Poetic Sensibility Research Articles

New poetics in China

A new study of modern Chinese poetry has been published that deserves the attention of linguists working in both the applied and theoretical fields. The focus of the book is experimental and avant-garde literature, and as such it raises questions that are different than the ones we are accustomed to considering in the field of poetics. This review essay considers proposals for understanding poetic ability and sensibility from the point of view of applications of cognitive science.

A Journey into the Night in Pursuit of Light: Abjection and Catharsis in Richard Hugo’s “Museum of Cruel Days”

The psychological dimension hidden underneath the surface of Richard Hugo’s poetry is a much neglected aspect that, in the light of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic hypotheses that explore the ‘mysterious’ mechanisms of the human psyche and their effect on language, begs for a discourse long overdue. Many of the subjects discussed by Kristeva in her essays Powers of Horror (1982), Black Sun (1987), Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) are pertinent and useful in broadening our understanding of Hugo’s poetry and add a utilitarian dimension to poetry in general as a therapeutic device or as a means to catharsis. This essay discusses the poem, “Museum of Cruel Days,” by the poet Richard Hugo through a psychoanalytic framework involving the underlying psychosomatic processes encompassed in the making of the language using being. It examines how the phenomenon of abjection and its abject permeate the poem and influence our reading as either appealing or revolting to our poetic sensibilities. Through Kristeva’s essay, Powers of Horror (1982), that serves as the theoretical framework, this paper engages with the poem’s abject imagery; its themes of violence and cruelty that speak of a poem whose emotional content is founded on fear and cries out for sympathy, for fellowship and understanding; the signs of narcissism and compulsive abjection embedded in the poem while also discussing the potential cathartic development that prevents the poem from becoming a poetic monstrosity and provides it with a utilitarian purpose.

The memory of Pringle as Prospero, or the cannibal that faked Caliban: issues of authority and representation in Thomas Pringle’s ethnographic poetry

This article argues that, with the benefit of hindsight, Thomas Pringle’s poetry demands of his twenty-first-century readers that they measure its commitment to manumission by the balance between the syllables of his ethnographic poetry and force of his advocacy for manumission. The two measures, though, necessitate interdisciplinary forages into his work, albeit that the risk of either full leverage or attenuation may result from any interdisciplinary exercise that straddles history, anthropology, and literature. This paper ascribes primacy to that risk. It proceeds to point out a trajectory of earlier over-simplistic ethnographic poetry from a white colonist that, upon reflection, gives way to the later scripts of manumission of his work. It disavows an ahistorical reading of Pringle’s poetry that imposes his anti-slavery sentiment as informing his poetry in general and ethnographic poetry in particular, and so demonstrates that Pringle’s ethnographic poetry – unlike his celebrated manumission epistolary archive – does not support a singular reading of a humanizing intention. Pringle’s poetic sensibility – however much laudable – remains at odds with his political convictions: he inaugurates a Calibanesques axis through which Southern Africans in the settler colony vacillate between ‘Othering’ silence and colonized ‘voicing’. All told, Pringle’s ethnography poetry is shown to render the indigenous subjects as Calibanesque and, by that very fact, ‘cannibalizes’ him as he devours and usurps their right to self-representation.

La musicalité de la comptine vietnamienne

Nursery rhymes involve a play on the musicality of the language, such that, for this kind of oral heritage, sound and rhythm are more important than the meaning of words. Vietnamese is a tonal language where each of the six tones is characterized by a complex interplay of sound frequencies. This musicality, intrinsic to the words, combined with prosodic constructions (caesura, rhythm…) and structural characteristics (rhyme, echo…) gives a rich musical structure that nourishes the child’s poetic sensibility while participating in its language learning and its awakening to the outside world. In the case of riddles and formulettes, the tones are creating a melodic line and their construction is reminiscent of the rules of harmony and counterpoint. In children songs and lullabies, the score and musical ornaments are often modeled on the music of the words.

