Poetic Craft Research Articles

Ezra Pound's early verse and lyric tradition: a jargoner's apprenticeship

This title traces the lyricism and musicality in Pound's early verse through to his radical Modernist style. Robert Stark argues that Pound learned how to write poetry more or less as if it was a foreign tongue - or poetic 'jargon' - with a unique lexicon, grammar, and even morphology, and that his most innovative poetry is the result of his ambivalent orientation towards different European literary traditions. Stark contextualizes Pound's poetic craft by examining his relationship to the Mediaeval and Classical originators of the methods he employs and by considering the practice and criticism of his immediate Victorian and Romantic predecessors. He explores the influence of poets such as Francois Villon, Guido Cavalcanti, Robert Burns, Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walt Whitman on Pound's lyrical style. For Stark, Pound's multi-vocalism arises out of his interest in dialect and the acoustic qualities of speech which leads to a 'modern' barbarous language marked by polysemy and heterogeneity. This title marries two discrete strands in Pound scholarship: his fastidious obsession with poetic craft and his furious pursuit of erudition. It describes a simple, but revolutionary, approach to poetic form, taking account of the total organization of sound in a poem without dwelling on arcane scholarly terminology. It examines Pound's famous style in a pre-modern context where we can better gauge what was at stake in the author's traiblazing invention of Modernism. It provides detailed, practical assistance to Pound's readers, especially in its detailed close reading of almost totally neglected early poems by this notoriously difficult writer.

Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics

This essay brings together two medieval explorations of sensation— one by St. Thomas Aquinas and one by Geoffrey Chaucer—and situates them within the twentieth-century account of aesthetics offered by Theodor Adorno. This juxtaposition reveals how past and present structures of thought and expression, far from being straightforwardly aligned in a sequence or developmental arc, are asynchronously intertwined. All three writers engage with the relationship between sensation and historical change; all three, in different ways, think about the problem of embodiment and its relation to generalities like “society,” “history,” and “divinity.” Adorno and Aquinas are concerned with abstractions, with describing how categories like “sensation” or “beauty” function within historical or theological structures of understanding. Chaucer, conversely, is immersed in the particular; not only does he create characters who experience sensations, but he also arouses a variety of sensations by means of poetic craft, from line to line, image to image, and sound to sound. As a result, his poetry functions here as a kind of hinge between the Thomistic account of sensory perception and Adorno’s articulation of aesthetic change over time. This hinge opens up a new conversation about sensation, not only about its place in medieval vernacular poetics but also about its relationship to cognition and the social forms by which human understanding, perception, and behavior are regulated.

Mistrz i uczeń albo sekrety humanistów Dialog Jana z Wiślicy z Pawłem z Krosna na kartach Wojny pruskiej / The Master And His Apprentice , or the Secrets of the Humanists : The Dialogue of Jan of Wiślica (Joannis Vislicensis ) And Paweł of Krosno in the Bellum Prutenum (1516)

Summary The article contains the original text and the Polish translation of two Latin elegies from the Bellum Prutenum (The Prussian War) by Jan of Wiślica (Joannis Vislicensis), published in Cracow in 1516. The first is a plea addressed to the author by Paweł of Krosno (Paulus Crosnensis Ruthenus) to start his book with an appropriate epigram; the latter is a reply to that request. This description, however, does not exhaust the meaning of the two poems. Their full, more complex significance can be unlocked with help of the conventions and codes of the Humanist discourse. Interpreted in the light of the 16th-century thinking about poetry and the process of learning, this versified dialogue appears to be a record of a master-pupil relationship, which, after Jan of Wiślica’s apprenticeship ceremony, is transformed into a bond of friendship. The poems also contain a string of timely reflections on the nature of the poetic craft.

