Poetic Book Research Articles

IV Middle period: Odes 1–3, Epistles 1

The first three books of Odes have been the most popular of Horace's works in modern scholarship, as they have consistently been his most popular poems since the Renaissance. This popularity has meant that they have played a key role as objects of modern Latin scholarship's particular concerns and developments – for example intertextuality, genre, metapoetry, the poetic book, narratology, and political colouring. This chapter will try to highlight the most important and stimulating items of scholarship from a vast range of work.

From Blake to Beardsley: "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry"

'I sing,' says modern Bard, 'speaking to eye alone, by help of type-founders, papermakers, compositors, ink balls, folding, and stitching.' Published in review of Eliza Cook's poetry in Anglo-American in 1847, statement testifies to nineteenth century's growing recognition of expressiveness of poetic book, whether in elite folio, high-end quarto, everyday octavo, or, as in this case, common reader's duodecimo. (1) Observing that days of oral tradition, when the song and singer were one, had been supplanted by print culture, reviewer went on to note compensations offered by visual and material: For charm thus lost, we must make up, as we can, in other ways. The painter's and graver's art does something; reader's mind must do rest (p. 343). When William Blake, in his Introduction to Songs of Innocence, had his piper substitute pipe for pen and stain the water clear in order to write a book that all may read, (2) he too commented on poetry's metamorphosis in print culture. He enacted this insight materially, in bibliographic, linguistic, iconic, and graphic features he conceived and fashioned himself. Except that all may not book he made: few of us have been fortunate enough to view, let alone handle, one of physical copies of Songs of Innocence from 1789, 1795, 1802, 1804, or 1811. (3) As we know, none of these copies is identical in coloring, sequence, or contents. Each necessarily stages its own argument about poetry, pictures, print, and possibilities of pastoral innocence. Until relatively recently, most of us Songs of Innocence in printed collections and anthologies, assisted by facsimile reproductions of plates from one of extant copies. In digital age, thanks to work of Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi on William Blake Archive, we have recourse to virtual representations of multiple copies and better understanding of uniqueness of each of Blake's individual productions. (4) But we still, for most part, and teach Blake's poetry apart from material forms he designed for its expression. And perhaps this says as much about our own limitations as it does about access. How do we read Blake's graphic ornaments in midst of poetic lines? Do semantics always trump iconic and graphic elements? How much close attention do nonreferential squiggles require? Does color signify? What is meaning of paper, layout, calligraphy and sequence? In this most material of poetic productions, how much does matter actually matter? Blake's creative control over processes of production was unique, but his interest in expressiveness of printed page was not. As we are beginning to recognize, an extraordinary number of nineteenth-century poets, artists, book designers, and publishers experimented with interplay between bibliographic form and linguistic and iconic content. Yet our study of Victorian poems as embodied, graphic forms is in its infancy. As Johanna Drucker remarks in one of essays collected here, we lack basic critical vocabulary for talking about organization and composition of pages, way these create development over sequence of openings, use of patterns, decoration, typographic formats and styles, and specific ways methods of print production are thought about in conception of work. Bindings, typographic treatment, and other matters are usually left for bibliophiles to ponder in their own peculiar backwater of terrain once known as bibliographical studies (VP 48, no. 1: 139). Contending that bibliographic forms are as significant as linguistic, this special issue of Victorian Poetry and Book Arts explores some methodological and conceptual premises and vocabulary for talking about Victorian poetry as physical text. Analyzing material features of wide range of poetic texts made in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, its essays historicize and theorize Some of Characteristics of Modern Poetry. …

