Unpublished Poetry Research Articles

Sarah Wesley, British Methodism, and the Feminist Question, Again

This essay introduces the unpublished poetry of Sarah Wesley (1759-1828), daughter of co-founder and poet of Methodism Charles Wesley. Although Sarah Wesley is a crucial (if unacknowledged) source for our knowledge of early Methodism, her poetry challenges many of the denomination's central tenets, particularly its doctrine of love. What is more, the poetry offers a new tenor to the period's most pressing political concerns, as well as possibilities for reconsidering the relationship between religion and early liberal feminism. Contextualizing Wesley in the incipient feminist debates at the end of the eighteenth century, I give particular regard to the thought of Catharine Macaulay and Hannah More (both of whom Wesley knew), and of Mary Wollstonecraft (whom Wesley anticipates).

NEW LETTERS, NEW POEMS: ANN YEARSLEY IN CONTEXT

For a long time Ann Yearsley was remembered only as an unfortunate footnote in Hannah More's career as a writer and philanthropist. Having enjoyed considerable fame during her 11 years as an active writer (subscribers to her poetry included the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Charlotte Smith, prime ministers and politicians, and high-ranking clergy), Yearsley, and her works, fell into obscurity within only a few years of her death. It would be nearly 200 years before scholars began to reappraise Yearsley's career, and to investigate the reasons for the absence of what was clearly an important voice during the last years of the eighteenth century. In this essay, the author considers the advances in understanding of Yearsley's life and works made during the past 20 years, in particular Mary Waldron's contribution as Yearsley's (only) biographer, and the importance of her emphasis on archive research to Yearsley scholarship, and the author's own research in preparing the first collected edition of Yearsley's complete works. Through a discussion of a selection of Yearsley's unpublished poetry, the author considers the kinds of contexts in which it is now possible to locate Yearsley and her work, and the impact on our understanding of regional culture and labouring-class poetry at the end of the eighteenth century.

Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works by Arturo Islas

4 7 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 5 Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works. By Arturo Islas. Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama. Houston, Texas: Arte Público Press, 2003. 276 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Curtis Marez University of Southern California, Los Angeles Surprisingly, the remarkable work of the queer Chicano writer Arturo Islas (1938-1991) has attracted relatively little critical attention. A new volume, Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works, may help remedy this neglect. This work collects an array of Islas’s writing, including previously unpublished short sto­ ries and significantly different drafts of some of his published works, a generous selection of previously unpublished poetry, and a group of his essays and lec­ tures on Chicano literature. It also includes an excellent critical introduction by Frederick Luis Aldama, the author of an Islas biography titled Dancing with Ghosts (2004). Together with his novels, the writing in this volume indicates that Islas was a major twentieth-century intellectual and artist. It also provides a unique window on the history of Chicano studies in the academy. One of the first Chicano undergraduates (1956-1960) and the first Chicano graduate student to earn a Ph.D. in English (1969), Islas was a trailblazer at Stanford before such institutions even gave lip service to notions of diversity. As the first Chicano professor of English there, he taught undergraduate courses in Chicano litera­ ture, helped to educate one of the first cadres of Chicano/a students to graduate from Stanford, and thereby gave Chicano studies a real, albeit tenuous, founda­ tion at the university. Further evidencing his participation in the educational wing of the Chicano movement, in 1974 Islas founded the journal Miquiztli, in which he published the work of his students as well as some of his own work, including an essay titled “Can There Be a Chicano Fiction or Writer’s Block?” about the dilemma of the Chicano artist caught between the demands of the movement and the elitism of the academy. Similarly, in “Saints, Artists, and Vile Politics” and “Richard Rodriguez: Autobiography as Self-Denial,” Islas analyzes the politics of publishing and the emergent canon of Chicano writers. Given contemporary interest in globalization and hemispheric studies, as well as the trend toward the formation of academic programs that combine Latino and Latin American studies, Islas’s efforts to link Chicano literature to Latin American traditions seems particularly prescient. My only quibble with the anthology is that it does not include more of his critical writings. Also noteworthy are the short stories and, especially, the poetry concern­ ing sexuality. At the same time that Islas was challenging the racist exclusions of academia, he was also an active participant in the gay revolution centered in San Francisco, where he frequented the bathhouses and sadomasochism clubs. In poems such as “A Cock,” “The Island,” “Bondage and Discipline,” “Ambush,” “Faggot,” “Nelly and Butch: A Song,” and “Motherfucker, or the Exile,” Islas emerges as the poet laureate of queer Chicano melancholy, obsessed with B o o k R e v ie w s 4 7 3 racialized and sexualized forms of loss and abjection. In his poetry, Islas explic­ itly represented sadomasochistic role playing as revisions of family dramas—a revealing connection given that his most famous work, The Rain God (1991), focuses on a tortured family melodrama. Although Islas has sometimes been criticized for having been in the closet, Aldama’s anthology underlines the criti­ cal importance of “queemess” to his art and suggests fresh ways to think about Chicano sexuality. This collection ofArturo Islas’s work should be ofgreat inter­ est to cultural critics working in a variety of fields, and, in conjunction with his novels, it would be a welcome addition to graduate and undergraduate courses on Chicano literature, queer literature, and twentieth-century U.S. literature more generally. 4 O b i t u a r y Susan J. Rosowski (1942-2004) died November 2, 2004, after a determined, and typically unremarked, struggle with cancer. Sue, as she was known to everyone, was the...

Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany

Zafer enocak is the most prominent and versatile German Turkish writer today. A prize-winning poet, translator, editor, political and philosophical essayist, and fiction writer, enocak is the most challenging voice of the Turkish population in united Germany. His stylish and provocative essays explore taboo and repressed aspects of relations between Occident and Orient, Europe and Islam. His fiction has won him international acclaim, especially the post-unification novel Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft (1998), which deals with the German-Jewish-Turkish-Armenian complex. But poetry is always at the heart of his work. This is the first book in any language devoted to Zafer enocak. It is intended both as an introduction for the general reader and as a resource for the specialist. The volume includes a brief biography, previously unpublished poetry, and an interview with the author held during his period as writer-in-residence at University of Wales Swansea in May 2000.

Lost but Found: The “Missing” Poems of C. S. Lewis's Spirits in Bondage

status of the literary corpus of C. S. Lewis's prose has largely been resolved. While Walter Hooper's latest project, the collected letters, (1) will undoubtedly produce a number of heretofore unpublished letters, it is doubtful that any new essays or works of fiction will appear, particularly given the controversy provoked by Hooper's publication of Dark Tower (1977). (2) At the same time, the status of Lewis's unpublished poetry remains unresolved. (3) Specifically, in the preface to the 1986 reprint of Lewis's Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919), Hooper reviewed the initial publication history of this volume, Lewis's first published work. He did this primarily by drawing on Warren Lewis's notes in The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850-1930. Warren's careful assessment of the development of Spirits in Bondage includes reference to an early collection of poems titled The of a Cod: It would be during this [Easter 1915] visit to Little Lea that Clive wrote the first poetry which he himself considered worthy of preservation so late as In the two years intervening between Easter 1915 and Easter 1917, he wrote fifty[-]two poems which he copied carefully into an old Malvern Upper Fifth Divinity note book, prefixing them with a chronological list of titles. whole is entitled The [M]etrical [M]editations of a Cod. (LP 4:306) (4) Hooper then noted that the Metrical Meditations were lost, perhaps, according to Warren, in a fire since Jack himself burnt all documents therein transcribed [in LP], including his own diaries, in or soon after 1936 (xii). Accordingly, scholars of Lewis's poetry have assumed that the Metrical Meditations were destroyed. However, as neared the end of research for C. S. Lewis, Poet: Impulse of His Poetic Legacy, came across a curious holograph notebook purported to be in the hand of Arthur Greeves, Lewis's lifelong friend to whom he had entrusted the Metrical Meditations at various times, particularly when Lewis was serving in France during World War I. (5) title page of this notebook, Early Poems, reads: English Verses Made By--Clive Staples Lewis: --and Copied by His Friend--Joseph Arthur Greeves:--Belfast in the Year 1917. Fifty-two poems are listed in chronological order in the table of contents. (6) What caught my eye was the number fifty-two, since this is the identical number Warren refers to as having comprised Metrical Meditations. am now ready to argue that Early Poems is in fact a draft of the lost collection titled Metrical Meditations. (7) This essay will review briefly the evidence for this contention, note the relationship between Early Poems (also, by association, Metrical Meditations) and Spirits in Bondage, (8) and publish for the first time twenty-one heretofore unpublished poems found in Early Poems. Lewis's letters indicate that Greeves was intimately involved in the development of his earliest lyrical poems. On 29 June 1915 Lewis wrote Greeves: I am glad to hear that you are keeping up the 'illustrative' side of your art, and shall want you to do some for my lyric poems. You can begin a picture of my 'dream garden' where the 'West wind blows.' As directions inform you it is 'girt about with mists,' and is in 'the shadowy country neither life nor sleep,' and is the home of 'faint dreams' (CL 134). Undoubtedly Lewis was referring to passages in the heretofore unpublished poem My Western Garden that appears as the first poem in Early Poems: know a garden where the West-Winds blow; (9) Far hence it lies, and few there be that know, And few that tread the road that leads thereto. Its gladsome glades are girt about with mists, And o'er its sward a slumberous streamlet twists, Flowing like Lethe, soundless. [...] No chart will guide thee to that twilit land, Nor mariner hath reached that Ocean's strand, For space it knoweth not, nor Time's rough hand. …