A poet's craft: a comprehensive guide to making and sharing your poetry

A poet's craft: a comprehensive guide to making and sharing your poetry

Forget-Me-Nots: Poems to Learn by Heart (review)

Reviewed by: Forget-Me-Nots: Poems to Learn by Heart Deborah Stevenson, Editor Forget-Me-Nots: Poems to Learn by Heart. compiled by Mary Ann Hoberman; illustrated by Michael Emberley. Poetic recitation got a bad rap for a while there, associated as it was with regurgitation of material rather than creative learning. Kids, who can memorize thousands of riddles and belt out rude rhymes at the slightest encouragement (or discouragement), know better, of course: memorization can provide a window into words that merely reading them doesn't, it offers a special kind of ownership, and it's often a whole lot of fun. Fortunately, Hoberman is here to champion memorization's revival. Already a superstar for her readaloud works (You Read to Me, I'll Read to You: Very Short Fables to Read Aloud, BCCB 1/11, etc.), she here features what you might call speakalouds. Approximately 120 poems from over eighty poets are divided into eleven sections, some thematic ("Beautiful Beasts," "Strange and Mysterious") and some categorized by form ("The Long of It") or origin ("Poems from Storybooks"). Poets featured range from the contemporary (Hoberman herself, Nikki Grimes, Douglas Florian) to the longterm anthology veterans (Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Emily Dickinson); the poems range from the free verse to the crisply metrical. Got kids uncertain about memorization? The four-liners, limericks, and haiku of the opening section, "The Short of It," will be right in their wheelhouse. Got some showoffs who like to go for length? Show them the final section's ballads from the likes of Kipling, Milne, and Lear. A table of contents lays out the goods in advance, while an index of first lines helps searchers their treasures. Memorization isn't just an offhand suggestion for the collection, either. The verses are clearly chosen and arranged with considerable care and attention to the goal (the test runs are probably still echoing through the Hoberman household and leaving its compiler with earwormish fragments of failed entries), and the opportunity to tackle increasing challenges and explore the clearly demarcated sections evokes the allure of working your way through gaming levels. The book provides encouragement and guidance in a thoughtful introduction and a closing spread of suggestions that gives some tips on methodology and draws attention to components of sound and imagery within verse, a focus that not only helps memorization but also the appreciation of the poet's craft. The volume could see additional duty as a readaloud treasury or readalone delight, since it's a pretty delicious assortment in general; ultimately, though, it's best suited to its noble purpose, and it will provide an ideal spur for memorization and recitation in any setting. The inclusion of some venerable classics provides additional appeal for multigenerational sharing and, perhaps, joint recitation; the varying levels of the poetry also ensure accessibility [End Page 495] for kids over a range of ages, making the volume a winner for family, camp, or other non-graded situations. Emberley's art is an unassuming wonder, a playful masterclass in using the page to support and extend the verse visuals. Watercolor lined with pencil and touched with pastel, the illustrations perform their job with assurance, taste, and humor, subtly linking spreads across the gutter and framing verse in negative or even positive space. For instance, the first anthological spread is a clever perpendical, subtly framing the verses with a focused vertical downpour on the side (which falls on a mournful, umbrella-wielding auk) and an oceanic horizon line on the bottom (the auk bobs in a tiny boat). The subsequent spreads plaster poems on the broad backs of animals, illuminate them in the diagonal lightspill from a flashlight, or curve around them with snowy footprints. Small jokes, visual stories, and sneaky allusions to the poems add to the visual entertainment, insuring that kids will want to return to the book even when they've tucked the poems into memory. "I like to think of the process of learning a poem by heart as a game, with the memorized poem as the prize," says Hoberman. Now we can all be winners. (See p. 513 for publication information.) Click for larger view View...

Falling Upwards: Paul Celan’s Poetics of the Abyss

The abyss, the German Abgrund , is a recurring concept and motif which Paul Celan addresses in both his poetics and poetry. The abyss-like quality of Celan’s poetry did not emerge unheralded, but the Abgrund topos has been little researched. This paper argues that in Celan Abgrund functions as both a thematic image and textual practice. The Abgrund topos is motivated by rich allusions to Celan’s literary sources. Celan’s abysses have a paradoxical twofold function. On the one hand the abyss is an ultimate end-point in which significance and value are doomed to collapse; on the other hand, building on that non-foundation is the source of Celan’s poetic craft.

