Poetic Diction Research Articles

Eighteenth-Century Review Culture and the “Enormous Crimes” of Antislavery Verse

This essay charts the reception of five widely read antislavery poems—Hannah More's Slavery (1788); Edward Rushton's West-Indian Eclogues (1787); William Roscoe's The Wrongs of Africa (1787 – 88); John Jamieson's The Sorrows of Slavery (1789); and James Field Stanfield's The Guinea Voyage (1789)—in contemporary review journals. It argues that these poets’ commitment to depicting the “enormous crimes” of British slavery in poetic form clashed with reviewers’ expectations of poetic diction, imagination, and representation, a conflict that arose from what I term “literary review culture” in the period. Understanding these responses can help us reassess the history of literary criticism as it was shaped by these poems’ efforts to delineate the inhumanities of the slave trade.

Parallelisms and deviations: two fundamentals of an aesthetics of poetic diction.

Poetic diction routinely involves two complementary classes of features: (i) parallelisms, i.e. repetitive patterns (rhyme, metre, alliteration, etc.) that enhance the predictability of upcoming words, and (ii) poetic deviations that challenge standard expectations/predictions regarding regular word form and order. The present study investigated how these two prediction-modulating fundamentals of poetic diction affect the cognitive processing and aesthetic evaluation of poems, humoristic couplets and proverbs. We developed quantitative measures of these two groups of text features. Across the three text genres, higher deviation scores reduced both comprehensibility and aesthetic liking whereas higher parallelism scores enhanced these. The positive effects of parallelism are significantly stronger than the concurrent negative effects of the features of deviation. These results are in accord with the hypothesis that art reception involves an interplay of prediction errors and prediction error minimization, with the latter paving the way for processing fluency and aesthetic liking. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.

‘And You Shall Know That I am the Lord’: The Wanderer and the Book of Ezekiel

AbstractThe ruined-city motif in the Old English poem The Wanderer (lines 73–87) has long been read as a reflex of traditional Germanic diction, and as a symbol of material transience. In line with more recent biblical readings of the poem, this paper identifies a number of analogues and possible sources for both the excidio urbis image and other images of transience, in the biblical Book of Ezekiel. Among these correspondences between The Wanderer and the prophetic biblical narrative are references to scavenging animals, traditionally read as Germanic ‘beasts of battle’ when encountered in the Old English elegies. Reading this passage alongside Gregory the Great’s Homilies on Ezekiel further illuminates how the poem’s structure and changing use of tense corresponds with contemporary thought on the revelatory processes of prophecy. It is here proposed that the Old English poet has chosen to use images and devices which resonate with both biblical and traditional vernacular poetic diction.

PRESENCE AND ABSENCEAND THEIR MANIFESTATIONS IN THE ALGERIAN POETIC DISCOURSE READ IN THE POEM (LOVE FROM ALGERIA) IN FAVOR OF SALAH KHARFI

This research aims at proofing the dialectic of “presence and absence” through the study of the structure of SalihKhorafi’s poem entitled “Love from Algeria”. It unveils the semantic diversity of the poet’s writing experience and its poetical diction. Thus,this research has been studied based on the following elements: -Introduction to the poetry case. 1.Definition the term Presence and absence 2.Presence/absence of the topic 3.Presence/absence of the beloved 4.Presence/ absence of the time and the place 5.Presence / absence of the authority. -Summary of the main results

Physics and poetry revisited

In his April 2022 editorial (page 8), Charles Day opens with a quote from Paul Dirac: “The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.” As a poet with a bachelor’s in applied math, I find Dirac’s comment to be clever but misguided.Doubtless many poets would say that physics makes the simple incomprehensible. Comprehension is a function of training, and mathematical formulation remains baffling to many. Meanwhile, we should always be suspicious of the Dunning–Kruger effect when judging others’ fields as dealing with especially simple matters, particularly when we can see that we do not understand the results.Poets have diverse aims, not primarily obfuscatory. Some poets explore the limits of language, seeking to say that which is unsayable in everyday speech—a task tackled elegantly by quantum formalism in a domain for which our vernacular has not evolved. The very syntax of human language obscures fundamental understanding of the “really real world” beyond the prosaic and the mesoscale.Dirac was 13 years old when the poet Hugo Ball presented his “Dada Manifesto” (1916) in pursuit of “poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language.” Such “experimental poetry” may reveal aspects of how language functions or how the brain constructs meaning. Poetic diction may be deliberately dissociated from lyric expression to examine language distinct from confounding factors of sentiment (see, for example, the Language poets of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Bernadette Mayer).Incomprehensible? Yes, often. But it misses the mark to say that the simple has been made so. Poetry is a kind of laboratory environment where language can be brought to exhibit all sorts of odd behaviors that won’t occur in plain prose. The process may appear bizarre, and the results ambiguous. Surely a physicist can relate. Section:ChooseTop of page <<© 2023 American Institute of Physics.

