Poetry Criticism Research Articles

The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature

Introduction: The Origins and Impact of Literati Culture Map of China Abbreviations Prolegomenon Preface Acknowledgements Romanization Conversion Chart from Wade-Giles to Pinyin Foundations Poetry Prose Fiction Drama Commentary, Criticism, and Interpretation Popular and Peripheral Manifestations Chart of the Chinese Dynasties Romanization Conversion Chart from Wade-Giles to Pinyin Glossary Contributors Index

The criticism of didactic poetry: essays on Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid

Shelley thought all didactic poetry an 'abhorrence,' and most of the Romantics agreed with this judgment. Critics in this century have been less dismissive of the genre, but seem puzzled by it. There has been a tendency to treat a didactic poem as though it were a kind of lyric, in which the focus of interest lies in the emotions and feelings of the writer. But didactic poetry has a purpose, history, and character of its own. This original and important book asks the question, 'What can the practising critic usefully say about a didactic poem?' This is not primarily a book about theory, but a guide to practical criticism combined with a fresh reading of the chosen texts. Through a close analysis of three of the major didactic poems in the classical canon, the De rerum natura of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Ars amatoria of Ovid, Dalzell's aim is to consider these poems as a genre and to ascertain what tools are available to the critic for their understanding. He raises questions about the limits of genre criticism, the relationship of poetry and knowledge, reader-response, and historical reception. Can there be a poetry of statement? Is all genuine poetry necessarily fictive in some sense? To what extent is a serious didactic intent compatible with poetry?The Criticism of Didactic Poetry is primarily of interest to classicists. It will also be of great value to scholars of other literatures who are interested in the history of the genre or in the theoretical debate about whether poetry can encompass knowledge. This book is a significant original contribution to the field, with the potential to influence future scholarly thinking on didactic poetry.

Contexto Crítico de la Poesía Cervantina

Criticism of Cervantes's poetry has been conditioned by theoretical and esthetic presuppositions which have yet to surpass the prejudices forged by his contemporaries and apparently consecrated by the words of the author of Don Quixote. A biased reading of some of his metapoetic affirmations and the comparison established between verse and prose have distorted critical and interpretative perspectives, which can be corrected only by reconsidering three factors: the interposition of characters in the fictitious enunciation of most of the poems; the revision of the esthetic and communicative problematics posed by these texts and their narrative frame; and finally, the inclusion of Cervantine poetic writing as part of the wider process of poetic and esthetic renovation that occurred at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Developing a Multimedia Product

This article is a diary form account of the process of scripting and authoring a CD-ROM on the criticism of pre-twentieth century poetry. It attempts to show how English teachers with limited technical backgrounds were able to acquire enough of the appropriate skills to manage and see through to completion such a project within six months, on top of their normal timetables. It also discusses the importance of music and graphic design and the ups and downs of using this new creative teaching medium for making interactive and student-centred resources for practical criticism.

Knowledge acquisition in poetry criticism: the expert's eye movements as an information tool

Implicit knowledge, that is, task performance knowledge which cannot be articulated by the expert, presents one of the most difficult problems for knowledge acquisition. The present paper examines the information value of the expert's eye movements as a complementary method to elicit implicit knowledge. In a first step, a focused interview and a repertory grid analysis were carried out with a single poetry expert, leading to a first draft of the conceptual domain of poetry criticism. In a second step, the expert was requested to assess 10 poems; his thinking aloud and eye movements while reading the poems were registered. A group of 42 subjects (knowledge engineers) received 10 poems, together with the expert's assertions and information about his eye movements while reading the poems. For half the assertions, the eye information was genuine; for the other assertions, the eye information was misleading. The subjects were asked (a) to decide whether or not genuine eye movements were presented with the assertion, (b) to formulate a paraphrase of the assertion, (c) to formulate a production rule from the assertion, and (d) to decide to what degree the eye information was useful to the elicitation of the knowledge structure. A direct comparison of the findings from the protocol analysis with and without genuine eye information revealed both quantitative and qualitative differences, pertaining to the structure of the information that the expert is attending to during classification. With this information, the reconstruction of the expert's implicit problem analysis was considerably enhanced.

