Versions Of Poems Research Articles

Tagore and Nationalism ed. by K. L. Tuteja and Kaustav Chakraborty

Reviewed by: Tagore and Nationalism ed. by K. L. Tuteja and Kaustav Chakraborty Sukanya Chakrabarti TAGORE AND NATIONALISM (e-book). Edited by K. L. Tuteja and Kaustav Chakraborty. New Delhi: Springer, 2017. xiv + 379 pp. The volume, Tagore and Nationalism, edited by K. L. Tuteja and Kaustav Chakraborty, presents a broad gamut of works by scholars from universities in India, Bangladesh, Scotland, and Italy. As the preface articulates, the conversations around Tagore's contribution to the discourse of nationalism emerged out of a critical need "to be inspired by Tagore's unshaken faith on the essential goodness of humankind that would restore the 'human' to this desolated world of antagonists and combatants" (p. vii) at a time when "the world seems to be getting fragmented by the fundamentalist designer of the narrow walls" (p. vii). Part I has eight chapters, each looking at a specific site of ambivalence. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya introduces the idea of "antinomies" in Tagore's nationalism, the jostling between a state and a society, between competition, and cooperation, where he considers a nation-state to be a mechanical organization, as opposed to a society, which has a more organic character. While Bhattacharya establishes the evolving nature of Tagore's ideologies, Krishna Sen defends Tagore's nationalism by pointing out the coexistence of Anglophilia and a disdain for the colonial state, ascribing it to Tagore's "multistranded background" (p. 35). Citing from Tagore's essay, "Nation ki?," Sukanta Chaudhuri notes Tagore chooses to retain the English word in the title of his essay due to his inability of finding a Bengali equivalent term. Chaudhuri explains that unlike the Western concept of a militant power-hungry nation-state, and the disjuncture between "private morality" and "public expediency" that it necessitates, for Tagore, the "political is the ethical" (p. 69). Tilottama Misra offers a critique of the limitations in Tagore's views of linguistic nationalism and echoes Krishna Sen on differences between an "English Tagore" and a "Bengali Tagore" (p. 32). Misra points out that despite promoting notions of inclusion and diversity in his English essays and international lectures, one cannot overlook the exclusions of India's Northeastern states—even "in his well-known [End Page 351] paean to the 'ruler of India's destiny (Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka)'" (p. 54). Taking this argument further, Misra points out how his 1898 Bengali essay "Bhasha-Bichhed," meant primarily for the emerging Bengali elites, supports a kind of colonial modernity that reinforces the evolutionary theory of languages and merging of "weaker languages" with "stronger ones" (p. 56). While Makarand R. Paranjape reminds us that Tagore restated the difference between a nation-state and social organization in his essays and lectures, R. Siva Kumar illustrates the making of a community as an example of vernacular nationalism through the example of Santiniketan.1 Tagore addressed the urban-rural divide and the "race problem" through indigenous education, reconstruction of village life, focus on nature, arts, and humanities, with the vision of making Santiniketan "national in aspect, international in spirit" (p. 95). K. Satchidanandan mentions the possibility that Tagore, foreseeing the rise of Hindu nationalism, was critical of a nation built purely on Hindutva values, while simultaneously being skeptical of "heartless globalization" (p. 119). Offering examples from Tagore's poems in the 1916 volume of Balaka, his political novels Chaturanga, Ghare Baire, and Gora, and his 1922 verse poems from Lipika, Fakrul Alam concludes Part I with his essay pointing the readers to Tagore's "alternative modernism" (p. 129), which celebrates experimentations with form, modernist techniques of narrative perspectives and a constantly evolving and enlarging sense of self. Part II explores relationships of national identity, Hindu culture and religion, and literature. Supriya Chaudhuri's essay identifies the gaps in Benedict Anderson's established relationship between a novel and a nation (in his Imagined Communities), arguing, while invoking Ranajit Guha, that subaltern communities are not included in this print-culture-led "imagination." Again citing Ghare Baire and Gora as examples, Chaudhuri proves Tagore's refusal of this correlation established by Anderson, as Tagore puts "notions of self and nation to the test" (p. 145), inevitably creating for the readers a "profound, inalienable feeling of self-difference, a...

