. It suggests that for Eliot poetry was part of a journey of self‐exploration and, at the time of The Waste Land and subsequently, became a vital part of his struggle towards a new integration within his self.

'The bright garbage on the incoming wave': Rubbish in the poetry of Derek Mahon

Mahon is increasingly recognized as one of the most important Irish poets of our time, along with Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. Of all contemporary Irish poets, however, Mahon is probably the most consistently occupied by the crisis of modernity, and this article approaches his poetry in relation to his related preoccupations with industrial rubbish, trash, waste, obsolescence and dereliction. Mahon has been categorized as a poet of elegance and urbanity, but the author of 'Rage for Order' is also the writer of 'The Apotheosis of Tins', and this study seeks to see an unstable but intimate connection between order and detritus as dialectically crucial to his work. Taking off from texts as different as the sociologist Michael Thompson's Rubbish Theory , Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger , Susan Strassner's History of Trash and Don De Lillo's Underworld , it offers interpretations of major poems such as 'A Disused Shed in Co Wexford', 'A Garage in Co Cork', 'Ovid in Tomis' and The Hudson Letter in terms of Mahon's own developing rubbish theory. At the same time it seeks to situate the poet's paradoxical fascination with trash as a place 'where a thought might grow' in terms of an ecological vision of the waste crisis of modern society, his experience of the postmodern Manhattan of the 1990s, and his reaction to the political crisis in his native Northern Ireland. The article suggests that rubbish is central to the poet's investigation of cultural value, and that his work represents offers, among other things, of a poetics of rubbish.

Astrology and Iconoclasm in Milton's Paradise Regained

The work of setting John Milton amid the political events to which his poems respond should enhance our reading of the poems themselves. In juxtaposing "accounts of spectacle with literary texts," Laura Lunger Knoppers shows how the Restoration exerted a profound, though negative, influence on his three major poems; in her view, the major poems counter the spectacles of state by "constituting an inwardness or conscience" in readers. 1 If the prose treatises that opposed the Restoration show Milton standing his ground in both disappointment and prophetic indignation, the major poems provide a common ground for future generations of readers seeking a critical vantage point on history. Milton invested his hopes in the "children of reviving libertie" at the close of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth; 2 nevertheless, he was dismayed by the capacity of his contemporaries for political idolatry. If Areopagitica anticipates the progressive reformation of society through the dynamic of reading, The Readie and Easie Way laments the devolution of political imagination upon a monarchical icon. Milton's major poems effect the emancipation of political imagination by providing counterhistorical texts for readers who would resist "the detested thraldom of Kingship" induced by material displays of power. 3 Published in 1671, Paradise Regained portrays this emancipation as Jesus counters the spectacle of temptation with a developing vision of the Kingdom of God. During his inward rehearsal of the history of Israel in the wilderness, Jesus finds no material signs of his messianic identity, as Israel did not in times [End Page 175] of exile; he conserves the textual grounds of that identity by internalizing and remembering scripture, as Israel did in hearing the Law and the Prophets. Satan's purpose as a tempter is thus twofold: (1) to provoke Jesus into producing a material sign of his messianic identity through the performance of a miracle and (2) to deprive Jesus of the textual grounds of his identity through an exchange or substitution that supplants scripture by diverting Jesus' mission into demonic paradigms of power rather than grounding it in God's purpose.

The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature

The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature

The Endgame of Taste: Keats, Sartre, Beckett

In deciding what kind of weather suits his taste, Beckett’s absurdist quest-hero Molloy decides that he has no taste, that he had lost it long ago.1 Modernism never wholly let go of the aesthetic legacy of taste, and by 1947 when Beckett was working on the first novel in his trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, it had already experienced this legacy in the form of an existentialist nausea. Perhaps nowhere do we see this more clearly than in Keats’s late fragmentary epics, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, where the metaphor of taste gives way to an all-pervasive sickness in the stomach. While the starving speaker of The Fall of Hyperion fails to relish the stale banquet he is offered at the outset of the poem, the defeated gods of Hyperion suffer an existential queasiness playing itself out in bodies that are “crampt and screw’d.”2 Hyperion experiences a “nauseous feel” from the repulsive smells he is forced to consume. Critics since Walter Jackson Bate have noticed the proleptically existential tone of the Hyperion poems: they “anticipate much that we associate with existentialism (no other major nineteenth-century poem does this to the same extent).”3 Here I pursue the possibility, evinced by Keats, that existentialism itself— and its dominant paradigms of nausea and disgust—constitutes the philosophical aftermath of aesthetic taste.

Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. Reading the conflicts: ceremony, ideology and the meaning of religion 3. George Herbert: devotion in The Temple and the art of contradiction 4. Robert Herrick: religious experience in the 'Temple' of Hesperides 5. Sir Thomas Browne: the promiscuous embrace of ritual order 6. John Milton: carnal idolatry and the reconfiguration of worship, part I, 1634-1660 7. John Milton: carnal idolatry and the reconfiguration of worship, part II, after the Restoration: the major poems Notes Index.

Haptic Poetics

Haptic Poetics David Fredrick Sigma is an unattractive, disagreeable letter, very offensive when used to excess. A hiss seems a sound more suited to a brute beast than to a rational being. Dionysius of Halicarnassus1 Catullus 4 is a poem about a retired boat. It does not employ erotic, grotesque, or invective imagery: no Lesbia, no Gellius, no dread Mother Goddess, no befouled orifices, no stolen napkins, and not even any food. It is similarly apolitical—no Cicero, Mamurra, or Caesar. As content in Catullus goes, the yacht's story is less than titillating. At the same time, the poem displays an extraordinarily dense acoustic texture, which makes it seem truly a nuga, an illustration of what the poet can do technically to embellish uninteresting, or at least benign, subject matter. Consequently, poem 4 appears irrelevant to the central issues in Catullus like love, politics, gender, and power, especially compared to the Lesbia cycle, the Attis poem, or pedicabo et irrumabo, "I will fuck you anally and orally . . ." But even in this apparently marginal poem, Catullus' use of sound is important programmatically, as is the theme of reminiscence itself. The long poems, the Lesbia poems, and the obscene poems all display in various ways a preoccupation with corporeal integrity and violation, and the voice is the place where poetry, through its acoustic qualities, intersects materially the reader's own body. [End Page 49] Reading aloud, one takes into one's mouth the language of the poems. If the content is obscene, then the os impurum becomes at least temporarily one's own.2 At the same time, themes of violation and abandonment can be generalized beyond poems with specifically erotic or obscene content to include a "Callimachean" poem like 4. I will argue that the retirement of the phaselus is a metaphor for poetics in the face of cultural transformation and, in this capacity, it resonates with other lost figures in Catullus such as Ariadne, Attis, Catullus' brother, and the Catullan ego. An examination of acoustic technique in Catullus 4 suggests fundamental links, in content and aural aesthetics, between it and poems 63 and 64, major poems that any interpretation of Catullus must consider. Finally, the issues of erotic representation and acoustic pleasure in Catullus must be situated in the physical context of Roman poetic performance. The intricate sound-patterns of Catullan verse, throughout the corpus, shape the voice as if it were a physical medium like stone or paint, rather than an optional addition to the reader's eyes and the words on the page. But the voice, as a form of "cultural plastic," is inseparable from, and internal to, the body.3 This raises the question of oral versus written performance for Catullus and subsequent Latin poets. On the one hand, Catullus' text demands visual study. Close, repeated reading is required to trace both intratextual patterns shared between poems and equally complex intertextual strategies of allusion to prior texts and poetic models. Catullus' self-conscious association of his own poetry with Callimachus certainly suggests that the techniques of writing are much more important than the requirements of oral performance.4 On the other hand, if Catullus' lyric consciousness demands a collected, written text, there is no denying the performance qualities of his work, qualities it obviously shares with much of Latin literature. As Starr has put it (1991.338): Roman literature, then, might more accurately be described as "aural" rather than as "oral." Literature was [End Page 50] appreciated primarily through the ears rather than the eyes. When Pliny compliments the voce suavissima of Piso . . . or Juvenal complains about the epic poet Cordus, whom he calls raucus, a word Ovid applies to the sounds of frogs and asses . . . the voice and the poetry are not easily separable: the experience of the poem was also the experience of the reader's voice. It is worth asking, then, not only how lyric consciousness is written and experienced as text in late Republican and Augustan Rome, but where it is performed and what it sounds like. Catullus' manipulations of the voice cannot be subordinated, in a simple way, to meaning, like ornaments to be congratulated when they help the sense...

:Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization

Playing with Desire takes a new approach to Christopher Marlowe's body of writing, replacing the view of Marlovian desire as heroic aspiration with a far less uplifting model. Fred B. Tromly shows that in Marlowe's writing desire is a response to calculated, teasing enticement, ultimately a sign not of power but of impotence. The author identifies this desire with the sadistic irony of the Tantalus myth rather than with the sublime tragedy exemplified by the familiar figure of Icarus. Thus, Marlowe's characteristic mis en scene is moved from the heavens to the netherworld. Tromly also demonstrates that the manipulations of desire among Marlowe's characters find close parallels in the strategies by which his works tantalize and frustrate their audiences. Closely examining all the plays and the major poems, the author deploys a variety of resources - Renaissance mythography, the study of literary sources (especially Ovid), comparisons with contemporary writers, performance history, and social history - to demonstrate how central Tantalus and tantalizing are to Marlowe's imagination.

Alexandreis by Waiter of Châtillon (review)

running head waiter of châtillon, Alexandreis, a verse translation by David Townsend. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996. Pp. xxix, 214. isbn: 0-8122-3347-6. $37-50. Walter ofChâtillon's Alexandreis, an epic poem composed in Latin between 1171 and 1181, was for a long time part of the canon in grammatical studies, at the same level as the classic masterpieces. With Colkers critical edition (1978) and Pritchard's prose translation (1986), it started again to attract the attention ofscholars and students of medieval literature. We now have David Townsend's new translation in blank verses, which proposes 'to afford the general anglophone reader a satisfying literary experience of the poem' (xxii). The image ofAlexander the Great (356-323 b.c.) transmitted throughout the ages is an amazing combination of facts and legends. Of the predominantly historical records kept by his contemporaries (Cleitarchus, Ptolomy, Aristobulos, Callisthenes, among others), only fragments remain. It was mostly on Cleitarchus that Quintus Curtius Rufus based his Latin biography (circa 50 a.d.), which in turn becameWalter's main source. Shortly after 1180—and thus roughly at the same time as the Alexandreis—the Old French Roman d'Alexandre, initiated much earlier by Alberic de Briançon and Lambert Ie Tort, was completed and recast in its final form byAlexandre de Paris. Its origin can be traced to the Greek Romance ofAlexander (Egypt, 3rd century ce.), amply disseminated through its Latin translations. These two major poems of 12thcentury France nicely complement each other as different views ofAlexander, the Alexandreis being more factual and the Roman d'Alexandre wildly fantastic. This is not to say that Walter's account remained immune to legend; it incorporated, for instance, the visit ofthe Amazon Thalestris, retained by the usually skeptical Curtius, as well as a number ofelements from the legendary tradition leading to the Roman d'Alexandre, such as the reference to Nectanebus. Also present, with lesser emphasis, are some ofthe amusing anecdotes which, to Plutarch, seemed 'to reveal far more of a man's character than the mere fact ofwinning battles' (ParallelLives—Alexander ?). Plutarch also tells of Alexander's intellectual curiosity and readiness to perform experiments, supposedly stimulated by Aristotle, when confronted with the exotic natural phenomena observed in his Asian expedition. This aspect is treated in a surrealistic fashion in the legends, being the most fascinating part of the Roman d'Alexandre. In the Alexandreis, the hero's hubris prods him to lay open Nature's secrets (x.10). Writing in Latin and modestly comparing his efforts to Virgil's in his Prologue, it was only natural that Walter should also adapt epic scenes from the Aeneid. The style used to describe individual participations in the course of battles between armies reflects this influence (e.g., Pallas in Virgil and Fidias in Walter). The personified Nature's appeal to Leviathan to detain Alexander and Leviathan's fear that the king is the New Man fated to harrow Hell, combines classic and Christian allusions: Juno's call to the fury Allecto in Virgil (also Ceres sending Fames to punish Erysichthon in Ovid's Metamorphoses) and Satan's predicament in the Decensus Christi ad Inferos arthuriana (part ofthe apocryphal Evangelium Nicodemi). Ofpurely Biblical origin is the explicit reference to the Book ofDaniel (8:20—21) to announce that a Greek should destroy the Persian empire. Walter's narrative is interesting and sometimes truly epic. One verse lingers in our memory: the proverbial 'incidís in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim' [You fall to Scyllawhile you shun Charybdis (5.350)] . Not even an anachronic reference to Arthur is missing (7.457). All in all, I enjoyed reading Townsend's translation, which strives for literary quality, but never allows the self-imposed adherence to poetical conventions to obscure meaning. antonio 1. furtado Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro ...

Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major's "The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage"

Many writers of the black diaspora have embarked upon figurative journeys to the troubled waters of the in their poetry, fiction, and criticism. Their attempts to wrest meaning from this historical site of terror speak to compelling identification of the as the originary moment of the black diasporic migration. In his well-known modernist poem Middle Passage (1945), Robert Hayden presents redemptive critique of the past through melange of imagined voices that ultimately articulates passage through suffering to affirmation. More recently, in her widely acclaimed novel Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison turns to the to chart the possibilities for individual and communal agency in the face of radical dislocation and systematic terror. Charles Johnson's controversial postmodern allegory of African American history, (1990), places its protagonist on mid-Atlantic voyage that radically alters his conception of personal identity, leading him to understand the self as fluid rather than fixed, formed by each person's confrontation with an Other. Finally, in an important recent critical work, Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy attempts to rethink modernity through the history of the black Atlantic, seeing in its process of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity challenge to established categorizations of history and nationalist definitions of culture (2). Contrasting with traditional narratives of the search for origins in some utopian or prelapsarian past, these figurative returns to the troubled history of the are suggestive of black writers' continuing struggle with issues of identity and representation in their art. In Slave Trade: View from the Passage (1994), Clarence Major makes his own distinctive voyage across the Atlantic in poem that is devastating in its attack on the discourse of empire and subtle in its analysis of the difficulties inherent in the project of fashioning an identity through art. In contrast to the speakerly text Henry Louis Gates describes as characteristic of fiction growing out of the African American folk idiom, Major's poetry typically offers instead what might be called painterly text - one that presents readers with complex collage of historical, literary, and philosophical allusions, street talk, cartoons, puns, folk tales, children's songs, advertising slogans, and references to international locales. A talented painter as well as writer, Major has recently described himself as a visual thinker, one who tends to make connections between things more on the basis of visual associations than verbal or logical ones (McCaffery and Kutnik 132). Building its critique through images drawn from specific art works and from repeated themes in Western iconography, Slave Trade draws heavily on Major's technique of associative collage to document European culture's normalization of its own history of conquest through the representation of black people in hierarchical history of progress. By drawing upon actual works of art to illustrate the various ways in which blackness has been framed by the designs of others and by offering its own reconfigurations of specific European landscapes, Major's poem ultimately raises difficult questions about representation, self-expression, and the emancipatory potential of art, while simultaneously delineating the special province of the painterly text. I. Hope, Fallacious Hope / Where is Your Market, Now? - J. M. W. Turner, from poem displayed with his painting The Slave Ship (1840)(1) Charting dizzying route over three continents and several time periods, Slave Trade is composed of four major sections that move from the African past, to Europe, to the Americas, and, finally, to the present-day United States. From this comprehensive vantage point the poem attempts to negotiate the crisscrossing conceptual routes of triangular trade whose operating principles are Christianity, commerce, and colonialism. …

"That Tritest/Brightest Truth": Emily Dickinson's Anti-Sentimentality

While the cultural importance of sentimental fiction has been well documented by critics such as Jane Tompkins and Claudia Tate, the nature and function of sentimental poetry has remained largely unexplored. This essay offers a corrective to this critical tendency by reading major poems by Emily Dickinson in terms of the contemporary sentimental fictions of death and immortality to which they are indebted. Against those critics who have emphasized Dickinson's embrace of sentimentality's domestication of death, the essay argues that her poems contest and even negate the fictions of immortality made available by popular authors such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Ik Marvel. Dickinson's poems employ certain distinctive generic conventions of sentimentality's conduct of death-the passage from life to immortality, the posthumous reunion, the equation of heaven and home. But where sentimental fictions employ familiar scenes of earth and home to represent the less-familiar prospect of heaven and immortality, Dickinson's poems remove hometown places and persons from heaven's scene; where sentimental fictions domesticate death, her poems detach and strip it bare. The characteristic features of her poetry-scenelessness and temporal transcendence-are thus the mark neither of Dickinson's incipient modernism nor of the lyric voice's isolation from society or history, but rather of Dickinson's deliberate departure from a historically specific mode of representing immortality.

