Poetry Criticism Research Articles

Plato's Criticism of Poetry in Republic and its Educational Implications

플라톤은 [국가]에서 당시 교육의 대명사인 시(poiēsis)에 대해 논한다. [국가] 2, 3권에서시는 수호자를 위한 기초 교육 중 하나로 제시되는 데 비해, 10권에서 시는 해로운 것이자 추방되어야 할 것으로 기술된다. 이러한 외견상의 상충은 교육의 차원에서 바라볼 때 해소될 수있다. [국가] 2, 3권에서 시는 어린이를 교육대상으로...

Political criticism in Al-Jawahiri's poetry

The Poetry of Al-Jwahiri is a document and a history. Since literature is the essence of history, we can find within it events, culture, thought, struggle of modern Iraq and the Arab region and the attempts of the living peoples in its march towards justice and freedom taking the most sophisticated steps overcoming the romantic tendency during his era. The document of Al-Jwahiri was mixed with an elevated art and a perfect well-formed language. He combined objectivity and aesthetics he also mixed his blood and pains, excitement with his carelessness as well as his hopes and wishes. He recorded history and participated in making history through subjective and objective methods. His poetry was imprinted in the imagination and thoughts of people. It was Al-Jwahiri who called for solving the problems of Iraq which he suffered from till our time. Policy and struggle is what made his poetry a burning type of poetry and elevated his severe criticism and the political attitude is what made Al-Jwahiri an alienated loner wondering the countries of the world.

Squeezing, Bleaching, and the Victims’ Fate: Wounds, Geography, Poetry, Micrology

This article opens a dialogue between geohumanities and poetry—or, more broadly, creative writing—around the subject matters of violence and wounding. It considers what kinds of “poetry” might be usefully enrolled by the geoliterary critic, or even authored by the geographer-poet, in response to such subject matters. Difficult questions abound about what it means to author, hear, and read poetry that is engaged and enraged by instances of violence, trauma, and victimhood. One horizon for these questions is Adorno’s ([1966] 1973) claim that “there can be no more poetry after Auschwitz,” and more particularly his elaboration and partial retreat from this claim in Negative Dialectics. Here, wary of attempts “at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate” (Adorno [1966] 1973, 361), he nonetheless concluded that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man to scream; hence it may be wrong to say that after Auschwitz you can no longer write poems” (363). This article explores Adorno’s position, chiefly pursuing his arguments about the need for poetry—and indeed philosophy—that strives not for “purity” but precisely to be “soiled” and “spoiled,” never comforting, always disconcerting, never idealistically “transcendent,” always materialistically “micrological.” Including reference to a short story by Borges and critique of poetry by the geographer Wreford Watson, the argument is further advanced by attending to Adorno’s claims about another poet, Heine, sometimes regarded as a particularly “geographical” poet. The article concludes with final notes on possible implications for recasting work on wounded geographies as a species of applied micrology.

For the (Philosophical) Love of Poetic Beauty

It is a well-worn trope to view Plato’s banishment of the poets in Republic as a crude form of philistinism. In this paper I defend Plato against this charge. I argue that Republic does not present a final view of poetry, for it leaves room for a philosophical love of poetic beauty. First I analyse the political nature of Plato’s critique of poetry. I suggest that Plato does not reject the political order of change and decay, but opens space for a new kind of political project. I then suggest that Plato’s discussion of tragic poetry in Book X supports this claim, for it contains the hope for a reconfigured love of poetic beauty. I conclude that Plato does not limit aesthetic experience to artistic solace or metaphysical escapism, but opens a way to see aesthetic experience as a vital part of building a world in which it makes sense to live.

