Poetic Tropes Research Articles

Reflections on a Bridge and Its Waters: Fleeting Access at Jazirat b. ʿUmar / Cizre / ʿAin Diwar = Reflections on a Bridge and Its Waters: Fleeting Access at Jazirat b. ʿUmar / Cizre / ʿAin Diwar

AbstractWhether for medieval or modern audiences, the Zangid bridge at Jazirat b. ʿUmar / Cizre / ʿAin Diwar has been integrally linked to its waters. Historically, reflections of its dome-like arch, astrological reliefs, and Kufic calligraphy shimmered on them in shifting combinations. The bridge and its waters thereby together expressed the widespread poetic trope of the earth as the mirror of the heavens, the causal link medieval audiences believed existed between terrestrial and celestial realms, and the highly elusive nature of earthly access to heavenly influences. In the modern world, the same waters define the troubled state border between Syria and Turkey. As a result, scholarly access to the bridge has also been highly elusive, making it particularly vulnerable to theft, and endangering our access to the past. The bridge ultimately exemplifies both the sophistication of medieval relationships between art and nature, and the inescapable ways the present impedes historical inquiry.

Contraindre le chaos à devenir forme: le motif de la descente aux enfers dans Et les chiens se taisaient d’Aimé Césaire

In this paper, I argue that the persistent historical trauma of colonialism leads to a crisis akin to the descent to the underworld (or katabasis) in Aime Cesaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient, in which we may discern the deep patterns shaping the poetics of the author. Offering a close reading of the play grounded in Edouard Glissant’s “poetics of Relation”, I argue that Cesaire’s hellish “abyss” functions productively as a poetic trope for the experience of slavery and its traumatic consequences. I also show that the “abyss” (which represents the spatio-temporal rupture engendered by the Atlantic slave trade and the experience of slavery itself) is conceived as a creative void out of which the author’s poetic aesthetic emerges. The article pays particular attention to Cesaire’s intertexts, especially Dante and the Divine Comedy. Glissant’s theory of “Relation” is used as a guiding framework to emphasise the dialectical thrust of Cesaire’s poetic project.

JACK LYNCH (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800.

There is a lot going on in Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry studies at present and now feels like a good time to have a major essay collection to celebrate it. Historically minded formalist work is challenging the way we think about the use of poetic tropes and devices at particular points in history by particular people. The materialist turn in (especially) bibliographical studies has encouraged attention to the lives of eighteenth-century books as objects and the odd contingent forces that come together to make a printed poem look the way it does. New work in eco-criticism, genre studies, the history of science and the history of institutions is busy shaping the approaches we take to Restoration and eighteenth-century writing and the contexts we place it in. Poets (particularly female ones) who over the past 200 years have been mentioned only in passing, or in scorn, are being revisited to challenge the small canon of writers and their works enshrined by twentieth-century criticism. Editorial work is flourishing, both in the production of landmark new editions of ‘major’ poets and in more experimental projects devoted to the recuperation of miscellanies and manuscript collections.

The Language of Space Compressed Down to a Point

Irina Surat examines the poetry written during Osip Mandelstam’s two years of exile in Voronezh, finding that its precise evocations of space provide the terms that can be used to analyze the poems. This helps Mandelstam to address exile as a personal experience and a poetic trope, as well as to assert imaginatively his connections with the wider world—both in Soviet space and farther afield. Geography (taken through the filter of Dante’s Inferno, etc.) expresses the poetic connections that support his internal freedom, moving (as Surat puts it) from real space into an open space of imagination.

Creative Ontologies and the Infinite Task of Language in Levinas’s and Rosenzweig’s Notions of Poetic Expression

On the final page of Reality and its Shadow , Emmanuel Levinas states that the task of philosophical interpretation is to become conscious of the creative event, an event that eludes cognition during the very act of creation itself. While it sounds like Levinas demands an impossible task from the philosopher, I will show how this knowledge is possible by understanding the expressive aspect of language and speech that is different from the meanings they aim to convey. Through revealing the ethical possibilities of expressive language, the paper will develop Levinas’s interpretation of Shai Agnon’s poetry, whose work illustrates an ethical rupturing in being’s creative unfolding. Levinas writes in Proper Names that Agnon is an ethical poet who is not bewitched by passive illusions, but rather whose use of language and poetic tropes express a world of shared, cultural, and religious memories to develop the “creature” that is being. Agnon’s poetry will be used as an example to illuminate how echoes of Rosenzweig’s concept of creation is developed in Levinas’s own work on poetic language.