"Perchance my hand may touch the lyre": Orality and Textuality in Nineteenth-Century Deaf Poetry

In his book The Lost Senses: Deafness and Blindness (1845), deaf (1 British writer and missionary John Kitto declares that deaf people cannot write poetry. Kitto argues, want of hearing others speak, it is next to impossible that [a deaf person] should have that knowledge of quantity and rhyme which is essential to harmonious verse. (2) However, after explaining this personal disqualification, Kitto provides specimens of his own verse to demonstrate his attempt at tuneful art (1:171). Kitto suggests that the reader can discover the formal errors-the bad rhymes--the halting, hopping, stumping feet-which I am unable to detect, then my proposition is demonstrated; but if he can make no such discoveries, it must then be admitted with some qualification (1:171). While Kitto's poetry provides evidence of his poetic ability, his preface exposes his anxieties about writing in a genre that he believed required the ability to hear. Kitto's strange vacillation between declaring the impossibility of a deaf poet and demonstrating the viability of his own poetry reflects the complicated position inhabited by a nineteenth-century deaf poet writing in English. Kitto, like all other nineteenth-century poets, both hearing and deaf, was facing a cultural climate that linked written poetry with orality, especially in terms of formal features including rhythm and rhyme. Kitto was not the only deaf poet who felt ambivalent about participating in a genre tied to sound and speech: about a dozen American and British deaf poets, who used signed languages or fingerspelling to communicate, published one or more volumes of work during the Victorian period. These deaf poets often acknowledged that their position was contradictory in a cultural paradigm that invested poetry with a special relationship to aurality and orality. This essay will investigate how these nineteenth-century deaf poets balanced cultural beliefs about the primacy of sound to poetry with their own desire to sever hearing ability from poetic ability and will explore what this tension reveals about nineteenth-century perceptions of the relation between sound and poetry. By considering both the formal conventionalism and the thematic radicalism of their constructions of sound in poetry, I will argue that these poets mobilized the tension between sound and deafness. This essay will posit that nineteenth-century deaf poets ambivalently maintained an idea of vocality in their poetry while underscoring how that imagined voice was a silent construct of print. My argument about nineteenth-century deaf poetry also intervenes in contemporary critical conversations about sound in poetry because deaf poetry disrupts any model of poetry that imagines sound as essential to poetic craft and consumption. Despite the potential barriers to deaf poetic production, poetry was a valued element of nineteenth-century deaf culture. Important events in the deaf community, including deaf school graduations, for instance, were commemorated with poems written and signed by pupils. (3) Furthermore, the vast network of periodicals created by and for deaf people, including the widely circulated deaf school newspapers known as the Little Paper Family, (4) published poetry by deaf writers in monthly poetry columns. The nineteenth-century poets I will examine were all heavily involved with this culture of deaf poetry. They constitute what I will propose is the canon of nineteenth-century deaf poetry in English from the 1830s to the 1890s. While these poets had diverse class, gender, national, racial, educational, audiological, and historical experiences, in this essay I focus on the one important quality they shared: a concern that their deafness might preclude poetic achievement. (5) For example, early poets like Kitto (1804-1854) (6) and American poets John Burnet (1808-1874) (7) and James Nack (1809-1879) (8) did not have deaf forebears to validate their desire to write poetry. …

"Higiene en la casa del habla": Eugenio Montejo's El cuaderno de Blas Coll

El cuaderno de Blas Coll (1981) by Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo consists of a collection of notes written by Blas Coll, an apocryphal linguist who devises a project of transforming the Spanish language by reducing all words to bisyllabic and monosyllabic expressions. The character of Blas Coll is composed of allusions to certain philosophers, writers, and doctrines. This paper identifies and analyzes some of the main cultural and theoretical components of this character's ideas: Plato's Cratylus , the figure of the nineteenth century Spanish American letrado , the linguistic doctrines of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Stéphane Mallarmé's theories about linguistics and poetry. This analysis demonstrates how Coll's project is a device by which Eugenio Montejo elaborates a meditation on the origin and limits of language, and on how this reflection can be materialized in the poetic craft.

