Role Of Poet Research Articles

Al-Mutanabbi, the Renowned 10th-Century Arab Poet: Insights from Eastern and Western Scholars' Research

This study offers a comparative analysis of Eastern and Western scholarship on Al-Mutanabbi, the renowned 10th-century Arab poet, whose work has profoundly impacted Arabic literature and beyond. By examining key themes such as linguistic style, cultural identity, heroism, and individualism, the research highlights differences in how Eastern and Western scholars interpret his legacy. Eastern scholarship emphasizes Al-Mutanabbi’s mastery of the Arabic language, his deep cultural significance, and his philosophical exploration of Arab ideals, celebrating him as a symbol of Arab identity. Western scholars, on the other hand, often frame his work within the global literary tradition, focusing on universal themes of self-reflection and existential struggle, which position him as a bridge between Eastern and Western literature. This cross-cultural dialogue underscores the poet's dual role as both a representative of Arab heritage and a timeless voice for universal human concerns. The study concludes with suggestions for future research, including exploring Al-Mutanabbi's themes of fate and mortality, cross-cultural influences, and the effects of translation on his work's interpretation. Such research would further establish Al-Mutanabbi’s relevance in world literature and deepen the appreciation of Arabic poetry’s contributions to global literary heritage.

Towards the Communicative Strategies of Russian Modernism: the Poetic Correspondence of V. Bryusov and A. Bely

The object of this article is the poetic correspondence of Valery Bryusov and Andrei Bely in the 1900s. The analysis allowed us to draw a number of conclusions about the communicative strategies of Russian modernism. Firstly, in the structure of the correspondence, the dominant genre setting for dialogue with the addressee is identified, which allows identifying these poems as messages. This, on the one hand, makes it possible to fit the messages of Bryusov and Bely into the all-symbolist poetological and communicative context of the early twentieth century, when this genre was a kind of mainstream. On the other hand, the analysis of genre dominants allows us to identify their genre renewal associated with the formation of an original metastructural cycle resembling a "novel in letters", the heroes of which are Bryusov and Bely, simultaneously combining the roles of author and addressee. Secondly, in the titles of the poems under consideration ("Balder Loki", "Balder II", "Ancient Enemy", "Magician"), mythological codes are revealed, genetic links are established with Christian apocrypha and Scandinavian legends, in which the author's "I" and "you" of the addressee are associated with images of light and dark forces rooted in religious and pagan traditions. Thirdly, with the help of the biographical method, the parallels of the lyrical plots of the poems with the life and creative relationships of the poets are established. As a result, the poetic correspondence of the masters of symbolism is interpreted as a philosophical duel implicitly realizing dramatic situations of personal and "workshop" relationships, with a clear separation of aesthetic and ethical roles, these roles structure the plot of an epistolary "novel", the vicissitudes of which are reduced to binary oppositions of "light" and "darkness", heavenly and earthly, divine and demonic principles. However, at the same time, this exchange of messages appears as a dialogue about the poet's role in symbolist discourse, a dialogue reflecting different vectors of creative aspirations of symbolists and, consequently, the ambivalent tendencies of the current towards both consolidation and separation.

Strategies of Palestinian Resisting Poetic Speech Guidance and Convincingness

The challenges evolving within the Palestinian context compel the resistance poet to formulate novel strategies in response to the oppressive practices of Israeli occupation. As such, the poet's role becomes increasingly critical and fraught with danger, magnified by the harrowing conditions of living within occupied territories or in exile. Consequently, the poet relies on two primary strategies: Guidance and Persuasiveness within their poetic discourse. They aim to confront the shifts and changes impacting the Palestinian context and resist the occupation's policies designed to dominate thought and culture and undermine the Palestinian cause and the right of return. These strategies are of utmost importance: they guide the reader, convince them, and serve as a reminder. They also protect against the risk of being subsumed within the occupation's culture. Thus, the resistant poem comes to encompass aspects of cultural, psychological, and political resistance. This is a response to the vast and escalating conflict with the occupier, who seeks to distort people's beliefs and principles. This study will examine the features of each strategy, illustrating examples from resistance poetry. It will explore the linguistic relationships and devices used in both strategies, examining their influence on meaning. The effective use of evidence and arguments to guide, convince, and deepen understanding is critical. Therefore, the resistance poet must proceed with caution, meticulously selecting linguistic tools that resonate with the situation and context at hand.