Rethinking the Cartesian subject in Latin America and Spain: decolonial theory and María Zambrano's philosophy

In this article, I argue that although María Zambrano's philosophy does not engage directly with decolonization as a historical process, her concept of “la razón poética” shares a similar concern with that expressed by recent decolonial theorists, regarding delinking subjectivity from an epistemology of power grounded in rationalist thought. Reading Zambrano's understanding of poetic language in tension with various strands of contemporary decolonial thought, such as Walter Mignolo's focus on the locus of enunciation as central to a Western production of a geopolitics of knowledge, or Aníbal Quijano's interest in a subject–object distinction that sustains a rationalist coloniality of power, the article explores the consequences of thinking about Zambrano's work as similarly invested in “epistemic delinking”. Within this context, Zambrano's focus on how metaphoric language relates to felt and experiential effects of power on individuals and communities that transcend place acquires new meaning. Through the poetic tropes of voids, secrets and metaphors, Zambrano broadens the seemingly transparent logic of the cogito ergo sum into a notion of self and community that includes affect and relationality with others and which may, at times, be viewed not only as what Alberto Moreiras calls “infrapolitical”, but also as decolonizing reason from within. Yet, as the article concludes, reading these thinkers’ works together in this way also reveals the discursive and material limitations of their intellectual projects.

Écfrase da Vila de Plínio na Túscia (Plínio o Jovem, Epístola 5.6)

Na epístola 5.6, uma das mais longas do autor, endereçada a Domício Apolinar, Plínio faz a descrição de sua vila na Túscia, por meio da qual procura mostrar ao destinatário que a propriedade não é insalubre, mas muito salutar. Neste breve artigo, antes de apresentar a tradução anotada da epístola em português, aponto como Plínio deliberadamente agencia a écfrase, primeiro como ingrediente da enargia, que é tropo retórico, e depois como tropo poético, isto é, como ingrediente mais característico de poemas épicos heroicos – afamado pelas descrições do escudo de Aquiles (Ilíada 18.468–613) e do escudo de Eneias (Eneida 8.617–718), ambas as quais o autor menciona. A passagem da condição retórica para a condição poética corresponde não apenas à mudança do escopo da descrição – que de persuadir (mouere) passa a deleitar (placere) – mas também a transformação de um argumento persuasivo em ornamento deleitável. As passagens acarretam outrossim certo elevamento, mesmo momentâneo (justamente no interregno de uma digressão, que enfim toda écfrase épica é) do epistológrafo prosador à potencial condição de poeta épico.

