Poetic Purposes Research Articles

John Wilson to William Wordsworth (1802): A New Text

John Wilson was profoundly affected by his first reading of Lyrical Ballads. At age sixteen in June, 1802, he wrote a remarkably insightful letter to Wordsworth praising volume--to which Wordsworth replied [William Wordsworth's Letter to John Wilson, 1802: A Corrected Version, ed. John O. Hayden, TWC, XVIII (1987)33-38]. This sensitivity to Wordsworth's poetic philosophy was rare at time, and began a relationship, which, despite controversy, was always marked by Wilson's high regard for Wordsworth's poetry. Many years later in an essay in Blackwood's Magazine, Wilson, as his alter-ego Christopher North, describes praise he has courted from all corners of earth, for his role in extending and promoting Wordsworth's reputation from the banks of Mississippi to the Ganges. In same essay North claims that in Scotland in early 1800s, there not twenty copies [of Lyrical Ballads]--we question if there were ten (Stroll to Grasmere, Collected Works). Despite his youth, Wilson's exuberant letter marks him out as a vigorously independent thinker and clearly able to extrapolate some of key concepts in Wordsworth's Preface. He conceives of poet's readers as connected by a delightful sympathy of Souls; a union of common interest in spontaneous appreciation of poetry. This system of philosophy, is embodied in poetry that, Wilson writes, flash on our Souls a conviction of immortality. Crucially here, Wilson recognises and responds to poet's intention. In his Preface to 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth makes claim for poems that their purpose is to illustrate manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement ... to follow fluxes and refluxes of mind when agitated by great and affections of our nature. Wilson is excited by Wordsworth's radical views on duty of poet and he even embraces tone of his writing. letter opens effusively praising Wordsworth's simple and forcible language in rhetoric that bears all hallmarks of an imagination profoundly coloured by Lyrical Ballads and its Preface. Once he graduated and moved to Lake District, Wilson became a friend of both Wordsworths and Coleridges. At one point he was assisting Coleridge's research for Friend by running errands to library at Calgarth Park, home of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. Wordsworths were frequent visitors to Wilson's home at Elleray, which was far more comfortable than their own. It is not unlikely either that two friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, would have discussed their young acolyte's earlier letter. After all, it was a rare critical correspondence that had elicited an equally uncharacteristic reply, especially on subject of The Idiot Boy. Wilson's lucid comments on poem in 1802 are so clearly articulated that it may well be with them in mind, some fifteen years later, that Coleridge refers to only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine one is, that author has not, in poem itself, taken care to preclude from reader's fancy, disgusting images of ordinary, morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He has even by 'burr. burr, burr,' uncounteracted by any preceding description of boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. other is, that idiocy of boy is so evenly balanced by folly of mother, as to present to general reader rather a laughable burlesque on blindness of anile dotage, rather than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary workings. (Biographia Literaria, xvii) Wilson is torn between his genuine admiration for poet and his uncertainty that design of poem achieves its motive. He questions validity of subject as a suitable vehicle for moral intention of poem. …

Browning's Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day : Formal Verse Satire and the Donnean Influence

Browning's Christmas-Eve andEaster-Day. Formal Verse Satire and the Donnean Influence Barbara Ryerse Browning's poem Christmas-Eve andEaster-Day was published in the spring of 1850, and although critics from early to late have regarded this work as an exceptional piece within the overall dimensions of the canon, there is no clear consensus ofopinion as to why this should be the case, or how it should be categorised in terms ofgenre. No commentary was ever offered by Browning himselfto satisfy a reader's curiosity and already in 1891, Mrs. Sutherland Orr was voicing her own sense ofbewilderment: "This double poem stands indeed so much alone in Mr. Browning's work that we are tempted to ask ourselves to what circumstance or impulse, external or internal, it has been due [. . .]" (186). While answers to Mrs. Orr's question frequently make note ofthe influence ofElizabeth Barrett Browning, both before and after her marriage to the poet, as well as the trauma Browning suffered following the birth ofhis son and the death ofhis mother in March 1849, these factors, crucial as they may be, are likely to obscure the poem's dramatic effects and the strategic importance ofa composite structure that holds together an unusual admixture of stylistic features in the rendering ofreligious experience. More often than not, reviews ofthe poem reveal deep concerns over its motley effect or the incongruity ofserious religious themes delivered in comic or satiric tones. Yet irregularities ofthis kind can be seen in a different light when they are placed within the context ofmethods derived from the ancient Roman saturawith its root meaning ofmedley or mixture, and which have gradually evolved into what is now known in literary terms as Victorian Review (2003)49 B. Ryerse the genre of formal verse satire. It is true that readers and critics in Browning's time and later were not likely to be looking to an obscure classical genre to unravel the intricacies ofa mid-century poem. Victorian poets themselves were not much concerned at all with satirical writings, and, in fact, very few versions oforiginal formal verse satire had been produced by English satirists through the years. Deterred by its confusing historical roots and the tightly structured format ofthe genre, they preferred instead to give vent to their satirical spleen through imitations or adaptations ofthe original design. On the other hand, Browning's own extensive knowledge of traditional forms enabled him to draw at will on the literature ofthe past to fulfil his own poetic intentions, and when he began writing Cbristmas-Eve andEaster-Day early in 1850, at a time when the religious uncertainties that followed from his emotional crisis ofthe previous spring were heavy on his mind, he could turn to a ready and familiar precedent in the late sixteenth-century formal verse Satyres ofJohn Donne. And, indeed, an accumulation ofevidence, biographical as well as literary, suggests that Browning's own creative endeavour owes much to the model provided for him by the youngJohn Donne, both as an individual seeking truth in the midst ofdifficult choices affecting his spiritual life, and as a Christian satirist. It is an accepted fact, for example, that the Satyreswere written during a time when Donne was deeply involved in the intellectual inquiry that led to his turning from Catholicism to the Anglican Church: a "difficult and dangerous process ofconversion" which, Herbert Grierson tells us, "was accompanied by deep-rooted conflict and soul-torment that was never entirely dispelled"(xvi). Yet the five verse Satyreswith their rollicking good humour remain a testimony to the courage and optimism ofa poet who could enliven the graver moral aspects ofhis search for truth by threading his way imaginatively through the evils and foibles ofa contemporary world where both kings and fools become the target ofhis mockery and wit. Against this kind ofbackground the satiric domain in Christmas-Eve andEaster-Day loses much ofits jarring effect. Rather, it indicates that Browning, like Donne before 50volume 29 number 1 Browning's Christmas-Eve andEaster-Day him, discovered in the conventions and techniques offormal verse satire a viable method ofexamining, however obliquely, questions relating to his Christian faith. Furthermore, it is clear that Christmas-Eve andEaster...

