Poetic Vocation Research Articles

Seamus Heaney, Zbigniew Herbert, and the Moral Imperative

Seamus Heaney, Zbigniew Herbert, and the Moral Imperative

Introduction: New Approaches to Goethe’s Lyric Poetry

Introduction: New Approaches to Goethe’s Lyric Poetry Horst Lange and Christian P. Weber This collection of articles emerged from a series of panels devoted to Goethe’s lyric poetry at the Thirty-first Conference of the German Studies Association in 2010. The organizers, including Regina Sachers, were motivated by the observation that this genre of Goethe’s writings has been surprisingly understudied in recent years. On the one hand, scholars have tended to revisit very similar questions raised by a comparatively small number of individual poems; only rarely have new contexts or innovative theoretical approaches been brought into play. On the other hand, David Wellbery’s magisterial study The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1996) has been received with such appreciation that scholars seem to have been discouraged from pursuing new directions in this area of research. Our aim was to bring together a wide variety of established and emerging Goethe scholars and take stock of the current innovative approaches to Goethe’s lyric poetry. We are hopeful that the following articles, which (with one exception) have their origin in this panel series, will open up new avenues of research and poetic insight as they examine Goethe’s lyric through various discursive lenses and from different theoretical angles. The first three contributions propose new ways of reading Goethe’s early poems that go beyond David Wellbery’s methodology and assessments. Edgar Landgraf, meeting David Wellbery on his home turf, makes a strong argument that the discursive formation of Goethe’s early poems is better understood if approached with a rigorous application of Luhmann’s systems theory. Christian Weber delineates metapoetic strategies in Goethe’s early poetry and argues that the arrangement of the “great hymns of genius” in the Erste Weimarer Gedichtsammlung constitutes a dimension of poetic meaning that cannot be captured by the common approach of reading poems as singular events. Joseph O’Neil’s reading of Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes vorstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung reviews David Wellbery’s notion of “specular romanticism.” As O’Neil argues, in this poem of his first Weimar years Goethe proclaims an alternative version of “poetic vocation” based on distinction, mediation, and judgment instead of the imagined identity between the self and the cosmos that had been suggested as characteristic of his earlier poems. Other articles gain new ground by activating new contexts. Reading Mignon’s “Kennst du das Land” both in its setting in Wilhelm Meisters [End Page 3] Lehrjahre and in the context of a theory of empathy, Fritz Breithaupt asks how this poem, despite thematizing a highly individual fate, can command universal appeal. Frauke Berndt and Claudia Maienborn draw on insights from linguistics, psychoanalysis, and rhetoric to argue that the “standard” reading of Auf dem See, which construes the “reifende Frucht” as a symbol of the maturing subject, is highly questionable; their proposed reading of the poem casts it as a “media event.” Daniel Wilson submits that the questions raised by Selige Sehnsucht are best answered by placing it in a series of Divan poems that talk about homosexuality. Benjamin Bennett argues that—in light of the “antipoetic” agenda of Faust—poetry can only relate to truth by enacting it; he carefully reads two poems (Dauer im Wechsel and Vermächtniß) to make visible the features of such an enactment. Via Goethe’s theory of science and American transcendentalism, Hannah Eldridge connects her analysis of the difficulties of comprehending the Divan poem Unbegrenzt to Stanley Cavell’s response to the problems of skepticism. And, intriguingly, starting with Unbegrenzt as well, Charlotte Lee finds that the Divan and Hegel’s speculative philosophy resonate with surprising similarities. [End Page 4] Horst Lange University of Central Arkansas Christian P. Weber Florida State University Copyright © 2013 Goethe Society of North America

Meistersänger als Beruf : The Maieutics of Poetic Vocation in “Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes . . .”

There are at least two stories to be told about Goethe's poetry According to one, power of artist (and we all know is consummate artist) grows from passions and drives that are crystallized in and expressed in art. This hermeneutics of experience produces myth of unmediated expressivity1 that is central to biographical story about (or, more recently, about Goethe.O,2 a story that nonetheless persists in different forms, on different premises, in various considerations of Goethe as a coherent unit, author with a project who produces a certain discourse.In second story about this author-person's poetry, a story told by David Wellbery in his pathbreaking study The Specular Moment, presents a recodification of intimacy (Wellbery adapts Niklas Luhmann's language of encoding and recoding here) in form of the lyric. More than poetry in usual sense,the lyric is a new discourse, and its reader is held to operate differently from reader of previous poetic discourse by an effort of projection onto speaking subject that amounts to grasp[ing], through of divination, the. subjectivity that alone gives text its coherence.3 From Erlebnis criticism to a partially Luhmann-inspired discourse analysis, from idyll to as a particular formation beginning in 1770-71, this story posits and performs decisive breaks with tradition in claiming for and itself a modernity that begins in now of subjectivity and critical subjectivity that would project former onto or into latter.In what follows, I want to tell yet a third story. My story, however brief, focuses on step in lyric-critical from empathetic projection to act of divination and challenges identity of those operations as well as Romantic paradigm that implicitly underwrites this identity. In his early Weimar period, so well after beginning of period in 1770-71,1 want to suggest, is dealing with or dealing in multiple versions of subject at same time, commonalities among which, however, constitute a specific poetic structure that challenges of divinatory criticism.In both Wellbery's story and mine, subject is not just a poetic figure but also a poietic figure, not just a first-person seer or speaker in poem but also a maker, one who engages in poiesis. While central poems in his model of Lyrik, such as Willkommen und Abschied, emphasize autonomization of poetic subject in itself, without regard to end in sense of Zweck or telos, Wellbery concludes his study with notion of poetic vocation, implying that creation follows autonomization. This link is most evident in Prometheus, in which Ich now makes people:Hier sitz ich, forme MenschenNach meinem Bilde,Ein Geschlecht das mir gleich sei,Zu leiden, weinen,Geniesen und zu freuen sichUnd dein nicht zu achtenWie ich! (FA 1:204)4The moments of autonomy, creativity, and identity are joined in Promethean self-reproduction, a neat encapsulation both of tendencies of what would become Romantic poetics and of a certain account of selfhood presented in theological terms. While former stress role of mirror, latter constitutes a set of arguments about subjectivity evidently thematized in Goethe's poem, with its interchange of ich and mein with du and dein, and highly formalized in Wellbery's study, which puts a fine Romantic point on Promethean logic of poiesis. This model evokes three essential acts: seeing, being called, and receiving. These steps form subject, who is also poet, in terms of a specifically modern, autonomous subject. While a more skeptical reading might see this as of influence on part of toward his poetic forebears, anxiety that fabricates autonomous subject simply for sake of poetic one-upmanship, Goethe's Promethean moment in fact calls such a subject performatively into poetic being in three steps. …