Poetry and Sociality in a Global Frame

Poetry and Sociality in a Global Frame Walt Hunter (bio) Dowdy, Michael. 2013. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. $30.00 sc. 296 pp. Furani, Khaled. 2012. Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $55.00 hc. 312 pp. A formidable hermeticism has long held sway over Anglophone poetry criticism. While criticism of other literary genres expands its grasp, most notably into new sociological approaches to literature, knowledge of the tropes and schemes of poetry serves as a border check for those interested in poetic criticism, slowing contemporary poetry’s reception, inhibiting pedagogy, and operating in general like a canon of revealed truths. Generally speaking, to read poetry means to learn the history of poetic devices and to recognize the various appearances (or absences) of this history in an individual poem: why a line break works the way it does, why a metaphor appears where it does. But these claims about poetic design do not only represent a neutral language specific to literary study or a convenient mechanism for distinguishing between traditional and avant-garde strands of poetry. By attributing a private and individual, rather than global and material, foundation to the aesthetics of poetry, such claims also prevent poetry from being recognized as a social form. As a result, canonical notions of line, verse, and enjambment are theorized as though poetry developed and continues to develop in monastic seclusion from the political economies and emergent precarities of modern global capitalism. [End Page 129] No sustained analysis exists in which the history of poetry and poetics is reread in the light of the history of globalization. Books on Anglophone poetry in particular have been cautious in adopting a postcolonial, global, or transnational critical perspective and, in general, complacent in upholding the immutable value of a small set of formal devices and traditions. Within this tradition, however, there are critics who are moving toward a global and socially attuned poetics. Jahan Ramazani’s The Hybrid Muse (2001) and A Transnational Poetics (2009) link poetic tropes of metaphor and figures of irony with theories and themes of hybridity, migration, and exile in postcolonial Anglophone poetry. After Ramazani, the Jamaican poets Claude McKay and Louise Bennett can no longer be treated as marginal, neither to postcolonial studies nor to poetry, while the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott, who are already the subjects of a voluminous critical corpus, appear newly relevant. Focusing on the late nineteenth century, Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) calls attention to the processes by which a variety of poetic genres had been “lyricized” into a single, dominant genre, at the same time that it incites new histories of poetic subgenres, genealogies of American poetry, and compelling defenses of lyric as a collective voice (Costello 2012) or the “performance of an event” (Culler 2009, 887). Meanwhile, Stephen Burt’s many accessible reviews of contemporary poets bypass altogether the retrenched arguments for conceptual and lyric forms. The cultivation of a catholic taste for multiple, often discrepant styles in poetry, rather than buttressing a single framework of value, makes Burt a welcome voice in the wake of Language and post-Language scuffles over the politics of poetic form and political identity. Most recently, the poetics of precarious life under neoliberal conditions has been the object of attention by a scattered group of leftist poets and thinkers, including Anne Boyer (2014), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), Jasper Bernes (2013), Christopher Nealon (2011), Joshua Clover and Keston Sutherland (2013), Franco Berardi (2012), Judith Butler (2013), Chris Chen (2013), and Rob Halpern (2013). If we place this work alongside emergent, innovative work on post-war Anglophone, Russian, and Nigerian poetry by critics as diverse as Jennifer Ashton (2013), Marijeta Bozovic (2014), and Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (2013), it becomes immediately apparent that the entire field of poetry and poetics has taken on a new urgency and a pluralism of method. There is no reason why more work on poetry cannot wager the ambition, strength of argument, accessibility, and cross-disciplinary reach of groundbreaking books on globalization and culture such...

The Transgenic Imagination

The Transgenic Imagination Megan Fernandes (bio) This essay examines how transgenic paradigms of recombination and mutation have influenced contemporary lyrical poetry. These paradigms offer poetic strategies that highlight a growing uncertainty about the future of biodiversity and the curious anticipation of the evolutionary unknown. The central poetic question becomes one of survival. Can the transgenic survive? How has the transgenic become a symbol for the unnatural, the inorganic, the monstrous? Is a transgenic population, and therefore an unnatural population, a vision of the future? And if so, how will the human fit into such vision? For a discourse that has historically equated poetry with the human, this signals a new future that expands the parameters of poetry’s engagement with biopolitical formations on account of science’s continuing renegotiations with human bodies and human consciousness. Transgenic Poetics In this essay, I focus on what I call transgenic poetics, examining how molecular culture has shaped contemporary poetry. In the past ten years, theories from the molecular sciences developed by scholars such as Colin Milburn (“molecular erotics”i) and Nikolas Rose (“the molecularization of vitality”ii) have given us a foundation to investigate an emerging transgenic paradigm based on the evolutionary potential of mutation. The transgenic imagination has transformed the way we conceive of poetry’s engagement with subjectivity by borrowing a complex nonhuman agency from a scientific culture centered around customization and mutation. I make two arguments here about transgenic poetics. The first is that the transgenic imagination has morphed away from disciplinary boundaries within medicine and agricultural policy and is reorienting our aesthetic categories in light of debates about artistic freedom, pleasure, and comfort. This shift in how we understand the transgenic underpins certain feminist and queer materialist critiques of the ways that new understandings of scientific matter transgress and exceed the biological body. It is not coincidental that scholars invested in marginal identity politics now consider the care, ethics, and ontologies of objects, matter, and animals as worthy of serious inquiry.iii The new wave of scientific materialist criticism has claimed an interest in exploring non-identitarian agency that nevertheless remains deeply rooted in a feminist and queer ethics of critical empathy and care. Secondly, I explore how contemporary poetry by Matthea Harvey and Eleni Sikélianòs has co-opted recombinant discourses from transgenic culture by examining the phenomena of “crossing” and “surrogacy,” two ways of imagining genetic taboos that often render unpredictable results. Crossing and surrogacy become poetic tropes for thinking about the hybridity of different scientific forms of matter (as well as their origins and reproduction), and the central poetic question becomes one of survival. Can the transgenic survive? How has the transgenic become a symbol for the unnatural, the inorganic, the monstrous? Is a transgenic population, and therefore an unnatural population, a vision of the future? And if so, how will the human fit into such vision? My argument addresses two examples of contemporary poetry collections of poetry, Harvey’s Modern Life (2007) and Sikélianòs’s Body Clock (2008), that are committed to the lyrical examination of transgenic culture. My goal is not to define the transgenic instrumentally as a pheno- or genotypically altered creature with mixed genomes, but rather to consider the ways that the making of new creatures and objects allows us to focus on epistemological rather than ontological poetic practices. The transgenic mediates the lyric and emancipates poetics from mere self-expression; instead, the paradigm of mutation pushes towards a more dynamic, ecological model of distributed agency. I will examine how lyrical practices of syntax, voice, and imagery produce such a model. For the discourse that has historically equated poetry with the human, this signals a new future that expands the parameters of poetry’s engagement with biopolitical formations on account of science’s continuing renegotiations with human bodies and human consciousness. The poetic texts investigated in this paper all engage in a kind of eco/techno-materialism. They are about crossed-matter: recombined creatures, unnaturally merging landscapes, metal flesh, robot wombs—a wild gathering of dissociative idioms. Therefore, the poetic fascination with the transgenic is a fascination not only with the molecule as an agent of mutation, but also...