Millay at 100: a critical reappraisal

In this newest addition to Sandra M. Gilbert s Ad Feminam: Women and Literature series, Diane P. Freedman brings together twelve essays by critics of poetry and women s writing for a critical reappraisal of the prolific work of Edna St. Vincent Millay.Though finding its occasion in the life of Millaythe centennial of the writer s birththis volume refocuses attention on s art by asking questions central to our present concerns: What in the varied body of s work speaks to us most forcefully today? Which critical perspectives most illuminate her texts? How might those approaches be challenged, extended, or reoriented? In seeking the answers to such questions, the volume s contributors illuminate the means by which s early success has been slighted and misunderstood and examine issues of personality, personae, critical stature, and formal experimentation in s various genres: lyric poetry, the sonnet, verse drama, fiction, and the personal letter.In 1920, following the publication of A Few Figs from Thistles, Millay was the It girl of American poetry. But by the late 1930s, her popularity waned as her critical reputation declined under the reign of high modernism and its critics. In fact, Millay, like others of her generation, had rejected modernist elitism in favor of public engagement, using her powerful public voice to plead for an end to the Sacco-Vanzetti trials as well as for U.S. entry into World War II. Condemned for both her politicizing and her political poetry, she was the first to admit that she and her poetry suffered in the service of public causes.Grouped into four parts, these essays focus on s relation to modernism, her revisionary perspectives on love, her treatment of time and of the female body, and her use of masquerade and impersonation in life and in art. Throughout, the essayists pose such questions as: Where is s place in the literary histories of modern writing and in our hearts? How are we to value, interpret, and characterize the various forms and genres in which she wrote? What is the cultural work achieves and reflects? How does she help us redefine modernism? What do s great gifts enable us to see about genre, the social construction of gender, the definition of modernism, and the role of the poet?Millay s considerable productivity, the range and virtues of her forms, and her experimentation clearly argue for a wide-ranging reappraisal of her work.

Seferis and Friends. Some of George Seferis' Friends of the English-Speaking World (review)

Reviews 371 George Thaniel, Seferis and Friends. Some of George Seferis' Friends of the EnglishSpeaking World. Edited by Edward Phinney. Stratford, Ontario: The Mercury Press. 1994. Pp. 143. $14.95. The decision to publish George Thaniel's postiiumous book was certainly a way of paying homage to a scholar who recognized the need for continued research into Seferian archival material. Originally intended as a monograph about Seferis and his "interactions" with prominent English and American scholars, intellectuals, and writers, the manuscript has been published virtually intact in its rough draft form. Included is already published material researched at the Gennadeios Library in Adiens from 1985 to 1986 and in Maro Seferis's personal archive, on Seferis's connections to figures such as T. S. Eliot, Lawrence Durrell, and Henry Miller. Using what might be described as a biographical approach, the book expands upon this base to illuminate our understanding of Seferis's public and private personas. Chapter 1 prints twenty letters written to Seferis during the period 19471970 , and includes a brief introduction. The correspondents include Romilly Jenkins, Stephen Spender, Steven Runciman, Rex Warner, A. R Bury, E. M. Forster, Robert Graves, and Eugene McCardiy. Chapter 2, drawing on autobiographical material found in the poet's diaries, reconstructs Seferis's sojourns in England from the 1930s to the 1950s as a representative of the Greek government , and discusses his formative years as a poet and especially his apparent debt to Eliot. Chapters 3 and 4, integrating material from published travelogues and archival sources, focus separately on Durrell and Miller, adding substance to each audior's association with Seferis and dispelling the mythological nature of previous accounts. Providing an assessment of this "work in progress" places die present reviewer in an uneasy position owing to a number of stylistic flaws and omissions in the text, much of which may not have been intended for publication. The fragmentary condition of the first two chapters, for example, prevents a thorough evaluation. They present a mere catalogue of Seferis's contacts with prominent Englishmen and Americans, but offer no organizing principle upon which the material is based. Moreover, the archival sources are not consistendy cited; nor are die secondary sources adequately utilized, except for those that comprise the "pioneering" wave. More recent sources employing a theoretical approach are conspicuously absent. Beyond these problems, there are more serious ones deriving from Thaniel's treatment of Seferis as a public and private figure. He offers no new insight into the problem of Seferis's political versus literary self, a question that has preoccupied scholars for decades. Instead of reverting to a conventional psychoanalytic approach, he employs extraneous evidence to describe the poet's character. For example, to dispel the myth of Seferis's melancholic disposition, he notes how Steven Runciman "sets the record straight" about Seferis "the man": He "was not, in reality, the gloomy person that some people (inferring from his poems) imagine. Seferis had a lively mind and could share a good joke with a friend" (11). 372 Reviews Most problematic is Thaniel's criticism of Seferis's early poetry, especially his insistence that die young poet succumbed to the "influence" of Eliot. He suggests that diis poetry suggests "the ways in which Eliot's themes were skillfully woven into the fabric of Seferis's art. The series of poems Notes for a 'Week'... are in terms of articulation and imagery Eliotic, in contrast to the Stratis the Mariner poems where no Eliotic influence is apparent" (62). Thaniel's approach runs contrary to recent scholarship—for example that of Tziovas, Calotychos, and Leontis—which, rather than link Seferis to the poetics of the high modernists, places him in the context of autochthonous cultural politics. Indeed, Seferis himself refuted the question of influence as early as 1933. "Last year," he wrote in his diary, "I thought that [Eliot] was the first poet whom I have influenced! I could not explain this similarity in our inclinations and quests in any other way" (quoted by Thaniel, p. 60). Thaniel's major contribution is no doubt his research into the Seferis archive. The letters to Seferis dispersed throughout his book reveal gems included in this extensive correspondence, most...

