Scawen Blunt Research Articles

Reconceptualizing the Global Transformation of Islam in the Colonial Period: Early Islamic Reform in British-Ruled India and Egypt

Abstract Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European empires extended their rule over most of the Muslim world. The present article argues that these empires promoted three interrelated political discourses; namely, a discourse on utilitarianism, a discourse on civilizational progress, and a discourse on liberal imperialism. The empires also encouraged Islamic reform movements, which entailed cooperation between Muslim thinkers, European officials, liberal intellectuals, and Orientalists. Reform movements legitimated the three aforementioned discourses in terms of premodern Islamic religious concepts (e.g. ʿaql, maṣlaḥa, maqāṣid al-šarīʿa, iǧtihād, taqlīd). These concepts were reinterpreted and tacitly linked to imperial policies concerning race, technology, industrial capitalism, and authoritarian violence. The article examines this process by considering the British Empire, and its relationship to Islamic reform projects in India and Egypt. The article discusses nineteenth century British political discourses as developed in the writings of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. The article then discusses Islamic reform in India, focusing on the Muslim thinkers Sayyid Aḥmad Ḫān and Amīr ʿAlī, as well as their relationships with British figures like William Muir and John Strachey. Next the article discusses Islamic reform in Egypt, focusing on the Muslim thinkers Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rašīd Riḍā as well as their relationships with British figures like Lord Cromer and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

Gendered Poetic Discourse and Autobiographical Narratives in Late Victorian Sonnet Sequences

Gendered Poetic Discourse and Autobiographical Narratives in Late Victorian Sonnet Sequences Patricia Rigg (bio) In the second half of the nineteenth century in England, when laws and cultural traditions concerning love, marriage, and sexuality were in flux, the sonnet was a poetic form well suited to express the conflict between shifting expectations of Victorian social propriety and increasingly liberal expressions of human desire. As Stephen Burt and David Mikics point out in The Art of the Sonnet, "the sonnet form thrives on, and fosters, within the self, a thorny internal monologue."1 Italian poetic forms such as the sonnet and the rispetto that evolve out of a long and distinguished amatory tradition associated with carnal love allowed English poets in the later nineteenth century to express a new ideal of love that could accommodate and reflect sexual desire in a changing social framework. In this essay, I focus on the ways in which sequencing these poetic forms with attention to coherence and order enabled gendered discourse on what was conventionally unsayable, particularly when inspiration for that discourse was autobiographical. Sequencing sonnets and rispetti creates a hybrid form, a form that combines the subjectivity of the lyric voice with the objectivity of an implicitly fictional narrator in lyrics that contribute to an overarching storyline. Consequently, poetic expression of intimate and even forbidden desire unfolds with relative impunity. I am interested in the ways in which sequencing lyric poetic forms to create a hybrid genre-fostered poetic autobiography that discretely and subversively wrestles with late-nineteenth-century anxieties about marital infidelity, sexual desire, and sexual orientation and that contributes to a gendered discourse on the nature of the sacred and the profane in these matters. As the nineteenth-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim points out, the sacred could be good and it could be evil, just as the profane could be either.2 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese is the first [End Page 201] significant autobiographical sonnet sequence in the Victorian period, and it substantiates Durkheim's argument that one society's profane is another society's sacred; Barrett Browning was criticized for violating Victorian standards of reticence and discretion in making public the intimacy of her developing love for Robert Browning, while modern feminist audiences have been less forgiving of her self-abasement and self-denigration in the earlier sonnets of the sequence. Barrett Browning did not view herself as transgressive, and she did not publish her work with the intent to express subversive ideas about love, but she did publish a poetic autobiography. In contrast to Sonnets from the Portuguese, there are autobiographical sequences that reveal fissures in Victorian marriage—fissures that highlight marital infidelity, such as George Meredith's Modern Love, published in 1862, a sequence that reveals the sordid and cruel elements of the heterosexual love that Barrett Browning idealizes and that arises out of Meredith's own experience in a failed marriage. Because these sequences are autobiographical, their narratives come out of distinctly masculine and feminine life contexts in which the poetic discourse on these subjects unfolds, a discourse sometimes available to us today through memoirs and other documents that have passed through post-death restrictions on access and that now form a meta-commentary on the poetry. For instance, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's "The Love Sonnets of Proteus," included in The Love Lyrics and Songs of Proteus, embeds the sequence "A Woman's Sonnets" in its poetic narrative, but these sonnets were actually written by the married woman with whom Blunt had an affair, Lady Augusta Gregory. John Addington Symonds and A. Mary F. Robinson challenge assumptions about gendered desire, suggesting alternatives to heterosexual love and even to sexual love itself. Symonds's "Stella Maris" was inspired by and written for his male lover, Angelo Fusato, and Robinson's rispetti sequence "Tuscan Cypress" arose out of her jealousy of Vernon Lee's friendship with Alice Callander. In all these sequences, the poet relies on what we might call the mask-lyric or, as Augusta Webster puts it, the assumption that in lyric poetry "I does not mean I."3 It is not surprising that gender—as it is related to life experience—informs...