The Value of Poetry and the Poet's Role in Mahmoud Darwish's Poetic Outlook: A Thematic Study.

The Value of Poetry and the Poet's Role in Mahmoud Darwish's Poetic Outlook: A Thematic Study.

The Role of Poets in Documenting the Relationship between Africa and the Middle East: Nigerian Poet Isah Alabi as a Model

The Role of Poets in Documenting the Relationship between Africa and the Middle East: Nigerian Poet Isah Alabi as a Model

Status of the Mourned by Hugh Seidman

Reviewed by: Status of the Mourned by Hugh Seidman Jon Curley (bio) status of the mourned Hugh Seidman Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/status-of-the-mourned.html 84 pages, Print, $15.00 For over a half century, Hugh Seidman has crafted a formidable body of work that reflects the Objectivist mandate for sincerity, honesty, and clarity in poetic representation. A student of Louis Zukofsky, who theorized Objectivism as primarily a set of guidelines rather than an actual avant garde movement, [End Page 108] Seidman emerged in 1970 with Collecting Evidence (1970), dedicated to describing "a difference in reference/an epiphany." In Status of the Mourned, his newest collection, he is not only collecting the evidence but taking stock: composing a chronicle of his life and the lives of others, as elegist, fabulist, and witness to personal loss and historical catastrophe. It is a weird, arresting requiem that can veer abruptly from mournful meditation to quickened reverie. This whiplash movement across a spectrum of sentiment guarantees that it pulses with vitality and inquiry, probing "The living lives lived." In his eighty-second year, Seidman refuses the grandiose pronouncement of a presumed poetic elder statesman, the lofty utterances of a pretentious self-fashioned Bard, or the complacent curatorial considerations of a career bringing finality or semi-closure to his musings. As with his contemporary and close friend Michael Heller's recent work (whose Telescope: Selected Poems was published by New York Review Books in 2019), his so-called Late Style is an advancement in reckoning, a refusal to be settled in either particular moods or modes. These poems are at times frustrated, forlorn, and ferocious; they are always on fire. A Seidman requiem is a sustained recording of grief and loss but also the establishment of a sequence of resurrection songs "amid the remarkable fervor that raises/the dead to the status of the living." Memorial markers are occasions for conjuration, bringing dead kin and friends back to conscience, back to the poet's page, assembling threshold portraits of the dead in duel perspective: gone and beyond; here and animate. These remembrances are brought to bear on Seidman's sense of how he reckons with their occasions—how they shape his sense of self and self-judgement. As Burt Kimmelman has noted in the publication Jacket, a "singular characteristic of Seidman's work is its ethical imperative, of how to live." Childhood reminisces, international historical events ranging over decades, homages to forebears and influences, and exacting tributes in the form of raw obituaries predominate here. Seidman's preoccupations and passions are vast and differentiated into multiple frames for discerning the poet's role in remembering his and others' experiences. Always there is the awareness of mortality's fragility and the imminent end of all as "Einstein on the Beach" succinctly telegraphs the final journey awaited: "All passports stamped for the underworld." [End Page 109] The verse is volatile, moving frenetically across moods, critiques, and judgements, established then cancelled, modified and then, as often as not, jettisoned. After numerous inventories of international conflict and barbarity, the reckoning would seem clear, following Adorno's dictum about lyric poetry after Auschwitz being untenable as in "Writing and Catastrophe": "Poem implodes—cannot hold 'holocaust.'" Or from "Statements for Poetry": Not magic, logos, light.What "hope"? But Seidman remains twitchy and any sense of these lines being final conclusions are soon undermined elsewhere (but the quotations surrounding "holocaust" and "hope" still express frustration with the inadequacy of such terms and meanings). Elsewhere, however, in the poem defiance of resignation registers, even the fragile force of language can bring possibility; so arise more promising equations "Failed fate/art? Still—bloody heart!" and "History: stubborn, shrill,/Most dreams, dreams will." In "Two Poems," a tribute to his teacher and fellow poet Adrienne Rich, Seidman writes the following in the second section subtitled "The Hope of Poetry": I type this as time stopsI attain the workshop I graduate to the hopeless cosmosI labor because of you with the hope of poetry Hope against hope is the fulfillment of a poetic gesture unsuited to the world and therefore so crucial to it. Restless then...

