Sonnet Form Research Articles

‘Sonnet / aan D.G. Rossetti voor zijn portretstudie naar mevrouw Morris’ - Interpretatie en contextualisering van een beeldgedicht van P.C. Boutens

The poet P.C. Boutens was much interested in the poems and artworks of the English Pre-Raphaelite painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He bought and read Rossetti’s books, translated Rossetti’s poetry, and alluded to Rossetti’s artworks in his own poetry. In the ‘Sonnet / aan D.G. Rossetti’, Boutens refers to Rossetti’s portrait studies of Jane Morris. This paper explores the function of the reference to Rossetti’s visual artworks in this poem, and indicates how Boutens’ ‘picture-sonnet’ can be related to international tendencies in the genre of ekphrasis (or ‘Bildgedichten’) around 1900, and to Rossetti’s double works of art in particular. I will show that Boutens placed himself in Rossetti’s tradition with his poem to D.G. Rossetti by choosing the sonnet form, by articulating the attempt to get a glimpse of an eternal soul through the visual representation of a face, and by putting this momentary experience into a permanent, symbolist language.

A tragic harp: Ritual, irony and myth in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen stands out as one of the foremost poets writing on the theme of war and the pity of war. This article examines Owen’s innovative use of Romantic, biblical, and Classical language in conjunction with specific literary and rhetorical devices as a way of developing irony in his work. Also central to the poet’s stylistic approach was his deliberate collapse of conventional literary modes of expression, which included the traditional sonnet form. The enquiry which follows examines how Owen’s use of antiquated language and literary patterning — which the poet relied on to undercut established ritual and myth and their associated symbolism — served to juxtapose the classically ‘heroic’ with the sacrificial ‘heroes’ he had encountered on the battlefields of Europe. To assist him in this the poet — somewhat paradoxically — relied on a mythopoeic approach that mirrored later Modernist attempts to address issues of personal nobility amidst the perceived dissolution of society. Close stylistic analysis contributes to an understanding of the intricate ironic patterning in Owen’s war poetry, which defamiliarizes, yet also heightens, a reader’s intuitive response to the poet’s work.

“Telling what’s o’er”: Remaking the Sonnet Cycle in Augusta Webster’s Mother and Daughter

In her 1878 essay Poets and Personal Pronouns, Augusta Webster proposed that poets adopt new pronoun: use of instead of I might have some effect as sort of disclaimer of writer's personality.' (1) This neologism would allow writers constantly to remind their readers that poetry is not to be as autobiographical unless explicitly marked as such by big I. Although essay quickly acknowledges that the printers would never stand for this proposal, Webster would soon embark on her own experiment with authorial 'T' in unfinished sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895), which takes up sonnet's familiar preoccupations with love, temporality, death, absence, and language. Recasting these issues in context of mother/daughter relationship, speaker in Webster's sonnets celebrates her relationship with her daughter and mourns its evanescence. Though she employs conventional capital I, this speaker not only analyzes her own subjectivity as mother but also theorizes maternal subjectivity more generally; in doing so, she reimagines conventions of sonnet cycle. Webster would probably have availed herself of little i in these sonnets had been recognized as modest disclaimer of writer's personality, but in absence of such disclaimer poems' earliest reader blithely ignored poet's previously published caveats against conflating speaker and poet. William Michael Rossetti, in his introduction to posthumous 1895 publication, wrote: Nothing certainly could be more genuine than these sonnets. A Mother is expressing her love for Daughter.... The theme is as beautiful and natural one as any poetess could select. So natural is it, indeed, that it seems surprising that Mrs. Webster had not been forestalled--and to best of my knowledge she never was forestalled--in such treatment. But some of poetesses have not been Mothers. (2) Attributing her choice of theme to her maternity, Rossetti clearly suggests that Webster not only writes from but about her own experience. The temptation to read speaker in sonnets as Webster herself is understandable. Most of poems depict relationship between mother and her only daughter, and Webster had one child, daughter. Moreover, what dates we have support biographical reading; while some sonnets describe girl's infancy and early childhood, others show speaker looking back on her daughter's youth after has passed. The only three sonnets in twenty-seven-poem cycle that bear dates were composed in 1880s (I in 1881, XIII in 1882, and XXIV in 1886); Webster's daughter was born in 1864 (Portraits, p. 10). So these sonnets would have been written when she was in her late teens and early twenties. However, as we have seen, Webster herself warns readers against autobiographical interpretation; in Poets and Personal Pronouns, she not only wishes for an orthographical means of differentiating poet and persona, but also insists that poet should not be taken as offering his readers presentment of himself, his hopes, his loves, his sorrows, his guilt and remorses, his history and psychology generally (Portraits, p. 369). Rather than interpreting Webster's sonnet sequence as transparent display of maternal feeling, then, I read as an innovative reconsideration of both genre in which she was working and discursive dimensions of maternal subjectivity. To speak as mother is already to figure oneself as subjective, personal, and domestic. Webster challenges this equation through her innovative use of sonnet cycle, simultaneously exploiting and resisting what Natalie Houston terms a widespread understanding of sonnet form itself as truthful and documentary. (3) Moreover, even as many of Mother and Daughter sonnets seem to invite us to identify poet with speaker, cycle refuses to limit its analysis of motherhood to speaker's--or any one woman's--experience of this institution. …