Helene Johnson’s Barbaric Songs Choked

Helene Johnson’s Barbaric Songs Choked Eleanor Wakefield (bio) Helene Johnson, born in 1906, was among the younger poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Today, Helene Johnson suffers from relative neglect, which impoverishes our understanding of both the Harlem Renaissance and the possibilities of the sonnet form. Though her free verse poems are more often anthologized, her sonnets offer complex, sometimes deliberately ambiguous portrayals of Black women’s interiority. In particular, two of her sonnets, “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” (1928) and “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” (1927), have a shared contrast between sonnet and “song” that reveals one way that Johnson exploits the nuance of the form to simultaneously embody and critique the American sonnet tradition. This paper asks: what does the sonnet form contribute to the understanding of Black figures in America who are not (yet) American, and how does the form embody and also create this vision of America in contrast to an African or otherwise exoticized home? The poems use different rhyme schemes and depict different types of Black characters in America, raising different questions about assimilation, among other things. That said, the shared theme of song within the sonnet structure provides a way of imagining the creation of a place in America (or perhaps America making a type of figure out of the poetic object). The sonnet invites contrasts and tensions, in fact emphasizing them formally, and Johnson uses that effect to distance speaker from observation and form from what the poem represents; the form is aware of its history and its work in creating poetic meaning. In “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America,” a 1928 sonnet first published in Harlem, the contrast between speaker and subject of the poem (here in [End Page 230] the object position) is put in religious terms, with America represented by a missionary who has brought a “young native” to this continent. In “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,” a 1927 sonnet that appeared in both Caroling Dusk and Ebony and Topaz, the contrast between America and the man’s “home” (Africa or perhaps the Caribbean) is visual and aural, in how the man looks and sounds walking down the street. These poetic subjects, which appear in the object rather than the subject position of the poem, are not allowed to speak in the sonnet form, which, here, is an American form, representing the tenets of a culture they do not yet fit into. Both poems mention the “songs” of the characters. Their songs differentiate them from the people they are around, but the poetic form does not give voice to those songs. Though the sonnet is a “little song” in its meaning, it is now more associated with its constructedness, its lack of spontaneity, whereas a “song-like” poem tends to connote a feeling of spontaneity or unconstructedness. Of course, sonnet writers and readers know that the “constraint” of the form need not be “limiting,” but the association of the form with control, with tradition, and with labor marks it as distinct from a poem or song that seeks to appear spontaneous (or many lyric poems that critics historically dismissed as song-like, thereby also dismissing the skill required to write them, as was the case for many female poets historically). Thus “song,” in these poems and more broadly, connotes something closer to “natural” (or even primitive, revealed by the adjective “barbaric” in “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”) in that it may be unlearned or from a folk tradition, and something not yet worked into a particular shape like the sonnet has been. This distance between the song and the sonnet features prominently in both of these poems, emphasizing a distance between the speaker/observer and the observed, immigrant character whose songs are mentioned but not represented on the page. The physical presence of the Black body combines with a deep, emotional ambivalence about Christianity in “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” (1928), which imagines one woman’s [End Page 231] experience of the mythologized journey to “salvation” in America. The poem ends: And as the moon grew large and whiteAbove the roof, afraid that she would scream...

Shatter the Bell in My Ear: Selected Poems by Christine Lavant

Reviewed by: Shatter the Bell in My Ear: Selected Poems by Christine Lavant Vincent Kling Christine Lavant, Shatter the Bell in My Ear: Selected Poems. David Chorlton. Fayetteville, NY: Bitter Oleander, 2017. 128 pp. Clichés grow entrenched when they capture some truth; accordingly, the perennial indictment of translators as traitors rightly acknowledges that no translation, however skilled, can replicate all the qualities of the original.Failure or at best shortfall is inherent, a foregone conclusion, so bilingual editions of poems, like this selection from each of Lavant's volumes, are thus "no more than an honest admission of defeat from the outset," to quote Tim Parks. Lavant and Chorlton side by side provide readers with many moments of gratitude and admiration for apt renderings, but that juxtaposition raises demurrers as well. More than in most other pursuits, no assessment of any translation can be free of confirmation bias. As David Bellos pertinently asks, "How can you have theories and principles about a process that comes up with no determinate results?" Translators who believe, for example, that rhyme need not be replicated will usually judge the rhymes in Dorothy L. Sayers's version of Dante as awkward, clumsy, and forced; those who insist that capturing rhyme is essential will find them graceful, adept, and natural. This reviewer, himself a translator, has never read any rationale for omitt ing rhyme that didn't ring hollow, as here; Chorlton writes (xiv), "I have chosen more of the free verse poems [ … ] and where there is rhyme I find it preferable to hold on to the tone and meaning than attempting to replicate the echoing sounds." How does one aim preclude the other? Look at Anthea Bell's version of "Gingko Biloba" from Goethe's West- Östlicher Divan for an outstanding achievement in all respects. Look at Gunhild Kübler's triumphant edition of Emily Dickinson in German, at Max Knight's Christian Morgenstern, at Norman R. Shapiro's Théophile Gautier. Arguments that rhyme cannot or should not be transmitt ed are invalidated by Sayers, as noted, or, for just one more example, by Babett e Deutsch's rendering of Eugene Onegin, matched in this generation by Antony Wood's forthcoming edition of Pushkin's poetry. (Nabokov's perverse, mean-spirited rejection of rhyme in his rendering of Pushkin is one of the great betrayals in the whole history of translation.) These examplesrender inadmissible to this reviewer/translator that thereis any valid reason for Chorlton to avoid Lavant's rhymes, as if not observing them made the poems more authentic somehow. [End Page 161] Where Chorlton has distinct success is in so often finding apt renderings of Lavant's diction. Philippe Jaccott et (translated by Tess Lewis) uses a striking image to characterize Lavant's work: "beautiful as the old crucifixes in country churches, like old cloth, coarse and rough." Lavant's technical mastery, subtle and unobtrusive, is complete, notably as to lineation, but the reclusive countrywoman who wrote these poems never shows offor attempts conspicuous virtuosity. Chorlton keeps his translations as close to the earth and objects in nature, as does Lavant in not "improving" a diction almost always purposely reticent, expressing the depths of emotion through an animal, a plant, a household object, a rock, a tree, aspiring to the humility religious grounding offers while remaining in fierce debate with faith and without expecting spiritual assurance or comfort. It gratifies Bellos to say that no two translators would ever produce the same result, but this translator respects "Among withering apple trees / the souls of beggars speak / about bread that never runs out" (21) as an alert response to "Unter verdorrenden Apfelbäumen / reden die Seelen der Bett ler / von Brot, das nie ausgeht," or later in the same poem (Die Bett lerschale), "deaf and dumb children learn / the language of roots and of stones" ("und taubstumme Kinder erlernen / die Sprache von Wurzeln und Steinen"). The English features even more prominently the balance of two elements in each line, whereas the German "taubstumme" combines in one word what stands out better as two. Chorlton is also alert to Lavant's nuances of rhythm, even if he does not replicate them without modification...

Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith on War and Acquiescence

This essay considers works published by two women writers as Britain was preparing for hostilities against revolutionary France in 1793: a Fast Day sermon, Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, published anonymously by Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith’s novel The Old Manor House, and her blank verse poem The Emigrants. It considers how these works, which condemn the guilt arising from war, expose the problem of necessary acquiescence in what is condemned. Taken together, the writings illuminate two sides of the problem. As a Dissenter, Barbauld belonged to a social group that, during the early years of the French revolution, had reason to feel especially vulnerable to the threat of civil disorder; she therefore had a particular incentive to see the horrors of war abroad in relation to the fear of social unrest at home. For Smith, who identified herself publicly with the landowning classes, and who desired socially appropriate positions for her children, such horrors had to be set against the material opportunities made available by war. In both cases the representation of sympathy for the victims of war provides a way out of the moral impasse they encounter.

In the Sky at Nighttime by L. Deal

Deal, Laura. In the Sky at Nighttime. Iqaluit, NU: Inhabit Media, 2019.
 This illustrated poem shows what a polar village looks like at night and what is in the night sky. In the Arctic, winter nights are long, and it is dark as people go about their daily lives, so many people are familiar with the night sky. Tamara Campeau’s illustrations, each of which fill two facing pages, are in deep blue and purple hues, with the sky prominent in them. The text is overprinted on the artwork. Campeau’s rendering of the village has accurate details. Some of the houses have heating oil tanks outside. Paths to the doors have snow heaped alongside them. Power lines, attached to wooden power poles with insulators and transformers, loop through the village. The yellow light from electric lighting shines out through the windows of the houses. At the beginning of the book Laura Deal describes observable things in the sky: stars, falling snow, northern lights, ravens. Towards the end she becomes more figurative, introducing a mother’s song and dreams swirling in the sky.
 The text is a six verse poem, each verse beginning with the phrase “In the sky at night time.” The structure of the poem is reminiscent of Stephen Eaton Hume’s 1992 picture book, Midnight on the Farm, which also uses six verses, each beginning with a repeating phrase, to describe a nighttime world, however the two landscapes are distinct.
 Because this is an illustrated poem in the form of a picture book, rather than a picture book with text, some of the words are more difficult than one would expect in books for young children. For example, the dreams are “magical and extraordinary.” As a result, this text, simple as it is, will need some explanation. In the Sky at Nighttime is highly recommended for public libraries and elementary school libraries.
 Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sandy Campbell
 Sandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

The Poetics of Experimentation in the Poetic Devices A Study of Kadhim Al-Hajjaj's Experience

Experimentation is synonymous with modernism, innovation, breaking new ground and change but it acquires its importance from having great effectiveness as it is the most daring to go into new spaces. Experimentation is not limited to a particular epoch because each poetic period; experimentation is what gives the literary discourse its modernity and otherwise the literary discourse would be repeated and exhausted. This paper is a study of experimentation in the poetic works of the Iraqi poet Khadim AL-Hajaj (1942- ), published by Dar Sutoor 2017. It attempts to explore his style and techniques such as experimenting with the formal structure of the text which is the most outstanding aspect of experimentation in his poetry. One of his poetic forms is the narrative structure where the poem is like a story though it is written in verse. Al-Hajjaj does not employ music and metre in a conventional way; he combines more than one metre in his poetic texts and uses both the traditional metrical foot (taf'ila) and the prose poem, he even uses the classical line of verse ('Amudi) within the modern free verse poem exploiting all the musical potentialities to produce his poetic discourse. His other innovative features include the dedications and the titles. As for the content, his experimentation includes defamiliarization which is not his invention but he employed it in a particular way to make it part of his poetic discourse. The paper ends with a conclusion which sums up the results of the study.

Şİ R-İ ES AD EFENDİ (KÂŞİF) DE TERKİM-İ MUKTESEBAT

Poetry, means the composition of the poem in verse. This verse is a matter of verse art. The artist is the one who prevails in this matter with his vinner and the ignorant whatch. Of course; poets are categorized on this axis. Our poet, who is instrumental in the study, is of the sufism and road of the God. This opened; the poet's importance is important. The justification of this irritation is reserved for the same doors. Kâsif Es’ad Efendi, XVII. century is one of the essential personalities. It is certain that Kâsif, who was a sufi poet, was one of the school of Ummi Sinân and Niyâzi-i Misri. Didactic (instructive) poems in addition to the poetry of poet's poetry, poetry was read through his poetry. As a result, supply was made through dissection and representation. Thus; divan poetry was reminded of what the meaning of literary poetry in the perspective of a poet and what proportion it could take in the century in which the his poets lived.