Review Essay: Poet in the Public Arena

Review Essay: Poet in the Public Arena

Stevens, Emerson, and Abandonment

Stevens, Emerson, and Abandonment Jesse Zuba UNLIKE PATRICK REDDING, who, in the previous contribution to this special issue, takes a skeptical approach toward the question of Ralph Waldo Emerson's influence on Wallace Stevens, I agree with Harold Bloom and other critics that Stevens's immersion in Emerson is evident throughout his poetry. Stevens's extensive Emersonian heritage consists in both specific references, such as "poverty," the "central man," and the "scholar," and broader interests and affinities, such as the importance of the ordinary, contact with elemental reality, and the attitude of impersonality.1 James Longenbach identifies an intriguing element of that heritage in Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, where he describes Stevens's "innate Emersonian diffidence" regarding politics. He writes that Stevens "always felt somewhat insecure commenting on political situations he knew less well than he knew poetry" (161), though, as Longenbach demonstrates, that never prevented Stevens from engaging politics in his poetry. Similarly, for Redding, Stevens's insecurity regarding political commentary leads him to adopt a "stance of reluctant concession" in his poetry of the 1930s, when the suffering and upheaval caused by the Great Depression added urgency to the question of the poet's social role. While the publication of the revised and expanded edition of Harmonium in 1931 and of Ideas of Order in 1936 suggests that self-doubt did not necessarily slow Stevens's productivity—as various critics have usefully shown, it may even have inspired it—he tends nevertheless to "represent[] politics as an unwelcome disturbance to the peace, an interruption to the normal flow of creative private life," as Redding puts it (272). If in "Farewell to Florida," for example, Stevens abandons his isolated location in the "ever-freshened Keys," where he often spent holidays, to "return to the violent mind" of "men in crowds" that populate his "leafless" north, he does so only grudgingly. Confronting social unrest requires a departure announced in hyperbolic terms—Florida is "forever gone"—as well as the tellingly regular rededication to the task embodied in the repeated commands "carry me, misty deck, carry me / To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on" (CPP 97–98). As Harold Bloom rightly suggests, the poem's farewells are "wild with all regret" (111). [End Page 28] To describe Stevens this way brings the Emersonian roots of his "diffidence" into focus. According to David Bromwich, Emerson's responses to political crises were predictable enough to qualify as a "pattern": His pattern generally was to withhold himself from the fray until the last possible moment, when the force of a calamity became unendurable. Then, at the beckoning of others, he would make his statement. Once he had played the part, he would confess to a sense of having been besmirched, or somehow cheated of himself, in the course of making his eloquence serviceable to a cause. (136–37) Bromwich goes on to recount how Emerson was persuaded by his friends to write to President Van Buren to protest the implementation of the Indian Removal Act. "In speaking thus the sentiments of my neighbors and my own," Emerson was denouncing what was clearly a great wrong—both in his own eyes and those of others—yet he confides, nevertheless, in his journal that the "tragic Cherokee business which we stirred at a meeting in the church yesterday will look to me degrading & injurious do what I can. It is like dead cats around one's neck" (Political Writings 51; Journals 1820–1842 591). The journal entry anticipates the still more forceful objection to political commentary that Emerson registers in a famous passage from the opening of his address on the Fugitive Slave Law, where he states that he does "not often speak to public questions. They are odious and hurtful and it seems like meddling or leaving your work," a point he reinforces when he further claims that the "one thing not to be forgiven intellectual persons is not to know their own task, or to take their ideas from others and believe in the ideas of others" (Essays 993). This connection raises the question of the provenance of both writers' shared antipathy to political commentary. Emerson's...