Rupert Brooke’s Neo-Paganism

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) embodies the myth of the Great War but after his sudden death his war poems tended to be disapproved of. His pre war Georgian lines are also dismissed on account of their effete pestoralism and alleged escapism. It seemed as if both the critics and the audience simply failed to understand the subtext of his poems that reveals a magnificent spiritual pilgrimage undertaken by a poet in the age of anxiety. In search of the calm point of his tumultuous universe Brook varies different symbolic patterns and groups of symbols thus disclosing the lasting change of his poetic sensibility that range from purely pagan denial of urban values and the unrestrained blasphemy up to the true Christian piety. Our analysis affirms him the true modernist poet, a cosmopolitan mind, always apt to accumulate new experiences and it is certain that his work will be seen in quite a new light in the decades to come.

A Tribute to Princip: Metapoetry and Commentaries

Just after the end of the Great War Miloš Crnjanski wrote a poem dedicated to Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914. The title of the poem is “A Tribute to Princip” (“Spomen Principu”), and it was first published in Crnjanski’s early book of poetry Lyrics of Ithaca (Lirika Itake, 1919). Forty years later Crnjanski wrote a commentary on the poem, a sort of its prose paraphrase, and entitled it “On the Poem about Princip” (“Uz pesmu o Principu”); it was published in his Commentaries on Lyrics of Ithaca (Komentari uz Liriku Itake, 1959). Although by no means as significant as his famous poem “Sumatra”, and equally famous “Explanation of Sumatra”, that is considered a kind of Crnjanski’s personal poetic manifesto, as well as a poetic manifesto of Serbian modernism in general, “A Tribute to Princip” and its explanation represent an equally important testimony to Crnjanski’s poetic sensibility and his literary inspiration. The subject of the poem, the manner of poetic expression, on the one side, and the prose style of its commentary, on the other, clearly indicate what was considered by young Crnjanski the main role of the new, modern poetry he was advocating for: the break with the tradition, the rejection of the old and no longer productive poetic and national myths, and the affirmation of the new role of poetry in the everyday life. Therefore, opposing the standard interpretation of the poem, in this paper I argue that “A Tribute to Princip” is not a political poem but a “poem about poem”, which we could read as metapoetry or a poetry poem, providing that we apply the term with a little more freedom.

A STUDY OF THE CULTURAL AMBIANCE DELINEATED IN SUNITI NAMJOSHI’S SELECT POEMS IN THE LIGHT OF HER MEDITATIVE SENSIBILITY WHICH IS GIFTED WITH IRONIC PERCEPTION

This paper takes into account the cultural ambiance against which Indian women poets have kept the feminine poetic tradition and poetic sensibility vibrant and considers Indian poetry in English by women as the daring assertion of the modern Indian woman. It analyses the cultural ambiance delineated in a few of the poet’s select poems in the light of her meditative sensibility which is gifted with ironic perception.

Lillian F. Schwartz Redux: In Movement, Color and 3D Chromostereoscopy

This article examines three computer animations created by the pioneering filmmaker Lillian F. Schwartz circa 1970 that are currently viewable in 3D chromostereoscopy, specifically with ChromaDepth® 3D glasses. Reimaging these works 40 years after their creation permits a renewed formalist experience and a thematic analysis that reveals the primacy of Schwartz’s concern with depth and visual perception as part of her poetic sensibility. Excerpted interviews between the author and Lillian Schwartz are provided as an online appendix to this paper.