Texases: Poems by John Poch

Reviewed by: Texases: Poems by John Poch Timothy E. G. Bartel (bio) John Poch, Texases: Poems (WordFarm, 2019), 89 pp. Each American state produces its own indelible poems. New York has Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Illinois has Sandburg's Chicago [End Page 625] poems, and California has Ginsberg's "Supermarket." But Texas has always seemed to inspire great novelists more than great poets, with Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry among the most prominent. Indeed, Cormac McCarthy's words grace the opening page of epigraphs in Poch's Texases, alongside a verse from Ezekiel. Both McCarthy and Ezekiel speak of places. "You are Texas," says a character from Blood Meridian. The prophet speaks of "The glory which I saw by the River Chebar." Poch follows these epigraphs with a prose poem aptly titled "Texas": Coyotes suddenly howled in the ditches miles away. Everyone looked at each other, wide-eyed and smiling. And then another group of coyotes a mile in a different direction. I believed it had little to do with the moon and much more to do with the sandhill cranes that had alighted in the cotton fields nearby. The ache of hunger. The reader can be forgiven for believing that Poch has fallen under McCarthy's spell and will lead his readers through an Old-Testament-haunted prose landscape for the duration of the collection. But Poch is done with prose poems after this opening salvo. The rest of the poems in Texases are in verse, many with formal elements like rhyme and sometimes strict meter. By the end of the collection, Poch proves himself less an inheritor of McCarthy's or McMurtry's tradition and more a student of the lesser known Texas laureate Vassar Miller. Here, for instance, is the final stanza of Miller's poem "Rivers," from If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems (1991): River de Brazos de Dios,river of rest and rescues,bear me with lullabies,safe to the arms of Jesus. And here is the final stanza of Poch's poem "The Brazos": In the shadow of wind on waterover white rocks moves light to delight,and just downstream aroundthe next bend, high tension wireshold above the scene. They travelto a hospital and to houses—one house where a womanirons shirtsleeves smoothas the arms of God. [End Page 626] Both stanzas tend toward trimeter, though Poch's meter is looser than Miller's, and both are concerned with where the Brazos river leads. Miller describes a simpler movement, being borne to divine arms, while Poch's movement is more labyrinthine: the bend of the river leads to high wires, which lead to both hospitals and homes, and it is in one of the homes the divine arms are found, figured in the ironed shirt. In the second line from "The Brazos" we see Poch play with the varying meanings of a repeated word: "light to delight." Such repetition risks mere redundancy, but Poch usually manages to avoid that when employing this verbal structure. In his first poem in verse, "God in the Shape of Texas," he plays with the meaning of the word "man": a necessary perpendicular walk on the caprockwithout barbed wire might have made a mana man from the expanse. Poch frames his exact repetition of the phrase "a man" with internal rhymes: "walk on the caprock," and "man from the expanse." To "make a man / a man" also sounds slightly parodic of a sort of mid-century Texan cliché, a phrase that could be at home in the mouth of a John Wayne or Larry McMurtry character. Poch shows himself alive to the landscape of sound as well as image, piling both rhyme and homonym into impressive chiasms, as in "In Corpus Christi": the miles long beach,interrupting love and rest.And the rest is loveand relentless sun. Not only do we have a chiasmic structure of word repetition with "love . . . rest . . . rest . . . love," but we also get the repetition of the vowel sounds from those two words again in "relentless sun." Further, Poch nudges us toward mapping themes from Hamlet onto these lines, echoing Hamlet's final...

Three Meditations on Anti-Asian Violence and COVID-19, or Fuck Off, Andrew Yang!

:This three-part free verse poem encapsulates my response as a Filipina American peminist scholar to the increasingly hostile anti-Asian violence aided and abetted by 45 amid this pandemic through a critique of Andrew Yang's naive "We Asian Americans are not the virus . . . "

A Study on Influx of Hymn and Possibility of Metamorphosis Poetics —Focusing on the Emergence of Song, the New Style Poetry, the Free Verse Poem.

A Study on Influx of Hymn and Possibility of Metamorphosis Poetics —Focusing on the Emergence of Song, the New Style Poetry, the Free Verse Poem.