Homeric Epic and Its Reception: Interpretive Essays by Seth L. Schein

Reviewed by: Homeric Epic and Its Reception: Interpretive Essays by Seth L. Schein Jonathan Burgess Seth L. Schein. Homeric Epic and Its Reception: Interpretive Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii, 225. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-19-958941-8. This collection of essays composed over more than four decades holds together remarkably well, though the range is certainly wide, from close reading of small-scale lexical matters to broader thematic issues. There are twelve chapters in all, ten of which have been previously published, though many of these not in especially prominent publications. As the author explains, the original works have only been lightly revised, though several chapters have postscripts that provide updated bibliography and brief comments. The quality of work is always high, and although some parts of the book are most appropriate for Homeric specialists, the general reader will find most of the contents informative and rewarding. This is especially true for the final two chapters on reception. “‘War—What Is It Good For?’ in Homer’s Iliad and Four Receptions” nicely pairs Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force with Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, and Alice Oswald’s Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad with Christopher Logue’s War Music. Schein compares and contrasts each of the two pairs, which are philosophical and poetic in nature respectively. While appreciative of the brilliance of all four receptions, he also carefully explains how they differ from the Homeric treatment of war. “An American Homer for the Twentieth Century” is thorough [End Page 279] and excellent in its survey of the Iliad and Odyssey in undergraduate great books courses. This necessarily involves discussion of translation, but the essay also insightfully explores the historical and cultural contexts of the employment of the Homeric epics in American undergraduate courses of the last century. Despite the title, only these two final chapters focus on reception, though “Homeric Intertextuality: Two Examples” might be thought to involve a kind of self-reception within Homeric poetry. I found unpersuasive its optimism about allusive interconnections between the Iliad and Odyssey—or their traditions, since the author is aware that a precise definition of the process would be problematic—but the skilled exploration of the possibilities is worthy of consideration. “Mythological Allusion in the Odyssey: Herakles and the Bow of Odysseus” also employs close reading, successfully uncovering the nuanced meanings of the Homeric use of external myth. These chapters provide examples of the many expert interpretations of lexical and metrical matters that appear in the book. Most generally, the book is dedicated to literary criticism of Homeric poetry. Schein pursues this enthusiastically as a unitarian with reference to oral poetics and neoanalysis. A good example of his approach is “Odysseus and Polyphemos in the Odyssey,” which rebuts the analytical interpretation of the Cyclops episode by Denys Page by showing how the scene is thematically embedded within larger themes of the entire epic. Schein’s interest in oral poetics and neoanalysis leads to an interesting pair of chapters about Milman Parry and Ioannis Kakridis. The discussion of Parry perhaps unfairly critiques a late address by him that was only posthumously published, but it reminds us that anthropological approaches in Homeric studies are rooted in romantic notions of recreating historical contexts. The favorable discussion of the often under-appreciated Kakridis is welcome, though the portrayal of Kakridis as a proto-oralist, or a superior unitarian compared to German neoanalytical scholars, is debatable. Schein’s rather expansive approval of very different employments of neoanalysis in more recent scholarship is also an example of the occasional inconsistency that arises in this collection. For example, there are many types of “allusion” that are praised or employed in the course of the book, and one sometimes desires a more thorough and stable statement of methodology. Overall, however, the reader will come away illuminated about the nature of both Homeric scholarship and Homeric poetics. Besides documenting a long and productive career in Homeric studies, the collection reads well in its ultimately cohesive interweaving of recurring topics. As a result, the book convincingly demonstrates the progressively rewarding nature of scholarship about the great Homeric epics. Jonathan Burgess University...

Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead by Willard Spiegelman

Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead by Willard Spiegelman Ernest Hilbert (bio) Willard Spiegelman, Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 208 pp. As Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he taught for many years, Willard Spiegelman made a name for himself with a number of impressive book-length studies, including Majestic Indolence, an examination of his much-loved English Romantic poets, and Imaginative Transcripts, which addressed the likes of Jorie Graham and John Ashbery. His role as a commanding scholar and critic took a remarkable turn in 2010, when he published a charming collection of personal essays ambitiously (and cheekily) titled Seven Pleasures, Essays on Ordinary Happiness—after the trivium and the quadrivium, otherwise known as the seven liberal arts—which brought him before a general readership. The volume included pleasing observations on "dancing, reading, walking, looking, listening, swimming, and writing," presenting these ordinary pursuits as deep wells from which one may draw with great satisfaction. It proved a popular book, something an author of thoughtful poetry criticism hardly dares dream of, and it changed the trajectory of his writing life, making him a celebrity beyond the groves of academe. Spiegelman's latest (again cheekily titled), Senior Moments, Looking Back, Looking Ahead, brings the author's deep knowledge of literature to bear on a fresh array of topics, eight altogether in this case, including three locales—Dallas, Japan, and Manhattan—and some broader categories, such as talk, books, art, nostalgia, and quiet. Those hoping for a dissertation on the pleasures and [End Page 314] pains of aging will find instead a droll look at the world and how it has changed in Spiegelman's life (he was born in 1944). Spiegelman remarks that he did not set out to write a memoir but that the book gradually turned out as something resembling one. While it contains no outrageous confessions and often only loosely bears upon its author, it is roughly structured according to stages in his life. Stories of his childhood in Philadelphia give way to episodes in Dallas, where he spent much of his life teaching, then Japan, which he visited only once, and finally Manhattan, where he has retired and seems to enjoy himself immensely (he encouraged others to follow suit in "For a Long Life, Retire to Manhattan" in the New York Times). Even the most personal episodes serve as points of departure for imaginative dilations on art, literature, cuisine, language, friendship, and the culture at large (this last is where we find the critic at his most acerbic). The book begins with something of an origin story. We see the development of a critic, connoisseur, editor, and raconteur in what may seem, at first, the unlikeliest of places, working class Philadelphia. From the start, his wonderful talent for linking literature with life is on full display, as he relates that "unlike Shakespeare's Cordelia, whose voice was 'ever soft'… my mother's was loud, grating, often shrill, and always capable of penetrating the bowels of any department store when she was trying to locate a wayward child." His mother's voice is styled as the very fabric of his less-than-literary childhood in Philadelphia. He goes so far as to say that "when I hear a Philadelphia accent, I hear her." Yet it was in this rough, Philadelphian English that he felt the first stirrings of his calling as a man of letters, catching what he calls "phonophilia: love of sounds," though adding "at least certain ones." He goes on, I can still hear, through the years, my family chattering: assertively, ironically, simultaneously. Language was the best way to make one's mark. I hardly knew it at the time, but language became my life's leitmotif. While his love of language brought him great success as a literature professor, it is the "spoken language, even more than writing" that "brings us together." As a boy expanding his vocabulary, he was "discovering the essential charms of poetry itself, with its combination of the semantic and the non-semantic. Rhythm, rhyme, and music: melody enhances the meanings of words and the power of communication." Lessons begin to emerge...

Beat women poets and writers: countercultural urban geographies and feminist avant-garde poetics

The work of Beat women poets and their contribution to the Beat canon was neglected for decades until the late nineties. This study presents a critical appreciation of early Beat women poets and writers’ impact on contemporary US literature drawing from theoretical tools provided by feminist literary and poetry criticism and gender studies on geography. The aim is to situate this female literary community, in specific the one of late 1950s and 1960s in New York, within the Beat generation and to analyze the characteristics of their cultural and literary phenomena, highlighting two of their most important contributions from the point of view of gender, cultural and literary studies: their negotiation of urban geographies and city space as bohemian women and writers, and their revision of Beat aesthetics through a feminist avant-garde poetics.

A Study on Gwon, Donin’s Aesthetics of Calligraphy and Paintings from the Perspective of the Beauty of Gusto in Shipin(詩品, Poetry Criticism)

A Study on Gwon, Donin’s Aesthetics of Calligraphy and Paintings from the Perspective of the Beauty of Gusto in Shipin(詩品, Poetry Criticism)

Platão e a poesia de seu tempo: contra Simônides

Embora sejam a epopeia homérica, a tragédia e a comédia, os alvos principais da crítica de Platão à poesia, pretende-se mostrar que ela se estende também à lírica, perso nificada na figura inovadora de Simônides de Ceos, e tal como era praticada em sua época.

Elégiák az 1945 utáni angol költészetben

As has frequently been remarked in poetry criticism, an elegy always suggests that the poet’s own death is inconceivable. What I add is that in many cases the lost person’s death is also inconceivable or, at least, unspeakable; therefore, the poet has to turn to something speakable, meaning repeatable: a form, a motif, etc. This means that there is always something in the poem that admittedly does not belong to the author’s subjectivity. In my study I offer a survey of three British poets’ elegies from the second half of the 20th century: sequences by Douglas Dunn, Peter Porter and Thom Gunn; the former two writing to commemorate their dead wives, and Gunn writing in memory of his lost friends. As I argue, all the three poets follow in the wake of classic examples to repeat and reiterate something that belongs to tradition: Dunn is inspired by the classic dramatic monologue and gaps in medieval ballads, Porter by Henry King’s poem, and Gunn by romantic poetry. All the three can be read as self-elegies: Dunn’s poems through the motif of the wedding rings, Porter’s through the motif of the dead wife waiting for him, and Gunn’s through the image of the dream where the two friends are united. Probably all elegies can be read as self-elegies, signifying that we speak about someone else’s death because we are unable to speak of our own.