The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry (review)

Reviewed by: The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry Terence Diggory The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry. Ian Copestake. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Pp. 169. $75.00 (cloth). The ethics referred to in the title of Ian Copestake's provocative study can be reduced to a single principle: tell the truth. What makes this study provocative is Copestake's attempt to explore the ground of Williams's ethics in two articles of faith: first, faith in the ability of poetry to embody the truth in language; second, faith in the poet's responsibility for the risks entailed in that embodiment. Faith or belief receive more attention from Copestake than ethics, as he indicates in the titles of his opening and concluding chapters: "The Basis of Williams's Faith in Art" (which echoes the title of an essay by Williams) and "The Struggle to Believe: Williams's Poetry of Service, Work, and Self." Copestake does not shrink from the religious associations of faith and belief. In fact, he attempts to tie them directly to Williams's early upbringing in the Unitarian church, which Copestake identifies as the source of Williams's understanding of his poetic vocation. Whatever one makes of this conclusion, it is hard to deny the premise that poetry for Williams was much more than an aesthetic enterprise. As an aesthetic principle, the embodiment of truth in language can be recognized as the modernist commitment to the medium of art. Truth in this sense means being true to one's materials, recognizing their value in themselves. This is the "freedom of truth from usage" that Williams celebrated in James Joyce, as Copestake notes (79). However, while Williams rejects "usage" in the sense of past uses of language, he insists that language thus liberated is to be put to use in serving present needs. This is what Copestake means by "Williams's Poetry of Service," where the terms "serviceability" or "utility," which Copestake employs elsewhere, would express the meaning more clearly. How language is to be put to use in contemporary society is "a moral question at base," as Williams remarked of another modernist exemplar, Gertrude Stein (87). That is, it is a question of ethics, not aesthetics alone. And as a user of language in this wider context, the poet assumes ethical responsibility. "Poetry makes nothing happen," in Auden's famous declaration, but things do happen when language is used for good or ill, and that distinction presents people (including poets) with an ethical choice.1 People can use poetry to make something happen. Although the direction of Williams's ethics leads from poetry into the world, Copestake's study moves in the opposite direction, starting with three chapters focused on contexts that helped to shape Williams's poetry (Unitarianism, Pre-Raphaelite "modernizing," and Emersonian pragmatism), and then concluding with two chapters focused on the long poem Paterson. Each of the two Paterson chapters is devoted to one of the two articles of faith mentioned above—the [End Page 625] first to faith in language, the second to the poet's faith in himself. In his account of the latter, Copestake finds William's doubt frequently threatening to overwhelm faith, a dramatic situation that increases the poem's power. However, for Copestake the drama does not end in a loss of ego or defeat of self, as in previous influential readings by J. Hillis Miller or Joseph N. Riddel. The self persists through "the struggle to believe," though the form of the self that is ultimately forged in that struggle is not entirely clear in Copestake's account. A logical corollary of faith in poetry as "redeeming language" (Williams's phrase) would be to cast the poet "as a redeemer" (125), an assignment that Copestake, at times, seems willing to risk. At other times, however, Copestake criticizes such terms as "bordering on the presumptuous" and he attempts to limit the presumption to "the internal drama of the poem" (101). Copestake asserts: "That such claims can have validity outside the realm of a poet's creation seems to be denied by Williams's careful contextualization" (101). This, of course, undercuts Copestake's own claims for the...

Reaching a European Audience: Milton's Neo-Latin Poems for Charles Diodati, 1625–39

Although relatively neglected, Milton's three Latin poems for his school friend Charles Diodati are arguably amongst the most self-revelatory poems in the 1645 collection. As well as evidence of the strength of their literary friendship, each of these poems adumbrates aspects of Milton's vocational dilemma and provides an intriguing example of how Latin afforded Milton an imaginative freedom that he did not exercise when composing in English at this time. The disillusionment that clouded Milton's first impressions of Cambridge is voiced feelingly in the wittily nuanced Elegia Prima, while Elegia Sexta, for all its affable and accommodating manner, also offers serious reflections on the conditions necessary to nurture poetic creativity, and captures what seems to be a pivotal moment in Milton's understanding of his own poetic vocation. Although both these verse-epistles are directed at Diodati as their immediate recipient, they enabled Milton to engage a European audience when recitations of his Latin verses won him acclaim in the Florentine academies. The Epitaphium Damonis, written after Milton's return from Italy, laments the death of Diodati, his first “fit audience,” and celebrates the literary fellowship he had enjoyed in Florence. Separated from his school-friend by death and the Florentine literary community by the unbridgeable distance between them, the full force of his isolation found expression in a letter to Carlo Dati in which he described his feelings of inner exile.

