Romantic Poetry Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction Adriana Craciun (bio) This special issue of studies in romanticism is devoted to places and senses in Romantic poetry. Traditionally in literary studies, place has been seen as complementary to space; the former is thought to be rooted, bounded, and associated with local authenticity, while the latter is abstract, empty, and associated with the universal and the global. Human geographers no longer think in terms of this place/space binary, however, but instead increasingly conceive of place as a dynamic meeting place, necessarily entangled with more distant, even global, developments. As Doreen Massey has argued, place is better thought of as an event than as a bounded location, “an ever-shifting constellation of trajectories” and mobilities.1 One of the Romantic era’s most intellectually and physically mobile men of letters, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, spent five years exploring South and North America, and in his popular Aspects of Nature of 1808 (as the volume was first known in English), he devoted an essay to “The Nocturnal Life of Animals in the Primeval Forest.” His readers’ tropical visions were of landscapes to be looked at, but Humboldt wanted to evoke not the apparent uniformity of a tropical forest choked with vegetation, but rather, the species diversity converging in a tangle of unique places: the exceeding variety of their flora renders it vain to ask of what trees the primeval forest consists. A countless number of families are here crowded together and even in small spaces individuals of the same species are rarely associated. Each day, and at each change of place, new forms present themselves to the traveller, who, however, often finds that he cannot reach the blossoms of trees whose leaves and ramifications previously arrested his attention.2 Humboldt reveals a world dominated by the agency of plants, their movements, associations, innovations, and the arresting powers of their flowers. [End Page 347] Like Erasmus Darwin had done in The Botanic Garden, we might say that Humboldt restored to plants “their original animality.”3 Human travelers encounter new and distinct places everywhere they turn in this forest, places shaped by the convergence of nonhuman inhabitants. Humboldt draws our attention to the movements of animals along mysterious treetop routes and pathways “at considerable distances from each other, which have doubtless been made by the larger four-footed beasts of the forest” as they “stalk leisurely” through this seemingly impenetrable flora: There came down together, to drink, to bathe, or to fish, groups consisting of the most different classes of animals, the larger mammalia being associated with many-colored herons, palamedeas, and proudly-stepping curassow and cashew birds (Crax Alector and C. Pauxi). “Es como en el Paraiso”—it is here as in Paradise—said, with a pious air, our steersman, an old Indian, who had been brought up in the house of an ecclesiastic. The peace of the golden age was, however, far from prevailing among the animals of this American paradise, which carefully watched and avoided each other.4 Indigenous and Christian visions may converge in the steersman’s glimpse of Paradise, but instead of an unchanging Eden, Humboldt sees the forest as a cultivated and contested place, shaped largely by the secretive comings and goings of nonhuman animals and plants. Here it is helpful to draw on anthropologist Tim Ingold’s emphasis on place-making as a practice, instead of place as a static and bounded location. Far from being the unmarked, unoccupied, and undifferentiated space that we at first imagine, Humboldt’s primordial forest is what Ingold describes as a “tangled mesh of interwoven and complexly knotted strands”: “Every strand is a way of life, and every knot a place.”5 The wayfarers moving through and making this complex mesh are for the most part nonhuman animals. They break trails, broker uneasy truces, negotiate co-travel, walk with leisure and pleasure, and fight fierce battles invisible to humans, which we register only through the nocturnal “wild cries of animals [that] appeared to rage throughout the forest.”6 We see and hear in Humboldt’s primordial forest not Nature herself in all her Romantic grandeur as sublime landscape, but partial traces of place-making, where the...

