Occasional Poetry Research Articles

Algunhas claves sobre a poesía de Antonio Fernández Morales

O poeta berciano Antonio Fernández Morales (1817-1896) escribe tanto en castelán, como en dialecto berciano (modalidade, neste caso, do galego). Participa dalgunhas das correntes poéticas da segunda metade do século XIX (continuidade do romanticismo, poesía civil e de expresión grandilocuente, de circunstancias) e trata temas como o local, o familiar e íntimo, o amoroso, o relixioso, así como o civil e patriótico. Pero a súa maior importancia reside en que está na raíz poética do Rexurdimento galego, debido á súa obra Ensayos poéticos en dialecto berciano (1861), cuxa publicación se anticipa en dous anos aos Cantares gallegos (1863), de Rosalía de Castro.

Trzy szubienice. Paszkwile na biskupów: Stanisława Józefa Hozjusza, Jana Aleksandra Lipskiego oraz Krzysztofa Antoniego Szembeka z okresu przedostatniego bezkrólewia i walki o koronę polską (1733–1736)

The article is an analysis of pasquils about Bishops Stanislaw Jozef Hozjusz, Jan Aleksander Lipski and Krzysztof Antoni Szembek. There are the pieces of occasionally political poetry from the period of the interregnum after the death of August II Sas and the fight for the crown by two rivals: his son’s August III and Stanislaw Leszczynski (in the years 1733–1736). The Bishops, who come under attack, were adherents of Fryderyk August, but the occasional poetry was written by adherents of Leszczynski, August’s political antagonists. The article presents various political faults, symbols of betrayal, and heraldic conceits which were used to bring discredit on clergy. The author shows the adopted strategies which were used in the polemical poems.

Public and Private Social Realities in the <em>poesía de circunstancias</em> of Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán

This article examines the occasional verse of the little-known Spanish writer Catalina Clara Ramirez de Guzman (1618-c.1684). Straddling the public and private spheres, the large group of poems marking occasions ranging from official festivities and encomiastic celebrations of aristocrats to occurrences much closer to home constitute interesting examples of the social and familial use of verse in the seventeenth century. Partly literary and partly referential, they tell us a considerable amount about the author herself and, unlike much verse of this type, provide a clear connection with the real, everyday world.