Editor’s Introduction: The Sheltering Tree

Editor’s Introduction: The Sheltering Tree

Translator's Note: Look to the Law: On Translating the Poems of Ennio Moltedo

Notebook translator’s note Look to the Law On Translating the Poems of Ennio Moltedo by Marguerite Feitlowitz I ARRIVED IN Santiago de Chile on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon in early December 2016, too travel-weary to go exploring. But of course I set out anyway, with no sense that my working life was about to take a surprising detour. Wandering through Lastarria—an artsy and bustling old urban village—I turned into a lovely little square and found a terrific bookstore: Librería Ulíses. Before long, my arms were full of recently published books I intended to buy. And then, over my shoulder , came a booming voice: Basta con la narrative argentina!! Este es el país de poetas!” (Enough with the Argentine novels. This is the land of poets!) The voice came from a surprisingly delicate-looking man—Jorge Rosemary, bookseller, poet, publisher—who sat me down and for the next two hours brought me book upon book of Chilean poetry. My reaction to Ennio Moltedo was immediate and physical: as I read, the lines felt like they were passing right through me. That I am now translating Moltedo’s body of work is an ongoing gift from Jorge. Revered in Chile among readers and critics of twentieth-century Spanish-language poetry, Moltedo (1931–2012) has been compared with Cavafy for his allegiance to a city at once mythic and mundane ; with Char for the inventiveness of his political poems; with Saba for his mastery of extreme concision. The poems that appear in this issue of WLT are from La Noche, a collection of 113 prose poems written in response to the Pinochet regime but that also seem to arise from the present political moment—here and abroad—of brutal corruption and cruel politics. A native of Valparaíso, Moltedo is a poet of the sea, and his connection to ancient Mediterranean poets is manifest in his poems. The son of Italian immigrants, he was strongly attached to the Italian community of Valparaíso and adjacent Viña del Mar. He staunchly refused to relocate to Santiago, Chile’s political capital and seat of the cultural establishment. Moltedo, who daily strolled the streets of his port cities, was part of a tight-knit circle of local writers and artists. For many years, he was director of the University of Valparaíso Press. After his first book was published, Moltedo decided he would never again write according to externally driven meter; he de-lineated everything he’d written thus far and never again wrote poems in verse. He sought a deeper, more subtle music, whose sonorities would release the shape of sentences , the energy of images, and fuel a prosody of rhetorical power. Moltedo’s lines are always plain in terms of diction and vocabulary—a trait that only heightens their surrealism, lyricism, and political force. His rage is exquisitely controlled in tight syntax and in images that appear surreal but are grounded in material fact. One example is the “blue envelope” in “12,” which suggests the paperwork associated with employee firings. Because my Spanish is so Argentinean, Moltedo’s rhythms have been challenging. But what a pleasure to retrain my ear, to learn to hear anew a language in which I’ve lived for much of my life. Moltedo likes to employ specifically Chilean legalistic, military , and bureaucratic turns of phrase (the better to skewer Pinochet’s institutions); my guides for this vocabulary have been the Latin Americanist Jonathan Pitcher and especially Montserrat Madariaga, a journalist and scholar from Valparaíso who conducted an extensive series of interviews with the poet over the months of his final illness. This first publication of Moltedo in English is the fruit of literary generosity and friendship—a fitting tribute to a poet whose own gift for friendship was legendary. Marguerite Feitlowitz teaches literature at Bennington College, where she is founding director of Bennington Translates. Recent publications include translations of Luisa Valenzuela, Liliane Atlan, and Salvador Novo. Editorial note: To read five of Feitlowitz’s translations, turn to page 33. Librería Ulíses in Santiago de Chile. Photo courtesy of Librería Ulíses. 6 WLT WINTER 2019 ...

Poetry, Politics & the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material by Robert St. Clair, and: Arthur Rimbaud by Seth Whidden

Reviewed by: Poetry, Politics & the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material by Robert St. Clair, and: Arthur Rimbaud by Seth Whidden Thomas C. Connolly Robert St. Clair, Poetry, Politics & the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material. Oxford University Press, 2018. 271pp. and Seth Whidden, Arthur Rimbaud. London: Reaktion Books, ‘Critical Lives,’ 2018. 204pp. Robert St. Clair’s brilliant new book Poetry, Politics & the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material, takes as its point of departure a letter—not one of the “lettres du voyant” addressed to Georges Izambard and Paul Demeny, dated May 13 and 15, 1871 respectively, but another—sent to Izambard the previous August, during the Franco-Prussian war. Here, Rimbaud complains: “Ma ville natale est supérieurement idiote entre les petites villes de province” (1). This missive precedes, and to some degree explains, Rim-baud first flight to Paris, which ends almost before it begins with his arrest, brief imprisonment, and a ticket back home. St. Clair calls this Rimbaud’s initial attempt “to make his way in the capital” (1), but it soon becomes clear that the formulation also lends itself—catachrestically—to St. Clair’s book. In Poetry, Politics & the Body, the reader is invited to see how Rim-baud initially “make[s] his way in (. . .) capital.” As such, the book might be considered a highly erudite and persuasive response to Steve Murphy’s remark—made in his landmark Rimbaud et la Commune: microlectures et perspectives (2010)—that “on a généralement minoré la dimension idéologique de l’œuvre” (162). Instead of returning to the more overtly political poems written during and in the immediate aftermath of the Commune, such as “Chant de guerre parisien,” St. Clair seeks to show how Rimbaud’s poems were already ideologically charged—albeit in mostly hidden ways—as early as 1870. Specifically, and most strikingly, St. Clair makes the case that “the nineteenth-century thinker of emancipatory politics, history and indeed embodiment” to whom this early Rimbaud comes closest is Karl Marx, and that, together, the poet and the philosopher are part of “a common discursive, historical, and epistemological ‘ecosystem’ ” (20). As a study of Rimbaud’s verse poems, Poetry, Politics & the Body examines a domain that “remains curiously under-interrogated in English-language scholarship” (13). Each chapter provides an extensive interpretation of a single verse poem, four composed during 1870 and one in the fall of 1871. Of the five poems, only one—whose eponymous smithy challenges a timid Louis XVI to don the red bonnet, offering a transparent allegory for class conflict—might be considered political. They are for the most part “joke poems and parodies, (. . .) sonnets about drinking beer and [End Page 456] eating ham tartines in a bar, (. . .) quatrains about nothing in particular” (15). They are also all texts that trouble—rather than radically contest—rules of French versification, rules that Rimbaud will shatter in the years that follow, culminating with the creation of “Marine” and “Mouvement,” the first examples of “vers libre” ever written in French. But here, St. Clair skillfully demonstrates how even poems from 1870 contain stresses and cracks, formal imperfections that discreetly make the irruption to come little more than a matter of time. Chapter One, “Natural Bodies,” proposes to read one of three poems the fifteen-year-old Rimbaud sent to Théodore de Banville, a leading figure of Parnassian poetry, in May 1870. “Sensation” is a slight poem, consisting of just two quatrains, but in St. Clair’s hands it becomes the pretext to a series of highly intelligent and informative examinations of “the complex historical and poetic moment in which Rimbaud composed the poem” (22). St. Clair’s method consists in “following the unexpected ways in which such texts insistently link themselves to political and literary contexts and intertexts” (15). Specifically, he draws on the importance to the early Rimbaud of Parnassian poetry, arguing that Rimbaud’s brief flirtation with the movement—particularly although not exclusively through the figure of Banville—was not entirely antagonistic or parodic as is commonly presumed. Unlike the young Mallarmé or Théophile Gautier, for instance, Banville was not disconnected from political concerns. From as early as 1846, the poet espoused a “kind of...

