Poetic Invention Research Articles

Tradition of Minstrelsy in Turkic Peoples

The minstrel competition is one of the traditions that emerged in oral literature. The emergence process of this tradition, its original character that shapes its dramatic and lyrical elements, and its unique performance ritual have enabled it to emerge as a tradition. Minstrelsy; since it is an ancient tradition that is the continuation of shamanlyk (hayloft), bakshylyk (bakshy) and ozanlyk (minstrelsy) it appears in the oral literature tradition of the Turkic peoples. For this reason, our study analyzes one of the current issues of folklore to address and compare the spread of the minstrelsy tradition in Turkic peoples and the state of research in the region. The aim of our study is to evaluate the spreading characteristics, nomenclature, sub-types, and research on the subject of the tradition of minstrelsy in the oral works of literature of Anatolian, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Karakalpak, Tatar, Bashkir, Uyghur, and Altai Turks. The studies of such researchers as B. Kebekova, S. Nasirov, R. Muhammadiyev, B. Sarımsakov, A. Musakulov, M. Kuşmakov, K. Bazarov, N. Davkarayev, S. Karaş, O. Aydın, N. Kutlusoy, T. Kovalskiy, M. Auezov, S. Mukanov, E. Ismayılov, K. Cumacanov etc., who examined the tradition of minstrel dueling in Turkic peoples with the typological comparison method, constitute the literature basis of our research. As a result of our research, it has been determined that poetic innovation should also be addressed in the tradition of minstrel dueling in Turkic peoples, together with comparative folk literature, folklore, history of literature, and the effect of historical periods on the tradition, subject, and ideology.

‘America e Sardigna’: Una poesia in sardo della giovane Grazia Deledda (1893)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the rediscovered printed edition of ‘America e Sardigna’, a poem written in Sardinian by Grazia Deledda for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; so far, this appears to be the only poetic text composed by Deledda in her native language. The analysis is carried out at several levels: historical, ideological, linguistic, orthographic, and metric-structural. After reconstructing the editorial context, the author frames the poem within the Sardinian literary system – in relation to diachrony and synchrony, cultured and popular style, and written and oral literature, also taking into account the multilingualism arising from the Logudorese koiné and the author’s dialect, Nuorese. The study, focused through the lens of Sardinian poetic culture, considers the stylistic and aesthetic choices of ‘America e Sardigna’, and concludes by considering why Deledda broke away from an avenue of poetic invention she had only recently embarked on.

A New Language for a New Perception: A Study of the Influence of Chinese Poetry on the Composition of Spring and All

Abstract This essay highlights the numerous evidences of Chinese influences on Williams’s poetry, and particularly on the composition of Spring and All. What was it in Chinese poetry that could help Williams accomplish his poetic modernization which Pound was urging him to perform? In which ways and to which extent did Williams use Chinese poetic forms and concepts to compose his modernist masterpiece? As a continuation of the research of Wai-Lim Yip and Zhaoming Qian, two of the very few scholars who have focused their attention on this topic, this essay asks how much of what is seen by Western critics as poetic innovations by Williams can actually be seen as appropriations or derivations from Chinese language and poetics. It highlights that many of the poetic devices used in Spring and All, Williams’s breakthrough volume as a modernist, are actually either borrowed from traditional Chinese poetics, or result from the fusion of the English language with ideogramic linguistic concepts.

Young Poets and Black Spaces: Vanessa Howard’s Poetics of Nature

This article explores the poetics of nature in the work of Vanessa Howard, a young poet involved with The Voice of the Children workshop, a group of Black and Latinx teenaged writers in Brooklyn, New York, who worked with poet June Jordan and educator Terri Bush from 1967 to 1971. A significant poet whose work has not received sufficient scholarly attention, Howard uses nuanced strategies to craft a poetics of nature that acknowledges injustice and remakes possibilities for envisioning and depicting Black spaces. Across a range of poems, Howard figures internal capacities of perception and imagination, and visions of natural and urban landscapes that counter external environments constrained by racial and economic injustice. The fact that Howard created her innovative poetics of nature as a young person demonstrates the importance of recovering and including young poets in considerations of African American poetry and poetics.

