Role Of Poetry Research Articles

A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent (review)

Reviewed by: A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent Nili Gold A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent, by Miryam Segal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 206 pp. $34.95. While Miryam Segal's A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent focuses on a seemingly marginal issue, it holds the echoes of the fierce historical battle over the soul of a people. Reading this book—"a genealogy of the proto-Israeli accent as it functioned in the burgeoning Hebrew literature of Palestine" and an examination of "the role of poetry in the formation of national identity" (p. 4)—it is impossible not to admire the emotional, cultural, intellectual and political investment that was required to give modern Israeli Hebrew its sound. Contemporary Israel's immense and vibrant literary output seems to be a sheer miracle for anyone who knows that only 150 years ago Hebrew was primarily a written language, not a living tongue (almost akin to Latin). The Zionist movement, which promoted Jews' return to their ancient homeland, recognized that the "entire nationalist project depends on the success of linguistic unification" (p. 51). Zionist leaders saw Hebrew, the language of the Bible, as vital to the creation of the old/new nation. But even with the Zionists' ideological commitment to Hebrew, the way it would be pronounced was as of yet undetermined. In the late nineteenth century, despite the fact that the majority of Jews in Palestine used the Ashkenazi accent when praying, the Zionists saw the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew (the way it was pronounced by the Jews of the greater Middle East) as more authentic and therefore preferable. (The Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew was dominant throughout Europe [and was thus associated with the Diaspora]. It often emphasizes the penultimate syllable. Sephardic usually puts the emphasis on the last syllable of the word.) In her first chapters, Segal shows that Hebrew's ascendancy into a spoken language was not inevitable, but rather took an enormous amount of effort. She tracks how the modern Israeli accent was initially created, beginning with the nascent movement in Palestine to make Hebrew the language of instruction [End Page 151] in schools during the 1880s through the triumph of the "new accent" in the late 1920s. She delves into the long-forgotten debates between "pedagogues," most notably, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who promoted a "Sephardized" Ashkenazi speech, and David Yellin, who hoped to build a synthetic Hebrew from a multitude of pronunciations. Segal concludes that Ben Yehuda's Hebrew triumphed because it resembled the Sephardic accent that Ashkenazi-speaking immigrants were already attempting to adopt. Against this textured historical and linguistic backdrop, Segal investigates the link between the creation of a new national language and its literature—specifically, between Ben-Yehuda's Hebrew and contemporaneous poets. As in other cultures, poetry and singing were used in Jewish Palestinian education to instill children with a connection to their folklore and foster national pride and unification. Alas, little Sephardic-accented children's poetry existed. Moreover, many Hebraists feared that the Sephardic pronunciation, with emphases on the last syllable, would form monotonous, heavy lines unsuitable for poetry (p. 124). Although H. N. Bialik had revitalized Hebrew as a literary language, he had used the Ashkenazi pronunciation. Sephardic poetry's modest beginnings were thus in the arenas of educational children's and folk songs. Through these, Sephardic made its way into the "high" form of poetry. Segal examines the poetry and literary roles of the 1920s' female poets, most notably Rahel Bluwstein (which the author spells "Bluvshtain"). Informed by gender theories, Segal highlights the unique role that female poets—who were heretofore undervalued and almost entirely unrecognized—were able to play in this virgin poetic field. She argues that women were seen as "authentic" bearers of culture and that "the new accent . . . was associated with women, who, in the criticism of the period were most often perceived as verbally, rather than textually expressive" (p. 74). Specifically, she shows how Bluwstein (known to Hebrew readers as "Rahel") cultivated the persona of one who speaks directly from the land, not as a poetess who crafts her words. Segal uses Bluwstein's famous poem "Rahel...

The Poetry Garden: Ecoliteracy in an Urban School

What is the role of poetry in developing ecoliteracy in urban schooling? While current educational and political discourse calls for ‘sustainable’ management of the earth’s resources, leading environmentalist educators state that a shift in practice must bepreceded by a shift in perspective that includes first-hand awareness of local environments. This interdisciplinary, narrative inquiry took place over a two year period to examine how students at a low ranked, inner city elementary school write poetry abouttheir environment as a form of ecoliterate knowledge.