Scientific Thought and Poetic Craft: Seeking New Imagery and Vision to Involve the American Scholar

Scientific Thought and Poetic Craft: Seeking New Imagery and Vision to Involve the American Scholar

Denise Levertov: Poet and Pilgrim

William Butler Yeats posed the dilemma: one must choose the perfection of the life or of the work. Denise Levertov offers a refutation of that choice. As the world she responded with full engagement to her historical environment. Her poetry of pro- test was written response to the major political issue of her time, the Vietnam War. She later confronted the tragedies of her personal life through her poetic craft, ultimately coming to a renewed sense of awe and wonder. In the last years of her life this avowed agnostic turned to faith, and the process produced a luminous and crys- talline poetry. Levertov acknowledges that writing poetry was her means to faith, that her work enfaithed. It is also true that her faith resulted renewed creativity and produced poetry in service to the transcendent. For Levertov, there was no choice between life and work; the desire for engagement and the consequent transfor- mation linked the two. Denise Levertov claimed few designations other than that of poet and pilgrim. At age seven or eight she intuited she was an artist; she soon understood her vocation was to poetry. When she was twelve she sent off her first clutch of poems to T. S. Eliot for critique, who

Book Reviews

THE EDINBURGH COMPANION TO ROBERT BURNS. Edited by Gerard Carruthers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 978 0 7486 3648 8. £70.00 (hbk). 978 0 7486 3649 5. £18.99 (pbk). There was a spate of very useful collections of essays on Burns published in the 1990s. Partly this was due to the two-hundredth anniversary of his death in 1996, which occasioned conferences that, in turn, produced published proceedings. But something about Burns also invites the multiplicity of interpretive angles that such volumes make possible, and, conversely, resists the unifying grand thesis that might inspire an academic monograph. In the collections edited by Kenneth Simpson, Burns Now (1994) and Love and Liberty (1996), and Robert Crawford, Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (1997), this quality led to the inclusion of a broad range of commentators, including contemporary poets, novelists and musicians. Gerry Carruthers's volume for the Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature series is equally broad in terms of the number of angles from which Burns is approached, but, floating free from any particular occasion, is more scrupulously academic. The result is a definitive survey of the present state of Burns Studies. Most of the essays here can be grouped under one of two headings. On the one hand there are those that address the ways in which Burns borrowed from or reacted against earlier poets and figured in the literary cultures that came after him. Rhona Brown makes a convincing case for Robert Fergusson as the crucial model for the satires. In 'Burns's Songs and Poetic Craft' Kirsten McCue argues that Allan Ramsay perhaps became a more important precursor when Burns turned to song writing and collecting. Steven McKenna links Burns directly to Virgil's Georgics, while Kenneth Simpson places Burns the narrative artist in relation to the various traditions on which he drew in this respect. Alison Lumsden reveals just how much Burns there is in the Waverley novels, suggesting the extent to which Scott's appropriation of Scottish folk tradition was mediated by the poet's example, not only as an inheritor of that tradition but also as its collector and editor. Potentially most interesting for readers of The Byron Journal under this heading is Fiona Stafford's essay on responses to Burns among Romantic poets and critics more generally. This essay identifies the publication of Dr James Currie's edition of the Works in 1800, with its revelatory biography of the poet attached, as something of an epoch in the period. Stafford makes the important distinction between the older generation (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott) that first encountered the poetry unencumbered by knowledge of Burns's personal life, and later generations that came to the poetry through the biography. But striking here is the extent to which Byron and Shelley responded in the same paradoxical way as Wordsworth: to reject the specifics revealed by literary biography as a distraction from the lasting value of a poet's works, while continuing to insist that this value was, in a more general way, the product of the poet's most intimate self. Of course, Burns himself had, from the beginning of his poetic career, advertised the connection between one aspect of his biography (his status as a labouring tenant farmer) and his poetry, perhaps thereby inviting the curiosity of his readers. …