Textile Work in Shared Domestic Spaces in the Roman House: The Evidence from Latin Poetry

This paper examines the engagement with the materiality of textiles and textile crafts in Roman poetry. Through close readings of Ausonius’ Epigrams and Silius Italicus’ epic on the Punic war, informed by archaeological evidence and reconstructions of ancient weaving, the paper demonstrates that male Roman authors display significant knowledge of the practicalities of contemporary textile work and its range of sensory experiences. The paper explains the basis for this knowledge by drawing on archaeological evidence for shared use of domestic space, but in contrast to previous studies on shared space utilisation and crafts, emphasis is placed on the childhood experiences both of male and female children in elite households. The paper proposes that training undertaken by girls of such families impacts considerably on male members of the household and underpins the technical knowledge displayed in literary descriptions of textile work

Victorian Illustrations of Romantic Poetry

Victorian Illustrations of Romantic Poetry

Reading Lyric's Form: The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals

Reading Lyric's Form:The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals Lindsey Eckert In her introduction to the 1832 edition of Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-book, Letitia Elizabeth Landon laments, "The ideas that seemed at first so delightful, are grown common, by passing through the familiarizing process of writing, printing. and correcting."1 Landon's comments are directly informed by her extensive experience with writing, printing, and correcting, particularly as a prominent contributor to and editor of British literary annuals like Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-book, The Keepsake, and Heath's Book of Beauty.2 Landon's contemporaries also saw their work "grown common" in literary annuals; authors such as Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and William Makepeace Thackeray were frequent contributors.3 Such notable authors—along with the volumes' attractive bindings and elaborate illustrations—made the annual one of the most commercially successful genres in the period, "dominat[ing] the market for poetry from 1825 to 1835" at a time when it was shifting away from poetry to prose.4 In the context of the literary marketplace in which Landon and her annuals were a driving force, her introduction to Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-book points to the specific commercial and material conditions facing Romantic writers. Initially, her emphasis on the distance between "delightful" ideas and the "familiarizing process" of their composition seems to echo more well-known Romantic descriptions of inspiration and writing, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous metaphor in A Defence of Poetry that the mind is "a fading coal."5 Shelley's assertion that "when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline" is an abstract claim rather than an allusion to the physical process of composing lines of type to be printed on a press.6 Indeed, throughout A Defence of Poetry Shelley eschews the material conditions of handwritten composition as well as its tangible transmission to readers via print and the marketplace. By contrast, Landon points to the practical realities that mediate poetic ideas into commercial products. Her own writing, she claims, has become tiringly familiar to her, a feeling perhaps shared by many writers forced to [End Page 973] reread their work as it makes its way to publication. But beyond that, she suggests that through writing and, more importantly, printing, correcting page proofs, and ultimately selling her work, its literary content somehow seems familiar in more general and negative ways. For Landon, material form takes the sheen off of one's ideas, and the further removed that material form is from the author—say, a printed lyric as opposed to a handwritten poem—the more common, tired, and familiar a work becomes. Landon's preoccupation with the "familiarizing process" that transfers poetic ideas into common and even banal material forms was not unique. Others also worried that new technologies and industrial techniques such as steam and iron printing presses, stereotype printing, edition binding, and mechanized paper production injected a new type of uniformity into literature. Thomas Carlyle went so far as to decry "the Mechanical Age" in which he lived.7 "[B]ooks," he observed, "are not only printed, but in a great measure, written and sold, by machinery."8 The vast amount of printed texts that these technologies produced and the rapidly expanding reading public that consumed them caused nineteenth-century writers, especially poets, to rethink the relationship between literary forms—lyric, ode, sonnet, ballad—and material forms—manuscript, book, broadside, newspaper, musical score. As Celeste Langan and Maureen McLane have asserted, "[W]e find in this period a sustained effort to reimagine poetry not as a genre—a literary kind among kinds—but as a medium."9 Focusing on the mediums of Romantic poetry, particularly manuscript albums and printed literary annuals, this article explores connections between poetic form and the various material forms it takes. My approach takes its lead from the New Lyric Studies and its arguments for historical poetics.10 Scholars such as Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson have convincingly argued that transhistorical understandings of lyric mistakenly conflate different types of poems that would have been distinct for historical readers and that likely would have encouraged different methods of reading genre...