Into the Past, Into the Present--Historical Poetry as Warning: A Review of Julie Swarstad Johnson's Pennsylvania Furnace

Into the Past, Into the Present--Historical Poetry as Warning:A Review of Julie Swarstad Johnson's Pennsylvania Furnace Alyse Bensel (bio) Into the Past, Into the Present--Historical Poetry as Warning: A Review of Julie Swarstad Johnson's Pennsylvania Furnace Alyse Bensel Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 2019. 91 pages. $18.00 Pennsylvania Furnace, Julie Swarstad Johnson's debut poetry collection, explores what possibilities arise when a newcomer encounters the relics so common to a place that they have gradually disappeared into the landscape, becoming increasingly inscrutable and obscure. By listening to those artifacts, Johnson performs a resurrection through poems that traverse history, time, and space. Different registers resonate in this collection: persona poems inhabit the lives of those who lived in Pennsylvania furnace towns, meaningful landscapes across the country are painted with precision, and other poems interrogate the poet's own role in relaying this reclaimed history through research and her own encounters. Pennsylvania Furnace serves as both testimony and historical document, illuminating the need to not just simply preserve history but dissect its complications, gaps, and contradictions. The collection's central core is comprised of poems that animate the dead, who are pieced together or imagined through the archive. For readers unfamiliar with furnaces, these structures were used until the early twentieth century in rural areas of the American landscape to smelt iron ore into iron. Because furnaces needed to be continuously lit to operate, which required a constant fuel source from the surrounding forest, entire villages grew around them. Johnson deftly weaves in much of this context within the poems themselves, as characters reveal how their lives revolved around these furnaces. In "Night Watch, Greenwood Furnace," the distanced speaker describes the light from the furnace at night while the filler's wife observes him perform his work: "thin divide between his lungs / and hell, between him and a light like Armageddon // beginning in this valley, here along the familiar, / whistling stream." The juxtaposition between the filler's nightly labor and the potential danger of the incredibly hot ore are placed in a landscape both fantastic and ordinary. Yet even the filler succumbs to the furnace, as his Christian belief that "Satan's armies fought the Lord" cause him to "[throw] himself down there beside // the tunnel mouth of pray and cry aloud" in response to the Biblical allegory that has been made material. Using a similar perspective of contrasts, "The Woodcutter" describes a widowed woman performing her task harvesting wood in winter so she can earn enough money to care for her children. She becomes otherworldly, larger than herself, in the process of clearing the forest to feed the furnaces. "Her body fills / the space between the trees," the speaker notes, "stretches to meet / the sky she's opened, her children's lifted hands." In serving as the sole provider during a time in which women were homemakers, the transformation is almost monstrous yet beautiful, as she is still tender with her muscles that are "strong enough to down these trees / or darn socks, stitch a quilt to keep our cold." For her children, the mother is represented as the world in all its shapes and forms. These specters of the past truly begin to come to life through the more intimate persona poem. "The Record Keeper" offers insight into the record keeper's life while visually presenting the process of keeping brief notes alongside a ledger. The poem's sonnet-like structure is halved with a narrow column of words that describe everyday events: "Snow / Balloon ascends from Bellefonte / White broke hand / rain / rain." The quotidian anchors the poem in lived experience, reinforced by the record keeper who admits, "Two inches, all I have. Read my words, see / my only act of keeping in a burning [End Page 282] world." The idea of making do with what is available is further reflected in the sonnet "The Ironmaster's Daughter," where the young woman, choosing fabric for elaborate dresses, proclaims, "This narrow hall can't hem me in: I swell / to fill its bounds." Like "The Woodcutter," the daughter grows beyond her physical form but does so in order to catch "admiring looks" from men. Through her...

