New Generation Of Poets Research Articles

Perestroika și noua poetică basarabeană: Eugen Cioclea și Grigore Chiper

"The poetic model Păunescu − Vieru hasn’t diminished its value in the Bessarabian literary space and most probably the lyrism with ethnical and ethical elements will be regarded as a source of inspiration for the new generation of poets. The study problematizes a unifying perspective by simplifying, reducing the field of poetical experiences to a patriotic dominant feature. Considering the perspective from a distance, outside the Bessarabian literary space, as well as from the inside, we notice the way that a poet chooses one or several models no matter the space and its matrix, his mother tongue and the time frame he lives in. Considering and studying such authors as Eugen Cioclea and Grigore Chiper in the cultural-historic context of the Perestroika time and the following period, two personal and original lyrical voices are revealed, outside the poetic model of the Bessarabian patriotic commitment, obviously synchronizing with the poetic reality on the other side of the Prut River."

«Американский поэт всегда ищет Бога, но не всегда находит его»: лекция Джорджа Сильвестра Вирека «Америка – земля поэтов» (1911)

The beginning of the American Poetic Renaissance is considered to be 1912: the Imagists, Poetry magazine, the new generation of poets — Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, etc. This phenomenon keeps attracting a lot of attention of literary critics, meanwhile the previous two decades of American poetry fell out of sight of both readers and scholars. However it would be wrong to assume that there were no noteworthy poets and poems in America after Whitman’s death and before the debuts of Pound and Eliot. How did the American poets themselves evaluate “the current moment”? George Viereck’s lecture “America as a Land of Poets” delivered in 1911 at the University of Berlin can give an idea. George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962), an outstanding poet, critic and editor, speaking of the “undiscovered, esoteric America, where religion and poetry dwell,” divided American poets into four groups. In the first one there are Whitman's heirs, nativists and democrats, singers of labor and comradeship, like Horace Traubel and Edwin Markham. Next, there are heirs of Poe, aristocrats and esthetes, masters of style, like George Santayana and William Vaughn Moody. The third group unites heirs of Longfellow, traditional and conservative authors, like Henry Van Dyke and Richard Watson Gilder. Finally, there are “lyrical rebels,” combining the legacy of Poe and Whitman and that of Swinburne and Baudelaire. Vireck included himself and the majority of young poets from the anthology The Younger Choir (1910) to the fourth group. This paper includes the full Russian translation of the lecture in Viereck’s English presentation.

Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano.

<i>Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop</i> by Thomas Travisano.

The poetics of hope and frustration: young Egyptian poets interrogating the nation

Never has the timeless distrust of different generations been more manifest than these days where we see the Egyptian young revolutionaries who emerged in the wake of 2011 being marginalized and even silenced. The last few years in Egypt have witnessed numerous attempts to analyze and interrogate contemporary discourses within different forms of popular culture situating them as fundamental means of examining power and agency. Such contemporary discourses of power, hegemony, revolution, opposition besides concepts of nationalism and resistance in the wake of 2011 revolution and its aftermath, have been the subject of a number of studies on the literary output of the revolution, and notably in the field of poetry and songs. Most of these studies viewed the colloquial poetry produced by young Egyptian poets within the continuum of this rich poetic tradition. I argue that recent poems by young Egyptian poets represent a rupture rather than a continuity within this same tradition. The selected poetic voices are distinguished from both the Egyptian long established tradition of vernacular poetry but also from the poetry composed and sung in the early days of the revolution. This new generation of poets sing the pain and frustration of a dream that did not come true. As they interrogate the meaning of nationalism and the nation itself, one of the main themes in Egyptian vernacular lyrical and poetic tradition, a new corpus is emerging out of their poetry of resistance almost claiming a history of its own.

