Nature Of Poem Research Articles

Die piëtistiese egoprofiel van pioniersvrou Anna Elizabeth Steenkamp (1797-1891) in twee weergawes van haar “Joernaal” uit die Transoranje

Religious ego-texts of Cape Trekboers on the frontier reflect prominent traits of mystical Pietism. Similar features can also be detected in the ego-texts of both male and female believers deeper into the interior prior to and during the Great Trek. These pioneer texts reflect religious literary styles similar to the dominant pietistic literature in Germany and in the Netherlands. In addition to the influence of religious literature of German Pietism and devotional literature of Dutch Second Reformation authors, the marginalisation and isolation of believers stimulated pietistic tendencies similar to trends in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. The end of the eighteenth-century witnessed the gradual demise of Pietism in Germany and supplanting of pietistic tendencies by more secular oriented chronicles, autobiographical descriptions and life adventures. In the Netherlands, however, Pietism flourished from the mid- eighteenth century and publications of pietistic ego-texts continued well into the twentieth century. The “Journal” of the Voortrekker woman Anna Steenkamp is a typical example of a family chronicle with descriptions of her life adventures during the Great Trek. Two copies of her “Journal” composed in the Transorange are analysed in order to determine her religious mentality profile as representative of Voortrekker women of the period 1838 to 1854. The first contains an attachment with religious songs and poems of a typical pietistic nature. These reflections mirror religious tendencies on the frontier at a stage when the dominant culture of similar religious texts in the Netherlands had reached its peak. The second copy contains brief reflections on her life on the frontier undergirded by typical pietistic reflections on God’s providential care. This text, composed in the Transorange, reflects a more secular inclined profile undergirded by pietistic elements from an earlier epoch in German autobiographical texts from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century.

WUJUD CINTA ALAM DALAM PUISI REMAJA KALIMANTAN TIMUR (THE FORM OF LOVE OF NATURE IN POEMS MADE BY ADOLESCENTS OF EAST KALIMANTAN)

The purpose of the study is to describe the form of love of nature in poems made by adolescents of East Kalimantan. The poems themed nature life made by adolescents are interesting to analyze. The approach of semiotic by doing the heuristic and hermeneutic reading is used to reveal meaning in the poems. Human beings take part in natural disaster. Illegal logging, mining, and forestry take part also in damaging the nature.

Nâzim Hikmet’s ecopoetics and the Gezi Park protests

ABSTRACTNâzim Hikmet’s representation of nature in his poems became a powerful incentive to political action in the 2013 Istanbul Gezi Park protests. Protecting trees meant challenging divisions between the human and the non-human through communal acts of civil disobedience. This action and the literary models that informed it are relevant to current issues in ecopoetics. This article identifies four interlocking categories of nature in Hikmet’s poems: Anatolian nature poems, poems of land and resistance, nature in exile poems, and Istanbul nature poems. In these poems a sustainable land ethic is synonymous with political pluralism and nature is harnessed as a resource for social change. Nature, the literary arts and socio-political protest are fused in the poems and give rise to Nâzim Hikmet’s relevance to contemporary environmental movements.

“‘The light that never was on sea or land’: William Wordsworth in America and Emily Dickinson’s “Frostier” Style

This paper proposes to investigate Emily Dickinson’s transatlantic literary connection with William Wordsworth. Her references to and appropriation of Wordsworth inform her critical understanding of the polarized reception of Wordsworth’s poetry and its potential impact on her own poetic experimentation. Dickinson’s role as a poetic heir of Wordsworth, particularly her relation to Romanticism, has been extensively explored. Critics such as Harold Bloom and Joanne Feit Diehl point out the antagonistic relationship between Dickinson and her male precursors. Robert Weisbuch and Inder Nath Kher, alternatively, see Dickinson’s quest poems as essentially Romantic. Scholars such as Margaret Homans consider Dickinson’s poems as deconstructing the binary structure embedded in the writings of her male precursors. More recently, critics such as Richard Gravil and Richard E. Brantley place Dickinson firmly in the literary tradition of Anglo-American Romanticism. This paper explores Dickinson’s engagement with Wordsworth further through her potential awareness of and response to Wordsworth’s mixed Anglo-American receptions. A number of Dickinson’s Wordsworthian allusions in her poems, such as daffodils, primroses, and the sunlight, borrow and appropriate images that Wordsworth’s poetry had made popular in the cultural consciousness. These poems of Dickinson conjure up the Wordsworthian imagery as objects of rare values or commodities, reflecting the polarized receptions of Wordsworth in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, Wordsworth’s “joyful” message of nature, which Arnold and his contemporaries considered most valuable, played a role in Dickinson’s experimentation with her own poetic voices in the 1850s and 1860s. The paper examines how Dickinson might have been aware of Wordsworth’s poetic reputation, and how Wordsworth’s “joyful” nature poems are critically reviewed in the mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American world. I then scrutinize a number of Dickinson’s poems about Wordsworthian nature in relation to Dickinson’s tentative adjustment of her poetic expression for a “frostier” style at the inception of her poetic career. The paper suggests that Dickinson’s subtle engagement with Wordsworth provides a glimpse of how she is concerned about the positioning of herself, a New England poet, in a mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary tradition.

