Nineteenth-century Poetry Research Articles

Poetry’s ‘Formative Power’: Teaching Poetry in Tasmania 1900-1950

Poetry has always featured in formal learning programs, but both its function and importance have varied over time according to political and social needs. In his analysis of texts used in the teaching of English from the sixteenth century to 1870, Ian Michael illustrates the different functions poetry served during this period. These ranged from teaching skills - such as grammar, spelling, vocabulary, elocution, rhetoric and composition - to the more elevated aims of fostering Christian beliefs, moral and social values, and particular standards of personal behaviour. When compulsory education was introduced in the nineteenth century poetry met many of these needs, but educators were particularly diligent in describing poetry's power to instil virtue and faith in the young. In this period more liberal approaches to education evolved, underpinned by what Ian Reid calls 'Romantic ideologies' (22). In 1880, Matthew Arnold claimed that poetry was 'capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which men have assigned to it hitherto', believing that '[m]ore and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us' ('The Study of Poetry' 171). In his Report for the same year, Arnold, then an inspector, wrote that the 'acquisition of good poetry is a discipline which works deeper than any other discipline in our schools'.

The Cambridge history of American literature: v.4: Nineteenth-century poetry, 1800-1910

The Cambridge history of American literature: v.4: Nineteenth-century poetry, 1800-1910

Hopkins and Whitman

In a letter to his friend Robert Bridges, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that ‘I have always felt in my heart that Walt Whitman’s mind was more like my own than any other man’s living’; my essay considers what he could have meant by this. This is the first work to identify and consult the books in which Hopkins read Whitman, together with their annotations. This answered several facts about where Hopkins read Whitman, but questions of the cultural place of sexuality and homosexuality were crucial to the interpretation of Hopkins’s letters about his fellow poet. Most commonly read as ‘confessions’ to homosexuality, his discussions of Whitman reveal not just anxieties about sexuality in the nineteenth century but also about religious prejudice, politics, and Hopkins’s perceived parallels between his and Whitman’s (downtrodden) poetic fates. The likeness of ‘mind’ he identifies I traced not just to specific allusions but to lexic coincidences. I reconstructed the cultural state of Hopkins’s Oxford with Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds and others’ interest in the intersection of art criticism and sexuality centered around the writings of Winckelmann and examined John Henry Newman’s portrayals of anti-Catholicism as a means of setting the complex hinterlands of Hopkins’s statements. ‘Hopkins and Whitman’ is the first chapter of a larger work on the interrelation between nineteenth-century philology and poetic technique, Extreme Language: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Philology, begun at the University of Cambridge with the help of four national grants. My book examines the ways in which new discoveries about language, its genesis, and its structure, influenced poets, specifically amateur philologists such as Hopkins and Whitman.

From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (review)

From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (review)

Whithering Away: Editorial Introduction

ALTHOUGH THIS EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION MIGHT HAVE GLANCED BACK TO the first special issue of Whither Victorian to assess its significance, the need for such retrospection has withered away. (1) Happily so, since the six distinguished scholars in this second special issue perform the task themselves with great sensitivity and panache. (2) All were given advance proofs of the younger contributors' essays and asked to respond and to indicate as well their own views of where scholarship might most productively venture. My comments here, accordingly, will be confined to a preview of the essays by Isobel Armstrong, Herbert Tucker, Yopie Prins, E. Warwick Slinn, Virginia Blain, and Joseph Bristow, with an additional postscript on my choice of title for both issues. This second special issue appropriately opens with Isobel Armstrong's The Victorian Poetry Party since it so beautifully captures--and extends--the energy and carnivalesque atmosphere of the first issue while systematically surveying its contents. As Armstrong envisions herself circulating from group to group at the party she attends, she reminds us just creative scholarship can be: her performance piece is at once playful, passionately felt, and erudite. Though their energies spill over into constant motion between groups, Armstrong discerns three principal clusters of partygoers, Technologies conversationalists, Expansionists, and Neoformalists. Noting seldom the word politics appears in Technologies and Neoformalist conversations even when critique is the point, Armstrong asks whether this might indicate a retreat from direct engagement with politics. She does not shy away from engagement herself, questioning members of each group even while praising their talents (and pointing out the provenances of their theoretical frameworks). She questions, for example, whether reconceiving lyric poetry and technology as parts of a continuum, though so powerful an insight, might also obscure one oppositional context that surely mattered, the oppressive living and working conditions wrought on workers' bodies by industrial machines and the organizational technologies that administered them. If Armstrong praises renewed attention to the many poets formerly shuffled out of sight in the rush to form a literary counterpart to the canon of religious texts, she worries about the ironic obscurity of major poems--too beautiful to lose, she asserts--in younger scholars' conversations, and suggests inventive new ways (dramatic, somatic, mimetic, parodic) to teach the era's best-known poems so that they become new again. In the act of imagining kinetic classrooms (and briefly raising the curtain on her own scene of writing at Breadloaf, Vermont), these concluding paragraphs also pose an alternative to concern with job placement and professional strategies that she finds worrisome among some younger North American contributors. None who have witnessed the trials of those seeking admission to the academy can be surprised by such preoccupations; Armstrong's concern, rather, is that scholarship not be perceived as--or dwindle into--mere fashion (designer commodities) in an academic marketplace. But her narrator is given as much to delight in the younger scholars' party and self-directed irony as to keen scrutiny. Armstrong's inclusive welcome of younger scholars resonates in turn with her insistence that future work include more attention to poetry and race, while her frank acknowledgment of emotion (in herself and in poetic texts) finds expression in her call for a new theorizing of affect, a key component of the historical experience of nineteenth-century poetry. If Armstrong adopts the guise of partygoer, Herbert Tucker dons a lab coat to classify, test, and weigh the range of methods suggested by contributors to the prior special issue. For, as he shrewdly observes, they characteristically address the how of literary study more often than the ends whither such study should tend. …