In the Wake of Disaster: Black Women's Innovative Poetics

Abstract This is a review essay of Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), an anthology of innovative and cross-genre writing produced primarily in the twenty-first century. Edited by the poets and essayists Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, the book collects poetry and prose by thirty-five Black women, particularly poets, including LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Duriel E. Harris, Robin Coste Lewis, Harryette Mullen, Akilah Oliver, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claudia Rankine, and Evie Shockley, as well as artists such as Adrian Piper and Kara Walker. The essay first assesses the framing and organization of the book in terms of its professed radicalism—a term that encompasses formal innovation and radical politics while eliding the differences between them. This portion of the essay contextualizes the book by examining its relationship to recent scholarship on race and poetry in general and innovative Black poetry in particular. The essay then turns to a major through line of the anthology, in which many writers consider Black futures by revisiting historical archives and imaginaries. Drawing on a lineage of Black feminist thinkers, Joshua Lam uses Christina Sharpe's concept of “wake work” from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) to examine how these writers engage with the language of disaster, from the legacy of slavery and its afterlives to quotidian contemporary manifestations of anti-Blackness. Navigating between what Saidiya Hartman calls “the violence of abstraction” and what Phillip Brian Harper calls “abstractionist aesthetics,” Lam argues that the writings most successful in imagining Black futures are those that, paradoxically, turn to the past: works that explore how the creation and curation of the past (in museums, memorials, historical documents) establishes the limitations of the present.

Law and Love in Ovid: Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus by Ioannis Ziogas

Reviewed by: Law and Love in Ovid: Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus by Ioannis Ziogas Teresa Ramsby Law and Love in Ovid: Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus. By Ioannis Ziogas. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii + 420. Hardback, $115.00. ISBN: 9780198845140. The presence of legal and forensic rhetoric in Ovid’s many works has long been a subject of interest among scholars. In his recent monograph, Ioannis Ziogas dials up the significance of these aspects of Ovid’s poetic style by claiming that they are not merely reflective of Ovid’s legal training, as described in his autobiographical poems. Ziogas also rejects the notion that Ovid is simply being playful with legal terms within the sportive and culturally parodic context of elegiac love poetry. Rather, Ziogas asserts that Ovid is purposefully and provocatively building towers of poetic and legal structures on two important foundations, the first being the concept of sovereign exceptionalism that culminates in Augustus who, for the first time in Roman political history, stood alone, outside the law, [End Page 484] while making the laws (as princeps). The second foundation is the forensic language of prior poets (Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius) who had already explored the idea of the amator as living outside the Roman system and who thus created terminologies to define that existence, with words and phrases that we are well familiar with, such as servitium amoris, militia amoris, otiosus and exclusus. Ovid’s legal structures of language and those of Latin love elegy in general, Ziogas explains, anticipate “the juridico-political milieu of the Principate” (55), so that “the sacrosanctity of the poet and that of the prince exist in parallel, if not in tension” (57). Ovid far surpassed his predecessors in his application of these precarious poetics, and, as we know, the tension he created did not resolve peacefully for him. In the introductory first chapter, Ziogas provides the theoretical basis of this interpretation, relying heavily on the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose notions of the homo sacer and the sovereign exception have been influential in philosophy, sociology, political science and ancient world studies. Ziogas discusses the creation of Augustus’s tribunician and sacrosanct status, as developed by Verrius Flaccus (and cited in Pompeius Festus centuries later), as bearing great similarity to Agamben’s homo sacer who lives a “bare life” outside the juridical order – a place of vulnerability for most, but a supremely protected and powerful place for Augustus. Ziogas summons many elegiac examples to make a compelling case for the idea of the elegiac amator as a man outside the law – governed not by the compelling cultural forces that shape the Roman man, but by the laws and legal environments he creates within his poems. The remaining seven chapters are divided into three sections and the work concludes with an epilogue. Part I: The Trials of Love (Chapters 2–4), develops the Ovidian amator as homo sacer, established primarily through recusatio, where forensic arguments are deployed through these acts of rejection, placing the poet in a position of enacting and empowering whichever pleasure principle he chooses to pursue. This ability is compared to the power of the princeps who is not constrained by any external force to pursue (or dismantle) the legal code of Rome. Ziogas then examines the courtroom dramas that unfold in the Amores (particularly 2.7, 2.19 and 3.4), whereby Ovid makes “free love the absolute basis of legality” and “defines a private zone that lies outside the juridical order” (141). In Chapter 4, Ziogas demonstrates how the paired epistles written by Acontius and Cydippe (Heroides 20 and 21) complicate “the issue of intention in the enactment of contracts and in falling in love,” (198), a poetic innovation that points to “the rise of epistolography in imperial adjudication” (199). [End Page 485] In Part II: Lex Amatoria (Chapters 5–6), Ziogas charts the “continuity of didactic and elegiac traditions from Hesiod to Ovid” (203) in his exploration of Ovid’s defense of his work in the Ars amatoria and its overt opposition to Augustus’s marital laws. He draws fruitful comparisons between Ovid’s didactic works and those...