Evolution and the Struggle of Love in Emily Pfeiffer’s Sonnets

Mrs. Pfeiffer's most abiding reputation will rest upon her sonnets, and of these best deal with two great questions of day--evolution and sphere, wrote Eric Robertson in his headnote to six Pfeiffer poems he selected for English Poetesses: A Series of Critical Biographies, with Illustrative Extracts (1883). (1) Robertson's second center of interest, woman's sphere, has found traction in emerging scholarship on Pfeiffer's poetry--a scholarship not birthed till mid-1990s and growing but slowly, despite a nineteenth-century regard for Pfeiffer that led Robertson to group her in a chapter with Christina Rossetti, Augusta Webster, and Mathilde Blind. Questions of gender typically anchor modern editorial introductions or headnotes on Pfeiffer, and gender also informs studies of Pfeiffer's prose travel writing, Hellenism, and Welsh nationalism. (2) In contrast, despite expanding scholarly conversation on nineteenth-century poetry and evolutionary theory, Pfeiffer's poetry on this subject has been little discussed. For instance, in Darwin's Bards: British and American Poetry in Age of Evolution, John Holmes studies numerous major and minor poets who grapple with competing Darwinian and non-Darwinian evolutionary theories but does not mention Pfeiffer, though he considers Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden, and Agnes Mary Robinson alongside an array of male poets. Fabienne Moine's recent Women Poets in Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry helpfully brings multiple women poets with evolutionary interests into view; but her expansive coverage requires Moine to consider Pfeiffer in under two pages. (3) Yet Pfeiffer's sonnets merit more sustained attention for their vigorous critique of Darwinism within a general assent to evolutionary theory. In present article, therefore, I revise and extend emerging interpretations of Pfeiffer's evolutionary thought. Pfeiffer (1827-1890) was well read on this and other subjects: though not formally schooled, she maximized opportunity to study and write afforded her by her 1850 marriage to Jurgen Edward Pfeiffer, a wealthy and supportive German merchant in London; having no children, she could devote time to literary endeavors. She and her husband frequented literary circles and corresponded with British and American editors such as Theodore Watts-Dunton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Horace Elisha Scudder. Pfeiffer published her first serious volume of poetry seven years after her marriage, followed by more than a dozen poetry collections and periodical essays--on women's education, women's suffrage, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Pre-Raphaelite poet--before her death in 1890 (Hickok, Emily Pfeiffer; Hickok, Why?, p. 374; Brown et al.). To my mind as well as to many of her contemporary reviewers, Pfeiffer's sonnets form her best work. Pfeiffer herself seemed compelled by form: she wrote more than ninety sonnets between 1873 and 1889, ones most invested in evolutionary thought by 1880. Her sonnets frequently blend Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms, perhaps implying she viewed sonnet form as equally in flux with her evolutionary subject. (4) In any case, her sonnets mostly precede now more recognized nineteenth-century poems on subject of evolution such as George Meredith's nature poems (1880s); Naden's Evolutional Erotics (1887); Blind's A scent of Man (1889); and Tennyson's By an Evolutionist and The Making of Man, among others (1889 and 1892, respectively). As I shall demonstrate, poet-speaker of Pfeiffer's sonnets emerges in a position unique among these close contemporaries: she accepts Darwinian evolution as true but regards it as an enemy whose savagery must be resisted through a moral force called Love. This claim differs from brief readings put forward by Kathleen Hickok, Trenton B. Olsen, Fabienne Moine, and Virginia Blain. Hickok interprets one of Pfeiffer's most anthologized poems, The Chrysalis, as a religious poem whose phrase the Love that saves! …

The Great War and All That in A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley

Who can bring peace to people who are not civilised? All of these people, alive or dead, are civilised. (Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan) In an interview granted in 2011, on occasion of publication of A Hundred Doors, Michael Longley expressed wish that work would ultimately look like four really long poems, a very long love poem, a very long meditation on and death, a very long nature poem and a playful poem on art of Using plant image, he wanted the strands both to entwine with each other, and every now and again to emerge as separate (Moore). Indeed, if nature, love and life are major aspects which intertwine sometimes inextricably so, in a kind of Noah's ark (Brown 2002: 92), violence and have also pervaded poetry since he began writing. As he himself acknowledged, the two World Wars were part of [his] family's history before they became part of [his] imaginative landscape (Brown: 94). approach is underlined by fact that everything is interconnected and this, to quote Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, is what characterizes Longley's aesthetic expressed through his use of metaphor, techniques of fusion, juxtaposition and parallelism, fluid handling of time, place and identity, self-conscious intertextuality (Kennedy-Andrews 2000: 74-75). The collection published under title A Hundred in 2011, is composed of sixtysix poems ranging from two lines up to fortyfour. The title of book refers to Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on island of Paros, considered to be oldest Byzantine Church in Greece, which poet had visited during sojourns in that part of Aegean Sea, and which he calls muse (15) in an eponymous poem contained in collection. This paper aims at showing that while A Hundred contains most of characteristics of earlier poetry it evinces a somewhat lighter utterance. If tone has become simpler and maybe insouciant, there is still a deep awareness of fragility of nature and life. My analysis will follow three main themes that in fact are interlinked and echo each other: and particularly First World War, then life and its corollary death in shape of poet's human environment and finally context of nature which poet has found in west of Ireland. I. The No Man's Land of War Michael father is a recurring figure in poetry and many of son's poems celebrate courage in trenches during First World War. These poems are often associated with evocations of poets such as Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, so-called war poets, who fought in Northern France and some of whom died in action there. Moreover, two World Wars and reading of poets framed view of Troubles in native country, in so far as they have given him a perspective on violence which generally pervades poetry. In 2013, Longley edited a selection of poems by Robert Graves. The phrase included in title of this article (and all that) partly refers to Graves's autobiography, Good-Bye to All That, published in 1929. In this work, its author relates memories of World War I, precisely battle of Loos and Battle of Somme in which he took part as an officer in Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and during which he had mistakenly been declared as killed in action. As a matter of fact, Graves, more than was case with other poets, did not make an indictment of but, to quote Longley, professed an open-faced, almost naive regimental loyalty. Graves's poetry has been an important source of inspiration and a model, confining to veneration as Longley recalled in same introduction: Graves lays down law majestically [...]. Yet line is flexible, at times improvisatory, jazzy even. Michael Longley acknowledges importance of Graves's prose work previously mentioned on own evolution and also fact that Graves's portrayal of the psychic quagmire of trenches echoed what he remembered of father's infrequent recollections. …

Fourteen Stories That Inspired Satyajit Ray by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay, ed. tr.

78 WLT JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2015 out of town.” Where but under “picket fences ” (Smallwood’s catch-all section) would one place the pantoum about the doll, the one that survived through all the years, or the verse about crochet-bordered sheets that “lend / dignity / sleeping / horizontally”? In “Tea Bubbles,” we find the poet playing with random observation and thought: “I lift the Styrofoam cup like mulled wine / Or in adoration of the Holy Grail— / Once the lid’s off you see bubbles align.” This villanelle concludes, “The hot water dots shape no evident design.” By contrast to these lighter poems, we find Smallwood’s revelation of her bout with cancer heartrending. Especially so when we read “A Counseling Session,” “A Chemo Visit,” and “The Second MRI.” Experiencing these poems, we begin to understand the poet’s playfulness. We sense, as if from the poet’s viewpoint, that things will be what they will be, that there is yet time for enjoyment, time for reflection about great and small things. Realizing this brings a cohesion to the volume that I didn’t at first foresee. My slight quibble with the collection concerns the poet’s inclusion of one or two of her pantoums that seem to gallop forward with “rhyme” but lack enough “reason” to justify. One such was “Before I Have to Go Home,” but “Mainsprings” carried a realistic and worthy message and used purposeful rhyming. Give me, rather, Smallwood’s nature poem: “Cumulus clouds fly the sky today: / queens of optimism, / delight of dreamers.” For I’m one who, in reading poetry, likes to dream a little. Carole Mertz Parma, Ohio miscellaneous Fourteen Stories That Inspired Satyajit Ray. Bhaskar Chattopadhyay, ed. & tr. New York / New Delhi. Harper Perennial / HarperCollins India. 2014. isbn 9789351361930 Satyajit Ray’s roots as a filmmaker are in the visual arts and literature, two fields he knew intimately and professionally as a commercial artist and author of popular fiction . Twenty-six out of his thirty narrative films (including two shorts and three made for television) are based on literary works, twenty-four of which by modern Bengali authors such as Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (Ray’s grandfather, 1863–1915), Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee (1873–1932), Rajshekhar Basu (aka Parashuram, 1880– 1960), Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1894-1950), Tarashankar Banerjee (1898– 1971), Saradindu Bandyopadhyay (1899– 1970), Premendra Mitra (1904–88), Narendranath Mitra (1916–75), Mani Shankar Mukherjee (b. 1933), Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934–2012), and Ray himself. The three exceptions are The Chess Players (1977) and Sadgati (“The Deliverance,” 1981), based on two short stories by the Hindi writer Munshi Premchand (1880–1936), and An Enemy of the People (1989), an adaptation of the 1882 play by Ibsen (Ray’s only non-Indian source of inspiration). For this book, Bhaskar Chattopadhyay, a Bangalore-based statistician turned online art dealer, selected and translated fourteen stories that inspired eleven of Ray’s films. (The remaining nineteen are based on a dozen Bengali novels, a novella, the already-mentioned Ibsen play, and original screenplays.) The result is an intelligent and highly enjoyable collection whose value and effectiveness are obvious and twofold. On the one hand, it prompts the reader to watch the films (or to watch them again, he or she being most likely a Ray fan) and to read more works by the authors showcased, who are all major figures in Bengali literary modernism. On the other hand, the student of Ray’s cinema will further enjoy the opportunity to analyze his choice of literary sources (wondering, for example, about the conspicuous absence of such a major figure as Buddhadeva Bose) and the complex and fascinating ways in which he reworked and interpreted them to suit his own artistic purposes and vision. Interestingly enough, the fourteen stories represent different genres (children’s literature , social realism, historical fiction, satire, etc.) and periods (from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century), but they all have, in different ways and degrees, a distinct visual and dramatic potential, which Ray exploited and enhanced by means of accomplished screenplays, compelling camerawork, and masterful directing. A translator’s note, four brief pieces on or by Bengali actors who worked with Ray (Chhabi Biswas, Sharmila Tagore...