Theorizing a republican poetics: P.B. Shelley and Alfieri

In A Defence of Poetry, written in Tuscany in early 1821, Shelley considered the role of poetry in effecting freedom at a time when monarchies in Europe were in crisis. This essay speculates that his Italian situation speaks to Della tirannide, Del principe e delle lettere and Vita, amongst the most esteemed of Alfieri’s works. An outline is offered first of Shelley’s recorded engagement with Alfieri’s writings, including their distinct conceptions of tragedy, then of the treatment of Alfieri in reviews between 1800 and 1825. Consideration is also given to representations of Alfieri by Foscolo, Byron and Staël. The latter are not unsympathetic towards Alfieri’s view that the artist’s principal function is as a patriot since it is a fitting response to the impossible political situation of Italy. Like Alfieri’s prose, Shelley’s Defence and A Philosophical View of Reform align poetry against monarchy and set the writer apart from the state. His interests therefore correspond with the cosmopolitan, transnational reach of Alfieri’s writings, not only the uses made of them for nationalist ends by others. Finally, it is noticed that Shelley discovered in Italy what Alfieri found in England, a critical vantage‐point that enabled the expression of cosmopolitan republican values.

Bending the bow: an anthology of African love poetry

This title is from Africa with love. From the ancient Egyptian inventors of the love lyric to contemporary poets, Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry gathers together both written and sung love poetry from Africa. This anthology is a work of literary archeology that lays bare a genre of African poetry that has been overshadowed by political poetry. Frank Chipasula has assembled a historically and geographically comprehensive wealth of African love poetry that spans more than three thousand years. By collecting a continent's celebrations and explorations of the nature of love, he expands African literature into the sublime territory of the heart. Bending the Bow traces the development of African love poetry from antiquity to modernity while establishing a cross-millennial dialog. The anonymously written love poems from Pharaonic Egypt that open the anthology both predate Biblical love poetry and reveal the longevity of written love poetry in Africa. The middle section is devoted to sung love poetry from all regions of the continent. These great works serve as the foundation for modern poetry and testify to love poetry's omnipresence in Africa. The final section, showcasing forty-eight modern African poets, celebrates the genre's continuing vitality. Among those represented are Muyaka bin Hajji and Shaaban Robert, two major Swahili poets; Gabriel Okara, the innovative though underrated Nigerian poet; Leopold Sedar Senghor, the first president of Senegal and a founder of the Negritude Movement in francophone African literature; Rashidah Ismaili from Benin; Flavien Ranaivo from Madagascar; and Gabeba Baderoon from South Africa. Ranging from the subtly suggestive to the openly erotic, this collection highlights love's endurance in a world too often riven by contention. Bending the Bow bears testimony to poetry's role as conciliator while opening up a new area of study for scholars and students.

The Decline of Poetry in the Fourth-Century West

Historians of Latin literature of late antiquity agree that besides a more stable economy and political environment, the fourth and early fifth centuries saw a renaissance of Latin literature. Yet given this apparent consensus, poetry in this period lacked its traditional cultural authority; that is, poetry's ability to be intellectually and culturally relevant had been significantly curtailed. Patristic prose (Lactantius, Ambrose, Augustine) played a decisive role in determining what kind of poetry was permissible in the Roman Christian empire of the fourth century and influenced poetry's status in subsequent centuries. Although the major poets (Juvencus, Proba, Ambrose, Ausonius, Paulinus of Noia, Prudentius, and Claudian) have received well-deserved scholarly attention, their work reflects poetry's marginalized cultural status. The notion of a fourth-century revival for poetry should be scrutinized according to criteria that takes into account die subsidiary role of poetry within the church-dominated society of the age, and according to its reception in the Christian and secular literary histories that have since followed.