Ideological and Artistic Features of the Poetry of Svetkali Nurzhan

Svetkali Nurzhan (Aitman) is one of the outstanding poets who came to the world of poetry with their style, won the hearts of readers, determined their place in modern Kazakh poetry. His poems and stories depict various problems of the historical era and the present with a special artistic manner and deep socio-philosophical overtones and give rise to their own thoughts. The poet's desire to reveal the deep layers of social reality and human nature is distinguished by its ideological scope and poetic innovation. In addition to the subtle lyricism that penetrates deep into the human soul, epic poetry is clearly visible in his works, mixed with lofty thoughts and sharp civic wisdom. This article highlights the themes, ideological and artistic features of the poetry of the famous Kazakh poet Svetkali Nurzhan. Various themes in the poet's poems are depicted in a broad artistic and ideological manner. The poet's poetry is analyzed through the concepts of the Great Steppe and the native land, which are the main conceptual core and invariable poetic orientation of the poet's work. Whatever topic the poet approaches, it is noted that he sings from the standpoint of the national spirit and national identity, Kazakh traditions, from the point of view of his civic position. The poet brings his unique character and thoughts into his lyrical character, thereby revealing his poetic personality. On specific examples, it is proved that the images, captivating the reader and evoking the real thought and reality of life, philosophical thought, leading to deep reflection, reveal the poetic individuality of the author and show the originality of his poetry.

Female Roles Revisited in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1653) was an English noblewoman and one of the significant literary figures of the English Renaissance. She is renowned for her works, namely, Love’s Victory (c. 1620), The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621). In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Lady Mary Wroth challenges the patriarchal ideology that excludes women both as sonneteers and lovers who are able to express their love in Petrarchan sonnet tradition. The dominant tradition centralizes the male lovers and marginalizes women as idealized silent beloveds. Thus, it transforms female characters into docile objects to be loved by their male lovers. In order to confront the misogynistic treatment of these concepts of female author and lover in the sonnet tradition, Lady Mary Wroth writes within and against the sonnet tradition and manipulates the masculine genre to insert the female voice into it. First, she assumes submissive roles the dominant tradition appropriates. She negotiates these roles and accordingly manipulates them to her own advantage. Her contestation and later manipulation of these traditional roles create opportunities to resist the oppression she faces by rewriting the disempowering tradition. Hence, she subverts the limited roles of female characters in the dynamics of sonnet tradition by employing specific strategies. In this regard, this article analyzes Lady Mary Wroth’s strategies of subversion of the conventional roles for female characters in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and explores Wroth’s poetic innovations that challenge the gendered concept of the male poet in the sonnet tradition.

REFLECTION OF THEMATIC REPRESNTATIONS OF GHALIB’S POTERY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

Literature, art and all its genres are always engaged in creating a vast landscape by transcending the oppression and limitations of history and civilization. The sphere of expression of the greatest human emotions is not confined to any class, region or scenario and is always immortalized on the scale of time. While great poetry organizes the feelings of an individual, it also becomes a means of exposing them to new feelings and then harmonizes these feelings with nature and civilization by giving them modesty and purity. Ghalib's poetry is also great, in the sense that Ghalib has created his own unique poetic universe with creative essence, collective memory and poetic innovations. Ghalib's greatness rests on the fact that he has seen life through his eyes and is the spokesperson of the basic values of our civilization. The culture created by Subcontinent in centuries, the heart of this civilization is felt in Ghalib's personality and poetry. Kalam-e- Ghalib is a great asset of this civilization and culture.
 The most important problem for the interpreter of any literary and poetic text is the recovery of cultural values ​​and identity, and it is not so easy to capture it in translation. In the background of every word of the language, there is its own culture, its own history, and with the passage of time, the same is reflected in its meanings. In the translation of poetry, the reflection of cultural exchange and cultural context is hard task for the translator. However, the aspect of discovery and non-discovery remains in interpretation.
 The creative use of symbols, metaphors, and similes in Ghalib's poem has put the translators in a difficult position. In translation, it is very difficult to carve out alternatives to capture the state of meaning and gestures and impressions that arise from the interplay of symbols, metaphors, and similes. In such a case, cultural exchange and interpretation of the cultural context and the passing of the meaning in the translation is not easy anyway. This Article is an attempt to highlight the difficulties and uncertainties that faces translators while the process of translating Mirza Ghalib’s poetry.
 In the article under review, an attempt has been made to compare and analyze the translations of Kalam-e-Ghalib so that in the form of comparison and analysis, the competence of the translators can be displayed as well as the standard patterns can be reflected. This comparative study will also make it clear which translators are familiar with the classical tradition of the Urdu ghazal, its lyricism, contexts, themes, and how successful they were in representing the Ghalib’s poetry.

Many Voices, One Page: Poetic Innovation and Intercultural Protest in “The Cherokee Mother”

Many Voices, One Page: Poetic Innovation and Intercultural Protest in “The Cherokee Mother”

Фольклорные традиции и основы поэтики Кязима Мечиева

The annotated paper explores the insufficiently studied aspects of the versification of the classic of Karachay-Balkar poetry Kyazim Mechiyev, in particular the connection with folklore poetic traditions and the author’s innovation in the transition to a new system of versification in the pre-written period of national literature development. The research aims to identify the peculiarities of K. Mechiyev’s versification, their conditionality by the new cultural circumstances, i.e. the emergence of opportunities for the printed distribution of poetic texts instead of the traditional handwritten one, the appearance of readers instead of listeners, an increase in the level of both listenership and readership. Scientific novelty of the research is seen in the fact that the work is the first to shed light on the complex of poetic techniques used by K. Mechiyev in the organisation of the verse, his commitment to the Turkic system of versification and the author’s artistic identity. The research findings have shown the relevance of the topic, have revealed the richness and originality of the author’s poetic skill. The chosen perspective for the research has demonstrated its importance for understanding K. Mechiyev’s creative searches in the field of versification and its significance for understanding the formal structures of the author’s poetics, as well as the necessity for further study of K. Mechiyev’s poetic innovations in the formation of written literature, primarily poetry.

Exploring the Construction of Self: An Ironic Gaze Towards Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess

Dramatic monologue can be considered as a lyrical- dramatic narrative hybrid and the flagship genre of Victorian poetry. It is the most significant poetic innovation of the Victorian era that helped to increase the dignity of Victorian poetry and especially the poems of Robert Browning to a very sophisticated level in the genre of literature. The lengthy speech delivered by the speaker expresses his/her private thoughts intentionally or not. It leads to the uncovering of the intentions and emotions deep within the self of a person. A dramatic monologue reveals the speaker’s temperament and character. The peculiar characteristics of the psychological state of the speaker may be revealed to the silent listener. The construction of the self is done on the basis of the close reading of the lines of the poem. This paper deals with the idea on how a dramatic monologue throws light upon the self within a person.

Ідея спорідненої праці Григорія Сковороди у поезії модерністського об’єднання „Музагет”

Hryhoriy Skovoroda’s idea of the immanent existence (1722–1794) about related work in Ukrainian modernists poetry, in particular representatives of the artistic group “Muzaget” (1919) is considered as the main methodological prism that conceptualize related work of Panna, outlined with the support of V. Gorsky, L. Ushkalov, and D. Chyzhevsky. The article describes the history of creation and specifics of Kyiv post-revolutionary group of symbolists “Muzaget” activities. The literary and artistic almanac with a similar name was analyzed, where each member of the collective presented his “related” art form: poetry, prose, criticism, painting and, at the same time, recorded the affinity of individual and social (national) principles. Based on the analysis of Mykhailo Zhuk, Dmytro Zahul, Volodymyr Kobylyansky, Klym Polishchuk, Oleksa Slisarenko, Mykola Tereshchenko, Pavlo Tychyna, Pavlo Fylypovych, and Volodymyr Yaroshenko poetry, conceptual dominants have been singled out, which in general realize the creative and collective affinity of “Muzaget poetry”. The symbolism of poetic images-archetypes is outlined: God, Christ, joy, star, flower, wind, path, poet’s soul, singing, music, and dream. The functioning of antitheses and parallelisms is emphasized: the flow of human life / the impermanence of nature, life / death, earth / hell / heaven, good / evil, day / night, asceticism / holiness / sinfulness, Christ / Satan, loneliness / crowd. The polyphonic musical imagery and musicality of the poem are analyzed by using tropes, phonetic and syntactic means. It is concluded that poetic innovation, truthful exhibition of creativity and individuality, accentuation of affinity between talent and character, productive interaction of friends in popular creative collectives in the conditions and under the influence of complex historical events and ideological dilemmas of the 20-30s of the 20th century, led some Musagetists to glorious recognition, and others to the tragic consequences of the Red Renaissance.

Postmodernism in the Literature of the North Caucasus: Based on Dina Damian’s Novel “In your World I am a Passer-by”

The Russian academician G.D. Gachev in the middle of the 20th century put forward the theory of “accelerated development”, according to which the literary systems of minority peoples, which for a number of different reasons were delayed in their development, are able at one moment to join in a single world process and in a short time to catch up and overtake highly developed literature. In the presented article, the legitimacy of the Gachev theory is proved on the example of the North Caucasian postmodern literature, which has developed into a single school. Based on the novel by Dina Damian (a pseudonym of Madina Tlostanova) “I am a passer-by in your world”, it is shown how one “stormy genius” in the person of a Kabardian writer performs a dual task: it raises regional postmodernism to an unprecedented height, and at the same time enriches world literature with innovative poetics and a whole series of original philosophical ideas. The novel solves a number of other tasks related to clarifying the philosophical, historical, social, and aesthetic roots of postmodernism.

Après Ulysse: vers une poétique de l’hospitalité en Méditerranée. Par André Benhaïm

Through the trope of Odysseus’s Mediterranean travels, André Benhaïm’s erudite book delineates a poetics of hospitality tethered to the figure of the migrant, the ‘passant de la Méditerranée d’aujourd’hui’ (p. 7), an absolute stranger whose endless intrusion redraws the very boundaries of community. Thinking in the wake of The Odyssey (‘après Ulysse’, a phrase to be read both chronologically and spatially) raises the question of how to construe the space of the Mediterranean beyond the framework of return proffered by Homer’s ­Odyssey. Après Ulysse adopts a francophone intertextual approach, weaving together the study of Mediterranean literatures in French with the Proustian intertext and an assortment of francophone Caribbean and Algerian authors in a transcolonial gesture. One of the book’s strongest contributions lies in its substitution of a future-oriented paradigm of hospitality (the search for another, more welcoming home, which here materializes through movement across the Mediterranean) for one of nostalgic return. By recasting ­Odysseus as an undesirable intruder in his own land, the book blurs the dichotomy between insider and outsider, same and other. It recalibrates the experiences of time pertaining to the welcoming of the other; the act of carving out space for their irruptive existence. In this argument, hospitality is a horizon of thought infused with concurrent poetic, political, and ethical currents. In Benhaïm’s lyrical prose, the liminal space of the Mediterranean stands at the intersection of all three. As a mnesic space, the sea carries the echo of multiple histories of displacement that bred hospitality — in both its conditional and unbounded forms. Odysseus here symbolizes poetic invention and the power of parole rather than the nostos of return. Hospitality, for Benhaïm, lies in ‘l’usage créatif de la parole libérée, et l’écoute, la sensibilité au mot inattendu’ (p. 65). Sophisticated analyses delve into the multiple incarnations of this po-ethics of parole in works by Albert Cohen, Albert Camus, Assia Djebar, and Edmond Jabès, as well as ancient Greek philosophers. From this survey three tropes emerge, each designating one ‘énigme à recueillir’ (p. 45), a series of clues to piece together to complete the quest into the fluid meaning of this ‘poetics of hospitality’ — namely, the refuge, the passport as shorthand for mobility, and the anticipated destination (p. 96). What is left aside, in this volume with its primarily francophone focus, is a capacious and nuanced reading of the Mediterranean in terms of its polyglossia beyond the strictures of French imperial history. A consideration of the rich theoretical corpus dedicated to the Mediterranean as concept across languages and disciplines might have further highlighted the realities of Mediterranean mobility beyond the merely textual, in a move more closely attuned to the political dimension reclaimed in the book. Further, the disregard for recent Mediterranean-focused criticism in francophone studies results in a somewhat truncated perspective, especially in relation to Camus whose examination might well count among the book’s most consummate close readings. This dexterous monograph will nevertheless leave its mark for its subtle theorization of hospitality and the poignant engagement with fraternité reverberating through its pages.

The sociologization of the concept of the inner form of the word by Gustav Speth and Vladimir Bibikhin

Speths (Gustav Spet/Speth/Spth) theory of language, which subjects W. von Humboldt's linguistics, rooted in the semantic production of Indo-European languages, to phenomenological criticism, problematizes the limits of linguistic expression. For Speth, the inner form of the word is not just a matter of etymological image, capable of generating other, more efficacious images, actualized in poetic invention. Speth understands the poetic already on the basis of the distinction between the content of consciousness and the object of consciousness in the school of F. Brentano, and therefore interprets poetic speech as a resource of constant interpretation of language data. Inner form then turns out to be the very content of consciousness that exists before interpretations - whereas interpretation is produced by the very energy of language, by its social existence itself, and the social being of language coincides with the making of stable images with a form of their own. Ways of writing, then, may not be limited to the familiar script, but may convey a sustained syntax of the imagination that differs from the school syntax that goes back to the Aristotelian understanding of predication. Speth's rejection of the doubling of consonants within a morpheme and V. Bibikhin's rejection of the comma as a separating rather than intonational sign belongs to the general line of rejection of the separation of the similar, which contradicts the new understanding of the sociality of language. Bibikhin sees Speth as an administrator, but of a new type, knowing the internal form as the basis of correct scientific production and giving ritual duty to the internal form, whereas Potebnya took ritual seriously. But this administrative experience is what allowed Spet to formulate all those prerequisites for a sociological understanding of internal form, which Bibikhin interprets in light of Speths biography. Understanding Speth as a virtuous administrator, Bibikhin reveals Speths doctrine of internal form as a doctrine of the creation of new disciplinary boundaries, as opposed to the avant-garde overcoming of boundaries. A close reading of Shpeths work shows that his particular apophatic approach to inner form was the source of the generation of new disciplines and practices within disciplines, which Bibikhin understood as the project of a new Renaissance, the rebirth of productive scholarship.

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Poetry and the Language of Otherness: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Ponge

Abstract The language of otherness is a discursive framework that applies to modern poetry in the way it responds to the disappearance of stable forms of legitimization. This study focuses on the writings of three poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Ponge, all of whom have approached in a vexed manner the task of poetic innovation because they were all preoccupied to some degree by the question of authentication. It analyses selected writings of the poets by highlighting the affective polarities that emerge in their works, particularly through the intellectual trials to which they subject themselves, but also in their assessment of their place in a literary tradition that, as modern poets, they seek to overturn. The analysis is based on Lacan’s notion of the big Other as the site of authorization but also of the misestimation of desire inasmuch as it conveyed in language.

From Timothy Tingfang Lew to Bing Xin: The Bible and Poetic Innovation at Yenching University

The sweeping spread of Christianity in China since the late Qing Dynasty contributed to the construction of modern Chinese literature. Among scholars, this view is widely recognized. However, how the Bible as literature crossed the linguistic boundary and specifically influenced modern Chinese literature, especially the study of Chinese vernacular poetry, has not been thoroughly researched. Yenching University (1919–1952), a legendary ecclesiastical university in Peking, is famous for producing many famous modern writers. In the 1920s, at this university, the Bible deeply inspired and influenced several key writers in the history of modern Chinese literature and culture. This paper will review the poetry of these writers and analyze the following three questions: (1) How did biblical poetry take root in a historically non-Biblical cultural context through Christian higher education? (2) How was biblical poetry inherited and recreated in early twentieth century China in the circumstances of Yenching University? (3) How did Bible-inspired poetry contribute to and change the creation of modern Chinese literature?

Henrician Homer: English Verse Translations from the Iliad and Odyssey, 1531–1545

Verse translations from the Iliad and Odyssey embedded in Thomas Elyot’s Gouernour, Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus, and Nicholas Udall’s Apophthegmes might seem the poor cousins of longer and better-known Homer translations by poets such as George Chapman. But this article, which pays close literary-critical attention to Elyot’s, Ascham’s, and Udall’s Homer translations, argues that they play an important and mostly untold part in a larger story concerning the translation of Homer into English, not to mention the vernacular translation of ancient Greek literature in England in the sixteenth century. These fragmentary translations reveal that early Tudor writers had a wider array of options in their methods of classical translation than has hitherto been appreciated. They also call for more nuanced consideration of the diverse intellectual, political, and literary contexts that spurred poetic innovation in late Henrician England.