A Chinese Aesthetics Reading of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey ---with a Comparison to Chunjiang Huayue Ye

The nature poetry written by English Romantic poet Wordsworth is a milestone in English literary history. Its inbuilt aesthetics is much similar with that of ancient Chinese Mountain-Water poetry. The most remarkable aspect is the fusion of feeling and scene, in which philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics are interwoven into a thematic unity. In this perspective, one Chinese nature poem Chunjiang Huayue Ye written by early Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Ruoxu can be well compared. This mutual illumination not only yields a dialogical channel, more importantly, it also discovers the potential values of the two: first, Wordsworth’s unique aesthetical awareness is forwarded; second, it helps to globalize and modernize ancient Chinese literary theory

Daniela Stamatiadi: Greece ⋆ Illustrator

Daniela StamatiadiGreece ⋆ Illustrator Taylor Kraayenbrink Daniela Stamatiadi was born in 1972 in Athens, Greece. She studied her craft at the Athens School of Fine Art. Stamatiadi has been a children's book illustrator for over a decade, and has successfully been the illustrator of over seventy publications. She has published books with all major presses in Greece, and she teaches illustration at various private colleges in Greece. Stamatiadi has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the 2010 Greek IBBY illustration award for her book Von Kourabies versus Count Melomakoronis. Stamatiadi's illustrations are fi tting for a wide variety of subjects. She illustrates many stories; the subject matter could be children who don't like their fi sh dinners, or it could be a nature poem. Stamatiadi's style as an illustrator defies neat definitions, and this is why she is able to suit her work to so many books. She is by all accounts an incredibly versatile artist. Her style ranges from being almost photographic in some books to deliberately stripped down, strikingly primitive, in other books. Her more elaborate and realistic paintings come through as portraits. In these, Stamatiadi uses a variety of colours and shadings to achieve a vibrancy and warmth that is innocent and inviting to the reader. A wonderful example of this style in action is The Promise (written by Anna Conomos). In other illustrations, Stamatiadi's minimalism takes over. She is a master of minimal colour and powerful but spare detail. In these illustrations she uses a sketch-like approach; oftentimes, most of the illustrations look like mere pencil sketches. This sketch is then set off by a distinctive and pronounced detail (made pronounced by its singularity). For example, a pencilled wolf might have a red tongue, or a black and white sketched child could have a red dimple. Besides being a very effective method of illustration in that it is distinctive, this minimalism is also quite refined, and it sets Stamatiadi apart as a children's book illustrator whose work has great value as art for adults as well. As the popular Greek children's author, Maria Angelidou, has noted, Stamatiadi's work has value "for all those who rejoice to hear and see beauty." Selected Bibliography • The Little Empty Christmas Book. Text Kyriakos Haritos. Athens: Metaixmio, 2010. Print. Google Scholar • Milena and the Horrible Fish. Text Soti Triantafyllou. Athens: Patakis, 2011. Print. Google Scholar • The Most Beautiful Thing in the World. Text Anna Damianidi. Athens: Potamos, 2012. Print. Google Scholar • The Promise. Text Anna Conomos. Athens: Potamos, 2012. Print. Google Scholar • Von Courabies Versus Count Melomakaronis. Text Helen Svoronou. Athens: Metaixmio, 2010. Print. [End Page 27] Google Scholar Copyright © 2014 Bookbird, Inc.