”Vårvindar friska” och världen

”Vårvindar friska” (Fresh Spring Breezes) and the World
 With a point of departure in a specific case of poetry reception the article aims to nuance the contemporary discussions of world literature, by paying attention to song performances, anthologies and the digital archive as central media for transnational circulation of poetry in a historical perspective. The article examines the national and international reception of the poem, or song lyrics known as ”Vårvindar friska” (1828, Fresh Spring Breezes) by the Swedish romantic poet Julia Nyberg (pseud. Euphrosyne). Nyberg used a traditional melody when composing her text and it was further adjusted to a specific image of the Nordic traditional song when it was included in the Swedish canon. The reception history shows how the song became associated with Swedishness and on that account subjected to a whole range of ideological and commercial agendas. Today, several interpretations and performances of the song are available on YouTube, and the user comments demonstrate that they generate interest in the words, including the original, full text.The case of ”Vårvindar friska” also provides an opportunity to highlight central types of media through which world literature has been envisioned during two formative periods. In the second half of the nineteenth century, poetry anthologies were considered important media for the collection and dissemination of world literature. In our own century, YouTube seems to have taken over some of these tasks and expectations which also relate to the more general question of world literature in a digital age. The obvious differences notwithstanding, the presence (or non-presence) of ”Vårvindar friska” and other Swedish romantic poetry in translation anthologies and in the YouTube archive, point out some similar features, such as the principles of recycling and remediation and identity formation as a driving force. The two reception contexts shed light on each other as well as further complicating our understanding of the dynamics between availability and impact on a world-wide scale.

The Unfortunates by Kim Liggett

Reviewed by: The Unfortunates by Kim Liggett Karen Coats Liggett, Kim The Unfortunates. Tor Teen, 2018 [224p] ISBN 978-0-7653-8100-2 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 Grant Franklin Tavish the fifth, son of a senator, has a guilty conscience: the accident that he caused resulting in the death of four teens is being swept under the legal rug. Desperate to be punished but unable to take responsibility without [End Page 477] hurting his father’s career, Grant decides to arrange for his own death in a caving accident. When four teens show up lost in the cave with him, however, he feels obligated to get them out, but one by one they are being killed by some unknown force that is following them underground. There is nothing subtle about this story that is clearly based on the real-life case wherein “affluenza” became part of the criminal excuse lexicon. The four teens (who turn out to be hallucinated by Grant) are all poor, sweet, and talented with bright, well-defined futures, heavy-handedly magnifying the impact of their tragic deaths. This moral simplicity, though, is complicated as Grant is portrayed as a good guy who made one impulsive decision with devastating consequences. While Grant’s overwhelming sense of guilt may be credible, his character is developed inconsistently through his inner dialogue and his overt speech, which alternates between trite sentiments of regret and lines of dark Romantic poetry. The book does, though, offer a fantasy of enlightenment and retributive justice as Grant rises above his privilege to care about what he has done and suffers consequences no real-life legal system can impose. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives by Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones

Reviewed by: The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives by Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones Marina Gerzić Bildhauer, Bettina, and Chris Jones, The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (Proceedings of the British Academy, 208), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017; hardback; pp. xx, 346; 21 b/w, 16 colour illustrations; R.R.P. US$135.00, £85.00; ISBN 9780197266144. The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives offers a fascinating array of international and multidisciplinary reflections on medievalism. The introduction by Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones presents a broad history of the continuing evolution of the idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ from the fourteenth century to the present day. The collection is then divided into three themed sections, with various genres and areas, such as film, literature, politics, and Byzantinism, discussed across all the sections. One of the major strengths of this wide-ranging collection is its diversity of voices and of subject matter, with topics ranging from how Old Norse sagas are used as evidence by climate change deniers, to the way that Lady Gaga employs medieval iconography in her music videos. Part I of the collection looks at medievalism in politics and histories. Bruce Holsinger’s chapter traces the origin of the idea of the ‘medieval Warm Period’ to a naïve reading of Landnámabók, highlighting the afterlife of the idea of the ‘Warm Period’ in political discourse regarding climate change in order to argue for a more engaged relationship between natural sciences and the humanities. Eamon Byers, Stephen Kelly, and Kath Stevenson examine the connection between cultural nationalism and the figures of Cú Chulainn and Saint Patrick in their chapter, showing how these figures were used to give legitimacy to political affiliations during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Patrick Geary argues that nineteenth-century scholars such as Alexandre Herculano, Jules Michelet, and Felix Dahn served as proto-celebrities, whose writings reflect a time when medieval origin myths were used to bolster European nations. Andrew Lynch’s chapter analyses the attitudes towards and representation of the Middle Ages in a selection of children’s histories from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, arguing that these works often feature the beginning of the British nation, war, and religion as ‘the chief signifiers of the Middle Ages’ (p. 90). [End Page 194] Part II of the collection looks at practising medievalism. Celebrated German author Felicitas Hoppe reflects on her experience in adapting Hartmann von Aue’s verse romance Iwein into the young-adult novel genre, highlighting the importance of female characters Laudine and Lunette, both in von Aue’s original and in her adaptation. Museum curator James Robinson’s chapter draws on his experience of curating the Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum to outline the parallels between the medieval cult of saints and contemporary celebrity culture. Composer and musician Graham Coatman’s chapter analyses the way that medieval music is used by British composers such as Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Judith Weir, arguing for their role as examples of a broader trend of medievalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde music. Archivist Fani Gargova demonstrates that ‘the political dimension of medievalism […] can only be understood through an investigation of archival material’ (p. 152), examining previously unknown photographs that prove the sustained contact of three early twentieth-century Byzantine scholars. Chris Jones’s chapter provides a rich overview of medievalism in recent British and Irish poetry, highlighting the renewed turn to the medieval in contemporary verse, and offering insightful reflections of his own involvement with two projects: the translation of Seamus Heaney’s versions of Robert Henryson’s Fables into a digital app; and the creation of poetic riddles capable of being published on Twitter. The joint chapter between Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri and Lila Yawn focuses on the medieval revival festival Calendimaggio held in Assisi, and Pasolini’s left-wing medievalist Trilogy of Life, and provides insight not only into the nostalgia for, and a selective reevocation of, the medieval past, but also the importance of medievalism in Italian culture and politics. Part III of the collection centres on medievalism...

Images of Dead Poets in Roman Elegiac and Lyric Underworld

In this paper I analyse and compare the representations (or self-representations) of poets in the underworld in elegiac and lyric Roman poetry. I focus especially on five poems: Tibullus I.3; Propertius II. 34; Ovid, Amores II.6 (birds as poets) and III.9; Horace, Odes II.13. It is not my intention to give a detailed interpretation of the whole poems; my principal aim is to analyse how dead poets are pictured in two different genres, the elegiac and the lyric, which share certain features (for instance, we can have in some lyric poems the poetic persona of a lover, the amator, which characterizes erotic elegy discourse, and some similar topics, as the metaphor of love as illness, etc.). At the end of this paper, I will point to the images of dead poets that are (I think) the most representative of the difference between elegiac and lyric genres. In the footnotes I provide some bibliographical references on studies and commentaries about each of the poems I treat here.

Obraz Achillesa i Hektora w poezji rzymskiej. Prolego­mena

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A Lacanian Reading of Human Psyche in the Poetry of John Keats and Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Romantic poetry, as an expression of the conscious and unconscious sentiments of the individual, holds a significant potential to be analysed for psychological contents. Such a view would reveal the personal life and psychological status of the poets. Therefore, the present paper concentrates on the Lacanian reading of the poetry of John Keats and Faiz Ahmad Faiz: the two major romantic poets of two different eras. Lacan divides the development of human psyche into three different stages i.e. ‘imaginary order’, ‘symbolic order’ and ‘real order’ While focusing on the ‘imaginary order’ and ‘symbolic order’, this comparative study intends highlighting the similar psychological states of the two poets as expressed in their poetry.

Romantic electricity: Fields and currents in recent research

AbstractRomantic writings about electricity have proved a fruitful topic for recent scholars of the period, and the study of electrical discourse is a fast‐growing interdisciplinary field. This essay offers a survey of the best work on Romantic electricity, focusing on 2 key areas: the ways in which electricity appears as an image of revolutionary activity, and the use of electric imagery in Romantic poetry as a figure for creativity and vitality. In assessing such recent work, this essay argues for the importance of reading Romantic electrical texts within the context of the material experimental cultures of period. Such historical attention reveals that electrical language is amazingly ubiquitous in the Romantic period, and is used in a variety of ways in literary and political texts. Awareness of this rich body of electrical texts offers scholars opportunities to move beyond assigning electricity a particular political valence, and to investigate the operation of electrical language in the work of a wide range of authors.

