Poetic Craft Research Articles

BOOK REVIEW:ED. Abdul-Rasheed Na'allah. THE PEOPLE'S POET: EMERGING PERSPECTIVES ON NIYI OSUNDARE. Trenton: Africa World P, 2003.

Reviewed by: The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare F. Odun Balogun The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare Ed. Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah Trenton: Africa World P, 2003. 629 pp. ISBN 0-86543-849-8 paper. Niyi Osundare's growth as a poet is perceived in most essays in this collection as evolutionary, with his latest volume, Waiting Laughter, seen, for example, in Abiola Irele's preface, as marking the highest peak in the poet's developmental progression [End Page 186] toward an artistic fusion of craft and content that has produced an increasingly dense poetic idiom. In an introduction to Songs of the Market Place, featured in this collection as "Afterword," the critic Biodun Jeyifo had earlier noted what is now uniformly acknowledged in most contributions to this book, that Osundare's intense preoccupation with poetic craft is what sets him apart from the other Nigerian poets of his generation, except that Odia Ofeimun is noted by Stewart Brown as also displaying similar poetic fastidiousness (102). Though Osundare is acclaimed as primus inter pares, many scholars in this collection equally emphasize his representativeness as a poet of his generation because the group of poets that emerged about the same time as he were responding to the same national artistic impulse. In protest against the poetry of opaque density, characterizing first-generation Nigerian poets like Clark, Okigbo, and Soyinka, the second generation sought to create a poetry that was marked by stylistic accessibility. Ironically, although Osundare's poetry exemplifies the trend for accessibility at its best, especially in his early poems which articulated this generational poetic manifesto, a number of the essays included here have validly observed that the more artistically proficient Osundare's poetry becomes, the more it is characterized by stylistic opacity. This phenomenon, it is pointed out, is a consequence of Osundare's love of stylistic experimentations, which in Irene Sywenky's opinion include a tendency that Osundare shares with the Ukranian poet Yuri Andrukhovych, to re-evaluate and recontextualize both received native oral tradition as well as borrowed Western literary models as a way of "writing oneself into the world culture while maintaining a distinct cultural identity" (375). Poetic density, in Adepitan's view, is also an inescapable consequence of Osundare's adoption of the oral poetic tradition, known for its mythic tendencies. "Osundare," he writes, "is not overly concerned with myth-making in The Eye of the Earth. Nonetheless, is it fair to ask a Yoruba poet to write a whole tome of invocations and salutations in obeisance to the earth without willy-nilly re-discovering that mystic, mythic association with the earth for which his forefathers were exemplars? The answer is no—not even for a poet with a materialist outlook." (72) A generous number of essays analyze Osundare's stylistic experimentations with various aspects of poetic composition, including morphology, metaphoric diction, and oral tradition's performance devices. If the adoption of the stylistic elements of orature and a preference for intensely committed social themes, as correctly pointed out in several essays, constitute traits that Osundare shares with other poets of his generation, it is equally remarked that his patronage of ecological themes as a poet of nature and his infusion of hope and optimism into the treatment of the ills of the society are qualities that also set him aside from his peers (see Adepitan, Brown, Burness). As much as Femi Oyebode admires the brilliance with which Osundare integrates elements of his native Yoruba poetic devices in his Nigerian English poetry, he nonetheless argues that all that Osundare can achieve in this regard is a qualified, limited success in as much as poetry, more than drama or prose fiction, requires a native language to adequately express a native reality. "The overall effect" of composing poetry on Nigeria in English rather than his native Yoruba, the scholar insists, "is of a language treating its subject as alien to the integrity of the language itself " (86). While it may be argued that English cannot strictly be regarded as an alien language to Osundare, considering his training in it as a linguist, as well as his amply demonstrated [End Page 187...