Mortal Diamond by Durs Grünbein

70 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews call to “Let the syntax crack!” and “voice” becomes “an old tangle of synapse.” The poem “Calendars” is “a poem in chants for four voices”: Demeter, Persephone, Hades, and a Greek chorus. Like all the other mythic poems in this collection, “Calendars” works for contemporary readers, and the language is, for lack of a better word, gorgeous, engorged with color and imagery. This is not to say that Finch’s poems don’t engage with the present or with contemporary issues—there are poems on incest and abortion, love poems, nature poems, poems of women’s friendship, and an elegy for the poet’s father: “Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly / past the long edge of the last human shore, / there are deep windows the waves haven’t opened, / where night is reflected through decades of glass. / There is the nursery, there is the nanny, / there are my father’s unreachable eyes / turned towards the window. Is the child uneasy? / His is the death that is circling the stars.” “My father’s unreachable eyes” is a fine example of Finch’s facility with emotionally powerful imagery, and the stanza displays her graceful use of meter. Finch’s poetry, plays, and performance pieces, infused with the spirit of thousands of poetic predecessors , remind us that poetry and theater were once wedded and that, in poetry, emotional and intellectual meanings are inextricable from their material properties: voice, word, sound, form, and rhythm. Everyone should have a copy of Annie Finch’s Spells on their shelf, for those hours when patterned rhythm and sound seem the best approximation of the soul’s speaking. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish Oklahoma City University Durs Grünbein. Mortal Diamond. Michael Eskin, tr. New York. Upper West Side Philosophers. 2013. isbn 9781935830078 Durs Grünbein’s philosophical poetics in Mortal Diamond come to us in English from Upper West Side Philosophers, a publisher that proclaims to focus on “philosophical thinking steeped in lived life.” This small book of dense poems is framed as a “spiritual journey through the labyrinthine cosmos of the human soul,” regarding the “paradoxes of creatureliness.” Through Grünbein’s treatise on what it means to be alive as related to other living organisms, the divine, and past philosophers, he questions what he can really proclaim to be true, and what part of that truth he can question. Sandwiched between the translator ’s preface and notes are thirty poems that vary between one and six pages of small type (a book you can carry along in a purse or lunch bag), which on any given page will challenge the intellect as much as the aesthetic of verse. Divided into five sections, tropes of extended metaphor , allusions to mythology, and internal rhyme thread the individual parts into one work. Many of the poems center around theology and various musings on God and his existence , including those of Descartes, Pascal, Augustine, Malebranche, and Dante, often through dialogue with these thinkers of the past. Alongside a tradition of religion, Grünbein follows the histories of geometry, biology, and astrology. He focuses particularly on Pascal and his perceptions of God: “like a pulsar, he is light years away from us, yet, with the regularity of a pulse, he sends palpable, hot and cold waves through the human heart” (“The Indian of Spirit: Bagatelles on the Life of the Philosopher Pascal”). These poems claim that we find God in the scientific explanations of what we can see and sense as humans, an interesting take on bringing heaven to earth. Though addressing the cosmic divine, Grünbein focuses in on the microscopic—actually seeing things through a microscope—details of tiny creatures and the technical language of science and mathematics. He relates philosophy to looking at animals and landscapes: “The land adorns itself with cones of white: the trees / That with his wintry hand the mighty arrangeur / Refined / . . . A folio of sheets of white, which he alone inscribes / . . . A brand new dawn of pure geometry / . . . snow helps to understand perception” (“The Snows of Today,” the first canto from Grünbein’s novel in verse, On Snow or Descartes in Germany). The speakers of these poems will not...

Creating One’s Self

Creating One’s Self Hasanthika Sirisena (bio) Gradually the world: new and selected poems. Burt Kimmelman. BlazeVOX Books. http://www.blazevox.org. 252pages; paper, $18.00 The Tang Dynasty poet Meng Jiao claims: “Poets are usually pure, rugged / Die from hunger, cling to desolate mountains.” Rugged might, at first, seem a strange adjective to invoke when describing the elegant, often delicate poems in Burt Kimmelman’s collection Gradually the World; the image of starvation and endurance at odds with the richness of the vision captured in the volume—a vision whose scope includes marriage, fatherhood, Jewishness, and Kimmelman’s experiences as a poet and lover of art. But if, at the heart of Meng Jiao’s grief for his fellow poet, there exists weariness with the poetic endeavor, a lament for the poet’s existence, there is here in Kimmelman’s collected work also a sorrow—a reckoning with mortality and the constancy of loss. Toughness is also embedded within these pages. Rugged with its intimation of persistence and stamina seems apt. The over 200 poems here testify to the artistic and aesthetic value of the steady accumulation of detail and observation. The book is divided into four sections with Kimmelman’s newest work appearing first and the remaining three sections each covering roughly a decade. The opening poem of the first section embodies the qualities I have come to associate with Kimmelman’s poetry: a fascination with the physical world, with family life, as well as the clarity and honesty of emotional expression. The title of the opening poem, “Lips,” invokes sensual experience: the kiss, the sip, the action of forming words. The power of the first two stanzas derives from the juxtaposition of a series of poignant and evocative images: the poet as a boy watching his father shave; the poet as a man seeing in himself his father’s features; and the memories of the veiled expressions of his parents’ disillusionment and emotional estrangement. The final stanza, though, takes a darker—and startling—turn: I found my dead father, his head resting on a pillow, in his death mask his lips wrenched sideways, twisted as if, in wanting to utter a final thought, he had sought an elusive breath of air. A poem characterized in the first two stanzas by motion and sensation freezes in the third. Kimmelman preserves the image of both his parents on their deathbeds. The poet’s final homage to his parents is a simple act: a kiss against cold flesh. Fans of Kimmelman often note the debt he owes to the Chinese classical poetic tradition. His poems certainly exhibit the characteristics we associate with Chinese poetry, including precision in language, observation of the natural world, concision, and a preoccupation with impermanence. For example, this nature poem “After the Storm”: Rain gone, the white flowers on the brambles bow forward over a mallard floating by beside its image in the water. Nature here is active, transformative, and transient. Kimmelman also incorporates many of the formal traditions of Chinese poetry including the manipulation of the poetic line through patterns of syllabic meter, caesura, and enjambment to create original and unusual associations. In his poem “Wounded Bird” Kimmelman writes: Water covers what it can and makes the shore where the bird, wounded, standing on its one good leg, each day finds within the mud the life of insects to its liking. Rigor is maintained through the alternation between three and four syllable lines. The end-stopped fourth line and the caesura in the fifth carry the dramatic tension, and the destruction in the final stanza is about the preservation of life as well as its impermanence—common themes in Asian poetry. It’s important I think to note that the use of form here isn’t simply indulging a fascination with the exotic or an attempt to import formalism, but an artist seeking through tradition a way of engaging—and finding agency—in the world around him. The result is a focus on personal humility and awe, the striving, through art, to place the poet not just in a vast topography but also in the vast experiences of life. To limit oneself to Kimmelman’s...