John Clare and Community by John Goodridge

BOOK REVIEWS 135 shadows by the close of her life, though perhaps this is simply because, as he notes, there is minimal documentation of her life after 1806. Never­ theless, with this biography Gross brings Damer and her world vividly and comprehensively to life, making a vital contribution to the history of Regency art and culture. Elizabeth Weybright City University of New York, The Graduate Center John Goodridge. John Clare and Community. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2013. Pp. vii+252. $99.99. A sketch among John Clare’s papers depicts a tombstone upon which he has written “To the Memory of CHATTERTON KEATS and BLOOM­ FIELD” (13). The image serves as a symbol of the influence of these men on Clare’s poetic sensibility and his desire to place them together for pos­ terity’s sake. Clare’s own appeal for posthumous fame took a different, lonelier form: he planned a simple memorial, stating: “I desire that no date be inserted there on (the headstone) as I wish it to live or dye with my po­ ems and other writings” (55). We see in this how, though Clare drew strength from real and imagined “brother bards,” he also saw himself as an outsider. His notion of solitude was complex, one of self-celebration and self-isolation. This book complicates the critical binary of Clare as sociable or forlorn, emphasizing the distinctive, earnest way Clare incorporated ex­ pansive, if tenuous, communities—poets, poems, songs, family members, storytellers, folk wisdom, animals—into his verse. Using various contradic­ tions in Clare’s personality and work—a desire for fame against the integ­ rity of his rural identity, for example—Goodridge creates a flexible, nondeterministic lens with which to read Clare’s work. The lives of other poets helped Clare to shape a posture as an artist in a shrewd, profit-driven world, such that Goodridge views Thomas Chatterton’s biography, for example, as having likely been as important to Clare as his poems. Clare first learned of Thomas Chatterton when his mother gave him a souvenir handkerchieffrom Deeping May Fair with the poet’s face embroidered on it, alongside some lines of “Resignation.” In the portrait, which the young Clare must have studied, perhaps he glimpsed all he would share with the troubled poet: self-doubt, suicidal thoughts, anxiety ofinfluence, and a keen sense ofthe double-edged sword ofsuccess. Clare and Chatterton even shared a predilection for “literary de­ ceptions”: Clare passed off several of his poems in 1825 as authored by a group of famous seventeenth century poets. His joyful irreverence in these SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) 136 BOOK REVIEWS moments, which required lying to his patrons, may have been a direct in­ heritance from Chatterton: Clare had read Cary’s biography which empha­ sized the poet’s cynicism around the patronage system. Though Clare and Keats never met, communicating only through shared acquaintances and letters, Goodridge traces with great care the sense of kinship between them. Clare was predictably outraged at the critical re­ sponse memorialized in “Adonais”; in a letter to Taylor upon learning of Keats’s death, he decries them as foxes that bite in the dark (76). The in­ fluence ofKeats’s poems also receives substantial treatment in this book; in particular, the manifestation ofKeats’s philosophical and aesthetic questions in Clare’s rural, community-oriented verse. As Clare writes admiringly of Keats’s 1820 volume, “he launches on the sea without compass ... if those cursd critics could be shoved out of fashion . . . but he is a child of nature warm and wild” (69). Ofadditional interest is Goodridge’s account ofthree hitherto unpublished letters written by Clare which reference Keats, in­ cluding Clare’s response to Keats’s death (twice: the first was a false alarm). Goodridge also traces Clare’s engagement with eighteenth-century poets Gray, Pomfret, and Cunningham in opposition to the prevailing view that Clare’s early work is simply a clumsy imitation of eighteenth-century texts, an awkward phase to be cast off. The productive, subversive way Clare en­ gages these works demonstrates that far from treating the works as “holy writ,” they were “as a new door to open a paintbox full...

Music in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Unheard Melodies

Music in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Unheard Melodies

Music in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Unheard Melodies

Music in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Unheard Melodies

워드워즈와 키츠, 그리고 낭만주의 예이츠 읽기

Crossway (1889), the first collection of Yeats’s poems, is based on Romantic poetics, in particular that of Blake and Shelley, which reflects his sympathy and reaction to such poets. His early poetry, a little distanced from Nature, is an art for art work, a result of the young Yeats’s pure and unique poetic sensibility. By making comparisons between Yeats, Wordsworth, Keats, the paper is to show the rare sensibility of Yeats, as well as the characteristics in Wordsworth and Keats that is slighted by scholars, who stress nature-man harmony in the poets.