Resonating with Job. Czesław Miłosz as a Translator of The Book of Job

This discussion of why the Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) translated the Book of Job distinguishes two meanings of translation in reference to the poet’s work: fi rst as a process, which relates to Miłosz’s life and personal experience, and second as an outcome, which relates to his poetry. The investigation of this problem makes use of some work by Father Joseph Sadzik as well as of Clive Scott’s concept of rediscovery of reading. The article contributes to an understanding of how Miłosz reconciled the roles of poet and translator, of humble servant and rebellious yet fragile human being, of innocent yet disturbing witness. The author argues that the translation of the Book of Job, as a process and as an outcome, reveals the complexity of Miłosz’s craft and its effectiveness in defi ning the scope of the translator’s duties, of which the most important is to come alongside Job and learn how he coped with his experience of being an innocent victim.

“I Could Read It Like Leaves”: Communion of Languages in Paula Meehan’s Geomantic

“I Could Read It Like Leaves”: Communion of Languages in Paula Meehan’s Geomantic Wit Pietrzak Throughout her oeuvre, Paula Meehan has paid much attention to the tragic condition of oppressed people, including women and the financially destitute, all of whom are often evoked in conjunction with the precarious situation of the natural environment. In her twentieth-century volumes, the matters of economic deprivation and social injustice, also on the part of the Catholic Church, come to prominence, as in “The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks,” which focuses on the church’s “toxic language of evasion and hypocrisy.”1 In The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991), the role of poets across the ages has been that of “representative spokespersons of the oppressed and vulnerable communities,” even if Meehan is hesitant to accept that role, instead frequently “emphasiz[ing] the limitations involved in presenting herself as a spokesperson.”2 While it would be disingenuous to claim that her work has undergone a major change—especially as Meehan has noted, in regard to frequently being dubbed an urban poet, that “[she doesn’t] see the city and the human beings and non-human beings in the city as apart from nature that nature ends where man-made material looms”—it seems there has been what she herself describes as “a gear shift” in her twenty-first-century work, particularly in the last two collections, Painting Rain (2009) and Geomantic (2016).3 In them, the issue of environmental degradation is brought to the fore with an increased urgency. Given the breadth of her preoccupations and the degree to which they intertwine in her poetry as well as in interviews, “addressing her work fully,” as Kathryn Kirkpatrick points out, “requires an expansive ecocritical frame, one that [End Page 62] acknowledges the interconnections between exploitative economic systems, social inequities, and environmental degradation.”4 The “ecocritcal frame” that has so far been applied to reading Meehan’s poems includes the work of cultural theorist Carol Merchant as well as of ecofeminist thinkers like Rosi Braidotti, Val Plumwood, Maria Mies, and Vandana Shiva. The starting point in considering Meehan’s ecologically attuned work is the critique of “the cosmology of a capitalist patriarchal world system which defines freedom as the transcendence of nature, a transcendence available only for a few and at the expanse of the Others.”5 This condition of capitalist exploitation is characteristic for the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger period. Meehan has increasingly noted in interviews that So many of our vulnerable ecosystems were (are still) under threat from mindless turbo development. Late century capitalism run riot. Now that the boom is over and we’ve gone into recession and the government is using taxpayers’ money to bail out the banks, we may have a breathing space to estimate what’s been lost through the unmediated and rampant greed that characterized both planning and building in nineties and noughties Ireland. In there too is the “Sean Bean Bocht,” poor old mother Ireland with her four green fields—“each one is a jewel” as the song tells us, only now she’d more likely sing about her four green sites. House and site for sale was a common advertisement, whereas before you’d have House and garden for sale. In fact you’d be afraid to stand still too long in case someone built an apartment complex on your head.6 This general anxiety over the fate of the environment is given a still sharper expression in the 2009 interview with Jody Allen Randolph, in which Meehan states that “the ravages of turbo development in the last decade have meant enormous loss, erosions of rich biodiverse fields and the communities they sustained,” adding, “I think the big loser [of the Tiger-period boom] has been the environment. There are ecosystems and marginal zones that will never recover.”7 Compared to her earlier interviews, the 2009 conversation with Allen Randolph exudes a sense of grief for the condition of nature. The above remarks about the destruction the Irish environment has suffered are made in reference to her celebrated poem “Death of a Field,” which opens Painting Rain: “The field itself is lost...