Dorothy Wordsworth's Return to Tintern Abbey

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Return to Tintern Abbey James Soderholm (bio) William Wordsworth’s most famous contribution to Lyrical Ballads (1798), “Tintern Abbey,” is directly alluded to in one of Dorothy Wordsworth’s poems, written over thirty years later, entitled “Thoughts on my sick bed.” Most of the recent debates about Dorothy’s place in her brother’s poem underestimate the importance of this “sister poem.” Among the critics of “Tintern Abbey,” there are those who feel that William includes Dorothy in his myth of memory and those who feel that he only pretends to include her. Indeed, this disagreement about Dorothy’s place in the poem encapsulates the positions of the major critics of romantic poetry. After analyzing the last section of “Tintern Abbey,” I will discuss “Thoughts on my sick bed.” I will argue that it replies directly to the hopes of futurity evoked in the last lines of her brother’s poem. Dorothy’s poem echoes her brother’s earlier works, borrowing from them as liberally as William once borrowed from her journals. The intermingling of poetic images helps us to reexamine the function of address and apostrophe: figural evocations of subjectivity produced by turning, and returning, to another person. I will conclude with a few remarks about the meaning of recent critical views of both Wordsworths. I In “Tintern Abbey,” William presents his gains and losses in a series of affirmations and abnegations: the poet recompenses himself for his lost youth with spiritual abundance only to pare it away, revealing how little he actually needs to sustain himself at the ripe age of twenty-eight. This argument for the superiority of adulthood appears to reach a solid conclusion two-thirds of the way through the poem. Therefore I am still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, [End Page 309] And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. 1 The poem might have ended on these graceful woodnotes. But William, as if committed to further self-abnegation, goes on to tell us that his happiness does not depend on the spiritual instruction of nature, so long as his sister Dorothy is there to restore him. Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. (ll. 112–19) William seems intent on showing us just how little he needs to keep his spirits from diminishment. Her brother’s “former heart,” Dorothy becomes his saving grace, or Beatrice, with an important difference: in the shooting lights of her wild eyes the poet sees not a vision of God but the image of what he once was. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her . . . (ll. 119–23) These impassioned lines unite address and apostrophe. In the turn to Dorothy, both the lyric “I” and the addressee vividly materialize. To be more precise, the lyric “I” is reflected in the addressee. 2 The traditional apostrophe is, M. H. Abrams observes, “a direct and explicit address either to an absent person or to an abstract entity.” 3 But what is the figural nature of an apostrophe addressed to a present person? How does the address/apostrophe to Dorothy enjamb the “figured” and the “real”? David Simpson argues that Wordsworth’s poetry metaphorically encodes the world, transforming trees into tropes, as if the poet’s whole [End Page 310] vocation were endless figuration. But what is the force of this activity when the “real” is, presumably...

WHITHER THE CRITICISM OF CLASSICAL ARABIC POETRY?

WHITHER THE CRITICISM OF CLASSICAL ARABIC POETRY? Get access J. A. ABU-HAIDAR J. A. ABU-HAIDAR SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Semitic Studies, Volume XL, Issue 2, AUTUMN 1995, Pages 259–281, https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/XL.2.259 Published: 01 October 1995