In a Minor Key: Visual Effects in Shake-Speare’s Sonnets

Students of the sonnets are no doubt aware that they abound in wordplay that rewards multiple readings. They may be less aware, especially if they are unfamiliar with the original 1609 Quarto edition, that the poems may have been arranged to have a visual impact as well. The sonnet form itself is emblematic of a number of familiar referents, including an escutcheon, a “glass” (mirror), a leaf, and a seal. One might even see in the poems, as did Lady Mary Worth and John Donne in their “crowns” of sonnets, the links in a chain, or necklace. The sonnet form is roughly the poetic equivalent to the portrait miniature (a fad of the day) in art. I shall be pursuing these analogies in my paper. The most striking visual effect occurs in Sonnet 126, the last of the “fair youth” sonnets, which consists of six rhymed couplets followed by two empty sets of brackets. Katherine Duncan-Jones and others have, in recent years, argued authorial intent for this alleged “printer’s error.” Duncan-Jones suggests that the open parentheses may signify the poet and the fair youth’s “failure to couple,” while John Lennard sees in them “the silence of the grave.” I hope to demonstrate that, by thinking in visual terms, we might one day be able to unlock the story behind the most enigmatic verse sequence in English poetry.

“With no great quantity of paintings”: Pushkin’s Polemic with Raphael in “Madona”

One of only three sonnets Pushkin wrote in his lifetime, (1830) is a monument to union of a poet's life and work. (1) Due in large part to circumstances of Pushkin's death, reception of sonnet has focused less on poem itself and more on his wife's famous epithet. Although Pushkin's marriage is important from a creative standpoint, extent to which Natal'ia Goncharova's presence has saturated interpretations of his poems to her should be reexamined. The stoic quality attributed to Goncharova most notably in (1830) became fertile ground for scholars and writers interested in Pushkin's mythologizing of his wife. (2) This concentration on Goncharova--thought to be core of sonnet--appears to have stifled greater interest in poem beyond Pushkin's ekphrasis of painting that inspired comparison. A deeper investigation into rarity of sonnet form in Pushkin's oeuvre, as well as rhetorical stance imbedded in his tone and word choice, shows a more complex side to Madona. Whatever details of their married life, association Pushkin drew between image and his bride-to-be does not exhaust or exclude other interpretations of sonnet. Just by taking poem's title as our point of departure, it seems emphasis should first be placed not on Pushkin's wife, but on culturally-loaded associations word had in Romantic period. The purveyor of Romantic fascination with Raphael's Madonnas was Vasily Zhukovsky, whose essay Rafaeleva Madonna (Raphael's Madonna) had itself arisen after a close reading of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder's Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-loving Friar), written in 1797. (3) Before Pushkin wrote in 1830, he had already made poetic reference to Madonnas by Raphael with an eye to Zhukovsky's presentation of artist in his essay. In poems Kto znaet krai, gde nebo bleshchet ... (Who knows land, where sky shines ...) and Ee glaza (Her Eyes), both from 1828, one finds a foregrounding of Raphaers Madonnas and conventional praise for rare talent of their creator in vein of Zhukovsky, albeit with some irony. Compared to poet's rejection of the paintings of old masters (kartiny starinnykh masterov) in two years later, two poems from 1828 betray traditional Romantic reception of Raphael, although Kto znaet krai ... initiates a playful critique of painter's dedication to image. The penultimate line of sonnet, however, is an emphatic claim not only over Goncharova, but over image itself: tebia, moia Madona (literally you, my lady; my emphasis)--an image connected to earlier poems, but also to certain literary and cultural trends of nineteenth century. Apart from a cursory reference in Polkovodets (1835), a poem that shares reverent tone of in its opening lines, Pushkin did not refer to image again. Pushkin may have written about other incarnations of Mary, (4) but term Madonna, prior to sonnet, frequently corresponded to a painting by Raphael. The image ceased to be just a painting once it had been associated with his wife--what had once been a ubiquitous symbol of culture and Raphael's entrenched position in Romantic view of artist was transfigured by Pushkin's pen into a human being. Like his brief experimentation with sonnet, Pushkin retired image once he had taken it to limits of creative expression. Perhaps this general tendency towards constant experimentation and innovation is source of Pushkin's suggestion in Kto znaet krai ... that Raphael choose other subjects to endow with his genius. A poet with Pushkin's range provides an interesting contrast to an artist known for painting same woman over and over again. The language and tone of further reinforces change in Pushkin's attitude toward image. …

Modern Love and the Sonetto Caudato : Comedic Intervention through the Satiric Sonnet Form

Modern Love and the Sonetto Caudato : Comedic Intervention through the Satiric Sonnet Form

The art of the sonnet

Few poetic forms have found more uses than the sonnet in English, and none is now more recognizable. It is one of the longest-lived of verse forms, and one of the briefest. A mere fourteen lines, fashioned by intricate rhymes, it is, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it, 'a moment's monument'. From the Renaissance to the present, the sonnet has given poets a superb vehicle for private contemplation, introspection, and the expression of passionate feelings and thoughts. Art of the Sonnet collects one hundred exemplary sonnets of the English language (and a few sonnets in translation), representing highlights in the history of the sonnet, accompanied by short commentaries on each of the poems. The commentaries by Stephen Burt and David Mikics offer new perspectives and insights, and, taken together, demonstrate the enduring as well as changing nature of the sonnet. The authors serve as guides to some of the most-celebrated sonnets in English as well as less-well-known gems by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets. Also included is a general introductory essay, in which the authors examine the sonnet form and its long and fascinating history, from its origin in medieval Sicily to its English appropriation in the sixteenth century to sonnet writing today in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking parts of the world.