Visions of a Hero: Optical Illusions and Multifocal Epic in Statius's Achilleid

Visions of a Hero:Optical Illusions and Multifocal Epic in Statius's Achilleid Federica Bessone (bio) "Poetry for the eyes" is a felicitous definition of Ovid's epic. The Metamorphoses are a model for the Achilleid in this as in other aspects,1 like the themes of deceit, transformation, and gender fluidity; the spectacle of appearances, matched by ambiguity in language; the provocation of the proem, with its program of a cyclic epos and a carmen deductum (finely spun song); the dialogue with alternative genres, like elegy and comedy; and, in addition, the lightness of tone, irony, and detachment towards the characters, first and foremost Achilles. The greatest Greek hero is here the object of a witty attitude that recalls Ovid's epic, and of cleverly provocative jokes evoking the narrative about him in Metamorphoses 12 and 13, as well as his appearance as an exemplum in the Ars amatoria. Statius shares with Ovid multiple modes of literary self-consciousness and, in his whole work, is indebted to his experimentations; in the Achilleid he owes him, inter alia, an exercise in poetry as a feast for the eyes. In the same years when he composed his second epic, the Flavian poet experimented with the ekphrastic poetry of the Silvae: an epideictic mode of poetry based on visual evidence, transfiguration of reality into mythic images, and a rhetoric of wonder. Like the celebratory gesture of occasional poetry, the subject matter of the Achilleid also lends itself to a poetics of vision, of stupefying vision: the Scyros episode above all, with its ingredients—ambiguity, disguise, simulation, unveiling—is a sequence of intriguing images and lively scenes, exploited by a rich figurative tradition, as well as by dramatic poetry, like Euripides' Skyrioi. Statius presupposes this visual (and scenic) heritage, which is part of the artistic experience and material culture of his contemporaries, and vies with it in another medium. This ironic and light poetic discourse does not interrogate dramatic scenarios, but switches between tones without letting pathos prevail. It also adheres to the surface of things: it translates feelings into symptoms and stories into signs, looks with the eyes of the characters and follows the mimicry of their looks, and exhibits their rhetorical poses and ostentatious gestures, orchestrating stage movements to perfection. With an [End Page 169] amazed eye, the description explores territories of marvelous terrains inhabited by extraordinary creatures—a nymph, a Centaur, an exceptional ephebe—and transports the reader to idyllic landscapes, wild sceneries, and refined interiors. The narration, in turn, becomes a mise en scène, setting up a lively comedy, with effective simulations, coups de théâtre, and dazzling revelations. Statius develops a spectacular tale, and a "poetics of illusion": where evidence is equivocal, appearance surprising, language illusionistic. Here vision is subjective and deforming, different perspectives conflict with each other, and identity is deconstructed. A multifocal epic, the Achilleid constructs a complex image of its hero, thereby straining the rules of the genre: it offers shifting pictures of Achilles' physical form, multiple perspectives on his appearance, and competing views of his literary profile (Bessone 2016). The ambiguous beauty of the young boy sets off a comedy of deceits, in which the reader's gendered assumptions are tested; staging a transvestite hero, the epic narrator engages the gaze of the characters and the external audience in spectacular illusions. The spectacle of the hero's body is at the center of this visual poetics: descriptions, similes, words of seeing, internal point of views, and projections by different characters keep Achilles—his gender identity and generic profile—under scrutiny by the reader's eye, continually changing its perception. In this play of appearances, the female gaze has a crucial role. Thetis's anxious looking at her grownup child, her reeducation of him as a feigned daughter so that he can look like a girl, and her pride in her artistic creation show an anxious mother's concern for her offspring's social and literary appearance: the mother's 'vision' represents a deviation from the Achilles of heroic epic. The view of Deidamia and her sisters of the masculine newcomer, the ambiguous attitude of the courted princess towards the odd-looking girl, and...

Der erste Veränderungsversuch der mittelalterlichen memorialen Begräbniskultur und die Geburt der humanistischen Gelegenheitsdichtung auf der Schwelle der Reformation in Livland | The First Attempt to Change the Medieval Sepulchral Culture …

The visual aspects of sepulchral culture in Livonia in the Late Medieval and Early Modern period have beenthoroughly studied by art historians. They have analysed the spread and condition of tombstones and epitaphs,as well as the pictorial programmes of monuments. Less attention has been paid to records inscribed on tombstones,which are known both from surviving examples and from old manuscripts. According to Estonian arthistorians, Lutheranism changed the pictorial programmes of tombstones, and only in the second half of the16th century put the word into the central position on them. The article seeks to verify this statement on the basisof broader material than has been used so far. For this purpose, the author uses data on all Latin tombstonerecords known today from Estonian churches (from the 14th century to 1918, they are held in the yet unpublisheddatabase Corpus Electronicum Inscriptionum Latinarum Estoniae), and analyses the oldest Livonian occasionalpoetry (manuscript and printed) from the first half of the 16th century. The article shows that the attemptsto write long texts for grave monuments and place them in the dominating position on the tombstone weremade in Livonia already before the Reformation, and can be considered a result of the impact of Renaissancehumanism. KEY WORDS: humanism, Reformation, New Latin occasional poetry, tombstone epitaph, sepulchral culture,Livonia.

Lyric for the Rulers, Lyric for the People: The Transformation of Some Lyric Subgenres in Hellenistic Poetry

Abstract:This is a meticulous survey of the reception of some lyric subgenres in Hellenistic poetry and it is meant to be the first of a series of contributions on the subject. Leaving aside lyric in a religious context, the paper is divided into two main sections, namely lyric poetry composed for rulers and lyric poetry written for everyday people. In the new social context lyric poetry was intended for presentation in the royal symposia. The Alexandrians wrote all types of occasional lyric poetry (

Poetyckie formy pamięci o Czerwcu ’56

The article is devoted to occasional poetry related to the Poznań 1956 protests. The survery was conducted within the framework of memory studies, assuming that this type of verse is mostly involved in the literary discourse of memory, and can be treated as one of the forms of forgetting. This approach is supported by theory of collective memory, with notions proposed by Pierre Nora, Jan Assmann, Marcin Kula, Andrzej Szpociński and Michel Foucault.