‘SCHRIFT ZAGT BLASSES UNBEKANNT’: THE POETRY OF AUGUST STRAMM (1874–1915)

This essay examines the radical innovations in language and form on display in Stramm’s poems, from the early nature poems and ‘Du. Liebesgedichte’ to the late war poems. It focuses in particular on the radical forms of experience and subjectivity that such innovations convey. The essay is organized around various tropes of movement and mobility, offering in-depth readings of key poems to discuss how Stramm’s spare yet formalized language points to mobile, shifting and traumatic subjectivities, all the way to the final war poems in which the twin poles of Expressionism – modernist alienation and redemptive articulation – seem to coincide.

Climate Change and the Individual Talent

Climate Change and the Individual Talent:Eliotic Ecopoetics Matthew Griffiths (bio) Contemporary climate change emerges as an unexpected interaction of nonhuman natural processes and collective human practices. Yet as natural and cultural agencies operate at terrestrial and global scales, beyond immediate experience, they destabilize many of the paradigms on which the notion of writing as the creation of an individual personality is based, making them problematic to articulate. I will argue here that T. S. Eliot’s landmark 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” dealing as it does with relations between writer and collective cultural agency, can be productively reconsidered given the way climate change complicates those relations. For Eliot, this collective agency is tradition; for my purposes it is climate, “collective” inasmuch as it comprises multiple phenomena—including human activity—to a problematically indeterminate degree. Because climate change demands that we write and think in new ways, as the previously disregarded consequences of our past actions make themselves apparent, we must now create and criticize with the understanding that culture is no longer what we thought it was: “the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show,” as Eliot says (1975, 39). This modified understanding simultaneously identifies a previously unrecognized “tradition” of human activity—greenhouse gas generation—and assimilates it into creative practice. Texts of the past, such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” itself, then become liable to Eliot’s famous assertion that “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it” (1975, 38): anthropogenic climate change can be thought of as just such a transformative artifact of human endeavor, one that forces us to revisit and revise Eliot’s ideas in ways that ecologize his critical concerns. Eliot’s essay does not suddenly become an articulation of green concerns by swapping “tradition” for “climate change,” as my title might suggest. However, by allowing Eliot’s analysis a fuller scope than he himself does, I intend to show that, at its hub, it still offers a point around which human–environmental relations can be [End Page 83] articulated. After assessing what the implications of this are for “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” I will examine how we might then reread The Waste Land, before suggesting how these deconstructive reassessments of Eliot’s principles can inform a contemporary poetics of climate change. Traditional Perspectives The Eliotic ecopoetics I outline here helps work through the critical implications of climate change; it recognizes with J. Scott Bryson that “an ecopoet, in order to continue to write poems of nature, must necessarily alter his or her poetics” (2002, 5). Bryson continues: “while adhering to certain conventions of romanticism, [ecopoetry] also advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues” (5); Eliot’s formulation that “the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (1975, 38) is similar to an extent, but where Bryson talks of “advanc[ing] beyond…tradition” and the “distinctly contemporary,” Eliot realizes that we are distinctive by being part of a tradition rather than by simply advancing beyond it. We should consider, then, the tradition from which ecopoetics emerges. According to Bryson, “drastic changes in the way Westerners envisioned themselves and the world around them” in the nineteenth century meant that “anything resembling romantic nature poetry was rarely written, and if it was, it was even more rarely taken seriously” (2002, 2) in the early twentieth; yet it was to the romantic paradigm that the first ecocritics turned nearly a century later, “taking seriously” romantic nature poetry and leaving modernist responses to the nineteenth century in its shadow. When Jonathan Bate, one such early ecocritic, declares, “Histories, theories, political systems are all enframings” and “Ecopoetics renounces the mastery of enframing knowledge and listens instead to the voice of art” (2000, 268-9, emphasis in original), he might seem to resist a position like Eliot’s, concerned as it is with “Histories [and] theories” of art. As such, Bate’s...