HEAVENLY AND EARTHLY ELEMENTS IN MANILIUS'ASTRONOMICA

Mud and stars make a strange mixture, yet here in brief is Manilius' universe, in which the rarefied heavens regulate the coarse earth. As shown by the recent spate of critical attention to theAstronomica, his various intellectual resources—astronomical calculation, mythology, astrological lore and Stoic physics—, while not forming a unified dogma, are less muddled than previously thought. He switches between these different discourses (or as it were, idioms) in pursuit of his own cherished goal: an optimistic eulogy to a fatalistic cosmos in which the study of the heavens holds supreme interest and value. Manilius' discipline is the most specialised and mathematical, as well as the most novel, of all Roman didactic poets. He therefore takes a decidedly concrete approach to the inevitable balancing act between technical content and poetic form, as is immediately obvious in his self-portrait as a priest-poetuatestending the twin altar-fires of poem and subject (carminis et rerum, 1.22). The proposal of this paper will be that the division between poetic and technical corresponds far more profoundly with Manilius' dualistic universe (mundus), in which the realm of the hierophantic astronomer and natural philosopher is the sky (caelum) and that of the mythological poet is the earth (terra). Likewise, the constellations are both cosmic stars (stellae) and mythic signs (signa). Because the cosmos is a dynamic system, terrestrial inconstancy—violence, mortality and mess of all kinds—interferes with the absolute constancy of the celestial clockwork. The paradigm for such interference is catasterism, the translation of something mortal into stars. It turns the constellations into duck-rabbits: from one perspective they are eternal parts in the machinery of fate; from the other, vestiges of mortal beings or objects, which are often of dubious and even monstrous provenance. In this article I propose that Manilius' fundamental view is that the stars represent order and the earth chaos, a conviction partly expressed through Stoic doctrine and partly through poetic tropes. He frequently uses the imagery of the four elements to divide the superior realm of air and fire from the inferior realm of water and earth. Significant themes contributing towards this include Gigantomachy, cosmic vapours, the planets, and the figure of the Whale (Cetus) in the Andromeda story near the close of the poem.

Global Subjects of Poetry: Power and Discourse in Poetry

To argue for the utility of comparing poetic tropes across cultures, this essay takes up French and Chinese poems (by Baudelaire and Li Bai) using tropes of wine and inebriation. A critical analysis demonstrates how the base tropes are expressed in terms of their source cultures’ power relations.

