Poet's Mind Research Articles

"A Parliament of Monsters": Genre, Disability, and the Revival of Epic Ability in Wordsworth's Prelude

Although scholars addressing William Wordsworth's shorter lyrics have traditionally praised his positive treatment of physical otherness, at least one commenter writing on The Prelude correctly characterizes Wordsworth's depiction of disabled individuals as "demonic" (Curran 184). This is a divide that as of yet has not been properly explicated, and one which I attribute to the shift in genre, from lyric to epic, which superimposes onto The Prelude pre-drawn battle-lines between the virile hero and the sluggishly-monstrous, aberrant creatures who stand in his way. Indeed, the poet's consistent stigmatization of disability coupled with an equally persistent insistence that physical ability is fundamental to his epic endeavor situates The Prelude more squarely within the epic tradition than previously noticed. As in the works of poetic forbears, disabled characters nearly derail Wordsworth from his epic project—the development of the poet's mind via the instruction of nature. But more importantly, it is Wordsworth's commentary on how one can most successfully participate in the natural world that definitively excludes physically-othered individuals from achieving even a romanticized iteration of heroic status. By the end of this essay, then, it will become clear that The Prelude, which many scholars consider to be extending Milton's epic turn inward in Paradise Lost, depends far more upon the physical realm, and ability, than previously believed.

Expression of a Non-Traditional Chronotop in Lyrics

The image in the poetry of the artistic space in a symbolic sense expresses the psychological state of the lyrical hero. These images have their exact and inaccurate features, and also relate to spaces that are only in the poet's mind, not related to an external object. The types of time change depending on the action of space. Stopped art forms of time are created.

“Epileptic winds and breezes”: Coleridgean Fancy and the Pathology of the Mind

This article focuses on Coleridge’s writing of epileptic signs in the light of debates and disagreements regarding the physiology and psychology of the brain by, among others, Erasmus Darwin, and Beddoes. Widely debated at a time where both evangelical movements and consumer behaviours were threatening the nerves and brains of English society, epileptic auras, I suggest, formed a significant context for Coleridge’s pathography writing: his understanding of epileptic signs influenced his theory of a poetic mind involuntarily creating stories and fictions that could be disbelieved and thus disavowed.

Byron and Romantic Concepts of Inspiration

Though treated marginally in histories of philosophy and criticism, Byron was deeply involved in Romantic-Period controversies. In that post-Enlightenment, science-orientated age, the Platonic-Romantic concept of inspiration as divine afflatus linking the prophet-priest-poet with the ideal world beyond was no longer tenable without an admixture of doubt that turned religion into myth. As a seriously-minded Romantic sceptic in the Pyrrhonian tradition and commuter between the genres of sensibility and satire, Byron often refers to the prophet-poet concept, acting it out in pre-Decadent poses of inspiration, yet undercutting it with his typical Romantic Irony. In contrast to Goethe, who insisted on an inspired poet's sanity, he saw inspiration both as a social distinction and as a pathological norm deviation. The more imaginative and poetical the creation, the more insane is the poet's mind; the more realistic and prosaic, the more compos it is, though an active poet is never quite sane in the sense of Coleridge's ‘depression’, meaning his non-visitation by his ‘shaping spirit of imagination’.

Rowing to Sublimity: The ＂Stolen Boat＂ Episode from The Prelude

The ＂Stolen Boat,＂ one of the most celebrated episodes from William Wordsworth's The Prelude, recounts the occasion when the poet as a youth takes a boat from the shore of the Ullswater in England's Lake District and begins rowing into the middle of the lake. Suddenly, when he sees a higher peak emerge from a lower hill adjacent to the bank from which he is rowing, he is taken aback by the sight and immediately returns to shore. The episode in recent years has rightly been cited by critics as a representative example of the sublime, but on-site investigations by the author suggest that the matter should be further considered in light of physical evidence that the poet may have amalgamated the image of the mountain with other information in a time-integration analogous to the motion of the boat. The result is a new reading that does not necessarily refute earlier theoretical insights into the episode as a sublime experience, but rather qualifies them by underscoring the complicated manner in which Wordsworth incorporates nature into the ＂growth of the poet's mind.＂