A Companion to Catullus (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to Catullus John B. Van Sickle Marilyn B. Skinner (ed.). A Companion to Catullus. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007. Pp. xxvi, 590. $149.95. ISBN 978-1-4051-3533-7. Topics and authors attract, promising expert and timely ways to approach or reconnect with the poet and trace readers' shifting fashions. Good reading starts with the editor—judicious, attentive to scholarly history's turns and to advances by her notable crew. Given the editorial constraints customary here, however, my remarks will focus on a few of the many intersections with scholarly concerns of mine. Text history fascinates in the hands of the late James Butrica—redeeming Pontano, prizing Billanovich (praised now too by a Latin inscription at his Milanese university). Competing perceptions of a Catullan book get historicized by the editor as conditioned by evolving preconceptions about structure: other poetic books could use such reckoning. Already central to the editor's account of order, Peter Wiseman vindicates his standing (with her) as a dean of Catullan studies, bringing again to life hints of "Transpadane upbringing" and providing an exemplary reconstruction of social history for the Valerii Catulli and their Sirmionian villa through lapidary hints from ruins, inscriptions, satire, and epigram. Also reconstructing socio-political circles, Konstan revives and amplifies possible allegory encoded in the manneristic rendering of marriage between Peleus and Thetis, e.g., indicat not merely colorless "reveal" (Guy Lee) but "expose" (cf. "indict"). Despite a textual lapse (legitur, an unmetrical gloss displacing fertur, c. 114.2), Konstan recalls that Callimachus' Lock of Berenice was court poetry and he intuits that the metonym and slight catachresis of caesaries ("head of hair") to translate "lock" might flatter Julia, daughter of Julius Caesar. Catullus' use of Hellenistic learning to negotiate social status, closely argued by Andrew Feldherr, may even prompt rueful reflection about the relative status of learning in our times. The "court poetry" of Catullus' forebears at Alexandria has morphed in recent scholarship into ideological engagement: e.g., Fantuzzi and Hunter (Tradition and Innovation, 2005) decrying notions of "art for art's sake" to restore Hellenistic poetry to "its own intellectual and cultural context" (cf. more emphatically Stephens, Seeing Double. Intercultural Poetics, Berkeley 2003). But if Alexandrian poets looked beyond the library, to honor the hand that fed and to collaborate on ideological instruments for Ptolemaic rule, their role anticipates that of the poets (Livius, Naevius, Ennius) engaged by Rome's elite to corroborate imperial expansion (cf. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature, 1998). They codified the mythic frame and epic style for the confident republican order. That order's last master was Cicero, portrayed with empathy and wit by W. R. Johnson as an old school poet, dutifully Roman, perplexed by the rather fresh (neoteroi) "Euphorionic troupe" (cantores) with their "poetics of style for style's sake"—the "peeled" ("slight," lepton)—to which Catullus and his ilk turned, Johnson writes, "away from civic failure and public catastrophe—inward to a private world of immense, exciting emotions and of extraordinary pleasures (and pains)." Rome's political chaos allowed them not a neo-Alexandrian ideology but a mirror of broken ties: fragments of the shattered frame for Catullus' private construct, cobbled together from amicitia, amor, Troy as manifold sign of tragic loss, even one bit of the old foundational mythology reduced to a satiric barb—glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes ("she peels back the descendants of heroic Remus")—ultimate variant of lepton. Construing the "neoteric" emphasis on private amor as retreat from the public engagement of Alexandrian and republican Roman poetics, suggests review of takes on [End Page 516] Virgil and Catullus by both W. R. Johnson and Christopher Nappa. Virgil, perhaps little more than a decade on into the agony of the republic, begins to move beyond neoteric retreat to reclaim an Alexandrian role for his poetics, envisioning public order beyond chaos. In the first half of the Bucolics, Virgil makes ROMA the causative power for new order and new epos, starting to restore but stretch the republican mythic frame—ille mihi semper deus (ecl. 1), nova progenies, Iovis incrementum (Ecl. 4), deus, deus ille (Ecl. 5); cf. Dionaei Caesaris astrum (ecl...

Инверсия сюжетного архетипа в стихотворной книге О. Седаковой «Старые песни»

Инверсия сюжетного архетипа в стихотворной книге О. Седаковой «Старые песни»

History and Pastoral in the Structure of Leopardi's "Canti"

This article explores the cultural matrices of Leopardi's "Canti", one of the most complex and stratified poetic books of the Italian tradition: the notion of history and that of pastoral (or bucolic or idyll, as Leopardi would have it). Emphasis is put on Leopardi's translations from the Greek, on the shaping spatial and temporal metaphors of the book, and in particular on the classical sources of 'L'infinito', a poem provisionally resolving the intellectual clash between historical decline and utopian nostalgia on which the structure of the collection is based.

Adventures of a Suburban Boy (review)