"Spirit Divine! With Thee I'II Wander": Mary Robinson and Coleridge in Poetic Dialogue

On February 1,1801, Coleridge reported that Mary Robinson wrote him most affecting, heart-rending Letter a few weeks before she died, to express what she called her death bed affection & esteem for me--the very last lines of her Letter are indeed sublime-- 'My little Cottage is retired and comfortable. There mean to remain (if indeed live so long) till Christmas. But it is not surrounded with the romantic Scenery of your chosen retreat: it is not, my dear Sir! the nursery of sublime Thoughts--the abode of Peace--the Solitude of Nature's Wonders. O! Skiddaw!--I think, if could but once contemplate thy Summit, should never quit the Prospect it would present till my eyes were closed for ever!' (Letters 2: 669). Too ill to visit the Lake District, Robinson died on December 26, 1800. In A Stranger Minstrel, Coleridge replies concluding with a tribute to Robinson's presence, the Lady of sweet song. This acknowledgment of Robinson's magic song is the final poetic round in a verse dialogue of six poems between the end of 1797 and of 1800 (1) illustrating a literary relationship between different generations and genders, writers who sympathized with each other and believed in poetry as an inspired craft. In light of the contemporary interest in Robinson's poetry, this dialogue between the older and well-known female poet in the final phase of her career and the young and still obscure coauthor of the Lyrical Ballads is revealing. dialogue is unbalanced: Robinson at the end of her life has more at stake than Coleridge, her ambivalent admirer. While Coleridge still has a brilliant if troubled literary-philosophical career ahead of him, the scandal-burdened English Sappho, at age forty-two, is at the end of hers. As a final poetic and testamentary act, Robinson, an invalid facing death, links her poetics to the new Lake Poets in both collaboration and friendly rivalry. Although Coleridge and Robinson didn't meet until early 1800, they were aware of each other's work as contributors to Daniel Stuart's Morning Post. While Coleridge was struggling to establish himself as a writer and support his new family, Robinson was consolidating her literary authority. Robinson initiated the dialogue with Ode to the Drop in Morning Post on December 26, 1797. Taken from her novel Walsingham (1797), the reprinting conveys a sentimental parallel between the speaker and the author as beautiful but vulnerable flowers [Where'er find thee, gentle flow'r,/ Thou still art sweet, and dear to me!/ For have known the cheerless hour,/ Have seen the sun-beams cold and pale,/ Have felt the chilling, wint'ry gale,/ And WEPT, and SHRUNK LIKE THEE! (Pascoe 324)]. Robinson's most fanciful conceit, The night-breeze tears thy silky dress,/ Which deck'd with silv'ry lustre shone (323), joins pathos with poetic craft. Although distanced from the Della Cruscan style of her 1791 Poems, the Snow Drop retains the self-consciously artificial and erotic tone. Impressed by Robinson's lyric, Coleridge responded with The Apotheosis, or the Drop on January 3, 1798, under the pseudonym Francini, after he submitted it with yet another pseudonym: I am one among your many readers, who have been highly gratified by your extracts from Mrs Robinson's Walsingham; you will oblige me by inserting the following lines [written] immediately on the perusal of her beautiful poem, the Drop (Letters 1: 639). His verse reply to The Drop is in fact more a Della Cruscan erotic compliment than eulogy. In light of the recent critical revaluation of the poetry of sensibility so popular at the end of the eighteenth century, David Erdman's characterization of Robinson's lyric nearly half a century ago as factitious and imitative piece of flattery (250) may need to be revised to acknowledge that both Robinson's Snow Drop and Coleridge's Apotheosis are in fact elegant and polished poems. …

The People's Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare (review)

