Poetic Sequence Research Articles

The Lost Poetic Sequence of the Priest Manzei

The Lost Poetic Sequence of the Priest Manzei

An Interview with Galway Kinnell

Born in 1927, Galway Kinnell shares with most poets of his generation -James Wright and W. S. Merwin were born in the same year, Philip Levine in 1928-two significant patterns: an early mastery and rejection of strict poetic forms, and a growing tendency to direct the imagination inward, linking a vision of the world to an understanding of the self. In The Poetics of the Physical World (1971), Kinnell defends the first pattern: Fixed form, in our time anyway, seems to bring you to a place where someone has been before. In a poem, you wish to reach a new place. And this requires pure wandering-that rare condition when you have no external guides at all, only your own, inner impulse to go, or to turn, or to stand still. A second essay, Poetry, Personality, and Death (1971), offers Kinnell's version of the other pattern: for poetry to avoid the selfabsorbed, closed ego of our time, the poet must seek to get beyond his personality by going through it. He proposes that we move toward a poetry in which the poet seeks an inner liberation by going so deeply into himself-into the worst of himself as well as the best-that he suddenly finds he is everyone. In the conversation that follows, Song of Myself is a constant Kinnell touchstone, and it is Whitman's embrace of the world around him which powers Kinnell's poetry as well. Both are poets of empathy; both insist, with ringing conviction, I am the man, I suffered, I was there. Kinnell's first volume, What a Kingdom It Was (1960), is capped by an extended poetic sequence which reaches out to the persons and things of New York's Avenue C. As in Whitman's catalogues, The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New

Modern British and American Poetic Sequences

We are faced with a remarkable and curious phenomenon. My subject is the modern poetic sequence in Britain and the United States over the past few decades. But I cannot take the obvious for granted. I cannot assume general knowledge of the nature or importance of this genre, which is nothing less than the outstanding formal development in our poetry for over a century. Examples abound-I despair of being able to touch on enough of them in so short a space. A litany of outstanding poets since Whitman will show that most have been makers of sequences. This form of the long poem-intimate, fragmented, self-analytical, open, emotionally volatile-meets the needs of modern sensibility, even when the poet aspires to tragic scope. Yet because of the stultifying critical and scholarly situation, it remains one of those fine things that need much laboring but are largely ignored by our supposed theorists. The modern sequence is a grouping of mainly lyric poems and passages, rarely uniform in pattern, tending to interact as an organic whole. It usually includes narrative and dramatic elements, and ratiocinative ones as well; but its ordering is finally lyrical, a succession of affects-that is, of units of phrasing that generate specific intensities of feeling and awareness. Because of these separate radiating centers, the sequence meets Poe's significantly modern objection to the idea of a long poem: namely, that it is impossible because of the limited duration of any one surge of emotional energy. The sequence is openly improvisational and tentative in structure-a condition, in fact, of all art, but often papered over by the conventions of set forms. From this standpoint, every successful long work of the past is, after all, a sequence beneath its surface continuity and uniformity. Tennyson's superb Maud: A Monodrama is a clear example. Its hero's psychic state gives the poet his excuse to juxtapose varied states of naked feeling, with minimal need to justify

Roy Andrew Miller (ed. and tr.): ‘The footprints of the Buddha’: an eighth-century Old Japanese poetic sequence. (American Oriental Series, Vol. 58.) x, 185 pp. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1975. [9¾ × 8½ inches.

Roy Andrew Miller (ed. and tr.): ‘The footprints of the Buddha’: an eighth-century Old Japanese poetic sequence. (American Oriental Series, Vol. 58.) x, 185 pp. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1975. [9¾ × 8½ inches.

Francis Webb’s ‘Sturt and the Vultures’ : A Note on Sources

Francis Webb's interest in Australian explorers has been a continuing one and he has found material tor his major poetic sequences in their characters and in their careers. In 1947 the Bulletin printed his 'Leichhardt Pantomime'; this was subsequently revised and published as the title poem of the volume Leichhardt in Theatre in 1952. 'Eyre All Alone' followed in 1961. That his interest hasnot diminished is apparent from his poem 'Sturt and the Vultures', which appear ed in the last issue of Meanjin Quarterly for 1970.

Fujiwara Teika's "Superior Poems of Our Time": A Thirteenth-Century Poetic Treatise and Sequence

Fujiwara Teika's "Superior Poems of Our Time": A Thirteenth-Century Poetic Treatise and Sequence

Fujiwara Teika's Supreme Poems of Our Times. A Thirteenth-Century Poetic Treatise and Sequence.

Fujiwara Teika's Supreme Poems of Our Times. A Thirteenth-Century Poetic Treatise and Sequence.

Drama and Doctrine in Gods Determinations

C RITICAL OPINION has tended to link Edward Taylor with the Umorality tradition on the basis of patent similarities between medieval drama and Gods Determinations Touching His Elect.' Nathalia Wright has accordingly interpreted the poem as a recast morality play, but more recently Norman Grabo has noted Taylor's de-emphasis of drama and suggested that the poetic sequence may represent an effort at literary meditation.2 This alternative reading points to the possibility that the poem may derive, not from the morality tradition itself, but from its antecedent-the homiletic tradition of the Middle Ages. Prior to the emergence of the drama, the pulpit made dynamic use of allegorical themes which were later incorporated into miracle and morality plays and have thus become associated with the medieval stage. One such feature was the antic Devil, who enlivened countless sermons long before he became a dramatis persona. And, as the persistence of satanic imagery indicates, the homiletic tradition died hard.3 Those modes of expression used by Taylor to portray man's Fall and Redemption have precedents in the writings of sixteenthand seventeenth-century clergymen who, even in that age of nascent rationalism, still drew on their medieval heritage in an appeal to popular taste. At the same time that Gods Determinations reflects the influence of Du Bartas and Spenser and his early imitators, it bears a closer resemblance to the literature of religious instruction in the method and language of its doctrinal presentation. As Grabo points out, dialogue was a device common to devotional manuals designed for the layman. Inevitably, then, the homiletic and morality traditions

The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Shakespeare, the man and his poetic sequence, is analyzed for clues to his character. The controversial interpretations of homosexuality are thoroughly reviewed.