Rhetorical Landscapes: The Poetry and Art Criticism of Jacques Dupin

Rhetorical Landscapes: The Poetry and Art Criticism of Jacques Dupin

Politics and the Personal Lyric in the Poetry of Joy Harjo and CD. Wright

What those of us whose lives are permeated by a sense of unremitting political emergency, and who are at the same time writers of poetry, most desire in our work, I think, is to attain to such osmosis of the personal and the public, of assertion and of song, that no one would be able to divide our poems into categories. The didactic would be lyrical, the lyrical would be didactic. That is, at any rate, my own probably unattainable goal. (128) Denise Levertov On the Edge of Darkness The private lyric poem continues to hold a central place in our thinking about contemporary American poetry. Commentators who mention the genre often recognize its persistence as well as its inadequacy. In a 1982 review, for example, Katha Pollit provides a scathing description of this sort of poem that I think depicts accurately, if parodically, what is perhaps still the dominant poetic form found in many of our literary magazines, public readings, and creative writing classrooms: A free verse elegy on the isolation of the self, set on a campus in the Middle West and decorated with references to snow, light, angels and the poet's nostalgia for his [or her] childhood. Ours is a poetry, in other words, of wistful longings, of failed connections, of inevitable personal loss, expressed in a set of poetic strategies that suit such themes a lax syntax and simplified vocabulary that disclaim intellectual pretension, and ethereal numinous images that testify to the poet's sensibility. (qtd. in Doubiago 35) If there is a role for the reader in what become the conventional personal poem, it is to observe the poet's private experience, as a kind of voyeur. At the same time as much literary commentary centered on the private poem (even as many find fault with it), academic criticism turned increasingly historicist, often examining literature as a text made up of various politically charged cultural discourses, an orientation that risks reducing poetry to a conscious or unconscious statement about power relations. Marjorie Perloff remarks that she stirred up contention in her refusal to abide by either of what she suggests are the two preeminent stances in current discussions of poetry and poetic theory. Perloff tells us that the first perspective, which assumes that poetry has an essential nature that is timeless and universal, evaluates poets according to their 'sensitivity' and 'craftsmanship,' the appeal of their subject matter and emotional range (Introduction 2). The second view assumes that poetic discourse (like the other discourses of a given culture and moment) is defined largely by what the dominant classes take it to be, that indeed there is no such thing as inherent poetic value, the production of poetry always being culture specific and ideologically determined. As such, our role as critics is, in the first place, to characterize the dominant discourse and then to read against it that writing it excluded or marginalized, thus redefining the canon so as to give pride of place to the hitherto repressed. (2) As a poet and critic, I have found many of the insights of the new historicisms to be compelling. These approaches clearly offer possibilities for much richer interpretations of literary works than Perloff's remarks, simplified for her own rhetorical purpose, imply. Still, I am wary of criticism that seems to overlook the specificity of poetic forms in seeking to determine implied positions on predetermined ideological conflicts. In identifying a tendency toward oversimplification in some academic criticism of poetry, I do not mean to reassert some sort of mythical purity of the poetic text. Rather, I am interested in the ways innovations in poetic form can heighten and even change poets's and readers's consciousness of the language and other symbols that frame public life. …

Allegories of Temporality: Philippe Jaccottet and the Poetics of the Notebook

Without hesitation, critics of contemporary French poetry have placed Philippe Jaccottet squarely in the tradition of German Romanticism. According to Jean-Claude Mathieu, Jaccottet prolongs Romanticism (100) while for Peter Low, Jaccottet's elegiac tone and his nostalgia for a lost plenitude are H61derlin revisited (61). The poet himself foregrounds the Germanic influences on his work, citing Novalis, for instance, when he evokes the poetic function in La Promenade sous les arbres: Le Paradis est dispers6 sur toute la terre, c'est pourquoi nous ne le reconnaissons plus. II faut reunir ses traits epars (28). For most critics, this last quote has served as a kind of unofficial poetics for Jaccottet's project as a whole, one that defines writing as a gathering together of a disseminated unity. It is not surprising that Jaccottet would be identified as a neo-Romantic, or that he would be linked to a tradition that posits the poet as self-present visionary, scribe of the a-temporal transcendent insaisissable.' What is surprising, however, is that contemporary critics would neglect to search for the kind of disruptive ironies and subversive dismantlings of the self-present subject that have recently been located in the works of Jaccottet's predecessors, Rousseau, H6lderlin and Goethe. Critical assessments that neglect to problematize Jaccottet's explicit celebrations of unity treat only one moment in a dialectical poetics.2 Such assessments obscure a crucial, perhaps the crucial aspect of Jaccottet's work, absenting him from critical discussions that

The Function of the Niphʿal in Biblical Hebrew in Relationship to Other Passive-Reflexive Verbal Stems and to the Puʿal and Hophʿal in Particular (review)

Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 217 Reviews and rhyme in Alterman's work. (In this regard it is appropriate to note Arnold Band's recent paper-yet unpublished-on semantic rhyme and his departure from Shavit's emphasis.) One of my first doctoral assignments in 1965 was to assess the positions of several critics (two of them in this collection) regarding the Holocaust specificity of themes in "Simhat 'Ani'im." It was actually my first exposure to Dan Miron's emphasis on the continuity between "Kokhavim baHutz" and "Simhat 'Ani'im" (see p. 98 of this volume). At the time I argued that-at least from the thematic point of view-the earlier and the later Alterman had too much in common to permit us to read the later cycle through the lens of the Holocaust. I now see that the problem is more complex, and more seasoned readers should welcome the chance to look at this and related questions through all the lenses provided by a book such as this. There is a variety of formalistic questions attached to this question, even though we must continue to insist that aesthetic issues are the proper concern of poetry criticism. The debate goes on through new frames like "New Historicism," and the public concerns with cultural desiderata continue to harass formalists. Genre concerns and social utility will tug at students for as long as literature will be taught. Anthologies such as this one are helpful mirrors of all these kinds of struggle. This particular anthology is helpful both in this way and as a series ofessays that recall a founder of modem Hebrew aesthetics. William Cutter Hebrew Union College Los Angeles, CA 90004 THE FUNCTION OF THE NIPHcAL IN BIBLICAL HEBREW IN RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER PASSIVE-REFLEXIVE VERBAL STEMS AND TO THE PucAL AND HOPlfAL IN PARTICULAR. By P. A. Siebesma. Studia Semitica Neerlandica 28. Pp. ix + 207. Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1991. Paper. Siebesma's doctoral dissertation, first published in Dutch in 1988, has now been made available in an excellent English translation. Since from the beginning of this century only two comprehensive studies on Hebrew verbal stems have been published, this detailed study of the function of the niph(al takes on added significance. Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 218 Reviews The first of the earlier publications was an article by M. Lambert, "L'emploi du Niph'al en hebreu," published in 1900 (REJ 41, pp. 196-214). Siebesma's main interest, however, is with a 1968 publication by the Swiss Hebrew scholar Ernst Jenni, Das hebriiische Pi'ei, a study of the pileI stem in 'Biblical Hebrew. Siebesma acknowledges that he chose Jenni's work as his starting point since the latter's approach to the study of other Hebrew verbal stems had been influenced by his views on the pileI. Siebesma does not always agree with Jenni's approach, particularly his assumption that verbal stems formed a system within which each stem had a clearly defined semantic function and meaning distinct from that of others. Siebesma takes a different view of the interrelation of the various verbal stems and states as the purpose of his dissertation "the description and study of the ni. in relation to the other 'passive' verbal stems (pass. qal, pu., ho., and hitp.)" (p. 32). Siebesma treats his subject in four lengthy chapters plus a very brief chapter of summary and conclusions. The first chapter offers a survey of the literature on verbal stems in Biblical Hebrew from the last century and a half. Throughout this and subsequent chapters, Siebesma draws heavily from four principal sources. The first is the grammar of W. Gesenius, who is recognized as "the founding father of Hebrew linguistics" (p. 2). The second is the previously referenced work of E. Jenni on the pi'el stem. The third is the unpublished Ph.D. dissertation of A. F. Bean, A Phenomenological Study of the Hithpa'el Verbal Stem in the Hebrew Old Testament (Louisville, Kentucky: The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1976). The fourth source is that published by R. J. Williams, "The Passive Qal Theme in Hebrew," in Essays on the Ancient Semitic World (Toronto, 1970). The second chapter offers...

Culturalism and the "New" Poetry. A Poem by Pedro Gimferrer: "Cascabeles" from Arde el mar (1966)

The study deals with the group of Spanish poets commonly called the novisimos or promocion de 1970, using as a base a poem by Pedro Gimferrer published in 1966. It studies the aesthetic break-through achieved by this generation, highlighting the concept of culturalism that critics used to define it twenty years ago. It examines the equivocal uses to which this concept can be put, and describes its correct meaning in the light of the aesthetic to which it refers. It then studies the mechanisms implicit in the writing of this non-confessional lyric poetry, centering it on two complementary procedures: the use of a historical persona that serves as an analogue (personaje historico analogico), and that of another work of art that functions as an objectifying device (obra de arte ajena objetivadora). It considers these in the light of two perspectives: the overcoming of neo-romantic rhetoric, and the participation of the reader. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol16/iss1/6 Culturalism and New Poetry. A Poem by Pedro Gimferrer: `Cascabeles' from Arde el mar (1966) Guillermo Cutler() Universidad de Alicante Translated by Frederick H. Fornoff Arde el mar (The Sea is Burning), published in 1966, is the book that inaugurates the radical change which, with respect to the immediate tradition of postwar Spanish poetry, was realized by the socalled novisimos or poets of the generation of 1970. Cascabeles (Bells) is a perfectly representative example of that rupture, of the new concept of the poetic text that it occasions, and of the first moment in the evolution of the poets to whom I refer. The change that is brought about in the second half of the decade of the sixties has the effect of disorienting readers as well as critics of poetry in Spain, because it is marked by an absolute lack of response to the expectations of both. Those expectations, as in every moment of literary history, are determined by an implicit assumption of continuity of the tendencies admitted as forming part of the prevailing literary universe or as having formed part of it in the recent past, and as having achieved, in both cases, majority acceptance. The horizon of expectations of the Spanish reader of poetry in the seventh decade of this century consisted in essence of two fundamental elements: 1) the direct use of the confessional and confidential I, which derives from the concept of language as a non-problematical means of communication for the transmission of ethical messages pertaining to the human condition, messages that allude without mediation to a necessarily shared referential space (occasionally involving ideological, religious or moral obstacles) between author and reader; and 2) a product of the same concept of language, the establishment of the text as a vehicle for the transmission of critical messages relative to the social and political environment. In this second case, the dogma of the social function of the text, which theoretically embraces the dogma of its reception by the majority,