A Study of Case Studies: Some Reflections and Projections on the Narrative Structuring of Management Cases

This article explores the narrative structure of management cases. A selective sample of cases ( n = 5) which focus on the turnaround of a high profile corporation is examined. The analysis considers the notions of: thematic framing and ordering (i.e., univocality, causal chains and a ‘problem-to-solution’ flow); verisimilitude (i.e., coherence and plausibility); the use of poetic tropes (i.e., the attribution of responsibility, agency and providential significance). The common features and general characteristics revealed in both ‘conventional cases’ and ‘critical cases’ are identified and discussed. Finally, the scope for embracing and applying alternative approaches (e.g., plurivocal, fragmented and less problem-centred) is presented.

The Happy Man and the Cultural Fable of the Good Life

The Good Life, a cultural fable prominent in the imaginative artifacts of the post-war period, is fundamentally linked to material culture as an imaginative reflection upon or negotiation with contemporary historical forces. The material phenomenon condensed this fantasy of happiness is the economic expansion of the immediately postwar period. The Good Life registers and shapes the experience of prosperity, comfort, and individual material gratification. The formulation of this paradigm of bourgeois social success could be said to originate in the English eighteenth century, through the projection of certain assertions, models, images, and claims on the imagination from the past into the future. We can support an understanding and critique of The Good Life as it appears today, through an attention to the early phases of its development in the eighteenth-century poetic trope of the Happy Man. The fantasy of the Happy Man provides a first-stage version of the cultural fable of The Good Life, and this early mode of modern happiness-invention can help us understand the nature of its imaginative power, and can support our critique of the ideology behind this cultural fable going forward to our own present and future. This essay suggests that this very local but influential eighteenth-century figure structures an ongoing imaginative experience that tends to coalesce around ideologies of bourgeois prosperity, then and now.

Dead Men Running

“Dead Men Running” explores the frequency with which the dead win election in contemporary US politics and connects the results of these elections to the poetic trope prosopopoeia (granting a face and voice to the dead or inanimate). In recent decades readers of poetry have worked to show that poetry is deeply embedded within historical and political discourse. In this essay, and with specific attention to a poem by Lucille Clifton, “jasper texas 1998,” I focus on the ways political discourse relies on poetic tropes. The election of the dead to public office makes newly legible the poetic tropes, like prosopopoeia, that condition representative government, as one’s vote (one’s voice) is lent to another, even a deceased one. In this way, the election of the dead offers readers a chance to think differently the relation between poetry and politics. In other words, just as poetry is political so too is politics poetical.

The Challenges of Retranslating The Great Gatsby into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

The Challenges of Retranslating <i>The Great Gatsby</i> into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

Death in three scenes of recitation

In the discourse of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, their own death is not presented merely as a necessary means towards a desired political end. Instead, it is often invested with an intense significance that exceeds its political function. This essay proposes that literary and poetic tropes borrowed from available languages of love, revolution, and religion played a central role in this imagining of death. It argues that we cannot comprehend the sphere of the political inhabited by Bhagat Singh, Ram Prasad Bismil, and their comrades without taking seriously this literary dimension. Political action, in this sphere, in large measure depended on “reciting”—that is to say, appropriating and performing—gestures, phrases, and stances learnt from an astonishingly varied repertoire of literary texts. The essay also critically examines contemporary recitations of the work of the revolutionaries, with special attention to the discourse of the right-wing Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena on the one hand, and that of the popular film Rang de Basanti (2006) on the other. It argues that such appropriations focus only on the revolutionaries’ fidelity to the nation, while neglecting or repressing the critique of the state evident in Bhagat Singh's work, and especially in his admiration of the anarchists.

Édouard Glissant’s Legacy: Transmitting without Universals?