Tellings of an Encounter: A Meeting between Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Herbert Spencer and Wilfrid Blunt (1903)

AbstractIn 1903, the Islamic reformist Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849-1905), the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and the English writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) met in Spencer’s home in Brighton. This article focuses on the history of the various tellings of this encounter that brought together three intellectuals from a globalizing and colonial world. It shows that the various renditions were creative negotiations of the encounter’s meaning across times, places and languages in the twentieth century. Specifically, this article’s comparison of the content, form and role of the accounts in Rashīd Riḍā’sAl-Manār(1915 and 1922), Blunt’sMy Diaries(1920), Riḍā’s biography of ʿAbduh (theTārīkh, 1931) and ʿImārah’s collection of ʿAbduh’s works (Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah, 1972), and the way these accounts relate to each other through creative borrowing and translation, demonstrate the way European dominance in the global political and intellectual realm was confronted, negotiated and reiterated in the various tellings of the encounter.

Lucy McDiarmid, Poets & The Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal.

ON 18 January 1914, the anti-imperialist and sometime poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt hosted several poets, including W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, at his home in West Sussex. They dined on peacock culled from Blunt’s personal flock. This became known as the peacock dinner, and is the focus for Lucy McDiarmid’s excellently written book. From this event the author ranges widely: from Lord Bryon’s 1823 trip to Greece to Pound’s winning the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 at Robert Lowell’s urging. McDiarmid argues that the dinner is ‘central to literary history’ since ‘The peacock dinner survived not only in post-prandial correspondence but in major works’ of poetry (10). It is a story of ‘microtransmissions of culture’ (6). Structured chronologically, the book first explores the networks of male poets that substituted for professional bodies and licences, explaining how, on coming to England, Pound first sought out Yeats, then contacted Blunt. ‘The locus of culture, he assumed, was the poet himself’ (25). The peacock dinner provided an ideal opportunity: not just remote contact, but physical proximity.

Radicalism in the Margins: The Politics of Reading Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in 1920

AbstractThis article examines marginalia as a form of radical writing practice in the period immediately after the First World War. It focuses specifically on a densely annotated copy of the second part of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's My Diaries, which covers on 1900–1914 and was published in 1920. The annotator, John Arthur Fallows (1864–1935), was a former Church of England clergyman and Independent Labour Party politician, and the article asks what motivated him to leave such an explicit record of his engagement with the book in its margins. Blunt recast his original diary entries to show how the outbreak of the First World War had arisen from the prewar imperialist policies of the Entente. Fallows, meanwhile, used his copy of My Diaries to inscribe a permanent record of his responses to Blunt's writing, which were shaped by his own memories of prewar radical-left political action. The dual record of textual engagement that can be recovered from this copy of My Diaries provides insight into how two British radicals “read” the causes of the First World War in the period between the Armistice and the conclusion of the Paris Peace Accords.

Poets & the peacock dinner: the literary history of a meal

On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: the poet, horse-breeder, Arabist, and anti-imperialist married to Byron's only granddaughter. In this story of the curious occasion that came to be known as the 'peacock dinner,' immortalized in the famous photograph of the poets standing in a row, Lucy McDiarmid creates a new kind of literary history derived from intimacies rather than 'isms.' The dinner evolved from three close literary friendships, those between Pound and Yeats, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Lady Gregory and Blunt, whose romantic affair thirty years earlier was unknown to the others. Through close readings of unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, and poems, in an argument at all times theoretically informed, McDiarmid reveals the way marriage and adultery, as well as friendship, offer ways of transmitting the professional culture of poetry. Like the women who are absent from the photograph, the poets at its edges (F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Sturge Moore, and Victor Plarr) are also brought into the discussion, adding interest by their very marginality. This is literary history told with considerable style and brio, often comically aware of the extraordinary alliances and rivalries of the 'seven male poets' but attuned to significant issues in coterie formation, literary homosociality, and the development of modernist poetics from late-Victorian and Georgian beginnings. Poets and the Peacock Dinner is written with critical sophistication and a wit and lightness that never compromise on the rich texture of event and personality.