“Here it is safe to assume nothing at all”: aesthetics and the impasse of South African poetry criticism

ABSTRACTThis intervention highlights the question of literary evaluation and aesthetics in contemporary South African poetry in English. It suggests that the antinomy of ‘formal’ versus ‘sociological’ approaches, first criticised by Cronin three decades ago, is still present, and mars any attempt by critics to understand, appreciate and assess the diversity of the output of South African poets more fully. This flaw has become more noticeable and more vexed in the contemporary situation of global flows of information and influence, inter alia via the internet. This is exemplified in a brief analysis of two contemporary South African poets, Khulile Nxumalo and Lesego Rampolokeng. Using the formulations in Jahan Ramazani’s recent A transnational poetics as a starting point, the article suggests ways in which the present critical impasse might be addressed.

MJC Echeruo: Occidentalism, Diaspora, Nationalist, and Transnationalist Trajectories of His African Modernism

Michael Chukwudalu Echeruo’s trajectories are broad and complex: poet, literary critic, and scholar, Echeruo is quite easily one of the most vital and one of the most accomplished of modern African literary theorists and practitioners. As a poet, Echeruo’s style is considered difficult and arcane, and it left most critics of modern African poetry, like Chinweizu, Madubuike, and Jemie, very distraught with what they discerned as “Hopkins disease.” His critical scholarship, far ranging and varied, moved from a very occidentalist sensibility to its final mooring in the Africa and the African diaspora, with which he has engaged in some of its most original and archival scholarship. This essay attempts to place Echeruo, whose intimidating work has the quality of grandeur, within the specific tradition of an African modernity. It also places in context the linkages that clarify the critical tensions within Echeruo’s artistic and critical production as a modernist thinker.

Robert Browning

Robert Browning Suzanne Bailey (bio) Ann Marie Drury, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry. (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Richard Pearson, Victorian Writers and the Stage: The Plays of dickens, Browning, Collins and Tennyson. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 1790–1880, eds. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace. (Oxford University Press, 2015). The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 22, November 1855–June 1856, eds. Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, Joseph Phelan, and Rhian Williams. (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 2015). Was Browning’s career as a playwright more successful than critics have presumed? Is Browning experimenting with the monodrama in The Ring and the Book (1868/1869), and does this mark a shift in his poetics? In what ways does Browning’s writing fit within Victorian cultures of translation? How do we read Browning’s language, and how does the poet mobilize patterns of repetition and deferral? These are some of the questions scholars have posed this year in research on Browning. Richard Pearson’s work on Victorian theater highlights debates about the state of the theater and the public role of the author- playwright, suggesting that Browning carved out a unique response to theatrical authorship by choosing to publish his plays. A number of essays propose innovative ways of reading Browning’s writing and career. Patricia Rigg suggests that Browning began to experiment with the monodrama in The Ring [End Page 344] and the Book, possibly through the influence of Augusta Webster’s poetry. Yopie Prins and Annmarie Drury also recast the later work: Prins, by focusing on Browning’s creative appropriations and translations of classical literature, particularly in the decade of the 1870s, and Drury, by considering translation itself as a trope. Browning’s language is a significant theme this year. In a fine article on “Sordello,” Ewan Jones studies the poem’s transfiguration of “the nature and effect of dysfluency” (p. 121), and Joshua Taft reflects on the characteristic density of Browning’s language, which he sees Augusta Webster resisting in her practice. Stefan Hawlin examines intertextual echoes of Keats in Browning’s poetry, and numerous critics consider Browning as part of a network of influence, reading his work in conjunction with that of Augusta Webster, William Michael Rossetti, William Morris, Ezra Pound, and even James Joyce. The most unusual context in which Browning appears is in the analysis of an early silent film directed by Lois Weber in 1915. Critic Paul Young argues that the film Hypocrites (1915) may have been inspired by the structure of The Ring and the Book, as well as by the poem’s preoccupation with notions of truth. Young mentions other films with links to Victorian poetry: the 1909 adaptation of Pippa Passes, for instance, and a homage to Tennyson in The Golden Supper (1910), suggesting that critics of Victorian poetry have fertile ground to explore in early film history. Books and Book Chapters Ann Marie Drury, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry. (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Annmarie Drury sets out to clarify our understanding of Victorian translation as a kind of “translation culture,” the effects of which extend into the early twentieth-century. In Translation As Transformation in Victorian Poetry, Drury undertakes some novel conceptual work in her analysis of the dynamics of translation, particularly in the context of British imperialism. She describes “the incorporative impulse” by which foreign elements, whether actual objects or a poem in another language, are assimilated as part of the desire “to enlarge and enhance the English world of life and letters by incorporating non-English things into it” (p. 5). Victorian translators shared a range of cultural assumptions, including “[r]ejeuvenated interest in Eastern civilizations, conflicts over racial identity associated with the ascendance of Welsh nationalism, and uncertainty about the viability of [End Page 345] imperialist undertakings” (p. 5). Among her concerns are “the role of translators as key agents of assimilation” and the notion of poems themselves as “enacting intercultural negotiations,” as Victorians sought to “incorporate foreignness” (p. 8). Drury also makes a compelling case for considering translation as a kind of collecting (p. 45) and as “a strategy for the accrual of cultural wealth” (p. 45). Discussions...