Search for Grace The landscape of the imagination is formed early; it grows out of the first childhood tensions and dreams. At least, this would seem to be the case with John Boorman, the British director of Point Blank, Deliverance and The Emerald Forest. Although his autobiography does everything that one would expect of a famous film director (it covers the youthful struggles, the on-set traumas and the encounters with famous people), it is, in essence, a more interior story about the search for a vision and about how human frailty and industrial contingency make this a life-long quest. Boorman has written a graceful, even poetic book, as good in its way as Michael Powell's two masterful autobiographies. In fact, like Powell, David Lean and even Derek Jarman, Boorman is one of those English directors for whom films are a way of battling with, and escaping from, the social and emotional limitations of this overcrowded island. As his opening chapters point out, he was born in 1933 into a particular class trap, "a faceless, mindless London suburb amongst people who had lost their way in the world, who had forgotten who they were, and had fallen from grace". In his memory, the neat, semi-detached houses of Carshalton contained a deracinated lower middle class cut off from its natural instincts by industrialisation and the First World War; as in his beloved Arthurian legends, "the Grail was lost because men had sinned against nature". For the young John, there were personal falls from grace, too; his mother was really in love with his father's best friend, and there was an unstated rivalry for her affection between the boy and the elder Boorman. Yet redemption was at hand in the surprising form of Adolf Hitler. With his father away at the war, John and his family fled the bombs by moving to his maternal grandfather's bungalow by the Thames at Shepperton. Here, the boy developed his lifelong love of water and the sense of spiritual wholeness that it offered: "We had left the landlocked and earthbound suburbs and embraced the flow of river life. Our lives were fluid." One summer's day, when he was a teenager, he took off in his canoe to Runnymede, and, in the water, experienced what he calls an "epiphany": "I knew myself to be in a state of grace...That experience, so profound, sent me on a quest for images, through cinema, to try to recapture what I knew that day." Viewed in this light, much of Boorman's work is a search for grace and the Grail with men pitching themselves against the forces of nature (Deliverance (1972), The Emerald Forest (1985)), or, in Excalibur (1981), returning to the roots of the lost England, to the primordial battle between pagan and Christian. (Division haunts Boorman's world; although an Anglican, he went to a Roman Catholic school.) Yet he has been as fascinated by the modern trap as by its mythic and elemental shadows. As he notes himself, Point Blank (1967), his first Hollywood film, places Lee Marvin in the kind of emotional triangle that Boorman witnessed between his parents and his father's chum; his other film with Marvin, Hell in the Pacific (1968), has an American airman and a Japanese naval officer (Toshiro Mifune) stranded on a lonely Pacific island; it plays out the ironies of two enemies forced to rely on each other in a kind of Arthurian wasteland. Moreover, the effort of getting these stories on film has been as dramatic as any of the conflicts that they contain. Apart from meddling executives (who are an occupational hazard), Boorman has had to contend with inhospitable locations, upturned canoes and near drowning, malevolent tropical diseases and highly unreliable examples of light aircraft. Like Sam Peckinpah, it seems, he needs a crisis in order...

Beyond Depression: A New Approach to Understanding and Management

In our darwinian societies, professions can behave much like species in the natural world. The activities of successful ones tend continually to enlarge their niche space, often at the expense of competitors. One has only to look at the proliferation of lawyers or accountants to see that this is true. Medicine too has achieved 'success' of this sort. The dynamic behind it, though, can sometimes produce results at odds with both explicit professional goals and the intentions of individual practitioners. The sad histories of lying-in hospitals in the 18th century, or neurasthenia in the 19th, provide good examples of how expansion of medicine into neighbouring territories helped to create, rather than relieve, illness and disability. Christopher Dowrick's thoughtful, sensitive and sometimes poetic book makes a good case for supposing that the present, perceived, epidemic of depression derives from causes more closely related to the 'ecology' of our profession than the condition of our patients. Dowrick, a general practitioner and academic in Liverpool's primary care department, pinpoints four principal factors, namely: The commercial pressure and marketing strategies of the psychopharmaceutical industry, the origins, nature and consequences of which have been so ably documented by David Healy in a series of books The need of psychiatrists to have a clearcut 'disease' to treat, research and bill funding sources for, just like their colleagues in general medicine The need of general practitioners for a concept which sometimes allows a relatively simple solution to the extremely complex conceptual and management problems presented by many of their patients The increasing tendency in western societies to suppose that feelings falling short of contentment and ease are unacceptable and require remedy. There is, in chapter 2, an excellent and quite erudite summary of the reasons for supposing that depression should be regarded as a medical condition much like any other. Later on, however, Dowrick cogently argues that this is something of an illusion. At times he verges on falling into the opposite error, by seeming to imply that it may never be illness-like. Despite this, his argument is convincing overall. Depression is a term like 'bellyache', not like 'appendicitis'. Most bellyaches may be non-pathological and some even benign, but appendicitis does occasionally occur. It may be significant that Dowrick mentions melancholy, grief, angst, accidia, anomie, ennui, even the Buddhist concept of dukkha (suffering), but melancholia does not appear—and this was the concept most closely related to the 'illness' aspect of depression. Though he may have a bit of a blind spot for actual depressive illness, probably deriving from his perspective in general practice, there seems little doubt that his general scepticism about the worth of ever-proliferating diagnoses of depression is correct. One particularly neat piece of evidence derives from a survey of general practice patients which identified those with 'depression'. It showed that patients whose depression remained undetected by their GPs were better on average at follow-up than those whose condition was recognized, though there had been little difference between the two groups initially. Believing as he does (rightly so in my opinion) that doctors are at least as much part of the problem as part of the solution when it comes to the spread of depression, Dowrick faces a 'Catch-22' dilemma when recommending how individual cases of 'depression' should be treated. In the course of a nice cross-cultural account of negative emotions, he comes perilously close to suggesting that cases should be told to put up with their feelings and make the best of their situations—perhaps with the aid of advice and emotional support from a family practitioner. This may work for some but, applied generally, sounds far from a good idea! Surely further research is needed in order to allow us to distinguish the 'appendicitises' from the 'benign bellyaches' and, in the interim, each case must be dealt with individually and pragmatically. The trouble with further research is that much of it will be funded by drug companies who in their dreams would like us all to be suffering from generic 'depression' and swallowing their product. All the same, truth will eventually out. Anyone may appreciate this book for its nice case histories, poetry and snippets of cultural information. I recommend it particularly, however, to those on the receiving end of antidepressant drug advertising and especially for psychiatrists who go along with their College in thinking that raising public awareness of 'depression' is an unmitigatedly good idea. Of course, our darwinian professional dynamic will almost certainly result in attempts to sweep Dowrick's message under the carpet, or even in efforts to shoot the messenger. Let's hope they don't succeed.

