Poetic Truth Research Articles

Tell it slant: Talking with Jane Yolen about poetry

Among her more than 400 books, Jane Yolen (b. 1939) has written or edited around 50 collections of poetry. In this new interview, Yolen discusses how her poetry developed throughout her writing life. We talk about her early desire in childhood to write poetry and about poets whose work she has admired. Yolen talks about her process in writing works such as the verse novel Finding Baba Yaga (2018) or the agonizing Radiation Sonnets (2003) and explains the difference between writing poetry for children and grown-ups, using her How Do Dinosaurs…? (2000–ongoing) series and Yuck, You Suck! Poems about Animals that Sip, Slurp, Suck (2022) as examples. She gives advice to teachers and suggestions to the poetically perplexed, as well as telling stories about encountering W. B. Yeats and reciting poetry to a wombat. Yolen’s poetic oeuvre is by turns whimsical and heart-wrenching, lyrical and conversational. She writes with a demotic lyricism that balances the formal requirements of prosody against the musicality of everyday speech. Her poetry begins from keen observation of everyday life and translates it into the mythic and the elemental, her words creating images that haunt the readers’ imaginations. What emerges is a glimpse of poetic truth—or, perhaps, the glimpse of the way to catch a glimpse.

VOCAL SHASHKEVYCHIANA OF BOHDAN-YURIY YANIVSKYI (FOR THE 180TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF MARKIYAN SHASHKEVYCH)

The article is devoted to the research of the works of Markiyan Shashkevych (1811−1843) – «a true poet with great talent» (Wozniak, 1911, p. 22), whose images and poetics he drew from Ukrainian folk songs. Ukrainian composer Bohdan-Yuriy Yanivskyі (1941−2005), did not miss her attention, creating two vocal masterpieces on the texts of romance. The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of reading of Markiyan Shashkevychʹs poetry in Bohdan-Yuriy Yanivskyiʹs vocal artefacts, to describe the means of musical expressiveness, their importance in creating an artistic image. Methodology of the research consists in application of musicology approach for implementation of musical and theoretical analysis of vocal works by Bohdan-Yuriy Yanivskyiʹs based on the poems by Markiyan Shashkevych. Scientific novelty. For the first time, two vocal compositions accompanied by a piano («To my darling», «Thought» («The moon dashed in the clear sky…»), the necessity of their introduction into the concert practice, their role in the composerʹs creative heritage are emphasized. Conclusions. Bohdan-Yuriy Yanivskyi has comprehended Markiyan Shashkevychʹs poetry very creatively, interpreting it in a specific way, deepening the meaning, organically combining folk (kolomyjkaʹs) and romance elements with harmonic and rhythmic expressive means of light pop music. The artist brought some naive, sentimental verses of «Galician riser» to the contemporary listener. Vocal Shashkevychiana of Bohdan-Yuriy Yanivskyi takes a worthy place within the artist's compositions. It extends the coordinates of the chamber vocal creativity to words by Markiyan Shashkevych not only in the Ukrainian but also in the Slavic musical scope, confirms a deep understanding of poetry, its subtle composing reading embodied in the musical text.