Arabic Poetry and Terrorism: The Dictator Perishes and the Poet Remains

Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati is one of the most prominent twentieth-century Arab poets. His poetry makes a drastic shift from politically committed in the 1950s and 1960s to metapoetic in the 1970s onward. In his post-Nasserist works, al-Bayati interrogates the role of poets and the function of their poetry. This article explores some of the main metapoetic themes in al-Bayati's poem “Meditations on the Other Face of Love,” which was published in 1979. The article argues that al-Bayati consciously uses reflexive poetry as a platform to blur the line between poetry and literary criticism and to declare his discontent with the literary scene and the political status quo in the Arab world. The article also examines some of the poetry by Nizar Qabbani and Muzaffar al-Nawab, in relation to that of al-Bayati. These three poets provide a poetic discussion of “terrorism” against the hegemony of political discourse, and demand that Arab citizens reject their undignified lives by adopting resistance and rejecting terrorism.

Gavriil Derzhavin on Russian Civilization: Russia as “The North”

This article examines the role of poet and statesman Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin (1743–1816) in the development of the “Russian northerndom” idea, a rich concept of identification that played a major role in the history of Russian geopolitical and philosophical-ideological thought from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, receding to the background only in the mid-nineteenth century with the arrival of the “classical” Russian opposition of “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles.”

On the Discovery of a Sequence of Constance Naden’s Notebooks: Finding Her Voice, 1875–1879

On the Discovery of a Sequence of Constance Naden’s Notebooks: Finding Her Voice, 1875–1879 Clare Stainthorp (bio) 1 Oh for the poet’s glorious thought, The painter’s gift divine!Why for their semblance have I sought, When they can ne’er be mine? 2 Though I can copy, line for line, The fairest flowers that blow,Though I can write, as thousands do, In lines that softly flow, 3 Though all of this, & more, is mine Yet vainly I aspire,To draw a stroke, to write a line, That glows with living fire. 4 For all my childhood’s dreams are fled, And I may plainly seeThe wreath that crowns the poet’s head Shall ne’er be twined for me. 5 Ye will not visit me again, Sweet simple thoughts of fame,Fond hopes, by pencil & by pen, To win a lasting name. [End Page 233] 6 Yet will I write my simple lays My pencil shall not rest,For it is sweet to win the praise Of those I love the best.1 It is thus that Constance Naden (1858–1889) conceived her artistic ambitions in a newly discovered notebook titled “Poems; by Constance C. W. Naden. 1875–6–7.” Naden went on to publish two well-received volumes of poems during the 1880s, but here she lacks confidence in her poetic ability: she may have common skill, but she does not possess the flame of genius. Titled “A Lament,” this poem also demonstrates Naden’s worries about being derivative—she is aware of her youthful tendency to copy rather than create. This familiar stage in a person’s writing career is “natural,” Christine Alexander asserts; she goes on to argue that “young writers will experiment by impersonating different voices and imitating different genres” and that this “major characteristic of youthful writing . . . is often misunderstood.”2 Imitation was an acknowledged part of the development of the poet during the nineteenth century. For example, in Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has Aurora explain, And so, like most young poets, in a flushOf individual life I poured myselfAlong the veins of others, and achievedMere lifeless imitations of live verse.3 This is a rather negative portrayal of the process that led Naden to test many different poetic forms and genres and to try on a variety of voices. While not her most consistently innovative or uniformly successful works, the previously unknown poems in “Poems 1875,” “Poems 1875–6–7,” and “Untitled Notebook 1878–79” demonstrate both Naden’s range—from Petrarchan blazon to extended medieval narrative, testing the conventions of common meter to those of comic verse—and her burgeoning skill.4 The connecting thread across the notebook poems is their vitality; these manuscripts illuminate the lived experience of a young Victorian woman who aspired to write, demonstrating the influences and ideals that converged upon an intelligent adolescent of the 1870s. To read these three notebooks is to encounter Naden’s voice anew; her poems express a depth of thought and feeling that is at turns serious and sentimental, comedic and cutting. This article describes in detail the context, form, [End Page 234] and contents of the notebooks, before exploring the impact of this discovery on our understanding of Naden’s life and works. I begin with new insights into her approach to composition, paying attention to moments that reveal her poetic process, and then consider how Naden conceived the figure of the poet, showing how the development of her poetic voice occurs in dialogue with Romantic ideals of the poet genius. The article proceeds by tracing Naden’s characteristic comic style, familiar from the 1887 “Evolutional Erotics,” through these newly discovered writings; such poems illuminate her critical perspective on the role of poets and the position of women in society. I conclude by turning to the biographical insights that these notebooks provide, showing how these open up a previously unknown facet of Naden’s young life. Situating Naden’s Notebooks During the 1880s, Naden established herself as a poet, philosopher, and student of science. Critics have primarily discussed her work in relation to women’s literary engagement with Darwin and the...