The consistency and diversification in the literary research and criticism of the author Lê Đình Kỵ

Lê Đình Kỵ was a talented author born a great literary critic; his sharp sense and his free spirit intertwined interestingly to create his distinctively style. Although Lê Đình Kỵ made his most contributions to the field of literary criticism, it was the artist sense that integrated into his works. Being both a scholar and an artist, taking both the academic and literary approaches, Lê Đình Kỵ was able to “balance” well in literary studies. In regard to poetry criticism, the hidden artist inside Le was totally released. His exquisite talent was sublimated.

Characteristics of poetry criticism and meaning from a historical perspective appeared in 『Jehosiwha(霽湖詩話)』

Characteristics of poetry criticism and meaning from a historical perspective appeared in 『Jehosiwha(霽湖詩話)』

翁方綱在詩歌批評方面對金正喜的影響

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 乾隆年間，朝鮮李氏皇朝不斷派員遠赴北京求學交流。其中著名者有金正喜（1786—1856），他精於經學和金石學，又是著名的書法大家，曾在嘉慶年間隨燕行使到北京。金正喜因此得以師事翁方綱，在經學以至詩歌批評方面，都受到翁氏的影響。本文旨在研究翁方綱在詩歌批評方面對金正喜的影響，首先論述金正喜與翁方綱二人在詩學方面的交流情況，然後從詩學門徑、重學問與性情的觀點兩方面，探討他們在詩論上的繼承關係。金正喜的詩學主張與翁方綱基本上是一致的。金正喜主張學詩者由近而遠，由宋、元入唐，從蘇軾、黄庭堅等詩人入手以學習杜甫。他能欣賞翁方綱以學問爲詩，卻反對無關實際的神韻詩。他重視性靈，但强調須具備學問和品德的修養，所以不滿袁枚佻巧浮薄的性靈詩。
 During the rule of the Qianlong Emperor of China, correspondents from the Joseon Dynasty of Korea were continuously sent to Beijing for study and exchange purposes. Among those sent was the famous Kim Jeong-hui (1786-1856). Not only was he highly proficient in the classics and in epigraphy, but he was also an acclaimed calligrapher who had followed Emperor Joseon on his diplomatic ventures to Beijing during the rule of Emperor Jiaqing. Thus, Kim Jeong-hui received Weng Fanggang as a teacher, and was influenced by him regarding both the classics and poetry criticism. This study aimed to explore the influence of Weng Fanggang’s poetry criticism on Kim Jeong-hui, starting by describing the two men’s poetry-related exchanges and subsequently discussing their relationship of inheritance in the field of poetry from two perspectives: (a) the study of poetry and (b) emphasis on learning and temperament. In doing so, we discovered that Kim Jeong-hui’s standpoint regarding the study of poetry was essentially identical to that of Weng Fanggang. Kim Jeong-hui’s philosophy was to approach what is distant by first studying what is close. Therefore, he studied the poetry of the Song and Yuan Dynasties before studying that of the Tang Dynasty, and the works of Su Shi and Huang Tingjian before those of Du Fu. He appreciated “learning that is poetry” while opposing romantic poetry, which is not practically anchored. He emphasized spirituality but also stressed the need for learning and moral cultivation; therefore, he did not appreciate the frivolous and trivial spiritual poems of Yuan Mei.