Tickets for the steamboat of modernity

The article examines the poetry collections printed by Voymega publishers in their new series ‘Pyroscaphe.’ Authors of the six collections published so far are young poets who participated in the literary seminar ‘The way to literature. Continued’ held by the Moscow Writers’ Union in 2019: M. Bessonov, D. Nozdryakov, B. Peygin, K. Tarayan, E. Uliankina, and V. Fedotov. Despite their very dissimilar poetics, the study of their works enables the critic to trace certain common features that define the new generation of poets. In particular, Batalov believes that each author tells their own myth. What unites those myths are the concept of the post-Soviet childhood (with all realia typical of the 1990s), the crossing of the border between life and death, and idealization of the provinces; it is also pointed out that each of the authors eventually arrives at the myth of Hades, the kingdom of shadows, where human souls are roaming in solitude. In conclusion, Batalov proposes to poets that if they cannot overcome the inertia of mythological thinking, they should at least mitigate it by addressing reality.

A Critical Reading of Nabakanta Barua’s “Measurements”

‘Measurements’ is a poem written by an Assamese poet, Nabakanta Barua. He belongs to the new generation of poets in Assamese Literature. He writes in the modernist tradition of Hopkins (using sprung rhythm), W. B. Yeats (conflict between the romantic and the modern) and T. S. Eliot (material and spiritual hollowness). He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Assamese Literature in 1975. The poem has a good deal of influence of T. S. Eliot. It reminds the beginning of ‘Prufrock’ and depicts the purposelessness, hollowness and faithlessness of modern existence. It bears the influence of the European decadent culture which reveals the inner crisis of the human soul through doubts, apprehensions, boredom and frustration. In this poem Nabakanta Barua talks about city life in which man has to go through an endless process of ‘measurements’ resulting into nothingness. The poem seems to begin with talking about the stitching of clothing in a materialistic sense but, in its deeper meanings, it gives philosophical and spiritual perspectives. Different kinds of metaphors have been used to clarify the situations of nothingness and barrenness.

The Ocular Turn, Misty Poetry, and a Postrevolutionary Imagination

Abstract “The Answer,” a poem by Bei Dao first published in 1978, marks the emergence of a defiant voice in contemporary Chinese poetry and asserts skepticism as the political stance of a young generation in post–Cultural Revolution China. It also heralds a historic transition from an era of sonic agitation to an aesthetics based on visual perception and contemplation. This rereading of Bei Dao's canonical poem and other related texts goes back to the late 1970s, when the political implications of the human senses were firmly grasped and heatedly debated. The author shows that an ocular turn occurs in “The Answer” and drives the aesthetic as well as political pursuits of a new generation of poets. He further argues that, in a moment still enthralled with a revolutionary sonic culture, Misty poetry disavowed aural excitement and was part of the reconditioning of the human senses in preparation for a postrevolutionary order and sensibility.

Sound in silence: design and listening cultures in the Woodberry Poetry Room

This article examines the ways in which architecture and design forged a place for sound reproduction technologies inside the silent sanctuary of the modern library. During the first half of the twentieth century, recorded theatrical plays, interviews and readings entered the collections of public and private libraries, forcing universities to reckon with acoustic modalities of knowledge production and circulation. Focussing on the Woodberry Poetry Room, a small room designed by Aino and Alvar Aalto inside Harvard University’s Lamont Library, the article discusses how the two architects and designers addressed the acoustic challenge that record players presented to spaces of learning.Although an oddity in Aino and Alvar Aalto’s oeuvre, the Poetry Room holds a central position in the history of acoustic modernisms in architecture. Inside the room the two architects articulated their modernist critique of functionalism and technology, reclaiming listening spaces as the subject matter of design. In transforming each record player into a listening station in the middle of the room, their design turned the gramophone into a pillar of modern poetry. This interior marked a new sonic sensibility in architectural practices and discourses, indicative of the place that sound reproduction technologies, such as gramophones and record players, held in modern architecture as iconic objects of modernity and mass culture. The interior was also the meeting point for a new generation of poets, who gathered around those record players, plugged in, and listened together, yet alone, to the voices of modern poetries. In the 1960s, these same poets took over the New York scene, forcefully transforming the live performance of poetry. The article argues that architecture ultimately shaped the social space of reading and listening to poetry, and thus played an important role in producing new encounters between objects and human subjects, readers and sound reproduction technologies.

Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation

Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation

Demystification of Poetic Language as a Style in Niyi Osundare’s Poetry

The language of poetry remains one of mystic which requires deep imaginative ability for its analysis. This is basedon the poet’s medium of interaction with the audience in terms of diction. Environment, culture and tradition,sometimes, if not most of the times, play dominant role in accessing a literary discourse. Osundare uses the oralsources to lay bare his message thus exploiting the traditional mode to define nature, by so doing reducing the stresson the mental intuition in accessing the meaning of a poem. His literary artistic innovation appears to be the mostdistinctive among the new generation of poets because of his peculiar choice of diction.

Loving Literature: A Cultural History by Deidre Shauna Lynch

Reviewed by: Loving Literature: A Cultural History by Deidre Shauna Lynch Jacob Sider Jost Lynch, Deidre Shauna. 2015. Loving Literature: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $40.00 hc. 352 pp. There are certain critical stories that scholars of eighteenth-century literature must tell again and again. Like the “rise of the novel” or the “emergence of the public sphere,” the story of the origins of English literature—as a canon, a mode, a discipline, a profession— is too important to narrate only once. Following in the footsteps of John Guillory’s trailblazing Cultural Capital (1993), the eighteenth-century history of “English literature” as a discourse has been the topic of monographs by Simon Jarvis, Jonathan Kramnick, Trevor Ross, Mary Poovey, and many others. Among the seductions of these studies is the way they function both as metonymies and metaphors of our contemporary critical moment, at once prehistories of how we got here and period-costume allegories of our own debates and concerns. Deidre Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History makes a major contribution to this tradition. Lynch’s guiding argument is both original and elegantly simple: at the same historical period (c. 1750–1850) that “English literature” comes to name a certain kind of text, a certain kind of study, and a certain kind of academic profession, it also comes to entail a certain kind of emotional relationship between readers and their books. It was no longer enough merely to admire [End Page 603] literature, as earlier critics in the tradition of Joseph Addison had done; in the period Lynch examines, nothing but love would do. For today’s teachers and professors, English is “a line of work” whose practitioners “are also called upon to love literature and to ensure that others do so” (1, emphasis in original). We turn our pleasure reading into articles and our bedtime stories into class discussions. Lynch demonstrates that it has been thus from the beginning—and, moreover, that the tension between literature as an edifying profession and literature as the object of love was every bit as fraught for Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Anna Seward, Thomas Warton, Thomas de Quincey, and others as it is for us. Though Lynch’s central thesis lends itself to ready summary, the course of her argument is nuanced, subtle, and richly textured by engagement with both recent scholarship and the material archive of the Romantic era. Her opening chapter retells the debate between Seward and Boswell over the critical legacy of Johnson as a debate about the appropriate emotional stance between reader and text. Her second chapter, on Warton, explains how the very literary scholars who reconceived the English canon as something past, different, and other, simultaneously described that canon as waiting to be discovered and loved by each new generation of poets and readers. Patient archival research and historical explication are thus not opposed to literary love but rather its prerequisite. This chapter is a tour de force—the one I loved the most—because (with apologies to Pope on Longinus) it is itself the great historicism it draws. Warton and his friend Richard Hurd imagined Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton as romantic men of letters like themselves, escaping into the past in order to create poetry. Without quite explicitly saying so, Lynch imagines Warton and Hurd as academics like us, escaping into our reading rooms and carrels (she makes much of Warton’s voracious use of the Bodleian) in order to write books like Loving Literature. A third chapter examines the “bibliomania” of the early eighteenth century, when book collectors paid unprecedented prices for First Folios and ballad collections alike, and essayists such as Leigh Hunt rhapsodized about the pleasures of old books, in the interest, Lynch argues, of appropriating the public canon for private pleasure. In chapter four, Lynch describes how reading (and, particularly, rereading) allowed novels to function like beloved family members. For nineteenth-century Janeites, literature was an object of domestic, habitual love, modeled on the felicitous companionate marriage that the reader may imagine to follow the denouement (or [End Page 604] rather, nouement) of an Austen courtship plot. Two final chapters turn from possessive love and domestic love...

