Poetic Truth Research Articles

Poets and the Devil’s Party

Poets and the Devil’s Party Jennifer Davis Michael (bio) The Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and the Adversary by Fred Parker (Baylor University Press, 2011. 216 pages. $29.95) This new book in Baylor’s series The Making of the Christian Imagination explores an old topic: the perennial and peculiar affinity between the artist and the Devil. By the sheer act of creation, the artist treads dangerously close to Lucifer’s challenge of divine authority. Closely associated is the suspicion that such extraordinary powers must come from Hell if they cannot be explained as a normal part of human psychology. Finally the free exercise of imagination has always resembled madness, which in turn was once thought to be the work of a possessing demon. In this study, however, Fred Parker avoids many of these familiar themes, focusing instead on what he calls “a radical tension between the ethical and the aesthetic,” a tension that finds expression in the ambiguous role of the Devil in literature as “Adversary, the supreme figure of opposition, in a multiple sense: as the opponent of God; as the accuser who brings the knowledge of good and evil, that divisive polarity which shapes most ethical thought, and as the figure who tells us that our habits of reflective consciousness . . . are alienated, fallen, the mark of our exile from the garden.” With this complex set of associations in mind, he explores how poets make use of this adversarial muse. Refreshingly free of jargon and engaging to read, the book offers not an exhaustive treatment of the subject but a series of approaches for the reader to explore the idea of opposition as “true Friendship” (to borrow Blake’s phrase). The book’s subtitle is somewhat misleading since Parker deals not only with Blake and Byron but also substantially with Goethe’s Faust and Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and to a lesser degree with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (though not with Marlowe’s play). His discussion of Mann’s novel frames the book: a prologue in chapter one uses the composer Leverkühn as a test case, suggesting that his artistic breakthrough reaches an “equivocal” state beyond opposition. Parker suggests that the artist, by engaging with the supreme “otherness” of the Devil, frees us from the ethical opposition of good and evil and from our alienated reflective consciousness; but this is achieved at a great price. Chapter two traces the history of Satan in Christian tradition, noting that the “unambiguously evil Devil” is a late development. Although the Church Fathers made him the Evil One, he appears throughout the Old Testament as an accuser and prosecutor, but never completely split from God. This is what Parker terms the “secret history” of the Devil, a much more ambiguous figure who “used to work for the divine administration, and conceivably still does.” Parker explores this ambiguity through a brief examination of Milton, whom Blake identified as “a true Poet and of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.” Although Milton follows the received narrative of Satan’s rebellion, he grants sufficient ambiguity for us to [End Page iii] see God’s allowing Satan to act as he does. Parker suggests that the same dualistic thinking that defines the Devil by separating good from evil is also able to “call itself into question” as it recalls the Archangel in his unfallen glory. The central chapters on Blake and Byron trace the well-known relationship of each poet with the Devil, but in each case suggest a specific connection between the stance of parody (in Blake’s case) or the cynical spectator (in Byron’s) and the opposing or ambiguous voice of the Devil. The parodic or reflective voice can help to uncover truth, but it also threatens to undermine the power of imagination to transform. I quibble with Parker’s negative evaluation of Blake’s Milton, which seems to hang on Parker’s opinion that Blake’s poetry peaks in the early to mid-1790s and falls away after that. His reading of Byron focuses primarily on the later works, especially Don Juan, whose style of narration incorporates “the Mephistophelean bathos.” This reading...

Reading Wisdoms

The writer explains how important knowing critical and cultural theory is for a contemporary poet. The writer explores the idea of generation mentioned within Mick Jagger's “As Tears Go By,” W.B. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's “Reading the World.” He establishes a connection among each as the essay moves through each work's passages on the idea of generation. The essay equates wisdom to Michele Foucault's “empirical order of a primary code” and the “middle region which liberates order itself” as the place for poetry and what Jean-Francois Lyotard would call the differend. The essay seems to suggest that the idea of “poetic truth” is more difficult to access than one might think. The essay closes with the writer suggesting the kinds of reading and thinking contemporary poets should be doing in light of the thinking brought to bear in the late 20th and early 21st Century.

“ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS AN S.S. OFFICER”: THE HOLOCAUST BETWEEN HISTORY AND FICTION IN ELSA MORANTE'S LA STORIA

The twentieth-century Italian Jewish novelist Elsa Morante's La Storia, published in 1974, is rarely included in the canon of Holocaust literature today, yet contains considerable content regarding the Italian experience of the Holocaust. In this essay I examine how Morante's proclaimed artistic principles, in particular her notion of “verità poetica”, “poetic truth”, and “storia”, “history” or “story”, affect her depiction of the Holocaust. I also trace what I term an “anxiety of absence” in La Storia, which I believe explains not only Morante's use of characters who are unreliable witnesses to the Holocaust as it unfolds in Rome, but also explains her ultimate swerve away from her artistic ideals and her problematic use of historical sources.