Die "Bindung Isaaks" im Kanon (Gen 22): Grundlagen und Programm einer kanonisch-intertextuellen Lekture

Die Bindung Isaaks im Kanon (Gen 22): Grundlagen and Programm einer kanonischintertextuellen Lekture, by Georg Steins. Herder: Freiburg, 1999. Pp. x + 302. C45.00. The polyvalency of the Bible presents serious difficulty for those who expect a symphony of voices in perfect harmony. Rather than celebrating the multiple witnesses to revelation, many interpreters search earnestly for a norm by which to read the seams and to mute the cacophony. Steins opts for the canon as controlling norm but seeks to provide methodological rigor. As a test case, he studies the Akedah (Gen 22:1-19). The book therefore consists of two distinct and roughly equal parts, method and application. The result, a Habilitationsschrift from the University of Munster, illustrates both the potential of canonical criticism and its weaknesses. Context shapes the manner in which a given text is read; that much seems clear. The problem arises when one insists that a particular external context takes precedence over others. First, which canon provides the structure for reading-the Pentateuch, the poetic books, prophetic texts, Wisdom literature; Hebrew Bible or Septuagint; ancient Near Eastern literature or Jewish extrabiblical literature? Second, which religious community-jewish, Christian, or neither? Third, what manuscript tradition, or oral tradition, or stage of transmission is definitive-the final destination or stages on the journey? Steins subscribes to a positive understanding of canonical reading, despite these inherent flaws, and endeavors to salvage the enterprise by providing a methodological underpinning. His proposal has three ingredients: dialogic discourse as outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin, intertextuality as propounded by Julia Kristeva, and psychological insights of reception theory. The initial pages, nearly half the book (pp. 1-102), offer elaborate analysis of these three prongs; here and there one comes across perceptive insights about this oft-discussed duo, along with incisive quotations (e.g, Kristeva's formulation of a post-Cartesian axiom: speak, you hear me; therefore we are). Few readers today would contest the claim that discourse is polyphonic, that metatexts enrich one's understanding of a given textual unit, and that three factors-author, text, and reader-make up the dynamic of interpretation. Where I find the method wanting is at the point of choosing hypotexts, specifically Gen 12;1-19; Exod 3-4; 19-24; 29:38-46; Lev 8-9; 16; and Dent 8:2-6; 12, for the test case, Gen 22:1-19. The mere occurrence of similar vocabulary (in particular, three days, rain, burnt offering, mountain, appear, fear) fails to link them in more than a superficial way, for the vocabulary is too common and the substance too disparate to carry the weight of the hypothesis. Steins seems to imply that readers would have thought of each one of these texts when interpreting Gen 22:1-19. The few links isolated by linguistic similarities seem altogether accidental, and the fact that they point away from the real problematic of Gen 22, which comes closest to the prologue in the book of Job, does not help. Similarly, the author's assumptions about the position of ancient interpreters on the continuum of orality and literacy, so much in dispute today, raise questions. …

Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II

In 1839 the Tractatus Coislinianus, a summarised treatise on comedy, was published from a tenth-century manuscript. Its discoverer suggested that it derived from the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, which inaugurated the systematic study of comedy, but it was soon condemned as an ignorant compilation verging on forgery, and thus matters stood until the first publication of Aristotle on Comedy in 1984. Richard Janko's edition of the text is accompanied by a facing translation, interpretive essays, reconstruction and commentary. This edition contains a new preface and additional bibliography.