Unpublished Poetry Excerpts

Unpublished Poetry Excerpts

The cartography of despair: Randall Swingler's The Map

The poet, novelist, playwright, critic and editor Randall Swingler was the British Communist Party's best-known writer between the early 1930s and 1956. A founder editor of The New Reasoner , he was a crucial link between the Old Left and the first New Left. But in his last unpublished poetry he repudiated the utopianism of both the 1930s and the late 1950s. No other English poet wrote so powerfully about the intellectual and emotional crisis caused by the events of 1956 as Swingler did in his valetudinarian epic, The Map (1967), published here for the first time.

The Unpublished Poetry of Owen Dodson

The following is a selection of the unpublished poetry of Owen Dodson (19141983), culled from old handwritten or typewritten drafts found in various folders. Dodson, not unlike many poets, was accustomed to writing whenever the writing mood surfaced, and on whatever surface was at hand. He would write while at dinner, or in transit, on the backs of napkins, or on handbills, or brown paper bags; most of what survives, even some of the typewritten poems, are illegible or have portions missing. Some of these are early versions of later published poems; some are what Dodson might have considered failed efforts. Many of them are ideas which may have seemed wonderfully rich in their conception, but were ultimately distorted in their execution, and much of the distortion came from either or both of two sources: rheumatism and alcohol. What remains undistorted in these poems is Dodson's tragic sense of life as circumscribed by the recurrent specter of death. While Dodson was still a youth, the deaths of both his parents, only eighteen months apart, left their first and lasting impressions. Later in life, the death of his brother, and the passing of close friends and associates such as Paul Robeson, W.H. Auden, and Arna Bontemps, all within only a few months, reinforced an already pronounced awareness of mortality.' Nevertheless, there also appears in Dodson's poetry, in opposition to the threat of death, the eternal promise of faith. Sometimes this too suffers, but it always seems prepared to ward off death with its countervailing presence. At the horizon of this urge toward faith is a strong religious sensibility, nurtured by a strict Baptist upbringing. But the God of Dodson's universe must work long hours and often put in overtime, as death-wearing among its several guises cynicism, despair, failed intimacy, and racial discord-is capable of inciting chaos without notice. These two cosmic elements, faith and death, eternally at war with each other, characterize Dodson's poetic career-even and perhaps especially unto these attempts, which may also have fallen victim to a slow disintegration. Dodson probably responded to these poems as some of us would to so many unruly children-often with regret, but nevertheless with love. Even their flaws reflect something of the marrow of the poet's craft. In these works, talent, structure and nuance prevail as strength, sobriety and security appear, at points, to have ebbed. Though reconstructing these poems has not been a simple task, the responsibility for their remaining flaws is mine alone. Trained in the austere tradition of English poetry, Dodson ordinarily brooked no transgressions. Wherever spelling, punctuation or capitalization has been problematic, I have tried to retain Dodson's idiom as