Édouard Glissant’s Legacy:Transmitting without Universals? François Noudelmann (bio) Translated by Celia Britton (bio) Ideas, as Montaigne remarked, belong to no one, and as soon as someone incorporates them into their thought they become theirs. Universal and shared, they circulate because human beings digest them and embody them in the sites of their own experience. But philosophy comes up against the paradox that it produces concepts which, while certainly anonymous, are nevertheless identified with their author. Édouard Glissant, known as a poet and novelist, was also engaged in a life-long philosophical reflection, which started with his studies at university and continued via the development of his personal ideas in his many theoretical writings. One of his last works, Philosophie de la Relation, offers a synthesis—both poetic and pedagogical—of these ideas, as though the author had wanted to define the scope of his conceptual innovations and preempt any future simplifications of them. Digenesis, traces, creolization, archipelago, trembling, tout-monde are terms which outline the contours of a body of thought that has been built and tested through reading and travelling. Their use today implies a reference to Glissant who has left them for us to inherit, but without presenting them as a bible for faithful or not so faithful disciples. The poetic formulation of these figures of thought, however, sets them apart from the classic concepts of philosophy. Glissant was not a poet and a philosopher but a philosopher because he was a poet: therefore, the transmission after his death of his theoretical innovations calls for a different reading. The contradictory definition of the universal, in its poetic usage, presupposes a complex fine-tuning of the ideas and their expression in the various sites of the Tout-monde. In the recurrent debate opposing the promotion of difference to universalism—which has become the obsessive antithesis of French republican culture—Glissant the poet has opened up a particular and original angle. A philosophical rather than a culturalist approach to his ideas enables us to appreciate their originality. Glissant’s theoretical legacy does not form a rationally constructed block but follows routes and byways that convey figures constantly reworked over half a century, from Soleil de la conscience right through to the final essays, from 1956 to 2011. The writing of the essays is intertwined with that of the collections of poetry and the novels, in accordance with particular moments of inspiration that produce and articulate several different modes of writing. “I write in bursts,” Glissant would say, describing these moments of coalition between literary and speculative genres. The evolution of the figures, and the abandoning of some of them, does not follow the strict rational development of a thought; they come from the places he has known, the political situations and literary transformations. Glissant brought these metamorphoses together under the heading—almost impossible to translate—of imaginaire: the perpetually changing representation of a world structured [End Page 869] by unpredictable encounters. The continuity between Le Discours antillais (1981) and L’Intraitable beauté du monde (2009) may seem obvious, but it is enriched by the multiple theoretical revolutions provided by the treatises on poetics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Does this kind of thought, created in a poetic relation to the world, count as a philosophy, in the sense in which European history has defined the term? Poetry has inspired numerous philosophical meditations in so far as it has been interpreted by others, who have conferred a speculative depth on the poetic tropes; however, those poets who have themselves proposed a reflection on the meaning of being have remained as a marginal, unidentified fringe. From Lucretius to Nietzsche, they invented ways of writing/thinking which broke with the narrowly instrumental language of rational thought. Glissant studied the philosophers of the Western tradition and refers to them regularly, notably to Hegel and Heidegger; but he nonetheless offers a radical rereading of this intellectual history. That is, he notes that the philosophy which has become dominant is based on a desire for synthesis and stability. Taking up Nietzsche’s critique, he emphasizes the extent to which its principal concepts work to repress multiplicity and movement. Sensuous diversity and the profusion of the...