A New Kind of Beauty

A New Kind of Beauty Sarah White (bio) The Haunt Road Karen Garthe Spuyten Duyvil Press www.spuytenduyvil.net 102 Pages; Print, $15.00 The first line of "flag that saved a tribe," which opens Karen Garthe's The hauntRoad, is "They were in Cairo like tiny cups of tea." Rather than wondering who "they" were, or why Cairo, or just how "they" resembled cups of tea, I recommend inquiring what we can expect language to do in the work under review. We soon have to conclude that, as a poet, Garthe simply does not send words on journalistic errands. Who? What? When? et al. are the wrong questions to ask of her poems. She does not use words to describe things. "They" didn't LOOK like tiny cups of tea or smell or taste or sound like them. "They" simply WERE like them, the same way "they" were in Cairo, which remains unexplained, along with the surprising typography of the poem's title because Explain is another thing this poet does not do with words. Any further information we receive about the cups-of-tea-people will be strictly lyrical and rhythmical: "the lightest part of cloud they were, such powers of everything." The poem diligently, religiously, avoids making a certain kind of sense and, at the same time, offers ways of reading, as well as emphatic hints as to how NOT to read: We demanded trick words STOP explaining ourselves STOP I have taken mybreasts and proffer them. . . We get, not an explication, but an erotic invitation. What more do we want? Perhaps a little additional advice: "STOP laughing STOP / any annoying / Knowingness." I will keep this in mind as I proceed along The hauntRoad. In a poem called "scalloped," I am told that "Poems hang in air boats and grammars of / Mercy," maybe not all poems, but these, certainly. Each one evokes its décor, about which there is much sweetness, sensuality, and, above all, musicality: "some nights lay on the heart / like King David's musician / harping." There is also keen distress in these lush scenarios, for instance, the distress of "misunderstanding poetry, panicked and unconsoled. The persistent defeat you wear in the dream." There are even worse distresses than that; the poems often struggle gorgeously against Love's elusiveness—a ubiquitous theme, of course, in lyric poetry, though here it rarely, if ever, laments predictably on behalf of the poet's own person. It is more likely to complain on behalf of Cleopatra in her "sunk palace," Rebekah at her well, Eurydice in her "Many Caves" or a (Jamesian?) "Little Sinecure governess come face to face with her master." These are some of the legendary literary figures with whom this poet wants to attune our hearts. Somewhere in the mix is a passionate, familiar voice: Garthe's ravishing "sharp Prow," a sailboat-shaped poem, gives us swoon oars stirring delicate night delicate peace and: What we'd do with such a starred clear chance. . . a satin crossing, a long kiss The same contrary-to-fact erotic diction found in Emily Dickinson's Wild Nights-Wild Nights!Were I with theeWild nights should beOur luxury! perhaps the same "Thee" as one that opens Garthe's "Wild gray door." But it's foolish to pretend I recognize the precise origin or emotional engine of these poems. I'm reminded that I have been told to minimize "annoying Knowingness." In most cases, I do not know and cannot trace the poems to a single origin. They seem to spring fully armed—and fully surprising—from a poetic mind like none I've encountered, a mind that seems deeply loyal to the gods of Surprise. I constantly find myself, as a poet, asking (though I tell myself not to), "Where could THAT have come from?" Comfort of pepper dogs joy in the woodsand a moonshine sip handing back the lost understanding of Imposter on the rim of the flavor deal's shakedown I can't be sure exactly why but it matters in the book's thematics whether a poem is located in the woods, or on the ocean, or both...