Placing Human Constants within Literary History: Generic Revision and Affective Sociality inThe Winter’s TaleandThe Tempest

This essay explores Shakespeare’s qualification of romance conventions as a significant event in Western literary history. It may be seen as part of a sustained challenge to the subordination of somatic and affective sense to intellectual, conceptual significance advocated or assumed by dominant hermeneutic and poetic theories since late antiquity. Shakespeare’s final romances move toward making an ethical sense—one rooted in human constants of embodied responsiveness to others—the source and ultimate judge of literary significance or poetic truth. By making the ethical rather than the metaphysical primary in romance, Shakespeare suggests that receptivity to affective upheaval disrupts ideological consolidations of elite complacency, awakening us to a redemptive sociality that is implicitly experienced by protagonists and audiences together (characters in the course of the action, audiences in the course of mental and bodily reception of artistically rendered action). Shakespeare’s revision of romance, in challenging inherited regulation of what and how literature can signify, dramatizes relations between somatic, affective experiences and social, ethical life that illuminate the role played by human constants in literary communication.

The Trouble with History and Fiction

The Trouble with History and Fiction

'Burns and Byron in Scottish, British and European Romanticism' The Byron Centre, University of Manchester 4–5 December 2010

In light of the fact that most of Western Europe had been brought to a standstill in the week immediately prior to the conference, it is a miracle that so many participants actually managed to get to Manchester at all. Interestingly, those who failed the snow challenge were all from other parts of the UK - a triumph for UK public transport and public services! The conference organisers, Gerry Carruthers (Glasgow) and Alan Rawes (Manchester), seemed quite unfazed by the impact of the weather, although we suspect that they were secretly more than a little worried about whether anyone would still be able to make it. This took nothing away from the enthusiasm of the participants and rather promoted a sense of victory over the snow. Located in the historic Samuel Alexander Building, the conference was a collaboration between The Byron Centre at the University of Manchester and the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. It opened on Saturday morning with the first plenary, given by Professor Murray Pittock (Glasgow) and entitled 'The Real Language of Men: fa's speerin?', which offered a lucid close reading of, among other texts, Burns's 'To a Mouse' and 'To a Louse', focusing on their use of idiolects and dialects from a historical and political perspective, and on the particular power of the poems' language. After a coffee break, the first set of parallel sessions commenced. In 'Burns, Byron and Scotland', chaired by Gerry Carruthers, Colin Clark (Charles, Prague) presented his paper, 'Hell's Hot Jurisdiction: Byron, Burns and the Poetics of Transgression and Transcendence'. This unravelled the complexities of the Calvinist literary legacy in various well-known works by Burns and Byron. Inspired by the portraits of Burns and Scott (both freemasons) and Byron and Shakespeare (neither normally linked with freemasonry) hanging in the lodge room of Lodge Canongate Kilwinning, Andrew Prescott (Glasgow) then explored some interesting connections between Burns and Byron and freemasonry in his wide-ranging paper, 'Annexing Reputation: the Masonic Reputations of Byron and Burns'. The other parallel session, 'Burns and Byron in British Romanticism', chaired by Alan Rawes, was marked by the first arctic-weather absence, that of Will Bowers (Oxford), whose paper would have been on 'Byron, Hunt and the Genesis of the Italian Fashion'. Peter Francev (Mount San Antonio College) was present, and spoke on 'Byron and the Mistress Poem', discussing the question of whether Teresa Guiccioli was or was not a source of inspiration for Byron's poetry, looking closely at works such as 'Stanzas to the Po', 'Stornelli' and 'The Prophecy of Dante'. The session then closed with Adam White (Manchester), whose paper, 'Burns, Byron and John Clare', argued that Clare drew on the lyric poetry of Burns and Byron to construct a haunting, complex and mysterious female figure through which to imaginatively explore farflung, exotic places. The second plenary speaker of the day, Brean Hammond (Nottingham), scheduled for after lunch, was defeated by the Nottinghamshire snow, but his paper was not. It was very competently delivered by Alan Rawes. Entitled 'The Ethical Turn in Literary Criticism: Burns and Byron', Hammond's paper examined the issue of ethical reading in relation to the problematic cases of Burns and Byron - two poets who have often been seen as unethical in both their lives and work. To explore notions of the performativity of the self and its aversiveness, and how these fit with the idea of poetic truth in both Burns and Byron, Hammond gave an insightful analysis of 'Ae Fond Kiss' and 'So We'll Go No More A-Roving', to the musical accompaniment of Leonard Cohen's husky rendering of the latter. The afternoon tea and coffee break was followed by two more parallel sessions: one dealing with 'Burns, Byron and Romantic Celebrity' and the other with 'Burns, Byron and other European Writers'. In the Romantic celebrity session, chaired by Murray Pittock, Hannah Doherty (Stanford) opened with a paper on 'Byronic Advertising: Selling Romanticism in the Early Nineteenth Century', which explored the many ways in which Byron's name was put to use for publicity purposes during the latter part of his life, highlighting especially the political associations evoked by its eclectic use. …

Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children: Christian Romanticism and Instruction as Worship

In anthologies of British literature published in the last couple of decades, the first author one is likely to encounter is Anna Letitia Barbauld. She is frequently represented in these anthologies by selections from her poetry, but Barbauld's influence during her lifetime (1743-1825) and beyond was not limited to her poetry; nor were her aims solely literary. was a devoutly Christian Romantic, one who embraced the concept of Nature as sacred text and Christianity as sacred practice, characterized by authentic emotional investment, attention to natural/textual detail, and a staunch belief in the inherent value of the individual She was also a devoutly Christian teacher. She and her husband, Rochemont (a Dissenting minister, like her father, John Aikin), managed a school for boys in Suffolk for several years. Anna Barbanld's religious convictions taught her to reverence the individual human mind, to see it as her duty to instruct it, and to understand such instruction as an act of worship. Seeking to instruct children between the ages of three and five, Barbanld created in Hymns in Prose for Children a design argument dependent upon a dose attention to natural detail and a reverential attitude toward both perceiver and perceived. Emphasizing structure and order as well as imagination, the sanctity of the infant mind (Barbauld, Hymns 238), and a natural world invested with divinity, set out to write a functionally significant text, a text that means what it does. It clearly did something, from the date of its first publication well into the nineteenth century and the twentieth. In Mother of All Discourses;' William McCarthy states that Hymns in Prose was reprinted more than fifty times between 1801 and 1905, not counting translations, and that the number of copies reprinted was always 1,000, 2,000, or 2,500 (196, n. 1). Samuel Pickering points out that as one of the earliest adopted texts in the Sunday School movement, it introduced hundreds of thousands of English children to the activities of reading and practical devotion (263). Hymns was also read by the founding fathers of Romanticism. In a 1975 essay titled Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose: 'An Air-Blown Particle' of Romanticism?;' Pickering identifies several echoes of Barbauld's text in Wordsworth's poetry and prose, including the poems and preface(s) of Lyrical Ballads; interestingly enough, Pickering tends to read backward in time with comments like, Barbauld also resembles Wordsworth in her belief that natural objects possessed a moral or spiritual life... (264). While Pickering concedes that Mrs. Barbauld's poetics were Romantic (263-64), he clearly wishes to distance the true poets from this minor writer of children's literature: Mrs. helped create the element in which the poets eventually floated (267), he writes. William McCarthy is more careful with chronology in his monumental 2008 study of Barbauld; he states that [l]ove of nature led to nature's God [in Barbauld's Hymns] long before Wordsworth or Coleridge put pen to paper (Anna Letitia 210). The first publication of Lyrical Ballads was in 1798; the prefaces appeared in 1800 and 1802. first published Hymns in Prose for Children in 1781. William Blake is the most-often discussed poet whom Barbauld's Hymns inspired (or provoked), according to scholars such as Geoffrey Summerfield and, more recently, Thomas C. Kennedy. Summerfield's side-by-side comparison (216-19) of Barbauld's Hymns and Blake's 1789 Songs of Innocence and then his 1794 Songs of Innocence and of Experience is both provocative and convincing in its illumination of several echoes of and responses to Barbauld's Hymns in Blake's Songs. Less convincing are some of Summerfield's conclusions regarding Blake's supposed revision--or even correction--of her. For example, a comment regarding her attitude toward slavery is especially wrong-headed: Mrs. …

On the Poetic Truth that is Higher than History

Porphyry's On the Cave of the Nymphs inaugurates a style of philosophico-allegorical interpretation of literary texts that flourished in antiquity and finds analogues in criticism down to the present. It is distinguished by its use of literary interpretation to think through speculative problems of philosophy and theology. Although it became suspect in terms of Enlightenment philological principles prescribing interpretation of the text on its own terms, this kind of criticism reveals the originally philosophical motives and purpose of literary criticism and restores to literature the vocation of disclosing a properly poetic truth higher than that of fact or history. The history of this type of speculative criticism stemming from Porphyry`s reading of Homer is traced forward through Latin allegorical readings of epic revolving around Virgil. This itinerary highlights the perennial and inevitable tensions between philological and philosophical approaches to interpreting literature as a revelation of truth.