Arabic Poetry in West Africa: An Assessment of the Panegyric and Elegy Genres In Arabic Poetry of the 19th and 20th Centuries In Senegal and Nigeria

AbstractThis article explores the form and content of West African Arabic poetry, with particular reference to Nigeria and Senegal. It analyses several key poetic features of this region of West Africa, with the focus on nineteenth and twentieth century poetry. The historical context is both the period of European colonisation and the pre-colonial period. The article suggests that Arabic poetry was a much older tradition in the region, that it was in no sense challenged by colonial rule, and that strong religious commitment is visible in its content. This study surveys the key influence of Arabian poetry on West African Arabic poetry. It analyses relevant texts and highlights the importance of a number of signi ficant issues relating to this area of study in the research of West African Islamic literature. The study also explores the extent of the intellectual in fluence of Islam. This is evidenced by the irrefutable presence of Arabisation at a time of Islamic penetration, as de fined by the distinctive Islamic character of West African Arabic poetry.

Unbinding "The Book": Bryant's "The Fountain" in the Democratic Review

William Cullen Bryant's status exemplifies the current neglect by American literary studies of its nineteenth-cen tury poetry. In a field all but eclipsed by Whitman and Dickinson, Bryant is the reception historian's ironic counterexample: the preemi nent poet of his day, the poet who always would be remembered even if he had written only Thanatopsis, subsequently designated as a genteel writer and ignored. Even attention to Bryant's career as the decades-long, fierce political editor of the New York Evening Post has done little to resuscitate his reputation. split appears too wide be tween the poet's meditations and the editor's political passions.2 My reading of different publication forms of Bryant's poem The Fountain seeks to forge intersections in Bryant's seemingly split ca reer and argues that the periodical versions of Bryant's poetry are key for a renewed understanding of his career. By comparing The Foun tain in its first book appearance (1842) to its original periodical pub lication (1839), I argue that the book as a form ultimately renders Bryant's poem politically impotent, while the periodical publication re veals a text actively engaged in the political debates of its day. To read Bryant's seemingly apolitical poem otherwise requires that we adjust our understanding of the poem's vehicle of dissemination in addition to collating Bryant's political and poetical careers. Recognizing period icals as a key vehicle for nineteenth-century American poetry makes clear how the removal of Bryant's poetry from a periodical context has damaged its position in the American canon. Recovering Bryant's periodical publication of The Fountain as a political poem is an act that seeks to infuse interest in the career of a writer whose current status as a genteel poet elides his past position as a highly visible citizen involved in the social and political events of his time.3 It is also an act that responds to the larger neglect suffered

Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a Poetic Language from 1878 to the Present by J. Derrick McClure, and: Scottish Women’s Fiction, 1920s to 1960s: Journeys into Being ed. by Carol Anderson, Aileen Christianson (review)