Reviewed by: The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare F. Odun Balogun The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare Ed. Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah Trenton: Africa World P, 2003. 629 pp. ISBN 0-86543-849-8 paper. Niyi Osundare's growth as a poet is perceived in most essays in this collection as evolutionary, with his latest volume, Waiting Laughter, seen, for example, in Abiola Irele's preface, as marking the highest peak in the poet's developmental progression [End Page 186] toward an artistic fusion of craft and content that has produced an increasingly dense poetic idiom. In an introduction to Songs of the Market Place, featured in this collection as "Afterword," the critic Biodun Jeyifo had earlier noted what is now uniformly acknowledged in most contributions to this book, that Osundare's intense preoccupation with poetic craft is what sets him apart from the other Nigerian poets of his generation, except that Odia Ofeimun is noted by Stewart Brown as also displaying similar poetic fastidiousness (102). Though Osundare is acclaimed as primus inter pares, many scholars in this collection equally emphasize his representativeness as a poet of his generation because the group of poets that emerged about the same time as he were responding to the same national artistic impulse. In protest against the poetry of opaque density, characterizing first-generation Nigerian poets like Clark, Okigbo, and Soyinka, the second generation sought to create a poetry that was marked by stylistic accessibility. Ironically, although Osundare's poetry exemplifies the trend for accessibility at its best, especially in his early poems which articulated this generational poetic manifesto, a number of the essays included here have validly observed that the more artistically proficient Osundare's poetry becomes, the more it is characterized by stylistic opacity. This phenomenon, it is pointed out, is a consequence of Osundare's love of stylistic experimentations, which in Irene Sywenky's opinion include a tendency that Osundare shares with the Ukranian poet Yuri Andrukhovych, to re-evaluate and recontextualize both received native oral tradition as well as borrowed Western literary models as a way of "writing oneself into the world culture while maintaining a distinct cultural identity" (375). Poetic density, in Adepitan's view, is also an inescapable consequence of Osundare's adoption of the oral poetic tradition, known for its mythic tendencies. "Osundare," he writes, "is not overly concerned with myth-making in The Eye of the Earth. Nonetheless, is it fair to ask a Yoruba poet to write a whole tome of invocations and salutations in obeisance to the earth without willy-nilly re-discovering that mystic, mythic association with the earth for which his forefathers were exemplars? The answer is no—not even for a poet with a materialist outlook." (72) A generous number of essays analyze Osundare's stylistic experimentations with various aspects of poetic composition, including morphology, metaphoric diction, and oral tradition's performance devices. If the adoption of the stylistic elements of orature and a preference for intensely committed social themes, as correctly pointed out in several essays, constitute traits that Osundare shares with other poets of his generation, it is equally remarked that his patronage of ecological themes as a poet of nature and his infusion of hope and optimism into the treatment of the ills of the society are qualities that also set him aside from his peers (see Adepitan, Brown, Burness). As much as Femi Oyebode admires the brilliance with which Osundare integrates elements of his native Yoruba poetic devices in his Nigerian English poetry, he nonetheless argues that all that Osundare can achieve in this regard is a qualified, limited success in as much as poetry, more than drama or prose fiction, requires a native language to adequately express a native reality. "The overall effect" of composing poetry on Nigeria in English rather than his native Yoruba, the scholar insists, "is of a language treating its subject as alien to the integrity of the language itself " (86). While it may be argued that English cannot strictly be regarded as an alien language to Osundare, considering his training in it as a linguist, as well as his amply demonstrated [End Page 187...

Emigrations of l'Art pour l'Art to America

The imitation and adaptation of Gautier's enamel-and-cameo poetics by American poets, in particular by French Canadians and Latin Americans, reveal the inherent craftiness of a poetic craft whose irrelevancies and foreignness became relevant and local. By reviewing Octavio Paz's analysis of el modernismo, and by examining the Premi�res po�sies (1878) of the Qu�b�cois poet Eudore Evanturel and the immediate rejection of this poetry by the literary institution of his time and place, my study shows the slipperiness between claims (or charges) of aesthetic autonomy, disengagement, complicity, and opposition. (CGS)

Les stratégies négatives ou les intrusions poétiques de Charles Reznikoff

Within the context of the high modernist period, this paper proposes an analysis of the makings of an aesthetic in the early poems of Charles Reznikoff. Introductory remarks stress the need to relocate Reznikoff 's poetics outside the confines of an imagist perspective-a major defining moment of modernism— and of the later objectivist perspective of the 1930s. Receptive to reappraisal in recent French criticism of poetry previously labelled impersonal or objective, the author subsequently underscores the contiguity of poetic craft and emotion. The poet is seen to encroah upon the outside world through strategies which paradoxically heighten a semblance of contact. These strategies are construed as intrusions in so far as they bring the poet to breach poetic boundaries. Actively cutting away at the purported limits of his craft, Reznikoff redefines the poet's relationship to his materials. In conclusion, it is examined how by paring down the poetic image, Reznikoff 's intrusions take him a step closer to a world which holds him at bay.