“Stand Still, True Poet that You Are!”: Remembering the Brownings, Imagining Memorabilia

This paper draws on Robert Browning’s poetry and on late-Victorian celebrity magazines to consider some of the ways in which dead poets and the objects which belonged to them are remembered. The paper then focuses on the 1913 sale of the so called Browning Collections - of almost all of Robert and Elizabeth Browning’s former possessions. The auction signified a climax of the Victorian cult of the poet as hero, as it quite literally allowed bidders to buy into the famous poets’ commodified lives. However, the sale also raised wider questions about the right kind of literary afterlife, as well as about the right sort of (posthumous) popularity. The selling of a dead poet’s effects can easily look like a disgraceful dismantling of his or her life. By contrast, I want to consider the ways in which bidders at the Browning auction managed to create meaning out of the vast array of items offered up for sale

Instructional Note: Custer and Longfellow: Helping First-Year English Students Understand the Relationship between History and Poetry

To understand better the subtle relationship between history and English, first-year students in an introductory literature class compare Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem about the 1876 deaths of General George Armstrong Custer and his men with historical accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in order to discover how historical and poetic truths are related.

Literary Anamnesis: Boethius Remembers Ovid

Manlius Anicius Severinus Boethius composed the Consolatio philosophiae in the first quarter of the sixth century C.E., while the ex-consul was exiled from Rome, probably imprisoned at Pavia and awaiting execution. Boethius was a victim of the complex politics of his time that set the Orthodox East against the Arian West. (1) Both classicists and medievalists find the polymath Boethius of interest. (2) He was not a great original thinker but, along with Cicero, is considered the purveyor of Greek philosophy the Latin West. Boethius's writings on philosophy, mathematics, music, and theology stretch over a wide spectrum of disciplines, culminating in the Consolatio. (3) The work comprises a melange not only of philosophical views but also of allusions virtually the whole of the classical canon, including the major poets of the Augustan era. In the main it reflects Platonic thought on the nature of God and the relative merits of Free Will versus Providence, (4) and portrays the fall from grace and the recovery of its author in the guise of reminiscences about the visitation of the allegorical figure of herself, who, as mentor and physician, brings her lapsed adherent back full recollection (anamnesis) of her healing and sustaining precepts in an extended dialectic. We may assume that throughout the text Dame Philosophy and her pupil are both mouthpieces for the philosopher's own inner struggle come terms with his lot. That is, the creative author reports in the words of the what he himself as historical personage feels or has felt and, in the words of Philosophy, what he knows he should be thinking. (5) In his political fall and banishment from Rome, Boethius may appear resemble the famous exiles of an earlier era, Cicero, Ovid, and Seneca, but in circumstances and general mindset he seems a world removed from all three, Ovid in particular. Yet it is my intention here consider possible Ovidian influence in the manner in which Boethius treats the topic of amor. Specifically I try answer the question as what degree Boethius's concept of amor in various key poems agrees with, or opposes, Ovid's. Such intertextual comparison may playfully be termed an exploration of literary anamnesis. Various problems of interpreting the Consolatio need no than a rapid review. (6) The five books of the work are Menippean in format, (7) that is, we have prose passages of varying length alternating with thirty-nine poems in a variety of meters, most purportedly sung by Philosophia, with only four in the prisoner's mouth. (8) Generic considerations are a matter of debate, such as the nonsatirical content of what essentially is Menippean satire, and its prosimetric format. (9) Critics disagree on the importance and degree of integration of the verse sections with the prose: Are the poems integral the philosophical prose, or mere ornament, perhaps even the insertion by the perforce idle consular of previously composed nugae? Do they offer contrast or counterpoint the prose? Or do they carry a supporting or even a secondary philosophical message? (10) Contents vary considerably. (11) The workings of the cosmos and extraterrestrial signs are perhaps the most frequent topic; but various myths are told, and the central hexameter (3.m.9) is a hymn the cosmic Creator-Deity. (12) On how judge the poems, Walsh (1999, xliii) suggests that Boethius is more of a versifier than a true poet, denoting him a prisoner of his models, assembling a medley of borrowings without ordering them into a unique vision. For Walsh, this versifier's chief skill lies in his adaptation of his verses to the contexts of the philosophical arguments. This assertion needs exploration. Philosophical Content Critics are unsure if the Consolatio was meant as an apologia pro vita sua. Its conversational format is deceptively simple, veering between first-person reminiscence and second-person address. …