Formulas, Orality and Arthurian Romance: A Short Note on a Long Story

In the field of medieval French studies, before Orality, there was the Formula, and before that, there was nothing, just texts badly written. To the pioneers of Romance philology, the chanson de geste appeared hampered by all those repetitions that modern French aesthetics had taught its pupils to track down and eliminate. Leon Gautier, for instance, who spent most of his academic life studying the chanson de geste, which he admired for its noble and patriotic content, remained somewhat reluctant when it came to judging its style. Speaking of the evolution of the chanson de geste, Gautier can only state that it suffers from the same shortcomings as poetry: the Homeric epithet, the nucleus of what today we would probably call formula: Ces odieux versificateurs de vingtieme ordre, qui regnerent trop longtemps sur la poesie francaise, trouverent un precieux et inestimable avantage dans l'emploi de l'epithete homerique: c'est qu'elle remplissait la moitie d'un vers. Pour ces pauvres imaginations, quelle heureuse rencontre! Ils multiplierent l'epithete de facon a en composer la deuxieme partie de leurs alexandrins, et n'eurent plus se mettre en frais d'invention que pour leur premier hemistiche. Alors commenca le regne de la cheville. (1) This is presumably one of the very first occasions in the history of French studies in which a semantic and metrical entity, a formula, is recognized as a device facilitating versification. It is certainly not a pure coincidence if it occurs in the context of a study on the chanson de geste, a genre to which the formula will remain linked even when everything else has changed. Many things have happened since Leon Gautier, most of them in the fifties, when scholars began to appreciate the poetic potential of the formula and discovered the artistic achievement obtained by the deliberate repetition of certain lines within a given chanson de geste. (2) That was the first step away from the cheville toward something new, something inconceivable, or at least not yet conceived, the first step towards the idea that there could be something more than laziness or incompetence in those texts, an Art epique des jongleurs, as Jean Rychner would entitle his fundamental book on the medieval French epic. (3) In 1955, when his study was published, the title could still almost appear as an oxymoron to all those accustomed to the norms of nineteenth-century writing even if Rychner was less concerned with poetry than with poetic technique, techne, the poet's craft, his ars; his art in the Latin sense of the term. Rychner's book was not only a step away from the cheville in the direction of aesthetics, but also a step toward something that was equally neglected in those days: orality. Cette litterature orale nous est parvenue ecrite, Rychner states plainly in the opening pages of his book. (4) The written word, in the case of the chanson de geste, is secondary and accessory: what counts is the moment in which the poem was recited, or, as we would say today, in which it was performed. Every performance is unique, since there is always an element of improvisation to it. Each written document captures just one given performance, and that is why there are so many differences between the manuscripts. By working on the written documents, the scholar can shed light on the conditions of these recitations, and the elaboration of the texts. What enabled Rychner to overcome and leave far behind him everything that had been written up to that time on the chanson de geste was the fact that he drew on work on poetry undertaken by scholars outside the field of French studies, focusing on professional singers active in the former Yugoslavia. (5) There, Rychner found answers to all the puzzling questions that medievalists had always been asking: those singers could memorize several thousands of lines without difficulty, and when they were asked to sing the same song again a couple of hours later, one would of course hear the same song, but with so many variants that it was impossible even to record them: changes in the order of words, one hemistich replaced by another, and lines added or omitted, exactly as with the medieval chanson de geste. …