Wiersze pochwalne na cześć Elżbiety z Branickich Sapieżyny i jej najbliższych krewnych

The paper is devoted to occasional laudatory verses which were written to honour princess Elzbieta Sapiezyna (nee Branicka) and the members of her closest family – son Kazimierz Nestor Sapieha, General of the Lithuanian Artillery and brother Franciszek Ksawery Branicki, Great Crown Hetman. The begining of the article reminds of already known literary works containing complimentary images of the female aristocrat. The main object of author’s interest are pieces that have not been noticed by scholars of the eighteenth-century political writings. These are: anonymous ode written in 1784 in connection with arrival of Sapiezyna to Prienai (pol. Preny) in Lithuania and collection of four verses created by Wojciech Zacharkiewicz, who thereby added splendour to the Franciszek Ksawery Branicki’s coming to Warsaw for parliamentary sitting of the Great Sejm and to election of Kazimierz Nestor Sapieha for the Marshal of lithuanian confederation. The author discussed circumstances of the creation, main motifs of content and artistic composition of laudatory images of addressees. Furthermore he determined connections of these verses with then popular genres of occasional poetry and put Sapiezyna’s complimentary portraits in context of manners of creation women’s images in literary works of that time.

The Same in Polish, or Peculiarities of Bilingual Occasional Poetry in the Eighteenth-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania

The paper addresses eighteenth-century occasional poetry of Lithuania written in parallel Latin and Polish. The research seeks to draw attention to bilingual creation as a literary phenomenon that reflects the linguistic priorities and cultural needs of the time, and to reveal the most distinct semantic and artistic peculiarities of bilingual occasional poetry. As a phenomenon of Lithuanian neo-Latin literature, bilingualism has not yet been addressed in detail in scholarly historiography. Only an article by Eugenija Ulčinaitė, in which she introduces linguistic expression, semantics and stylistics of sixteenth to seventeenth-century Lithuanian bilingual texts is devoted to this thematic. Research in eighteenth-century occasional poetry of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania has shown that parallel texts occur in nearly all poetry genres, but they were most popular among epigrams. Language variants of the works can be written both by the same and by different authors. Comparative analysis of texts has shown that when the primary – Latin – content is conveyed in Polish, it can be modified or complemented with information relevant to the dedicatee. Such alteration causes semantic and stylistic differences and creates a shift in the emotional tone of a work. Despite the fact that both – Latin and Polish – versions of a work are officially dedicated to the same dedicatee, the group of recipients seems expanded. It is quite possible that the Latin version is addressed to the individual named in the title, while the Polish version is meant for the general public or people lacking in education necessary to understand the Latin text. The need to convey the same content in Polish points to the vitality of occasional literature and its universally perceived purpose.

In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America by Caroline Wigginton