Elucidating the Aging Process Through Poetry: An Elderly Woman's Life

The purpose of this case study was to explicate the life story and gain deeper understanding of the aging experience of an elderly woman. Through poetry, this woman transformed challenging life experiences. Data analysis revealed themes of determination, spiritual strength, and creatively aging. The findings support knowledge development about how older women age and express their lives. Most of the participant's poetry was in the sonnet form, which can convey deep and universal insights. Thus, the aging experience was seen from an extraordinary perspective. The study led to a deeper understanding of a dynamic holistic perspective of aging.

Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use. Robert B. Shaw . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+305.

Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use. Robert B. Shaw . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+305.

The 'Spenserian Sonnet' in Sixteenth-Century Scotland

THE apparently synonymous development resulting in the identical preferred rhyme scheme of the Scottish sonneteers at the court of James VI, and the English poet, Edmund Spenser has been much examined by critics,1 with the tendency being to conclude that similarity is coincidental. However, the first published usage was in Scotland and predates Spenser’s by up to six years; the form’s Scottish popularity is unquestionable: over three hundred and fifty Scots sonnets use it. Though it was ‘never popular in England’, the rhyme scheme is termed the ‘Spenserian Sonnet’, his ‘distinctive contribution to the sonnet form’.2 Nevertheless, it is possible that Spenser was influenced by the Scots usage. The first printed examples of the so-called Spenserian sonnet are Scots, in James’ The Essayes of a Prentise, In the Divine Art of Poesie (1584) and the introductory sonnets to Hudson’s The Historie of Jvdith (1584).3 It is unclear which text has priority, but both predate Spenser’s first published examples, the ten dedicatory sonnets to Books I–III of the Faerie Queene (1590). Spiller notes that ‘Spenser seems to have used the form first about 1580 or 1582, and again in 1586,4 but not with any consistency until his Amoretti, written at the beginning of the 1590s, and first published in 1595.’5 But Spenser’s early flirtations with the form were sporadic, unpublished until 1590, and his earliest sonnets, written when he was seventeen, do not use the distinctive rhyme.6 Printed Spenserian examples are anticipated by Judith and the Essayes.

On "the hearing ear": Some Sonnets of the Rossettis

within me, music seemed to be; Something (1) These two lines from Christina Rossetti's An Old-World Thicket seem to touch on something peculiar to her work, something roundabout, snatching, teasing. There's it's music; it's Without within; music, yet musical. The lines disclose as much as they withold, so that reading them is bit like watching magician's trick: now you see it (the white rabbit, music), now you don't. We're sure where music is, or whether it is music at all. By time we've finished, our minds are empty--empty, at least, of any object to be named or known. But our ears are full. Something, whatever it is, suggests hearing, and makes us listen. Although grammar scrambles thing (it is not and yet), repetition insists on it: music, most musical. am reminded of Marianne Moore's comment about in general: there are things that are important beyond all fiddle, (2) where fiddle puns on three different senses: cheat, fidgetting, and of Without, within me, music seemed to be; / Something musical. Such verbal constructions are common in Rossetti. In Sonnet Six from Later Life, for instance, she writes: this, nor that; certainly (l. 2), where somewhat, whatever it is, hovers in distinctly uncertain twilight between this and that. In Somewhere or Other, verbal game of be or far, be far or near (ll. 5, 9), bats its desired object elusively between contrary perspectives. Such playing fast and loose, missing poetic object by an inch or mile, is one of poet's favorite tactics. Christina Rossetti is master magician, as well as, of course, master musician. Although essay is focused on some sonnets of Rossettis, sonnet form as such is its object. Instead of looking at technical formalities of sonnet, its lines, rhyme scheme, and meter, want to try listening, to way sonnet becomes shape in ear, sound-work or rhythm. value seeing eye already, Robert Frost once pointed out: Time we said something about ear. (3) The hearing ear nicely emphasizes what it might like: tautological and self-echoing. Gerard Manley Hopkins once expostulated of his own poetry: but take breath and read it with (34) Not only reader, writer too, depends on ears. As Ezra Pound put it: the true economy lies in making tune first. We all of us compose verse to some sort of tune. (5) When Hall Caine reported to Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Watts-Dunton had proposed strict criteria of rhyme and meter in his choice of poems for Sonnets of Three Centuries, Rossetti answered briskly: I would be too anxious were you about anything in choice of sonnets except brains and music. (6) Again, So what do we mean by music in poetry, and is it interpretable? Too often music has seemed merely singable extra to content and thought, pleasing sonorousness, added like gloss. Yet, wherever we look, we find poets themselves invoking as origin of what they do. Not only does the music of poetry exist apart from as T. S. Eliot asserts, a poem, or passage of poem, may tend to realize itself first as particular rhythm ... and that rhythm may bring to birth idea and image. (7) Music may come first and create meaning. There is nice definition in James Longenbach's The Resistance to Poetry (2004), which suggests how we might shift traditionally oppositional terms of music and meaning, form and content. He writes that we should attend to the of thinking in poetry--not of finished thought. (8) The sound of thinking: it's an interesting phrase. For start it leaves out pronouns. …