All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay from Lincoln to Roosevelt. By JohnTaliaferro. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. 673 pp.

All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay from to Roosevelt. By John Taliaferro. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. 673 pp. It is not clear whether or not the young John Hay, an office secretary busy with envelopes and ink working for Abraham Lincoln, longed for any greater political future. Fortune, though, would open a way for his unique brand of quiet ambition. His career in the White House would span a stunning 66 years and 10 presidents; he was a witness to great transformations of American life, from the Civil War to the Gilded Age to the United States' emergence as a superpower. He was acquainted with such luminaries as Mark Twain and Henry Adams, and contributed his own insights on the times as the author of several novels and hundreds of poems. Yet he was also instrumental in shaping those times with two monumental foreign policy achievements: the treaty ending the Spanish-American War and the Open Door Policy on China, both major contributions to the United States' role in geopolitics. His various roles in civil service were perhaps more critical to American foreign policy than any president of his day. John Taliaferro's new book, All the Great Prizes, is a lengthy but engaging record of the life and times of America's most illustrious civil servant. It is a beautifully researched account of the man, both professionally and personally, his formative experiences, and how his decisions shaped so much of modern America. Taliaferro describes the book as an attempt to allow [Hay] to speak for himself, in order that the brilliance of his life, the example of his life, and, what is more, the sheer poignancy of his life might at last be considered in full (13). Hay might have lived out his life in obscurity working at his uncle's law firm in Illinois were it not for his early acquaintance with Abraham Lincoln. The newly elected president invited Hay into his small nucleus of secretaries, living in close quarters baring every seam of their natures, as war and the affairs of the nation enveloped them, and they in turn endeavored to steer the nation's course (p. 40). It was no doubt that closeness to and a familiarity with his rhetorical power that enabled Hay to respond to the president's mail during the most intense days of the Civil War. Hay became a keen observer of the president's character--his dark melancholy, his poetic sense, and his devastating humor. But above all, Hay was a student of Lincoln's greatness. In Lincoln, he found a standard for all subsequent presidents, not to mention a view of the republic that served as Hay's political creed. Over Hay's public life, Lincoln would always be watching (p. 108). Though Hay's ties to opened every door in Washington, he always chose the State Department. He had many important experiences in European politics, which revealed his own country's uniqueness in the world. He was alarmed at the declining authority of the Austrian aristocracy, where tension between cosmopolitan liberal democracy and the paranoid upper classes indicated a dark future for Europe. Already he observed the desperation of monarchies and foresaw the volatility of rampant nationalism when backed by modern weaponry, Taliaferro writes. [T]he more he saw of the Old World's way of governance, the more he appreciated his own country's methods (p. 119). The possibility of an American century lay ahead. Leaders of the new generation, men like Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, were certainly up to that task. …

The Narrow Road to the Western Isles — If Keats had journeyed with Bashō

The Japanese poet we know by the pen name Bashō was born in 1644 in Iga Ueno, a castle town in an old province south-east of Kyōto. By an almost perfectly tidy coincidence, he died one hundred and one years before John Keats was born in London in 1795. Although to all appearances their worlds and their lives could not have been more different, their poetic sensibilities seem to have been strikingly similar. This is not an original observation: it was, for instance, at the heart of an essay by James Kirkup in The Keats-Shelley Review in 1996 (vol. 10, pp. 65–75). But in what follows I try to give the observation a new twist by likening Keats and Bashō as travellers — travellers, that is, both in the literal and the metaphorical sense.

Reliquaries and a Poetic Sensibility

Reliquaries are forms for remembrance, but they are also enactments, processes of just that remembering. In this piece, through five exemplar poems, I examine “reliquary” as noun and “reliquary” as verb.