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

:Jonson's Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism

Seldom in the history of literary criticism does evidence like Jonson's annotations to Spenser's The Faerie Queene emerge to so definitely alter our understanding of the opinion of one major poet, writing as both poet and critic, of another major poet. For centuries, critics have speculated about Jonson's attitude toward Spenser. In recent times, speculation has even led critics to suppose that Jonson's attitude was just the opposite of what new evidence shows it in fact was. Not only do the authors reevaluate the printed record of Jonson's remarks on Spenser, including allusions evident in his own poetry, but they also closely examine all of Jonson's markings and annotations to his copy of the 1617 Folio of The Faerie Queen, The Shepheards Calender and Together With The Other Works. Riddell and Stewart show how consistently these markings and annotations reflect Jonson's understanding and admiration of Spenser's poetic craft. By a careful analysis of the evidence, they show also how Jonson's reactions to Spenser fit into the critical tradition of the seventeenth century surrounding Spenser's greatest poem. That evidence now includes a volume once believed either to have been lost, or perhaps never to have existed. Riddell and Stewart trace the provenance, and then the recovery of this book, and transcribe all of its annotations. (All annotations and representative markings are reproduced in two valuable appendices.) The authors argue that nothing can replace evidence in determining proper answers to intelligible literary questions.

The Unpublished Poetry of Owen Dodson

The following is a selection of the unpublished poetry of Owen Dodson (19141983), culled from old handwritten or typewritten drafts found in various folders. Dodson, not unlike many poets, was accustomed to writing whenever the writing mood surfaced, and on whatever surface was at hand. He would write while at dinner, or in transit, on the backs of napkins, or on handbills, or brown paper bags; most of what survives, even some of the typewritten poems, are illegible or have portions missing. Some of these are early versions of later published poems; some are what Dodson might have considered failed efforts. Many of them are ideas which may have seemed wonderfully rich in their conception, but were ultimately distorted in their execution, and much of the distortion came from either or both of two sources: rheumatism and alcohol. What remains undistorted in these poems is Dodson's tragic sense of life as circumscribed by the recurrent specter of death. While Dodson was still a youth, the deaths of both his parents, only eighteen months apart, left their first and lasting impressions. Later in life, the death of his brother, and the passing of close friends and associates such as Paul Robeson, W.H. Auden, and Arna Bontemps, all within only a few months, reinforced an already pronounced awareness of mortality.' Nevertheless, there also appears in Dodson's poetry, in opposition to the threat of death, the eternal promise of faith. Sometimes this too suffers, but it always seems prepared to ward off death with its countervailing presence. At the horizon of this urge toward faith is a strong religious sensibility, nurtured by a strict Baptist upbringing. But the God of Dodson's universe must work long hours and often put in overtime, as death-wearing among its several guises cynicism, despair, failed intimacy, and racial discord-is capable of inciting chaos without notice. These two cosmic elements, faith and death, eternally at war with each other, characterize Dodson's poetic career-even and perhaps especially unto these attempts, which may also have fallen victim to a slow disintegration. Dodson probably responded to these poems as some of us would to so many unruly children-often with regret, but nevertheless with love. Even their flaws reflect something of the marrow of the poet's craft. In these works, talent, structure and nuance prevail as strength, sobriety and security appear, at points, to have ebbed. Though reconstructing these poems has not been a simple task, the responsibility for their remaining flaws is mine alone. Trained in the austere tradition of English poetry, Dodson ordinarily brooked no transgressions. Wherever spelling, punctuation or capitalization has been problematic, I have tried to retain Dodson's idiom as

Footprints Revisited or "Life in the Changed Space that I don't Know": Elke Erb's Poetry Since 1989

After the fall of the Wall, the lyrical correspondence of the East German writer Elke Erb with the Austrian experimental writer Friederike Mayröcker proved to be of great significance for Erb's process of reexamining perspectives and constituting a new poetic self. In a close reading of Erb's post-Wende texts, the article discusses Erb's reshaping of her poetic craft against the backdrop of her life in the former GDR and literarty discourses in unified Germany. The analysis of representative poetry focuses on three areas of Erb's poetry collections after 1989: critical reflections on life in the former GDR through linguistically playful strategies; unanchored existence in spaces of language that signify a suspicious stance toward language and signification; intertextuality in the form of "text-echoes" with Friederike Mayröcker. This essay argues that Erb's intense reading of Mayröcker between 1991 and 1994 is a unique model of female reader response.

