Popular Poetry Research Articles

Mateo Flecha's Ensaladas

Catalan Mateo Flecha the Elder (1481–1553) is best known for his ensaladas, a musical genre that was popular in the sixteenth-century on the Iberian Peninsula. Ensaladas are poetic compositions sung in four or five voices alternating homophonic passages with polyphonic ones. The lyrics are a mixture of refrains from popular songs and biblical verse along with the composer's original lines; they often include regional dialects and foreign words in a humorous, nonsensical way. Mateo Flecha composed eleven ensaladas, which were assembled and published by his nephew, F. Mateo Flecha the Younger in Prague, 1581. The original manuscript is held in the Library of Orfeó Català at the Palau de la Música Catalana.

La ambivalente representación del roto en la poesía popular chilena

Este articulo examina la representacion ambivalente de la figura del roto en la poesia popular chilena impresa en hojas sueltas entre fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX. Se estudia la manera en que se construye desde la cultura popular la celebracion del roto en tanto representante de la nacion (el soldado anonimo que lucha contra la amenaza extranjera), por un lado, y un rechazo en su mismo grupo social (en tanto se le asocian significados como vagancia, robo, inestabilidad), por otro. Se comprueba que la representacion del roto como sujeto de la enunciacion de estos poemas es un ejemplo mas de su compleja identidad

Constructing the Political Prophet in 1640s England

'Prophecy,' wrote the anonymous author of Ignatius, His Prophecie, 'is the key to heaven ... the tower of humane knowledge that defends mortality and preserved Kingdomes from destructive ruine.'1 While this quote might suggest a straight-forward defence of scriptural foresight, the prophecy the author of Ignatius discussed was not that found in the Bible. Instead, he referred to the many extra-biblical texts which had remained hidden or lost until God providentially revealed them once again to his people.2 Texts, which like Ignatius's prophecy, were 'found in the Abby [sic] of St. Benedict neere the city of Norwich. Containing the praedivination concerning the various distempers and divisions of this kingdom'.3 In the author's view, the aim of prophecy was to act as a clarion call to the nation. Yet the correct interpretation of these predictions was not a simple matter. Prophecies were 'very mysterious... They seeme so aenigmaticall [sic], as Sphynk [i.e the Sphinx] his hidden riddle'. The way in which pamphlets such as Ignatius dealt with problems of interpretation was straightforward. While prophecies were often transparently applicable to contemporary political events (and there could have been few readers who would have been left confused by Ignatius's claim that 'If Eighty Eight be past, then thrive/ Thou mayst, till thirty four or five'), pamphlets were often at pains to spell out the implications of more obscure predictions for readers. So the author of 'Ignatius's' prophecy takes his readers through the prediction line by line, each time applying the text specifically to contemporary events.The use of prophecy in this manner can be labelled as 'self-authenticating'. The prophecy itself, through its links to a distinguished early Christian figure, claims both authority and reliability. The same could be said for predictions by those prophets inhabiting a distant, mythical British past, of whom Merlin was the most well known.4 The prophecies of such figures appeared so selfevidently authoritative that no further support was seen to be needed - the prophecy was allowed to stand on its own. Yet while these sorts of prophetic pamphlets were certainly popular, they were by no means accepted uncriti- cally, being increasingly viewed by more educated readers as unsophisticated frauds. As Francis Bacon noted, almost all prophecies credited to great figures of the past 'have been impostures, and by idle and crafty brains merely contrived and feigned, after the event past'.5With this in mind, a new form of political prophecy began to emerge in the early 1640s. Instead of using the great figures of the past, these prophecies aimed to construct new, more relevant prophets to act as examples for the nation. A number of pamphlets emerged which used the predictions of those within living memory. Instead of finding prophecies hidden in abbeys and on walls, these pamphlets drew on print culture, extracting hidden prophecies from extant texts. Instead of providing a self-authenticating argument, in which the stature of the prophet was the only argument for the prophecy's reliability, they aimed to construct a new standard of proof - an inter-textual matrix of works which served to authenticate one another. These pamphlets used several standard tropes to convince the reader of the prophet's skill. Usually, this led pamphlets to emphasise the prophet's resilience in the face of persecution and to picture the prophet as the latest in a long line of Christian martyrs.In this article I explore the emergence of this tradition of 'prophetic construction' through a collection of similarly themed pamphlets - those focused on the puritan curate and biblical commentator Thomas Brightman (1562-1607). Brightman's weighty commentary on Revelation, written between 1600 and 1604, was reduced to the level of short pamphlet popularisations. His inaccessible prose became pithy popular verse, of the style familiar to the public from ballads and almanacs. …