Technique and empire in the poetry of Ee Tiang Hong

ABSTRACT: Despite his high profile in poetry anthologies and in the commentaries of specialists in South East Asian literature, the craft of Ee Tiang Hong has not been subject to close investigation. Systematic attention to the linguistic organization of his poems brings out Ee's command of resources more general to speakers of English than the localistic lexical items and idioms which are overt signals of his provenance as a sensibility, but are not synonymous with his technique as a poet. Ensemble effects in Ee's poems, based on grammatical selections from mood, transitivity, theme and clause combination (including subordination and embedding) are examined and interpreted here. Such textual ensembles are part of the poet's syntactic craft (Ee, personal communication) and invite comparison with strategies developed by other poets of English whose works tend to dominate university curricula in English literature (viz. Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Auden). Such systematic analyses and comparisons stimulate further reflection on terms, such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘code‐switching’, which have directed attention away from a poet's craft and towards his or her cultural provenance. While Malacca, Singapore and Perth cannot be treated merely as background to Ee's work, further enquiry into motivated selection across the language of Ee's poems assists us in understanding what is substantial and what is misleading about the point of view implicit in terms like ‘code‐switching’. Greater attention to ‘register’ and ‘class’ may also help in another systemic domain crucial to Ee's sensibility – namely, what counts as progress in systems of education.

On Constructs and Insights: Revisiting Robert Pring-Mill's ‘Interaction View’ of Conceits for a Reading of Conceptista Devotional Verse

This paper tests several of Robert Pring-Mill's schematic clarifications of ‘the nature and functioning of the concepto’ against examples from Golden-Age devotional poetry and doctrinal treatises. In particular, it explores ways in which the conceptista conflation of figures for the Incarnation and figures for the poet's craft can clarify our understanding of contemporary aesthetics and reading practices, thereby building on Pring-Mill's treatment. Gaspar de los Reyes's Tesoro de divinos concetos and Lope de Vega's Los pastores de Belén provide the principal sources of conceptista specimens.

The Depth of Herbert's Voiceprint: Intentional and Unintentional Traces in the Poetry of Alfred Corn

The Depth of Herbert's Voiceprint:Intentional and Unintentional Traces in the Poetry of Alfred Corn Sean H. McDowell To further the ongoing conversation about the influence of Herbert's poetry on modern poets, I wish to invoke a term currently enjoying favor in studies of Donne's analogous influence: what Judith Scherer Herz calls Donne's "voiceprint," the product not so much of one poet's occasional imitation of another but of a more profound, more substantial engagement of one poet with the "psychology" and "linguistic system" of another.1 The "later writer greets" Donne, "trying on his language and looking inside his imagination." The ensuing "encounter," Herz explains, "happens less in the manner of a Bloomean agon or an overreaching than simply as a willingness to listen, to reimagine, to make over as one's own." Often enough, it results from the kind of preoccupation non-poets might consider obsession: Edgell Rickword carries his two-volume Muse's Library Donne to the Front in 1917; Rupert Brooke tours Germany with Baedecker and Donne (the latter as much of a guide as the former?); Joseph Brodsky learns English for the express purpose of translating Donne; Tennessee Williams asks a friend to read him Donne poems for several hours as consolation on the night his first play Battle of Angels bombed during its first performance; Paul Muldoon "swallows Donne whole" to elegize Warren Zevon.2 In each case, one poet finds in another poet's imagination a spur for moving his or her own. The voiceprint is the verbal residue of this activity. Like a fingerprint, which captures in finely oiled lines a unique material trace of the original, it is composed of all the verbal traces that show through in the subsequent new work - allusions, echoes, stanza forms, logical or grammatical structures, phrasings, and of course, repeated words, all refracted through the imagination of another and in response to the demands of the new poetic context. Donne's voiceprint often enough issues from a fascination with his personality and with his fascinations - with death, say, or love, or what Raymond-Jean Frontain aptly calls, the "need to make disparate parts [End Page 68] or experiences cohere."3 To return to Herz, "it is Donne in his texts" the later poet "greets," Donne who fascinates through a "language" and a "vision" "oddly transportable over the centuries."4 For the character of the Herbertian voiceprint, we would do well to start with a distinction Seamus Heaney makes in contrasting a "political activist" view of poetry with what he terms a "visionary" view of poetry, the latter emerging from the "self-delighting inventiveness" at the heart of poetic craft.5 In contrast to the "heckler," for whom poetry must be harnessed to social movements to be useful, Heaney believes we must not slight the "imperative" to "redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means."6 During the writing process, the visionary poet's "movement is from delight to wisdom and not vice versa," Heaney writes. "The felicity of a cadence, the chain reaction of a rhyme, the pleasuring of an etymology, such things can proceed happily and as it were autistically, in an area of mental operations cordoned off by and from the critical sense." The poet must dive into the pleasures of wordsmithing to render a compelling vision, a "counter-reality" capable of balancing his or her "historical situation."7 Not surprisingly, Heaney finds in Herbert's "self-delighting" verbal "inventiveness" an example of a "fully realized poetry," where the "coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our own experience."8 That Herbert's poetry is more readily approachable "as poetry" than that of the majority of his contemporaries is a central condition of the nature of his influence for many practicing poets today. For, more often than not, it is less the specific claims Herbert makes about his particularly Protestant point of view that show through in the work of subsequent poets than it is a habit of language use that enables other poets to grasp...