El catálogo de las naves de la Ilíada. Un problema de cálculo

This article proposes an unusual interpretation within the research area around the Cathalogue of the vessels in the Iliad. Using the mentions to this part made in Ancient times, the author tries to find out the procedures used by Homer to give sense to the calculation of the troops fighting in the Trojan War -a calculation from which a valid criterium can be inferred to, in turn, propose a new reading of the Homeric epic poem. It is therefore (and there lays the innovation) a dramatic criterium which, consequently, subordinates the historic data to Homer's poetic intentions.

Wordsworth, Free Verse and Exteriority

Wordsworth is often considered a prophet of modernist poetics. That honour usually goes to Coleridge, with his experiments in irregular syllable counts in Christabel in name of matching metre to passion, and his insistence on this principle more generally in notion of form. As Donald Wesling and others have pointed out, principles of form demand that metre be derived within poetic content, or poet's interior intention, which sponsors most of modernist arguments for free verse (The New Poetries 64). Since Dryden, declared Coleridge, the of our poets leads to sense; in our older and more genuine poets, sense, including passion, leads to meter (Shakespearian Criticism I 197). In eighteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria, he accordingly remarks that discrepancy between pathetic events of poems like Simon Lee and Mice Fell and implied by their metre means that they fail to be poems. Wordsworth, after all, had unpardonably argued that metre might suggest a feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with passion in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Prose Works I 147). With Coleridge, criteria for poetic form is its interiority, so that formal pattern becomes equated with exterior, artificial and disunified: form is about ethics of subjectivity as well as poetics. Hence when Ezra Pound began to proselytise for free verse a century later, his terms are exactly Coleridge's:Poetry is a composition or organisation of sounds set to music. By 'music' here we can scarcely mean more than and timbre. The form is false unless it belongs to particular emotion or energy which it purports to represent (New Age 349-50). Pound began his Imagist revolution in 1912, with a rousing call to poetic accuracy and a disparaging of all nineteenth-century deviation from it as rhetoric, a criterion that like organic combines poetics with an ethical principle: rhetoric is borrowed form and thus insincere expression. But in pages of The Egoist, semi-official house organ of Modernist poets, this dislike of rhetoric became correlative of an aggressive reworking of interiorization into individualism. As Richard Aldington, magazine's sub-editor, declared: The old accented verse forced poet to abandon some of his individuality, most of his accuracy and all his style in order to wedge his emotions into some preconceived and childish formality; free verse permits poet all this individuality because he creates his cadence instead of copying other people's, all his accuracy because with his cadence flowing naturally he tends to write naturally and therefore with precision, all his style because style consists in concentration, and exactness which could only be obtained rarely in old forms. (Free Verse in England The Egoist 351) Despite inordinate length of Aldington's sentence being determined entirely by rhetorical device of ternary parallelism, his point is clear: to be accurate is to be hindered by external considerations, which means to be an individual. Or, as Pound had put it: I believe in an a rhythm, that is, in poetry, which corresponds exactly to emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man's must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in end, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable ... I think there is a fluid as well as a solid content, that some poems may have a form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore properly rendered in symmetrical forms. (Literal, Essays 9) An absolute rhythm is a that could be measured against anything else but emotional content, and which could be copied or reproduced. …

Toward a Pragmatic Poetics: The Convergence of Form, Act, and Ontology in Hopkins' "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo"

I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN BY RECONSIDERING A WELL-KNOWN DISAGREEMENT between F. R. Leavis and Robert Bridges concerning poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In 1918, Bridges published first edition of Poems of Hopkins and appended Preface to Notes where he denounced Hopkins' unusual mannerism and style. According to Bridges, Hopkins' poetry problematic because it both extravagant and obscure. He accuses poems of occasional affectation in metaphor, of human feeling, and exaggerated Marianism and deplores the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism in Golden Echo as well as Hopkins' efforts to force emotion into theological or sectarian channels. In Bridges' opinion, such poetic tactics constitute rude shocks of purely artistic wantonness. They do not contribute to an overall poetic purpose, but make for and Obscurity, aberrations in Bridges' mind that not part of [the poet's] intention since Hopkins is serious and always ha s something to say. Elsewhere, Bridges expresses his perplexity over the mixture of passages of extreme delicacy and exquisite diction with passages where in jungle of rough root-words, emphasis seems to oust euphony (Preface, p. 99). Bridges' theory of poetics implied here, but it also abundantly clear. Poetry must be part of continuous literary decorum (p. 96). It must follow poetics of intelligibility, striking balance between all extremes. Affectation and perversion must be cast out and replaced with genuineness and normality. Oddity and obscurity must give way to familiarity and clarity. Coherence must be favored over paradox. In short, poetry must follow official rules of convention, semantics, and common-sense. Bridges comments on of Deutschland in similar vein: The labour spent on this metrical experiment must have served to establish poet's prosody and perhaps his diction: therefore poem stands logically as well as chronologically in front of his book, like dragon folded in gate to forbid all entrance, and confident in his strength from past success. This editor advises reader to circumvent him and attack him later in rear; for he himself shamefully worsted in brave frontal more easily perhaps because both and were to (Preface, p. 114) While stating that poem experimental and, therefore, premature in Hopkins' poetic development, Bridges does not tell us what makes poem great dragon folded in gate. He says that he was himself shamefully worsted in brave frontal assault, but he does not tell us how or why. Nor does he explain what caused subject and treatment of poem to be distasteful to him. It clear, however, that, for Bridges, poem something to be overcome rather than enjoyed. In associating Wreck with forbidding dragon, Bridges prepares reader for very specific experience of poem. We are not only led to anticipate grave semantic difficulties, but are encouraged to negotiate these difficulties through type of interpretive assault. For Bridges, Wreck threatens to devour readers who make frontal assault because it catches them off their hermeneutic guard; it discovers them as helpless prey, drifting within a galaxy of signifiers rather than a structure of signifids. (2) Subsequently, poem must be read only after it has been vanquished by readerly invasion from rear. Perhaps most significant of Bridges' comments in terms of their relation to his theory of poetics his discussion of Hopkins' various grammatical deviations: Here ... another source of poet's obscurity; that in aiming at condensation he neglects need that there for care in placing of words that are grammatically ambiguous. …

The Significance of Stage Properties in EuripidesElectra

Stage properties in Greek tragedy are used economically, a fact which enhances the significance of their dramatic function. Oliver Taplin has amply demonstrated how their appearance on stage is not an adventitious means of lending life to a character or situation but rather a device by which the dramatist underlines some essential aspect of the scene in which they occur or theme in the play as a whole. Economy of props in tragedy is in marked contrast with their multiplicity in Aristophanic comedy. When it comes, therefore, to interpreting the poet's artistic intention in a particular tragedy, the props list may prove a useful critical instrument, as I hope will be evident from this study of their use in Euripides'Electra.

On Wordsworth, the Lake District, protection and exclusion

While exploring the Guide to the Lakes, Whyte (2000) notes that Wordsworth 'has been seen as a prophet of the conservation movement on the strength of his statement about the Lake District being a sort of national property'. This relatively well known snippet has too often been cited out of context and without reference to the poet's intention to reserve the Lake District for privileged minorities, notably the indigenous residents and discerning visitors. Wordsworth was, in fact, an effective prophet and high priest of protection and exclusion no less than conservation; and, in his day, he would have reserved all places of great 'natural beauty' for quiet enjoyment by a favoured few. In 1835 he was prompted by changes to the landscape generated by new residents to declare:

Whose Turn Is It Anyway?

My brother-in-law at one point this summer asked me what I was working on and when I told him that I was translating contemporary poetry for an upcoming issue of an American journal, he asked, Szymborska? I told him that Szymborska was something on the order of ancient history. Andrzej Sosnowski, whose poems were on my mind at the time of our conversation, is roughly a dozen years older than my brother-in-law; according to the time-lag evinced by his suggestion, Sosnowski will have to wait until his generation's children are in their early thirties before his name will to the popular mind at the mention of contemporary Polish poetry. Assuming of course that he manages to win a Nobel Prize in the meantime. But it's more likely that a poet like Sosnowski is destined for an entirely different sort of recognition: he is recondite where Szymborska (or Rozewicz or Herbert) is, however elliptical, easily recognisable; he is hermetic where the earlier generation was public. The earlier poets belong to a poetic tradition stretching back, most famously, to Adam Mickiewicz, who compared his country's eminently lamentable fate to that of the Lord's Passion: Poland's re-emergence out of total dismemberment (completed in 1793--maintained until 1918) at the hands of Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be for Europe what Christ's rise from the dead was for a Christian mankind. It was in the context of this political oppression that Mickiewicz introduced the concept of evasion into Polish verse, as he tiptoed around the Czarist authorities; the same evasion is to be found in any number of parabolic poems written between the drawing of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (--the metap hor mixing with time). What's a poet to do when the pressure of political censorship is removed and everything can be said, when the content of a poem no longer has the potential to cause problems to those in power? After all, it was this very pressure, in the famous phrasing of Alfred Alvarez, that lent the poetry of postwar Eastern Europe the urgency that Alvarez found so lacking in the poetry of his native land. What indeed is the poet to do? In the back-and-forth of international literary influence, it's the Anglophone world's turn at service: John Ashbery makes it over the net as a generation of Polish poets goes in search of new sources of pressure. Jerzy Jarniewicz drew my attention to a couple of lines from a Sosnowski poem that might be taken as programmatic of the Polish reaction to Ashbery: Te dwie kobiety zlaly sie we snie-- nie chcialem tak tego powiedziec. The two women in a dream-- I didn't mean for it to out like that. (from Zaraz wracam [I'll Be Right Back]) If the earlier generation was compelled to think about how a government official would interpret its work, Sosnowski, with the other Polish poets who followed Ashbery's lead, shows himself thinking about how language contains within itself interpretations alien to the poet's intentions--assuming that the phrase streamed together carries the ambiguity (melted into one/urinated in unison) that is so apparent in the Polish (zlaly sie). Donald Davie, in a different context, pointed out that poetic composition results as much from what can't be said as from what can. The poet's inability to control how it will come out, in the case of these Polish poets, is no longer a question of politics, but of etymology and the growth of idiom; it is at this point that the poet ceases to be of interest to those not concerned--whether congenitally or professionally--on an everyday basis with language, itself, as a problem. …

Russian Sophiology and Anthroposophy

The Russian poet and anthroposophist Andrei Belyi has four poems from 1918 with the same title, Anthroposophy [Antroposofiia]. These are love poems and anthroposophy is represented in them as a living spiritual being of female gender. The principal attribute of this being is a clear gaze, flashing eyes, which regard the poet from the precincts of light, of blueness, from waves of aromas and musical harmonies. These verses are clearly oriented to the poem Three Encounters [Tri vstrechi] by Vladimir Solov'ev, the theme of which is the thrice-repeated vision of what Solov'ev recognized as the Sophia of the ancient Gnostics and of Jakob Bohme. How are we to understand Belyi's enigmatic poetic intent? How does anthroposophy—a science of the spirit, an occult system created by Rudolf Steiner—become in Belyi's imagination now a sister, now a beloved—tender, gentle, and kind—linked to the poet by a mysterious and fateful meeting in eternity? Most importantly, what does this anthropomorphism of anthrop...

Overcoming Augustinian Dichotomies in Defense of the Laurel in Canzoni 359 and 360 of the Rime sparse

Overcoming Augustinian Dichotomies in Defense of the Laurel in Canzoni 359 and 360 of the Rime sparse Brenda Deen Schildgen I’ vo piangendo i miei passati tempi i quai posi in amar cosa mortale senza levarmi a volo, abbiend’ io l’ale per dar forse di me non bassi esempi. Rime sparse 365 1 The closing poems of the Rime sparse refer copiously to the major texts in the Latin-Italian literary traditions. Whether Cicero’s De Amicitia, a central text for medieval “courtly” love traditions, 2 Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Dante’s Commedia, which Petrarch unflatteringly called a popular poem, Vita Nuova, or Convivio, Augustine’s Confessions, St. Paul, Propertius, Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid, Macrobius’ Somnium Scipionis, or Ovid, among others, Petrarch fills his poems with references whose nuances expand their ambiguities and connotations. 3 Petrarch deploys these allusions as he develops some of the main [End Page 149] themes of the closing poems, many of which he has explored throughout the collection. These include his affection for literature and fame, his love of Laura, his constant immobility and lethargy, his desire for conversion, and his fear of death. No figure, whether fictional or true, including Laura, however, can surpass Augustine’s ominous yet ambiguous presence in Petrarch’s “lungo error” (Poem 224). This, of course, is hardly a revelation. Anyone who knows Petrarch even superficially, knows the significance Augustine has in his correspondence, in the Secretum, a dialogue with Augustine, and the Rime sparse. 4 Petrarch’s Augustine is an enduring voice through all his introspective interludes, raised by the poet himself as a judge, a critic, an advocate of Christian spirituality and morality, an admirer of secular literature, a true celibate, and most importantly, as a searcher for the single authentic and integrated inner person who located the path to rise beyond “human things,” for which Orpheus longingly sings but finds elusive nonetheless. 5 Especially in these closing poems, Augustine’s reflective style and literary conviction, moral efficacy, and spiritual assent determine the context for the debates the poet dramatizes. In 359 and 360 of the Rime sparse, which precede the closing sonnets, Petrarch uses Augustinian self-inquiry to ponder the central activity of [End Page 150] his life, that is, the acquisition of fame through letters. The dominant theme of the closing sonnets, 361–365, is death and perhaps Petrarch’s real or imagined impending death, but the conclusion to 362, “Egli è ben fermo il tuo destino, / et per tardar ancor vent’ anni o trenta / parrà a te troppo, et non fia però molto” suggests that Petrarch contemplated the implications of his imminent, that is, inevitable death regularly. 6 Remorse over his life and the primary activities of his life also inform these closing sonnets. Making use of Augustinian semantic and theological terms, these poems unveil the inconclusiveness of the poet’s erring and labyrinthine quests. In canzone 359 and 360, the poet makes use of Augustinian and Boethian allusions to contemplate his conflicted attitude towards his literary activities which, rather than reversing the Christian allegorical literary poetics in which all words must lead to the single Verbum, attempt to overcome this Augustinian dichotomy between words and the Word through which poetry had been unconditionally challenged. 7 Petrarch, in a radical rethinking of poetic fame, explores how the “signs” which provide secular fame to the poet might be one avenue to God. This is a stunning difference from Dante, who cannot “save” poets whose goal in writing was worldly fame (Brunetto Latini, for example). In fact, only one poet appears in Dante’s Paradiso, and although some are in the intermediate purgatorial terrain, many inhabit hell. Dante must write the “poema sacro” (Par. XXV) to overcome his [End Page 151] exilic worldly status. 8 Petrarch’s argument also breaks with Augustine and Boethius, for while Augustine and Boethius justify secular letters as useful, they still support a hierarchy of poetic purpose to undergird their defenses of the usefulness or consolation provided by secular poetry. Demonstrating how important this issue must have been for Petrarch, when Boccaccio calls up Petrarch’s image in De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, he specifically portrays his friend’s passion for fame...

Contracts with Animals: Lucretius, <em>De Rerum Natura</em>

Modem philosophers interested in the moral status of animals frequently debate the possibility of extending justice to animals througb a theory of social contract, witb Rawl's theory usually providing the basis of discussion. Contractualism was, of course, also an interest of ancient pbilosopbers, particularly tbe Epicureans, wbo believed that pleasure, dermed as freedom from anxiety, was the summum bonum and that this pleasure was dependent, in part, on human willingness to form contracts with one another. In this paper, I will propose that the Roman poet/pbilosopber Lucretius develops an ethical theory that pleasure is also achieved by forming contracts with some nonbuman species and by physically separating ourselves from other species. I will then examine a passage in the De Rerum Natura where Lucretius demonstrates that bumans cause anxiety and distress for themselves wben they violate these arrangements. Lucretius is often dismissed by philosopbers as simply the didactic poet whose contributions to the western pbilosophic tradition lie not in any originality of thought, but rather in his ability to make the teacbings of the Garden accessible to a wider audience than the attract. And indeed there can be no question about Lucretius' skillfulness in boney-coating the medicine of the pbilosopby of materialism.1 His use of exempla drawn from the natural world continues even today to delight, to instruct, and to seduce his readers into an understanding of difficult theories. For instance, the verbal image of fleecy sheep grazing on a far-off billside (2.317-322) makes readily comprebensible the concept of the invisibility of the individual moving atom. In his use of such exempla from the natural world, Lucretius is, of course, doing more than simply making palatable the principles ofEpicurean physics by offering familiar situations as proofs for the scientific arguments; be is also implicitly instructing bis readers in the methodology of Epicurean logic by encouraging them, first, to accept the validity of sense perception as the basis for exploring our universe and, second, to abstract from the perceived world to the unperceived world. In tbe didacticism of Lucretius, philosophic and poetic purposes converge, and the union is so seamless that we cannot justly evaluate tbe originality of bis contributions to tbe pbilosophic tradition witbout analyzing the literary aspects of the poem. Lucretius' presentation ofEpicurean ethics is especially dependent on a complex interweaving of poetic elements, such as recurring images, metapbors and verbal motifs. Of particular interest to philosophers tracing the bistory of buman thought about our relationsbips with other

Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes/The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes by Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones, and Lori Walters (review)

REVIEWS279 KEITH BUSBY, TERRY NIXON, ALISON STONES, A]V(D LORI WALTERS, LeS Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes/The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. Pp. xiv, 503; viii, 553. $532. The most exciting and profitable trend in recent philological studies is not the selfproclaimed 'New Philology' but the renewed interest in manuscript studies, manifested in such diverse works as Rupert Pickens' edition ofall the manuscript versions of The Songs ofJaufréRudel(Toronto, 1978), collaborative editions ofthe many Crusade Cycle poems and the Chanson de Roland (currently being readied under the direction of Joseph J. Duggan), Alastair J. Minnis's Medieval'Theory ofAuthorship (London, 1984), Alison Stones's important series of art historical studies of vernacular illuminated manuscripts, and the important contributions of Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book (Cornell, 1987) and The Romance ofthe Rose and Its Medieval Readers (Cambridge, 1993). Thanks to these and other scholars drawing particularly on the seminal works of Jean Rychner and Paul Zumthor, we are much more conscious today of the material context of medieval literary production, whether oral or manuscript. Nonetheless, manuscript studies of vernacular literature - studies which considet the physical organization ofthe medieval codex, its contents, script, decoration, and illumination are still in their infancy. The collaborative volume under review, which includes 13 entries by the four principal authors and an additional 13 (several collaborative) by 14 other scholars, is a significant scholarly and publishing event. The contents can be roughly divided into three areas of interest: 'literary' studies of scribal and textual problems; 'art historical' evaluations ofthe decoration and miniatures, particularly of Chretien's Perceval; and 'codicological' descriptions of the individual manuscripts containing Chretien's works. Forty-three manuscripts or fragments exist of Chretien's five Arthurian romances (two additional ones previously described have since been lost), which is more than that for any other vernacular text of the twelfth century. None, however, is from the twelfth century, and all but one (Pierre Sala's 16th-century antiquarian recopying of Yvain) can be dated either thirteenth- or fourteenth-century. Of the 45 known manuscripts or fragments, 11 contain miniatures or historiated initials, totaling 2 illustrations for Lancelot, 4 for Erec, 17 for Yvain, and 62 for Perceval. The present volumes have 28 color and 805 black-and-white reproductions, which include all the miniatures and decorated initials of the 11 illuminated manuscripts, photographs of text and initials from the other extant Chrétien manuscripts and fragments, as well as numerous reproductions from stylistically related manuscripts. Volume one contains 19 essays that offer a variety ofapproaches to the manuscript evidence. After providing a list of manuscripts by shelf order, by date attribution, and by text, Terry Nixon discusses the make-up of the individual manuscripts, which move from single- to multiple-column productions, and from individual works to collections of Chretien's romances, to complilations of multiple Arthurian romances. Problems of editing Chretien's works occupyTony Hunt (a reprinting ofhis important French Studies article of 1979) and Margot van Mulken, while four essays treat various scribal and 28oA RTHU RIANA paleographical features: Keith Busby argues that the manuscripts B.N.. fr. 12576 and fr. 6614 were produced by the same scribe; Stewart Gregory and Claude Luttrell describe the 8 manuscripts and 4 fragments containing Cligès, with conclusions that parallel those of Nixon above; Françoise Gasparri, Geneviève Hasenohr, and Christine Ruby examine the Erec et Enide manuscripts, with particular attention to punctuation, abbreviations, and decoration; and Roger Middleton studies the colored capitals in the Erec manuscripts. In separate essays, Patricia Stirnemann, Alison Stones, and Elizabeth Burin explore the artistic context of the illuminated Chrétien manuscripts. In the final seven essays of volume one, Lori Walters (2 essays), Keith Busby (2 essays), Angelica Rieger, I^aurence Harf-Lancner, and Emmanuele Baumgartner discuss various aspects ofthe five illustrated Percevalmanuscripts, showing particularly the relationship (or lack thereof) ofillumination and rubric to text. Whereas Busby concludes that 'the miniatures ofChretien's Percevalm the thirteenth and fourteenth century manuscripts tell us little about the poet's intentions and the reception of his poems by his first audiencs' (363), Walters, and to a lesser extent Rieger, argue that...

Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments of the Canterbury Tales by Jerome Mandel

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ciaos it in part addresses; to the medievalists reading this review, I highly recommend the volume as both stimulating and accessible. KATHLEEN AsHLEY University of Southern Maine JEROME MANDEL. Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments ofthe Canter­ bury Tales. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992. Pp. 257. $39.50. Ever since Chaucer died and left behind him not The Canterbury Tales but "a mass of papers in which the tales he had written formed a series of fragments," as Derek Pearsall puts it in his recent biography (The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992}, p. 233), scholars and critics have tried to discover the poet's intentions about the eventual plan of the collection. Most of these claims are either uncontroversially general or implausibly specific; the currently prevailing approach seems to be rather more commonsensical and pragmatic than speculative, as exem­ plified by Derek Pearsall's eminently helpful account in his The Canterbury Tales (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985). He comes down very firmly on the side of those who find in the individual tales the real achievement of the collection and who refuse to join in the "game offree association," which he dismisses as "the activity not ofthe critically alert mind striving to partici­ pate with Chaucer in his imaginative engagement with his matter, but of the mind idling among its reminiscences ofthe Tales" (p. 50). This may be a somewhat extreme position, and it will certainly not stop readers from discovering for themselves all kinds of links and parallels between various Tales, but it is more trustworthy than more or less inspired guesses about Chaucer's hidden intentions. Jerome Mandel's book must be read in this context, but it is different from most previous hypothetical structures because he makes the much more modest and plausible claim that it is the fragments, not the Tales as a whole, that are unified, i.e., made "coherent in terms of structure, theme, and characters" by Chaucer (p. 17). This is argued with a wealth of detail, persuasive eloquence, and infectious enthusiasm. One virtue of Mandel's book seems to me that one need not necessarily be convinced by evety single observation or perhaps even by his general thesis to find his argu224 REVIEWS ment stimulating and useful. For one thing, it is very reader-friendly: there is ample and fair documentation, dissenting critics are treated without any righteous superiority, and objections are openmindedly admitted. In this spirit scholarly controversy genuinely enriches our understanding of the text, independent of our consent. Each chapter ofMandel's book is devoted to one fragment, and each tries to show that the stories Chaucer chose to link have more in common with each other than they have with any other part of The Canterbury Tales. Starting with minor and sometimes marginal but often striking details, Mandel proceeds to discuss the areas in which he finds the most demon­ strable links: structure, theme, and character. Thus The Clerk's Tale and The Merchant's Tale are linked by their common structure (council, marriage agreement, test, restoration) in a number of surprisingly similar details. More doubtful is perhaps the claim that the themes treated in both tales are significantly related to each other to the exclusion ofothers, and it takes some goodwill in the reader to agree with Mandel that January and Walter "are more like each other than they are like any other characters in the Canterbury Tales" (p. 41). Still, he has a way of holding our attention until we see at least the reasonableness of his point, especially since he is careful to dissociate himselffrom more extreme claims. There are many debatable observations, such as the belief that "Chaucer deliberately set Griselda and May into the same fragment to unify it because they complement each other" (p. 45); it is surprising how many correspondences, parallels and contrasts you can find if you look long and hard enough at Chaucer's words. This may also be the impression ofreaders when they come to chapter 2, where the performances of the Pardoner and the Physician, including the performers themselves, are presented as "unlike the sequence of events in any...

Leopardi's Shifting Understanding in “Il Tramonto Della Luna”

Giacomo Leopardi's last two canti, La ginestra and 11 tram onto della luna, composed in 1836, may be read as a poetic diptych. Both poems are characterized by a relentless expression of the sublime. In one of the most famous stanzas of Italian poetry, the 'solidarity stanza' (vv. 87-157) of La ginestra, Leopardi exhorts us to desist from fratricidal struggle and get down to the business of combatting our real enemy, Nature. Leopardi claims that we are all alienated from Nature, our wicked stepmother, and that awareness of our condition is the first important step to mitigating her tyranny. Whatever the truth of his heroic claim in La ginestra, Leopardi appeals directly to the intellect, arguing for an 'ethics of pessimism'. The poet is better able to communicate and evoke empathyl for this ethic in 11 tramonto della luna, where he speaks directly to the emotions in a way that many discursive passages of La ginestra, a much longer poem, do not. La ginestra is an instance of the' generalization of the sublime', by which the poet depicts the universality of alienation from Nature, whereas 11 tramonto della luna manifests the 'humanization of the sublime', by which Leopardi represents alienation as an intimate process in which the distinction between first-person and third-person points of view is transcended. Our knowledge about the workings of 'evocation of empathy' and' cognitive exhortation' in Leopardi' s poetry turns on the assumptions we hold about the poet's beliefs, desires and intentions. Adapting concepts from rationality theory and intentionalist psychology, the literary critic Paisley Livingston (1991:54)

"Man's words" and manly comradeship: language, politics, and homosexuality in Walt Whitman's works.

Critical assessments of Walt Whitman's works either emphasize his sexual themes while ignoring his political ideas or they focus on the poet's politics but ignore his poetics of corporeality. Recent studies that do discuss both politics and sexuality in Whitman's works do not devote much attention if any to the poet's theory of language as it appears in his An American Primer. This essay explores the complex intersections among sexuality, politics, and language in Whitman's works, illustrating how the poet consistently correlated his linguistic, sexual, and political metaphors, constantly relating the health and the sexual potency of the male body with the power of language, the efficacy of literature, and the strength of the states in the United States. Underlying these multiple metaphors and poetic intentions is the poet's homosexual vision. It constitutes the basis of his linguistic theory, his hope of an ideal democratic union, and his plea for sexual equality. To Whitman, America needed male-to-male friendships to free it from materialistic vulgarities and to ensure its perpetuation.

England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape

Ruinists in Rome history into landscape - vernacular ruin poetry out of the wasteland - Wordsworth's repair of ruins the sublime of ruin - Blake's Jerusalem.

Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales ed. by Susanna Greer Fein, David Raybin, Peter C. Braeger

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER oretical horizons and sufficient patience,Ratio andInvention will prove an exciting intellectual experience. R. W HANNING Columbia University SUSANNA GREER FEIN, DAVID RAYBIN, and PETER C. BRAEGER, eds. Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales. Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 29. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991. Pp. xxiv, 269. $32.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. This volume traces its history from a six-week Institute on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales held at the University ofConnecticut in the summer of 1987. The purpose of the institute, which was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was in part to reenergize Chaucer teachers faced with a real or threatened decline in institutional support for medieval studies. "Chaucer's Institute," as it came to be called after the conference coordinating office printed the badges that way, sounds like an impressive success in C. David Benson's account of it, "A Memoir of Chaucer's In­ stitute." The essays in the volume suggest the nature ofthat success, which is based not on unanimity of outlook or adherence to a particular the­ oretical school (or even commitment to consider theory important to Chaucer studies) but on a genial pluralism and a pleasure in writing about The Canterbury Tales. The disclosure of new knowledge is quite varied among these essays, but all are written in accessible language, are focused closely on the texts of the Tales, and take a respectful attitude toward the poet's intentions, in keeping with the goals of the institute (pp. xx-xxi). The volume is carefully edited, with a largely appreciative foreword by Derek Pearsall, an explanatory preface by the editors, and a common reference list and index for all the essays. These features make the volume easy to use and suit it for what I take to be one of its major purposes: to stimulate the thinking of teachers ofChaucer. The thematic thread that runs through the collection is that of strife among the pilgrims, a focus broad enough to accommodate many interests and approaches. Some contributors write about rivalries between Chaucer's characters, as does Bruce Kent Cowgill in his attempt to show the usually 124 REVIEWS undifferentiated Aleyn andJohn in The Reeve's Tale to be in fact rivals in their unfolding narrative. Some take the pilgrims' conflicts as conflicts between ideas, as do Frederick B.Jonassen'salignmentofthe Host with the values and perspectives of the body and the Parson with those of the spirit (and the Pardoner a naysayer to both), and Susan K. Hagen's assertion that the Wife of Bath's call to reject male authority is doomed by critics who accept the priority of logic over rhetoric (a position I find too dismissive of Alison's considerable gifts for a "male" style of hermeneutics and debate). Jay Ruud places ideas in contest, discussing the rich patina of scriptural allusion in The Summoner's Tale and arguing that the focus ofthe tale is on the spirit (and its perversion by FriarJohn in the tale) rather than on anger. Two essays are good examples ofclose formalist readings, and both reveal much about their subjects. William F Woods explores The Knight's Tale as an elaborate pattern of compositional effects. His "Up and Down, To and Fro" is about the way narrative elements in themselves quite inconsequen­ tialcan be seen to add upto a vision ofnaturalcycles, social hierarchies, and spiritual aspirations. Charles Owen provides a meticulous examination of the metrical, figural, andsyntacticpatterns in thefalcon'scomplaint in The Squire's Tale, and the emotional effects they produce, demonstrating the subtle complexity of a passage often among those "forgotten" in critical accounts of Chaucer's style and vision. Susanna Greer Fein is also a very close reader. She draws together the Reeve's cynical lines on aging in his prologue with the narrative trajectory of his tale and his competition with the Miller through the medieval trope of the Wheel oflife. The trope and the attitudes that explain its ubiquity are persuasively discussed and cleverly linked to the mill wheel that superin­ tends the Reeve's story. Her argument locates Chaucer subtly but firmly within a familiar iconic...

Federico García Lorca's "Santa Lucía y San Lázaro" and the Aesthetics of Transition

By 1927, Federico Garcia Lorca had become one of Spain's most promising young writers. And yet his growing reputation left him feeling dissatisfied, unsettled, and inhibited. Enthusiasm for some of his best-loved work was based, he realized, on a widespread misunderstanding of his poetic intentions and on a distorted public perception of his creative personality. So a sense of diminishment and constriction found expression in his private correspondence, where he protested: ‘No quiero que me encasillen. Siento que me van echando cadenas. NO’.1 At this juncture, then, he was acutely sensitive to how others saw him, touchy about misrepresentation, and anxious to project an image of himself that reflected the full range of his artistic potential.

Grace under Pressure: "Hand-Words," "Wyrd," and Free Will in "Beowulf"

Who is the Shaper in Beowulf? Is it wyrd, the fixed fate that shaped the pagan world of the Anglo-Saxons? Or is it the Christian God whose worship they adopted? As the story of Beowulf was told and retold through the centuries, it seems to have picked up the verbal vestiges of cultural change like a snowball rolling through time: so many pagan and Christian ideas exist side by side in the poem that critics have long argued whether it is essentially a pagan or a Christian work. Some insist that it is a pagan poem which Christian transcribers defaced with dogma; others contend that its pagan pronouncements are relics of a time its culture outgrew-the poetic equivalent of the human appendix. Neither view gives much credit to the poet's intentions and artistry. Is Beowulf, then, a literary fossil in which two opposing belief systems are frozen together, fascinating from the standpoint of cultural anthropology, but ultimately lacking a unified theme? Or does the poem contain a genuine synthesis of two world-views? I believe that the latter is true, and shall attempt to show how a striking pattern of handwords helped the Beowulf poet to establish that synthesis.

Principles of segmentation in the literary text. The case of the formally unsegmented text

Summary This article explores the relationship that exists between the formal and functional units of a text, and attempts to show that some strategy of text segmentation can function as a device of text progression as it enables the concatenation of new segments. Within the framework of information structuring text segmentation is motivated by the need to change ‘Discourse Topics’ (DTs). If segmentation occurs where a new DT is presented to the text, the options available for the text are either to be segmented before or after the introduction of the new discourse segment. The article focusses on text segmentation after DT mention. Though the literary text is shown to conform to norms of text segmentation it is employed in an elaborate manner for poetic purposes. Deviant as it is, the literary text obeys cognitive and communicative postulates.