The Battle of the Dubyas: Romantic vs. early modern version

A creative assignment for an Introductory Literary Theory and Criticism course, The Battle of the Dubyas: Romantic vs. early Modernist version depicts a fictional dialogue between the Romantic poet William Wordsworth and modern writer Virginia Woolf. The informal nature of a dialogue allows for a heated debate between the two theorists, where their distinct style of speaking—Woolf with her many dashes and Wordsworth with his complete sentences—convey the periodical and ideological differences. The first subject of the debate is the topic of androgyny, where Woolf explains the demerits of confining writing to a single­sexed medium—whether it be an overtly direct writing, or covertly complicated one—and chides Wordsworth for being too masculine in his thought. The second topic arrives at the issue of material conditions needed for literary genius—where Wordsworth’s notion of the Poet transcending all physical obstacles is debunked and silenced by Woolf’s fictional account of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith. Between the opposing stances of each theorist’s views on gender divide in writing and nature vs. nurture in breeding genius, Woolf’s ideals of androgyny and material necessity for genius triumph that of Wordsworth’s arcane and masculine views on natural genius of the Poet.

FIGURAS DE LA CRÍTICA EN WALTER BENJAMIN: DEL ROMANTICISMO ALEMÁN A CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

In this article we intend to analyze the different considerations that Walter Benjamin carried out in his work on the problem of critique as an eminently philosophical subject. To do this, we will address, first, his approach to German romantic poetry, then baroque poetry and, finally, Baudelaire’s work, in order to explain how a full comprehension of critique means, for the German philosopher, to recover the idea of “actualization” as a key for reading History. In fact, if the actualization presupposes, for Benjamin, the assumption of the non-coincidence of time with itself, that is, the survival of the past within the present and its potentiality to signify, we try to show how Benjamin’s notion of criticism rests on that temporal difference and finds there its source of meaning.

December Liberties: Playing with the Roman Poets in the High-Medieval Schools

This essay discusses how and to what ends eleventh- to early thirteenth-century writers from the schools, monastic as well as secular, more or less explicitly incorporated elements from and allusions to the canon of classical Roman poetry into their own work. What function did these elements have, beyond literary embellishment and erudite showing-off? This essay remains a historian's view and represents a historian's attempt to grapple with the meaning and function of this classicising literature in its particular social setting – namely that of the northern European educational milieus of the two centuries after the first millennium. The hypothesis is that these intertextual references played a crucial part in making it possible to engage in very direct and often outrageous satire – which functioned as a clever pedagogical tool to enliven teaching, but also seems to have had a connection to a specific time in the school calendar, namely the Christmas season, during which the unwritten rules of decorum and restrictions that governed social interaction in the school community were momentarily relaxed. It is my contention that these texts were not an aberration from a more solemn and serious norm, but integral parts of a didactic and distinctly performative practice, which included a deliberate, subtly regulated playing with roles of power and authority and, not least, role-reversals. This seems particularly to be the case in the correspondence (real or imagined) consisting of letter-poems – often erotically explicit – between teachers and their students. A select number of examples of this intriguing literature, from various milieus and settings, are presented, and the essay addresses the question of how we as modern scholars should interpret it – particularly if our aim is to use it as a repository of historical source material regarding the social life of the high-medieval learned milieus. It is contended that these remarkable and sometimes outrageous texts, as well as being vehicles of the teaching of Latin composition, became a tool for negotiating and defining intimate relationships between people within these learned milieus, whether between equals, between superiors and subordinates, or between men and women.