A Canvas for Words: Spatial and Temporal Attitudes in the Writing of Poems

If we assume the common poet's adage, that ‘sometime I write the poem, sometime the poem writes me’, then we can assume, because a poem is typically a written thing, that a kind of dialogue takes place between the poet and the page that is different from any dialogue that occurs when we speak. A key difference is that the page has an explicitly spatial dimension. The combination of these more spatial aspects and the more temporal aspects of sound (more frequently discussed) makes up the non-tropical wing of the poet's craft, but the spatial aspects are rarely talked about. Drawing on the old saying that ‘Homer is the poet of the ear and Virgil is the poet of the eye’, this essay intends to heighten awareness of the visual/spatial elements of a poem particularly so that when we return to the page to write a poem day after day we can turn ourselves toward those aspects and get a better, more artful, handle on them.

Concern With Craft

This article contends with the question “what is good poetry?” The author argues that those interested in poetry as a means to represent research must be aware of poetic traditions and techniques and engage critically in a discussion of how an understanding of poetry informs their work. One means by which to accomplish this is through the use of ars poetica(art of poetry). The author presents a discussion of the function and utility of ars poetica for poetic craft, means of articulating one's own ars poetica, examples of some poets' conceptualizations of poetry, and the implications of ars poetica as artistic criteria. In addition, the author demonstrates how three versions of her own ars poetica written at different times may be used as criteria for assessing research poetry.