Reviewed by: In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America by Caroline Wigginton Paula Loscocco (bio) In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America CAROLINE WIGGINTON Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016 223pp. Caroline Wigginton’s fine study of eighteenth-century American women’s cultural productions and their multimedia publication begins by setting the idea of an uneasily mixed neighborhood of black, white, and native populations against that of a unified nation or virtuous republic. The book’s goal is to peer beneath constructions of national unity in order to trace how women drew on the particularities of lived experience and affiliation—embodied as these were in unequal bonds of race, class, gender, and religion—to represent, reimagine, and transform their local communities. Distancing itself from both “republican print” (1) and “belletristic” writing (4), In the Neighborhood considers a wide array of cultural artifacts, from baskets and dresses to performances and estate records. It then [End Page 801] explores how women publicized these artifacts through a practice of interpersonal exchange or “relational publication” (6). Wigginton offers two vivid examples to define relational publication. One is a Lenape woman who made and sent a wampum belt to the leader Manawkyhickon in 1728, for him to read and resend to others on her behalf to mobilize their community to avenge her son’s murder. The other is Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, whose 1768 manuscript poem “The Dream” has a resurrected William Penn hand a scroll to the Patriot writer John Dickinson, who reads it aloud to others to foment rebellion. Both the Lenape belt and the imagined scroll involve transmission of a cultural artifact through sequential exchanges and by means of multiple technologies in order to “realign . . . communal affiliations and partitions, local and transnational” (3). Wigginton insists on the element of change here: relational publication drew on the intimacy of local experience specifically to “revise and reimagine the neighborhood” and to “advance [its] communal visions and desires” (12–13). Neighborhood, particularity, relational publication, and transformation: these are key concepts in Wigginton’s study, and as she defines each of them in her introduction, two things become apparent. One is the extraordinary depth of her research, both primary and critical. Her copious and detailed notes represent a remarkable database of early native, black, and colonist women’s productions and communications, all of which she scans with a keen literary (and storytelling) eye, and with full command of recent developments in early American and native studies, as her study’s generic inclusiveness and grasp of nontraditional and multimedia forms of cultural publication make clear. “In the Neighborhood compiles its archive from the publications of early American women of diverse racial, spiritual, and social backgrounds,” Wigginton notes. “It examines letters but more often other kinds of communications and performances, public rituals, material objects, occasional verse, legal and diplomatic documents, commonplace books, and diaries” (23). The second overall observation emerges from reading both the introduction and afterward. Wigginton takes pains to set female relational publication apart from more traditionally belletristic texts and print publication. That said, she does in the end turn to a number of more traditionally literary works—notably Hannah Webster Foster’s 1797 The Coquette, but also Annis Boudinot Stockton’s “late-night musings” on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication in her 1793 letters to her daughter (136), Emily Dickinson’s [End Page 802] poetic fascicles, Ann Plato’s 1841 Essays, and Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 Iola Leroy. Wigginton is persuasive in arguing that these writings all derive from, depict, include, and participate in the cultural traditions of relational publication that this book explores. Her reading of The Coquette, for example, is brief but brilliant in its characterization of Peter Sanford as a man who refuses the particularities of relational publication: “When juxtaposed with the rich manuscript culture to which it refers, Foster’s epistolary novel reads as an anxious meditation on relational publication’s possible supercession [sic] by republican print and the concomitant ruptures in women’s neighborhood particularity and bonds” (137). This reader for one will welcome the author’s future work at this intersection of belletristic and relational publication. The main task of In the Neighborhood, however, is...

Medieval French Occasional Verse: Another Fair Field Needing Folk

A large, very significant section of medieval French literature consists of occasional verse, a terrain which, perhaps because of its size and its diverse nature, has been much neglected in recent times. This paper briefly surveys the work done on it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and then suggests a number of topics for study. These include authors’ identities; their motives for writing; the views expressed; the occasions which gave rise to the compositions and the authors’ connections, if any, with those occasions; the metrical forms; scribal presentations; whether the poems were sung or recited; their survival and transmission; and their reception then and their value to us now.

Winter Thaw

Winter Thaw Cori Martin (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Pray to Heaven. © Walter Sanchez [End Page 106] The garden gate creaks on spring hinges, swingingopen slowly. Snow-blown just last week,the yard's streaked with green and scattered violets.From under-earth the velvet moles emerge,hiding blind eyes from daylight, dazzled. Neatsquirrels—all sleek energy unbounded now—race, chase birds fluttering on Easter wings.Blood in creatures stirs; trees' sap seeps freely.Erupting bulbs cast off death's clasp, blast throughtheir burial ground, black caskets cracked. So letthe disused spirit too be born anew,the closed soul unfold, as when (shut againstbleak seasons) a slowly opening crocus creaks. [End Page 107] Cori Martin Cori Martin, a native of Toronto, is a poet and librettist, playwright, and editor who has also worked as a journalist, musician, and in musical artists' management in Toronto, New York City, New Haven, CT, and Washington DC, among other locations. She was a Lecturer in English at The Ohio State University from 2001 to 2014. In 2015 she won both first and second prize in The New Quarterly Occasional Verse Competition (Canada). Cori lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, Renaissance scholar Hannibal Hamlin. corimartin.323@gmail.com. Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press

American inaugural poetry: poetics and style

The paper represents critical reflection on a fifty-five-year history of American inaugural poetry. The research opens with the overview of theoretical aspects of occasional poetry, focusing on poetics and style of the poems commissioned for presidential inaugurations. Further on the article outlines the history of inaugural poetry in the U.S. Special attention is given to the comparative analysis of the poems The Gift Outright by Robert Frost, On the Pulse of Morning by Maya Angelou, Of History and Hope by Miller Williams, Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander and One Today by Richard Blanco. The comparative research focuses on the representation of the major themes, ideas and imagery in the above-mentioned inaugural poems.