Media, Redemption, and Myth Superscription in Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

This article analyzes scenes of media and redemption in Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 film Qianli zou danqi 千里走单骑 ( Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles , 2005) as a critique of Romantic Orientalism. Whereas in Western Romantic poetry, the themes of retreating to nature and journeying abroad are strengthened by imagining the Orient and appropriating the local voice, Riding Alone negates that motif by depicting the divided subjectivities of Kenichi, a historian of Oriental Art at Tokyo University, and his failed redemption during his journey to China. The film offers his father Takata’s alternative journey, which involves the foreign traveler losing his subject position before asserting his own, leading to the revival of the Lord Guan story. Much of the historical myth-making of Lord Guan in Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian religious practices involves a reinvention of a cultural tradition as a response to foreign threat; all share the features of what Prasenjit Duara calls “the apotheosization of a hero and his role as guardian” in a process of the “superscription of symbols.” By contrast, Riding Alone is secular and forward-thinking while reenacting several meanings of the Lord Guan myth such as repentance, sacrifice, redemption, and guardianship. The film interpolates the Japanese into a new “Oriental” subject position that has to lose its Western Orientalism as well as the negative impact of industrialism while retaining democratic subjectivity, and the Chinese into a new democratic subject position that maintains autonomy.Myth Superscription in Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

John Cowper Powys and the Inhuman Wordsworth

ABSTRACTThis article explores an overlooked strand of William Wordsworth’s early twentieth-century legacy: his valuing of human insentience, as recognized by the twentieth-century British novelist John Cowper Powys. With particular attention to “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” and “Resolution and Independence,” it argues that Powys’s treatment of Wordsworth anticipates recent mineral-focused analyses of Romantic poetry. The article examines some of the many revelatory references to Wordsworth’s images of rocks and stones in Powys’s idiosyncratic works of popular philosophy and his admiring 1938 essay on the poet before turning to Powys’s fictional reworking of those images in three of his novels, A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934) and Porius (1951). Powys’s “stone-colored” version of Wordsworth is bound up with the novelist’s rewriting of more familiar Romantic themes and thus accommodates a flexible eco-critical approach that acknowledges Wordsworth’s investment in the power of the imagination and the quest for transcendence.

More and less authenticity: A cognitive approach to re-visioning the Romantic legacy of authenticity in manuscript copy of Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Waggoner’

Romantic poetics is characterized by a focus on individual authenticity, a belief in the inner self in dealing with the world, poetry and nature. Yet since the mid twentieth century, the question of individual authenticity has been deconstructed by pre- and post-World War II poststructuralist approaches to social and aesthetic dynamics of individual identity, cultural aesthetics and language. This essay argues though, that it is possible to engage with authenticity as a ‘more and less’ presence in creative writing process; that identifiable claims to embodied and cognitive authorship (if not the writer’s authority) may be discerned in iterated processes of making the literary text. This is in terms of creative processes of writing and choices writers make in their writing, which may also participate in the dismantling of individuality, incorporating other writers’ comments on the work in communities of writing. The essay is based on analysis of original archival copy of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Benjamin The Waggoner’ (1806-1819), with the use of drafts and corrections as material for cognitive study supported by theories of externalised cognition and Extended Mind theory. The transdisciplinary approach of this paper thus incorporates frameworks of creative writing and literary studies with theories of embodied cognition to re-vision some of the key concepts of Romantic poetry.

Southey’s “Christabel”; Coleridge’s Thalaba

ABSTRACTIn September 1800, while living in Portugal, Robert Southey wrote a verse romance responding to the story of “Christabel.” He composed several hundred lines of poetry about Leoline, a “hell-hag,” a damsel, and her mother the Lady of the Land—intending them for the last book of his Oriental romance Thalaba the Destroyer. They remain little known, although they are preserved in two MS drafts, because Southey dropped them from the poem before publication. The purpose of this article is to make them more easily available to scholars, and to consider what they reveal about Coleridge and Southey as instigators and revisers of each other’s poetry (including their adoption of experimental meters), about the trajectory of Coleridge’s unfinished poem, and about the development of Oriental and gothic romance from its origins in Spenser and Percy. Southey’s Leoline verses were not only one of the first but also one of the best-informed responses to “Christabel”: they were inflected by inside knowledge of Coleridge’s intentions for the poem, and throw light on its second part and on his plans for its completion.