The Premonitory Shiver: Vol. 47, No. 3, Spring 1985

The Premonitory ShiverVol. 47, No. 3, Spring 1985 Maxine Kumin Terrence des Pres, writing in a respected literary magazine, The New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, which has devoted its entire summer issue—over 200 pages—to the question of the role of the writer in the nuclear age, examines in particular the response of the poets to the possibility of what he calls nuclear wipe-out. We have fallen from the Garden, and the Garden itself—nature conceived as an inviolate wilderness—is pocked with nuclear waste and toxic dumps, at the mercy of industry and Watt, all of it open to nuclear defilement. Generations come and go, but the earth abideth forever is something we need to feel, one of the foundations of poetry and humanness, and now we are not sure. That is the problem with nuclear threat, simply as threat; it under mines all certainty, and things once absolute are now contingent. To feel that one's private life was in the hands of God, or Fate, or even History, allowed the self a margin of transcendence, the dignity of personal life was part of a great if mysterious Order. But now our lives are in the hands of a few men in the Pentagon and the Kremlin, men who, having affirmed that they would destroy us to save us, have certified their madness-and yet their will determines our lives and our deaths. We are, then, quite literally enslaved, and assuming that this bothers poets no less than the rest of us, why do they so seldom speak of it?1 Is this a fair question? If so, is it answerable? Although I am one of two poets singled out in this article as coming to grips in some way with the reality of possible extinction of the species, I am not sure I want to be so noted. Part of me wants to resist the raising of the question on grounds that the poet is no better equipped to wrestle the demon of ultimate destruction than, say, the dentist or lawyer, the flight attendant or psychiatrist. Part of me wants to insist that the essence of poetry is contained in its lyric voice, that whatever else takes place in the world as long as we last, there will always be a place for the capsule poem of the lyric moment, for the personal cry from the heart. But of course that is begging the question. Given the social nature of language, which is to communicate, given the impulse to write the poem, which is, in Auden's words, "a passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events," the poet cannot escape his obligation to bear witness to the times. [End Page 233] It is impossible to separate the life and the art. Wherever there is language, there too stands the poet, the ultimate observer, a little to one side of things, but there. Whether the subject is a diving beetle or a fire-bombing, the poet's function is to speak of the encounter. I will try to explain what I mean by the poet's function. Over my desk I have a line copied out from Rilke's "Ninth Duino Elegy"—in translation, I hasten to add—a line that so impressed me that I excerpted from it for the title of a collection of poems. Speaking of the poet's role in society Rilke muses: "For are we here perhaps merely to say: house, bridge, fountain gate, jar, fruit tree, window-at most, pillar, tower? But to say them … to say them in such a way that even the things themselves never hoped to exist so intensely." This exhortation to the poet to name things—to say out their particularities as clearly as possible—seems to me to go to the heart of our "craft or sullen art." The poet's mission is to be authentic and specific, first of all, to evoke with an intensity that poetry, above all language by reason of its selection and comprehension, can evoke, the color, the clutch and hang, the shape of an event, an object, an emotion, a relationship. The poet trains...