A ‘Political Education’: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the Arabs and the Egyptian Revolution (1881–82)

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) was a member of the landed aristocracy well connected with the inner circle of late Victorian high society and high politics. He is known as a poet and a translator of Arabic poetry, as well as an adventurous traveller and an ardent anti-imperialist controversialist. He rates, in fact, as something of a precursor, and a fellow traveller, of J.A. Hobson. However, in the 1870s, at the beginning of his Arabophilia, he might have easily been mistaken for an ambitious patrician bent on making the East his ‘career’ (in the line of Disraeli's Tancred) at a time when the decline of Turkish religious and political authority over Islamic lands seemed to open up exciting opportunities for nations which were not ‘afraid of growing great’, as well as for enterprising individuals. It was only in 1881–82, through his commitment to the Egyptian nationalists, that his vague political sympathies were reshaped into a coherent critical attitude towards British colonial policies. Relying on Bl...

“Clark’s Fatuous Book”: Comments on Ronald W. Clark’s Life of Bertrand Russell (Part 3)

Edith Russell had already written the lives of Carey Thomas and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt when she married Bertrand Russell in 1952. She ordered and preserved his files as no one before had, and took a great interest in his earlier years as she did, of course, in his current campaigns and family. When Clark’s Life appeared in 1975, she reacted strongly to it. She wrote three drafts of comments, each draft more extensive than the last, and including information only she would have. She numbered the comments within the chapters and referred to them in her final (and often difficult) manuscript by page and comment number. On the verso of the dustjacket, having turned it inside out, she wrote: “Clark’s fatuous book”; then she replaced the jacket in its new state. Not all of her original comments are present in the final version, which she headed “Comments on Clark’s Biography of BR; Rather Rough Notes”. She also made a summary of her overall attitude and complaints. Altogether Countess Russell laboured hard in her effort to correct for researchers—especially future biographers—what she saw as imbalance, errors in fact, and appreciation of her esteemed husband. Along with similar but shorter critical notes on Dora Russell’s autobiography and a draft book by Michael Burn, the document was listed in the finding-aid to her papers (see S. Turcon, “The Edith Russell Papers”, Russell 12 [1992]: 61–78). This unabridged, third excerpt covers Chapters 21–24, up to Russell’s death. My notes are in angle brackets.

Repudiating the Shakespearean Script: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's The Bride of the Nile as Re-visioning of Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract Notes 1 Reference to Antony and Cleopatra is from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997). 2 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Bride of the Nile. A Political Extravaganza in Three Acts of Rhymed Verse (n.p.: n. pub., 1907), Act 3, p. 39. All reference is hereafter to that edition. 3 See The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). There the point is made, at p. 55: “It is almost a truism of current considerations of Orientalism that ‘the Orient’, ‘the Other’, and ‘the feminine’ are inextricably tied up with each other, and that the Orient itself plays the feminine role of the exploring of the to-be-penetrated object to the Occident's masculine role of the exploring and subduing subject”. 4 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), especially at pp. 1–5, 67, 104, 109, 334. See also: Claudia Moscovici, Double Dialectics: Between Universalism and Relativism in Enlightenment and Postmodern Thought (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p. 134; Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London: Verso, 2002), esp. pp. 224–248. 5 On Shakespeare's evocation, in his non-dramatic verse, of the multiplicity of Venus, see A. D. Cousins, Shakespeare's Sonnets and Narrative Poems (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 19–28. On Venus Victrix, see in particular Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd rev. edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 81–96. There is of course widespread discussion of allusions to Venus in Antony and Cleopatra but no close account of the mythography of Venus in that play. For an introductory account of Venus in Shakespeare's play, see Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), pp. 733–737. 6 For a stimulating history of Cleopatra as both historical figure and literary archetype, see Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (London: Bloomsbury, 1990). See also, Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 194–229. 7 Isis was sometimes identified with Venus, in the classical world – but she was also identified with many other goddesses. 8 When Alexis tries to become physically intimate with Belkis, at the beginning of Act 2, she chides him – pointing out that he, as a white coloniser, cannot really find her ethnic differences from him attractive. She says, “[M]y hand is brown” (p. 21), and then, as Alexis persists in his attentions declares: “You are really too absurd. I am a native girl,/ With a natural fuzz-head. I cannot keep from curl, / And you a white sub-prefect. Faugh. Ridiculous!” (p. 22). 9 It would be quite wrong to see Blunt's characterisation of Jael as making her an honorary British girl. It is rather that Blunt shows the Egyptian girl as every bit a modest, emotionally intense, vulnerable young young woman as could be any of her British counterparts.