Dissensus, Irony, Dialectic

Dissensus, Irony, Dialectic

Zen Meditation on Yeats’s Poetics of Automatic Writings; Re-creating His Poetic Minds in a New Creative Séance

Zen Meditation on Yeats’s Poetics of Automatic Writings; Re-creating His Poetic Minds in a New Creative Séance

PEREMPUAN DALAM PUISI CINTA SHUNTARO TANIKAWA DAN W.S. RENDRA: Sebuah Kajian Sastra Bandingan1

Perempuan merupakan objek paling yang menarik untuk dijadikan bahan pembicaraan, topik penelitian, atau sumber inspirasi bagi para kreator di bidang seni dan sastra. Namun, terdapat fenomena yang berbanding terbalik dengan hal tersebut, pada kehidupan sehari-hari, dalam masyarakat yang menganut sistem patriarkat, perempuan sering kali diabaikan, dinomorduakan, bahkan dianggap tidak penting. Fenomena yang terjadi dengan perempuan ini juga terjadi dalam masyarakat Indonesia dan Jepang yang menganut sistem patriarkat. Berbicara tentang kedudukan perempuan yang menjadi cerminan dari masyarakat di Indonesia dan Jepang dapat dilihat melalui sastra, seperti pada puisi. Salah satu genre karya sastra yang berisi luapan perasaan, imajinasi, dan pikiran penyair ini tidak terlepas dari bagian dari masyarakat. Penciptaan sebuah puisi dipegaruhi oleh lingkungan tempat penyair lahir dan hidup dalam masyarakat. Oleh karena itu, melalui puisi dapat terlihat juga ideologi masyarakat tempat penyair itu berasal, khususnya dalam membandingkan puisi cinta dari kedua negara tersebut. Objek dari penelitian ini puisi cinta karya W.S Rendra dan Shuntaro Tanikawa. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode komperatif, pendekatan sastra bandingan, dan teori feminis. Melalui kajian sastra bandingan antara puisi-puisi cinta W.S. Rendra dan Shuntaro Tanikawa diharapkan masyarakat mengetahui kedudukan perempuan menurut pandangan penyair dalam masyarakat Indonesia dan Jepang.

Four Books for the Price of One

Four Books for the Price of One

Text and Context:

The poor living conditions of the internally displaced people of Bangladesh at the Indian refugee camps during the months of the war of liberation in 1971 struck a deep chord with the philanthropic western minds, a handful of whom came in person to visit these camps. One of these people was the poet Allen Ginsberg, who, unlike a typical social worker, felt compelled within to address the global consciousness in an idiosyncratic way. Ginsberg’s “September on Jessore Road” was recited and sung by the poet himself in the tradition of the blues; but it counts more for its detailed account of the shocking ailment of the scared mob haunted by the atrocities of the Pakistani army. This paper is intent on assaying how the backdrop of the war-ridden Bangladesh affected Ginsberg’s poetic mind, resulting in a text dipped in a humanitarian appeal, which potently sketches the images of the sufferings of the distressed evacuees.

Re-imagining the Literary Brand

This paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Analysing Spielberg's film, The Adventures of Tintin (2011), and Andrew Motion's fictional continuation of Stevenson's Treasure Island, it argues that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture.