Na ponta do verso: poesia de improviso no Brasil (2008) Edited by Alexandre Pimentel and Joana Corrêa

Na ponta do verso: poesia de improviso no Brasil (literally, “on the tip of the verse, improvised poetry in Brazil”) is a volume of nine well-crafted essays that concern some of the principal forms of improvised, popular poetry from different regions of Brazil. Each contribution is linked to corresponding sound recordings on the companion CD, which contains both live and studio examples. The results are unique and valuable, telling of the encounters and evolution of improvisative poetic traditions and adaptations in the first decade of the new century and millennium.

“Mere Matter:” Causality, Subjectivity and Aesthetic Form in Erasmus Darwin

In his two-part medical treatise Zoonomia (1794-1796), Erasmus Darwin—physician, scientist, popular poet and grandfather of Charles Darwin—begins with a conception of living matter in order to envision an organic system of nature, in which the individual and the environment are not only interdependent, but also reciprocally determining. This essay contextualizes Darwin’s materialism within a wider debate over the status of “mere matter” in the Romantic era through a reading of section 39 of Zoonomia, “Of Generation,” alongside David Hartley’s psychological theories and Joseph Priestley’s thinking on the nature of matter. I argue that the perceived threat of materialism lies in the ways in which these systems of thought rethink the operation of causality, reorient conceptions of teleology, and thus rewrite the nature of the relationship between the human subject and material nature. A reading of the critical contemporary reactions to Darwin’s popular poetry further suggests that the same shifting conceptions of teleology, causality, and subjectivity drive Romantic era revolutions in aesthetic form.

Mentoring and the Female Poet's Voice

Female poets in the twentieth century faced well-documented challenges in finding a place in the masculine hegemony of modernist poetic values and practice. Their strategies for seizing the culturally sanctioned role of “poet” were often subversive—as William Drake, Cheryl Walker, and others have shown—or compulsively self-protective. Marianne Moore’s armored animals, Elinor Wylie’s “masks outrageous and austere” (65), Louise Bogan’s prescriptive obscurity, and Elizabeth Bishop’s famous reticence all seemed necessary to avoid the damning and oftdeployed charge of “writing like a woman.” Even in the years following the Second World War, retrenchment and conservatism in the culture at large sparked a forceful—if temporary—resurgence of modernist values in poetry that severely challenged young female poets in their search for credible poetic voice. Alicia Ostriker, in Stealing the Language (1986), chronicled the “quest for identity” that was the first task of the female poet coming of age in a culture “external and internal, which opposes female autonomy” (59). One reason each generation of female poets seemed to struggle anew with finding an authoritative voice is that the culture had done so much to obscure the tradition of poetry by women that preceded them. The twentieth century forcefully dismissed and then forgot the “poetesses” who dominated popular poetry in the nineteenth century, and the generation of female modernist poets was generally loath to claim those ancestors, or to identify in solidarity with one another. The following generations, with notable exceptions, found the female poets accepted into the modernist canon—Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein—too idiosyncratic

Estudio de la métrica de las canciones contenidas en Les Chansons des Pélerins de S. Jacques (1718)

In the present article we offer an analysis of the manner in which the six songs included in the 1718 book Les Chansons des Pelerins de S. Jacques were composed. This work is one of the many edited in France, mainly from the XVI to the XVIII centuries, for the use of pilgrims on their journey to Santiago de Compostela. The study of metrics in these compositions (rhyme, meter and stanzas), together with other factors, such as the themes and functions of the songs, will be of use to establish whether they were cultivated or popular poetry, how they were received by the public and to settle the time in which they were most likely written and published for the first time.

“Is There A Measure On Earth?”

