Poetic Predecessors Research Articles

The Poetics of Plenitude in Peter Gizzi’s Recent Poetry

This article continues my earlier exploration of an aesthetic, poetic, and cognitive phenomenon that I am calling “the poetics of plenitude.” Here, I trace this poetics in Peter Gizzi’s more recent volumes, with special attention given to his 2015 collection Archeophonics. In my discussion, I show how the term “plenitude,” which I distinguish against a number of other uses of this concept, evolves in Gizzi’s poems toward an emergence of a subjectivity. Such emergence is triggered within the space of a poem working as a device that modulates a specifically understood excess of externality. The externality engaged by Gizzi’s poetry is a kind of pragmatist composite that links the sense of the material presence of the world with the larger body of the earlier poetic descriptions of this presence. Since such amalgamation of matter with its existent poetic description entails contact with the poetic predecessors of the newly emerging poet, Gizzi’s variety of the poetics of plenitude also shows a new understanding of what Harold Bloom conceptualized when he argued that poetry is a response to the “anxiety of influence.”

Reading Anna Frajlich's Latest Volume of Poetry

Reading Anna Frajlich's Latest Volume of Poetry

Negritude’s Problem with History

This essay argues for the recuperation of the writings of Léonard Sainville, a founding member of Negritude, and the incorporation of his work into the movement’s canon. Sainville was a historian and novelist whose work mitigates Negritude’s undertheorization of the concept of history and critiques European historiographical methods. Whereas writers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor present Negritude, paradoxically, as both establishing continuity between the modernist present and the African past and marking a historical break from their poetic predecessors, Sainville argues that Pan-Africanism cannot form a sufficient basis for Negritude without sustained analysis of the cultural and historical evolution of both continental African and diasporic communities. Sainville’s historiographic intervention blurs the distinction between anti- and postcolonial thought, suggesting that the latter’s critiques of history do not follow necessarily from the failure of postcolonial history to follow the trajectory laid out for it by narratives of anticolonial overcoming.

Anthropocentrism and the Soul of Hopkins’s Ecopoetics

Anthropocentrism and the Soul of Hopkins’s Ecopoetics Julia F. Saville (bio) Today, anthropocentrism—that “[c]oncern for ourselves at the expense of concern for the non-human world”—is considered by many ecologists to be one of the fundamental causes of environmental degradation that, left unaddressed, threatens potential disaster.1 As Andrew Dobson puts it, to “de-throne human interests as the centerpiece of political life and extend ethical concern deep into the natural world,” we need a “radically changed state of consciousness,” one that refuses exploitative practices characteristic of “human-instrumental” thinking and cultivates a sense of self dependent on and enriched by “the widest possible identification with the non-human world” (pp. 31, 38). The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, vibrant with celebrations of flora and fauna, kingfishers and skylarks, the “low lull-off” of the ocean and “cordial air” of the woods, seems calculated to inspire precisely such a change of consciousness, such a sense of selves dependent on and enriched by nonhuman being for which ecocritics such as Dobson call.2 What is more, the value that his poetry attributes to nonhuman nature is not to be understood as merely aesthetic; on the contrary, while he certainly encourages a greater appreciation of natural beauty and marshals a finely wrought poetic practice to make his case, the crucial importance of his ecopoetics lies in the substantive ethical value it attributes to nonhuman being. Paradoxically, this is also because the health of the human soul is one of his leading concerns. Christianity, like the Platonism that preceded it and the Cartesianism that followed, is often perceived as authorizing anthropocentrism on the basis of humanity’s claim to a soul (psuchē) or mind (psyche).3 Yet as I will show in this essay, the human soul in Hopkins’s conception of it, far from endorsing human dominance over the natural world, is immersed in natural rhythms and energy systems, responsive to their alterity and inscrutability, and depends on natural phenomena for its well-being. For Hopkins’s poetry reflects a virtue ethics in which an Aristotelian Catholic’s view of soul as the shaping energy or instress of the body merges with a belief in God’s immanence in all being, the sanctity of which is therefore unquestionable. Unlike the Hegelian “beautiful soul” derided by Timothy Morton for its ethical quiescence, hypocrisy, and [End Page 129] lack of critical self-awareness,4 Hopkins’s soul bears moral obligations not simply to respect but to celebrate, revere, care for, and defend the natural world—obligations that, if not fulfilled, indict the ethical worth of human being in itself. Although Hopkins, like many of his poetic predecessors, was deeply concerned about the spiritual well-being of Victorian Britain, the conditions he faced were somewhat different from those addressed by earlier soul-poets. In Victorian Soul-Talk, I have argued that in the decades between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1884, British poets such as the Brownings, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, along with their American interlocutor, Walt Whitman, used a vibrant poetic soul-talk to assert their particular sense of moral responsibility for the spiritual well-being of the body politic.5 Each with a particular understanding of soul, its provenance and constitution, these poets exploited the rich aesthetic potential of language to create poetry with striking sensory appeal, encouraging readers to experience the complex effects of political decisions on public spirit.6 This, however, was before the changing political landscape and the new science of psychology transformed “soul” and a relatively homogeneous “soul politic” into the private, individualized “psyche” and a vastly increased and diversified voting public. In relation to these poets, Hopkins is an outlier. His conception of soul—aside from its immersion in Ignatian, Scotist, and Augustinian scholasticism—owed much to his study of the classics at 1860s Oxford, where curricular reforms were contributing to an intellectual climate challenging to metaphysics. Under the leadership of Benjamin Jowett, theories of soul found in, for example, Plato and Aristotle were stimulating newly liberating civic and aesthetic debates advanced by writers such as Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Oscar Wilde.7 Furthermore, in an intellectual climate...

The Transformative Poetics of Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets

This article examines the recurring formal traits, themes, and political concerns motivating Wanda Coleman’s 100-poem American Sonnets sequence. I argue that through her transformations of the sonnet form and her attention to current social issues, Coleman helps to define a new movement in experimental black poetics. Her work responds directly to poetic predecessors and contemporary writers while amassing a wide range of compositional strategies that both acknowledge her roots in the Black Arts Movement and mark out new creative ground.

Literary Past and Present in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

This essay considers Charlotte Smith’s treatment of the River Arun in her Elegiac Sonnets , focusing on how the river functions as a metaphor for literary influence and dramatizes her engagement with a range of poetic predecessors and contemporaries. In later editions of her sonnets, the sea replaces the river in importance and inscribes a rather different poetic outlook. In tracing the shift between river and sea, this essay offers a new way of situating and reading Smith’s sonnets as poems frequently celebrated for their innovation. This essay argues that the poems are nonetheless also deeply engaged with the literary past.

Mortal Diamond by Durs Grünbein

70 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews call to “Let the syntax crack!” and “voice” becomes “an old tangle of synapse.” The poem “Calendars” is “a poem in chants for four voices”: Demeter, Persephone, Hades, and a Greek chorus. Like all the other mythic poems in this collection, “Calendars” works for contemporary readers, and the language is, for lack of a better word, gorgeous, engorged with color and imagery. This is not to say that Finch’s poems don’t engage with the present or with contemporary issues—there are poems on incest and abortion, love poems, nature poems, poems of women’s friendship, and an elegy for the poet’s father: “Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly / past the long edge of the last human shore, / there are deep windows the waves haven’t opened, / where night is reflected through decades of glass. / There is the nursery, there is the nanny, / there are my father’s unreachable eyes / turned towards the window. Is the child uneasy? / His is the death that is circling the stars.” “My father’s unreachable eyes” is a fine example of Finch’s facility with emotionally powerful imagery, and the stanza displays her graceful use of meter. Finch’s poetry, plays, and performance pieces, infused with the spirit of thousands of poetic predecessors , remind us that poetry and theater were once wedded and that, in poetry, emotional and intellectual meanings are inextricable from their material properties: voice, word, sound, form, and rhythm. Everyone should have a copy of Annie Finch’s Spells on their shelf, for those hours when patterned rhythm and sound seem the best approximation of the soul’s speaking. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish Oklahoma City University Durs Grünbein. Mortal Diamond. Michael Eskin, tr. New York. Upper West Side Philosophers. 2013. isbn 9781935830078 Durs Grünbein’s philosophical poetics in Mortal Diamond come to us in English from Upper West Side Philosophers, a publisher that proclaims to focus on “philosophical thinking steeped in lived life.” This small book of dense poems is framed as a “spiritual journey through the labyrinthine cosmos of the human soul,” regarding the “paradoxes of creatureliness.” Through Grünbein’s treatise on what it means to be alive as related to other living organisms, the divine, and past philosophers, he questions what he can really proclaim to be true, and what part of that truth he can question. Sandwiched between the translator ’s preface and notes are thirty poems that vary between one and six pages of small type (a book you can carry along in a purse or lunch bag), which on any given page will challenge the intellect as much as the aesthetic of verse. Divided into five sections, tropes of extended metaphor , allusions to mythology, and internal rhyme thread the individual parts into one work. Many of the poems center around theology and various musings on God and his existence , including those of Descartes, Pascal, Augustine, Malebranche, and Dante, often through dialogue with these thinkers of the past. Alongside a tradition of religion, Grünbein follows the histories of geometry, biology, and astrology. He focuses particularly on Pascal and his perceptions of God: “like a pulsar, he is light years away from us, yet, with the regularity of a pulse, he sends palpable, hot and cold waves through the human heart” (“The Indian of Spirit: Bagatelles on the Life of the Philosopher Pascal”). These poems claim that we find God in the scientific explanations of what we can see and sense as humans, an interesting take on bringing heaven to earth. Though addressing the cosmic divine, Grünbein focuses in on the microscopic—actually seeing things through a microscope—details of tiny creatures and the technical language of science and mathematics. He relates philosophy to looking at animals and landscapes: “The land adorns itself with cones of white: the trees / That with his wintry hand the mighty arrangeur / Refined / . . . A folio of sheets of white, which he alone inscribes / . . . A brand new dawn of pure geometry / . . . snow helps to understand perception” (“The Snows of Today,” the first canto from Grünbein’s novel in verse, On Snow or Descartes in Germany). The speakers of these poems will not...

Wissen ist Macht!

AbstractWith his poems, which comprise more than 40.000 hexametric verses and cover a wide range of secular topics, the Neapolitan Jesuit Nicolò Partenio Giannettasio (1648-1715) represents a very distinct form of neo-Latin didactic poetry: on the one hand, Giannettasio’s poems refer to the literary models of classical antiquity such as Vergil’s Georgics and contemporary Jesuit didactic poetry such as René Rapin’s Hortorum libri. Hence, the poet from Naples claims for himself to be the natural heir of his ›Neapolitan‹ poetic predecessors Vergil, Pontano and Sannazaro. On the other hand, Giannettasio’s poetry can be regarded as a very specific instrument used to spread Jesuit doctrine. The secular topics of his poems perfectly match the scientific interests of the Societas Iesu, and at the end of the sixteenth century, it is exactly this specific form of poetry that grants its success. As the addressees of his didactic poems are highly educated aristocrats, Giannettasio tries to emulate their literary taste and arranges the scientific material in a way that resembles the baroque Kunstkammer rather than a (plain) scientific treatise. Nevertheless, Giannettasio never loses sight of the principles of the Jesuit order. All in all, Giannettasio’s didactic poems provide a unique example for the combination of scientific material, classical models, and Jesuit doctrine and for spreading a local literary microculture by means of the worldwide Jesuit network.

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

What the Thrush Said to T. S. Eliot

Although birds and birdsongs have inspired myriad poems for millennia, the thrush has generated a special fascination for English and American poets over the last two centuries. This little-known fact is borne out by a cabal of well-known poets who have written poems in pursuit of the elusive thrush and its ethereal song. In most of these poems, the thrush seems to know something the speaker doesn't, and its song taunts the speaker and reader alike with the possibility of hidden meaning beyond the reach of words. Many examples could be adduced, such as Thomas Hardy's “The Darkling Thrush,” Siegfried Sassoon's “Thrushes”, William Carlos Williams's “To a Wood Thrush”, Robert Frost's “Come In” and others. This fascination did not escape T. S. Eliot, and he dramatically incorporates thrush songs into his two greatest poems, The Waste Land and Four Quartets. These allusions locate Eliot in a conversation between his poetic predecessors and successors, which I would argue has a bearing on both of these poems.

Negative Influence

The central illumination of Harold Bloom's theory of influence was his insistence on the negative element of literary inheritance. This aspect of Bloom's work inspired fierce resistance, a resistance whose success may have masked, for many contemporary critics, the importance of negativity in poetic traditions. The article examines Emily Dickinson's “Essential Oils—are wrung” as an instance of a poem that may be clarified by an exploration of its negative response to her poetic predecessors, in this case the tradition of Petrarchanism. It explores a similar negativity in Alvin Feinman's “Relic,” in which a swerve from Petrarchanism threatens to undermine the position of the poet himself. The article concludes with a discussion of two poems by Brenda Hillman, “Remembering Form” and “Styrofoam Cup,” which suggest ways in which Bloomian misprision, the violent misreading of the past, induces an anxiety about the survival of the poetic impulse itself.

Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose by Leslie Kurke

178 PHOENIX labeled, and accurate. One quirk that annoyed this reviewer was the insertion of lighthearted subtitles to introduce highly technical material in Chapter Five on Canonic Theory in particular. Such irrelevant phrases as “Mules, semitones, and lukewarm coffee” (233), “The sore thumb: canonic division and the octave plus fourth” (239), and “Babylonios temptare numeros” (332), the latter leading to a footnote, “With apologies to Horace (Carm. I.11.2–3),” seemed miscalculated in a text which otherwise insists on mathematical precision. One problem well out of the author’s control is the extremely tight binding (at least on the review copy), which makes accessing the text block unnecessarily difficult and cumbersome for a book so worthy of careful study. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Jon Solomon Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose. By Leslie Kurke. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. Pp. xxi, 495. Leslie Kurke finds in Aesop far more than he appears to offer on the surface. In Aesopic Conversations, the simple tales and roguish persona of the legendary fabulist become the basis for an expansion of the author’s decades-long investigations into the nature of the relationship between the sociopolitical and generic dimensions of literature.1 According to Kurke, Aesopic fables are marked as “popular” and “abject” (4) in Greek culture, providing a useful low end for her rigorous model of literary-generic hierarchy. Because the texts and traditions that comprise Aesopica are both “low” and “open, fluid, anyone’s property” (10), Kurke is able to approach Aesopica as a form of “common culture” (8) in which both elite and non-elite participate. Thus the title of this superb and original book invokes a number of different “conversations”: between the high and the low in ancient Greek culture; between the disempowered and their oppressors; between the “Aesopic” Socrates and his interlocutors; between Herodotus the logopoios and his poetic predecessors; and even the exchanges between sub-disciplines within the contemporary academy. Who would have believed that the humble Aesop could incite so much discourse? Building upon the pioneering work of Jack Winkler and Keith Hopkins,2 Kurke was initially drawn to Aesopica in the hopes that somewhere in the motley corpus of fables, proverbs, and biographical legends associated with Aesop she might excavate remnants of the “elusive quarry” (2) of Greek popular culture. In the rich and admirably reflective “Introduction” (1–49), Kurke announces her intention to read the Lives of Aesop and other Aesopica “symptomatically for ideologies and for cultural contestation” (25), in 1 For example, L. Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca 1991); ead., “The Politics of Æbrosœnh in Archaic Greece,” CA 11 (1992) 90–121; ead., “Crisis and Decorum in Sixth-Century Lesbos: Reading Alkaios Otherwise,” QUCC n.s. 47.2 (1994) 67–92; ead., Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Ancient Greece (Princeton 1999); ead., “The Strangeness of ‘Song Culture’: Archaic Greek Poetry,” in O. Taplin (ed.), Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (Oxford 2000) 58–87. 2 J. J. Winkler, Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1985); K. Hopkins, “Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery,” Past and Present 138 (1993) 3–27. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 179 order to shed light on the interaction of popular and high cultural forms in ancient Greece, and ultimately on the origins of Greek prose writing. This approach naturally divides the book into two equal parts: In Part I, “Competitive Wisdom and Popular Culture” (51–237), the focus is on the figure of Aesop as a non-philosophical sage figure who stands both within and outside of the elite wisdom tradition; in Part II, “Aesop and the Invention of Greek Prose” (241–431), Kurke argues that Aesop stood as an important (if deeply problematic) model for early and formative experiments in Greek prose writing. Most of the arguments in Part I involve Kurke’s groundbreaking and sophisticated approach to the text(s) of the Life of Aesop. While there have been a number of valuable studies of the Life of Aesop in recent decades, few...

Conversations with Martín Gambarotta (May - September, 2010)

Martín Gambarotta is one of the most renowned poets of the poetic generation of the '90s in Argentina. During a period of five months we held an electronic conversation via email. In our exchange we explored themes relating to the cultural scene of the '90s in Buenos Aires; Gambarotta's relationship with various poetic predecessors; the political possibilities arising from what has been considered his return to ‘realism’; and various ‘objectivist’ literary strategies, focusing specifically on his texts Punctum (1996) and Seudo (2000).

In the Footprints of Aeschylus: Recognition, Allusion, and Metapoetics in Euripides

It is well known that Euripides responds to Aeschylus in several of his plays, most notably in Electra . In this article I suggest a new reading of the recognition scene in Euripides' Electra , comparing also the recognition sequence in Iphigenia among the Taurians , which alludes to the same Aeschylean model. I argue that through their allusions to Aeschylus, both scenes can be read as metapoetic reflections on the constraints and conventions of dramatic composition. The issue, therefore, is not one of criticism of or homage to Aeschylus (or Homer), as scholars have generally held. Rather I argue that Euripides presents his audience with an invitation to recognize and appreciate the poetic challenges of composing a dramatic performance, through metaphor, word-play and metapoetic suggestions. The poetic self-consciousness present in both scenes underlines the poet's awareness that he is following in the footsteps of mighty poetic predecessors.

Martial and the City of Rome

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the representation of the city of Rome in Martial's Epigrams, and specifically, his references to urban topography. The city is an insistent and vivid presence in Martial's Epigrams to a degree unparalleled in Roman poetry. He fashions a Rome that is more relentlessly sordid, irregular and jagged in texture, and overtly dissonant in its juxtapositions than the literary cities of his poetic predecessors. This new urban emphasis is not only a game of literary one-upmanship. Martial's urban poetics takes shape in the context of renewed attention to the city and monumental building under the Flavians.

A Multilingual Modernist: Avraham Shlonsky between Hebrew and Yiddish

From the early years of his long and prolific writing career, Hebrew poet Avraham Shlonsky continually wrote and rewrote himself into the early twentieth-century cultural scene as consummate artist and ideologue. Affiliating his artistic persona with a new Zionist language, ideology, and land, Shlonsky challenged the styles and themes of his Hebrew poetic predecessors. At the same time, he experimented with the modernist forms and aesthetics that held sway in European culture in the first decades of the twentieth century, mixing aspects of Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Imaginism to create his own idiosyncratic Hebrew modernism. At the center of his modernist poetry and manifestoes is a chameleon-like lyrical “I” that dominates the text as it unfolds.Shlonsky brilliantly used a new literary Hebrew to create himself as a revolutionary modernist poet. Like many of his fellow staunch Zionists, he argued passionately that Hebrew should be the language of the emerging national culture and that Yiddish, the language of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, should be abandoned to the Diaspora. But, strangely enough, Shlonsky's early poetry and manifestoes are infused with Yiddish influences and inflections, an implicit poetics that stands in opposition to his explicit pronouncements. Over the course of his long career, Shlonsky and his critics largely erased from his canonical image the Yiddish resonances and rhythms that surface in his early poetry, as well as the affiliations with contemporary Yiddish modernisms.In this article, I analyze the contradictions that emerge in Shlonsky's deft self-inventions during the 1920s in the context of contemporary modernist trends and the emerging Hebrew literary center in Palestine. I read his flamboyant authorial images as a particular kind of self-fashioning in and in-between languages. Recovering the traces of Yiddish in Shlonsky's early poetic self-inventions in his poetry, manifestos, and criticism, I argue, reveals the complex negotiations of language and identity that have been largely overlooked both in Shlonsky's canonical image and Hebrew literary history. Almost despite himself, Shlonsky demonstrates a multilingualism that exists within the national canon.

“We Want Anti-models”: John Berryman's Eliotic Inheritance

In his study Modern Poetry after Modernism, James Longenbach criticizes the lingering critical perception of the postmodernist development in poetry as a “breakthrough” narrative that rebelled against the traditionalism and impersonality of Eliotic modernism. As he points out, postmodern poets in fact confronted Eliot via a series of intricate and ambivalent interactive processes that are not confinable within this “breakthrough” narrative. In this paper, I use Longenbach's argument as a starting point for a re-examination of Eliot's influence on the major poetry of one of his more apparently vocal opponents: John Berryman. Berryman's attitude towards Eliot was radically ambivalent, based on an idea that poetic predecessors must become “anti-models,” figures whom the contemporary poet can only incorporate through productive gestures of reaction against them. In the light of this idea, I show that in Berryman's major works, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs, Eliot exerts a far stronger and more significant influence than has hitherto been recognized. My discussion of Berryman's participation in a postwar “Eliotic inheritance” allows for readings of these two poets that are not dependent upon crude oppositions between the “impersonal” and the “personal”. And as a consequence it opens the way for richer and more nuanced readings of Berryman's work as well as for invigorating reassessments of Eliot's own verse and his influence on twentieth-century poetry.

Poetic Allusion in Plato’s 'Timaeus' and 'Phaedrus'

Plato’s deft and playful artistry in composing allusions can be seen in two very different dialogues, Timaeus and Phaedrus. In these works Plato alludes to poetry and signals his use of allusion: to Hesiod in Timaeus and to Sappho and Anacreon in Phaedrus. Stephen Hinds begins Allusion and Intertext by quoting Christopher Ricks’ perceptive insight on allusion: ‘it is characteristic of art to find energy and delight in an enacting of that which it is saying’. 1 Hinds’ important account of Roman poetry demonstrates how: ‘alluding poets exert themselves to draw attention to the fact that they are alluding, and to reflect upon the nature of their allusive activity.’ 2 Plato’s art shares this ‘energy and delight’ as it offers teasing disclosure of its allusive activities. In Timaeus the epic poetry of Hesiod’s Theogony becomes the model that Plato emulates in his own account of the creation of the universe. In Phaedrus the lyric poetry of Sappho and Anacreon provides important starting points for Plato’s exploration of madness and self-control in the soul of the lover. The texts point to this creative engagement with poetry by presenting two pertinent images for allusion: in Timaeus poetic tradition is imaged as genealogy, while in Phaedrus poetic influence is imaged as flowing streams. 3 In each case the image for allusive activity, positioned in the early parts of the dialogue, not only reflects the content of the poetic genres referenced but also gives notice of material to follow in the main body of the work. In the prologue of Timaeus the transmission of stories about origins is directly linked with family history and genealogy (21a-d). The emphasis on lineage recalls the content of Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods and anticipates the family line that will for Plato generate the birth of the universe. Similarly, in Phaedrus the streams of poetic influence early in the dialogue (235c) recall the flowing waters of eroticized meadows in lyric and anticipate the ‘stream of beauty’ that will in the later myth flow into the lover’s soul. In this way Plato’s echoes of his poetic predecessors become thematic within his own compositions.

The drowned and the saved: shipwrecks and thecursusof Latin love elegy

Throughout the corpus of Latin love elegy, the imaginary tombs envisaged by the elegists for their ownpersonaeand for other inhabitants of their poetic world display a striking tendency to take on the characteristic attributes and personalities of those interred within. The final resting-place of Propertius, for instance, that self-proclaimed acolyte of Callimachean miniaturism and exclusivity, is to be sequestered from the degrading attentions of the passing populace (Prop. 3.16.25–30) and crowned with the poet's laurel (2.13.33–4). What remains of his meagre form will rest in a ‘tiny little urn’ (paruula testa, 2.13.32) beneath a monument declaring the lover's slavery to a single passion (2.13.35–6), and the grave is to be attended, or so he hopes, by the object of that passion herself (3.16.23–4), or occasionally (though he is not so confident of this) by his patron Maecenas (2.1.71–8). Likewise the memorial designed by Ovid for Corinna's pet parrot - animitatrix alesendowed with the most distinctive foibles of the elegiac tradition - inAmores2.6, comprising a burial moundpro corpore magnus(2.6.59) topped with a tombstone described asexiguus(‘tiny’, 2.6.60; cf. Prop. 2.1.72, 2.13.33), exhibits an elegiac emphasis worthy of the parrot's human counterparts among Ovid's poetic predecessors.

Marsyas's Howl: The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid'sMetamorphosesand Zbigniew Herbert's “Apollo and Marsyas”

Research Article| March 01 2001 Marsyas's Howl: The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert's “Apollo and Marsyas” JOANNA NIŻYŃSKA JOANNA NIŻYŃSKA Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2001) 53 (2): 151–169. https://doi.org/10.1215/-53-2-151 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation JOANNA NIŻYŃSKA; Marsyas's Howl: The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert's “Apollo and Marsyas”. Comparative Literature 1 March 2001; 53 (2): 151–169. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-53-2-151 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.