‘Emprendiendo el camino del corazón’: the role played by memory in Rafael Alberti's Retornos de lo vivo lejano

The poems of Retornos de lo vivo lejano (1948–1956) were written during Rafael Alberti's residence in Argentina (1940–1963). Forced to leave Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War, in this celebrated collection he recalls and appraises pivotal events from his childhood, youth and adulthood. Far from simply seeking to escape from his exiled condition by retreating into nostalgia, as often argued by critics, this article contends that Alberti uses memory as an analytical tool. In the first and second chapters, he undertakes a journey of self-exploration as he meditates upon the development of his poetic vocation and commemorates his discovery of the redemptive nature of love. Finally, in the third chapter, in which he pays homage to his fellow countrymen, his preferred writers and poetry itself, he creates a set of ethical values upon which he bases his poetic identity during the long years of physical exile.

“Poets of the First Book, Writers of Promise”: Beginning in the Era of the First Book Prize

The proliferation of first book prizes for poetry reflects the increasingly professionalized academic culture in which poetry was published, written, and read during the 1950s and 1960s. This change threatened the validity of the poetic vocation by formalizing the career and thus opening poets to the charge of careerism. Zuba's essay explores the representation of poets' paths in the context of postwar debuts, which consistently evoke the career through the theme of beginning. On the one hand, this emphasis signifies a capitulation to the imperative of development that informs the university-based poetry scene. On the other, laying claim to the status of a beginner may be read as a strategy of defense, for it allows poets to present themselves as if they had yet to embark on professional careers. Interpretations of articulations of beginning in first-book poems by Sylvia Plath, Richard Howard, Robert Pack, and Donald Hall illustrate the ambivalence with which poets responded to the new conditions of poetic production. In turn, that ambivalence signals a need to reevaluate the division between mainstream and countercultural poetries that often structures critical discussion of postwar verse, for it reflects a resistance to cultural norms typically credited solely to mainstream poets' more overtly antiestablishment counterparts on the margins.

Grammar of the Uncanny

AbstractInspired by the contemporary intersection between hermeneutics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis on the one hand, and poetics on the other, this article is a study in the peculiar manifestation of strangeness that obtains within the self. It is a descriptive and autobiographical account of a disclosure that, though common, is irreducible to traditional categories of mimesis and ontology: the experience of displacement in self-consciousness and embodiment. Drawing upon insights by Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger, and in dialogue with the poetics of Jules Renard, the essay seeks to appreciate a certain grammar of ipseity that is formative of subjectivity and constitutive of the poetic vocation. Emphasis is placed on the productive quality of the “between” (Zwischen) as it obtains both geographically and internally, and the concentration potentially resulting from the “between” as one grapples to configure in language the experience of playing “host” to one’s own self.

Paris à l’improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz, and Sub-Urban Beauty

Paris à l’improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz, and Sub-Urban Beauty Eric Prieto (bio) Jacques Réda is best known as a poet of place, remarkable precisely for his interest in the unremarkable and his compelling descriptions of nondescript places, the kind that most of us traverse unseeingly in our day-to-day lives. He has also led a notable second career as a jazz critic, having written extensively on the music and its history. The relationship between these two pursuits seems to be a lopsided one: the influence of his poetic preoccupations on his jazz writing is clear and pervasive, but the influence of the music on the poetry is much less obvious and harder to characterize. And yet it played a crucial role in his development as a poet. Réda spent the early part of his career in search of his own distinctive voice and thematic territory. He found it in his somewhat eccentric approach to the evocation of place, which is most tellingly characterized by the apparent aimlessness of the flâneur, who works in what appears to be a random manner (à l’improviste), devoting himself to ephemera, and unapologetically refusing to monumentalize his subject matter. Having realized that his poetic vocation lay in this direction, but unsure precisely how to explain what made this subject matter so compelling to him, Réda found himself in need of a set of aesthetic principles—a way to explain and justify his poetic practice, if only to himself. It is, I argue, through his study of jazz that he was finally able to develop the vocabulary necessary to articulate such a set of principles and become the poet of place that we know today. In order to understand what is at stake in this endeavor, why he might deem such justifications necessary, it will be useful to consider a question from the essay/poem “Où, comment, quand, pourquoi?” [where, what, when, why] which problematizes his ongoing obsessions with flânerie, travel, and the evocation of place. Motorisée ou non, la petite monade, Que cherche-t-elle encore, avec la promenade, Qui ne soit dans ses jours déjà tout contenu?1 [Motorized or not, our little monad, What on Earth is it looking for in its excursions That is not already completely contained in its days?] [End Page 89] Every word in this passage will resonate for assiduous readers of Réda—from the question of the mode of transport (motorized or not), to the hint of alienation or isolation implied by the term “monad,” to the nuance of repetition and frustration implied by the term “encore.” But it is in the third line that the real import of the question surfaces. What, Réda asks, can he learn from his poetic peregrinations that is not already “entirely contained” in his daily life at home? The question is so striking because it seems to call into question, however playfully, the entire course of Réda’s poetic career. The problem is not one of understanding the appeal of travel or flânerie (such pastimes need no justification), but of reconciling his urge to write about his peregrinations in a way that shows an almost complete indifference to the kinds of monumental, one-of-a-kind attractions, epiphanic encounters, and lessons learned that are usually deemed to justify travel writing and urban poetry in the Baudelairian tradition. If Réda’s travels always lead him back to the banal and the quotidian, then what makes this kind of experience seem more meaningful to him than, say, solitary meditation or the domestic realities of his day-to-day existence at home? The answer, which comes at the end of the same poem, remains somewhat obscure, even potentially misleading: […] nous n’aurons été Si mouvants, si divers, que pour chercher l’unique Passage qui peut-être à la fin communique Avec ce point toujours caché sous l’horizon Dont la douce clarté n’est d’aucune saison, D’aucun soleil parmi l’herbe qu’elle illumine. (40) [If we have been So restless, so shifting, it is only to seek the singular Passage that may in the end communicate With this...