Gifts of Love, Gifts of Poison: Anne Sexton and the Poetry of Intimate Exchange

This article argues that the confessional poem reflects an ambiguous relation between poet, reader and text. The confessional poem—at least as Sexton used it—does not so much reproduce a ‘real,’ as offer a distilled and complex gift that passes from the poet to the reader. As a gift, the confessional poem marks a site of desire, a textual locus which illuminates the complex desires of both speaker and reader. In this sense, if the poem offers a form of ‘life-writing,’ it does so differently, but no more or less than any other form of art. Utilising psychoanalytic concepts taken from Freud as well as Melanie Klein, this article reads Sexton's poetry as a series of texts through which to consider the role of poetry itself as an attempted act of reparation, reflective of the infantile relationship between mother and child. Within the space of poetry, with its shifting economy of exchange, of listening and speaking, the poem is seen as a complex gift to the intimate other of love and of toxicity that attempts to repair a damaged past, thus moving beyond the lures of the depressive while also charting, perhaps even facilitating, the seductions of the cataclysmic fall into the irreparably melancholic and disconnected. Rooted in artifice, the poem is always, in Sexton's terms, a ‘complicated lie,’ as well as, potentially, a form of ‘confession’ and release.

Fartspottings: Reflections on “high seriousness” and poetic passings of wind

AbstractThe mention of farts in English language poetry has changed just as the role of poetry in our lives. This essay offers a survey of the uses and mentions of the word fart and the act of farting in poetry, centering around poet and critic Matthew Arnold's notion of “high seriousness” as the ideal place for poetry, as well as poet Robert Lowell's idea of the “raw and cooked” in 20th century American poetry. Questions posed: Can poetry and the mention of farts coexist? Can both anti-academic and academic poets' farts find their way to the page in a post-post-“high seriousness” age?

Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World by Bonnie Costello

Reviewed by: Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World by Bonnie Costello Michael G. Devine Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World. Bonnie Costello. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. 224 pp. $32.95 (cloth). It is easy to forget that the stream-lined style of modern painting that would come to be known as Precisionism—overwhelming the French in 1924, perhaps most famously, with Gerald Murphy's eighteen-foot-high ode to transatlanticism, Boatdeck—also revolutionized that humblest of genres, the still life. See, for example, Murphy's Razor (1924), not so much a homely scene of domestic objects (safety razor, fountain pen, a box of matches) as it is an advertisement, a billboard, a story of modern efficiencies and inhuman scale: the fountain pen alone measures nearly three-feet in length. If the painting celebrates the shocking transformation convulsing even the ephemera of life, however, it does so not without some pause: the formal arrangement slyly evokes the skull-and-crossbones motif, potentially mourning the passing of a messy, personal, interior space, and warning of a time when such outsized abstractions could flatten a world. In Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World, Bonnie Costello picks up the tale of still life explored through lyric poetry in the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II, leading it deftly through the Cold War and into our own time. Her title, derived from a late Wallace Stevens poem, articulates the study's dominant interest in questions of scale in the work of Stevens, Williams, Bishop, Wilbur, and the curious boxes of Joseph Cornell. When history entered the home, as Murphy clearly illustrated, why did some artists and poets turn to the miniature, the local, the still life? Challenging readings of the lyric and still life as escapist retreats from the demands of history, Costello asks: "[C]ould these sensuous arts of the private, the everyday, the domestic, provide a medium by which individuals might encounter historical realities that were otherwise too distant, too vast, too mediated, too dangerous, or too impersonal to feel and comprehend?" (viii). Such encounters engage, rather than retreat from history; they resist the absolute prioritizing of the public realm, insisting on a space to imagine alternatives on a human scale. The still life in these works, Costello reminds us, are "porous environments," full of windows and sunlight, entrances and exits, "tying these artists to the world of ominous and disturbing circumstances even as they confirm an amenable, personal, aesthetic space" (18). As a defense of the lyric and still life, Planets on Tables is eloquent and forward-looking about poetry's role in the world. Starting with Stevens's post-war correction of his earlier ambition to place a jar in Tennessee, the study concludes [End Page 200] with readings of recent work by Robert Pinsky, Lucie Brock-Broido, and the artist Abelardo Morell. Such scope forgives the fact that more orientation to the still life genre pre-1930 would have helped round out the study for students of modernism. Of course, such scholarship is by now voluminous, dating back in Williams studies at least to Bram Djikstra's 1969 The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech. Modernists will benefit from Costello's close reading of Stevens's introduction to Williams's Collected Poems, 1921-1931, which puts the two writers in productive dialogue with one another. Costello here frames an intriguing question only implicit in Stevens's often backhanded sounding praise of Williams as the hero of the real: "Are Williams's still lifes themselves a little like Trojan horses, bringing violence and heroic narrative into the domestic lyric?" (52). Whereas the still life affords Stevens a shelter through which the imagination can meet the world on more intimate terms, its "deliberate assembly and disarray" (49) in Williams is a means of contending with the variety of forces containing, constricting, and constructing the individual. How both poets uniquely internalize violence, while fiercely distinguishing between poetry and politics, leads to fresh readings of Stevens's Parts of a World and of a scattering of Williams's poems, including "Between Walls," the complex and often overlooked "Simplex Sigilum Veri...