Aesthetics and Impossible Embodiment: Stevens, Imagery, and Disorientation

HAT MIGHT READERS do with imagery of Wallace Ste- vens' poetry? What kind of imaginative and aesthetic experi- ences might his poems enable? Such questions have wide im- plications, not just because they may influence our understanding of ways readers encounter poems, but because of role Stevens has played in story of lyric poetry and role concepts of aesthetic experi- ence have played in that story, too. His nearly constant foregrounding of imagery, sensation, and imagination, and their relation to a special kind of aesthetic experience, make questions about enacting imagery—that is, about one's own creation of representations of sensation and movement in mind as one reads—central. canonical criticism of Stevens' poetry has thus emphasized not just importance of imagery, but also that Ste- vens orchestrates a delicate play with felt experience of art, insisting that the naked poem is the imagination manifesting itself in its domi- nation of words (CPP 639). 1 If domination of imagination pro- duces particular aesthetic ends, however, what are they, and how might they come to be? In this essay, I argue that Stevens gives readers opportunity, as they engage imagery of sight, sound, and motion, to experience a form of oth- erwise impossible embodiment: an alteration or disruption of physical ex- perience that carries a distinct aesthetic signature of felt disorientation. As I will explain in detail below, one key way in which we actively engage with arts is by way of physical changes that are mediated both by artwork itself and by our own sensory architectures. Poems come to be embodied as we read them, and they affect our bodily experience in real time: they tend to disrupt status quo, altering it in ways that are otherwise generally unavailable in conscious life. Such manipulations or disruptions might come in form of a palimpsest of impressions from multiple viewpoints (e.g., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird); seeming slowing down or speeding up of time (as with moment of light's vanishing in The Idea of Order at Key West); access to imagined bodies and minds radically different from our own (as with The Snow Man, watery back of Paltry Nude (CPP 5), or air of The

Poetic journeys and other metaphors underlying literary criticism of poetry in English and Russian

The paper sets out to examine the metaphoricity of the discourse of literary criticism dealing with poetry. The research carried out in the framework of contemporary metaphor studies relying, first of all, on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and its followers, attempts to uncover metaphors structuring the discourse of literary criticism in two distinct cultures - English and Russian. The methodology of the investigation is based on the key principles of the metaphor identification procedure (STEEN et al., 2010) and metaphorical patterns (STEFANOWITSCH, 2006). The results suggest that the main source domain for conceptualizing poetry in literary criticism in both languages is a person. However, this domain features much more prominently in English, whereas the domains of sound and music, painting and journey are more relevant in Russian. Many metaphors are inevitably evaluative - employed to express the writer's positive or negative attitude.

Um diálogo no meio do caminho: Czesław Miłosz leitor e tradutor de Carlos Drummond de Andrade

In Wypisy z ksiąg użytecznych (Extracts from Useful Books), a very personal commented anthology of world poetry selected, prefaced and mostly translated by Czesław Miłosz himself (the volume also contains other translators’ versions, as well as pieces of Polish poetry), he has included only one text of a single Brazilian author: Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “In the Middle of the Road”. Rewritten – and reread – in Polish, the poem is likely to show unfamiliar and all the more interesting facets of Drummond’s writing. Furthermore, it offers a revealing perspective of Miłosz’ work as a poet and critic of modern poetry.

Um diálogo no meio do caminho: Czesław Miłosz leitor e tradutor de Carlos Drummond de Andrade

In Wypisy z ksiąg użytecznych (Extracts from Useful Books), a very personal commented anthology of world poetry selected, prefaced and mostly translated by Czesław Miłosz himself (the volume also contains other translators’ versions, as well as pieces of Polish poetry), he has included only one text of a single Brazilian author: Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “In the Middle of the Road”. Rewritten – and reread – in Polish, the poem is likely to show unfamiliar and all the more interesting facets of Drummond’s writing. Furthermore, it offers a revealing perspective of Miłosz’ work as a poet and critic of modern poetry.