Transgression médiatique et provocations décadentes: La décadence comme comportement médiatique.

The decadent and symbolist movements are deeply connected to the creation of media: newspapers, small reviews which make the promotion of the young poets and their original works. In the 1880’s, the decadent reviews use in a provocative way the codes and the media potentialities. However this provocative press is based on a double language (especially about the relationship with the public), and this contradiction generates a negative image in the popular press: the new generation of poets and writers appears to be a noisy group of « hoaxers ». Therefore, around 1890, when the new reviews grouped around the « symbolist » label define themselves a media identity, it is important for them to distance from decadent behaviours. The decadent moment of the mediatization of literature is thus indispensable to understand the history of connections between press and poetic avant-gardes.

From A Standard Human Wish

January–February 2012 | 37 detrimental under the Press Scrutiny Board—this was the start of many poets being imprisoned for their work, which still continues to this day). In a positive light, the Khit Por movement allowed for increased translation of key modernist texts. A principal translator of many anthologies over the years is Maung Tha Noe, who has produced Burmese versions of Apollinaire, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers” (interestingly , the most translated poem from the West in twentieth-century Burma). Maung Tha Noe’s signature anthology from 1968, In the Shade of a Pine Tree, is a keystone in Burmese literature, and increased access to good quality translations has been essential for Burmese literature to develop the national canvas. As leading poet Khin Aung Aye told me recently, “Translation is a way of climbing our own tree to get at the fruit.” In the 1990s, Khit Por began to suffer from a lack of originality, and a kind of mainstream homogenization of voice was seen to swamp Burmese literary magazines. This ushered in Zeyar Lynn and the latest tectonic shift of “language -oriented” and “postmodern” poetries in Burmese. While Maung Tha Noe has translated major poets to emerge from Khit San and Khit Por (like Aung Cheimt, Maung Chaw Nwe, and Tin Moe—all essential to the Burmese canon), Zeyar Lynn is possibly the finest poet writing in Burmese today and is a key translator in his own right—he’s published Burmese translations of Ashbery, Bernstein, and Szymborska, among others. Zeyar Lynn rejects sentimental poems and focuses more on poetry from the brain, a dramatic change in Burmese poetry and a necessary turning point. His translation work and his own poetry have influenced an exciting new generation of poets (like Moe Way, Pandora, and Maung Yu Py) who are part of a blog-poetry publishing revolution involving a crucial dialogue between the poets in Burma and the Burmese diaspora (which is in itself monumental—poets can finally evade the Press Scrutiny Board and its equivalents). Zeyar Lynn’s administering of Language poetry in Burma is often confused with the term postmodern , and the hybridization or pulling apart of these two delicate strands could yet bring about the next shift in a series of movements that have brought Burmese poetry into the twenty-first century. This could be the most exciting shift of all and unwittingly , perhaps, the political arena is not exempt from influencing change in this case. As poetry has taught us throughout history, in many countries, from the Russian moderns to the “Misty” poets of China, the more inventive poetry is in honoring and transforming tradition—while avoiding the political censor—the more extraordinary it can be. London / October 2011 Tin Moe’s first collection, Hpan-mi-ein (The glass lantern), won a national award. After the nationwide pro-democracy uprising in August 1988, he became an “Intellectual Committee” member of the National League for Democracy. As a result, in 1991 he was held without charge for six months and then confined to four years in the infamous Insein prison. Just before another possible arrest in 1999, he managed to escape Burma after obtaining a passport under his lesser-known real name, U Ba Gyan. He then took political asylum in the United States and died in Los Angeles in 2007, the author of eighteen collections of poetry. from A Standard Human Wish Tin Moe The mumbo-jumbo It’s not for me, I don’t beat Around the proverbial bush In the middle of a magniloquent forest. The right man in the right Place, I am a recluse who Lives deep in the jungle where Trees of knowledge bear fruit. I seek out and query the so-called Righteous paths in each and every book I scour for solutions that might turn My uncertainties into certainties. I don’t measure life’s depth Via a single moment, even in blurred Dreams, I don’t mix hogwash with reality I don’t wallow in the mire like you or go in For poker thrills, I know mind from matter I am no mediocre penpusher With a mu’s worth of letters...

Cuerpo plural: Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana contemporánea by Gustavo Guerrero

the excesses of freedom?imagined as more and more stuff without the hindrance of responsibility?to the constrictions of enclosure typifies Dionne Brand at her best: impas sioned politics and imaginative,pas sionate poetry. Jim Hannan LeMoyne College Cuerpo plural:Antologia de lapoesia hispanoamericana contempor?nea. Gustavo Guerrero, ed. Valencia / Madrid. Pre-Textos / Instituto Cer vantes. 2010. 616 pages + dvd. 25. isbn978-84-92913-17-6 Gustavo Guerrero's anthology of Latin American poetry includes fif ty-seven poets fromnineteen Latin American countries and, curiously, one from the United States. This selection aims to present theworks of a new generation of poets born between 1959 and 1979. While a number of these poets began pub lishing as early as the 1980s and today range between thirty and fifty years of age, all now have many col lections ofpoetry to theircredit and have achieved recognition, not only in theirrespective countries but also internationally. In his lengthy yet lucid intro duction, Guerrero indicates that the point ofdeparture forthisanthology is the generational kinship that this group ofpoets enjoys.He points out that these poets share the legacy of Latin American modernism, led by Rub?n Dario in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the experi mental works of theLatin American avant-garde period of the 1920s and '30s,aswell as thediverse social and political impulses of thepoetry pub lished in the 1960s and '70s.While thisnewer generation ofpoets rarely pays direct tribute to any of these traditions, their ownlives have wit- fl^^^Hjf^^^HKi? J^^^?I?????^^K? nessed othermore recent historical turning points, such asthe fall oftheH^^^^^^^^^^^Hf^^^HHS^I^^^I Berlin Wall, the attacks of September B^^^^^^^^^^^H^^^HHHH|[^H l and the impactof theInternetand the digital age?which is saythat H^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^HHH^^^HH they arethe H^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H^^h^^^^I andpostmodern values. Theirfl^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^HHHH^^^H attitudes express "una vocaci?n des- 9H mitificadora radical, desacralizadora HHHHHHHHH y antianacr?nica," which gives little BflB credence to conception prof?tica HHH|||^^^H|HH|||| del poeta ni en su trascendencia en HHHH^HHHHH si"; instead, theirpoetry expresses HnHH a larger awareness of a linguistic BliiW consensus in Latin America, while SUHHhHHH acknowledging theregionalHHHH|^|^^HHHjH^^^^^HH^^^^| particularities of the Spanish lanHHHHH ^HH^HH guage throughout Latin America. ImBHBHBMW While marked by a keen sense of BHjgWMW individualism, thisnew poetry does iiilBl? not adheretoanygivenschoolof HMHHHHHHHH|^^HHHBb^^|^^| poetry, dogma, or ideology, and is iBB best characterized by itsheterogene- 9 HBHHH ity anddiversity. Withinthis realm, lll|^BH|HBBBB Guerreroacknowledgesthatnew fl|^^^^^HHHHH^^^^HHH cultural andsocial realities since the ^^^^^H^IHfl^^^^lil^^^flBHI^^I 1980s have also required the creation W^^^^??wt^^^^K^^^^^^^HIi^^^^ ofanew poetic discourse. ^^^HBRK^S^^B^^^B^^H^I^^ Thisanthology contains a large H|Hllbjl|^ number ofpoets, which isa plus; l|l|HMHj^^^^^^^^|^^^|HB|H^|| however, this multiplicity of fl^B^^^^I^BI^^^^^^BH^^^^H^ es also indicates that the of Wj^B^^^^K?^?^^^^^^m^^m?^^^?i a particular poet, whose writings il^^^^^^^^^^H^^^^^^^HHHn^^l canestablish amilestone for Latin 9||^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^HHHHHHH| American poetry, hasyet tosurface. W?^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^K???????^^^? Keyfigures very turn fl^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^HIHfl^^^l out tobe EduardoChirinos, LorenIIIIh ^^HHBH zoHelguero, andJulio Trujillo, not 1^hEBIhH^H!^^^^^^SH^^^^^^^^hB tomention the excellent works of lljj Juan Carlos Ramiro Quiroga, LiliHflH ana Wittner, Mayra Santos-Febres, gann|^^^Hg^ Fabian Casas, Otoniel Guevara, or ^KK??I^^^/????K?kII^^K??B??I?I^^^? Tedi Lopez Mills, among others.All IB in all, theirpoetry leaves us with a MM certain nostalgia for the verses of flHHHH C?sar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Nica- ^^^I^^^^^^^^H^^^^^^H^^^^^H nor Parra,ErnestoCardenal,and fl^BH|j^^^HHHH^^H|HH|j^^^H Jos?Emilio Pacheco, whose ground- IbB WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW ^^^ ^^^^^^^H breaking legacies in Latin American poetry still remain at the forefront. One could also bemoan the absence of other poets in a volume of this nature (after all, an anthology will never please everyone). However, a more important concern worth noting about this ambitious work is that while some countries are rep resented by several authors (Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Argentina, Chile), others are barely represented at all (Paraguay, Ecuador, El Salva dor, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Uruguay). Such dispar ity is troubling, especially with the inclusion of New Mexican writer Levi Romero, who...

Basil Montagu QC (1770-1851): A Portrait of an Early 19th Century Life in Literature and the Law

In 1814 Basil Montagu, by now an extremely busy member of the Chancery bar took up residence at 25 Bedford Square in fashionable Bloomsbury. Together with his wife, large family and servants he continued to live at this address for the next 20 years or so. On Sundays Mrs Montagu often reigned over a salon that attracted prominent literary figures amongst whom were several long-standing friends of her husband. At the time of their marriage in 1808 Montagu had already been married twice before; his wife had been a widow for about six years and was bringing up her daughter who would one day as Mrs Proctor have her own salon frequented by a new generation of poets and authors. Montagu's chambers were at 10 New Square; his practice was mainly concerned with insolvency matters, serving as a Commissioner in Bankruptcy at the Guildhall. He was a prolific writer on commercial law but is best remembered, if at all, for his many books on bankruptcy and for a lengthy series of law reports. He also wrote numerous pamphlets on contemporary topics such as Catholic and Jewish emancipation. Additionally he published a book of essays one of which dealt with the general principles of law reform and a best selling philosophical anthology. If Bedford Square reflects Montagu's commitment to literature, then New Square represents his professional dedication; sometimes these two segments of his life came together; he acted as junior counsel for Shelley in the proceedings brought by the poet after his wife's death to obtain custody of their children; on at least one occasion Coleridge arrived at chambers to discuss Montagu's Francis Bacon project; urgent steps were taken by him and Bryan Waller Proctor, his step-son in law, to rescue Hazlitt from imprisonment for debt. In this article little attention is given to Montagu's legal career, his role as founder of the Legal & General Insurance Company, or to his work after 1836 as the first Accountant-General in Bankruptcy. Instead it concentrates on his literary activities and private life so often clouded by tragedy. It is suggested that when Montagu died at Boulogne in 1851 he was living there in exile fearful of arrest for debt at home resulting from involvement with the financial disaster of his principal publisher, William Pickering. His death does not end the story that must continue with the hunt, still in progress, for his voluminous papers, manuscripts and other documents together with reminiscences about him. Our research indicates that notwithstanding a belief that much of this material is lost this is by no means the case.