MLR, 97.4, 2002 945 during occupation, 'narratives of resistance', 'nation-buildingnarratives', 'narratives of internal dissent' produced in the immediate wake of postcolonial political independence , and 'transcultural narratives' which emphasize fluidity and post-national sensibilities. It is, clearly, a model based firmlyon the political and historical experiences of 'new Commonwealth' countries in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, and unsurprisingly the majority of Fraser's textual examples come from these regions . Fraser's mapping usefully contextualizes the novels discussed, especially those dealing with representations of the nation, and underwrites his analysis of novelistic language, use of tense, person, voice, typology, symbol, myth,time, duration, politics, and parody. Such is the excellence of Fraser's criticism that one is surprised and disappointed in turning to the final chapter, entitled 'Theocolonialism', to find an unseemly and disingenuous rant against postcolonial studies and theory (although there is the intimation that the author's tongue is perhaps a little in his cheek). In his closing remarks Fraser loses much of his poise and judiciousness in volleying fortha number of questionable critical cliches. Postcolonial theory is dismissed as little more than a raft of bizarre, seductive terminology which constitutes merely a bad case of logorrhea. Fraser never stops here to think about the extent to which his own criticism, especially with its focus upon politics, dissent, and nationalism, is clearly indebted to impor? tant intellectual developments in postcolonial theory. Even worse is his indefensible view that the older paradigm of Commonwealth literary studies 'was an academic annexe to neocolonialism' and equivalent to 'old-style' anthropology. Fraser might do better here to think of scholars such as Arthur Ravenscroft, a major figure in the study of Commonwealth literature who lefthis native South Africa in protest against Apartheid and dedicated his life to bringing attention to the literature of colonized peoples. It is unfortunate that the vital political agency of such scholars is overlooked in Fraser's droll diatribe. Coupled with some rather odd typographical errors (Ishiguro becomes 'Ishiguru', Shirley Hazzard becomes 'Izzard', while the titles of some texts lose their definite article), one abiding impression of the book is impatience. Sadly, this detracts from the enjoyment of what is in the main a refreshing study. University of Leeds John McLeod Language, Poetry andNationhood: Scots as a Poetic Language from 1878 to thePresent. By J. Derrick McClure. East Lothian: Tuckwell Press. 2000. v + 239 pp. ?i4-99Scottish Women's Fiction, ig20s to 1960s: Journeys into Being. Ed. by Carol Anderson and Aileen Christianson. East Lothian: Tuckwell Press. 2000. 177 pp. ?9-99A sure sign that one is dealing with a minor literature is the minor literary criti? cism that usually attaches to it. The criticism of Scottish literature remains decidedly minor, still awaiting the profound intellectual or theoretical milestone that may definitively enlarge that literature's place on the map. Neither of the brace of volumes under review is likely to provide such impetus, dealing as each does with many ofthe minor figures of that minor literature. At best they chart, often in a very summary and overconcise manner, the contributions of a number of miscellaneous figures of widely varying importance. J.Derrick McLure's introductory chapter to his volume does, however, provide one of the most sober discussions of 'Scots' in the last century or so (is it a language, or a dialect, or something indeterminately in-between?) by recourse to a well-balanced historical discussion, concluding that 'the development of a more careful attention to 946 Reviews the nature and appropriate poetic functions of the language, and a clearer awareness of the political implications of its use, led to an enormous widening of the range of Scots, both internally by a vastly more creative and imaginative use of its linguistic resources than had characterised most nineteenth-century poetry, and externally by a challengingand deliberately iconoclastic approach to its potential range of topics and functions' (p. x). There is a worrying circularity about the argument here, indicated by the fact that 'functions' of the language occupy positions of both cause and effect , but the profound point that literary Scots has in fact developed and grown in a period in which spoken Scots has contracted and become...