‘Beauty Bare: The Sonnet Form, Geometry and Aesthetics’

The appeal of the sonnet form over centuries is bot h unquestionable and curious. Most poets attempt a sonnet at one time or another in th eir career, and many readers in English, as well as other Western languages, have e ncountered a sonnet or two. While some might see the sonnet as an old-fashioned form, poets continue to produce them in great quantities, and new collections and studie s of them continue to appear. Zachariah Wells, editor of one sonnet anthology, at tributes the form’s longevity to its “adaptability, flexibility, plasticity” through his tory. 3 Others are more mystical in their ideas about the persistence of the sonnet: “Poets,” Don Paterson reflects, “write sonnets because it makes poems easier to write. Rea ders read them because it makes their lives easier to bear”. 4 There is a long-held perception that sonnets teach us something about the very nature of poetry, especial ly in relation to poetic form. This is frequently cited as the justification for insist ing that creative writing students try to write them, and that literature students learn to r ead them. But aside from the structural rigour of the form ‐ with the attendant assumption that the more restrictive the form, the greater the poetic challenge (haikus have a similar status in this respect) ‐ the actual reasoning behind the idea of the sonne t’s edifying qualities remains vague. Similarly, the sonnet’s aesthetic qualities are fr equently proclaimed, but slippery and difficult to articulate. Paul Oppenhei mer writes that the sonnet has a “mysterious aesthetic” that reveals “a psychologica l, as well as an aesthetic, law, or equation, or archetype” that makes it one of the mo st “secure and enduring forms in poetry”, but he remains vague as to what that is, p recisely. 5 Paterson connects the aesthetic and the psychological appeal of the sonne t: “a miraculous little form in which our human need for unity and discontinuity, r epetition and variation, tension and resolution, symmetry and asymmetry, lyric inspi ration and argumentative rigour, are all held in near-perfect oppositional balance” (xxvi-xxvii). It is frequently seen as having a meditative quality (xvi) ‐ an interiority, which Oppenheimer suggests is due to its non-musical, purely literary, history of cir culation. He provides convincing proof that despite the popular idea of sonnet meaning “little song,” it was always

Sestets by Charles Wright

, Treatise on Analogy" describes the 1 speaker findinghimself ina carwith i a trapped bee trying to get out: T 1 picked up the notebook inwhich i Fm /Now recording this incident, ' and with its help / I directed the i insect toward the slightlyopen door, , / Halfway believing that one day i / Someone will treatme the same , way." Full of wisdom, intelligence, 1 beauty, and grace, Janusz Szuber's i poems deepen and strengthen our 1 ties to ourselves and theworld at i large. ' PiotrFlorczyk i Wilmington,Delaware 1 Charles Wright. Sestets. New York. ! Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2009. ix+ 75 1 pages. $23. isbn978-0-374-26115-3 ' A collection of six-line poems, Ses i tetsis something new fromCharles , Wright. Readers will hear the same 1 meditative voice, the same mix of , secular and religious reference, the 1 same rich metaphoricity and imag i ery. Humor, nostalgia, remorse, Lit 1 tieRichard, God, Dante, Italy, Mon i tana, the Blue Ridge, the I Ching, and much more?it's all here, in a i wide range of an expansive spirit i and protean imagination. What's 1 different about trying to fitall this i into a sestet is that it's like a size-ten 1 foot fittinginto a size-six shoe. The i incredible thing is that Wright pulls ' itoff,at leastmost of the time,partly i because his lines are often banners , of print that stretch from the leftto 1 right margins, containing as many i as nine to ten stresses and afford 1 ing more opportunity than more i common line lengths. But, even so, 1 why would thepoet ofZone Journals i choose todo this? , Perhaps theopening lines from i "ThisWorld IsNot My Home, I'm , Only Passing Through" offer a 1 clue: "The more you say, the more mistakes youTl make, / so keep it simple." Well, maybe, but my sense is thatWright speaks from the evening land of a spirit on the edge ofnight and feels thepressure to say less or say itmore succinctly than ever: time is growing short. In the poem "Stiletto," we read: "Why does each evening up here / always, in summer, seem to be / The way?as itdoes, with the light knifing low from right to left? / It will be on the next-to-last one?" Here, the speaker isperched on the edge ofchange, in the evening zone of transition. Ah, maybe that's it: the ses tet, the last six lines of the Italian sonnet form (lines 9-14) after the octave, which begin with a "turn," a change, in their first line. These, then, are poems of "the turn." Con sider, for example, these first few richly allusive lines of "Twilight of theDogs": "Death is themother of nothing. / This is a fact of life, / And exponentially sad. /All these years?a lifetime, really?thinking itmight be otherwise. /What are thecolors ofdespair?" Here, Wright has a little fun alluding to theG?t terd?mmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, spelling "God" backward, and directly challenging Wallace Stevens's famous passage from his poem "Sunday Morning": "Death is the mother of beauty." The speaker seems to have turned from hope (though paradoxically in good humor); however, by the last poem in the sequence, "Little Ending," when he is "at thegreat forkon the untouchable road," he says, "Some one will take our hand, / someone will give us refuge, / Circling left or circling right."Here, in the last line of the last sestet, thefull turnis achieved, the eternal turn, the circle. FredDings University ofSouthCarolina MISCELLANEOUS Zs?fia Ban. Esti iskola: Olvas?k?nyv feln?tteknek. Pozsony/Bratislava. Kal ligram. 2007. 232 pages. 2700 Ft. isbn 978-80-7149-921-3 -. Pr?bacsomagol?s. Pozsony/ Bratislava. Kalligram. 2008. 213 pages. 2300 Ft. isbn978-80-8101-056-9 In an intenselypersonal essay about Susan Sontag, included in the volu me Pr?bacsomagol?s (Test packing), Zs?fia Ban comments that real essayists basically write about them selves. By that definition, Ban is an honest-to-goodness essayist. But the personal element is also present in her debut work of fiction,Esti iskola (Evening school), a very loosely con nected stringof stories that run the gamut from somber recitation...