Objects, Cabinets, and Cities: Wordsworth and the Matter of the Romantic Mind

EXPLORING WILLIAM WORDSWORTH'S AESTHETIC RESPONSE TO LONDON'S panoramas, J. Jennifer Jones notes how the poet was through the new technologies of his (1) The passing remark not central to Jones's argument, nor does she explore its implications for the city at large; still, it hints at an underlying logic that runs through much of the recent literary criticism on urban experience. Complicating the usual thought on Romanticism's rejection of the city--as a threat to knowledge formation and the transcendent imagination (2)--this criticism argues for new perceptual processes, mimetic modalities, and imaginative tendencies that urban experience inspired. (3) Implicit in this, but left unexplored in the criticism, a sense of mental life contingent on the objects and environments of the era. This logic, addressed more explicitly in cognitive archeology, one in which the material and mental co-evolve, in which material culture along with social systems prove as much the cause the consequences of new ways of thinking. (4) The purpose of this article to excavate this underlying logic within Romantic literature, to explicate further its implications for literary studies, and to argue that the city's capacity to be thought through precisely what made it so vital to Romantic mental life. My focus falls primarily on Wordsworth's The Prelude; or Growth of a Poet's Mind (1805) and its portrayal of the built environment a precarious yet productive apparatus for the poet's cognitive becoming. Essential to Wordsworth's sense of mental formation was the eighteenth-century intersection of sensationalist psychology, educational theory, and object-play practices, from which emerged a prescient view of material engagement catalyst for mental growth. By the 1790s, object-play approaches had become widespread among tutors and educators. As an auspicious case in point, William and Dorothy Wordsworth adopted such an approach with Basil Montague, whom they taught nothing at present but what he learns from the evidence of his senses, so that his attention is directed to everything he sees, the sky, the fields, trees, shrubs, corn, the making of tools, carts, etc etc etc. (5) As the list suggests, object-play approaches relied on both natural objects and human artifacts, the distinction being less significant than whether the object could be engaged and manipulated. Such approaches would also motivate the mass production of objects with explicit epistemic functions, such jigsaw puzzles, cards, games, battledores, writing sheets, map sampler patterns, alphabet tiles, and maps. (6) By the end of the eighteenth century, then, a recognition had swelled within the cultural consciousness: the material world was a means to cultivate the mind's contents and power. This recognition inspired more capacious and explicit thinking about the reciprocation between minds and objects, thinking that features centrally in canonical works from Wordsworth's great decade. It defines Wordsworth's view of humanity, such that he names it a prime subject for poetic exploration in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802): What then does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him acting and reacting upon each other, so to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure. ... (7) Sensationalist psychology recognized this affective economy between subjects and objects the engine behind knowledge formation, and it similarly underpins the educational value of object play. In The Prelude, Wordsworth extrapolates the educational view of object play to an engagement with the rural sphere at large, defining the objects of his youth affectively and epistemically rich playthings. (8) Yet, it the built environment that brings the poet to his fullest recognition of the blended of minds and materiality, (9) a might that further boosts his mental development. Not only does Wordsworth view the city through this educational lens, but so does the Romantic city demonstrate more emphatically than in prior ages the epistemic, associative, and imaginative influence of the material world. …

Keats’s Early Poetic Vision: Between the Confines of the Real and the Ideal

This paper seeks to understand Keats’s early poems as an attempt to shape his poetic identity. While his first volume of poetry can be seen in its entirety as the place where Keats plays out his desire (or even his urge/necessity) to discover his poetic self, two important poems, ‘I Stood tip-toe’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’ fully illustrate his tribute to literature, imagination, and the poetic mind. Like other Romantic poets, Keats has not been spared criticism for being solipsistic. However, as these early poems already demonstrate, his celebration of the poet or poetry is not solipsistic, but rooted in a profound belief in the power of literature to reach out and elevate the human soul above sorrow and loss. In ‘Sleep and Poetry’ Keats attacks the ‘elitist’ neoclassicism in order to bridge rather than increase the gap between poetry and society. He is trying to assimilate his poetry and art in general into the culture and lives of the people. Writing after the Enlightenment, which glorified reason and science, Keats is committed to shedding new light on the role of the imagination and poetry, tapping into man’s most intimate and authentic feelings. Circulating underneath his enchantment with poetry is the lingering concern with the legitimation of the poetic imagination. In ‘I Stood tip-toe’ the lyrical ‘I’ finds education in nature and goes back to myth and to the narrative of poetic beginnings in order to articulate a poetic vision. Keats’s later poetry-writing, or, poetry-making, has evolved but has never abandoned the early tenets of his poetic design.