Retrieving Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets: The Transformative Myths, Fragments and Voices of Webster, Blind and Levy

The critical recuperation of late nineteenth-century women poets is due significantly to the renewed interest in and study of the poetical works of Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind and Amy Levy (1860-90) by postmodern readers. A major reason for this ‘salvage’ may be that they represent and embody the profound and extraordinary changes that characterize the British Fin de Siècle, in which the transition from the Victorians to the Moderns implied the transformation or reconfiguration of certain myths or (hi)stories and the critical re-use or ‘recycling’ of major literary forms. This essay seeks to demonstrate that while Webster's poetry is firmly grounded in social activism and the exploration and dramatization of the nature of female experience, Blind's epic and dramatic verse creates new myths of human destiny, reclaiming the Poet's role as the singer of the age's scientific deeds, while Levy's lyrics signal the New Woman poet's role as victim of the pressures of emancipation. Through these hybrid and fragmentary forms, Webster, Blind and Levy literally give voice to unspeakable feelings and situations, in which the anomalous and the marginal are made central.

Somebody and Nobody: the Authorial Identity of the Player-Playwright-Poet in the Early Modern Theatre

This paper focusses on a particular moment at the beginning of the seventeenth century which has been considered to be transitional in terms of how the profession of playwright was perceived. It explores the complex authorial identities of playwrights who were also simultaneously poets and stage actors, roles which both in different ways created tensions with the role of playwright. Via an examination of the stage figure of Nobody which became popular at this time on the London stage, the paper suggests that filling the multiple roles of poet, playwright and player often led to a conflicted relationship with the idea of authorship. Metadramatic readings of the anonymous 1606 playbook Nobody and Somebody appear to support this suggestion, and to indicate that the figure of Nobody could be emblematic of the tensions and conflicts experienced by the player-playwright-poet at this time.

Murilo Mendes incorpora a poesia

Murilo Mendes informa em textos autobiográficos que foi um cuidadoso leitor de poemas. Daí resultou o povoamento da memória por um numeroso acervo de imagens e referências, muitas das quais foram distribuídas em vários dos seus poemas. Rastrear a presença dessa matéria alheia na poesia de Murilo é um modo de captar interpretações e possibilidades de expressão percebidas no que assimilou. Também se podem captar os processos de composição poética baseados na ressignificação de imagens e unidades rítmicas incorporadas. O corpus de poemas e textos aqui abordado pretende mostrar como a incorporação – etimologicamente “junção”, “enfeixamento” – do alheio permitiu a Murilo Mendes, entre outras possibilidades, ponderar a figura do poeta na modernidade

Algunas observaciones sobre la educación poético-musical en la Exposición de la “República” de Platón de Averroes

<p class="p1">El propósito de este trabajo es comentar los pasajes en donde Averroes estudia el papel de la educación poético-musical en la Exposición parafrasística de la “República” de Platón. El conocimiento del corpusaristotélico y el legado de algunos de sus predecesores árabes le permiten a Averroes hacer algunas consideraciones sobre los tipos de discurso y, en particular, sobre el discurso poético. Como se sabe, el papel de los poetas en la polis es un asunto al que Platón presta atención en varios fragmentos de su República. Las observaciones de Averroes se apartan sutilmente de la filosofía platónica e intentan mostrar la importancia de la ciencia política en el contexto islámico.</p>

The Voice of the Unconscious: Laforgue and the Poet as Lawgiver

This article discusses Laforgue's thinking about the nature and purpose of poetry against the backdrop of the age-old figure of the poet as lawgiver. Although Laforgue rejected the ‘vers philo.’ of Le Sanglot de la Terre, and with it apparently the Hugolian model of the poet as vates, this model continued to inform his poetic theory and practice as he developed a new aesthetic in the light of Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. The first part of the article briefly traces the emergence and development of the poet's new role as the ‘voice of the Unconscious’ from Le Sanglot de la Terre through to Derniers vers, while the second part examines the ways in which four of the protagonists in the Moralités légendaires — Hamlet, Salomé, the Monstre-Dragon, and Pan — constitute different manifestations of the poetlawgiver and represent successive stages in Laforgue's conception of the poet's function.