Lièwesschprooch Dichtung: Langue d'amour—Poésie (1940-2008) by Claude Vigée

EUROPEAN WAYNE MILLER, and KEVIN PRJJFER. Ni Dhomhnaill are presented along side those who use a more literal, colloquial language, likeRomania's Simona Popescu or Ukrainian poet Yuri Andrukhovych (seeWLT, Sep tember 2005, 24-32). The length of individual poems tends toward longer rather than shorter, and poetic influences are eclectic, rang ing from surrealism and dadaism to Russian acmeism and American confessionalism. What is equally striking is the breadth of historical engagement in many of the poems. The Finnish poet Martin Enckell offers a haunt ing hymn to the romantic, tragic history of the city of St. Petersburg ("in thiscityof the mothers, and the sphinxes, / lifewrites its shadow script, as in fever/'), and the Norwe gian poet 0ystein Wingaard Wolf presents a potent poem-memoir of a Jewish soap-maker who "became a small pile of soap and ashes / that theNazis wanted towash Europe with." Notable too is the frequency with which a playfully ironic or irreverent tone dominates the selec tions. Polish poet Ewa Sonnenberg What isequally striking isthe breadth of historical engagement in many of the poems. The Finnish poet Martin Enckelloffers a haunting hymnto the romantic,tragic history of thecity of St. Petersburgand the Norwegian poet 0ysteinWingaard Wolf presents a potent poem memoir of a Jewish soap-maker. wryly addresses the poem as if it were a person ("My funny little poem I'llwarm you inmy hands / we'll tell life we're sorry for writing not living"). The German poet Ulla Hahn delivers a witty send-up in sonnet form of both the lover and theact of love-making: "Rub ringsof sunshine intobelly's shell / so that thewarmth remains. / Then keep my eyelids open,my lips aswell." In theirintroduction,theeditors explain thatone of theirreasons for bringing together thepoems in this anthology was that the cultural and historical evolution of Europe dur ing the past few decades resulted in thewriting of "radically differ ent" poetry, creating theneed foran update. They also express concern that current American readers of = poetry and American poets them- = selves may have become less inter- = ested in European poetry in recent = years. Ifthat is true, it is all the more = reason forus tobe grateful thatwe = have been given access to an assem- = blage of contemporary European = verse that is uniformly vibrant and = well translated. = Rita Signorelli-Pappas = Princeton, New Jersey = Claude Vigee. Liewesschprooch E Dichtung: Langue d'amour?Poesie E (1940-2008). Bischwiller, France. 1 L'Associationdes Amis du Musee de la E Laub. 2008. 184 pages. 20. isbn 978- 1 2-9512380-8-4| "A language can only be pro- E nounced dead when no breath of E poetry strives to awaken it from a E prolonged coma, bestowing on it E with devotion, talent, and love, a E saving kiss of life/'Claude Vigee E writes about his endangered native E tongue,Alsatian, in the introduction E tohis newest book of poetry. Vigee E isa prolific, well-known French poet E who was awarded theGrand Prix E de Poesie de la Societe des Gens de E Lettres in 1987 and theGrand Prix E de Poesie de l'Academie Francaise in E 1997,amongmany otherdistinctions. E Today at eighty-seven,Vigee has had E a remarkable career spanning some = sixty years, with over fiftypoetry E collections inFrench, and important E French translationsofRilke and T. S. E Eliot. Translations of his works into E English include the recentChants de E Yabsence/Songs of Absence, translated E byAnthony Rudolf (2007), and Flow E Tide: SelectedPoetry and Prose, edited E and translated by Anthony Rudolf, E with additional translationsbyWillis E Barnstone (1992). Liewesschprooch, the E Alsatian word for"language of love," E isClaude Vigee's first book ofpoetry E _March-April 2009 i75 I > ^1 I H I ? I I "I written inwhat are in facthis two endangered mother tongues, Alsa tian (Els?ssisch) and Judeo-Alsatian (Eiss?ser-Jiddische L?sche). These languages, of Alemannic-German provenance, have been spoken for centuries in Alsace, a region in east ern France, but are facing extinction. Judeo-Alsatian is now spoken only by a few elders: l?ngschtvergesseni schtemme, "long forgotten voices." It is a revitalizing forcewhen a great poet likeVigee publishes works in these...