Scribleriana Transferred: Manuscripts and Rare Books, 2018 to Early 2019

Scribleriana TransferredManuscripts and Rare Books, 2018 to Early 2019 James E. May • The University of Illinois bought at Bonhams New York's sale on March 9, 2018 an unpublished autograph manuscript of Isaac Newton called "Opus Galli Anonymi," 8 pp. recto and verso on two bifolia, 4to ($275,000, acquired with funds from Jim and Lionelle Elsesser). In it, Newton translated into Latin a French work on making the philosopher's stone. Bonhams describes the MS as "closely written in ink with numerous deletions and supralinear emendations, approximately 45 lines per page" (illustrated at Bonhams' website). Bonhams in Pasadena on February 11, 2018 listed another Newton autograph MS, this with quotations in Latin and Greek for his writings on prophecy, 26 lines on a slip 152 x 70 mm. (illustrated at its website). Bonhams notes that the first side's quotation from Procopius's Historia Arcana on the Vandals' invasion into Africa later appeared in Newton's MS "Tuba Quarta," and the other side's quotation from Eunapius in Life of the Philosophers and Sophists appears in an unpublished MS on the history of the church as well as in Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel. • Early in 2019 J. & S. Wilbraham listed a complete copy of the first edition of Æsop's Fables. With Instructive Morals and Reflections. … Adapted to All Capacities … [with] Life of Æsop (Printed [by Samuel Richardson] for J. Osborn, 1740 [advertised November 1739]), ESTC T164572, 12mo: xxxiv, [2], 194, with engraved titlepage (with large vignette of animals to right of tree and person); "in contemporary ruled calf" with raised bands with cracked joints and flaws including absence of front free endpaper and repair to one joint (c. $6000). More recently the copy has been relisted by Blackwell's, as bound in "contemporary dark sheep," for c. $9560. ESTC calls for twenty-four plates illustrating the fables, the number noted by Blackwell's, but Wilbraham noted twenty-five, presumably including the engraved titlepage. The work was edited by Samuel Richardson, his first published book, appearing shortly before Pamela. ESTC records the edition for only four libraries—the next two editions are rarer (1749) and equally rare (1753). • Quaritch corrects a misattribution in its listing for the sole edition of The North-Country [End Page 119] Wedding, and the Fire, Two Poems in Blank Verse (Dublin: Printed by A. Rhames, for J. Hyde, 1722), 4to: 16pp., disbound (c. $1640). ESTC T189066 lists this rarity as by Nicholas Brown (1651/2–1722). But Quaritch—as had Andrew Carpenter in Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland, where part of the first is reprinted (1998)—notes that it was written by Brown's son while at Trinity College: "it is the only published work by the Fermanagh-born poet and clergyman Nicholas Brown (1699–1734)." Quartich notes both pieces are burlesques reprinted in Matthew Concanen's Miscellaneous Poems by Several Hands (1724). "The North-Country Wedding" treats a wedding in the region of counties Tyrone and Fermanagh, and "The Fire" presents a poet in an urban garret trying to fix his roof. • A. R. Heath describes and illustrates a one-sided engraved broadside by Henry Carey entitled "A Ballad by Mr. Carey" with his poem beginning "Tho Cruel you seem to my Pain," in three eight-line stanzas; with four lines of musical notation at the top and three "For the Flute" below lyrics to second and third verses (colophon: "Sold only by D. Wright next Door to the Sun Tavern near Holbourn bars London," n.d.), with Heath conjecturing "c. 1720" (c. $193). Presumably Wright was an engraver, for the only other publication by "D. Wright" in ESTC is the undated sole publication of John Francis Davis, The Musical Companion, engraved throughout except for the dedication ("for D. Wright & D. Wright junr., & ye Author, & Thomas Wright"), ESTC T187048, 21 leaves folio. And the Sun Tavern near or in "Holbourn" brings up no ESTC record to help date Wright's activities. Heath calls it without evidence "the first publication of this Ballad with music written and composed by the poet." The poem appears first not in the 1720 2nd edition of Carey's Poems on Several Occasions but...

Who's Listening to Modernism? BBC Features and Audience Response

This article focuses on three literary features—A Room of One's Own (1946), centred on the work of Virginia Woolf, an adaptation of David Jones’ epic poem In Parenthesis (1946) and Herbert Read's verse play Moon's Farm (1951)—in order to examine how they reflected on and adapted various aspects of modernist innovation. It also examines the range of listener response offered in the BBC Listener Research Reports for these programmes—from surprise and delight to outright bewilderment, with many listeners pleased in principle with the challenging literary content, but looking for pointed guidance on how to approach it, whilst others who were receptive to avant-garde writing were quick to identify lapses in quality. This article therefore traces how literary modernism functioned, and was experienced, when adapted into an aural experience in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the most innovative period of the Features Department.