Introduction

Introduction ALAN LUPACK and BARBARA TEPA LUPACK On October 26-28, 2000, there was a great gathering of Arthurian scholars from England, Canada, and the United States at the University of Rochester for Camelot 2000: A Millennial Conference on the Arthurian Legends. The essays in this special issue, one of two publications to result from the many fine presentations at the conference, grew from papers that focused on specific works or specific problems. (The keynote addresses and those papers that offered overviews ofa particular area ofArthurian Studies or that projected future trends in the field are being published separately in a volume by Boydell and Brewer.) One of the purposes of the conference was to demonstrate the wide variety ofapproaches used by scholars studying Arthurian material and indeed the wide variety ofmaterial available for study. Arthurian Studies is a fascinating field in part because it is multidisciplinary and it crosses linguistic, geographic, and temporal barriers. The very fact that the conference was generously sponsored by a broad array of departments and divisions of the University of Rochester—by the Rossell Hope Robbins Library, the Rush Rhees Library, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department ofEnglish, the Department ofArt and Art History, the Depattment ofFilm Studies, the Department ofHistory, the Department ofModern Languages and Cultures, the Department ofReligion and Classics, the Cluster on Premodern Studies, the Visual and Cultural Studies Program, and Boydell and Brewer—suggests the range ofinterests that come together under the rubric ofArthurian Studies. The essays in this issue capture some ofthat variety. They study Middle English as well as medieval Dutch and German romance, explore Malory's most influential text both as a medieval work and as it has been received in the twentieth century, examine some of the ways that the legend has been reinterpreted in nineteenth-century poetry and twentieth-century fiction, and discuss a bibliographic project that chronicles the tremendous scope of Arthurian material and the tremendous number of Arthurian works that have been produced since the Middle Ages. Ultimately, all of these essays offer new insights, either into individual works or genres or into the field of Arthurian Studies itself. ARTHURIANA 11.4(2001) ARTHURIANA We are grateful to all of those who participated in the Camelot 2000 conference, either as presenters or chairs, and to all those who contributed support, financial or otherwise. In addition to the branches ofthe University of Rochester listed above, special thanks goes to Rosemary Paprocki ofthe Robbins Library for her tireless work in planning and implementing every aspect ofthe conference; to Corinne Arráez, Katherine Marsh, Joanna Grant, Anne Zanzucchi, Gina Tonagbanua, and John Sutton, graduate students who worked in the Robbins Library and who assisted with various conference details; to Mike Anderson, a graduate student in the Department ofEnglish who assisted with setup; to Russell Peck, Thomas Hahn, and Sarah Higley ofthe Department ofEnglish, and Richard Kaeuper of the Department of History, for their help with planning the conference and for their participation in it; to Vicki Burns, Kathy McGowan, and Darka Hawryshkiw of the Reference Department ofRush Rhees Library and to Jason Stradling of the Preservation Department forvolunteering their time to help with registration; to Andrea Reithmayr ofthe Preservation Department for providing special bindings for some ofour exhibition catalogues; to Mary Huth and Melissa Mead of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections for their assistance with mounting the Camelot2000 exhibition; and to Dean William Scott Green for his generous support ofthe conference. UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER ...

"If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand": The Indeterminate in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Painting (review)

"If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand": The Indeterminate in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Painting (review)

Scholarly editing in The Netherlands

Scholarly editing in the Netherlands is concentrated in the Constantijn Huygens Instituut (CHI) in The Hague, which is a research institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The CHI produces text editions of works from every period of Dutch literary history. All genres and types of editions are represented. Editorial methods and techniques developed in other countries are adopted according to the needs of the Institute, In the past, most projects at the CHI resulted in printed publications and little consideration was given to production or presentation using electronic media. In the recent planning and development of new projects, however, an important shift can be seen in favour of these media. For two of the projects outlined in this paper this includes or has included the digitization of all relevant versions of a text through scanning and OCR. Computer programs such as TUSTEP and COLLATE will be used to compare all of those versions. The copy of the editions will be stored in SGML to make future reprints possible. Lists of authorial variants and perhaps other research material will be made available on the Internet. The third project discussed here involves the publication in its entirety of a sizeable body of nineteenth-century poetry by means of a CD-ROM/DVD or the Internet. The full-text electronic edition will also contain digital images of the original documents as well as hypertext links to the author's annotations

Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization

In Lost Saints Tricia Lootens argues that parallels betwee literary and religious canons are far deeper than has yet been realized. She presents the ideological underpinnings of Victorian literary canonization and the general processes by which it occurred and discloses the unacknowledged traces of canonization at work today. Literary legends have accorded canonicity to women writers such as Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti, she contends, but often at the cost of discounting their claims as serious poets.Through case studies of the canonization of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, Lootens demonstrates how nineteenth-century literary legends simultaneously glorified women poets and opened the way for critical neglect of their work. The author draws on a wide range of sources: histories of literature, religion, and art; medieval studies and folklore; and nineteenth-century poetry, essays, conduct books, textbooks, and novels.