Wallace Stevens, Plato, and the Question of Poetic Truth

Wallace Stevens, Plato, and the Question of Poetic Truth

Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman

'The Structure of Complex Words' and Related Writings by William Empson

Reviewed by: 'The Structure of Complex Words' and Related Writings by William Empson David Greenham 'The Structure of Complex Words' and Related Writings. By William Empson. Ed. by Helen Thaventhiran and Stefan Collini. (The Critical Works of William Empson) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. lii+614 pp. £95. ISBN 978–0–19–871343–2. All literary scholars should welcome Oxford University Press's critical editions of the works of William Empson, that most subtle arbiter of linguistic and literary ambiguity. Of all the volumes in the series, perhaps the most likely to remain unread, though first to be released, is his 1951 work The Structure of Complex Words. This probable neglect is for a very good reason: Empson's so-called 'little bits of machinery' (p. 25). Indeed, '3b+=1a—.1£1' was hardly likely to catch on as a way of expressing a particular nuance of the eighteenth-century term 'wit' as applied to persons. That said, Empson really could, in his prose, capture that elusive shade of meaning in Pope: 'As a true poet myself, I regard the critics as types; they have an itching to deride and judge by fashion' (p. 87). The machinery, it thankfully appears, is more superstructural than essential—it may have helped Empson believe in his interpretations, but it does not offer the same level of help to his reader. Empson almost admits as much when he tells us that many of the readings he provides were [End Page 496] put together before the theoretical work was undertaken. Furthermore, in one of the supplementary letters appended to this edition, Empson refers to his own method as 'malignantly stiff' (p. 417). For this reason, the author himself advised the less thorough reader to skip the first two long chapters, and the last half-dozen shorter ones, and focus on the middle section, in which the plainer literary criticism lies and the malignant machinery plays second fiddle to the extended analysis of the selected complex words (p. 14). These complex words are few, and their order in The Structure of Complex Words runs as follows: wit, all, fool, dog, honest, sense, sensible, and sensibility. What Empson means by a 'complex word' is extremely valuable. A complex word is one that contains a 'compacted doctrine', that is, one that encompasses 'a general background of ideas' (p. 142) from any given period. To interpret that word is to interpret an entire social and political context; to establish a particular usage is to determine a relationship between author and reader. Indeed, Empson heartily rejects the New Critical focus on the text to the exclusion of the author's intention, which for him is a key part of any word's complexity. There is also a mistrustful political side to this view of language in The Structure of Complex Words. In his 1977 'Preface', Empson recalls working on propaganda in the Second World War (he worked alongside Orwell at the BBC). Empson's readings, then, are fundamentally socio-historical and a way of enlivening a critical perception of the complexity (duplicity even) of language and rhetoric. Empson's idea of history in The Structure of Complex Words derives in large part from his use of The Oxford English Dictionary, still called the New English Dictionary in the 1930s when he was drawing on it for the earliest of the essays. In his typical adversarial and occasionally crotchety style, Empson critiques the OED/NED while acknowledging that his book could not have been written without it. In the literary-critical terms of the middle sections of the book, the purpose of a complex word is that it acts as a 'keyword' that unlocks a text. The many different meanings (or 'equations', to return to the machinery) of any given complex word as it recurs across a text illuminate its key themes. The most sustained examples in The Structure of Complex Words are 'fool' in King Lear, 'honest' in Othello, and 'sense' in Austen and Wordsworth (while Empson focuses on Renaissance and Restoration texts, he does make it as far as the Romantics). At the back of Empson's book is an argument with his...

Orthodox Tradition in the Linguistic and Poetic Rarity of the Poem by N.A. Nekrasov “Blessed is the Gentle Poet” (to Help the Teacher of Russian Literature)

In the article, considerable attention is paid to the role of the Orthodox component in the creation of artistic images in this work, and the means of poetic expression are also comprehensively studied. The relevance is due to the fact that this poem has not yet been analyzed in terms of identifying the role of the Orthodox spiritual tradition in shaping the ideal of the poet. The goal is to study the linguistic and poetic means of the work, which serve to form the ideal of the poet, taking into account the Orthodox tradition. The novelty of the article lies in the study of these means on the basis of a cultural and dogmatic approach, the essence of which lies in the fact that the religious component is found in the relationship of the author and the characters of his works to enemies and friends, to the Motherland, people, God through the prism of the religious (Orthodox) worldview. Such an approach helps to reveal the implementation of religious and moral categories in the work of the master of the artistic word, taking into account their refraction in accordance with the author’s position. Based on the work done, the following results were obtained. It is established that the composition of the poem has an obvious antonymic character. It was revealed that the expressive background of the poem is created due to expressive tropes that carry a huge charge of generalization, as well as due to phonetic repetitions and forms of the present tense verb. It is determined that in the semantic space of the poem, thematic groups of words are in opposition and enter into mutually exclusive relationships. It is proved that the poem reflects the traditions of the hagiographical genre, expressed in asceticism, deprivation and sacrifice of a true poet. The value of the study is expressed in the possibility of applying the approach used in it to the study of poetic works of both Nekrasov himself and other Russian poets and writers, which will help to identify the switching of religious energy characteristic of the Russian soul to non-religious phenomena and objects.

An Aroma of Spirituality and Indianness in the Poetry of Vishnu P. Joshi

Vishnu P. Joshi is a familiar name widely published, globally recognized, and innumerably awarded in the world has many published collections of poetry entitled Discover This India Today (1996), Echoes of India (1999), Anjali: Whispers of the Soul (1999) and Anjali: Whispers in the Dawn (2001). Though settled in the U.S.A. and educated in the Western atmosphere, the poet's soul is still pure, immaculate, taintless, and even brimming with the love for India, its people, culture, tradition, and rich heritage. His unfailing attempts to make Indians awake and enlightened with the true Gyana on the famous dictums of Indian Philosophy Uttishth Jagrat Prapya Varannibodhat i.e. ‘Awake and Attain’ and Chraivati Chraivati i.e. ‘Keep on Acting’ inspires the reader to rebuild and reconstruct the Nation as well as unite her, mirror the enormous energy of the poetry and the sacredness of a true poet which sighs and bleeds at the sight of pain and prays for the prosperity of the nation and its people.

The Influence of the National-Cultural Image of the World on the Construction of Metaphors in the Poetic Discourse

Abstract The poetic language of Federico García Lorca amazes the reader’s imagination with the richness of images with the outward simplicity and clarity of style. Lorca’s poems simultaneously reveal to us both the national and cultural specifics of the Spanish linguistic picture of the world, and the ways of cognition and reflection of reality by the author, his assessment of the phenomena of this reality from the standpoint of the aesthetic ideal. One of the ‘keys’ of the secret of the phenomenal success of Lorca’s poetry is its metaphor city, the semantic aesthetics of which is revealed only in the context of not only the poems themselves, but also in the context of Spanish culture as a whole. The metaphor, we emphasize once again, is one of the most mysterious phenomena of language, the intuitive comprehension of which is inherent only in true poets. In a metaphor, reality escapes, as if hiding from thought, and then a deep and urgent question begins to arise before the researcher about the role of metaphor in cognition. In the work of Federico Garcia Lorca, the ability of metaphor to clearly reveal the features of national culture characterizes the Spanish linguistic consciousness and the Spanish linguistic personality. The humanities are armed with modern scientific research tools at the present stage of development and lay the foundation for studying the role of metaphor in understanding the essence of Federico Garcia Lorca's work, as well as its relationship and interaction with reality, thinking and consciousness.

Wordsworth's Death and the Figure of the Poet in 1850

This article will consider the extent and nature of the celebrity of the Poet Laureate William Wordsworth, who died in 1850. Ostensibly the most famous English poet alive in that year, on his death on 23 April 1850, Wordsworth had been Poet Laureate for just over seven years and had been actively producing verse since 1793. Shortly after his death, his longest poem, now considered a masterpiece of autobiographical epic, The Prelude, was published; one could easily assume that the death of such a major poet coupled with the publication of one of his most significant works would dominate the literary world in that year; yet notices of his death, while widespread, were fleeting in focus, and The Prelude met with a lukewarm reception. This challenges the concept of even a Poet Laureate as a literary celebrity. Nonetheless, as I will show, his name endured as a byword for ‘poet’ in periodicals of the time, and the Wordsworthian pastoral lyric remained an enduring form in periodicals of the year of his death; meaning that Wordsworth as a figure of ‘true poet’ endured even as his personal celebrity had waned.

“From Historical Facts to Poetic Truths”: The Nigerian Civil War and Other Subjects: An Exploration of Texts and Images in Painting

“From Historical Facts to Poetic Truths”: The Nigerian Civil War and Other Subjects: An Exploration of Texts and Images in Painting

Philosophy of literature and the methodology of studying of poetic texts: In honor of the 80th anniversary of professor V. S.Nikonenko

The article deals with the anniversary of an eminent historian of Russian philosophy V. S.Nikonenko (1942–2013), who is the author of well-known works, a member of St Petersburg State University. The author of the article presents the theory of analysis of philosophical content of poetic texts, created in late Nikonenko’s works. Studying Pushkin’s and Zhukovsky’s poetry, Nikonenko asserts that Russian literature reached the new stage of self-consciousness in the beginning of the 19th century. It was not only a literature, but it has become a worldviewing paradigm of Russian thought. A poet thinks not in metaphysical, but in concrete image form. A poetical image is not a concept. It is a symbol expressed in verbal eidetic pattern. Pushkin is a propagandist of the general moral, political and metaphysical ideas presenting in symbolical poetical images. However, it is very difficult to rationalize poetic images at all. Pushkin’s typical heroes are ideal patterns and eidetic images of contemporary men. The specificity of poetic image is the possibility to interpret it in many conceptual dimensions. A poetic image is unknown in rational form: it is understood irrationally. Nikonenko holds the romantic theory of the impossibility of recognizing the essence of poetic image by poets and literal heroes. Pushkin expresses his ideal content in specific symbolic form of the prophecy. He uses verbal poetic symbols which could be analyzed only in a week sense because they are metaphors and not concepts. So poetic truths are not the logical ones. They are sentences having only apparent logical proofs. Shortly speaking, poetic sentences may be certain, but they are not true ones. To sum up, Nikonenko works hermeneutic method of interpretation of poetic texts, according to it philosophical content of poetry can be extracted only from the linguistic textual structure.

Abdalla Al-Nadeem, Pioneer of Patriotism and Civilization in the Modern Egyptian Thought

Abdullah Al-Nadim (1842-1896) is one of the most important intellectual and political figures in modern Egyptian history. He played a major role in all significant stages of the Egypt nineteenth century. He was called "the orator of the revolution." He left his mark on various aspects of Arab social, political, and cultural life and awareness. So now it is very important to study and analyze his intellectual legacy, especially in contemporary circumstances, in which we see the rise of the new barbarism of various primitive religious Salafism. Abdullah Al-Nadim was one of the fine examples of the free intellectual. He committed to issues of society, national Idea, freedom, and progress. This study aims to trace the emergence and development of political, social, and literary ideas of Abdullah Al-Nadim. In their outcome, these ideas were the outcome of the Egyptian social, political, and national struggle against Ottoman despotism and its ruined remnants in the historical existence at that time. In his research and positions, critical and satirical ideas, precise clarity, depth, and loyalty to the truth and the nation's supreme interests are united. His creativity was a model for critical vision and mockery of the remnants of a collapsing world. He sought in all his works for alternatives to development and social progress, calling for modern civilization and freedom. His defense of women, their rights, and freedom was among the most dramatic at that time. Abdullah Al-Nadim sacrificed himself for these endeavors and goals. But at the same time, he revealed the possibility of synthesizing the poetic spirit and truth in theoretical and practical creativity. They are the issues and aspects that form the focus of this research.

Mockumentary between Factual and Poetic Truth: The Case of Tehran Has No More Pomegranates

The admirably systematic Faking It (Roscoe and Hight 2001) defines mock-documentary (the authors’ preferred term for what I call mockumentary) as a genre of filmmaking that “[makes] a partial or co...

SOCRATES ON POETRY AND THE WISDOM OF SIMONIDES

In books 2 and 3 of the Republic, Socrates criticizes Homer andHesiod for telling the greatest falsehoods about the greatest things; in book 1, he assumes that Simonides is a ‘wise and blessed’ bard who knows the truth. Socrates’ position on the authority of poets seems contradictory. Can this tension be resolved? I argue that it can be. Building on but revising Nicholas Pappas’ suggestion that Socrates’ charity in interpreting poetry is a form of disrespect, I show that the contradiction in his position is not in principle but in use. Socrates assumes that a true poet must be a knower of the good; however, in book 1, he uses this assumption to absolve Simonides from error, whereas in books 2 and 3, he infers that Homer, Hesiod, and other lesser figures are not true poets. This difference in use is to be explained by changes in interlocutors and a material concern with early childhood education.

“The Very Music of the Name”

Chris Townsend, “‘The Very Music of the Name’: Uncertainty as Aesthetic Principle in Keats’s Endymion” (pp. 441–472) It is well known that John Keats thought that true poets were those who are capable of being in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” without feeling the need to reach after solid facts. And “uncertainty” is a recurrent term in his 1818 poem Endymion and its preface. But what does it mean for the figure of Endymion to follow an “uncertain path,” and what role do experimental poetics play in that experience of not knowing? This essay reflects on three aspects of the rhythms of Endymion—the relation of line to sentence, the transformative quality of the poem’s rhymes, and the rhythmical malleability of the name “Endymion” itself—to argue that what Keats’s early critics were hostile to in his poem was precisely what he strove to produce: a poetics of uncertainty. By turning close attention to the local effects of Keats’s rhythms, and by mounting an argument about the structure of his thinking that concerns the shape of his verses, I also want to reopen a perennial question in both Formalist and New Historicist branches of Keats scholarship: whether it makes sense to think of Keats as a “political” or “ideological” poet, and of what that might mean in relation to his aesthetics.

Air and Ghosts

91 ERIKA VEURINK Air and Ghosts • nne Sexton called her relationship with the monk Brother Dennis Farrell “a love built on air and ghosts.” He told her he loved her. She told him he was haunted. It began with a fan letter he wrote her in 1961 after the publication of her first poetry collection. Fan mail is generally one-sided optimism, but who has ever written without the slightest hope of being the exception ? This is my understanding of prayer. Correspondence is inevitably imbalanced. ‘ Anne Sexton wrote back to Brother Dennis. She wanted to believe in God. Could he help her? She thought of God as “large, covering up the sky / like a great resting jellyfish.” I think God would rather be called a feeling than a sea creature. But if he created both, what’s the harm? ‘ Conversion is courtship of ideology. When Anne Sexton told the monk “for some reason I love faith, but have none,” she was offering a challenge. I have a theory. In every relationship one person releases a fantasy while the other enacts one. If timed perfectly, it’s compatibility. When we love the wrong things well, we are caught in the miscommunication of what it means to be human. ThefirsttimeIlovedarightperson,itfeltlikefallingasleepontime. ‘ Another theory: Pick a god. Hold it loosely. a 92 ‘ Brother Dennis mailed Anne Sexton a crucifix after the exchange of a few letters. He introduced something physical to the exchange. He braved a new dimension. The cross was something to sink her teeth into. ‘ My pastor growing up said, “We should all be wearing empty tombs around our necks. It’s the resurrection that matters, not the death on the cross.” But where is the romance in an empty tomb? The cross and Christ were soaked in blood and vinegar, lit by cracks of lightning. It was a seed then a tree then a vessel then a grave then a symbol. Sexton fashioned a necklace out of the crucifix with packing string and wrote that she would “never wear it without a feeling of humility and awareness.” As a kid, all I wanted was to know my salvation was set in stone. I bowed to false gods on the bathroom floor just to try things out. I fashioned plenty of crucifixes. ‘ All love is iconography. Worship is high art. ‘ The monk sent her a photograph of himself, which Sexton hung above her desk. “I am hunting for the truth,” Sexton wrote to the monk. “It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you there is another truth, a secret life.” ‘ 93 Sexton thought writing should be painful.1 Otherwise, leave it unsaid. She understood the way suffering glimmered in the right light. In this way, prayer and poetry come from the same place. Sexton said we are all writing “God’s poem.” ‘ In her confusion and visions, in her forty days in the desert, there was the monk, waiting, ready to apostatize, for a word, for a chance at his new religion—Anne. ‘ I imagine Anne Sexton swore not to write poems about flowers or spring, but then flowers and spring happened anyway. The planet shuddered and her private world spun in a neighboring orbit. We are the worlds we occupy. We are the worlds we leave behind. ‘ There is a surrender in the act of extension. ‘ “I wish we were real,” wrote the poet to the monk in their final correspondence . She died of suicide years later after the publishing of her last book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. The invocation read “For Brother Dennis, wherever he is.” 1. Interview with Patricia Marx. “Interview with Anne Sexton.” The Hudson Review. Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1965–1966), pp. 560–570. ...

El tropo pastoral en la escritura de la naturaleza de Gabriel Miró

Este estudio está dedicado a ciertos enfoques de paisaje en la escritura de la naturaleza de Gabriel Miró; en particular, a la actualización de imágenes, tropos y modos del mito pastoral que dan consistencia a su obra ficcional y ensayística. Lo pastoral es analizado como modo sui generis y como parte de una tradición reconocible, sujeta a cánones de la tradición (helénica, bíblica, neoplatónica, cervantina, post-romántica y decadente) en obras selectas. En Las cerezas del cementerio (1910), el tropo idílico aparece contrapuesto a un orden realista, que no supone la destrucción del idilio, sino su reconstitución mediante un desenlace que superpone la verdad poética a la histórica, gracias a los recursos de subjetivación e inmanencia temporal, típicos de la novela lírica. En La novela de mi amigo, la dimensión pictórica del entorno y su abstracción en la tela del cuadro se complementan con el sentimiento panteísta y la fuerza vital del protagonista, quien busca en el paisaje la pastoral familiar perdida. La configuración espiritual de los elementos del paisaje, que el pintor otorga a su realidad empírica, es lo que provee el dinamismo idílico del relato. Por último, Del vivir supone la transición de un paisajismo estilizado a la escritura abierta de la Naturaleza y la creación de un bucolismo sui generis representado por la autorreflexividad irónica de Sigüenza —y de sus falacias literarias ante un paisaje «llagado» por la lepra. Esta obra híbrida de novela, literatura viajera y autobiografía, supone el comienzo de la poética post-pastoral que culmina en Años y leguas, donde el paisaje es tema central de reflexión literaria y de preocupaciones existenciales, proto-ecológicas y lingüísticas de la madurez del escritor.

On Poetic Fiction and Historical Truth: Concerning a song composed by Yu.G. Vinogradov

On Poetic Fiction and Historical Truth: Concerning a song composed by Yu.G. Vinogradov

‘And Making Death a Victory’: Scepticism and Personal Conflict in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I–II and ‘Prometheus’

This article explores Byron’s interest in the hybris / nemesis dichotomy of the Promethean poetic trope in his oeuvre, based on his reading of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound . Drawing on theories of writing by Nietzsche and Derrida, the article addresses the ways in which the Promethean acts as a supplement of Byron’s poetic selfhood, constructing a discourse of scepticism about poetic truth, and the tragedy of Byron the poet conflicted between creation and destruction. The reading of the past/present dichotomy in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I–II highlights an early Byronic awareness of the tragic force inhabiting poetry, defacing the illusion of lyrical symbolism. The analysis of ‘Prometheus’ invites a further discussion of Byronic scepticism in light of his meditations on mourning, death and posterity, as well as addressing the ways in which the dramatic pattern of the poem resembles the fragmentation of poetic thought between composition and mental performance.

<i>The Noise of Time</i>: Shostakovich in Biofiction

The life of Dmitri Shostakovich, a Soviet composer and Russian intellectual who was censored under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, features in many bio-works. Julian Barnes’s <i>The Noise of Time</i> is a reconstruction of the well-known composer’s life story, and it confronts the readers with the deconstruction of biographical conventions. In the novel, Barnes uses biographical and fictional techniques in portraying a person’s life to reflect on the relationship between art and history, artist and power, and shows that historical truth is t reconstituted, reordered, or reconstructed in a selective way. This article is focused on the narrative modes and re-presentation of the historical subject in <i>The Noise of Time</i>. By emphasizing formal features and their impact upon perception and interpretation of history, this analysis considers the genre of biofiction as a narrative for achieving a sense of “poetic truth” of Shostakovich’s time. By relating history with the theory of neo-historical biofiction, Barnes reminds us that history might have been concealed in totalitarian society but could also be restored among the many stories by and about the individual—to connect the histories with his stories. Thus, we should regard <i>The Noise of Time</i> as an amphibious art form, which ideally has both to obey the constraints of evidence and to respond creatively to the challenge of making literary form and meaning.