Fichte and Novalis on the Relationship between Ethics and Aesthetics

Fichte's moral [theory] contains the most correct views of morality. Morality says absolutely nothing determinate - it is conscience - a mere judge without law. Morality commands immediately, but always individually. It is decision through and through. correct idea of conscience. Laws are thoroughly opposed to morality.1 As is well known, the relationship between Fichte and the early German Romantic writer Novalis has been broadly explored in the last century and a half, though with diametrically differing conclusions. Both the extent of Fichte's influence on Novalis as well as the quality of Novalis's interpretation of Fichte have been the subjects of fierce dispute.2 Most recent work on the relationship between Novalis and Fichte has been devoted to the early notebooks, written by Novalis in the years 1795-1796 and normally referred to as the Fichte-Studien, and has considered this early work almost exclusively in its relationship to the 1794 Wissenschafislehre, and, even more narrowly, to its beginning sections.3 In this essay, I will be exploring this relationship at the extreme opposite end of Novalis's albeit very short career, focusing primarily upon the last completed section of the second part of the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen in relation to Fichte's later Jena writings, specifically the System of Ethics. This section of the novel is composed of a dialogue between the title figure, the burgeoning poet Heinrich, and an older man, introduced as Sylvester, the doctor, who, as I will demonstrate, enunciates a particular reading of the ethical views developed in the System of Ethics. This dialogue appears to be the place where Novalis attempts explicitly to come to terms with his philosophical influences, in particular, with Fichte's ethics, and to find a place for his poetic vocation in relation to it, which as I will suggest in the first half of my paper, remains problematic in Fichte's system. A close analysis of this final scene will form the second half of my essay. Sylvester passage, which fairly brims over with words such as Gewissen (conscience) and Tugend (virtue), has not been especially popular among advocates of what has been the prevailing interpretation of the early Romantics in the past few decades, as avatars of an ironic, deconstructive, and/or postmodern sensibility.4 As with any passage in Novalis, a number of possible influences come to mind, here including such figures as Hemsterhuis, Schleiermacher, and Baader. 5 Here, however, I will focus my reading of this passage on its parallels with SE, seeing the passage also as a commentary upon it. Following Beiser,6 1 will thus highlight the importance of the ethical project for Novalis and its direct relationship to his aesthetic aspirations. Fichte on Aesthetics and Ethics I thus begin with Fichte's views on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. One of the central texts in Fichte's work explicitly addressing this topic is §31 of the System of Ethics, titled The Duties of the Aesthetic Artist.7 As Hartmut Traub notes,8 this section contains a variety of ideas which can only be understood against the backdrop of Fichte's earlier writings, especially the essay written in 1795, the Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy,9 the subject of the famed dispute with Schiller, who refused to publish it in his journal. Because it appears in the System of Ethics, the fundamental question addressed by this section is the role which the fine arts have in the development of humanity toward its final goal, namely, the self-sufficiency of reason. At the beginning of the section, a certain resistance to the topic is palpable; Fichte discusses the theme if only for the sake of completeness and because such discussions must happen due to the necessities of our age.10 This latter comment is likely a reference to the claims that Schiller made in his On the Aesthetic Education of Humanity which posit the pedagogical effects of beauty as the only way to escape the dilemmas of modern society which have led, for example, to the failure of the French Revolution. …

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold Clinton Machann (bio) There were several substantial new readings of individual poems by Arnold in 2005, and I will begin with two articles on "The Scholar-Gipsy," an important new poem in Arnold's well-known1853 edition, which included a famous preface and notably excluded the poem Empedocles on Etna. Arnold intended Sohrab and Rustum, a blank-verse narrative in the Homeric tradition, to be the centerpiece of his new book. He was less satisfied with "The Scholar-Gipsy" because it did not "animate" and "enoble" readers but instead provided only a "pleasing melancholy," as he wrote his friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. Nevertheless, the poem had a special significance for him, because it was associated with Clough and their Oxford years; both Arnold and Clough [End Page 316] were familiar with the source of the scholar-gypsy legend, Joseph Glanvill's seventeenth-century book The Vanity of Dogmatizing, and the two young poets had walked together in the Cumner countryside near Oxford where the story is set. (When Arnold later wrote "Thyrsis," his elegy on Clough, he made it a companion-piece to "The Scholar-Gipsy.") Although he was not finally satisfied with the poem, Arnold was attempting to create a new version of the solitary questers who wander through his early poetry. For Arnold the myth of the scholar-gypsy stood for unity, stability, and creativity in a world of change and frustration, and this poem anticipates his notion of the "best" self, as distinct from the "ordinary" self, which he developed in his critical prose. At the same time, in spite of Arnold's earlier critical remarks about Keatsian lyricism, which he had contrasted with the classical grand style, "The Scholar-Gipsy" shows evidence of Keats's influence. According to John P. Farrell in "'The Scholar-Gipsy' and the Continuous Life of Victorian Poetry" (VP 43: 277-296), the poem does much more; he reads it as Arnold's "celebration of the continuous life of poetry." Although he acknowledges previous studies that emphasize Arnold's personal struggles and his intense awareness of his contemporary historical situation, with all its uncertainties and discontinuities, Farrell argues persuasively for an interpretation of the poem that is more positive about the history—and the future—of poetry. He accepts Harold Bloom's description of Arnold as a "derivative" poet but places it in a positive context as he shows how in "The Scholar-Gipsy" Arnold celebrates the continuity of the poetic imagination. Farrell's reading of the concluding two stanzas, much discussed by previous critics, is especially perceptive, and though he pays attention to the historical context of Arnold's work—incorporating, for example, a helpful discussion of Friedrich Schiller's distinction between naive and sentimental poets—he associates Arnold's treatment of poetry here with that of the modern poet Mark Strand in his long poem The Continuous Life (1990). This new assessment of Arnold's poetic vocation should be of interest to everyone who cares about the continuing relevance of his poetry. In "The Metamorphoses of the Scholar-Gipsy" (EIC 55: 117-135) Kazuhiko Funakawa argues that Arnold's use of his source in Glanvill is more important, and more complex, than previously recognized. Giving the full text of Glanvill's version of the scholar-gypsy story, Funakawa shows in some detail how Arnold, in quoting his source in a footnote to his poem, excised more than half of the original in order to construct his own version of the story. For Arnold, "the scholar-gipsy, who insists on waiting for the spark [from heaven], has no choice but to go back to the seventeenth century." Like Farrell, Funakawa focuses on the concluding two stanzas, but—in contrast to Farrell's idea that the poem "finally locates a life in which action is simultaneously pragmatic and symbolic"Breads the episode of the Tyrian trader as "a story [End Page 317] of the expulsion of magical science from the civilised world at the hands of the rising empirical science." In this version the "poet-speaker's quest ends in a cul-de-sac." Together these two new studies of this key poem remind us of the complexities...

Creating From Nothing: Swinburne and Baudelaire in "Ave Atque Vale"

Creating From Nothing:Swinburne and Baudelaire in “Ave Atque Vale” Thomas J. Brennan (bio) Algernon Charles Swinburne was among the earliest English critics to praise Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (1857). Writing in the Spectator for September 1862, Swinburne stresses the volume's "delight in problems": It has the languid lurid beauty of close and threatening weather—a heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hot-house scents in it; thick shadow of cloud closed about it, and fire of molten light. . . .The writer delights in problems and has a natural leaning to obscure and sorrowful things. Failure and sorrow, next to physical beauty and perfection of sound or scent, seem to have an infinite attraction for him. . . . Not the luxuries of pleasure, in their first simple form, but the sharp and cruel enjoyments of pain, the acrid relish of suffering felt or inflicted, the sides on which Nature looks unnatural, go to make up the stuff and substance of his poetry.1 The references to the embracing of suffering and physical disgust evoke the public scandal and legal action occasioned by Les Fleurs du Mal in which Baudelaire caught the tension between the horror and the ecstasy of life. What Swinburne recognizes is that the shock of these ideas derives from the clash of opposites—suffering asks us to consider the question of pleasure just as disgust asks us to consider the question of vivid sensuous awareness. Baudelaire knew that these questions persist as questions, and Swinburne is aware that delighting in them is the mark of the Frenchman's genius—"Ave Atque Vale" is farewell to the mortal Baudelaire and hail to his vibrant verse. Swinburne's elegy has received recent critical attention—most notably from Harold Bloom, Jerome McGann, and Peter Sacks.2 They follow the traditional notion of the elegy as a competitive genre, a view that does not account for Swinburne's lingering over Baudelaire—as a corpse but also as a corpus or body of work—throughout his poem. Another perspective of the poem is the Freudian connection between the instincts of pleasure and pain and of life and death. Gilles Deleuze has developed a basis for such a reading [End Page 251] in Difference and Repetition.3 By challenging us to think about death in non-materialist terms, Deleuze emphasizes that the death instinct is not opposed to the life instinct—but embedded in it as part of its potential. This emphasis on death as a potential that inheres in life provides an important but hitherto under-appreciated lens for viewing Swinburne's poem. By focusing on Swinburne's extensive allusions to Baudelaire's text, we appreciate the degree to which Swinburne repeats Baudelaire. Swinburne, however, makes these allusions not to replace the older poet but to situate him in a procession of images—now inhabiting Swinburne's mind—that will also pass away. Yopie Prins has recently shown that Swinburne's fascination with the Greek poet Sappho enables him to articulate the recurrent structure of poetic vocation: "the body of the poet is sacrificed to the body of her song, and this body is sacrificed to posterity, which recollects the scattered fragments in order to recall Sappho herself as the long-lost origin of lyric poetry."4 In a sense, my argument simply extends the circuit of Prins's. The repetition of Baudelaire's corpse in both his and Swinburne's corpus allows both poets to imagine an "afterlife" for their work in terms of future readers (p. 116). Most importantly, regardless of whose body we situate in this process, the process itself, as Prins suggests, raises the problem of subjectivity (p. 132). However, where she sees a non-naturalized rhythm—or poetic text—as the marker for the corpse, I extend this process to the position of the reader. Thought, memory, language, and sense: these faculties all exist for Deleuze only by connection with their opposites. Recognizing these same faculties operative in "Ave Atque Vale," we also perceive the most important aspect of Swinburne's legacy. The most worthwhile kinds of artistic endeavor, as products of these human faculties, resist simple conceptualization as the work of a subject even as they incite...

Strange Calling: A Theological Approach to Larkin

This essay inquires into Larkin's understanding of poetic vocation, a major theme of his work, and a fruitful starting point for an inquiry into his relationship to Christianity. He is deeply preoccupied with the question of whether his life and work should be understood as the response to a call. He often mocks this high Romantic idea, yet cannot get away from it. This open question is the key to the pathos of his work. The attempt to settle this question, to identify the source of his calling, leads to a flirtation with nihilism: vatic gloom offers the poet a suitably grand role. His pursuit of ‘undeceived’ honesty becomes a personal myth that entails a sort of anti-faith, a refusal of hope. But this is not to say that his work is essentially nihilistic, or anti-Christian. His pessimism includes a substantial interest in the idea of the Fall. From a theological point of view there is more wisdom in Larkin's gloom than in secular optimism.