РЕГІСТРИ ЖИТТЯ Й ПОЕЗІЇ АНАТОЛІЯ МОЙСІЄНКА

The article is devoted to the general description of Anatolii Moisiienko’s poetry, presented in the collection “Selected Poems”. Registers of multifaceted master’s life and work are considered in close unity. His work as a poet is characterized by a great variety of genres: strict sonnets, pretended free verse poems, poetry for children, palindromes, poems, translations. A. Moisiienko is also the founder of a new genre and poetry direction – intellectual-sensory “chess poetry”. Numerous poetry of the master allow the reader to feel an olfactive (smelling) color sound, expressed occasionally by the entire narrative-semantic outline of the text, rather than lexically. The most important logos for him is love, which the artist comprehends as an insight into the metaphysical essence of the universe, as a sunshine, as a “radiance”. Regarding grammatical and philosophical categories, special attention should be paid to the category of tense in A. Moisiienko’s poems, which becomes a notable means of comprehension of all life events in the value dimension. A frontal analysis of grammatical tense of verbs-predicates in the poetry from the collection “Selected Poems” revealed that the present tense denoted a lyrical space in more than 40 percent of poetry. And among the various types of present tense, an aphoristic or expanded (generalized) type, characterizing poetry of a high ethic-philosophical level, prevails prominently.

An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise by Ross Chambers

Reviewed by: An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise by Ross Chambers Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck Chambers, Ross. An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise. New York, Fordham UP, 2015. Pp. 208. $35.00 US hardcover. Ross Chambers's penetrating essay focuses on Baudelaire's late works: the major verse poems of Tableaux parisiens, which were included in the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal in 1861, and the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris, an unfinished project at the time of Baudelaire's death in 1867. While still holding artistic beauty as a transcendent value (what Chambers terms "fetish aesthetics") like his contemporaries Gautier and Nerval, Baudelaire evolved in these late works towards a new conception of "supernaturalism" that moved from the natural world and the sublime to the artificial city and its strident chaos. The "natural supernaturalism" that, according to M.H. Abrams, characterizes Romantic aesthetics is thus subverted into a paradoxical "urban supernaturalism." Historically, this turn in Baudelaire's poetics corresponds with the poet's disenchantment with politics, after the brutal crushing of the 1848 revolution and Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état of 1852; it also coincides with Paris's increasing overpopulation and poverty, and with the dramatic destruction of old neighbour-hoods under Haussmann's modernization project. Ever present in Baudelaire's late verse and prose poems, noise is an overwhelming fact of daily urban life, which anchors the works in the harsh reality of the poet's time. Chambers reads time in Baudelaire's poetry on several interwoven levels: as the inner experience of ineluctable passing; as the continuous weight of violent historical events on that experience; and as absolute Evil, the destructive force of "le Mal," which Chambers strikingly equates with entropy. In Baudelaire's poems, he argues, subjective time and historical time are metaphorically interconnected with the weather, which, as scorching sun or violent storm, bears down on urban activities (notably on the flâneur's walks) and moods-a connection Chambers encapsulates in the phrase "the weather of time." Far from neutral, this connection is permeated with unease, [End Page 673] the diffuse sense that the everyday, though familiar, is strange and inscrutable. The inability to know what is familiar, precisely because it is familiar, a notion Chambers borrows from Hegel, saturates the atmosphere of the city: an alienating otherness lurks in the physical, emotional, and moral milieu that surrounds its inhabitants. In making the reader aware of this secret otherness, the poetics of noise, Chambers argues, has a disalienating effect. In the great poems of Tableaux parisiens written between 1859 and 1861, the agent of disalienation is allegory, a trope that, in itself, enacts otherness. Chambers offers complex readings of some of these enigmatic and often discussed poems, "Le Cygne," "Les sept vieillards," and "A une passante" in particular, and shows how specific formal disruptions function as poetic noise, unsettling our reading and alerting us to the limits of our understanding. In these poems, fleeting encounters with perturbing figures amongst the deafening din, disorder, or stormy weather of the city weave together noise, atmospheric phenomena, and emotional shock into a melancholic recognition that the "empty sky" leaves us at the mercy of the malevolent action of time and death, the downward movement of history. The prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris move from supernaturalism to irony. God's withdrawal from the world, Chambers argues, has abandoned it to an invisibly ironic and impenetrable immanence. Anonymity governs daily social relations. This "cruel but transparent irony that haunts the everyday" is made visible in the prose poems, in which seemingly transparent anecdotes of urban life turn ironically on to themselves, introducing interfering noise into interpretation. In "Perte d'auréole" and "Le Mauvais vitrier," for example, Chambers shows how, in the course of the poem, irony shifts undecidedly between the poet and the man he encounters (a fellow poet, a glazier), so that the lofty figure of the poet, and our reading assurance, end up lost in the gutter or shattered. Social distinctions are tumbled in a "poetics of anonymity." Chambers pays particular attention to the fact that...

I'll Take My Science Spicy, Please.