"Clark's Fatuous Book"

Edith Russell had already written the lives of Carey Thomas and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt when she married Bertrand Russell in 1952. She preserved his files as no one before had, and took a great interest in his earlier years as she did in his current campaigns and family. When Clark’s Life appeared in 1975, she reacted strongly to it. She wrote three drafts of her comments, each draft more extensive, and including information only she would have, such as Russell’s views on personal matters, even his habits of dress. This unabridged excerpt goes to the end of Chapter 7 (about 1912).

From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830-1926, by Geoffrey P. NashThe Accidental Tourist, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and the British Invasion of Egypt in 1882, by Michael D. Berdine

<i>From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830-1926</i>, by Geoffrey P. Nash<i>The Accidental Tourist, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and the British Invasion of Egypt in 1882</i>, by Michael D. Berdine

Give and take: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Coffer for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Ezra Pound's homosocial modernism in 1914

sustained attempt to cast Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) as a prodigy of modernist sculpture.1 Ezra Pound’s mythologizing memoir of him took the lead and characterized Gaudier as the prototypical bohemian artist whose defining trait was a fierce and uncompromising individuality.2 Because Gaudier’s death in the trenches ended his short career, the fascination with his maverick reputation has been based primarily on the accounts of his life and on a select group of works within his oeuvre. Gaudier also created a number of awkward decorative and functional objects that have proved more difficult to bring into accord with the artist’s reputation.3 The Coffer for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (figs. 1–3) is a prime example of such an overlooked work and has rarely been considered worthy of sustained attention. This small marble casket – along with many of Gaudier’s other ‘decorative’ works – is frequently passed over in preference for his statuary, despite its importance as a commission from Ezra Pound. For instance, Roger Cole dismissed the Blunt Coffer ‘as a commercial piece of work which adds little to our understanding of the artist’.4 It is, I will argue, precisely its vexed status as a ‘commercial piece’ that makes it significant. An examination of this object and its place in the formulation of a modernist subculture in Britain sheds light on those traits of Gaudier’s artistic persona that, like this object, do not easily fit – namely, his irreverent and sexualized mockery of his own status as a producer of objects for others. Central to this question will be Pound, who was both patron and friend to Gaudier. In the commercial exchange of the artistic commission, Gaudier introduced in-jokes that both bound together and made fun of the players in that transaction. The Blunt Coffer resulted from a hurried commission given to Gaudier by Pound in 1914. The box was presented as a gift to the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) on the occasion of what became known as the ‘Peacock Dinner’ on 18 January 1914. In the years before World War I, Pound worked energetically to establish modernism in Britain and encouraged the development of an avantgarde subculture in London. Though still in the early stages of his own career, he acted as impresario for the new movement and sought ways to increase its momentum on multiple fronts. The ‘Peacock Dinner’ was one attempt to solidify the notion of the new generation.5 Gathering together a group of eight poets, including W. B. Yeats, F. S. Flint and Richard Aldington, Pound, with the encouragement of Blunt’s former lover Lady Gregory, organized a lavish luncheon Give and take: Henri GaudierBrzeska’s Coffer for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Ezra Pound’s homosocial modernism in 1914 David J. Getsy