Sjøreisen, det frie hav og endeløsheten. De maritime topois teknologihistorie

Early Romanticism established and developed a series of poetical maritime common places intended to convey the pure forceful and inhuman being of Nature. “Storm at Sea”, “The Endless Ocean” and “The monstrous deep” are but three of many topological variation of “The Ocean”, gaining widespread popularity in the 19th and the 20th centuries and gradually turning into cultural clichés. This article argues that the long history of maritime narratives contains a much richer and indeed both critical and instructive legacy of topological figures than the semantically rather limited legacy of Romantic poetry. Analyzing a wide range of examples spanning from Homer to Joseph Conrad by way of François Rabelais and Daniel Defoe, this article suggests that the topologies of maritime narratives are exemplary cases of what Mikhail M. Bakhtin called chrono-topes, that is, epistemologically and politically charged configuration of literary time-spaces. The ocean-spaces of the early modern sea narratives are explicitly informed by the technological and political realities of their times, thus yielding a rich material that reflects how our ways of experiencing the oceans cannot be separated from the protocols, tools and crafts that determines our interfaces with the world.

Vojeslav Molè kot pesnik ekfraze

Članek se ukvarja z ekfrastično poezijo enega od utemeljiteljev slovenske umetnostnozgodovinske stroke Vojeslava Moleta, ki je bil v mladosti znan kot pesnik in esejist. Preden je leta 1926 emigriral na Poljsko in začel z uspešno znanstveno kariero na krakovski Jagelonski univerzi, je izdal dve pesniški zbirki ter v revijah objavil posamezne pesmi in eseje. Njegova poetika je po formalni plati zavezana antiki in simbolizmu, glavni temi sta ljubezen in ženska, kasneje se jima pridruži še hrepenenje po mladosti. Pesnik, ki se je izobraževal v Trstu, Novem mestu, Krakovu, Rimu in na Dunaju, je napisal precej ekfrastičnih besedil. V italijanski prestolnici so ga prevzele Tizianova alegorija Sveta in profana ljubezen, Leonardova Mona Lisa ter Rafaelova freska Apolon in Marsija, ki se pojavijo že v naslovih ekfrastičnih pesmi prve zbirke Ko so cvele rože iz leta 1910. Tudi esej Umetnost in narava, v katerem razpravlja o razmerju med likovno umetnostjo, literaturo in naravo, je nastal v Rimu. Pesmi Giorgione in Bizantinska madona se nanašata na pesnikov obisk Benetk v času potovanja po Italiji. Moletov ekfrastični pristop je klasičen v smislu poveličevanja lepote in pomena umetniškega dela, kar ga približuje romantični poeziji. V pesmi V oglejskem muzeju je perspektiva kompleksnejša, saj se pesniški subjekt bolj odziva na sedanjost in obenem pripoveduje zgodbo o detomorilki iz časa hunskih vpadov. Zbirka Tristia ex Siberia, ki je izšla leta 1920, je nastajala v znamenju prve svetovne vojne, ko je bil pesnik v ujetništvu v Sibiriji. Pesmi Hegezo in Milonska Venera, napisani v že Grkom znanem in med pesniki kasnejših dob priljubljenem načinu »prosopopoeia«, lahko razumemo kot posledico doživljanja tesnobe in strahu v izgnanstvu. Antična relief in kip sta medij za izražanje pesnikove zapuščenosti v brezsmiselnem svetu ter hrepenenja po ljubezni, ženi in domovini. Čeprav je Rilke v Moletovem pesniškem razvoju odigral pomembno vlogo, ni mogoče z gotovostjo trditi, da je nanj vplivala Rilkejeva najznamenitejša ekfrastična pesem Apolonov arhajski torzo. Ob Moletovem osredotočanju na daljno preteklost in izogibanju sočasni umetniški produkciji je pesem Sejavec izjema. Vprašanje, ali jo je navdihnila znamenita slika Sejalec impresionista Ivana Groharja, ostaja odprto.