Not "As She Fulfills His Dreams" but "As She Is": The Feminist Voice of Christina Rossetti

Not "As She Fulfills His Dreams" but "As She Is": The Feminist Voice of Christina Rossetti Terry L. Spaise University of California, Riverside The "canonization" of Christina Rossetti as a woman and poet gained considerable momentum after her death due primarily to the number of platitudinous obituaries written about her and to William Michael Rossetti's idealized (and vastly edited) construct of his sister 's life and his attempts to censor and/or alter the mood and content of her previously unpublished poetry. Some of these works he suppressed altogether, possibly because their message was too personal or contradictory to the picture he had painted of his sister, and, in many cases, he "felt free to alter words in some of the poems ... to tone down the sensuality which is one of the strongest characteristics of her poetry, but which seemed inappropriate to her brother" (Jones 228). As a result of all of these posthumous actions, Rossetti's artistic successes and talents were stressed far less than the example she supposedly set of the perfect Victorian woman who posed no threat to the masculine portion of her society in either a personal or professional capacity. Her verses were lauded as examples of her life of self-sacrifice, simplicity, personal suffering, and lack of egoism and were professed to indicate her wholehearted support of the patriarchal social system in which she lived. At the time of her death, very little was mentioned of her work as a lay helper at Highgate, a sanctuary for fallen women, her active support of antivivisection , her interest in projects for women's education, and her acquaintance with the organizers of a Factory Girls' Club (Leighton 123). Even less was revealed about her volatile temper, failed love affairs, and her devotion to her art. Today, much of the research on Rossetti has focused on who the real Christina Rossetti was, how she really viewed the world in which she lived, and how those views and feelings manifested themselves in her verses. Scholars have attempted to answer such questions as how her religious canon exemplifies and explains her philosophy about life and God, what her succession of passive and dying women reveals about her thoughts of male/female relationships , and what her poetry tells us about her views of woman's place in this world and the next. Because Rossetti herself was an intensely private person who resisted revealing any personal information about herself (indeed, as Kathleen Jones states, she destroyed 53 54Rocky Mountain Review almost all personal material before her death), and because of William Michael's attempts to hide the real woman behind an idealized one, the answers to the above questions may be difficult to discover . Where, then, do we look for insights to Rossetti's social, political, and moral sentiments and attitudes? Where else but her poetry, which contains a magnificent breadth of style, theme, and craftsmanship. In the limited correspondence available to us, it is obvious that Rossetti was a serious artist who worked hard to perfect her skills as a poet. It is also clear that, at least early in her writing career, she needed the security of Dante Gabriel's approval of her verses and valued his observations and suggestions for change. After all, she was continually reminded by both her family and the general public of her brother's genius, and, true to the sentiments ofher age, she did not presume to place her own verses on a par with his. However, as she grew more secure with her art and talent, and as her work achieved a marked degree of public acceptance and praise, she was more reluctant to follow the critical advice of her brothers. She became very cognizant of her own artistic vision and voice, and on more than one occasion refused to follow Dante Gabriel's suggestions for revising both the theme and content of her work, which he felt was too radically challenging to contemporary values.1 It is this "radical" aspect of her verse which I want to explore in this article. To call Christina Rossetti a feminist may be a bit misleading and inaccurate, particularly considering her belief, based primarily on religious...