Quarrels and Coteries in the 1890s

This essay considers the rivalries and quarrels of coterie culture and some of its leading figures in the 1890s, including Yeats and the Rhymers' Club, the 'Valistes' (Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon), Francis Thompson and the Catholic circle surrounding Alice and Wilfred Meynell, and the Wilde and Whistler camps. Recognition of the complex motives behind the quarrels and hatreds of the time--battles for leadership, professional jealousy, financial interests, and the creative spirit of argument and contrariness--offers an alternative to previous accounts of the raillery of the period and its clash between decadents and anti-decadents. ********** Seldom, in recent history, have the social 'upper crust' and the cultural elite been the same. This is especially so in England, which has never really taken to the salon tradition of French culture. The 'Holland House Circle' and the Seamore Place elite of Lady Blessington (the Irish-born Margaret Gardiner nee Power) in the early part of the nineteenth century were exceptional. Casting around for a culturally militant circle in the late nineteenth century, one would not look to Wilfred Scawen Blunt's Crabbet Club, which foundered on rumbustiousness, nor to Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire and the high-born 'Souls' of Lady Dedborough (Ettie Grenfell), who appear to have been more interested in tennis than in who should succeed Tennyson. Lady Wilde's attempt to relocate her salon from Dublin to a small house in London in the late 1880s and early 1890s fell flat. George Bernard Shaw described her gatherings as 'desperate affairs'. (1) Speranza's grande dame manner, along with her flounced dressed and risque repartee, had become an embarrassing anachronism. By then, Gladstone's 'Home Rule' for Ireland had hardened political divisions within English society and made social gatherings a risky business. From mid-century, literary and artistic avant-gardism had in any case shifted towards what Ian Fletcher has called 'the privilegedly unprivileged circle' and the 'mythology of the group personality'. (2) Its 'voice' was usually the little magazine. The Germ (1850), the voice of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (the 'P.R.B.'), was to inspire Herbert Horne and Arthur Mackmurdo's The Century Guild Hobby Horse later in the century (1884-92), and Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon's The Dial (1889-97). The emergence of guilds, brotherhoods, and coteries was of course evident all over Europe from mid-century. The failure of the revolutions of 1848 coincided with the rise of creative revolution, and the quest for an authentic style and direction that resisted middle-class identity and conformity. Famously, the dominance of the Paris Salon, the official annual exhibition of the works of living artists, was challenged by an exhibition of rejected pictures (the Salon des Refuses) in 1863, and after the first Impressionist exhibition of 1873, by independent artists who declined to send their pictures to the official Salon. In England, in 1848, it was a dislike of the Academy, England's equivalent of the Paris Salon, that gave birth to the romantically independent 'P.R.B.'. Collective action in the larger political arena was matched by collective creative revolution, in which the coterie was central. There is, arguably, an important difference between the Pre-Raphaelites and later artistic groupings. Whereas the Pre-Raphaelites took on the literary and artistic Establishment, later coteries in England had to assert their identity in a rapidly expanding literary and artistic marketplace, while fending off the usual threats to group identity caused by factionalism and individualism from within. As Kelsey Thornton has indicated, the traditional reading of the 1890s in terms of a clash between the decadents and the anti-decadents provides a somewhat simplistic outline of the motivations behind the complexity of quarrels, feuds, and heartfelt hatreds that characterize the period. …

A Box for Wilfrid Blunt

This essay analyzes the testimonial occasion organized by Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Pound to honor the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922). On 18 January 1914, Blunt welcomed six younger poets to his house in Sussex, where they dined on a peacock culled from his flock. At the ritual center of the meal was the presentation to Blunt of a marble box containing his guests’ poems; on the top of the box, designed by Gaudier-Brzeska, was a reclining nude woman. The dinner had a double purpose: to construct a poetic genealogy that would give meaning to a distinctly masculine literary tradition and to make that genealogy visible. Accounts of the event were planted in four journals, and the famous photograph, with the tall, impressively bearded Blunt surrounded by his scions, appears in all the poets’ biographies. With its potent combination of homosocial intimacy and artistic glamour, the “peacock dinner” claimed an important place in its participants’ memories and resonated in their writing for many years.

Ezra Pound and Poetic Influence: The Official Proceedings of the 17th International Ezra Pound Conference Held at Castle Brunnenberg, Tirolo di Merano