A Lexicon for the Poetical Books

A Lexicon for the Poetical Books

A Lexicon for the Poetical Books. Neal D. Williams

<i>A Lexicon for the Poetical Books</i>. Neal D. Williams

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access NEAL D. WILLIAMS, A lexicon for the poetical books, Williams and Watrous Publishing Co., Irving, Texas 1977. Pp. 136. JAMES BARR JAMES BARR UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Semitic Studies, Volume 24, Issue 1, SPRING 1979, Pages 116-a–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/24.1.116-a Published: 01 March 1979

Toward a Biblical Theology of Marriage and Family Part One: Pentateuch and Historical Books

This first installment in a series of four studies on family theology represents only a scant outline form of what the author has assembled from the early books of the Old Testament constituting what Bible scholars call the Pentateuch and Historical Books. Multiple biblical references are representative of the wealth of family Scripture found throughout the Bible. Both writer and reader must be careful not to read into the revelation which appears in early Old Testament History and Law our advantageous understanding of the New Testament. Future installments will treat poetical books and prophets, Gospels and Acts, Pauline Epistles, and general Epistles and Revelation.

Toward a Biblical Theology of Marriage and Family Part two: Poetical and Prophetical Books

Symbolism is the key to the use of family references in the Poets and Prophets. After having taught His people the essentiality of the family and its basic role in human society, Jehovah now uses the concept with its many social and theological ramifications to develop a descriptive history of the nation's dealings with its God. Family analogies abound, particularly in the Prophets. And to a striking degree they focus on perversion and deviation, notably adultery and prostitution. Hidden amidst the symbolism, however, are gems of direct family teaching, too often overlooked by evangelicals in their quest for genuinely biblical answers to family problems.

Tybalt's Spanish Fencing in Romeo and Juliet

HE importance of fencing to the Elizabethan theater,1 to Shakespeare's company,2 and to the dramatic and theatrical structure of particular Shakespearian plays3 as well as the knowledge of fencing that we can postulate for Shakespeare's audience4 suggests strongly the value of inquiry into Shakespeare's use of fencing. Romeo and Juliet is filled with references to fencing, but aside from general comments, scholars have made little use of fencing terms and references to illuminate the play or stage the fights. Holmes points out Mercutio's sneers at the un-English rapier-and-dagger technique of Tybalt and the sympathy that the audience felt for such an attack on foreign mannerisms,5 but goes no further with the extensive fencing references in Romeo and Juliet. From the descriptions given in the play, we can describe Tybalt's fencing technique, adumbrate his character from the technique, and describe the theatrical effect his fighting had on the stage. Tybalt fights by a Spanish book of fence as mannered and artificial as that book of poetics by which Romeo makes love and sonnets; Romeo's impetuosity gives Tybalt a real advantage over Mercutio, an advantage, moreover, suited particularly to the Spanish style of fencing. Shakespeare's fencing terms describe with relative precision the fight between Tybalt and Mercutio, and tell us how to stage the fights, if Elizabethan weapons, or replicas, are available. Tybalt, Mercutio, and Romeo all use Elizabethan rapiers in their fights. Benvolio describes the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt:

Do Plural Nouns of Majesty Exist in Hebrew?

most often when he has followed his MS against all others. I have taken extreme care over the accents, especially in the Poetical Books, and I trust that I have placed them all in exactly the correct position. I have followed the custom of the early Amsterdam Bibles and have printed the table of Haphtaroth, and in every way I have tried to follow the Masoretic tradition. The authorities of the Oxford

On the Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics and the Source of Theophrastus' Definition of Tragedy

On the Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics and the Source of Theophrastus' Definition of Tragedy

A First Book of Poetics. Martha Hale Shackford

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsA First Book of Poetics. Martha Hale ShackfordH. E. CoblentzH. E. Coblentz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 15, Number 9Nov., 1907 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/435081 Views: 28 Journal History This article was published in The School Review (1893-1979), which is continued by the American Journal of Education (1979-present). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Book Review: A First Book of Poetics.

Book Review: A First Book of Poetics.

On Some Suspected Passages in the Poetical Books of the Old Testament

On Some Suspected Passages in the Poetical Books of the Old Testament