Review Essay: An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia

Reviewed by: An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia Barton Levi St.Armand (bio) An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. Edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1998. 395 pp. Ever since Samuel Johnson included some snappy, pointed, and what today we might call patently ideological entries in his famous 1755 Dictionary, we expect our best reference works to be not only authoritative and informative, but engaging and enticing, with a narrative personality of their own. Jane Donahue Eberwein’s Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia is just such a production, because even though it remains a communal effort, drawing on an international range of outstanding Dickinson scholars, it still creates a unified impression. In reading it we have the sense of conversing with a learned and witty Dickinsonian polymath who ushers us gracefully yet firmly through the labyrinths of all levels and classes of Dickinson studies, a compound visionary scholar who instructs us with a boldness that sometimes has an unbuttoned freedom of expression that itself is rather Johnsonian. Let me call this fanciful and androgynous figure by the familiar name of “Cyclo”— no harmless drudge, to be sure, but a sensitive sifter of opinion as well as of fact: myriad-minded enough to serve sometimes as editor, sometimes as critic, sometimes as historian, and sometimes as muse. Speaking through the heteronym of “Jonathan Morse” in a magisterial entry on “Biographical Scholarship,” Cyclo the Fair-minded acknowledges, for example, that “Since the late l970’s, feminist rereadings of the biography have helped us to conceive of a Dickinson less fey than we once imagined, more at home in a world of women whose voices we had barely heard before” (22). At the same time Cyclo the Well-read warns us that “Susan Howe’s narcissistic equation of textual analysis with autobiography . . . carries the readerly act of identification with the text to its excitingly fanatical extreme.” And finally Cyclo the Wise sanitively concludes that “What remains from a century of biographical scholarship is perhaps only the somehow satisfying news that the life of Emily Dickinson remains definitively unknown.” This kind of sprightly summation would have appealed to Dickinson herself, who in her game of tag with Fame and of hide- and go-seek with Biography dropped more than a few arch and acerbic comments about near [End Page 112] neighbors and close contemporaries — particularly professors with the soft emptiness of “cloth pinks.” There are no such artificial blooms here, however, though there are Cyclonic entries on flowers, insects, and birds, as well as very substantial readings of major poems. Key concepts like “Ambiguity” are highlighted, and Cyclo the Cybernetic allows us to build our own chat rooms within the site of the Encyclopedia’s ever expanding web as we are deftly referred to thematically affiliated entries. Like Dickinson herself in her famous “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (P216), we can stay on the ground of “The Grave” (128) firmly located in a “Connecticut Valley” (54–55), the ethos of which owed a great deal to both “Jonathan Edwards” (95–6) and “Edward Hitchcock “(143–4). Or we can move to a second stanza that takes us directly into “Nature” (205–6), “Romanticism” (251), “Gothicism” (127–8), and “Sentimentalism” (262–263). Or, responding to the heartfelt urgings of interested friends and scholarly relatives, we might fabricate a third possibility that spirals into the more cosmic reaches of “Circle Imagery” (45), “Science” (259), “Time”(287) and “Immortality” (159–160). In this way Cyclo stimulates us to progress to the meta and the mega without ever losing sight of the minute particular, for the Dickinson Encyclopedia provides us with zoom lenses and traveling shots that continually sweep us up and along while still retaining precision of detail and clarity of focus. We may begin by looking for short subjects, but we end up staying for double and triple features done in expansive letter box format. In each entry we are expertly guided to relevant books and essays listed in a very up-to-date bibliography, and if we don’t find what we should be looking for under one heading, we inevitably find it in another. Therefore while I did not see Hyatt Waggoner’s scholarship mentioned in the...