"Inheritor": A Poem by Czeslaw Milosz

"Inheritor":A Poem by Czeslaw Milosz Jeremy Driscoll OSB (bio) Listen, perhaps you will hear me, young man. Noon. Crickets sing as they did for us A hundred years ago. A white cloud passes, Its shadow runs beneath it, the river glitters. Your nakedness. The echo Of a tongue unknown to you, here, in the air, Our words addressed to you, gentle and guiltless Son of invaders. You do not know What happened here. You do not seek Faith and hope as they were practiced here, You walk by smashed stones with the fragments of a name. Yet this water in the sun, the scent of calamus, The same ecstasy of discovering things Unite us. You will find again The sacredness they tried to expel forever. Something returns, invisible, frail and shy, Adoring, without name, and yet fearless. After our despair, your hottest blood, Your young and avid eyes succeed us. Our heir. Now we are allowed to go. Again, listen. Echo. Faint. Fainter.1 [End Page 35] I think that Czeslaw Milosz's poem titled "Inheritor" is most certainly one of his greatest. It is not long, only twenty-one lines. And the lines advance slowly, surely, sadly to a finish that takes the reader's breath away. One cannot help but admire the way in which poetic craft delivers the message of this poem. Every line and indeed every word conspire to carry through its intent. The poem is profoundly Christian, even if there is no explicit Christian theme in it. I wonder even if Milosz himself was aware of how deeply Christian is this poem's achievement. In any case, the reader admiring it, knowingly or not, is admiring Christian truth in art. What Milosz says here is clearly uttered from his depths, the depths formed and molded through the Christian culture and history of Poland and the history through which Milosz himself lived. I want to indicate in this commentary why I make these claims about the poem. In some sense the whole of Milosz's life is condensed into the twenty-one lines of this poem. It is a poem of his old age, published in 1991. To hear it well, the reader must be mindful from the start of the broad outline of Milosz's life story, which unfolded under the force of some of the most significant, some of the most horrible events of the twentieth century. There was his upbringing in the countryside around Wilno and in Wilno itself in present day Lithuania. There was the invasion of this land and its appropriation by communist Russia. The countryside itself and the Polish culture of that region were destroyed and replaced by the invaders. Meanwhile, Milosz himself was forced to leave not only that place but eventually Poland itself, since his conscience could not make peace with Poland's postwar-Communist regime, a shameless puppet of the invading Russians. Then there was and is the bitter irony of defeated Germany faring better than Poland in the postwar decades, even though the Poles had fought valiantly against the Germans and were among the supposed victors. Milosz fled the land he loved and felt himself an exile during decades in France and then in America, even if he in many ways flourished there. [End Page 36] In addition, wherever he went, Milosz was always a sensuous man. I do not praise him for his weaknesses in this regard, which he himself confesses and loathes. But there is a splendid side to his sensuous nature, which knows how to bask gratefully and joyfully in the beauty of the earth, the beauty of the other, the beauty of oneself. The sensuous capacity of the poet and all this history roll themselves out in the lines of this poem. It is quintessential Milosz. The poem is an icon displaying the magnificent beauty of the virtue of forgiveness. How forgiveness could make for peace is its lesson. Its lines reveal the process of arriving at the point where, in fact, real forgiveness is realized. "Listen, perhaps you will hear me, young man." So the poem begins. By its end, forgiveness is achieved, but a deal must first be cut...

Passion and Arrogance: Poetic Craft and Topographies of Remembrance in the Work of Michael Hartnett

Passion and Arrogance: Poetic Craft and Topographies of Remembrance in the Work of Michael Hartnett

When He would Compose from Fragments a World Perfect at Last: Theology and Poetics in Czeslaw Milosz's "From the Rising of the Sun"

AbstractThis essay considers the place of religious and theological thought in the work of 20th century Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004). In a manner unique in contemporary world literature, Milosz approached and utilized these realms as a means to formulate and examine questions that are both timely and timeless. Focusing on sections I, II, and VII of the long poem-sequence, "From the Rising of the Sun," (along with discussions of other key poems and texts) the essay explores the dynamic interplay between theological thought and poetic craft in Milosz's work. Section I, "The Unveiling," introduces both the key themes the poem sequence explores (being and time, the meaning of history and individual lives, fall and redemption) as well as key poetic techniques (direct descriptive invocation and nuanced use of verb tense). Section II functions as a poetic embodiment of a particularly Miloszian, unorthodox "Manichaenism," an outlook that finds no basis for human values in the natural order of the world. Embedded in this section is a poetic gesture of hope that is more fully explored in Section VII. In this concluding section Milosz, using a full-range of poetic techniques ranging from the dramatic-narrative to the direct invocation of vanished reality, explores the heterodox theological concept of apokatastasis, or total restoration, as a gesture of profound hope that has theological, ethical, and aesthetic implications.