South African Women's Poetry: A Gynocritical Perspective

This paper is, in many ways, companion to paper I read at the 1988 AUETSA conference, which was subsequently published as Men's Club.2 In this paper I argued that what constituted tradition in South African poetry was overwhelmingly androcentric and exclusionary of women, akin to men's club. At the end of the paper I suggested that feminist criticism of poetry needed to develop awareness of the history of women's poetry?that there is such history and that it needs to be investigated.3 It is my aim in this paper to provide brief outline of such history of women's poetry in English in South Africa. In researching this alternative history of poetry I have focused on the work of women writing in the English language. Where Afrikaans women poets have been included, it is because they have published translations of their work into English that have been available to English-speaking women poets and readers in South Africa. The work of black women writing in English is also an inherent part of this history, but features prominently only in the latter part of the twentieth century for reasons that I will develop in the course of the paper. I have called this paper a gynocritical perspective of women's poetry since I am using the method of feminist scholarship known as gynocritics, or

Poetry criticism: excerpts from criticism of the works of the most significant and widely studied poets of world literature

Poetry criticism: excerpts from criticism of the works of the most significant and widely studied poets of world literature

Apocapolitics: Allusion and Structure in Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy"

The Mask of Anarchy occupies a curious place in modern criticism of Shelley's poetry. It has been praised as uncharacteristic of Shelley's work by F. R. Leavis,1 admired for its political content by Richard Holmes,2 and ignored by Harold Bloom and by Earl Wasserman in their influential studies.3 There will always of course be disagreement as to worth of a particular poem, but perhaps most striking in this instance are reservations expressed by some of those who have written about The Mask with greatest degree of interest. For Thomas R. Edwards, is a fine poem, in its earlier parts very nearly a great one, but clash of attitudes between what Edwards sees as Shelley's overt political intentions and his lurking despair about politics makes result a demonstration of how a certain kind of poetic imagination can damage its own admirable concern for public world.4 Although Richard Hendrix takes issue with this conclusion, praising The Mask's of dramatic form ... with political insight and populist attitudes, he concedes that the blend was imperfect.5 Michael Scrivener, who has illuminatingly discussed The Mask in relation to popular radical iconography, finds poem contradictory, at war with itself, not entirely resolved; and Stephen C. Behrendt finds in it an ambivalence of voice [that] is potentially dangerous, for poem implicitly condones a variety of violence it explicitly condemns.6 I suggest that these positive but uneasy views are responses to something deeply embedded in structure of The Mask of Anarchy: relationship between apocalypse and millenium.