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

Love, Death and Creation: Boris Pasternak and Two Rilke Requiems

Boris Pasternak's lifelong admiration for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is well known and has been documented in his published correspondence and the autobiographical memoirs Okhrannaia Gramota and Liudi i polozheniia. His translations of Rilke's Requiem fur Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth and Requiem fur eine Freundin may be seen as expressions of this admiration; however, Pasternak's translations of Rilke reflect far more complicated motives than simple homage to a beloved poet's craft.2 In the late 1920s and early thirties Rilke became for Pasternak a touchstone in the evolution of his own public and private persona. Through the Rilke translations Pasternak speaks of the pressures of life and especially byt on creative people, of the growing political pressures on literature, and of his gradual realization that in Soviet Russia the price of creativity may be death. Pasternak also understood that Rilke had consciously constructed his private life-his relationships with women, his insistence upon solitude-so as to serve his art. During these years Pasternak came to realize that he faced the same life dilemmas as the older poet and attempted to follow his example, or at least to justify his actions and needs by invoking the Rilkean model. This essay will discuss the nature and implications of the Rilkean presence in Pasternak's Okhrannaia Gramota, Rekviem, Po odnoi podruge Rekviem and Stikhi moi, begom, begom. Because life and art meet and intertwine in Pasternak's turning to Rilke, my analysis will draw alternately upon Pasternak's letters, memoirs, the relevant Rilke and Pasternak texts and their external referents. When the pianist Mariia Iudina asked Boris Pasternak to translate some Rilke poems for her students in December 1928, he refused: Peqb mia o nepeBoxe HeCKOJIbKHX cTHXOTBOpeHHH Hi3 'Studenbuch,' H X ei oTKa3aJI, noTOMy ITO 6biJI 3aHIT, a KpOMe Toro H aoJIr CBOH naMATHI Rilke HcnojHAio B pyroM coBceM nniaHe,

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires: A Memoir (review)

376Philosophy and Literature institutionally sanctioned devotional uses of Christ's body. This provocative irony drives much of Beckwith's study. The final chapter studies these issues in The Book ofMargery Kempe. Kempe embodies many of the tensions and the tendencies that Beckwith has traced. As part of a social class "developing its own cultural insignia" Kempe "might have been a typical candidate for crucifixion piety." And for her, Christ's body is "open enough to let her in, porous to her and intimate with her; [and at the same time] closed enough to make it a special privilege that she should be included" (p. 111). A short conclusion reviews the implications of this "materialist study" of the images of Christ's body and the struggle over "sacrality" as catholicity and protestantism "play out their tropes and struggle for cultural capital" (p. 117). Beckwith's notes are almost as long as her text, and the twenty pages ofworks cited and fifteen page index make the book a fine resource on Christological imagery. The prose, though at times laden with quotations and distracting theoretical paradigms, nonetheless constructs an argument which will inspire us to reimage the relations between individuals and institutions tearing at Christ's body in late medieval pious texts. California State University, Los AngelesMichael Calabrese With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires: A Memoir, by Willis Barnstone; 184 pp. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993, $25.95. It is now eight years sinceJorge Luis Borges—quirky sage, serious poet, and impish verbal trickster—died in Geneva, and became, as W. H. Auden said of Yeats, his admirers. One of the most fervent of his admirers was Willis Barnstone, who as translator, impresario, and friend to the blind Argentinean littérateur during the last third of his life, is eminently qualified to write this whimsical and freewheeling memoir. Barnstone's thesis, if that is not too weighty a word, is stated in the moving coda of the book: "There is a well-documented tradition of the sage whose work is spoken. . . . Our record of these sages is largely from others who recorded with the instruments of time: memory and the hands of scribes" (p. 185). Barnstone offers his own credentials as a handily clear-minded scribe, who moreover is progenitor and participant too: increasingly Borges's "new medium was the charla, the modern dialectic. In conversation with questioning colleagues and audiences he created a public testament for our time" (p. 185) . This memoir, then, purports to bejust such a public testament. Through the course of eleven relaxed, discursive chapters, Barnstone restages in dialogue form a series of highly profitable meetings in Argentina and the States with his Reviews377 subject—profitable, in the sense that the discussions offer Borges's views on a variety of absorbing topics. These include his feelings about authors past and present, his obsession with death and eternity, and his responses—puzzled, wry, and ultimately delighted—to the "immense attention" of his many international admirers (p. 164). Most readers will find Borges's supposed reflections on his poetic craft, its themes and its strategies, of chief interest. Imagining himself, a blind writer, as "between dream and waking," Borges "longed to explore the metaphysics of dream and nightmare, or the secular ecstasy of otherness" (p. 4) . He frankly used previous writers to figure himself as that other, reinventing himself in his poetry—Spinoza, Whitman, Descartes, Kafka—and much of the conversations in the book concern these favored wordsmiths. His lightly held grasp of his own sentiency, at the intersection of many languages (Jorge Luis Borges was nothing if not a literary citizen of the world) , flavors these wry, often aphoristic observations. Throughout, Willis Barnstone is on hand to prompt, cajole—and sometimes even to cap the great man. At the same time, Borges's scribe places these encounters within a vital, informing context, historic as well as geographic. Asserting that Borges "was the center of the Argentinean experience" during the turmoil of the late 1970s and early '80s, our scribe traces with subtle precision that fraught line the writer walks in a society ruptured by social and political upheaval. Among the less literary controversies about Borges that...