Die Herz‐Turbine: Rhythm and Urban Experience in the Poetry of Gerrit Engelke (1890–1918)

Although once celebrated as a representative of “workers' poetry” (Arbeiterdichtung), the expressionist poet Gerrit Engelke (1890–1918) has, with the exception of a few canonical poems, largely been forgotten today. But Engelke's poetry merits a rereading on account of its early and sustained engagement with industrialization. More specifically, it offers an insightful case study into the cross‐currents linking expressionist aesthetics and industrial science on account of the author's efforts to imagine urban modernity and—the role of poetry in the modern world— through the lens of rhythm. Exploring the connections between Engelke's lyric and modern discourses on rhythm (work science, vitalist philosophy, dance and film), I argue that Engelke saw poetic rhythm as a means of overcoming, via aesthetics, what Georg Simmel had identified as the growing chasm between subjective and objective culture in the industrial world.

Shelley's Ideas of Reform in Prometheus Unbound

The purpose of this essay is to examine how Shelley deploys his thoughts on reform underlying his diverse portrayals of the classical figure Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound (1819). It argues that the characters of Prometheus embody Shelley's ideas of political, social, and moral reform in his lifetime. Incorporating the complexity of the historical conditions of his age, the poet constructs the symbolic ramifications of the protagonist, which extend into moral, political, and social aspects. He emphasizes the prerequisite requirement of moral reformation, which provides the basis for improving political and social establishments. The poet unfolds the notable reflections of the poem on the struggle for reformation which took place in his contemporary English society, while also considering the role of poetry in capturing that struggle.

A morte de Laocoonte e o Gigante Adamastor: a écfrase em Virgílio e Camões

Ekphrasis oreuidentia is an important picture of affection which plays a significant role in poetry. This vivid and detailed description of an object or action makes what is being described emerge in order to provoke readers' emotions, moving their passion through poetical representation. The article presents some of the linguistic resources used to build this affective picture in two different episodes of two epic poems: Aeneid by Virgil and Os Lusíadas by Camões.
 
 
 

A morte de Laocoonte e o Gigante Adamastor: a écfrase em Virgílio e Camões

<p style="text-align: justify;"><em><span style="color: black; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT','serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">Ekphrasis </span></em><span style="color: black; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT','serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">or</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT','serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">euidentia is an important picture of affection which plays a significant role in poetry. This vivid and detailed description of an object or action makes what is being described emerge in order to provoke readers' emotions, moving their passion through poetical representation. The article presents some of the linguistic resources used to build this affective picture in two different episodes of two epic poems: Aeneid </span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT','serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">by Virgil and </span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT','serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">Os Lusíadas by Camões.</span></p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>

“Giving a Sense of History”: Brecht, Rimbaud and Akhmatova in a Northern Irish Context

Tom Paulin is one of the major Northern Irish poets attempting to communicate a new perspective on contemporary Northern Ireland through the lens of different literary traditions. He chooses translation as a mode of discourse and seizes upon the differences and similarities of Northern Ireland and various European countries. Through the identification with foreign cultures, histories and political conflicts, Paulin challenges established interpretations of the Northern Irish Troubles. This article focuses on Paulin’s versions of poems by Bertold Brecht, Arthur Rimbaud and Anna Akhmatova. It sets out to examine the deconstruction and redefinition of Irish identities through displacement. Taken out of the context of their culture of origin, the poems transformed by Paulin gain new meanings and new relevances against the background of the Northern Irish conflict. Considering Paulin’s versions of German, French and Russian poems, I will explore the role of poetry in a particular historical and cultural environment. In this context, the article is intended to shed light on the question why Paulin feels urged to strive for otherness and “elsewheres” outside Ireland in order to overcome the established political framework of Irish Nationalism and British Unionism.