The concept of measure embraces music and mathematics, law and jurisprudence, and such moral and ethical ideals as moderation and temperance. The word, in both its noun and verb forms, encompasses a wide range of meanings. Among the various definitions that the dictionary provides for the noun, some deal with proportionality and limits (an adequate or due portion; a moderate degree; a fixed or suitable limit; the dimensions of something being measured; an instrument for measuring; and a system for standard units of meaning), some with music and poetry (a melody, tune, or dance; rhythmic structure or movement; a metrical unit, foot; a grouping of a specified number of musical beats located between two vertical lines on a staff), and some with actions or legislative acts (a step planned or taken as a mean to an end; a proposed legislative act). The latent connection, implicit in the various meanings of the word, between poetry and legislation or government recalls Shelley's maxim in A Defence of Poetry that [p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World. (1) Poetry employs measure, but its relationship to the concept of measure differs from that of other disciplines and other forms of discourse. Like those other forms of discourse, poetry can be seen as a way of approaching, grasping, and communicating experience, truth, or knowledge; and though to the popular imagination poetry is sometimes thought of as vague, to the extent that it employs measure with precision it is at least potentially more rather than less precise than other forms of discourse. Not only does poetry employ measure, it is wholly taken up with measuring, and, in a sense, nothing more than a measuring process of a certain kind. The eighteenth century referred to verses as numbers and considered music and poetry to be a kind of counting without being aware that one was counting. This is as much to say that, in addition to presenting and representing the world, the task of the poet involves measuring one thing against another, putting things in proportion, judging, evaluating, and criticizing. It is not, of course, that the world is merely given to the poet: poetry invention; but this too involves measuring and cannot be separated from measuring. Ultimately, poetry employs measure in order to measure. The same, of course, could be said of the sciences, but poetry is obviously distinct from the sciences in a number of ways. For one thing, the measure it employs is musical and affective, not merely mathematical (if poetry involves counting without being aware that one is counting, it also, of course, involves feeling); and for another, in contrast to the sciences, poetry has no positive knowledge to impart and no content distinct from its form. Form can never be separated from content in poetry because what poetry measures, in addition to a content of some kind, is its own form--or in other words, itself. By giving measure to language, poetry turns the instrument of discourse into something musical, something that measures itself as well as the world, and it is this double capacity for measuring that distinguishes the poem from all other modes or forms of discourse. Nevertheless, although form can never be separated from content--which means that poetic form and poetic measure do not exist prior to content or to the poet's engagement with whatever it is that will become the poem's content (for poetic measure and what is being measured are in reciprocal relations to one another and come into existence dialectically)--the question remains whether the distinctiveness of poetry consists not only in its form but also in its content (even in the abstract). In one sense, the answer is clearly, No. Poetry is entitled to take the world as its purview, and it is just as appropriate for a poet to write about (a word that can only be used heuristically in connection with poetry) a steam engine or someone dying of cancer as for an engineer to explain the engine's mechanism or for a physician to find ways to combat the disease. …

<i>The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America</i> (review)

<i>The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America</i> (review)

The cultural politics of slam poetry: race, identity, and the performance of popular verse in America

How slam performers and their audiences reflect the politics of difference? cultural phenomenon known as slam poetry was born some twenty years ago in white working-class Chicago barrooms. Since then, the raucous competitions have spread internationally, launching a number of annual tournaments, inspiring a generation of young poets, and spawning a commercial empire in which the line between poetry and hip-hop merge. The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry is the first book to take an in-depth look at slam, shedding light on the relationships that slam poets build with their audiences through race and identity performance, and revealing how poets come to celebrate (and at times exploit) the politics of difference in American culture.With a special focus on African American poets, Susan B. A. Somers-Willett explores the pros and cons of identity representation in the commercial arena of spoken word poetry and, in doing so, situates slam within a history of verse performance, from blackface minstrelsy to Def Poetry. What's revealed is a race-based dynamic of authenticity lying at the heart of American culture. Rather than being just reflections of culture, Somers-Willett argues, slams are culture - sites where identities and political values get publicly re-figured and exchanged between poets and audiences.

Tudor autobiography: listening for inwardness

Histories of autobiography in England often assume the genre hardly existed before 1600. But Tudor Autobiography investigates eleven sixteenth-century English writers who used sermons, a saint's biography, courtly and popular verse, a traveler's report, a history book, a husbandry book, and a supposedly fictional adventure novel to share the secrets of the heart and tell their life stories.In the past such texts have not been called autobiographies because they do not reveal much of the inwardness of their subject, a requisite of most modern autobiographies. But, according to Meredith Anne Skura, writers reveal themselves not only by what they say but by how they say it. Borrowing methods from affective linguistics, narratology, and psychoanalysis, Skura shows that a writer's thoughts and feelings can be traced in his or her language. Rejecting the search for 'the early modern self' in life writing, Tudor Autobiography instead asks what authors said about themselves, who wrote about themselves, how, and why. The result is a fascinating glimpse into a range of lived and imagined experience that challenges assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern period.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam: Modernization Theory's Afterimage