Reforming Taste through Pope’s ‘celebrated moonlight scene’: Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth’s ‘A Night-Piece’

In ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815), Wordsworth condemned Pope’s ‘celebrated moonlight scene in the Iliad’. Pope’s ‘passage of descriptive poetry, which at this day finds so many and such ardent admirers’, did not impress Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, all three of whom drew specifically on this verse-paragraph of Pope’s to expose what they perceived to be faulty poetic diction and ‘corrupted’ taste. In the ‘Essay, Supplementary’, Wordsworth argued that a great poet has ‘the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’. This essay argues that Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth teach poetic taste through their challenge to Pope’s famous nightpiece. In ‘A Night-Piece’ Wordsworth engages intimately with Pope’s diction, form, and imagery in the moonlight scene in order to contest Popean hegemony.

Nominal Compounds in Old English Meter and Prosody

What is the lexicon’s role in licensing the selection of phonologically-marked structures in Old English verse? Specifically, what is its role in the avoidance of certain nominal compounds in verse, even though the same compounds are used apparently freely in prose (Terasawa 1994)? Using a simulation of the Old English lexicon, we offer a statistical analysis of the poetic use of nominal compounds compared to the availability of relevant prosodic structures in the ambient language. In the process, we unify Terasawa’s separate constraints and demonstrate a new way of addressing the complex interplay between Old English prosody and the structure of Old English alliterative meter. Our results endorse Terasawa’s position: We find that the dispreference for nominal compounds of the XX-LX type is a general but noncategorical property of Old English. We attribute their highly restricted usage in verse to the demands of poetic diction and their incompatibility with the metrical templates that scops and scribes replicate. Additionally, while syllable weight factors into metrical organization, it does so less for stress placement, which remains morphologically grounded; this asymmetry in the ranking value of weight between poetry and prose is considered briefly in the context of the Old English monastic scribal training.

„Wo er vorbei dir glänzt“

Abstract This study focuses – by way of a close reading – on (1) the multiple subtleties in the poetic diction and word morphology of Hölderlin‘s ode „Heidelberg“, (2) its metonymic macro-structure, (3) the oscillations between an aesthetics of the lovely („lieblich“) and the sublime, (4) the instances of blissful self-mirroring that depart from Narcissus‘ unhappy fate, and (5) the explicit poetics of the „image“ („Bild“) in this ode. A special emphasis is placed on Hölderlin’s creation of a series of novel German words that combine two words into new compounds.

APJ Abdul Kalam: A Poet of Human Concern

Abdul Ka la m Aza d, the former President of India , is known a s the Missile ma n of India. He hasa grea t na me in scientific development, a nd despite this, he is thoroughly a n India n poet. His poetry is replete with huma nism and intellectua litya ndpresentshis huma n concerns for the na tion. He is the pa ra gon for the lea rners. The a esthetic a nd ha rmonious feelings a re the rema rka ble tra its of his poetry. His scientific mood ca n be seen in his poetic diction. He wa s a versa tile genius, a nd his excellent cra ftsma nship identified his versa tility. His religious fa ith and love for the nation compelled him to pa int the socia l rea lity on his poetic ca nva s. Ka la m's poems express human concern, love, pea ce,a nd ha rmony. He succeeds in this a ttempt by selecting ima ges a nd symbols from his personal life. Indeed, his poetry a bounds in the spiritof pa triotism, heroism,a nd self-sa crifice. His inspiring poems have a ma rvelous sense of vision, pa ssion, ima gina tion,a nd innova tion. Therefore, it ca n be sa id tha t Ka la m wa s a highly innova tive poet of India .

The Visuality of Hortus Mirabilis in Krystyna Miłobędzka’s Poetry—A Study of Selected Examples

Krystyna Miłobędzka (born 1932) is one of the most interesting and unique phenomena of the Polish poetry scene of the 20th and 21st centuries. Two characteristics of her poetry, the visual character of her many poems and her preoccupation with the concept of the garden-world, are worth a closer look. Miłobędzka’s poetry refers to the topoï of the garden-world in single poems and cycles of poetic texts. Her hortus mirabilis, inserts itself into the sphere of the metaphysical reflection of nature, giving Miłobędzka’s poetry a specific dynamic in which the “I”—the gardener—has a significant role as an observer, and as a creator of entities. The activity of looking, which happens, in fact, in all types of verbs and aspects, is in this specific sphere (look, watch, see), fundamental to defining oneself in the world and the world’s relationship to oneself. In this perspective, the image of the garden from childhood, is confronted by a necessary new visualization. The temporal aspect of the garden is at the center of existence, in the cyclical return of nature’s laws of rebirth and death, which are relevant to the personal, singular perspective of the end in many of Miłobędzka’s volumes. In Anaglify (Anaglyphs), some poems particularly fit the issue of visuality in poetry, not only at the conceptual level, the place granted to observation, the poet-particular observer, but the poem itself. They are conceived as graphic and pictorial realizations. Poems from the volume dwanaście wierszy w kolorze (twelve poems in color) or wszystkowiersze (omnipoems) are special cases of these. The selected words are conceived in color, and their arrangement on the space of the page has meaning. The parallel between looking and writing, which Miłobędzka consistently uses in her writing method and poetically admits, is also very important. Although her poetic diction alludes to historical avant-garde and linguistic poetry achievements, her lyrical savoir-faire is characterized by a certain new minimalist construction and a separate, recognizable style. Miłobędzka’s innovativeness lies in combining seemingly distant and sometimes poetically opposite categories: full, ambiguous image-in-poem and asceticism by means of expression, such as a minimal number of words. Her poetry is deeply rooted in perceiving, seeing, watching, and contemplating the world—faithful to its physicality but also open to the most essential questions of philosophy asking about existence and its limits. This new visibility of elements is reflected in authentic poetic delight and in the “visualizing” form, where the poem also becomes an image on the plane of a sheet of paper or becoming one side of the house wall as a mural poem.

Bob Marley and Gender- Friendly Lyrics: A Critical Discourse On Feminist Response On “No Woman, No Cry”

The existing great strides on cultural feminist demonstration towards developing techniques to preventing domestic violence, and other forms of social construct against women, navigate through resistance and pragmatic ingenuity as a commendable role in appraising the songs of Bob Marley, owing to the constructive criticism the diction of his lyric songs possess. The Jamaican society where Marley’s songs are set is a physical, social and economic violence society which is against women, most especially the poor women of colour, who are perpetuated in part by top down globalization. This article demonstrates how resistance permeates through pragmatic ingenuity and feminist metaphors to embellish and address a set of approaches to legal scholarship rooted in feminist and anti- racist critical traditions, thereby reconceptualizing the human right problems facing Black women who migrate between the United States and Jamaica. Marley’s cultural feminist song “No Woman No Cry” depicts that Jamaica (Caribbean) women have become the private solution to the public problem of fundamental race, class, and gender inequalities in United States. Admissibly, critical race feminist approach requires prospective strategies to be pragmatic and metaphorical, as well as theoretical. It, however, requires a difficult process of building coalitions among women and men who sometimes resist seeing their common interest being trampled on. This scholarly work, therefore, aims at adopting post-colonial feminist theory as a theory that permeates through the subject matter of Marley’s lyric song and attempts to give a critical appraisal of the song from the post- colonial perspective through his poetic diction of the post- colonial feminist society.

Poetics of Resistance

Focusing on Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, this article aims to present his resistance poetry as aesthetic embodiment of oral dissemination rather than purely an art form. We can deduce three roles of Darwish’s take on resistance against the backdrop of Palestinian struggle; first is the attempt to subvert patriarchal/colonial ascendency by subjecting traditional affirmations to critical, postcolonial inquiry; second is the attempt to raise the self-esteem of the people by conferring upon them a ‘national sublime’ that emerges from their relentless struggle and sacrifice, and; third the presentation of poetic diction that evolves into a self-reflexive domain galvanizing the people into waging the struggle for their rights.

Перевод англоязычных фитонимов в художественной литературе

The study aims to describe the functioning of phytonyms as a component of the author’s style of William Morris and to identify the peculiarities of phytonyms translation. The researcher carries out analysis using the material of six later novels by William Morris, the creator of the fantasy novel genre. Scientific novelty of the study lies in involving new material, which makes it possible, firstly, to verify the conclusions we made earlier using other material and, secondly, to expand the range of the phenomenon under consideration. In addition to the purely semantic aspect, the study is also carried out in the stylistic aspect, since a relatively large part of the analysed translation difficulties are associated with the peculiarities of translating the poetic diction of the novel. As a result of the work, a dictionary of phytonyms used by the analysed author has been compiled, possible ways of translating phytonyms into Russian have been described.

Arbor Mundi w tradycyjnej poezji ustnej z perspektywy staroislandzkiej i litewskiej

The article discusses the world tree as reflected in the Old Icelandic collection of poems the Poetic Edda and in Lithuanian folk songs. The author investigates the poetic diction of the selected sources of traditional oral poetry to disclose their symbolic meaning and connection to myth. The analysis focuses on the poetic manifestations of the world tree as a model of the cosmos and as an evergreen tree of life. The selected Eddic poems and Lithuanian folk songs reveal the significance of the world tree as a structural marker, which defines the relationship of the centre vs. periphery, i.e., the known (organised) vs. the unknown (chaotic) space. The emphasis on the tree’s upward orientation is viewed as an implication of its sacred status. The life-giving characteristics of the world tree are explored in relation to the image of dew, which symbolises the fertility and fecundity of nature in the Poetic Edda and the health and fertility of the bride in Lithuanian folk songs.

Roberta Frank. The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse

This fabulous book of ‘Northern’ poetics developed out of the Robert Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies, delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2010 and—according to the author—only awaiting retirement to be transformed into a monograph. It condenses the work of a lifetime: from Frank’s very first publication on ‘Some Uses of Paranomasia in Old English Verse’ (1972), to more recent work on ‘the Incomparable Wryness of Old English Poetry’ (2006) and ‘Conversational Skills for Heroes’ (2014)—with all her research on Old Norse Court Poetry in between. In many ways, it positions itself as a handbook of poetics, an extension of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda—that invaluable guide to Old Norse poetry which is so envied by scholars of Old English: ‘Snorri Sturluson outlined several subcategories of extra rhymes, but not even he could net them all’ (40). The way Frank collects, lists, and succinctly analyses samples of poetry to illustrate wordplay, rhyme, and alliteration—adding anecdotes and witticisms along the way—both looks and feels very like a contemporary version of Snorri’s treatise Skáldskaparmál (‘On Poetic Diction’).

The Transcendent in Literature

Arabic poetry has changed after the advent of Islam; that poets started to adopt Islamic concepts and values to create a new method of rising and boasting and searching for the metaphysical and the abstract. This new vision was accompanied with the Islamic entity and the elevated abstract; thus, this has influenced poets’ vocabulary, methods, and poetic diction. This research aims to uncover the elevated intellectual transformations that Islam came up with in the Arabic poetry and their influence upon the Arabic poem and its subjects in the Islamic age. This is done by showing the religious elevated meaning and the humane tendency that is embodied in poetic patterns that reflected Islam as a big intellectual authority on the Arabic poetry. The study has examined three poetic patterns which are: the self-religious pattern in the poetry of Hassan Bin Thabit; the second pattern is the world of platonic love in the poetry of Jameel Buthaina. The last pattern discusses the horizon of liberty, sacrifice and the concept of life and death in the poetry of “Khawarej.”

Modulations in Portuguese of Oriental images, experiences and aesthetics: the fascination with some Chinese and Japanese poetic diction as poetry’s utopia

Resumo O fascínio do Ocidente pela dicção poética oriental está atestado em várias latitudes e línguas, e resultou numa profícua produção na área da poesia. Sabe-se que a reinvenção da poesia chinesa da autoria de Pound, em grande medida na origem da sua proposta de revolução do idioma poético, nas primeiras décadas do séc. XX, assentou, na verdade, numa falácia; numa concepção errada da natureza da escrita chinesa (e japonesa) como essencialmente pictográfica e ideogramática, na base de propriedades expressivas reconhecidas na poesia que resultariam numa particular eficácia na apreensão e tradução do real. Pessanha enaltece, em termos similares aos da exaltação poundiana, a escrita da poesia chinesa clássica. Interessa-nos rever alguns inventários dos traços da dicção poética chinesa e japonesa que explicam que ela seja tomada como metonímia e metáfora da poesia, ou como meta e utopia da poesia, para perceber o que terá levado autores muito díspares a tentar a mão nos haikus, processo em que sondaremos algumas formulações poéticas em língua portuguesa. Consideramos também que esse fascínio por uma (sonhada) origem da dicção poética, quando cruzada com o habitar (não metafórico, neste caso) do pequenino enclave de Macau, de autores que nele lançaram raízes, resultou em alguns exercícios poéticos particularmente felizes e singulares. Serão trazidos à colação nesta abordagem poemas de Eugénio de Andrade, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, José Tolentino Mendonça, Yao Feng, Fernanda Dias e Fernando Sales Lopes.

«Лес за Гранью Мира» Уильяма Морриса: возможности прочтения и перевода с английского на русский язык

The aim of the study is to conduct a translational analysis of two currently existing Russian translations of William Morris’s novel “The Wood beyond the World”, the first fantasy novel. The analysis is carried out at the graphic-phonetic, lexical, syntactic levels, the possibility of different readings of the novel leading to different translations is illustrated. The scientific novelty of the study lies in a comprehensive comparative analysis carried out on previously unstudied material. A comprehensive comparative analysis of the techniques used by various translators to solve problems, most of which are related to the transfer of the poetic style (poetic diction) of the novel, is carried out. As a result of the work, a detailed classification of the author’s stylistic devices has been given requiring a separate translation decision; various methods used by the translators of one of the late novels by William Morris have been described.

New Decorums

Whitman’s olfactory metaphors are key tropes in his poems but they have been neglected so far. Furthermore, Emerson’s reaction to them sheds light on the relation between the two men, and shows that we need to expand our research on them through the incorporation of various ‘olfactory perspectives.’ This essay is about olfactory reading of Song of Myself—reframing it through a lens of the sense of smell. It will show that Whitman’s exploration for new poetic diction and the semantic of Whitman’s materialization into a poet—both are correlated—necessitate frequent usages of olfactory metaphors. With the inclusion of various olfactory viewpoints, the essay shows that Whitman’s metaphors of this kind portray his transformation into a mythical poet and smooth out this transition. Through his ‘celebrations’—calling body odor the fragrance and enjoying it, coming into contact with the atmosphere, and calling breath ‘smoke’— Whitman metamorphoses into a mythical poet, while all these celebrations are effected by his verbal fiat through olfactory metaphors, which finally enables him to communicate with ‘a spirit,’ which spreads his ‘barbaric yawp.’ All of these are fruition of Whitman’s ‘new decorums.’

Poetics of Loss and Dislocation

Abstract This essay examines several recurring themes, references, and poetic tropes in Anna Frajlich's poetry, to establish how her personal experience of exile and dislocation shapes and enriches her poetic universe. It focuses on the poet's treatment of space, time, memory, human relations, and the nagging sense of incompleteness often expressed by her lyrical personae. The essay combines historical and structural analysis of the main features of Frajlich's poetry, paying special attention to the prosodic organization of her verse, types of poetic diction, the intermittent use of traditional and innovative poetic forms to show that the poet's work, though highly diverse in form and content, inclines toward the “classical” model of expression characterized by a sense of poise, emotional restraint, and search for order, while at the same time avoiding intellectual and moral aloofness, didacticism, abstractness usually associated with “classicist” literary style. Frajlich's poetry acknowledges life's confusion without yielding to it, resists chaos without denying its presence in our lives. Her personal experience presents itself primarily as a heightened sensitivity to all forms of discord and discontinuity in the lives of people, communities, and nations. Born of a “wound,” it surmounts a personal tale of anguish and alienation, and forges it into a universal tale of the modern human condition. An escape, an exile from home, a painful dislocation, self-doubt, and uncertainty, is transformed into what the poet calls a “perfect journey” of self-affirmation, self-renewal, and intellectual as well as emotional discovery.