Finding my voice and a vision: Poetic representations as valid/valuable knowledge

This paper addresses the self-discovery of the author, a graduate student, in recognizing her overlapping identities of researcher, artist, and activist and the role of poetry through all of them. The journey through the identities, inspired by Catherine Etmanski's (2006) artistic journey, brings an awareness of the ability of poetry to encourage praxis. The author uses poetry to share others’ voices, then she begins to share her own voice through her poetry, and finally, she begins to create spaces for others to compose their own poetry or alternative ways of making meaning. Etmanski maintains that education is the key characteristic among all means of social change, and therefore, the author concludes that her poetry, personal or research-based, as a means to educate, should be used to encourage social change.

What's the Use? Writing Poetry in Wartime

What's the Use?Writing Poetry in Wartime Alice Templeton (bio) In a "Statement of Conscience" in the anthology Poets Against the War, Morton Marcus, a Korean war veteran, offers this apology for the poem he submitted: "The pursuit of this war and our unilateral stance on a number of world issues have left me saddened and depressed. . . . This [submission] is not a poem. These events, especially the administration's war-mongering, have sucked the poetry out of me" (2003, 122). My own experience of dealing with poetry in the consciousness of the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also takes me to a similar brink of artistic depletion. Even as I welcome the general effort of resistance that Poets Against the War represents, as a reader, I feel exhausted by most (though certainly not all) of the poems in the volume. And as a poet, I, like Marcus, suffer a loss of voice, as if the very task of expressing war consciousness has "sucked" the poetry out of me. Like so many [End Page 43] poets before me, I wonder whether my aesthetic, or any lyric-based aesthetic, is at all adequate to the task. I would like to examine this exhaustion and some energetic alternatives to it in order to understand the particular aesthetic problems that surround writing about war or, from a civilian's perspective, writing in response to wartime. To this end, I will discuss the following texts: Marcus own contribution to Poets Against the War, which makes plain the aesthetic challenges a poet faces in writing about war; Muriel Rukeyser's 1949 prose book The Life of Poetry, in which she explores the uses of poetry in a culture dominated by war; and a selection of poems about war and systematized aggression by several different poets—Forché, Blake, James Wright, Yeats, Levertov, and Celan—that illustrate various non-despairing approaches to writing about war as they reveal some of the aesthetic limits encountered in the task. Intuitively, it seems that "a poetry of witness," deriving its authority from the poet's immediate involvement, should be truthful enough to vitalize the reader. But when I read Poets Against the War, it is not the poems of firsthand testimony that I find most engaging, but those with formal complexity and a dispassion that comes from personal disinterestedness. In fact, the poems of "authentic" witness, many of which are journalistic in tone and stylistically interchangeable, most often sustain the war-dominated imagination they claim to write against. My question is, then, what kind of lyric aesthetic—what kind of first-person authenticity—does writing in wartime require to be both authoritative and truthful? What is it about writing about war that, apparently, tends to reduce poetic singularity to a monotonous flatness, exhausting language itself? And, finally, if poetic language so seldom exceeds the us/them binaries and brutalities of uncritical rhetoric, then what is the use of writing poetry in the consciousness of wartime? In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser helps us think about these questions by speaking very directly about poetry's role in a culture dominated by war and profit. Writing in the utilitarian language of the Progressive Era, in what she elsewhere calls "the first century of world wars" (1994, 211), Rukeyser discusses poetry as a vital national resource that is not only underused but actively resisted in America. Poetry invites a "total imaginative response" (1996, 56) reached through the emotions, yet it is constantly devalued as obscure, elitist, or irrelevant to the worldly business at hand. For Rukeyser, this hostility to poetry betrays a deep-seated fear of feeling, a "complicated and civilized repression of the need for images of the real" (26). The social cost of denying the responsiveness poetry asks of us is "the weakness that leads to mechanical aggression . . . turning us inward to devour our own humanity, and outward to sell and kill nature and each other" (41). [End Page 44] When poetry is indeed put to use in the life of the individual and of the nation, the "totalitarian hardening of modern life as it expresses itself in the state" (1996, 26) becomes painfully evident and intolerable. For Rukeyser...