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam: Modernization Theory's Afterimage

‘Gracias a la vida’: Violeta Parra and the Creation of a Public Poetics of Introspective Reflection

This essay is inspired by and in dialogue with Robert Pring-Mill's 1990 lecture on Latin American protest poetry and song, ‘Gracias a la Vida’: The Power and Poetry of Song (C39), which analyses the work of Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara. In it, I seek to follow Pring-Mill's thought processes, which lead him from a subjective and imaginary engagement with the young woman to whom the lecture is dedicated (Kate Elder), to the prolonged consideration of two songs, particularly Violeta Parra's now iconic ‘Gracias a la vida’. Pring-Mill eloquently follows the move from the introspective to the public, to a sense of shared community that Violeta Parra traces in her song. It is this move that I then develop by close readings of her Décimas: autobiografía en verso (1959), placing them in the context of the cultural turns of popular poetry, and the genealogies to which her writing — and its study — belong. The essay then seeks to place Parra's work within a broader poetics that spans the popular, orality and the written, situating it in the force of wilful marginality from a state that is traditionally seen to disdain those that are beyond a narrowly defined centre.

The Facts On File companion to British poetry: 17th and 18th centuries

The Facts On File Companion to British Poetry: 17th and 18th Centuries is an encyclopedic guide to British poetry from 1600 to 1800. With more than 400 entries ranging in length from 300 to more than 2,500 words, this new and extensive resource covers some of the finest and most popular poetry in the English language. Appendixes include a general bibliography and a glossary of poetic terms. Coverage includes: major poems, such as Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, The Flea, Paradise Lost, and The Rape of the Lock; poets, from the Puritan period up to the beginnings of the Romantic Age, including Aphra Behn, John Donne, John Dryden, Thomas Gray, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Lady Mary Worth; and, important themes, topics, and movements, such as carpe diem, Cavalier poets, Metaphysical poets, Sons of Ben, and more.

Recovering Love’s Fugitive: Elizabeth Wilmot and the Oscillations between the Sexual and Textual Body in a Libertine Woman’s Manuscript Poetry

Recovering Love’s Fugitive: Elizabeth Wilmot and the Oscillations between the Sexual and Textual Body in a Libertine Woman’s Manuscript Poetry

Oral culture and Catholicism in early modern England

After the Reformation, England’s Catholics were marginalised and excluded from using printed media for propagandist ends. Instead, they turned to oral media, such as ballads and stories, to plead their case and maintain contact with their community. Building on the interest in Catholic literature which has developed in early modern studies over the last few years, Alison Shell examines the relationship between Catholicism and oral culture from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In order to recover the textual traces of this minority culture, she expands canonical boundaries, looking at anecdotes, spells and popular verse alongside more conventionally literary material. In her archival research she has uncovered many important new manuscript sources. This book is an important contribution to the rediscovery of the writings and culture of the Catholic community and will be of great interest to scholars of early modern literature, history and theology. • An important contribution to the growing field of Catholic literature and culture studies • Contains much original scholarship on important yet little-known texts • Of great interest to literary, historical and theological scholars

The characteristic of readers' reception and recognition about Korean modern poetry - The Research on the Culturally Formed Korean Popular Poetry and the Popularization of Korean Poetry as Genre(1)

The characteristic of readers' reception and recognition about Korean modern poetry - The Research on the Culturally Formed Korean Popular Poetry and the Popularization of Korean Poetry as Genre(1)

Literatura de cordel como meio de promoção para o aleitamento materno

A poesia popular impressa, também denominada literatura de cordel, é considerada pelo povo nordestino importante expressão cultural. Folhetos sobre a amamentação são pertinentes na medida em que podem contribuir para a educação da população sobre este assunto. Objetivou-se: analisar mensagens transmitidas e linguagem adotada nos folhetos que abordem o tema da amamentação. Estudo documental, descritivo, exploratório, de caráter analítico, realizado mediante a busca sistemática de folhetos de cordel disponíveis em praças públicas de Fortaleza-CE. Foram coletados 34 folhetos. Destes, 20 abordaram temas de saúde e um retratou a amamentação. A análise deste cordel revelou que a amamentação é necessária tanto à mãe como ao bebê, trazendo benefícios mútuos. Portanto, este recurso impresso deve ser visto como significativo material de educação em saúde que o profissional pode utilizar com nutrizes.

Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald's Rubáiyát

Among virtues of Christopher Decker's edition of FitzGerald Rubaiyat its patient elucidation, not only of various circumstances surrounding text's multiple versions, but of what we can infer about translator's equally various attitude toward his work. (1) Enthusiastic, torpid, apologetic, cavalier, across two decades and more between first edition of 1859 and final one of 1879 anonymous agent who once signed himself correspondence Fitz-Omar remains hard read with assurance--by reason partly of a diffidence that was specific man's character, partly of ambivalences that haunt translator's art generally. (2) But amid this history of shifts and much effacement, across variorum Rubaiyat there emerges an unswerving commitment that goes far toward explaining work's extraordinary appeal. I mean FitzGerald's commitment interpreting Omar Khayyam's quatrains not mystically but--in a term of FitzGerald's that becomes intriguingly complex--literally. The apparatus each version he authorized sets at defiance all Pretence at divine (1859, p. 6), all trafficking in Allegory and Abstraction (1868, p. 35), all Spiritual decoction of what is simply Juice of Grape (1872, p. 67). Keeping faith with his Persian original meant, for FitzGerald, scouting any and all Mysticism that might distract from Omar's manifest aim, which his Victorian translator deeply embraced too. That aim was to soothe Soul through Senses into Acquiescence with Things as he saw them (1868, p. 31). No doubt, averred preface of 1868, many of these Quatrains seem unaccountable unless mystically interpreted; but more as unaccountable unless literally (p. 35). FitzGerald's literalist affirmation so often took a feisty form because it was embroiled from start a polemic against Omar Khayyam's allegorizers. They were a tribe who had been around a long time--medieval Christianity had nothing on medieval Islam when it came wresting heretic texts into hermeneutic line--and had voluble representatives still during nineteenth century, and even Europe. Well before 1859 FitzGerald was politely differing with his young tutor Persian studies, Edward Cowell, about how take some of Omar's bitter pills, and then 1868 he stepped into public ring square off against J. B. Nicolas, a French exponent whom poems were dark Sufi conceits disclosing an orthodox message after all. FitzGerald survived this challenge handily, but question that lay behind it has gone on survive him. It flared up again just a generation ago, when no less an antagonist than poet Robert Graves placed before public a defense and illustration of Omar's hidden and mystical meaning. The Original Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam: A New Translation with Critical Commentaries a title whose every adjective bristles with polemic--and whose aggressively repossessive orthography prepares us learn that counterattacks were soon mounted polemical turn by harder-headed sons of Fitz. The latter have long since carried day against allegorically credulous Graves and his ignorant or unscrupulous informant, Sufi mystagogue votary Omar Ali-Shah. (3) I am spectacularly ill equipped pronounce on merits of this or any other matter pertaining astronomer algebrist with a nine-hundred-years-old name. But I can propose that his Victorian popularizer's firm commitment taking old Omar at his word--taking him literally, which say, part, linguistically--had, as its cardinal literary consequence, a mode of poetic presentation which Rubaiyat has owed breadth and longevity of its circulation among an anglophone public as the most popular verse translation into English ever made (Decker, p. xiv). For FitzGerald's freely translating hands this-worldly, bodily thematics of poem found consistent correlates its poetics. …

Songs of ourselves: the uses of poetry in America

In the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp outings, and civic affairs. As they did so, they invested poems - and the figure of the poet - with the beliefs, values, and emotions that they experienced in those settings. Reciting a poem together with others joined the individual to the community in a special and memorable way. In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Joan Shelley Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words. Emphasising the cultural circumstances that influenced the production and reception of poets and poetry in this country, Rubin recovers the experiences of ordinary people reading poems in public places. We see the recent immigrant seeking acceptance, the schoolchild eager to be integrated into the class, the mourner sharing grief at a funeral, the grandparent trying to bridge the generation gap - all instances of readers remaking texts to meet social and personal needs. Preserving the moral, romantic, and sentimental legacies of the 19th Century, the act of reading poems offered cultural continuity, spiritual comfort, and pleasure. Songs of Ourselves is a unique history of literary texts as lived experience. By blurring the boundaries between high and popular poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.