The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound by Frances Dickey

Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound by Frances Dickey University of Virginia Press, 2012. 260 pages Early on in this accomplished and wide-reaching study, Frances Dickey distinguishes between the late Victorian poetic tropes of persona and portrait. But leave it to Oscar Wilde to muddle such fine distinction. Putting his best lines, as he usually did, in the mouth of one of his characters (personae),Wilde's Basil Hallward (portraitist) declares that: Every portrait that is painted with feeling is portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. (Dorian) Wilde is, of course, playing with the kind of witty reversal that was already in 1890 one of his signatures. But rhetorical or tropical reversals work only when the conventional sense is so well established it doesn't need explaining: the reversal works precisely because it summons rather than banishes truism. By 1890 this expectation that the portrait offers window into the of the sitter was already venerable tradition, one that Dickey traces back to William Cowper's ekphrastic portrait On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture (1798). In other words, Wilde was here reaffirming rather than breaking with tradition. By the time Wilde published Dorian Gray two other conceptions of the portrait were challenging the ethically comforting expectation that its real subject was metaphysical. Dickey traces both through the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His painting Bocca Baciata (1859), she asserts, inaugurated new style of flat, decorative female portraiture challenging the assumption that appearance should or reveal the sitter's soul (12). What's exciting here isn't Rossetti's recognition of artistic limit but Dickey's characterization of that conception as moral and ethical challenge: could or should. In Rossetti's hands, the portrait is a self-sufficient object of beauty, assimilating the of the sitter, to her body and both to the material artwork, emphasizing surface and formal condensation. Soon afterwards, this emphasis on surface found verbal expression in two Rossetti poems, both called The Portrait, one sonnet and the other dramatic monologue. sonnet treats the portrait as self-sufficient object of beauty (12). What happens with the dramatic monologue is more complex--and in her reading of this portrait poem Dickey implicitly suggests an important link between Rossetti's poetry and that of Robert Browning. Rossetti's dramatic monologue responds to painted portrait as an uncanny mirror in which past and present, Beloved and self mingle, undermining the traditional dualism of portraiture. Dickey considers the significance of Rossetti giving two formally distinct poems the same title, and her reasoning demonstrates the clarity of mind that marks this volume: verbal condensation of the sonnet's length restrictions and the Petrarchan conventions of itemization and self-reference push Rossetti's shorter poem toward its thing-like self-absorption. By contrast, the measure of the poet's success in dramatic monologue is to sustain the utterance and make it plausible as speech, rather than keep it within prescribed length. dramatic monologue remains constantly aware of its own status as speech act in social context, constructing self and negotiating with the expectations and beliefs of an imagined auditor. form entails not brevity and closure but messy realism and proliferating points of view. Here then, to put it another way, are the two directions that the modern portrait poem has taken away from the Romantic expectation that great portrait captures the of the sitter. …

River and Labour in Samuel Scott’s Thames Views in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Between 1745 and his death in 1772, Samuel Scott (1710–1772) completed a series of at least sixty-two paintings in oil that depict scenes of the Thames and its environs within London. This paper examines a group of these paintings depicting views of the Pool of London, of the quay, and of bridges and bridge-building, placing them in the context of discourse on the river and the Thames in the mid-eighteenth century. Scott’s works adapt the conventions of topographical painting through their distinctive concentration on the ordinary world of the river labourers, especially boatmen, sailors, porters, and customs agents, as well as their passengers and customers. The paper examines how eighteenth-century poetry, especially georgic and descriptive verse, elaborates a discourse on the virtue of labour and commerce. These poetic tropes help identify within Scott’s paintings a celebration of trade and the prosperity that it brings London, but also his recognition that the river was a mixed social space, in which the grandeur and wealth of the city was contrasted with the everyday commerce and labour of ordinary river people.

The Poetry of Contact: William Carlos Williams’ Quest for American Mode of Verse

William Carlos Williams` concept of the is pivotal in understanding his work and poetical theories. What Williams means by contact functions as an important question putting into consideration the distinct historical and cultural identity of the period. For Symbolist poets the of this world become symbols through which they strive to express abstract ideas above words. But for Williams Symbolist poetic tropes such as simile and metaphor stick to the associational or sentimental value and only blur the uniqueness and the individuality of things. He objects to the way that the trope of similarity deprives language of and presence. Instead, Williams emphasizes the Precisionist and Objectivist language that does not describe or classify the meanings of words. Williams proposes that if there is to be artist`s own in his poetry, it must be impersonal and objective. And he compels his readers to focus on the vivid gestalt of things he presents in his poems. Williams` poetical theory is not simply distinguishable from that of Symbolist poetry; but his Precisionist Objectivism serves as a stepping stone to his vision of both American identity and modernist culture. His awareness of American locality leads to his discovery that the American voice must be the foundation of American verse. For him a true American voice reflects presence and particularity that characterize the immediate cultural and historical ground on which the American stands. Williams` poetry becomes a microcosm of his culture and society in which he captures and names an identifiable relation with the moment and place where he exists. Preferring to let the actual words that he finds in his immediate environment speak for themselves, Williams only shows by silently pointing in order to present the topography of his time. In Williams` poetry every object has not simply its own locality but names the unique and particular historical context in which it is situated.