Introduction 1. William PRATT, "To Have Gathered from the Air a Live Tradition": Pound's Poetic Legacy 2. David GORDON, "The River-Merchant's Wife": after 80 years an update 3. Milne HOLTON, Poets and Gaol-Birds: Pound, Lowell, and Villon 4. Helen M. DENNIS, The Translation Strategies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ezra Pound and Paul Blackburn 5. Roxana PREDA, The Broken Pieces of the Vessel: Pound and Cavalcanti 6. Diana COLLECOTT, "This pother about the Greeks": Hellenism and Anti-Hellenism in 1914 7. Stefano M. CASELLA, Ezra Pound and Cunizza da Romano: Fragments of an Unfinished Epic Poem 8. Leon SURETTE, Ezra Pound and Richard Hovey 9. Zhaoming QIAN, Pound and Chinese Art in the British Museum Era_ 10. Naikan TAO, Canto IV and the "Peach-Blossom-Fountain" Poetic 11. Burton Hatlen, Pound's Pisan Cantos and the Origins of Projective Verse 12. Helene AJI, Jerome Rothenberg Reading Ezra Pound 13. Massimo BACIGALUPO, Pound and Montale 14. Tony LOPEZ, Pound and Postmodern British Poets 15. Evelyn HALLER, Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock and Ezra Pound's Daughter, Mary 16. Richard TAYLOR, Towards a Reading Text of The Cantos 17. Michael FAHERTY, Defeated But Not Destroyed: the Prison Poems of Ezra Pound and Wilfred Scawen Blunt 18. Ted BLAKE, America's Lord Haw-Haw: The Trial of Ezra Pound in the Popular Press 19. Scott EASTHAM, Modernism contra Modernity: the 'case' of Ezra Pound 20. William McNAUGHTON, The Secret History of St. Elizabeths Notes on contributors Select Bibliography

Lady Gregory's toothbrush

In this remarkable biographical essay, Colm Toibin examines the contradictions that defined Lady Gregory, an essential figure in Irish cultural history. She was the wife of a landlord and member of Parliament who had been personally responsible for introducing measures that compounded the misery of the Irish peasantry during the Great Famine. Yet, Lady Gregory devoted much of her creative energy to idealizing that same peasantry, while never abandoning the aristocratic hauteur, the social connections, or the great house that her birth and marriage had bequeathed to her. Lady Gregory s capacity to occupy mutually contradictory positions was essential to her heroic work as a founder and director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin nurturing Synge and O Casey, her battles with rioters and censors, and to her central role in the career of W. B. Yeats. She was Yeats s artistic collaborator (writing most of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, for example), his helpmeet, and his diplomatic wing. Toibin s account of Yeats s attempts by turns glorious and graceless to memorialize Lady Gregory s son Robert when he was killed in the First War, and of Lady Gregory s pain at her loss and at the poet s appropriation of it, is a moving tour de force of literary history. Toibin also reveals a side of Lady Gregory that is at odds with the received image of a chilly dowager. Early in her marriage to Sir William Gregory, she had an affair with the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and wrote a series of torrid love sonnets that Blunt published under his own name. Much later in life, as she neared her sixtieth birthday, she fell in love with the great patron of the arts John Quinn, who was eighteen years her junior. It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don t. Lady Augusta Gregory writing to W.B. Yeats, referring to the riots at the Abbey Theatre over Synge s The Playboy of the Western World

Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: The Letters of Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt Together with Extracts from Blunt's Diaries

Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: The Letters of Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt Together with Extracts from Blunt's Diaries

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access P. Faulkner , (ed.), Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: The Letters of Jane Morris together with extracts from Blunt's diaries . Pp. xi + 135 . Exeter : University of Exeter , 1986 . £15.00. KATE FLINT KATE FLINT Mansfield CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 35, Issue 3, September 1988, Pages 392–393, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/35-3-392 Published: 01 September 1988

John Mandeville and the Irish crimes act of 1887

Imprisonment is a reality of discipline most useful to the modern soul, lapped as it is in physical sloth and self-indulgence. Like a sickness or a spiritual retreat it purifies and ennobles; and the soul emerges from it stronger and more self-contained. Alas, that these influences should so soon lose their power! And yet, fall as we may from the higher level, they do not wholly perish, but remain for us a wholesonle recollection and a standard of all that we can imagine best for this life and another. (Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, In vinculis (London, 1889), pp vii-viii.)We have repeatedly called attention to the fact. .that the food and discipline to which prisoners are evidently subjected, under at least the first stage of the penal system, and during short terms of confinement in her majesty’s jails and penitentiaries, are destructive to health and consequently dangerous to life. (Lancet, 21 Jan. 1882.)

Heart-Beguiling Araby

Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Foreword. Prologue. PART ONE 1. A Sometimes Noble Savage. 2. 'Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place...' PART TWO 3. Richard Burton (1821-1890). 4. Gifford Palgrave (1826-1888). 5. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922). 6. Charles M. Doughty (1843-1926). 7. The -Victorian Contribution. PART THREE 8. The Great War and the Arabists. 9. Hail and Farewell. Epilogue: To Know Them was to Love. Them. Notes. Bibliography. Index.