First Night South of the Antarctic Circle, After Too Much to Drink, I Dream That Apsley Cherry Garrard, Famous Polar Explorer, Offers a Critique of My Still Unfinished Manuscript; After Which I, Soberly, Attempt Rebuttal, and: Rebuttal, and: Sixty-Eight Degrees South, Marguerite Bay, and: Early Courtship Poem, and: Naming the Lifeboat

First Night South of the Antarctic Circle, After Too Much to Drink, I Dream That Apsley Cherry Garrard, Famous Polar Explorer, Offers a Critique of My Still Unfinished Manuscript; After Which I, Soberly, Attempt Rebuttal, and: Rebuttal, and: Sixty-Eight Degrees South, Marguerite Bay, and: Early Courtship Poem, and: Naming the Lifeboat Justin Gardiner (bio) First Night South of the Antarctic Circle, After Too Much to Drink, I Dream That Apsley Cherry Garrard, Famous Polar Explorer, Offers a Critique of My Still Unfinished Manuscript; After Which I, Soberly, Attempt Rebuttal Justin Gardiner (bio) “When I went South I never meant to write a book: I rather despised those who did so as being of an inferior brand to those who did things and said nothing about them.” Sad songs. What did you miss out on for these? As though it were enough, simply, to watch the scenery unfold and not also be in it. To lead a life thought and grieved though never fully lived. Given a coastline as grim and inhospitable as this, you must have thought that the threshold would suffice. It does not. Down here, the secret of the sky is to illuminate only what is out of reach, to pile grey upon grey, and counter it, on the far horizon, with a thin band of hopefulness. A light so true that even when suffering from snow blindness and myopia, I could still navigate by its distant gleam. Yes, I had my story—the constant shivering jaw that shattered all my teeth—and I paid for it with my life. Not then, but in the long sunless days that came after. [End Page 98] Let a man live as many lives as he writes books. I detect here but a half-life, buried beneath a mantle of abstracted ice. I’ve been told that in the country you call home, hidden far between both coasts, lies a basin whose cool, flowing waters never reach either ocean. A fitting emblem for a nation, like my own, full of artists and shopkeepers. What I say is that any river worth its salt will find a way to overflow such banks, and come rushing headlong to the sea. [End Page 99] Justin Gardiner “‘It was hard to be a great writer,’ Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘if you loved the world and living in it and special people. It was hard when you loved so many places.’ And I think that tension is there, underlying most everything he wrote: how, despite his dedication to art, he was also always being pulled toward the unmitigated joys of just living his life. While it’s hard to pinpoint as a governing aesthetic, I hope a similar tension shows through in my first manuscript, Naming the Lifeboat. Only a handful of the poems therein are set down in Antarctica, but they are a culmination, of sorts, of many of my other poems of travel and nature, and I am happy to have several of them appearing together in this issue.” Justin Gardiner is the 2012 Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Fellow, sponsored by PEN Northwest. He is also the recipient of the 2012 Larry Levis Stipend through Warren Wilson’s MFA program, from which he graduated in 2005. His poems have appeared in Quarterly West, New South, Zone 3, ZYZZYVA and others. Copyright © 2012 The Curators of the University of Missouri Rebuttal Justin Gardiner (bio) When you set out on your winter’s journey, sledging alongside two companions— in the service of science not art— to bring back a sample of the emperors’ eggs, you could not know the merits of what you sought. Of the six eggs you took, three broke along the way. And of the others, only one now remains, collecting dust on a museum shelf. Many the man who has thought to mock you for this. But I say, let no one judge too harshly that which has been faithfully carried: be that book or egg. [End Page 100] Justin Gardiner “‘It was hard to be a great writer,’ Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘if you loved the world and living in it and special people. It was hard when you...

On Yu Chihwan's Nature Poems

On Yu Chihwan's Nature Poems

An Ecocritical Reading of Selected Poems of Muhammad Haji Salleh

Ecocriticism is concerned with the relationship between literature and environment or how the relationships between humans and their physical world are reflected in literature. In this paper, we attempt to analyse selected poems of Muhammad Haji Salleh using some concepts from ecocriticism as an analytical lens. The premise of this paper is based on the poet’s symbiotic relationship which has become a significant feature of his work. Using six of his nature poems to exhibit Muhammad’s idea of mutual relationship between the human world and the natural world of environment, we show the poet’s concern about the slightest interference of human beings into the world of nature which results in the disruption of human-nature relationship. Muhammad Haji Salleh does not limit himself to presenting the brighter and darker side of nature, rather he has gone a step further to reveal the very concept of ecosystem and reflect the blossoming of ecological consciousness in modern Malaysian society. This approach of reading Muhammad Haji Salleh exhibits the current interest in the environment and the ways in which it has to be treated with respect and love. By explicating the intrinsic features of nature in his selected poems, we can inculcate environmental awareness and inspire ecological consciousness among people in Malaysia and elsewhere in the world. Keywords: Ecocriticism, ecosystem, interrelationship, ecological consciousness, poetry and Muhammad Haji Salleh

H.W. Longfellow: A Poetical-Dwelling Poet of Ecological Wisdom from the Perspective of Eco-criticism

Among a minority of Longfellow’s studies in China and abroad, there has even scarcely been one made from the perspective of eco-criticism. Eco-criticism aims at exploring the relation between literature and natural environment to find out the ecological wisdom in literary works so as to awaken the ecological consciousness of the contemporaries. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a poet concerning much about nature, in his nature poems, shows the value of nature by evoking people’s love and care for nature, and makes them reconsider the Man-Nature relationship so as to seek the ecological balance on earth, including that from within the human world. By reading Longfellow in the light of certain eco-ethical ideas, it is not difficult to discover the legacy glittering with ecological wisdom in his poetry. Such wisdom is highly connected with Longfellow’s “environmental niche”. Nowadays, with the increasing deterioration of the environment, the ecological wisdom implied in Longfellow’s poetry is of tremendous significance.

Recollections of journey from Essex by John Clare

SummaryThis article examines John Clare's prose account of his escape from High Beach Asylum in 1841. Clare has attracted attention for his nature poems as much as for his humble, peasant background and his well-described mental illness, including his asylum committals. Recollections of journey from Essex is unique as a piece of writing describing escape from an asylum and illustrating to some degree the mental state and experiences of a psychiatrically ill person in England in the mid-1800s.

Chickweed Wintergreen by Harry Martinson

or two scenes, the remembered and the present moment. Are we seeing through memory, or does memory dwell side by side with present perception ? Which is more “true,” if such a word has any place in discussions of lyric perception? These questions lead us into deep water, though Longley ’s lyrics have a readily accessible beauty that merges with, but is never obscured by, their subterranean questioning . A Hundred Doors does not lead us into new territory, but the familiar ground of Longley’s beloved Carrigskeewaun is seen in a newly prismatic perspective. The poet is confronted by his memories and with a future that holds “my final resting place,” and this sense of an ending —one’s own ending—is accepted with the equanimity of one who feels truly at home. Longley’s verse invites us to read autobiographically; he is the same age as when his compatriot Seamus Heaney contemplated beginnings and endings, and when W. B. Yeats composed “Under Ben Bulben,” yet Longley’s tone could not be farther from the patrician coldness of Yeats’s self-composed epitaph. Longley ’s poems are marked by a hospitable , magnanimous tone and a sense of fluidity that, at times, almost seems to escape the confines of personal identity altogether. Magdalena Kay University of Victoria Harry Martinson. Chickweed Wintergreen . Robin Fulton, tr. Tarset, North Umberland, UK. Bloodaxe Books (Dufour, distr.). 2011 (©2010). isbn 9781852248871 Swedish author Harry Martinson, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974, left behind a large and distinguished body of work when he died in 1978. Sadly, little of his poetry made it across into English, either in his lifetime or after, making him undoubtedly one of the least-known European Nobel laureates. Chickweed Wintergreen , newly selected and translated by Robin Fulton, is by far the largest single collection of Martinson’s poems we’ve seen so far. Fulton selects generously from the poet’s entire output, from the early collection Spökskepp (Ghost ships, 1929) to Martinson’s final book, Tuvor (Tussocks, 1973), and includes an important section of posthumously published poems. Fulton is well known as the translator of Tomas Tranströmer. His feeling for the cadences of Martinson’s Swedish shows the sensitivity and inventive range we’ve come to expect and rightly admire. His translations are models of balance and tone. It’s typical of Fulton, and his pairing with the publisher Bloodaxe, that details grow into a sum of tremendous intimacy : the inclusion of several poems in their original Swedish and the use of Martinson’s evocative, entrancing line drawings bring the book alive, as an object of craft and beauty. At sixteen, Martinson turned his back on Sweden, home of his childhood misery, and spent the next seven years sailing the world’s seas as a merchant marine. It was an experience , an education that taught him the essentials of his art, how to watch and listen and how, in the course of his subsequent life as a poet, to divine the vast stillness at the silent heart of all things. Martinson’s return to rural Sweden is mirrored and replayed over and again in the microvision of his most successful early poems. Landscape roots him, and it was in the minutely, intensely observed nature poems of Nomad (1931) that Martinson came into his own as a recognizably unique presence on the Swedish literary scene. What Martinson’s poems strive for above all is a kind of reckoning of the overlooked, the unobserved; to count and credit the everyday experience of nature, lest it too be abandoned . Staffan Söderblom hits the mark in his introduction when he says for Martinson, “the mystery, or the enigma, reveals itself everywhere in creation, and with its fine awareness and sensitivity his poetry can at times resemble a membrane for this mystery.” The evocative, meditative poem “The Quagmire” was one of Martinson ’s last, taken from his final book, Tuvor: “Late-born swarms of flying creatures / set out beneath trees now leafless. / They pause in sheltered places / and are seen dancing up and 72 | World Literature Today wltreviews Manoj Kumar Panda The Bone Garden and Other Stories Rupantar: A Centre for English...

Milton’s hypotextual presence in James Thomson’s Summer (1727)

Continuing his creative engagement with the literary past that had already been manifested in Winter. A Poem (1726), James Thomson fashions a poetics in Summer. A Poem. (1727) that promotes national pride, patriotism, and an attempt at generating an intellectual canon of writers. He capitalises on the high-cultural value attributed to John Milton’s works in 18th-century England by hypotextually modelling his descriptive nature poem on his illustrious predecessor’s poetry. He adopts a Miltonic diction and imbues Summer with an epic modulation, in the process appropriating Augustan poetic diction for his narrative-descriptive mode. In several reflective passages in his generically hybrid poem, Thomson theorises his adaptation and reworking of the poetic precepts of his literary model, hoping – above all – that his work, in line with other popular imitations of Milton, will find favour in the literary marketplace.