New European Poets by Wayne Miller, Kevin Prufer

New European Poets by Wayne Miller, Kevin Prufer

La Muse lascive. Anthologie de la poésie érotique et pornographique française (1560–1660) (review)

Reviewed by: La Muse lascive. Anthologie de la poésie érotique et pornographique française (1560–1660) Deborah N. Losse (bio) Michel Jeanneret. La Muse lascive. Anthologie de la poésie érotique et pornographique française (1560–1660). Paris: José Corti, 2007. 383 pages. ISBN: 978-2-7143-0942-6. Michel Jeanneret offers a comprehensive overview and sampling of erotic and pornographic poetry at the end of the Renaissance and in the first half of the grand siècle. Readers may ask why the author has bridged the two periods. He explains that it is important to trace the transition from a time when poems, in the Renaissance, expressed a joyous sensuality to the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV, when dissident voices and divergent styles began to be stifled. For Jeanneret, poets rebelled against orthodoxy in all its manifestations: belief, language, genres. With the onset of the seventeenth century, what had been a joyful expression of eroticism took on a subversive meaning. During the Renaissance, erotic poetry evokes pleasure, the harmony between the lovers and the world itself. The stress on the impetuous spirit of desire, Jeanneret notes, gives a fullness of expression unprecedented in love poetry in French literary history. When eroticism passes into pornography, the communion of the pair with nature turns to focus on transgressive acts and organs described not as a graceful whole but member by member in a disjointed and grotesque manner. For Jeanneret, there is an aspect of unbridled sexuality in Renaissance eroticism which stops short of pornography. Ronsard and his contemporaries were sometimes unkind and brutal in their descriptions of old prostitutes or young prudes who sought relief from sexual tension through auto-erotic measures, but there is a pervading spirit of freedom and fun in the intellectual game of composing erotic poetry. By 1620, pornography overturns the lyrical eroticism of the Pléiade. Jeanneret offers the example of Mathurin Regnier: “Rose, de qui le Con a de roses les bords,/où je voudrois fourrer les couïlles et le corps . . .” (Jeanneret 140). Using standard sonnet form for pornographic images creates a shock value that underscores the subversive, transgressive aspect of this poetry, written, as Jeanneret suggests, in protest against the religious and literary atmosphere of restriction and orthodoxy at the French court. Jeanneret defines pornography as : “la représentation du corps humain qui focalise le regard sur les organes sexuels” (Jeanneret 13). The author takes us back to the Greek root of the word: pornè or prostitute. Eroticism evokes the emotions of both individuals, pornography reduces all to [End Page 947] the specialized erogenous zones. There is an emphasis on deviant practices—masturbation, autoerotic practices, and sodomy, practices that do not lead to procreation. Sigogne represents the extreme misogyny of this pornographic trend. His manner of evoking the misery of the old prostitutes is particularly cruel. He targets the sodomites in the court of France: ”Prenez la robbe d’une femme, / Puisque vous en avez le coeur” (Jeanneret 281). Readers may wonder why the anthology stops at 1660. Jeanneret offers a logical explanation for the increase in censure of pornographic poetry. With the prosecution of Théophile de Viau for reason of impiety, blasphemy, and debauchery, the proliferation of scandalous poetry begins to slow down just after abundant printings of cheap collections of pornographic verse. With the arrival of Richelieu, the censure of such verse is reinforced But it is the execution of Claude Le Petit for his publication of Le Bordel des Muses ou les neuf Pucelles putains that rings the death knell for the outpouring of obscene poetry. Claude Le Petit with Sigogne are the masters of the genre. Jeanneret’s anthology is organized in thematic groupings. The first is an invitation “au bordel de ces Muses lubriques”—to read, to be aroused. It is a kind of verbal seduction of the readers. The second section speaks of “Sensualité, volupté.” Here the focus is on the physical and communal pleasure of love making. The third section, “Étreintes champêtres, nature en rut,” evokes the harmony of nature and young love, where pastoral setting and youth take center stage. It is in the fourth section, “Conquérant et...

Criticism at the Crossroads

Page 14 American Book Review Grotz continued from previous page This is only problematic because Edwards, with her recurring epigraphs from Clare, invites the reader to look for such a connection. Indeed, several of these poems would resonate more fully if the shadow of Clare were removed. Further, by braiding all of these series of poems together instead of separating them into individual sections, Edwards likewise inherently suggests a connection or coherence to the book overall that the reader is hard-pressed to find. None of these poems or series, however, have much to do with the sequence of highwayman sonnets , the heart of the Edwards’s book and the poems, along with the final section, that deserve the most attention. Comprised of twelve sonnets, including a prelude “Sonnet for the Highwayman” that opens the collection, the sequence explores the interior life of highwaymen and those around them and achieves a coherence and complexity that is missing elsewhere in the book. The most successful of these capitalize on the sonnet form and make the perspective of the highwayman and his vocation take on existential significance: [H]e hears the rafters and the hinges hissing go No road is calling, no lover taunting, no unmade fortune pulls him from his house to abandon favorite chair, faithful hound, just the shutters and the windows mouthing go And yet with all of the attention Edwards gives to this sequence and the other series in the book, by far the most resonant and successful poems are the ones that exist singly and seem to come directly from Edwards’s warm and imaginative observations of contemporary life. The first section of “Alabama Interlude,” for example, describes how a crawling baby interrupts a game of Monopoly, letting the reader momentarily see the baby in the delightful paradox of being huge and destructive: [T]he baby now sits flailing at the center of the game, insisting in its right to be the baby, the owner of all properties, the arbiter of wealth, the last great family tycoon making all the rules, chewing up the fragile sibling contracts in its toothless baby mouth, compounding all the debt in its ferocious baby fists. If many of the mythical female persona poems early in the collection fail to convince the reader, Edwards shows her strength in inhabiting the male persona in “Bargain, Spent,” a poem that follows a retired man shopping for the best buys in the supermarket. An epigraph from Randall Jarrell’s “Next Day,” one of many Jarrell poems that speak through a female persona, alerts the reader to Edwards’s play with persona and gender, and like Jarrell’s, Edwards’s poem is a lovely instance of human empathy and universal expression. While being somewhat obscured by the variety of projects and sheer quantity of poems in the book, there are nevertheless some real keepers in The Highwayman’s Wife. Jennifer Grotz is the author of Cusp (2003) and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Detail from cover Criticism at the Crossroads Chad Parmenter With Parnassus: Poetry in Review folding up shop, poetry criticism faces a possible vacuum. Contemporary journals of criticism can be depended on for new readings of older and classic poets. Web venues like choriamb, the page.name, and the everthriving blogosphere, offer space for commentary on emerging work. For discussion tying the older and the emerging together, which is essential for either to really show its importance, a reader can visit sites like Boston Comment, look through book reviews in journals like Pleiades or American Book Review, or parse the critical discussions in collections of essays like Radiant Lyre (2007). While all of the above contribute wonderfully to our understanding of contemporary poetry, they offer material that’s widely dispersed across the postmodern media, and it’s up to the reader to tie it all together. That job is taken on by Jerry Harp and Jan Weissmiller, making their A Poetry Criticism Reader a vital contribution to current poetry criticism. The first of what will hopefully be many volumes, it brings together some key explications, reviews, and articulations of poetics from the 1990s to offer any reader a grasp on...

The Art of Living Inward: Henry James on Rupert Brooke

The Art of Living Inward: Henry James on Rupert Brooke Hazel Hutchison Few sites in the field of literary biography have been so hotly contested as the biography of Rupert Brooke. Within days of his death from blood poisoning on a troop ship in the Aegean, he had been praised by Winston Churchill and wistfully mourned in national newspapers and literary journals. Meanwhile, a battle was brewing between his mother and Edward Marsh, his friend and literary executor, for control over his letters and papers. Brooke was held up by many as a national example of patriotism and as the idealization of youth, while others insisted that he was simply a flawed but talented young man. Things are much the same today. Brooke’s poem “The Soldier” is still read at Armistice Day services and is regularly taught at schools and universities as a fine example of sonnet form. In other camps, however, his poetry is lambasted as nationalistic, emotionally naïve, and conservative in form. So much has been projected onto the memory of this young man that he has become a potent symbol of a particular moment and set of values. Like it or loathe it, he has come to stand for “Englishness”—or at least the particular brand of English nostalgia that was in vogue in the opening stages of the First World War. Many of Brooke’s friends and colleagues protested his appropriation as an icon of establishment values. But cultural momentum was at work. The sheer number of tributes and appreciations written in the weeks after Brooke’s death demonstrates how keen the British were to find a representative figure on which to focus their grief in April 1915 and in the months that followed. Among these appreciations is an essay by Henry James, in the form of a preface to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America. This is a striking combination of names to find on the flyleaf of a book, so it is intriguing that this essay is not much discussed by scholars either of James or Brooke. Written in the autumn of 1915 and published with Brooke’s travel essays in March 1916, this essay is the last piece of work James completed before his health collapsed in December 1915. The writing of this preface coincided with work on The Sense of the Past and The Middle Years (the third volume of his Autobiography), and many of the themes and concerns evident in these texts [End Page 132] surface in his writing about Brooke: the collision of past and present, the nature of artistry, and the relation of individuality to nationality. This article examines how James used his essay as a platform to discuss the tension between his view of art and his impressions of the First World War—elements more closely connected in James’s mind than one might suppose. Like many of the pieces written about Brooke, James’s essay reveals as much about the writer as it does about the subject and thus occupies a hazy boundary zone between biography and autobiography. Nevertheless, James is more perceptive than many of his contemporaries about Brooke’s limitations and inconsistencies. James first met Brooke in 1909 on a visit to Cambridge University. Little remains in the way of correspondence between the two, but they obviously remained sufficiently in contact for Brooke to feel able to call on James at Lamb House in Rye one evening in 1912, while on a walking tour with James Strachey. Brooke’s account of what happened is reproduced in Edward Marsh’s introductory memoir in Brooke’s Collected Poems: At length I pressed the Bell of the Great Door—there was a smaller door further along, the servants’ door we were told. No answer. I pressed again. At length a slow dragging step was heard within. It stopped inside the door. We shuffled. Then, very slowly, very loudly, immense numbers of chains and bolts were drawn within. There was a pause again. Further rattlings within. Then the steps seemed to be heard retreating. There was silence. We waited in a wild agonising stupefaction. The house was dead silent. At length there was a shuffling noise from...

Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance

Reviewed by: Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance John Claborn (bio) Holcomb, Gary Edward . Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007. Its title evocative of a Cold War era spy film, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha argues that the Jamaican poet and novelist fashioned himself in the interwar years as the "deepest mole, a diaspora undercover agent of queer black Marxism" (15). Sasha was the secret name McKay adopted upon his tour of the Soviet Union in 1922 in order to duck FBI investigators, who suspected him of proselytizing Bolshevik propaganda in the United States. Contrary to popular scholarly belief, McKay's life as Sasha—as a subversive queer black Marxist—extended well into the late 1930s when he wrote his allegedly anti-communist memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937). Code Name links McKay's hitherto critically unexamined sexuality to his Marxist politics, contending that the "quest for Comrade Claude is the pursuit of queer Sasha" (53). Suppressed in the 1940s and 50s, McKay's now highly anthologized sonnets were first recovered by the Black Arts movement for their Black Nationalist sentiments. Recent critical recovery work on McKay, however, has emphasized his status as an international writer, venturing beyond the militant sonnets and into the rich totality of his oeuvre. Holcomb's book takes the work of Heather Hathaway, Brent Hayes Edwards, William J. Maxwell, and McKay biographer Wayne F. Cooper1 in new directions. Code Name paints the Caribbean vagabond—most often considered a progenitor of the Harlem Renaissance and destabilizer of the traditional sonnet form—as perhaps the prototype of twentieth-century queer black diasporic writers, a figure as much politically as geographically mobile. Central to Holcomb's book is the question of where to locate McKay as a political figure. How does one reconcile the militant black nationalism of the early 1920s sonnets with what Edwards calls the "vagabond internationalism" (187) of such later novels as Banjo (1929)? To answer this complex question nonreductively, Holcomb imports queer theory's concern with identity as a process of becoming rather than a fixed category of being in order to articulate the ménage à trois of queerness, blackness, and Marxism as it develops across McKay's work. For those who know McKay as the progenitor of the Black Arts Movement and the militant, manly sonneteer of "If We Must Die" (1919) and "The Mulatto" [End Page 617] (1925), such a queer reading may seem odd; however, McKay would be considered "bisexual" by clinical standards (12). By nonclinical standards, McKay's queer becoming resists the classificatory schemes of institutional power, just as the word queer in its 1920s usage designates anything outside the norm, beyond the reach of categorization. Given McKay's ambiguous sexual identity and the sheer diversity of work he produced in the late 1920s and 1930s, the militant sonnets are more the exception than the norm. Holcomb amasses an array of archival evidence to support his argument. Most notably, he recovers McKay's long-suppressed FBI file and the unpublished novel Romance in Marseille—works that reveal the author's commitment to Leftist politics and demand we recontextualize McKay's more well-known poetry and prose. The "Harlem Renaissance" in Code Name's subtitle is a bit of a misnomer, for Holcomb shows that the movement and its geographic locale were almost incidental to McKay's queer black Marxism, a mere one-night stand in McKay's "diaspora cruising" (5). This book might be read as a "queering" of the Harlem Renaissance itself—one that releases the movement from its New York locale and sets it adrift in international waters. Hol-comb shows that McKay's internationalism was rooted in multi-localism, a commitment to grassroots activism and a love for the particularities of locations, as his "Cities" poems and titles of his novels attest. Holcomb's queer reading stays faithful to McKay's love for all things local, his cosmopolitan ethos that allowed him to find a "home" anywhere and nowhere. In the introduction, Holcomb argues that McKay's "diasporic itinerary" (1) had a "kind of logic" that traces the...

The Romantic Sonnet Revival: Opening the Sonnet's Crypt

AbstractDiscussions of the sonnet tradition often claim that the sonnet is ‘the most popular, enduring, and widely used poetic form in English.’ At first glance, the Romantic period in English seems to bear out these claims fully. Keats and Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake – the six, standard male authors of the Romantic‐period canon – all wrote sonnets of some type, and undeniably the form achieved extraordinary popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, after its Elizabethan heyday, the sonnet in English had languished as a neglected and decidedly unfashionable form. Before the rise of Romanticism, the sonnet form in the 18th century appeared to be dead, a defunct and antiquated genre. Romanticism resurrected the sonnet and in doing so invented our notion of its widespread favor and timeless appeal. The sonnet, even a Shakespeare sonnet, only becomes a preeminent poetic genre in the age of Wordsworth and Keats, who wrote some of the most familiar sonnets in British literature. More accurately, however, we should credit the sonnet's revival to an age of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Anna Seward; poets, notably women poets, who, lying now at the margins of the male‐dominated Romantic canon, were essentially responsible for engaging and recuperating the moribund sonnet tradition in English. The question is repeatedly asked: Why did Romantic poets choose to revive such an outmoded form? A recent surge in critical attention to the Romantic sonnet, as part of Romanticist criticism's larger project of reclaiming texts and authors (especially women authors) long neglected and excluded by the standard canon, explores how the compact and demanding form of the sonnet could open up a space outside of the dominant literary authority in which poetic voices, excluded by gender or class, could appropriate for themselves the legitimacy of a cultural tradition that had long been closed. In opening the sonnet's 18th‐century crypt, Romanticism translates the abject relics of a dead poetic structure into a revitalized poetic space in which natural, spontaneous sentiment and diction could find expression.