Not "As She Fulfills His Dreams" but "As She Is": The Feminist Voice of Christina Rossetti

The canonization of Christina Rossetti as a woman and poet gained considerable momentum after her death due primarily to the number of platitudinous obituaries written about her and to William Michael Rossetti's idealized (and vastly edited) construct of his sister's life and his attempts to censor and/or alter the mood and content of her previously unpublished poetry. Some of these works he suppressed altogether, possibly because their message was too personal or contradictory to the picture he had painted of his sister, and, in many cases, he felt free to alter words in some of the poems . . . to tone down the sensuality which is one of the strongest characteristics of her poetry, but which seemed inappropriate to her brother (Jones 228). As a result of all of these posthumous actions, Rossetti's artistic successes and talents were stressed far less than the example she supposedly set of the perfect Victorian woman who posed no threat to the masculine portion of her society in either a personal or professional capacity. Her verses were lauded as examples of her life of self-sacrifice, simplicity, personal suffering, and lack of egoism and were professed to indicate her wholehearted support of the patriarchal social system in which she lived. At the time of her death, very little was mentioned of her work as a lay helper at Highgate, a sanctuary for fallen women, her active support of antivivisection, her interest in projects for women's education, and her acquaintance with the organizers of a Factory Girls' Club (Leighton 123). Even less was revealed about her volatile temper, failed love affairs, and her devotion to her art. Today, much of the research on Rossetti has focused on who the real Christina Rossetti was, how she really viewed the world in which she lived, and how those views and feelings manifested themselves in her verses. Scholars have attempted to answer such questions as how her religious canon exemplifies and explains her philosophy about life and God, what her succession of passive and dying women reveals about her thoughts of male/female relationships, and what her poetry tells us about her views of woman's place in this world and the next. Because Rossetti herself was an in-

Rethinking passionate friendships: the writing of mary fullerton

Abstract This paper focusses on the unpublished love poetry written by the Australian feminist writer, Mary Fullerton, to her life-long friend Mabel Singleton. Most of the poems were written between 1909 and 1924. In her published poetry, Mary Fullerton emphasised the quality of ‘separateness’. In her extensive correspondence with compatriot writer, Miles Franklin, she constructed herself as a woman who lacked the ‘sex instinct’, a ‘go alone’ woman. The eighty or so unpublished love poems to Mabel Singleton (many with dedications and dates) tell quite a different story. The paper examines Mary Fullerton's writing in the light of the discourses of homosexuality available to her in the first decades of this century. It also reviews contemporary feminist research on nineteenth-century passionate friendships.

John Wesley's Experimental Divinity. Studies in Methodist doctrinal standards. By Robert E. Cushman. Pp. 223. Nashville, TN.: Kingswood Books/Abingdon Press, 1990. $14.95. 0 687 20446 I - The Limits of ‘Love Divine’. John Wesley's response to antinomianism and enthusiasm. By W. Stephen Gunter. Pp. 368. Nashville, Tn.: Kingswood Books/Abingdon Press, 1990. $15.95. 0 687 21856 X - Mirror and Memory.

John Wesley's Experimental Divinity. Studies in Methodist doctrinal standards. By Robert E. Cushman. Pp. 223. Nashville, TN.: Kingswood Books/Abingdon Press, 1990. 15.95. 0 687 21856 X - Mirror and Memory. Reflections on early Methodism. By Richard P Heitzenrater. Pp. 286. Nashville, Tn.: Kingswood Books/Abingdon Press, 1990. 0 687 27069 3 - The Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley, I. Edited by S. T. KimbroughJr and Oliver A. Beckerlegge. Pp. 325. Nashville, Tn.: Kingswood Books/Abingdon Press, 1990. 0 687 43310 X - Volume 42 Issue 3

Unpublished Poetry of the 12th and 14th Centuries in the Baron David Guenzburg Collection

Unpublished Poetry of the 12th and 14th Centuries in the Baron David Guenzburg Collection

Spee, Southwell, and the Poetry of Meditation

HERE IS a curious similarity between the lives and works of Robert Southwell (1561-95) and Friedrich von Spee (159135).1 Both were descendent from nobility, were well schooled in the continental humanistic tradition, and, at an early age, became Jesuits. Later both were deeply involved as missionaries in the Counter-Reformation movements of their homelands; both witnessed religious executions and wrote tracts appealing for toleration; both risked and early gave their lives to the service of God, and both left behind a legacy of unpublished vernacular poetry. The remarkable similarity of their poetry cannot be safely explained on the basis of direct influence of the older writer upon the younger,2 but may rather be looked upon, to a large extent, as the product of a very similar religious and literary environment.