An Ebbigrammar of Motives; or, Ba for Short

worked and worn by passionate debates, And losing by the loss it apprehends, The flesh rocks round and every breath it sends Is ravelled to a sigh. All tortured states Suppose a straitened place. --EBB, Finite and Infinite (1850), ll. 5-9 (1) Just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the start of her third century has quite come of age, so have Barrett Browning studies come firmly into their majority, after a latency period and some feisty adolescence. If our honored poet was a rather lost saint a hundred years ago, by now we have found her again. (2) This is all to the good. Still, she seems a poet who remains at chronic risk of coterie re-sanctification if we fail--through a sin of omission not merely hypothetical--to hold her work to a less than high criterion of art. Strict poetic standards are the best critical offerings we can bring to an anniversary occasion like this special issue. The EBB whom I mean to praise is the EBB who meant to be above all, not a reformer or woman writer or evangelist or polemicist or lover but a poet, a maker of verbal art--in which capacity, to be sure, those other roles may be included and their several aims made good, nay better, in poetry's gift. It is in the critic's contrarian mood, then, of loyal opposition that I have thought to try EBB's work against a standard of aphoristic concision, a standard that seems the very reverse of what we tell ourselves we prize her for. The poet we know and warm to is after all a magnanimous figure of sweeping views, impulsive and heartfelt commitment to the persons she loved and the causes she embraced. She stands among us, on the whole, as a broad-minded liberal devoted to enlargement of the human prospect, implacable in resistance to those multiple oppressions whose recurrent nineteenth-century crime was to cramp by denial the authentic energies of all the human race. For these virtues of character we not only esteem but love her; and what makes it easy to do so is her lovable verses, which is to say, the very same accomplishment that led a certain stranger to blurt out to Miss Barrett, in the course of a certain indiscreet letter, that having read those verses he loved her too. (3) Mr. Robert Browning divined his correspondent's personality on the basis of her writerly manner. And in this question he, true poet that he was, divined truly. EBB wrote in accordance with the personality profile and sociocultural agenda I was just outlining: generously, sweepingly, impulsively, feelingly. She wrote, above all else, fluently. She whelms us in a torrent of words, borne along a verse onrush that Ellen Moers compared to the cascading water in which the poet's imagination delighted. (4) The reader's experience of her poetry is shaped, as Alethea Hayter happily phrased it, by forms welded together in flowing or structures, where that stick-to-your-ribs glutinous gets it just right. (5) Furthermore, this most fluent of the major Victorian poets can, let us admit it, seem downright superfluous in the literal sense of that adjective. That she is anything but superfluous to our literary history will go in these pages without saying; it is only a matter of time before even our more mulish counterparts in American studies realize how much of her weight they have been pulling for years without knowing it. Still, EBB does have a way of overflowing: I trust that other admirers too--on turning the page, say, of an apparently concluded stanzaic lyric, only to see how many more stanzas lie ahead--have been, I don't say discouraged by her volubility, but suitably impressed. Taking as granted EBB's overriding aesthetic of fluency, the critic in quest of fineness and point who would lead an expedition in ebbigrammatology finds himself in initial difficulties. But the difficulties are only initial. For the agglutinated character of our poet's output actually gives us a license to look everywhere. …

I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud (review)

Reviewed by: I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud Colin Fleming I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud translated and edited by Wyatt MasonModern Library, 2004, 416 pp., $15.95 (paper) Resolving to quit writing verse at the age of twenty, years before most poets reach artistic maturity, Arthur Rimbaud entered into a life that on its surface was very different, essentially becoming a merchant of fortune in Africa. This invaluable book, a companion to the earlier Rimbaud Complete, which compiled his poems, begins with the much-heralded and frequently unrevealing "seer letters," the thirty letters composed while Rimbaud was [End Page 168] writing poetry. But as one quickly learns, Rimbaud retains a poet's sensibility and eye, even when documenting the most mundane matters (typically, requests to his put-upon mother back in France) and seeking a financial windfall that never comes. Year after year, in letter after letter, one moneymaking scheme after another is enthusiastically set upon, only to falter before given a chance to be carried out or succeed, yielding nothing but frustration and, frequently, debt. "It's been a long time since I've heard from you. It isn't pleasant to feel so neglected," Rimbaud writes home to his family from Aden, an almost uninhabitable outcrop of rock where the poet would be stricken with knee pain that led to the eventual amputation of his leg. But his schemes, or at least the methodology behind them, betray the obsessive nature that makes no concessions to practicality, even the practicality of doing only what is needed to accomplish a given task: "To the package" (already a sizable package of metal-forging and candle-making guides that she is sending him) "add a Telegrapher's Manual, The Little Woodworker, and House Painter's Manual," Rimbaud writes his mother. It is tempting to think him a selfish man, giving little consideration to others, but then there is Rimbaud's own account of his struggle to return to France, soon to have his leg amputated. It is as terrible a trial of one man's dignity, bravery and loyalty to family as exists in modern literature. "I managed, with difficulty to put myself on my side and have a bowel movement in the hole I'd dug in the earth," he writes. Dragged across the desert on a stretcher by the "Negro porters" he had hired, Rimbaud is thrown to the ground when the men grow tired of their task. He imposes a fine. Eventually, having returned to France, he worries that even without his leg he will be required to perform military service. When we comes to the last line in the last letter—"Tell me what time I should be carried on board"—the heart aches for a great man with a true poet's spirit. These are letters unlike any others. Copyright © 2006 The Curators of the University of Missouri