The Most Archaic Ocean: Beyond the Bosphorus and the Strait of Sicily

From immemorial time, many Tyrrhenian places of ancient Sicily and Italy were identified (also by the local people) with the main stages of the return of Ulysses (Cyclopes, Aeolus, Circe, etc.). Some Hellenistic critics (for example Aristarchus and Polybius) assumed that it was from the various ancient and pre-Homeric myths that Homer drew inspiration, in the same way that he did with the myth of the Trojan War, which certainly occurred before him. Thus, the voyage of Ulysses, after his losing the course because of the storm at Cape Malea, had to be located in those sites. But how can one explain the fact that Homer places the voyage from Circe to the Hades over the Ocean? Is it only a pseudogeographic poetic touch, aimed to magnify the exploit? Crates of Mallus did not think so: in his opinion, only some of the numerous adventures had taken place in the Tyrrhenian Sea, whereas Homer had purposefully placed some other exactly on the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the ancient name given to the Straits of Gibraltar). Whichever of the two models one chooses, the route of Ulysses seems to be completely unlikely, both from the point of view of objective reality and from the point of view of poetic imagination (if one desires to retain at least some plausibility). It appears to be a senseless coming and going that takes the shape of some sort of a labyrinth. Furthermore, the navigation times suggested by the text do not accord at all (even approximately) with the distances among the real sites. For this reason, Eratosthenes held that, from Cape Malea onwards, Ulysses switched from the real world to that of fantasy, or better still to the world of some narrative fable that does not heed geography at all. The modern critics are inclined to agree with him and this thesis is nowadays the most popular one. Yet, a very serious objection can be raised here: the myth and the epos (since the most archaic era), are strictly linked to the geography and the topography as well – they are radically refractory to a narrative fable that totally contradicts the then realities of time and space. Why should Ulysses plunge from Cape Malea onwards straight into the Neverland kingdom? If we combine Odyssey’s data with those we can reconstruct for the earliest form of the Argonautic saga (taking also into account the chronology of the Greek western colonization), then we get the solution that neither the ancient nor the modern critics have guessed correctly: up to around the middle of the 8th century B.C., the Greeks thought the Ocean to flow just after the Sicily Channel, essentially coinciding with the so-called Tyrrhenian Sea, still completely unknown at that time. This new perspective can well justify the objective disorder of Ulysses’ route. Above all, it also bears a deeper poetic sense: the Hero had the chance to know and to experience not only some far and exotic countries in general terms (as it can happen to any off-course sailor), but he also met the very boundaries of the surfacing lands and the rushing waters which encircle the terrestrial disc, bordering the external cosmic abyss. Ulysses came back home alive. He was able to tell the stories about the lands where no human being could ever sail. This borderline that geographically is clearly located marks at the same time the insurmountable chasm between the physical and the meta-physical world.

Searching for Mr. Stevens: Poems by Ken Lauter (review)

Reviewed by: Searching for Mr. Stevens: Poems by Ken Lauter James Finnegan Searching for Mr. Stevens: Poems. By Ken Lauter. Xlibris, 2011. To be a poet (maker/creator) one must be audacious. Perhaps the most audacious project is to try to get inside the head of a major artist, especially such an outsized and commanding maker, and mind, as the poet Wallace Stevens. Ken Lauter has crafted a series of poems that together become an idiosyncratic portrait of Wallace Stevens. Idiosyncratic, because as much as these poems are about Stevens, and as much as they rely on Stevens’ poetry, letters, and biography, it’s Lauter’s particular vision of Stevens that pervades the poems. Both in a psychological and in a poetic sense, many of the poems literally try to speak Stevens’ mind. Others explore and elaborate various incidents from Stevens’ life and times. Clearly, Lauter knows his Stevens inside and out. And wisely he has entitled his collection Searching for Mr. Stevens. This helps undercut the inevitable [End Page 251] questions that arise when we read a poem speculating upon what Stevens might have thought or felt on a particular occasion during his life. Here Lauter not only searches but finds Marianne Moore and Stevens strolling together in New York City: down streets of glitter, stink, horns, smoke, smiles, curses, and cops. Did people passing by them wonder if they were a circus act? He was huge, a suave bear in a Panama hat and bow tie and she was bird-like—not a sparrow but a falcon—in a long, black coat and jaunty tri-corner hat. . . . (from: “Mr. Stevens & Miss Moore Take a Stroll”) I think of Stevens as more of a fedora man myself, and in poems like these, Lauter certainly takes his share of imaginative liberties. But if I can’t always believe Lauter’s vision, I don’t have trouble reading or rolling along, having some fun inhabiting Lauter’s inventive jaunts. The poems are most successful when Lauter makes (or approximates) a Stevensian poem to tell us about Stevens: He thinks of the thick stack of files of surety claims on his office desk waiting for him, oblivious to the gray of the sky, ignorant of the blue, high above the gray, and the always-burning eye high above the blue. He thinks all this thinking is a waste of time but knows time is all he has—and it isn’t gray. (from: “Mr. Stevens Overcast”) In many of his poems, Lauter quotes Stevens’ poetry and letters. These materials certainly lend authority to the poet or poem’s speaker, and being Stevens’ words they do good service within the poem. Direct quotes are italicized by convention, which is fine. But many of the quotes are also marked with an asterisk or a hashtag in the text, and then footnoted below. I understand the need to credit these quotes, but the alternative of adding a few notes at the end of the collection, citing specific sources within a particular poem, would have been less intrusive than running into an “*” or “#” within the text. To write one or two poems with Stevens in mind perhaps expresses one’s passion. To write a dozen borders on obsession. To write a book’s worth of poems based on Stevens may be the act of a fanatic. But for any fan of Stevens’ [End Page 252] poetry this collection will be a joy—partly because the poems touch on so many aspects of Stevens’ works and biography, partly because Lauter’s writing is direct and often deft. In the following poem, for instance, in which he imagines a love-like bond between Stevens and his much younger niece Jane, Lauter ends quite aptly with understatement and undertones: When these two finally speak, it is in slow, patient, syllables. Let us leave them there, an old man and a young woman sitting at peace in Elizabeth Park, awaiting December’s revisions. (from: “Wallace and Jane in Elizabeth Park”) Wallace Stevens is Lauter’s poetic paramour, and he has not failed to speak fully of that relationship, which he has so liberally imagined. Lauter writes clearly to and of...

Listen to Nice

In describing Humphrey Jennings' wartime documentary propaganda film, Listen to Britain (1942), a film with an overtly poetic sensibility and dominantly musical soundtrack, John Corner asserts that ‘through listening to Britain, we are enabled to properly look at it’ (2002: 306). This idea of sound leading our attention to the images has underpinned much of the collaborative work between composer and sound designer, Geoffrey Cox, and documentary filmmaker, Keith Marley. It is in this context that the article will analyse an extract of A Film About Nice (Marley and Cox 2010), a contemporary re-imagining of Jean Vigo's silent documentary, À propos de Nice (1930). Reference will be made throughout to the historical context, and the filmic and theoretical influences that have informed the way music and creative sound design have been used to place emphasis on hearing a place, as much as seeing it.

The Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelites Florence S. Boos (bio) The year brought more books, articles, edited letters and essay collections on the Pre-Raphaelites than can fit into a synopsis of conventional length. In what follows I will consider two volumes which offer synthetic studies of Pre-Raphaelitism as a whole, a variety of essays and book chapters focused on Christina Rossetti, Dante Rossetti and William Morris, and a comprehensive edition of the letters of Jane Morris. The Pre-Raphaelites and Rossettis The Germ: Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interactive Aesthetics (Peter Lang) by Paola Spinozzi and Elisa Bizzotto approaches Pre-Raphaelitism as a whole through the narrower lens of its originary periodical, a perspective which enables its authors to reconsider the ways in which the youthful Pre-Raphaelites' Victorian romanticism shocked their contemporaries and influenced their successors. Spinozzi and Bizzotto give careful attention to the views of less-often-cited figures such as William Michael Rossetti, Frederick Stephens, Walter Deverell, John Orchard, John Tupper, and Thomas Woolner, and in particular to their conviction that practicing artists in several media should be articulate critical intellectuals, who explained and interpreted the principles of their work in ways which influenced later periodicals such as The Century Guild, The Hobby Horse, and The Yellow Book. [End Page 402] In the book's first chapter, entitled "Origins and Propagations," the authors lay out The Germ's history, founders, brief four-issue run, initially favorable reception, and emphasis on manifestos as well as essays on art. Ignoring for the most part William Holman Hunt's claim that he and John Everett Millais were the originators of a Ruskin-influenced critique of Old Masters and advocacy of more direct and authentic views of the visual arts, they focus on the uneasy coexistence of the Rossettis' attempts to ally progressive calls for "truth to nature" with romantic medievalism and mildly "gothic" psychological states. In chapter two, "A Biographical Perspective on the Germ," the authors offer brief assessments of the contributions and perspectives of each contributor, and bring into focus such figures as Robert Campbell and William Bell Scott. The section on "Ellen Alleyn," for example, argues that Christina Rossetti permitted her elder brother to provide her with a pen-name and select from among her poems those he thought fit for inclusion, but took a keen if sometimes critical interest in the project and offered advice and commentary from a distance. In chapter three, "Aesthetic Prose in The Germ: Moulding a Literary Mode," Spinozzi and Bizzotto argue that the periodical modeled forms of self-referential aesthetic prose in which "statements acquire full significance only through a specific formal structure" (p. 100). Rossetti's "Hand and Soul," for example, modeled the psychological romance and "imaginary portrait," and essays by John Tupper, John Orchard, John Frederick Stephens, and Coventry Patmore considered the roles of critics, principles of close observation, and the interrelations of verbal, visual, and other arts. In chapter four, "Germinal Poetical Imageries: From Pre-Raphaelitism to the Fin de Siècle and Modernism," the authors offer critical commentary on each of the periodical's poetic selections by John Orchard, Thomas Woolner, Walter Deverell, James Collinson, Robert Campbell, Coventry Patmore, and the three Rossettis. Arguing that these writers anticipated later Pre-Raphaelite poetic sensibilities, they endeavor to find common strands in their use of symbolism and portrayals of natural details, romantic relationships, and transcendence, and clarify ways in which common literary models and tacit common principles anticipated subsequent paradigms (Rossetti's "Sonnets for Pictures" later "picture poems," for example). In chapter five, "The Germ as the Prototype of the Artist's Magazine," the authors conjecture that fine art/literature magazines such as The Savoy (1896), The Idler (1892-98), and the English Review (1908-37) were influenced by the example of the Germ and adopted some of its "constitutive aspects," among them "the Romantic legacy, the presence of charismatic personalities, interart [End Page 403] osmosis, aspiration to the Gesamtkunstwerk, [and] ambivalent relationship with the public and the market" (p. 199). They also give consideration to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and assert that in a comparison, "The Germ wins" in importance (p. 196), a debatable assertion in the light...

Georges Bataille’s Classical Modernism

Following decades of association with a style gauchi , the work of Georges Bataille has emerged as exemplar of le classique moderne . What do the markers of classical language and style signify in the context of his radically innovative fictional works? Bataille’s contention is that modern writing remains in the thrall of past emotions that are inseparable from the modes of expression it inherits. By invoking ancien régime artifice, classical tournures de-naturalize the erotic provocations of the text while relaying an emotive charge. As this article shows, the disconcerting effect of classical references must also be located within a broader paradigm of techniques of interruption. Such disruptions include cries – the expression of an archaic poetic sensibility identified here in the continuum forged between Racinian moments of L’Expérience intérieure and the avant-garde ambition for a universal language.