The Task by William Cowper was published in 1785. This blank verse poem in 6 books helped spark the Romantic era, commented on social issues to encourage change and influenced English authors, notably Jane Austen. The Task still resonates in modern times with Cowper’s catchphrase “variety is the very spice of life,” reminding us to embrace and diversify our perspective through new experiences and dynamic relationships. Diversity is advantageous and preferred in nearly all aspects of life. Even in biology, heterogeneity of selected cell populations and single-cell molecular profile variations are essential for population-level function as “functional diversity facilitates collective behavior that otherwise would be inaccessible to a homogenous population.”1 Drawing from cellular biological diversity, we as scientists should incorporate diverse educational and experiential knowledge from ongoing personal and professional development. Training and mentoring the next generation of scientists requires blended career knowledge. I admire researchers with diverse educational experience and believe that from diversifying one’s knowledge and experience a broader range of working skills and professional network emerges. With having a diverse perspective, creative problem solving and a willingness to entertain and accept new or alternative viewpoints are gained. This is not to be interpreted that a scientist should not have a particular research theme rather there are experiences, skills, and training beyond STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education to be successful in …

Portraits by the Artists as Young Men: Proust, Valéry, Colour

Marcel Proust and Paul Valery have received very little comparative critical attention. My article undertakes the first comparative analysis of works written and published by Proust and Valery just four years apart when both were in their early twenties: Valery’s prose ‘Glose sur quelques peintures’ (1891), which focuses on portraits by Cristofano Allori and Francisco de Zurbaran, and Proust’s ‘Portraits de peintres’ (1895), verse poems in which he celebrates paintings by Albert Cuyp, Paulus Potter, Antoine Watteau, and Anthony Van Dyck. My focus will be on the role colour plays in these brief, intense texts that are structurally at odds with the much more expansive spaces of the authors’ later works — A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) and the Cahiers (compiled 1894–1945). How do Proust and Valery use colour when transposing the visual medium of painting into text? Proust is above all a prose writer and Valery made his name as a poet. Does Proust’s handling of colour in his poetic texts differ from the ways in which colour figures in A la recherche ? How does Valery’s use of colour in his prose ‘Glose’ relate to the chromatic features of his verse? By taking colour in works written about paintings as a common thread I aim to determine the similarities and divergences of Proust and Valery during the years of their apprenticeship as writers.

“Allegiance and Parody”: An Interview with Robert Pinsky on Stevens and Frost

“Allegiance and Parody”: An Interview with Robert Pinsky on Stevens and Frost Laura Marris and Robert Pinsky THE FOLLOWING CONVERSATION began in Boston in May 2016 while we were working on Robert’s Massive Open Online Course “The Art of Poetry.” We continued the interview over e-mail. The transcript has been edited for clarity. Laura Marris: Robert Frost seems to have a very early presence in the lives of many Americans (and not only through memorization in high school—though people are sometimes surprised when they read “The Road Not Taken” later in life!). Do you remember the first time you read a Wallace Stevens poem? Did you have a first impression of him or of Frost? Robert Pinsky: The (then) anthologized poems of Stevens were a lot more attractive than the (then) anthologized poems of Frost. For Stevens it was “Domination of Black,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “The Snow Man,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” When I was eighteen or nineteen years old, those seemed more exciting than “The Road Not Taken,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Birches,” and “Mending Wall.” And I guess they still do. But in time I read “Directive,” “Provide, Provide,” “‘Out, Out—,’” “The Most of It,” and “Acquainted with the Night.” The volcanic energy of those poems made me look again at Robert Frost altogether. For me, technical mastery was part of why and how I read both poets. I had read a bit of Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats—enough to appreciate the pentameters of, say, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” and “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” Stevens’ blank verse and his poems in rhyme (and also those poems I later learned began in rhyme that Stevens revised out) seemed to illuminate the free verse of, say, “The Snow Man.” In Stevens’ free verse poems, the capital letters at the beginning of each line seemed to assert, this is verse, just as much as something written with end-rhyme. If anything, there’s a greater degree of difficulty in making such strong rhythms without iambic movement—far from Frost’s “playing tennis with the net down.” It’s something thrilling, difficult, supremely expressive. [End Page 65] The sentences of “To Earthward” and the sentences of “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” in their play with and against the rhythms of the lines, fascinated me in a similar way. Or maybe in the exact same way? L.M.: Could you tell me a little more about that fascination with a Stevens or a Frost line? Are there certain musical impulses that are unique to each of them? R.P.: Every poet, every poem, has a distinct, unique music. But if you heard a few stanzas of “Sunday Morning” and “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” from behind a closed door, so you could make out the sentence-sounds but not the words, I think you might perceive two things about that verbal music. First, that these are two different composers, and second, that these might be very great composers. I’ll risk going slightly further: in “Domination of Black” and “The Snow Man,” I hear a characteristically slow, measured, cello-like free verse. In “To Earthward” and “Provide, Provide,” I hear rapid, rippling, sometimes even pizzicato iambic verse. L.M.: Among the poems you recently collected in Singing School, you call Stevens’ poem “Madame La Fleurie” a lightning stroke, “the kind of imaginative stroke that cannot be forced or willed.” If you look at Frost’s revisions (I’m thinking of “Design,” for example), you can see a more incremental process. Where is the line between willing something and revising it? Or is this difference in process a reflection of each poet’s relationship to the formal music of their lines? R.P.: I was thinking of Stevens’ amazing conclusion, that vision of our mother Earth as “a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.” That “bearded”! Frost’s imagination may never be that fortissimo. But dazzling in its own way: the word “embodiment” in “The Most of It,” and the swimming animal “Pushing the crumpled water up ahead.” Or, in a different way, the word...