The Work at Hand

Donahue continuedfrom previous page ever. Time and the eternal, trauma and memory: one ponders such dichotomies with each new stanza. The poem is both ingenious and moving. As someone who lived in New York for many years. I would argue that "Hum" takes its place among poems like Lorca's "After a Walk" (with its resonant first line, "Cut down by the sky") and O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died." poems that speak on behalf of the city and preserve for the future an aspect of its inner life: Everyone is incidental. Everyone weeps. Detailfrom cover ofThe Night Sky The tears of today will put out tomorrow. The rain is ashes. The days are beautiful. The vocabulary of public events circulates throughout Hum. as if to illustrate a project outlined in The Night Sky: "how to conceive of words not as locked within the self, awaiting liberty, but as freely circulating outside of the self, waiting to be taken in. transformed, and sent back out." Even though we pass through moments of spellbinding clarity and opaque rebuffs to our impertinent demands for picture language, words move through us to reflect our social and political world. Lauterbach cannot, it seems to me, simply celebrate that circulation of words. She cannot sing untroubled the transformation of words that takes place within us. The incomprehensible has happened. It may not be something we care to admit. A bit retro. A symbolist crisis in a postmodern world. A gaudy predicament, she might say, one where the gaudy hides a God, who gives way to a doll, becoming in turn a gull. The flight of the adjective distracts us. The predicament remains, whether at the edge of Ground Zero, or looking at a painting, or talking to a friend, or watching MTV, or just looking out Malarmé's window: Fragment (September) Filtered through the cast of happiness so that evening has the weight of unconditional assent beyond the debris. Joseph Donahue's collection of poems include Incidental Eclipse, from Talisman House, and In This Paradise: Terra Lucinda XXI-XL, from Carolina Wren Press. The Work at Hand Larry Smith Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations Sam Hamill Shambhala http://www.shambhala.com 276 pages: paper. S 1 5.95 This world isfrost on an old man's breath, memory rushing into memory. Sam Hamill is one of the hardest working poets in America, and this includes his 30 years of work as editor-publisher at Copper Canyon Press (he's now retired). Like many poets who also edit and publish the works of others -James Laughlin. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Dennis Maloney, and the countless others of us in the small press publishing world -his own poetry is often given short shrift. It"s ironic since one wonders who. other than a true poet, would do the slave labor of this publishing work? Its chief reward, of course, is allowing us to work with those whose writing we respect, even love. Look at Hamill 's recent defiance of the Bush White House that led to his editing of the important Poets Against the War (2003) anthology. Other major achievements include his books of transía lions from the Latin, Greek. Chinese, and Japanese, selections of which are included here; then there's his monumental The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002). done with fellow Rexroth disciple Bradford Morrow, to keep a tradition of nature and engaged writing alive in American verse. He and others at Copper Canyon repeatedly cross the borders of mainstream and academic poetry. It's a calling, to be sure, but it shouldn't cause neglect. One of the finest statements on the task of a poet in the world is his A Poet's Work: The Other Side of Poetry (Broken Moon. 1990; Carnegie Mellon, 1998). Hamill is. then, a model to many others, but. that said, I want to offer an appreciation of his own poetry assembled so wisely here. More than a third of the collection is selections of Hamill's translations. It begins with Sappho, Anakreon, Asklepiados, and Catullus, and launches into his best work with the Chinese masters, most of them from the golden T'ang...