Cutlets or Fish Curry?: Debating Indian Authenticity in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Current discussions on the development of modern literary genres and aesthetic conventions in nineteenth-century colonial Bengal have tended, perhaps because of its relative neglect in the modern day, to ignore the seminal role of poetry in formulating the nationalist imagination. In academic discourse, the coming together of the birth of the novel, the concept of history and the idea of the nation-state under the sign of the modern has led to a collective blindness toward the forceful intervention of poetry and song in imagining the nation. Thus Dipesh Chakrabarty, in a chapter devoted to poetry in Provincializing Europe, ironically elides any mention of it at the crucial instance of the formulation of national modernity, when he takes his argument about the division between the prosaic and the poetic in Tagore further to say, without mentioning the seminal role of poetry, that: ‘The new prose of fiction—novels and short stories—was thus seen as intimately connected to questions of political modernity’. Partha Chatterjee discusses, in the introduction to The Nation and Its Fragments, the shaping of critical discourse in colonial Bengal in relation to drama, the novel, and even art, but ignores completely the fiercely contested and controversial processes by which modern Bengali poetry and literary criticism were formulated. ‘The desire to construct an aesthetic form that was modern and national’, to use his words, ‘was shown in its most exaggerated shape’ not, it is my contention, in the Bengal school of art in the 1920s as he says, but long before that in the poetry of Rangalal Banerjee, Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, Madhusudan Dutt, and Nabinchandra Sen, and in the literary criticism and controversy surrounding their work.

Inside a provider's perspective: Using practitioner poetry to explore the treatment of persons with mental illness

This article explores the uses of practitioner poetry as a tool for facilitating an understanding of the lived experiences of persons suffering from mental illness. This is accomplished in four primary ways. First, the use of poetry as a source of data and knowledge acquisition is explored. Epistemological issues implicated by expressive arts research are addressed, with a focus on the role of poetry in post-modern qualitative research. Second, the importance of poetry to the mental health field and mental health consumers is discussed. Third, poems are presented that explore the experience of people with mental illness from the vantage point of a practitioner. Finally, a thematic analysis of the poetry identified themes related to working with mental health consumers. The article ultimately can be used as a vehicle for increasing practitioner insight, self-reflection, and empathy.

Petrio‐Pindarics: John Wolcot and the Romantics

John Wolcot (aka “Peter Pindar, Esq.”), the most popular oppositional satirist in the 1780s and ’90s, received scant attention from the emerging Romantic coterie. With particular reference to Coleridge’s and Shelley’s scattered observations on Wolcot, this essay argues that the marginalization of Wolcot from critical discussion bespeaks the influential presence of satire, radical politics, and populist discourse in the making of Romantic notions of the cultural and moral role of poetry and the poet.

Word Order and Markedness in a Slovenian Poem and Its English Translations

When systemic differences between languages preclude the possibility of a truly “faithful” translation, the translator may choose to preserve either the form of the original, that is its syntactic structure, or its function, which includes not only the meaning but also stylistic effects such as the degree of markedness. Faithfulness to the original form may result in a different degree of markedness in translation, or even in a reinterpretation of the structure, with a concomitant change in meaning. On the other hand, the preservation of the original function by introducing structural devices congenial to the target language may obscure the original cohesive devices, including figures. Since the balance between form and function is particularly delicate in poetry, this paper examines the choices between them in two English translations of “Belo”, a free verse poem by the contemporary Slovenian poet Dane Zajc. The central issue discussed is the ordering of constituents, which is dominated by different principles in the two languages. Since both form and function play a vital role in poetry, such an analysis cannot yield a formula for each type of translation problem; nevertheless, it can locate the points of divergence in the source and target languages, as well as use the translators’ choices to draw conclusions about the nuances of acceptability in the target language.

Women Poets and Contested Spaces in The Yellow Book

To illuminate poetry's role in The Yellow Book as well as its gender politics, this essay investigates poems by women in relation to poems by men, the Oscar Wilde trial, and the literary marketplace. Volume 1 suggested that pages devoted to poetry were a contested space: no poems by women appeared alongside masculine contributions that celebrated male poetic tradition or objectified women. New Woman poems began to appear in volume 2, however. And after Wilde's trial, it was poetry by women that sustained the journal's decadent content and obliquely expressed sympathy with Wilde.