The Lament and the Rhetoric of the Sublime

The appearance of melodramatic language and gesture in nineteenth-century lyric poetry was underwritten by two theories of ecstasis, the sense of losing oneself or going beyond the limits of comprehension. The first kind of ecstasis belonged to the sublime reaction, as Kant and Burke had imagined it. The second sort belonged to the picture of the disordered mind in the medical literature. A rhetoric of shock and loss in the melodramatic lyric bears the remains of the inchoate language and wild gestures in ancient lamentation but also refers to more recent performances of overpowering emotion on stage. Conventional reactions to sublime landscapes in painting, for example, employ expressions and gestures inventoried both in Longinus's treatise on the sublime and in acting manuals for tragedians. Percy Bysshe Shelley's "A Lament" (1821) and Richard Harris Barham's "Epigram" (1847) are performances of the sublime confrontation with the idea of death. Both poems were attempts to record ecstasis and to transcribe melodramatic acting. "Epigram," moreover, alludes to another interpretation of ecstasis in the lately popular Romantic ballet. This revolutionary technique created an illusion of bodilessness-a vision of the body losing itself and fading into nothing. The reformulations of the sublime in philosophy and medicine thus enabled a set of signifying practices that appear in transcriptions of lamentation and in dance. Both are efforts to perform the sublime moment.

Kujibizana: Questions of language and power in nineteenth and twentieth century poetry in Kiswahili by Ann Biersteker (review)

Kujibizana: Questions of language and power in nineteenth and twentieth century poetry in Kiswahili by Ann Biersteker (review)

Influence and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry

Influence and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry

The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse

The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse is the first anthology to offer a full record of Australian women's poetry from European settlement to the present. Beginning with Fidelia Hill's recollections of her arrival in Adelaide and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop's indictment of the Myall Creek massacre, it surveys the nineteenth-century landscape poetry of writers such as `Australie' and Catherine Martin, the radical nationalist verse of the 1890s, through to the abundant verse of the last three decades. The anthology offers popular works such as Caroline Carleton's `Song of Australia', Dorothea Mackellar's `My Country', and Robyn Archer's `Menstruation Blues'. It also includes generous selections from such key poets as Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood and Oodgeroo. Here, women poets express the most personal feelings, as in Zora Cross's sonnets of love and motherhood, and declare their outrage at public folly, as in Marie Pitt's `Australia's Tommy Atkins' and Gig Ryan's `Disinformation'. The poets celebrate the natural environment and regret aspects of its use. Their poems - rarely unengaged or sentimental - often have an ironic and satirical edge. The anthology collects the diverse voices of 88 women, including some newly arrived from Europe and representatives of the oldest traditions of the land. The result is a moving, passionate book that will broaden our conceptions of Australian poetry.

Drinks and their Vessels in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Poetry: Davydov, Puškin, Jazykov

Drinks and their Vessels in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Poetry: Davydov, Puškin, Jazykov

‘Women's voices speak for them-selves‘: gender, subversion and the women's voices anthology of 1887

Abstract This article aims to contextualisewomen's Voices, a little-known anthology of the 1880s, edited by Mrs William (Elizabeth) Sharp. In so doing, it provides biographical information on Mrs Sharp, analyses the construction of the anthology, and suggests a theoretical framework by which to read it. Using techniques suggested by critical works such as those by Angela Leighton, Maggie Humm, and Judith Rowbotham, Mrs Sharp's text can be read as a subversive work, speaking to a recognisable ‘community’ of women readers. In context, both Sharp's text and her life can be regarded as radical. The cross-section of texts chosen by her likewise reflects the diversity of nineteenth-century poetry by women, suggesting questions concerning both class and nationality.

Dancing with goddesses: archetypes, poetry, and empowerment

Preface: Blackbirds in a Pie Acknowledgments Part One Medusa 1. The Other Side of a Mirror: The Deep Background of the Medusa Archetype 2. Medusa in Twentieth-Century British and U.S. Poetry 3. Medusa in Canada Part Two Aphrodite 4. The Deep Background of the Aphrodite Archtype 5. Aphrodite in Medieval through Nineteenth-Century Poetry 6. Aphrodite in Twentieth-Century Poetry by Men 7. Aphrodite in Twentieth-Century Poetry by Women 8. Romancing the Stone: Love Poetry in Canada Part Three: Where the Wild Things Are 9. The Artemis Continuum 10. Archetypal Patterns and Native American Poetry 11. Bear! Conclusion Notes Works Cites Index

Influence and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. G. Kim Blank and Margot K. Louis, eds.

Previous articleNext article No AccessAnnual ReviewInfluence and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. G. Kim Blank and Margot K. Louis, eds.Philip MartinPhilip Martin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 25, Number 4Autumn 1994 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043126 Views: 2Total views on this site © 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.