Christina Rossetti's Poetic vocation

This article argues that Christina Rossetti's Christianity enabled her to overcome the restraints placed upon the Victorian woman writer and publish her poetry. It compares her to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the other pre-eminent Victorian Christian poet, to show that while he felt constrained by his faith to refrain from publication, she felt empowered by hers to enter the literary marketplace and seek a readership. Whereas Hopkins felt his Christianity demanded him to be silent and reclusive, qualities attributed to the ideal Victorian woman, Rossetti modelled herself more upon the masculine type of the Christian preacher, believing her poetry might serve to bring her readers closer to God

Christina rossetti's poetic vocation

Christina rossetti's poetic vocation

Joyce's messianism: Dante, negative existence, and the messianic self

In his study of negative existence and how it affects James Joyce's principal characters, Gian Balsamo joins the ongoing debate about the Irish writer's relationship to Dante and considers the centrality of messianism to that relationship. Finding in Dante a negative poetics that becomes a model for Joyce, Balsamo suggests that the inception and cessation of life - two occurrences that conventionally are deemed impossible to experience personally and directly - typically frame the existential experiences of Joyce's main characters. Balsamo perceives Stephen, Leopold, and Shem as messianic figures because they rebel against this convention, clustering their lives around the very events of inception and burial. Balsamo traces the engagement of each of the three characters in a negative existence immune from the rules and limitations of ordinary experience. Each struggles to express rather than exorcise the fecundity of his own mortality; each reinvents his biography as involving the pivotal transaction of one death - be it a mother's, a son's, or even that of his own body - in return for catharsis. Drawing on the writings of Giambattista Vico, Saint Augustine, Emile Durkheim, and Noam Chomsky, Balsamo challenges the current debate by identifying the messianic thread that ties together the biographies of Joyce's three characters. Faced with the fissure between history and poetic vocation, Stephen embraces the sacrificial poetry of silence. Faced with the domestic squalor provoked by the loss of his son, Leopold renews at every meal the cathartic exchange of food and semen. Faced with a destiny of death and decomposition, Shem reenacts the tradition of the medieval cycle drama, stretching his own body like a parchment on a cross and then rubricating it like a sacred manuscript.

Alexander Smith and the Bisexual Poetics of A Life-Drama

In a sense, the binary restriction on culture postures as the precultural bisexuality that sunders into heterosexual familiarity through its advent into culture. From the start, however, the binary restriction on sexuality shows clearly that culture in no way postdates the bisexuality that it purports to repress: It constitutes the matrix of intelligibility through which primary bisexuality itself becomes thinkable. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Our pulses beat together, and our beings Mixed like two voices in one perfect tune, And his the richest voice. Alexander Smith, A Life-Drama (1) MOST COMMENTATORS ON ALEXANDER SMITH'S A LIFE-DRAMA, FIRST PUBLISHED in biweekly installments in the Critic from March 1, 1852-January 15, 1853 before becoming the lead poem in Smith's debut volume of Poems (1853), (2) make two points: the poem seems to exist more for the sake of the images that constantly disrupt its narrative than for the story itself, and the narrative shifts from transgression to redemption when, abruptly, the poet Walter pledges himself at the end to union with the woman he formerly wronged and to go[ing] forth 'mong men .../... in the armour of a pure intent. / Great duties are before me and songs (Smith, p. 211). In other words, the poem culminates in chivalric masculinity and heterosexual union--compensatory assurance after earlier solecisms against form, taste, and moral decorum. Rarely do nineteenth-century reviewers or recent scholars direct attention to another feature of the text, the origin of Walter's love of image-making, and of his poetic vocation, in an intimate friendship with an unnamed male poet. His achievement of a poem, in contrast--publicly acknowledged work--is tied to a narrative of heterosexual transgression recuperated by heterosexual union. I want to suggest that the two most notable features of Smith's Life-Drama--its preoccupations with image-making and with erotic transgression--are founded on bisexual poetics, the embedding of male-male desire within an unconventional courtship narrative. I here use in the broadest sense to indicate a poet's implied principles. Bisexuality, I argue, is the medium through which Smith imagines the action or plot of his verse drama and also an authorizing principle that allows poet and poem (including its proliferating imagery) to emerge. Bisexuality, defined by its instability and unpredictable sequence of erotic objects, (3) is also associated with a distinctive world view. As Maria Pramaggiore observes, Bisexual epistemologies--ways of apprehending, organizing, and intervening in the world that refuse one-to-one correspondences between sex acts and identity, between erotic objects and sexualities, between identification and desire--acknowledge fluid desires and their continual construction and deconstruction of the desiring subject. (4) However conventionally the poem ends, the epistemology of A Life-Drama is bisexual in the terms Pramaggiore identifies. Indeed, the culmination of the closet drama's bisexual narrative in marriage and armored masculinity exemplifies Judith Butler's arguments about Freud's distinction between infantile bisexuality and subsequent ego development, a distinction that in Freud's work underwrites the interdependence of culture and gender binaries. In A Life-Drama, as in the scenario Butler identifies in her critique of Freud, (5) the very swerve into compulsory heterosexuality at the poem's end is the medium through which the poem's prior investment in bisexuality and bisexual poetics becomes legible. In this essay, accordingly, I trace the bisexual plot of the verse drama, its interweaving of same-sex desire with heterosexual romance, of effeminate men with assertively desiring women. Ultimately the poem's bisexual poetics do more than trouble gender norms, however: they enable Smith to perform Byronism and thereby to mediate a more threatening scandal, the suggestion that a great poet is not born but made by a sponsoring editor and literary critic. …

Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in 'The Dynasts' by G. Glen Wickens (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 757 Coleridge's work on symbol and allegory and through a specifically female response to the repressions of patriarchal religion that deny the validity of women's experience and bodies. Rossetti develops an active theology that insists on its accessibility and relevance to the detail of women's everyday life. Furthermore?and this the book's most significant achievement?this argument challenges the dominant view that Ros? setti's religion was based on renunciation and repression, initiated in accounts by William Michael Rossetti of his sister as 'a fountain sealed'. Rossetti's theology is, on the contrary, nothing short of a radical feminist theology, and Palazzo makes nu? merous parallels to the contemporary feminist theologians such as Mary Daly who, she argues, were prefigured by Rossetti. Such interconnections are, unfortunately, left hanging as associations and similarities rather than historical and intellectual trajectories (rather surprising in a study otherwise sensitive to the complexities of analogy). Furthermore, the contradictory attitude of Rossetti to Victorian feminism, exemplified by her famous letters to Augusta Webster refusing to support her petition for women's suffrage, is not sufficientlyunravelled. Although a strong and eloquent case is made for Rossetti's woman-centred subversions of masculinist theology, the claim that it is modern and radically feminist is not wholly convincing. The analysis of Rossetti's prose is at its best when mapping connections to contem? porary theology and culture, in particular her relationship with the Revds Dodsworth, Burrows, and Littledale, the Langham Place Circle, and her challenges and revisions to Tractarianism. The study begins with two chapters that are mostly concerned with Rossetti's poetry prior to her firstreligious prose volume, and attempts to read her emerging theology through some paradigmatic texts such as 'Goblin Market', 'The Prince's Progress', and Maude. The following chapters are exclusively devoted to a chronological and detailed study of the devotional prose. Although Palazzo at times suggests a relationship between Rossetti's aesthetics and religion, and notes her poetic reading of Scripture, the sense of Rossetti's development into a Victorian sage writer does too often lose sight of her status as a woman poet, thus sidestepping a key issue for many other commentators on Rossetti, from Virginia Woolf to Angela Leighton, who question the tensions between poetic vocation and religion. There is a missed opportunity here to develop the excellent iftruncated discussion of Rossetti's analysis of language and symbol (in Chapters 4 and 5) into a wider account of her poetic writing and especially her theological poetics. University of Glasgow Alison Chapman Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in cThe Dynasts '. By G. Glen Wickens. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xix + 255pp. $60; ?40. ISBN 0-8020-4864-1. G. Glen Wickens's aim in writing this book is 'not to restore the "great" reputation of The Dynasts, but rather to bring it up close enough to be read and appreciated within the carnival tradition' (p. xix). Bakhtin and Hardy are placed in a mutually beneficial relationship here although the benefits Hardy's last 'major' work gains from Bakhtin are fargreater than the other way around. While Wickens suggests that Bakhtin functions as an 'antidote' to previous and predominantly pessimistic read? ings of The Dynasts, Hardy's 'longest novel' challenges and supplements Bakhtin's apparent disregard forthe dangers of carnivalistic violence. Wickens's argument rests on recasting The Dynasts as 'a novel in the carnival and menippean tradition' rather than 'a failed epic or drama' (p. 217) and relocating it in the 'serio-comical' rather than the pessimistic tradition (p. xi). In addition he seeks to locate The Dynasts in the context of the monistic debate which forms the 'dialogizing background of the 758 Reviews Overworld' (p. xii). The contributions of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Huxley, Spencer, and Carlyle to the controversy surrounding 'the one and the many' join with those of lesser and previously disregarded minor luminaries such as Armitage, Ward, Tyndall, Fiske, and Drummond in such a way as to foreground the debate without effacing its controversies and contradictions. For Wickens, Bakhtin and Hardy are linked by their interest in the relationship between elite culture...

Philosophy and German Literature, 1700-1990 by Nicholas Saul (review)

266 Reviews Philosophy and German Literature, 1700-1990. Ed. by Nicholas Saul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. xii +324pp. ?47.50. ISBN0-521-66052-1 (hbk). According to the famous remark by J. K. A. Musaus, the Germans are 'das Volk der Dichter und Denker', but although many studies, as Nicholas Saul observes in his introduction to Philosophy and German Literature, iyoo-1990, have examined the interplay between German literature and philosophy, few have investigated 'the concrete dialogue of literature and philosophy in Germany, as a whole, through the history of modernity'. So the ambition of these six essays, by John A. McCarthy, John Walker, Ritchie Robertson, Russell A. Berman, Robert C. Holub, and Saul himself, is 'to reconstruct, analyse and evaluate how poets and philosophers in Germany really did interact with one another through their writings, epoch by epoch, in the modern period as a whole' (p. 2). McCarthy's opening survey, 'Philosophy and Literature in the German Enlightenment', rightly emphasizes the emergence of aesthetics in the mid-eighteenth century as a separate discipline, noting the Enlightenment's 'in? herent proclivity to sensibility' (p. 30), as reflected in the slogan (attributed here to Charles Bonnet, but also associated with Hemsterhuis and Morelly) 'je sens, done je suis' (p. 18). What McCarthy sees as a co-operation between literature and philo? sophy in the eighteenth century begins, Saul suggests in 'The Pursuit ofthe Subject: Literature as Critic and Perfecter of Philosophy 1790-1830', to break down in the epoch of Classicism and Romanticism. Saul traces the history of productive misunderstanding which is post-Kantian philosophy, and identifies Schiller and Goethe as inaugurating 'the tradition of aesthetic modernism' (p. 69). With Kleist, however, whose poetic vocation is said to be motivated by the critique of philosophy, the al? leged 'utopian aesthetic consensus' begins to decay (p. 87), so that John Walker, in 'Two Realisms: German Literature and Philosophy 1830-1890', can distinguish be? tween not just two realisms but two differentconceptions of art: as 'critique', and as 'redemption' (p. 105). Walker reads the nineteenth century as a series of struggles between realism and idealism, arguing that 'German realism no less than classicism and Romanticism is philosophically informed' (p. 146). In 1908 Karl Kraus noted satirically that Musaus's Germans were becoming 'das Volk der Richter und Henker', and in 'Modernism and the Self 1890-1924' Ritchie Robertson picks up the histor? ical narrative, focusing on such conservative modernists in Germany and Austria as Thomas Mann, Rilke, and Hofmannsthal. The main philosophical influences in this period are Schopenhauerand Nietzsche, and Robertson sees philosophy'smain legacy to literature in the conception of a self that is minimal and embattled; in the notion of the unconscious; and in a return to the body and the senses. For Gottfried Benn, of course, everything that his generation discussed and thought through had already found expression in Nietzsche, but, as Russell A. Berman shows in 'The Subjects of Community: Aspiration, Memory, Resistance 1918-1945', the relationship be? tween literature and philosophy in this period can be seen to be much more complex: 'notwithstanding a sense of growing estrangement between subject and object, Wilhelmine culture was able to maintain a superficially cohesive landscape of meaning, no matter how fraught with neo-Kantian dualities' (p. 197). Finally, in 'Coming to Terms with the Past in Postwar Literature and Philosophy' Robert C. Holub moves the story forward to the end of the 1990s: not just Adorno and Horkheimer, Jaspers, Heidegger, Habermas, Gadamer, Luhmann, but also the post-Wall perspectives of a broader intellectual kind, such as Christa Wolf, Daniel Goldhagen, Rafael Seligmann, and Esther Dischereit. As the recent remarks by Martin Walser show, however, the conclusion that 'German-speaking writers were just as preoccupied with the legacy of the Third Reich after the fall of the Wall as before' (p. 288) may be in need of urgent revision. MLRy 99.1, 2004 267 As always with multi-authored volumes, it is intriguing to note the similarities and differences among the contributors. For instance, in the case of Hegel, both Saul and Walker concentrate on the lectures on aesthetics; whereas, in the case of Nietzsche (al? ways much harder forcritics to...

Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in 'The Dynasts' by G. Glen Wickens (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 757 Coleridge's work on symbol and allegory and through a specifically female response to the repressions of patriarchal religion that deny the validity of women's experience and bodies. Rossetti develops an active theology that insists on its accessibility and relevance to the detail of women's everyday life. Furthermore?and this the book's most significant achievement?this argument challenges the dominant view that Ros? setti's religion was based on renunciation and repression, initiated in accounts by William Michael Rossetti of his sister as 'a fountain sealed'. Rossetti's theology is, on the contrary, nothing short of a radical feminist theology, and Palazzo makes nu? merous parallels to the contemporary feminist theologians such as Mary Daly who, she argues, were prefigured by Rossetti. Such interconnections are, unfortunately, left hanging as associations and similarities rather than historical and intellectual trajectories (rather surprising in a study otherwise sensitive to the complexities of analogy). Furthermore, the contradictory attitude of Rossetti to Victorian feminism, exemplified by her famous letters to Augusta Webster refusing to support her petition for women's suffrage, is not sufficientlyunravelled. Although a strong and eloquent case is made for Rossetti's woman-centred subversions of masculinist theology, the claim that it is modern and radically feminist is not wholly convincing. The analysis of Rossetti's prose is at its best when mapping connections to contem? porary theology and culture, in particular her relationship with the Revds Dodsworth, Burrows, and Littledale, the Langham Place Circle, and her challenges and revisions to Tractarianism. The study begins with two chapters that are mostly concerned with Rossetti's poetry prior to her firstreligious prose volume, and attempts to read her emerging theology through some paradigmatic texts such as 'Goblin Market', 'The Prince's Progress', and Maude. The following chapters are exclusively devoted to a chronological and detailed study of the devotional prose. Although Palazzo at times suggests a relationship between Rossetti's aesthetics and religion, and notes her poetic reading of Scripture, the sense of Rossetti's development into a Victorian sage writer does too often lose sight of her status as a woman poet, thus sidestepping a key issue for many other commentators on Rossetti, from Virginia Woolf to Angela Leighton, who question the tensions between poetic vocation and religion. There is a missed opportunity here to develop the excellent iftruncated discussion of Rossetti's analysis of language and symbol (in Chapters 4 and 5) into a wider account of her poetic writing and especially her theological poetics. University of Glasgow Alison Chapman Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in cThe Dynasts '. By G. Glen Wickens. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xix + 255pp. $60; ?40. ISBN 0-8020-4864-1. G. Glen Wickens's aim in writing this book is 'not to restore the "great" reputation of The Dynasts, but rather to bring it up close enough to be read and appreciated within the carnival tradition' (p. xix). Bakhtin and Hardy are placed in a mutually beneficial relationship here although the benefits Hardy's last 'major' work gains from Bakhtin are fargreater than the other way around. While Wickens suggests that Bakhtin functions as an 'antidote' to previous and predominantly pessimistic read? ings of The Dynasts, Hardy's 'longest novel' challenges and supplements Bakhtin's apparent disregard forthe dangers of carnivalistic violence. Wickens's argument rests on recasting The Dynasts as 'a novel in the carnival and menippean tradition' rather than 'a failed epic or drama' (p. 217) and relocating it in the 'serio-comical' rather than the pessimistic tradition (p. xi). In addition he seeks to locate The Dynasts in the context of the monistic debate which forms the 'dialogizing background of the 758 Reviews Overworld' (p. xii). The contributions of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Huxley, Spencer, and Carlyle to the controversy surrounding 'the one and the many' join with those of lesser and previously disregarded minor luminaries such as Armitage, Ward, Tyndall, Fiske, and Drummond in such a way as to foreground the debate without effacing its controversies and contradictions. For Wickens, Bakhtin and Hardy are linked by their interest in the relationship between elite culture...