The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

80Book Reviews moves to our students? All "risings" are not the same. All tumescence is not male. Waves swell, as do breezes, bruises, and abrasions. Does a term used once in such and such a way imply poetic creation? Given a loose conceptualization of metaphoric expression, it surely might. And, then, will they — the waves, breezes, bruises — suggest priapic erection? Suppose our assumptions require an affirmative, if wary, response. Are we entitled, then, in our taxonomy of synonyms to say that (since A = B, B must also = A) images of onanism are metaphoric expressions of ocean waves, country breezes, and black eyes? In our lexicon, tumescence (A) is associated with genitalia (B) and both are figures of creative activity (C). But does it now also follow that as a poet writes, images of A and/or of B are invariably before the poet's mind? I have questions, too (but no room left to pursue them), about Schoenfeldt's use of the "resistance" theory, which holds that critics (Chana Bloch and Janis Lull, for instance) resist the drift of their own recognition of the erotic aspect of a poem because they are uncomfortable with its supposed sexual content. On balance, there is much in this volume worthy of admiration and reflection. Although I have doubts about certain editorial claims and efforts on the part of certain contributors to make them good, Harvey and Maus have attempted something worth doing, namely to elucidate the relevance of recent "philosophical" and "theoretical" writing to criticism of seventeenth-century poetry. The topic deserves attention. But the performance here is marred by a sense that the answers were given before the inquiry began. University of California — Riverside Anna K. Nardo, The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 263 pp. $49.50 cloth, $16.95 paper. by Sharon Cadman Seelig Anna K. Nardo argues that play, "especially in its relation to seriousness," was an important issue of the first half of the seventeenth century, a time with an extraordinary array of selfconscious literary players. While literary works, like games, are more Book Reviews81 or less inherently playful, Nardo considers play as a way of defining and creating the self, a response to crisis and transition, and therefore a very fruitful way to examine a number of important seventeenthcentury writers — Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Burton, and Browne — within the context of history and psychology. Nardo asserts that "What transformed medieval man, adapted to a hierarchical order that changed imperceptibly, to modern man, adapted to a world in constant flux ... is surprisingly simple: a prolonged youth of play," a period that fostered "the ability to evaluate changing situations and to adapt to the moment's demands," and so created "a mobile self adapted to a complex world that changes unpredictably" (p. 38). Play, as Nardo notes, is both individual and political; it may be seen as an escape valve which acts in effect to preserve order (as James's encouragement of sports has been seen by Peter Stallybrass and Leah Marcus, for example); or it may be seen as potentially revolutionary, as Nardo sees the death of Charles as an instance in which "play broke out of ritual into history" (p. 44). But for Nardo, the writers whom she treats "neither tried to retreat to an earlier, less confusing time, nor fomented rebellion, nor went mad. They played to find a locus for the self" (p. 45). Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Burton, and Browne, then, are all examples of writers who played purposefully, whose play grows out of individual needs, social and historical situations, whose play is both culturally and aesthetically significant. Nardo begins with a perceptive and useful discussion of Hamlet, whom she takes as a fictional paradigm for the other, later players she examines. Caught between his mother's rejection of him in her marriage to Claudius and her insistence that he show her love, Hamlet is a case of the classic double bind. Able to avoid madness only by playing mad, Hamlet in turn sets a double bind for Claudius, insisting that the play within a play is either purely a fiction, a mode of entertainment, or, alternatively...

Self-reference, Self-revision, and Self-containment in Stevens' "Domination of Black"

MEREDITH L. McGILL Self-reference, Self-revision, and Self-containment in Stevens' "Domination of Black" Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.1 In the selection from the Adagia I have used as my epigraph, Stevens identifies the poem as a structure of containment, specifically , the enclosure of a comprehensible mental construct within a framework of language which exists in a problematic relation to the concept it encloses. The difficulty of specifying this relation is itself both conceptual and linguistic. Intuitively, it is hard to construe two things as mutually constitutive as words and ideas in a relation of subordination and containment. Grammatically, while the use of the subordinating colon and the hierarchizing "within" would seem to enforce a strict division between inside and out (granting the "poem of the idea" a privileged interiority), the use of the word "poem" to describe the logical interior of the structure, the non-semantic exterior, and the overall structure, unseats the stable relation of frame to content and of part to whole. Where telling differences should be marked and boundaries defined, we are offered an undifferentiated sameness. Despite the statement's strong assertion ofhierarchy, this repetition enables reversal and transposition, so that the "poem of the word," the "poem of the idea," and "every poem" become interchangeable and inextricable. While presumably a definition and circumscription of the contents of Arizona Quarterly Volume 46 Number 4, Winter 1990 Copyright © 1990 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1610 ii8Meredith L. McGiIl poetry, this statement works to collapse the controlling opposition of container and contained, associating the poem with the condition of an uncertain doubleness—the unstable division of a structure against itself. In this adage, then, Stevens both sanctions and undoes the notion that his poems are containers and that ideas are what they hold. Yet the complex and self-cancelling nature of this statement notwithstanding, it seems to have served as a fairly straightforward directive for an influential tradition of Stevens criticism. Briefly, much formalist criticism of Stevens' poetry seems underwritten by a twofold assumption which can be traced back to the pressure such a statement exerts to regard the "poem of the idea" as both superior to and extricable from the "poem of the word." Not only do many Stevens critics seek to liberate the ideas of self, reality, and imagination which they see as trapped within an obfuscating poetic exterior, many also assume that these ideas can "stand in" for Stevens' poems in an adequate relation of parr to whole (implicitly reversing the status of container and contained).2 This excessive attention to the conceptual and confidence in its adequacy—the conviction that privileging the "poem of the idea" will stabilize and contain the repetitive, recessive action of the "poem within a poem"—is hardly accidental. Throughout his work, Stevens invites the simplifications that his poetry and prose ultimately resist. Through a tendency towards epigrammatic statement in the prose, through the short stanzas and the high propositional content of much of the poetry, and through the incessant self-framing gestures which pervade both the poetry and the prose, Stevens' work parcels itself out for selective representation. Self-framing gestures such as the reformulation of a proposition, the revisionary return of a refrain, or, most prominently , a retrospective, summarizing final stanza, sentence, or line, generate misreadings by asking the critic to take them for the whole, by teasing him or her with the promise ofthe poem's self-adequacy. Stevens' work is often flagrantly self-divisive—not ineffectually, but powerfully so. As such it is acutely susceptible to synecdochic misrepresentation. Deconstructive critics such as Joseph Riddel and J. Hillis Miller have provided a strong counterweight to this privileging of "the poem of the idea" in part by demonstrating how an abyssal structure such as the "poem within a poem" can undermine the relations between part and whole, inside and outside, and container and contained on which such "Domination of Black"1 19 criticism rests.5 Miller in particular has analyzed the displacements and deferrals of meaning produced by the infinitely receding series of the mise-en-abyme. In his analysis...

Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism by Jim Collins (review)

96Rocky Mountain Review of poetry as a "revolutionary vision" (100) with regard to cultural values in general. Bermann's discerning study provides clear and theoretically sound examples of the ways in which the principal tropes function in sonnet masterworks. Further, it offers a meditation on how and why such works epitomize their respective eras and anticipate in vital ways our own "postmodern condition." This expertly crafted text will be of essential interest to creative writers as well as scholars and theoreticians. Making an implicit statement about the ethos offiguration, such sensitive criticism of poetry helps keep the art alive. In her words: "The rubrics themselves [métonymie; metaphoric; ironic and allegorical] are intended as no more than figures for the lyric idioms I attempt to describe. That is, they are themselves understood to be repetitions of sorts, with no claims to finality, but only to a rethinking of poetic possibilities" (6). WILSON BALDRIDGE Wichita State University JIM COLLINS. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and PostModernism . New York: Routledge, 1989. 157 p. The interconnectedness ofpopular culture and post-modernism provides the basis for this inquiry into the nature of contemporary cultural analysis. Jim Collins organizes his observations into five chapters: (1) Cultural Fragmentation and the Rise of Discursive Ideologies; (2) Life in the Arena: Intertextuality in Decentered Cultures; (3) Speaking in Tongues: The Languages of Popular Narrative; (4) Discursive Ideologies and Popular Film; and (5) Post-Modernism as Culmination: The Aesthetic Politics of Decenter Cultures. One ofCollins' principal theses is that " 'culture' can no longer be conceived as a Grand Hotel, as a totalizable system that somehow orchestrates all cultural production and reception according to one master system" (xiii). Moreover, it is the improbable combination of post-modernism and popular culture which has undermined that dominant paradigm. Collins examines what happens to our ideas of culture when different discourses begin to view the world in conflicting and contradictory ways at the same time. The sheer multiplicity of cultural manifestations or discourses today is such that terms such as dominant culture, high culture, and mass culture are losing much of their significance. Collins means this premise to be provocative and heretical, but it may seem less profound to those who are not primarily engaged in formal, academic cultural analysis but are merely participating unreflectedly in the great variety of cultural options available to, say, a typical North American teenager. Still, Collins is perceptive in his assessment of the centrifugal movement favoring a decentering of cultural discourses and a departure from the monolithic forms which dominated our generally accepted understanding of popular culture only ten or twenty years ago. That, for example, more than half ofthe film industry's revenue now comes from home video rentals and cable television is a concrete reflection ofthis shift from one to many centers (if center is still even an accurate term). Book Reviews97 British "White Glove" and American "hard-boiled" detective fiction between roughly 1930 and 1955 serve Collins effectively as examples for narrative modes which establish cultural worlds unto themselves while regularly referring to the literary cultures they succeeded. Indeed, Collins focuses much ofhis attention on a historical conception of cultural heritage which has each culture reacting either positively or negatively to its immediate predecessor, mainly by means of reverential or ironic allusions to or quotations from ostensible masterworks. Acknowledging a hierarchy of intertextual discourses is, Collins asserts, the natural approach to orienting one cultural form relative to another. In similar veins, Collins examines Western films, comic books, performance art, architecture, and several other related popular culture phenomena. While this study will unquestionably interest the serious student of semiotics, it is written relentlessly in the arcane language ofthe academy and presumes its reader to be already so well versed in the arguments and theories underlying modern semiotics that Collins' insights may not be especially profound or disturbing. The book is at its most lucid and engaging when the author is discussing concrete examples of the theories he is either supporting or attacking. Collins is also engaged in dissecting the cultural phenomenon of postmodernism while it is still actively functioning. Nothing wrong with that— but it makes a number of his assertions rather more tentative than he...