The Patronage Politics of Equestrian Ballet: Allegory, Allusion, and Satire in the Courts of Seventeenth-Century Italy and France

AbstractEquestrian ballet was a spectacular genre of musical theater popular in the Baroque court. A phenomenon with military roots, the ballet communicated both the might and grace of its organizers, who often played starring roles. This essay explores the ballet’s centrality by tracing the itinerant opera singer and writer Margherita Costa’s use of the genre as a means of securing elite patronage: from an elegant manuscript libretto presented to Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici and later revised in print for Cardinal Jules Mazarin in Paris, to occasional poetry written for the Barberini in Rome, and even burlesque caricatures.

Dirk Schelte (1639-1714)

Abstract Dirk Schelte (1639-1714). The informal sociability and poetics of a rhymer Dirk Schelte was an Amsterdam jeweler who published in 1713 an enormous book of poetry, Rym-werken. The book is more or less an account in rhyme in various genres, such as letters, epithalamic poems or epigrams, of his relations with his family, friends, business contacts and colleagues, and as such a representative and at the same time extreme example of occasional poetry. He himself is the center of his attention and he tells with relish the larger or smaller events of his daily life. In this he is the tail-end of the so called anti-idealist poetics of e.g. Constantijn Huygens, whom he admired, and Jan Six van Chandelier. His style, however, is simple and focused on being easily understood. A son in law made a complete calligraphed copy of all Schelte’s poems, as a kind of family monument, thinking they would never be published, but soon after completion of that manuscript, now in the Leiden university library, Schelte decided to have his work printed after all. Because of the subjects, only interesting to direct relations, and the lack of poetic power, his work was soon forgotten or only remembered as a sample of what poetry should not be.

Tartu ülikool kui eestlaste mälupaik [The University of Tartu as a memory site for Estonians

Tartu ülikool kui eestlaste mälupaik [The University of Tartu as a memory site for Estonians

Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States. William Huntting Howell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 305.

<i>Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States</i>. William Huntting Howell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 305.

Epigonalität und Originalität in der Gelegenheitsdichtung von Sibylla Schwarz

Due to its peculiarity and significance, occasional poetry occupies a special role in the literary output of Sibylla Schwarz. In her epithalamia, epicedia and other casual poems, in which she shows her thorough humanities education, one finds not only conventional, partly trite rhetorical figures, but also some interesting autobiographical references. The following article attempts to analyse the poet’s output with respect to the epigonic (imitative) character of her works both in the spirit of Opitz’s poetics and her own originality.

Criticism of physicians by Johannes Gregorius Macer Szepsius (1530-after 1579)

Humanist author J. G. Macer Szepsius (1530-after 1579) born in Szepsi, Upper Hungary (today Slovakia, Moldava and Bodvou) lived in Krakow and was a typical author of Latin occasional poetry. In a part of his work De vera gloria libellus (Booklet on the true glory) published in 1562 he deals with certain professions and criticizes them. Physicians are described as being garrulus (loquacious), mendicus (beggar), and having a big belly due to a luxury. The Physician doesn´t read books, is lazy and not characterized by his knowledge, but rather by ignorance, arrogance and pride. Physicians prescribe medications without knowing their effects. Such a criticism is surprising, because Macer Szepsius was probably closely related to medicine.

Retorika ir poezija: filomatų proginiai kūriniai

The article concerns the occasional poetry of the Philomaths, which has not been highly valued in historical and literary studies. This resulted from the fact that this work was regarded as not Romantic enough, although the Philomaths themselves were treated as initiators of a new movement in literature. The name day poems, letters, and parting verses did not suit the image of the onset of Vilnius Romanticism; they were associated rather with Classic aestheticism. However, the occasional poetry of the Philomaths should not be described as a kind of confrontation between Classicism and Romanticism, but as a phenomenon of Rococo literary culture and a cultural manifestation of communication among a group of friends, within the circle of a certain special rhetorical community.