Dylan Thomas’s The Map of Love: The Poetic Licence

In the early poetry, 18 Poems and 25 Poems , Dylan Thomas speaks of his awareness of the artistic heritage and also of his poetic freedom resulting in a poetic force. The Map of Love vindicates, while mapping out the continuous process of exploiting poetic licence in his works, that the poetry of the past cannot fully serve the demands of the present. Apparently, the third book offers a comparative estimate of the time-conscientious poets, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice and the life-conscious War poets, Roy Fuller, Alan Rook, and Keidrych Rhys.The issues involved are wider and cover the whole range of aesthetic transcendence and historic sense of Auden. Thomas, “refusing to fall in love with God … gave himself to the love of created things … accepting only what he could see” and created his own poetic design, “an ideal surely which … here if anywhere is feasible.” This explains why Thomas’s earth-concentric poetic licence is deeper than Auden’s ideology-centric poetic justice. The War poets heaved a sigh of relief as the world-concentric Thomas’s 18 Poems offers a hope for poetry, “life-blood” for their poetic mind fumbling around Auden’s structural consciousness. The poetic licence developed in The Map of Love is, therefore, central to an understanding of Thomas’s entire poetic ouvre , more particularly, of the maturer poetry of the later phase carving out a road taken already to immortality. In the literary study of this collection, Walford Davies and John Ackerman refer to Thomas’s “querying the nature” of his own “earlier adolescent attitudes.” However, as their study remains limited to general or literal statements, denotative or elucidative meaning of a few individual poems, they fail to render the core of the poem, the totality of its meaning. The poetic language of this transitional poem is endowed with implications, suggestions, and modifications. Hence, this paper undertaking a comparative and contrastive evaluation of the dramatic rule and energy, the poetic licence and the poetic justice underlying the poem, strives to highlight its intrinsic values associated with contextual significances and establish Thomas’s distinctive contribution to the artistic heritage of English poetry.

Romantic Autopsy and Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude

This essay traces the development of autoptical dissection as a medical practice during the French Revolution and its relation to modes of self-analysis in Romantic poetry, especially William Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude (1798–1799). In keeping with William Godwin's association of autoptical analysis with radical politics, Wordsworth's autobiographical poem reveals his attraction to a practice of poetic interpretation informed by anatomical techniques of probing and dismemberment. What emerges in the Two-Part Prelude, though, is a hybrid version of dissective exegesis, in which post-Revolutionary radical analysis coexists with an earlier Enlightenment sense of dissection as a procedure that reveals underlying sympathy and wholeness. Performing this double function of dissection through invocations of the probing glance, the Two-Part Prelude looks beneath the surfaces of landscape and of the speaker's body to analyze and animate its account of the growth of the poet's mind. As it marks the historically transitioning status of dissection in the anatomical medicine of the 1790s, the poem asks how medical method might function as a protocol for poetic hermeneutics and anticipates the modern practice of symptomatic close reading.

The Poet's Mind. The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870

The Poet's Mind. The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870

The poetic mind: a producer-oriented approach to literature and art

Abstract This paper aims to shift theoretical attention from the reception to the production end of literature, and from the literary text per se to the action-process of which it is an outcome. It focuses on the internal activities that bring about literary, or more generally, artistic behavior and suggests that a certain action-process is literature – and the resulting object a literary text – when it stands in a causal relation to a specialised type of creative mental state. This state will be termed the artistic thought state. The idea that literary texts are causally linked to artistic thought states may help provide answers to some persistent ontological questions in literary and art study (e.g. about the ontological status of literary objects as opposed to their linguistic ‘mere thing’ equivalents), and delineate new potential for research in the linguistic study of literature.

The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870

The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870

The Critic and the Fat Girl

Charles Altieri’s new work demonstrates the power innate to Stevens’s poetics, as well as literature and criticism in general. Simultaneously reading through Stevens’s career and working toward a theory of value, we discover competing aims that engender the clash of two kinds of imaginations — Stevens’s poetic mind and Altieri’s critical prowess — in an unending dialectical play. This competition results in a work of scholarship that helps clarify the imaginative possibilities latent in the humanities. Through exacting readings and theoretical speculation, Altieri’s book raises substantial questions about the role of literature in our lives and how it works to shape our experience.