Assigning Names

Assigning Names Paul Oppenheimer Burnt Island D. Nurkse Alfred A. Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com 128 pages; cloth, $24.00 The Burnt Island of D. Nurkse's eighth collection is not the Burnt Norton of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Some such comparison seems inevitable, though, not least because Nurkse's island shows up as an eponymous poem at the center of a book that he divides into three "suites," thereby more than suggesting an echo of Eliot's famed four-part musical opus, and also that this linked group of poems may be meant, in Ezra Pound's useful summons, to "make it new." But is it new, and if it is, what is it renewing? A number of contrasts between these two linchpin poems, and between both of the longer works in which they appear, seem self-evident as well as intriguing . IfEliot's "Burnt Norton" takes us "Into our first world" and moves through "The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery," whose "leaves [are] full of children / Hidden excitedly, containing laughter," Nurkse's "Burnt Island"— with its title that refers to an island off the coast of Maine, whether "burnt" or not—presents us with: two villages, Baker and Chester; two industries, lobster and watercolor; two churches, Baptist and Universalist, and a single child who: followed at a fixed distance kicking a smooth white stdne that veered toward Canada, mumbling names of burweed, hiding so well we never knew, or climbing a scrub oak to find a thrush egg, an acorn lid, the tight ring of the ocean. In Eliot and Nurkse's primal visions, an early-feeling garden rises into spiritual possibilities and then slips free ofthem, withjust a hint in Nurkse's "Burnt Island" ofEliot's quietly menacing territory in which "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality." Despite these similarities and discrepancies, a measure of "Burnt Norton's" cruel and unbearable reality, but transposed and transformed, appears in Nurske's other poems. It develops as a ghostly negative even as his new poems keep returning us to the book's heart, its "Burnt Island," or lead us away from it—or to cite Eliot once more, as they "Point to one end, which is always present." Like Eliot's Four Quartets, Nurkse's book seems to be centered on that old, tantalizing puzzle: whether secure meanings can be found or said to exist. His poems are committed to uncovering those names that may move us beyond delusions, if not illusions, and into the crannies of significant memories that retain the messy residues of past events. As a result, and a bit like Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who sees any true poet's eyes "in a fine frenzy rolling" while he seeks to supply "airy nothing" with "[al local habitation and a name," this poet gambles on arriving at those rooted sorts of names that light up PAUL WEST "Writing ofwars past in a time ofwar, West creates a portrait of his father that has all the richness of Rembrandt as it evokes the endless suffering wars precipitate."—Booklist "Explores the mystery ofwar and its effects, and even more deeply the mystery ofwhat it is to be male—especially male and British in the mid-20th century."—Ithaca Times Justpublished. 187 pages, 5V2? 8V2" 0-929701-75-5 $24.00 sewn cloth Available at quality bookstores. For a listing, visit www.mcphersonco.com McPherson & Company Post Office Box 1126 Kingston, New York 12402 800-613-8219 "West stands as an authentic voice in the wilderness, a visionary who plugs the ghosts ofhistory and morality into his textual dream machine..." —Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix Published with assistance from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. the present by illuminating the past. These digging names, so to speak, have the power to clarify hearts and minds while laying bare the immanence of even trivial-seeming moments. "[A]nd somewhere / in that immense city," he writes in "My Father's Closet," the book's first poem, recreating one such crucial childhood memory, sinewy and strong, where snow trembled in high lit windows, a footstep receded, rapid, urgent, indelible as a...

Pluralist Myth and Nationalist Realities: The Dynastic Myth of the Habsburg Monarchy—a Futile Exercise in the Creation of Identity?

What is a myth? This question cannot be easily answered; the notions and concepts used in various scientific disciplines are too divergent and, as with many other terms, they possess different meanings in different societies. For the purpose of this article, a definition by Philip Manger is useful. According to this author, a myth is “a form of poetic truth, the sifting out of an essence, a hypothetical, metahistorical core that contained an intrinsic meaning,” a meaning that joins the past to the present and thus establishes another, perhaps higher, form of reality. This holds true for all kinds of myths, but especially for the “political” myth that will be dealt with in this paper.

Novel Poetry: Transgressing the Law of Genre

The future calls for perverse crossings: between genres, between periods, between theories. Although critics have responded to the demand for interdisciplinary and cultural studies for many years now, there are a few boundaries that have, nonetheless, resisted transgression: in particular, those between the Romantic and Victorian periods and those between poetry and the novel. One reason for this resistance, of course, is the very structure of academia: jobs are generally advertised for either poetry or the novel, either the Romantic or Victorian periods. And various institutional structures support such divisions (national organizations, conferences, period and genre journals, even listservs). Such separations are, however, perfectly artificial, themselves the product of retroactive reconstructions of a [End Page 490] literary history that is, inevitably, much more mixed. With all deserved respect to Jerome McGann, 1 we have not Romantic but Victorian ideology to blame for many of these distinctions: the belief that the Victorians represent a hard separation from the perversities of the Byronic, histrionic, Romantic poet; the belief that the true poet must "succeed in excluding from his work every vestige of . . . lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world"; 2 the belief that poetry is a pure form separate from not only politics but also the messy comminglings of the heteroglot, carnivalesque, and polyphonic novel. 3

Wordsworth's Classical Undersong: Education, Rhetoric and Poetic Truth (review)

Wordsworth's Classical Undersong: Education, Rhetoric and Poetic Truth (review)

Wordsworth's Classical Undersong: Education, Rhetoric and Poetic Truth

Introduction Wordsworth's Academic Training Wordsworth and Horace: Ethos and Poetic Truth Classical Undersong: 'lively images,' 'strong feelings,' 'purest Poesy' Notes Appendix: Aristotle's Ethical Proof: A Sampling of its Use in Recent Criticism Works Cited Index

Literarischer Antisemitismus: Untersuchungen zu Gustav Freytag und anderen burgerlichen Schriftstellern des 19. Jahrhunderts (review)

Reviewed by: Literarischer Antisemitismus: Untersuchungen zu Gustav Freytag und anderen bürgerlichen Schriftstellern des 19. Jahrhunderts Klaus L. Berghahn Literarischer Antisemitismus: Untersuchungen zu Gustav Freytag und anderen bürgerlichen Schriftstellern des 19. Jahrhunderts, by Martin Gubser. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998. 327 pp. DM 68.00. The controversies surrounding German novelists of the nineteenth century, when it comes to the “Jewish Question,” are all too familiar; they surface with predictable regularity at conferences on German-Jewish literature and history. Were many novelists of German Realism antisemites, or were their novels merely the result of the poetic truth of their critical realism? Is it possible to separate the intention of an author from the later antisemitic reception of his work, as some scholars argue? Or can one distinguish between the artistic value of a novel and other antisemitic utterances of an author? Are there not well-known cases where an author clearly presents stereotypical Jewish characters in his novels, but is otherwise a tolerant liberal who would even defend Jews against any defamation? A case in point is Gustav Freytag, an almost forgotten popular novelist of the nineteenth century, who wrote Soll und Haben (1855), which has become—next to Raabe’s Hungerpastor—the paradigm for such discussions. To overcome this uncertainty or undecidedness once and for all is the intention of Martin Gubser’s dissertation (Fribourg, 1995). There is no question for Gubser of how to situate Freytag in this debate: As a journalist of the Grenzbote he was an antisemite, his novel Soll und Haben unmistakably demonstrated it, and only in his later years did he seem to have been an advocate of Jewish emancipation. Freytag thus becomes an exemplary case of literary antisemitism of the nineteenth century. To prove all this, Gubser has to cover a lot of ground: First, nothing less will do than to write a history of the Prussian Jews and their struggle for emancipation in the nineteenth century; second, he has to define antisemitism and to tell its history from the Christian crusades to Martin Luther up to Wilhelm Marr’s racial antisemitism (1096–1879); third, he has also to define what literary antisemitism is and how it is represented through genres, language, and argumentation. Thus, more than well prepared, he can make Gustav Freytag a test case in the second half of his dissertation. The result, after so much preparation, cannot surprise: Freytag is a literary antisemite. Gubser is, of course, not the first to discover this, but he does it with so much didacticism and so deductively that [End Page 136] one is overwhelmed by the evidence, especially in the case of Soll und Haben, which is perhaps the best chapter of the book. This would almost be enough to characterize this book and recommend it to readers who need all the information they can get to understand German literary antisemitism in the nineteenth century. There are a few things, however, which bothered this reviewer. As a teacher of German-Jewish culture I am tempted to recommend the book for its richness of information; as a literary historian I am a bit surprised by its simpli fications; and as a literary critic I am disturbed by its style. I don’t want to argue about Gubser’s short history of Jewish emancipation in Prussia since 1812, which one can find much better described in many other books, but I would strongly disagree with his characterization of Moses Mendelssohn or the Haskalah as forerunners on the slippery road of assimilation. The dialectic of emancipation and assimilation in nineteenth- century Germany is well known, but reading Gubser’s history of antisemitism in Germany one has the impression that there were hardly any voices opposed to it. The same is true for his history of literary antisemitism in the nineteenth century. He quotes the well-known examples, like Clemens Brentano (Gockel und Hinkel),Wilhelm Hauff (Jud Süss), Wilhelm Raabe (Hungerpastor), Karl Immermann (Die Epigonen) Wilhelm Busch (Die fromme Helene, Plisch und Plum), Felix Dahn (Kampf um Rom), and Freytag of course, but again the book leaves the reader with the impression that German literature from Romanticism to Realism was entirely antisemitic. (Not to mention...