Walking and the French Romantics: Rousseau to Sand and Hugo (review)

Reviewed by: Walking and the French Romantics. Rousseau to Sand and Hugo Göran Blix Thompson, C. W.Walking and the French Romantics. Rousseau to Sand and Hugo. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. 160. ISBN3039100785 Walking and Romanticism are two inextricable cultural achievements, or so it would appear from C. W. Thompson's recent book. The modern form of recreational walking, which, first in England and Germany, and later in France, prompted a new generation of poets and painters to repossess their national landscapes on foot, had a measurable impact on the evolution of Romantic art. Thompson's book sets out to trace this impact on a handful of major and minor French Romantics, and starts from the slightly discouraging premise that while the French wrote more travel books than the English and German, they also walked less, with less enthusiasm, and more silently, so that a solid body of written evidence seems lacking. Yet from Rousseau to Hugo and Sand, through Senancour, Nodier, and Nerval, with scenic detours to the less well-known Charles Didier and to the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer, we find that there runs an unbroken thread of francophone pedestrianism, a genuine if often muted enthusiasm for walking that translated into a stock of literary themes and formal practices. These are treated, not systematically, theoretically, or historically (as evolving symbolic forms), but more modestly and traditionally by author, so that after being walked through a series of mini-studies on the pre-Romantics, we are then, in the second part, given more thorough studies of walking in Sand, Nerval, Hugo and Töpffer. This organization of the study around a few major peaks perhaps echoes the experience of walking itself, but it [End Page 159] also has some drawbacks, since we neither discover the broader cultural discourse that no doubt accompanied the growth of pedestrianism, nor find a well-drawn map of the topoï, forms, rhythms, themes, and figures associated with it. The decision to center the study traditionally on a few canonical authors, rather than to sketch a cultural history of walking (based on a much wider corpus), while more modest, also imposes a greater burden: we need to be shown, not just that each author walked (as he or she also slept, dressed, and went to the opera), but also that it had a meaningful impact on their writing. Is the stamp of walking visible in their poetic practice? On this score, Thompson strives to make the case that much formal inventiveness, as well as some typically Romantic meditations, owe a debt to the peculiar rhythms and patterns of ideas imposed on the walker. Just as Rousseau, the great ancestral figure in this genealogy, had found himself unable "to meditate otherwise than on the move" (27), so the twists and turns of Senancour's agonized prose, his "style of fragmentation, digression and progressive accumulation" (37) correspond to his and to Oberman's ramblings. Sand's "cult of improvisation" (90) would also be indebted to her love of the road. Similarly, in Hugo, the rhythms of walking can be plausibly linked to the slow elaboration of a poem, as they are in prose to his digressive practice, and to the mythical vagrancy of Jean Valjean. The pages on Valjean as an errant "passant," as an ambulant Christian witness, testifying to random injustices, are some of the strongest in the book. Thompson also makes the case that pedestrianism affects content: Nerval's tangled projections of time, folding in upon each other, arguably draw on the walker's penchant to gaze into the past, and to project the spatial itinerary through the landscape into the meanderings of reminiscence. For Sand, on the other hand, the road beckoned as a space of freedom, and conjured up the attractions of bohemian vagrancy, promising liberation from the norms of bourgeois society and its rigid gender hierarchies. Thompson also explores, in Töpffer and Didier, how walking provided a vehicle for a genuine encounter with the Other – peasants, laborers, tourists, foreigners – outside the social constraints of class, gender, and profession. These revelations about the role of walking for the French Romantics seem at once well worth making, and slightly...

A new aesthetics of black equality: on Tony Medina

In the US today, a new generation of poets and writers of colour is taking up and moving on from the 1960s Black Arts Movement. According to Amiri Baraka, a co-founder of that movement, one of its pitfalls was an inadequate critique of ‘race’ at the expense of a class understanding of oppression. Subsequent critical discussion has done little to correct this, despite the crucial links between class and race made by Malcolm X shortly before his death. But the paths indicated by Malcolm are now being challengingly developed by one of the most exciting of this new generation of poets, the Afro-Puerto Rican writer Tony Medina. Combining a visceral political sensibility with a dynamic, improvisatory aesthetic, Medina’s work speaks with urgency of the realities of life in the ghetto and the barrio and the need for radical, activist struggle.

Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR

Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR

Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR

Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR

Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR

Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR