Poetic Resources Research Articles

Remembrance and Invention: Poetry and Memory in Modern Russia

oetry and memory: the expanse covered in modern Russian history by these two terms is vast indeed. The three articles collected beneath this rubric in the present issue of The Russian Review may serve us, though, as a kind of shorthand guide to the extensive territory that poetic memory has been called upon to span in the Russian literature and culture of this century-from the recuperation of ancient myths by modern poet-dramatists in Silver Age Russia to the commemoration of one great poet by another in the early years of Stalin's terror to, finally, a postwar poet's efforts to revitalize a bruised and battered native tradition by turning the untapped poetic resources of modern Anglo-American verse to distinctly Russian purposes. In each case, memory functions not only to recuperate what has been forgotten or insufficiently remembered, but to create something new in the process of swerving from the esteemed original. Tomas Venclova's elegant essay examines Silver Age transformations of the classical past in the light of modern Russian cultural mythologies. Venclova carefully roots Fedor Sologub's and Innokentii Annenskii's creative revisions of ancient Greek tragedy in their individual efforts to reshape nineteenth-century Russian cultural myths of the poet. These revisions begin, as so much else, in Pushkin, where the semantic field of statue/shade is still, mythopoetically speaking, of a piece. Building on the scholarship of Jakobson, Venclova demonstrates that Sologub's use of the myth of Protesilaus and Laodameia in Dar mudrykh pchel (The Gift of the Wise Bees) is essentially symbolist in its emphasis on shade as pure signification and absence, while Annenskii's use of the same myth in his lyric tragedy Laodamiia is the opposite-proto-acmeist in its dependence on the leitmotif of statue as an embodiment of the signifying world of art that broadens and immortalizes life.

Poetic resources: Creativity and healing

Poetic resources: Creativity and healing

Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism (review)

106Philosophy and Literature Ifwe accept that the essays are, albeit loosely, centered around one main idea, we might proceed to read the book conscientiously from beginning to end. As the reviewer, I felt compelled to do just that, but too frequently for comfort found myselfbogged down in sentences like the following, chosen almost at random : "And the subject is pure not only in its manipulatory detachment from the object but also in its distance from the realm of togetherness with other subjects, which (bereft of an epistemological status of its own) has itself become 'objectified '" (p. 23). Interestingly enough, the three essays in the volume translated from Holdheim's original German text by one of his students read rather more lucidly than the others, although they too are by no means smooth and easy reading. Thus, while some pages and sections were stimulating (notably the "chapters" on Dostoyevsky, Gide, and "Poetic estrangement"), others had me painfully entangled in the coils of serpentine sentences and paragraphs, struggling in vain to cling to die main thread of argument. "The essay," we are told (p. 30), "is the hermeneutic genre par excellence." Agreed. And the word "hermeneutic" derives from the name of the god Hermes, whose principal task was to deliver messages. It is surely the hermeneutist's responsibility to ensure that his particular message is clear and that his critical comments on this or that writer, work or literary topic shed new light, not cast deeper darkness. In my more cynical moments I sometimes wonder if aposdes of "the hermeneutic mode" might be involuntary (or perhaps voluntary?) worshippers of another Hermes: Hermes Trismegistos, the thrice-greatest, the Greek version of the Egyptian deity Thoth, god of magic or alchemy, from which comes the word "hermetic." Professor Hondheim struck me as being radier more preoccupied widi the task of bewitching and enchanting his reader with verbal alchemy, blinding him with science, real or pseudo, dian widi mat of helping him clarify his own ideas on a literary text by writing in a lively, clear, and stimulating way. Thus die ideas in his book too often seem more hermetically sealed than hermeneutically revealed. University of Canterbury, New ZealandJohn Goodliffe Heidegger and the Question ofRenaissance Humanism, by Ernesto Grassi; 103 pp. Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983, $12.00. Students of Heidegger and of Italian Renaissance humanism should not be put offby the apparently strangejuxtaposition of themes indicated by this book's title. Ernesto Grassi has been a creative and productive scholar regarding both Heidegger (with whom he studied at Freiburg) and of humanism, although because of die vagaries of translation and transatlantic reception he is probably Reviews107 best known to those who read only in English as an important commentator on Vico. The present book is a brief and clear version of theses that Grassi has developed in more detail in his many German publications. He challenges Heidegger's ambitious story ofthe history ofphilosophy, thinking part ofwhat is unthought in that brilliant but overly schematic account of the metaphysics of presence from Plato to NATO ("The Question Concerning Technology," and "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking"). Heidegger had attacked humanism and Sartrean existentialism in his 1946/47 "Letter on Humanism" (published, incidentally, by Grassi). Yet while identifying humanism — as exemplified by Hegel, Sartre, and the implicit voluntaristic metaphysics of die technological worldview — as the destiny and denouement of Western philosophy , Heidegger never mentioned Renaissance humanism. (As Grassi notes, Heidegger's view of Latin as a coarser, less profound language than Greek — or German— tells us much about the reasons for Heidegger's ignorance here.) Grassi argues two interrelated claims: (1) In Renaissance humanism's concept of poetry and metaphor as productive of the truth, one finds a significant movement of thought that does not fit Heidegger's version of philosophy's history as a continual rationalization and narrowing ofthe concept of the world; (2) Renaissance humanism suggests the possibility of a thought that is both informed by an attempt to draw on the poetic resources of language for philosophical illumination and sensitive to the radically historical character of human existence, while yet (in contrast to Heidegger...

STRUCTURE AND SYNTAX IN ASTROPHIL AND STELLA

WHEN in The Defence Sidney wrote that the poets of his day should 'exercise to know', not 'as having known' he meant, I take it, that his contemporaries had much to learn about their language and its poetic resources, and that they should write in order to discover what could and what could not be done with the materials available to them. That Sidney practised what he preached has been extensively demonstrated over the past thirty years, and he is now recognized as probably the most versatile and innovatory of the Elizabethan poets. Not apparently concerned to ground his own standing with posterity on his writings, he saw them to a great extent, I believe, as technical experiments which might be useful to contemporary and later writers. For the twentieth century, of course, the technical problems Sidney addressed are no longer topical, and it is inevitable that critical emphasis should have fallen increasingly on what he said rather than how he said it. With regard to Astrophil and Stella such matters as the critique of Petrarchism, or the complex interrelation between Sidney/Astrophil/Penelope/Stella have tended to absorb most critical attention, although of course there has been no lack of concern with the techniques he employed in handling these themes. Sidney would have considered it an impertinence for him to attempt to teach other poets what they should write. The discovery of some fine invention, whether in his own heart or elsewhere, was the business of the individual author. But the demonstration of the capabilities of a particular form, for whatever purpose, was exactly the kind of contribution to English poetry that exercise, as Sidney understood it, could properly make. By focusing attention on a very limited aspect of his work I hope to show that formal considerations had a greater importance for Sidney in Astrophil and Stella than has generally been recognized. My area of concentration is his handling of the sestet, particularly in its English form with the characteristic final couplet. The interest and variety of Sidney's sestets have often been commented on, but not in sufficient detail to reveal their full significance. While experimenting more widely with the sonnet form than any other Elizabethan poet, Sidney showed throughout his career a predilection for the final couplet; he used it in fifteen out of the eighteen sonnets in the Arcadia, in all but one of the sonnets in Certain Sonnets, and in eighty-five ' Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. K. Duncan-Jones and J. van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973), p. II2.

Garcilaso's Second Eclogue and the Literary Tradition

G ARCILASO'S second eclogue has been subject to far more analysis than praise. The complexity of its themes, oddity of its form, have made it delight of scholar and despair of critic. Since it is generally believed that this eclogue was first one written, it has been proposed that Garcilaso was still inexperienced in use of his poetic resources and not completely certain of his way.1 Many attempts have been made to explain unusual features like horse-play, polymetry, low-level language, and long narratives, all of which seem at variance with our orthodox conception of the Garcilasian eclogue.2 The present study tries to delve into literary tradition of form in order to gain a better understanding of individual quality of Garcilaso's piece. Such an approach seems almost inevitable in study of a text from a period when poets were conscious of writing within genres and conventions which were handed down to them.