The poetic craft of Bella Akhmadulina

Sonia 1. Ketchian. The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. viii, 248 pp. Illustrations. $32.50, cloth. To date this is the only book-length study on one of the most prominent and enigmatic poets in contemporary Russia. The origins of Akhmadulina's poetry are inextricably linked to the cultural mythology of the 1960s, a period of relative creative freedom known as the Thaw. Succeeding the years of Stalinist terror, this period witnessed a mighty revival of lyric poetry, unprecedented since the revolutionary years, and Akhmadulina, together with her brilliant peers and brothers-in-verse Evtushenko and Voznesensky, gave dramatic public readings before enormous audiences in packed stadiums and concert halls. With her striking appearance, foreign-sounding name, exotic Tartar-Italian genealogy, and complex, overtly apolitical verse, Akhmadulina exuded an aura of mystique and sophistication, and soon became an icon for her generation. Ketchian's personal acquaintance with the legendary poetess and her intimate knowledge of Russian literature make her a uniquely qualified interpreter of Akhmadulina's art. She guides the reader through intricate and esoteric imagery and linguistic nuances until all the pieces fit into a single coherent verbal picture. Although the book's main focus is the 1983 collection, The Secret, Ketchian also surveys Akhmadulina's earlier verse, demonstrating the organic continuity between different stages of her poetic development. As is the case with almost every postmodern poet (or, perhaps, any true poet), Akhmadulina's primary preoccupation in The Secret is with her own creative process. Ketchian provides us with a key to Akhmadulina's metapoetic secret, which consists essentially in a belief that verse arises from the beauty of nature. However, the twentieth-century poetess is worlds apart from the Romantics, who also regarded nature as the source of inspiration. As Ketchian's insightful analysis demonstrates, the traditional theme of the poet's communion with nature is complicated and transformed in Akhmadulina's verse by her postmodern sensibility, urban experience, nostalgic awareness of cultural heritage, and intense spiritual life. In Akhmadulina's poetry, nature is understood in very broad terms, not only as the beauty of fields and plants, but also as the dynamic of the seasons and times of day, and the vast spaces of the universe. Ketchian scrupulously unravels the paradigm of the persona's creative process, closely intertwined with the natural cycle. Summer is a period of intense travel, particularly to the bright and exotic region of the Caucasus, a time of accumulating impressions and emotions. …

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

Anne Bradstreet and Elizabeth Bishop: Nature, Culture and Gender in “Contemplations” and “At the Fishhouses”

Written in and for a patriarchal community that valued its solidarity, Anne Bradstreet's “Contemplations” does not try to render an accurate, realistic portrait of nature in the New World. Rather, it employs what Leo Marx calls “ecological images…displaying the essence of a system of value” and subordinates these images to the reformed Judeo-Christian myth. “Contemplations” argues that God is the source of order, meaning, and history, and that the natural world, whether beneficent or hostile, reflects His omnipotence. But in delineating a predominantly masculine world view, Bradstreet also sets aside her own aspirations as a woman poet. Although the song of the female bird Philomel represents a kind of art that is free of Puritanism's monolithic expectations, Bradstreet's speaker cannot liberate herself to sing with Philomel. Instead, she stifles her own song for a practical poetic craft that serves her struggling community.

A.W.H.Adkins, Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists

A.W.H.Adkins, Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists

Technique in the Elegists - A. W. H. Adkins: Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists. Pp. xii + 250. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. £32.50.

Technique in the Elegists - A. W. H. Adkins: Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists. Pp. xii + 250. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. £32.50.

Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists

Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists

Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists

Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists