View Of Poetry Research Articles

Romance and Readership in Twentieth-Century France: Love Stories by Diana Holmes

MLR, 105.1, 2010 255 Jean-Luc Nancy. In this ffrench not only examines but intervenes, and he returns to community inChapter 4 by, in part, privileging a reading ofMadame Edwarda through Duras's La Maladie de lamort. Throughout this refreshingly dense book, ffrench is concerned to reappraise the 'spectacle of sacrifice as such' (p. 58). He draws attention, for example, to Bataille's view of poetry as a site of sacrifice but insists that it remains an implicit critique of the sacrificial, and the potential dissolution of sacrificial thought' (p. 85). ffrenchtakes Bataille's work to the limit of sacrifice and beyond into exposure?to the other, to death, eroticism?in order to advance a position thatmoves away from an idea of sacrifice as an action (that of the soldier or of themartyr, for example) thatwould benefit thewhole towards a notion of sacrifice that provokes a politics open to the other. At times, ffrench's work considers Bataillean sacrifice as an institution, at times sacrifice is literal, referential: 'in the event of a bloody sacrifice [...] something else emerges, namely the affective charge thatpasses between and across the gathered community at the sight of the slitting of the victim's throat' (p. 6). This is inevitable as Bataille was drawn to the 'real thing' and itsaffects. In his treatment ffrench,unlike Nancy and, even more so,Agamben, makes the argument thatBataille's notion of sacrifice can be rethought in a productive way, and inhis introduction he argues that to do so is 'worthy of consideration when one part of the globe constitutes itselfas a unitary existence at the expense of all others, and in a context where there is a marked disparity between themoralistic or cynical discourses of national or international security and the affect induced by the spectacle of the death that itdeals' (p. 6). Having established thisvista at the outset, ffrenchleaves itto the reader to establish the relation between itand the contents of the book, which, far from the interna tional order, offerassured, probing readings thatpersistently return to the triptych of figures cited in the subtitle and conclude with a view of exposure which 'is not a passive and silent sufferingof alterity,but also a compulsion, a drive towards the other' (p. 190). Here exegesis responds to a principle of insufficiency that findsnot completion within the other but the resistance of enclosure. In pursuing Bataille's legacy ffrenchseeks not simply to see where ithas got to but makes an invaluable contribution to it. University College Cork Patrick Crowley Romance and Readership in Twentieth-Century France: Love Stories. By Diana Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. xi+i54pp. ?40. ISBN 978 0-19-924984-8. Diana Holmes's study surveys and defines twentieth-century French 'romantic' fiction.However, as her subtitle implies, she does more than this: taking 'romance' back to theMiddle Ages, she gives modern romantic fiction its history, ranging across the centuries in her firstchapter and citing seventeenth- and eighteenth century authors such as d'Urfe, Mme de Lafayette, Riccoboni, Charrieres, and Prevost. This long perspective enables her the better to suggest differences be tween, on the one hand, literature by both men and women that has taken love as 256 Reviews a central but not exclusive interest, and, on the other, the popularizing romantic novel' thatplays on certain stereotypes, isusually written bywomen, and is targeted at a female readership. Plays on stereotypes?up to a point. For,while Holmes does skilfully tease out the long-running psychological functions of this genre (the hero must combine masculinity' with an almost motherly protectiveness; the heroine must possess amodicum of feistiness), she also brings out its flexibility: she shows almost decade by decade how the twentieth-century romantic novel adapted to the social needs of the nation. These of course were various: Resistance romances were published while Catholic-leaning and morally respectable series such as 'Bib liotheque de ma fille' continued on their unstoppable path. Not the least virtue ofHolmes's book is that it interweaves with the potboilers the fiction of the cen tury's famous female writers: it locates Colette's and Beauvoir's Tove stories' in a context that includes Georges Ohnet and Delly. (Ohnet's...

Poetry, Ontology, and Autobiography in Gide and Sartre

An examination and comparison of Sartre's condemnation of poetry in Carnets de la drôle de guerre and Qu'est-ce la littérature and Gide's censure of it in his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, reveals that the former rewrote in terms of temporality and ontology a critique that the latter had already formulated in a more literary language. Both disparage poetic diction as an intransitive use of language and criticise the poet as a narcissist who seeks to produce an essential image of himself in his poetic objects—thereby negating the temporality of the subject, which is characterised by becoming. Poetry is thus inherently autobiographical, but inauthentically so. Having ostensibly set up an opposition between poetry and narrative prose, they then undermine the dichotomy by revealing that poetry and narrative are temporally and ontologically equivalent: both freeze time and imply an essentialist conception of subjectivity. This view of poetry runs counter to a presumption shared by many critics of autobiography that poetry is a particularly appropriate vehicle for the expression of the decentered modern subject. Having rejected both poetic and narrative autobiography as inauthentic, Gide will turn to the exploration of non-linear narrative in Les Faux-monnayeurs, a precursor to the French new novel; Sartre will ostensibly, but ambiguously, bid farewell to literature in Les Mots.

The Paradoxes of Nature in Wordsworth and Coleridge

Coleridge and especially in the late 1790s, are rather loosely thought of as having been primarily poets. The matter will bear being looked into little further, however: how far did their views of nature converge, how far was there--as Coleridge later came to think concerning their views of poetry--a fundamental underlying disagreement? Coleridge was at that time making his name as a Unitarian preacher; he was thought of as a political and theological writer as much as a poet. It was who thought of him as a devotee of nature, addressing him in The Prelude as one The most intense of Nature's worshippers, In many things my brother, chiefly here In this my deep devotion How far, then, was Nature a subject of their conversations in 1798? We have a tantalizing glimpse in the Biographia, where they discuss the possibility of writing different kinds of supernatural poetry, and another there in the well-known story by Coleridge of how a spy, sent by Government to monitor their activities, was at first made anxious by hearing them talk about a nosy and thought that he had been rumbled until he realized that they were talking about a man who had written a book and lived a long time ago. Apart from mentions by Southey and the whole story was considered probably apocryphal by many biographers--at least until 1908, when a researcher named Eagleston found documents confirming the record in the Home Office (1); even then the Spy nosy element in the story was still doubted by-scholars such as Thomas McFarland. (2) Mary Moorman, for example, was intrigued by the existence of the evidence in the Home Office, but commented, Coleridge's account of how the spy used to lie behind the sand-dunes by the shore listening to him and discoursing about 'Spy Nozy' (Spinoza) and drawing conclusions therefrom that they were referring to him and his 'Bardolph nose', is scarcely credible, though it throws an interesting light on Coleridge's pronunciation of the philosopher's name. (3) After that, at least, it was no longer possible to maintain that two harmless versifiers in the west of England could not possibly have been attracting the attention of those in high places in London. The visit to the young men of John Thelwall, who already had a reputation for stirring up trouble, was also enough to cause some apprehension. The matter was then impelled into a quite different channel some years ago when the Trust acquired a small accounts book, recording private payments by government agencies, which was found to contain the intriguing entry, June 13 To paid Wordsworth's Draft [pounds sterling]92-12. Kenneth Johnston, who was working on a book about Wordsworth's career, thought this must be a reference to William and an indication that at the time he must have been employed as a secret counter-agent by the British Secret Service. If so it meant that while William had been indulging in political discussions with Coleridge and Thelwall, he was perhaps secretly reporting to those in government on their activities. Johnston extended his investigations to the question of why should have come to undertake these counter-revolutionary activities, and produced the results of his researches in the book entitled The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet--Lover--Rebel--Spy. The chief problem that then emerged, however, was that the main piece of solid evidence he had found, the apparently incriminating matter of the sum paid to Mr Wordsworth, turned out to be seriously flawed, since on further investigation the Mr Wordsworth named in it turned out to be William's cousin, Robinson who had risen to be Controller of Customs at Harwich. After that had been pointed out, scholars were left with the likelihood that the trip to Germany had most likely been what it had previously been assumed to be: a stay by Coleridge to learn more about what was going on in German universities such as Gottingen, and by William, together with Dorothy, to find cheaper lodgings in Goslar where he could devote himself to the exploration of his own past experience in poetic writing--an enterprise which would eventually form the basis of The Prelude. …

The Depth of Herbert's Voiceprint: Intentional and Unintentional Traces in the Poetry of Alfred Corn

The Depth of Herbert's Voiceprint:Intentional and Unintentional Traces in the Poetry of Alfred Corn Sean H. McDowell To further the ongoing conversation about the influence of Herbert's poetry on modern poets, I wish to invoke a term currently enjoying favor in studies of Donne's analogous influence: what Judith Scherer Herz calls Donne's "voiceprint," the product not so much of one poet's occasional imitation of another but of a more profound, more substantial engagement of one poet with the "psychology" and "linguistic system" of another.1 The "later writer greets" Donne, "trying on his language and looking inside his imagination." The ensuing "encounter," Herz explains, "happens less in the manner of a Bloomean agon or an overreaching than simply as a willingness to listen, to reimagine, to make over as one's own." Often enough, it results from the kind of preoccupation non-poets might consider obsession: Edgell Rickword carries his two-volume Muse's Library Donne to the Front in 1917; Rupert Brooke tours Germany with Baedecker and Donne (the latter as much of a guide as the former?); Joseph Brodsky learns English for the express purpose of translating Donne; Tennessee Williams asks a friend to read him Donne poems for several hours as consolation on the night his first play Battle of Angels bombed during its first performance; Paul Muldoon "swallows Donne whole" to elegize Warren Zevon.2 In each case, one poet finds in another poet's imagination a spur for moving his or her own. The voiceprint is the verbal residue of this activity. Like a fingerprint, which captures in finely oiled lines a unique material trace of the original, it is composed of all the verbal traces that show through in the subsequent new work - allusions, echoes, stanza forms, logical or grammatical structures, phrasings, and of course, repeated words, all refracted through the imagination of another and in response to the demands of the new poetic context. Donne's voiceprint often enough issues from a fascination with his personality and with his fascinations - with death, say, or love, or what Raymond-Jean Frontain aptly calls, the "need to make disparate parts [End Page 68] or experiences cohere."3 To return to Herz, "it is Donne in his texts" the later poet "greets," Donne who fascinates through a "language" and a "vision" "oddly transportable over the centuries."4 For the character of the Herbertian voiceprint, we would do well to start with a distinction Seamus Heaney makes in contrasting a "political activist" view of poetry with what he terms a "visionary" view of poetry, the latter emerging from the "self-delighting inventiveness" at the heart of poetic craft.5 In contrast to the "heckler," for whom poetry must be harnessed to social movements to be useful, Heaney believes we must not slight the "imperative" to "redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means."6 During the writing process, the visionary poet's "movement is from delight to wisdom and not vice versa," Heaney writes. "The felicity of a cadence, the chain reaction of a rhyme, the pleasuring of an etymology, such things can proceed happily and as it were autistically, in an area of mental operations cordoned off by and from the critical sense." The poet must dive into the pleasures of wordsmithing to render a compelling vision, a "counter-reality" capable of balancing his or her "historical situation."7 Not surprisingly, Heaney finds in Herbert's "self-delighting" verbal "inventiveness" an example of a "fully realized poetry," where the "coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our own experience."8 That Herbert's poetry is more readily approachable "as poetry" than that of the majority of his contemporaries is a central condition of the nature of his influence for many practicing poets today. For, more often than not, it is less the specific claims Herbert makes about his particularly Protestant point of view that show through in the work of subsequent poets than it is a habit of language use that enables other poets to grasp...

‘LE STYLE, C'EST LE DIABLE’: TWENTIETH‐CENTURY GERMAN POETRY IN DIALOGUE WITH PAUL VALÉRY

ABSTRACTThis article explores the dialectic of rejection and affinity shared by the responses to Paul Valéry of three non‐German German‐language poets. Despite significant affinities in cultural ambition and poetics (notably between ‘L'Âme et la danse’ and ‘Das Gespräch über Gedichte’), there is little evidence of an influence exerted by Valéry on Hofmannsthal, who was strangely suspicious of him. In contrast, Rilke was hugely enthusiastic, and although his translations of Valéry did not give the often asserted impetus for the creative flowering of 1922, other somewhat uncharacteristic poems (such as ‘Zueignung an M.’ and ‘Der Magier’) positively reflect his encounter with Valéry's Mallarméan conception of the poet. However, his versions of Charmes display less poetological proximité than the revisionary effects of a much less overtly self‐conscious view of poetry, shown here with ‘Les Grenades’. Celan's translation of La Jeune Parque was a systematic attempt to subvert the solipsism of the original study in self‐consciousness and ostensibly incarnates his rejection of the aesthetics of an overly intellectual poetry. However, possible reasons why his initial reluctance to translate Valéry was eventually overcome are discernible in the near‐contemporaneous speech, ‘Der Meridian’, which explores the utopian notion of ‘freiwerdende Sprache’, partly in response to Valéry.

Plato: The poet

Essay is an inter-disciplinary approach to the problem of Plato's view of Poetry: trying to seize it both in the semantic depth of the platonic text itself and in its cultural context. Poetry is deeply rooted in the divine - its sacerdotal dimension is one of the main problems both in the philosophical aim to compete with poets and in their attempt to understand the poetic phenomenon in the logical terms. Ambiguity of Plato's criticism is equally visible in the poetical quality of his own text and in the constant identification of the intra-textual voices with poets. This essay is trying to enlighten some of that ambiguity's aspects and implications.

Mary Wollstonecraft and the "Reserve of Reason"

I. Reason and Sensation in the 1790s IN A RECENT STUDY OF THE "DISCOURSE ON ENTHUSIASM," JOHN MEE HAS described Wordsworth's Prelude as "an extended attempt to demonstrate that a continuity of subjectivity could survive and benefit from the transports of enthusiasm and remain grounded in the world without dissolving into it." (1) Current British studies of the intellectual culture of the 1790s, and of Romanticism and beyond now abound with attempts to rediscover a lost relation between affect and reason, to examine the rational self's embodiment in the world and to suggest that the self remains "grounded" by resisting visionary transports through regulating emotion. The classic feminist endeavor to "include affect under the sign of cognition," as Isobel Armstrong recently put it, (2) has been supplemented by the view of poetry, in Mee's useful formulation, as a kind of "regulatory discourse" that determines the circumstances under which the rational self may be "transported" with enthusiasm without losing its contours in the "wild" enthusiasm of the crowd or of the religious visionary. Such revisions have in turn challenged a pat view of the archetypal male rationalist of the late Eighteenth Century. The view of William Godwin as a kind of "cold fish" inhabiting the "frozen zone" of the radical Enlightenment that Wordsworth supposedly set forth in The Prelude has been significantly revised, (3) while the stock view of Immanuel Kant as a dry formalist in the metaphysics of morals has been challenged by recent studies of the "anthropological applications" of his thought, and his alleged "embodiment of reason." (4) Many of these studies serve to historicize affect, to look at specific and significant moments of transaction between sensation and thought, rather than to describe a decontextualized sensation either as under the tyrannical sway of reason, or as escaping it in the anarchic and unregulated impulses of popular politics and dissenting extremism. (5) And far from figuring a transcendental authority that is inattentive to the differential life of embodied experience, this increasingly historicized power of reason shows itself, both for Godwin and for Kant, to foster its own dangerously excessive species of enthusiasm in its combined activity with an ambivalent and untrustworthy power of imagination. The worrying capacity to "rave with reason" that Kant encountered in a number of his contemporaries (notably J. G. Herder) required that reason itself be regulated or, as I will suggest below, that it be oriented with reference to sensibility. But what can these revisions to our understanding of the intellectual culture of the 1790s and its attitudes to emotion, this closer attention both to the structure of reason and the structure of feeling through an account of their significant interactions, tell us about female participants in the culture of radical Enlightenment? (6) Are not accounts such as Mee's in danger of reproducing a traditionalist view of the transcendentalizing effects of poetry in the Romantic period, by describing poetry's overcoming and regulating of an embodied particularity which for feminists such as Cora Kaplan long represented a form of resistance to the canon? (7) Shouldn't we after all be celebrating the capacity of sensibility and the life of the body to escape rational predication, to embody an eternally differential experience that escapes the domineering formalizations of reason? Yet it is not only canonical male poets who seek to regulate emotion in the revolutionary decade. As Mee reminds us, part of Mary Wollstonecraft's polemic against Burke in the Vindication of the Rights of Men serves to attack his "romantic enthusiasm," his attempt to make sentiment serve the ends of a nationalist and hierarchical domesticity against the revolutionary "cold mathematicians." (8) Even so, the breathless animation of the Vindication of the Rights of Men struggles to articulate a type of passionate resistance of reason to Burke's enthusiastic and irrational counter-revolutionary rallying call. …

Evoking Hearts and Heads: Exploring Issues of Social Justice through Poetry

This article focuses on how two boys in an ethnically diverse fifth–grade classroom shifted their perceptions of poetry, moving from views of poetry as “sappy” to seeing the transformative potential of poetry. This shift was linked to their opportunities to interact with poems written by Janet Wong and Sherman Alexie that deal with issues of racial prejudice and discrimination. Through journal writing and discussions with their classmates and teacher, the students were challenged to think and feel about issues that moved and mattered to them.

‘Signs of progress’: reconceptualising response to children's poetry writing

Poetry writing is felt by many primary teachers to be an important part of children's early language and literary development. It is also considered by many teachers to be very difficult to assess, due in part to the subjective nature of much poetry. Therefore poetry writing in schools enjoys both high and low status. If practice of teaching this genre is to develop it is necessary for teachers to have a clear view of what children are able to achieve within it. By looking at examples of children's poetry writing, my aim in this paper is to demonstrate how it is possible for primary school teachers to identify features of children's poetry writing which they consider to be of value. I shall argue, from the basis of an empirical research study, that teachers can, therefore, promote and encourage progression in poetry writing by their classes; but that to do so is to challenge views of poetry writing by children promoted in current orders and recommendations.

This issue of JAN

This issue of JAN

Abstraction Resisted (Or, H Still H)

When I started work toward my Ph.D. at Brandeis University in 1977, I hadn't heard of Allen Grossman, but within a few months I had caught on to what everyone around me seemed to know--that he was an awesome genius as a thinker about poetry, and a powerful poet, someone at that time mysteriously under-recognized on the national scene (his first volume of poems with New Directions, Woman on the Bridge Over the Chicago River, was to appear in 1979), a man to be reckoned with, a walking Mind, simultaneously intimidating and intensely encouraging to serious students. Two years later he became my dissertation director; meanwhile I audited several of his courses, and assisted him in one undergraduate lecture course, and wondered constantly how much of his view of poetry could become mine. In 1980 he proposed that we try a book-length interview in which I could offer queries and challenges to his long-brewed and passionately articulated ideas. result was Against Our Vanishing (Rowan Tree Press, 1981). A decade later Grossman proposed that we try a new set of conversations in which I would have more to say, and these 1990 conversations appear along with the 1981 text as part of Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins, 1991). I was forty-one in 1990; Allen Grossman, born in 1932, was fifty-eight. Another decade has passed. I'm still trying to figure out what I do and don't accept in Grossman's philosophy of poetry, and what I do and don't want to emulate in his practice of poetry. chance to contribute to a collection of essays on Grossman edited by Daniel Morris led me to write the present essay, which I offer not as a scholarly work but as one poet's effort to come to terms with the poems of a powerfully different poet. My favorite poems by Allen Grossman are the ones in which something--some particular thing--has refused to melt into a category of thought; in which some particular person, or event, or object, has defied generalization, and has thus successfully resisted the immense pressure toward abstraction exerted by Grossman's genius. Somehow the particular thing has withstood the tremendous G-force pulling all experience into such cosmological paradigms that most images seem either only symbolic (she has descended with the ice / Beneath the shadows of the pleasure boats / And dwells in the metal with the ancestors. / Her tears mingle with the freshness of the streams...) or only momentary illustrations or decorations of ideas. In my favorite poems by Grossman, the particular thing has somehow remained a holdout. criterion I advocate is so deeply at odds with the essential direction of Grossman's effort that my list of these favorite poems is short--I'm thinking mainly of six poems: Pat's Poem, The Holdout, The Department, The Prothanation of a Charioteer, Sentinel Yellowwoods, and Mary Snorak the Cook... Alongside these there are a dozen or more passages in other poems that tantalize a reader like me with glimpses of specific life. Meanwhile, there are certainly other poems and passages in Grossman's oeuvre whose force affects me albeit in ways harder to explain or justify. Great O North Cloud is such a poem; The Patience of the Darker Lover is another. There is a spirit I sometimes call nutty-spooky that imparts a disturbing energy of dark warning or of alarming celebration to such poems. I look forward to essays by other readers that will sort through these effects in Grossman's poetry and help us see where they are most significant--without just floating above the poetry on the plane of tremendous ideas. But when I undertake to write about Grossman's poetry, asking myself what matters most to me in it, I circle back to those six poems listed above and to the issue of non-dissolvable particularity. Thus I find myself writing exactly the essay that H (Halliday) would write. It's the obvious H essay that would be predicted by any reader of the conversations between Grossman (G) and me that constitute Against Our Vanishing in Sighted Singer. …

In Quest of Harmony: Plato and Confucius on Poetry

Plato (427?-347? B.C.) and Confucius (ca. 551-479 B.C.) lived only about half a century apart, but in two culturally unrelated worlds. The influence of these two thinkers on humankind can be measured only on the grandest scale of time and space. For about two and a half millennia, the thoughts of Plato and Confucius have shaped all aspects of life in those two largest cultural spheres that are known, respectively, as the West and the East. To compare Platonic and Confucian thought is to embark on an expedition back to the fountainheads of Western and Eastern cultures. By comparing the ideas of Plato and Confucius, we can observe similarities and differences between these cultures at their infancy and better understand why the two great traditions would develop as they did. For this reason, Plato-Confucius comparisons abound in the works of comparative philosophy.' While these comparisons cover a broad intellectual spectrum, they seldom explore the topic of the aesthetics of poetry. To bring due attention to this topic, I would like to consider the two thinkers' views of poetry in relation to their broader educational, ethical, and philosophical concerns. The respective theories of poetry of Plato and Confucius as we understand them today are very much the products of centuries of critical interp'retation. Neither Plato nor Confucius consciously set out to formulate a theory of poetry. They both came to discuss poetry in the course of conversations or dialogues with their friends or pupils. Plato's notion of poetry is not exactly the same as Confucius', with regard to both its ontological implications and its referential scope.2 For Plato, poetry is a very broad category for those works, composed by human beings or the divine muses, that are usually rhymed, set to music, and cast in the form of an epic or a tragedy. Confucius did not entertain such a generalized notion of poetry, nor did he discuss so extensive a range of works in the Analects (Lunyu ) as Plato did in his dialogues.3 Confucius' attention is fixed not on poetry in general, but on the Book of Poetry (Shi jing 4.) (hereafter the Poetry), the earliest Chinese anthology of ancient poems and songs. Ever since the Han, however, Confucius' remarks on the Poetry have customarily been considered to be comments on poetry in general as much as on a single anthology. Thanks to this ingenious identification of the Poetry with poetry,4 Confucius' remarks have become an invaluable source of ideas about poetry and have taken on phenomenal significance as a coherent theory of that subject. In the Western critical tradition, Plato's conversational remarks on poetry have undergone a similar process of transformation into a coherent theory of poetry. Proceeding to the discussion below, we will see that the theories of poetry of Plato

Shelley's Poetry: The Divided Self

Preface - The Case of Shelley - Shelley's Views of Poetry - Shelley's Poetry, 1811-17 - Shelley's Poetry, 1818-20 - Shelley's Poetry, 1818-20 (continued) - Shelley's Poetry, 1821-22 - Conclusion: The Divided Self - Notes - Bibliography - Index

Rational Meaning: Toward a New Foundation for the Definition of Words (And Supplementary Essays)

Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson. Rational Meaning: Toward a New Foundation for the Definition of Words (and Supplementary Essays). Ed. William Harmon with an introduction by Charles Bernstein. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1997. It is a strange time for Laura (Riding) Jackson, the poet. Her Collected Poems from Persea Books is easily available, and within the last five years two editions of selected poems and one edition of her juvenilla have been published. Although this may not seem an overabundance (particularly considering her recent death in 1991), it is a curious confirmation of the activity she so "devoutly renounced" in the early 1940s. As she wrote in the 1970 preface to her Selected Poems: In Five Sets, "Those who have known my poems.. have for the most part (as the indications go) shrugged off my change of view of poetry as exhibiting an inconsistency so bizarre as to be explicable only in private life terms" (Collected Poems, 414). It is hardly a surprise that the work of a poet who renounces being one continues to be read-and with increased interest. The poems of George Oppen and Rimbaud, for instance, are in many ways enriched by the silence or repudiation which interrupts or completes them. Yet one must wonder why the work Laura Riding accomplished after her disavowal of poetry has of late been so poorly represented. While Lives of Wives, The Word Woman and Other Related Writing and Four Unposted Letters to Catherine are prose works recently published, all predate her momentous decision in 1941 when she returned to America from Europe and married Schuyler B. Jackson. Perhaps her greatest work, her "personal evangel," The Telling, initially published in 1967 in Chelsea magazine and then five years later in book format, is out of print. The publication of Rational Meaning: Toward a New Foundation for the Definition of Words does much to combat what can seem a conspiracy to make poetry comfortably seem an end-limit, the disavowal of which can lead to no new space of or for writing. Yet as the authors explain, "the change of view of poetry that the first of us experienced was no mere turning away from poetry.... Her thought, her work, was plotted towards a general human event of full articulateness realized" (446). Charles Bernstein, in his introduction, calls Rational Meaning a "`poet's work,'...a pursuit of poetry's love for language by other means" (ix-x). Bernstein, as much as any other poet or critic, has explored and interrogated how and what we culturally define as "poetry." While he is well aware of the risk involved in disarming Rational Meaning, and Laura Riding's career, of their polemic against what Riding calls the "sleep maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on todays's doorstep" (The Telling, 11), there remains the interest in linking this deeply anti-poetic work to the project of poetry. And indeed, for Laura Riding, Rational Meaning is the continuation of the linguistic project she initially conceived through poetry: "The poetic course became for me more and more, as I dedicated to it my faith in the good significance of the human existence, and my powers, a course in which to unite, with all my virtue of comprehensive, personally general, sincerity of dedication, the intellectual, the moral, the spiritual trails of the journey to truth-to the plane of utterance on which human speaking spoke the language of being with a full, universal explicitness of sense" (CP, 5). …

Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry.

There is nothing at all, according to deconstructionist doctrine, outside of language. Nowhere, it holds, is it possible to locate any kind of "presence" external to language on which spoken and written utterances might be grounded. Nevertheless, Homer deeply contemplated the ocean, and Wordsworth the farmland, and Gerard Manly Hopkins "the dearest freshness deep down things", and their poetry suggests an undeniable experience of intimacy with things outside of language - things "as they are". In "Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry", eminent scholar Nathan Scott argues that this testimony to "presence" offered by poetry is the strongest possible refutation of post-structuralist epistemology. Exhibiting the kind of wide-ranging analysis his readers have come to expect, Scott explores the ways in which the poetic act of contemplation makes palpable the sense of "a something more". He does this by turning to "the nine figures with whom over the years I have found myself most deeply involved": Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons, James Wright, and Howard Nemerov. From Stevens' belief in the transcendence of the human imagination to Auden's flat rejection of Stevens' view of poetry as a guide to life; from Roethke'sjoyful praise of the "numinous" reality to Bishop's "poetry without myth"; from Wilbur's "splendor of mere being" to Ammons'reflections on the sublime and the mundane; from Wright's simple lyricism to Nemerov's expression of "a moment's inviolable presence", Scott finds one enduring principle - that the chief source of the sublime is to be found in the rich density of the everyday. The resulting "poetry of presence", he contends, represents the greatest legacy of modern American poetry. Nathan A. Scott Jr's other books include "Samuel Beckett", "The Broken Center", "Negative Capability", "The Wild Prayer of Longing", "The Poetry of Civic Virtue", and "The Poetics of Belief".

Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry

There is nothing at all, according to deconstructionist doctrine, outside of language. Nowhere, it holds, is it possible to locate any kind of "presence" external to language on which spoken and written utterances might be grounded. Nevertheless, Homer deeply contemplated the ocean, and Wordsworth the farmland, and Gerard Manly Hopkins "the dearest freshness deep down things", and their poetry suggests an undeniable experience of intimacy with things outside of language - things "as they are". In "Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry", eminent scholar Nathan Scott argues that this testimony to "presence" offered by poetry is the strongest possible refutation of post-structuralist epistemology. Exhibiting the kind of wide-ranging analysis his readers have come to expect, Scott explores the ways in which the poetic act of contemplation makes palpable the sense of "a something more". He does this by turning to "the nine figures with whom over the years I have found myself most deeply involved": Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons, James Wright, and Howard Nemerov. From Stevens' belief in the transcendence of the human imagination to Auden's flat rejection of Stevens' view of poetry as a guide to life; from Roethke'sjoyful praise of the "numinous" reality to Bishop's "poetry without myth"; from Wilbur's "splendor of mere being" to Ammons'reflections on the sublime and the mundane; from Wright's simple lyricism to Nemerov's expression of "a moment's inviolable presence", Scott finds one enduring principle - that the chief source of the sublime is to be found in the rich density of the everyday. The resulting "poetry of presence", he contends, represents the greatest legacy of modern American poetry. Nathan A. Scott Jr's other books include "Samuel Beckett", "The Broken Center", "Negative Capability", "The Wild Prayer of Longing", "The Poetry of Civic Virtue", and "The Poetics of Belief".

The Origins of the Fifteenth Century View of Poetry as "Seconde Rhetorique"

The Origins of the Fifteenth Century View of Poetry as "Seconde Rhetorique"

Arnold, Wordsworth, and “Memorial Verses”

ARNOLD, WORDSWORTH, AND “ MEMORIAL VERSES" HARVEY KERPNECK University of Toronto I n the essay on Wordsworth Arnold makes a famous distinction between higher and lower kinds of poetry. He has been working to discriminate the essence of Wordsworth's "superiority" in order that he might save his reputa­ tion for posterity from the ignorant neglect of the mass, on the one hand, and the meaningless idolatry of the "Wordsworthians," on the other. And he remarks that it is "the great and ample body of powerful work" that is left when an editor has pruned Wordsworth's luxuriance (his essay is an introduction to an anthology of selections from Wordsworth) that establishes this superiority. He goes on: Some kinds of poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others. The ballad kind is alower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is alower kind. Poetry of this latter sort counts, too, sometimes, by its biographical interest partly, not by its poetical interest pure and simple, but then this can only be when the poet producing it has the power and importance of Wordsworth.1 Arnold himself is such a poet, of course, and despite his strictures in his 1853 Preface against poetry in which the poet "allegorizes" the state of his own mind, it is a commonplace today that his most interesting poetry is his most subjective, self-concerned didactic poetry, poetry in which he describes more or less straightforwardly his spiritual dilemmas, ascribes causes to them, and prescribes remedies for them or notes analogous ills in his contemporaries. And one can discuss much of his total output in these terms; one can even "do something" with "Sohrab and Rustum" (father-son relationship) or “ The Forsaken Merman" (the buried life), for example. But with "Memorial Ver­ ses," Arnold's funeral tribute to Wordsworth, one should hesitate even to make the attempt. The poem, commissioned by Wordsworth's son-in-law, Edward Quillinan, and published in June 1850 in Fraser's Magazine, is only one of a number of tributes to Wordsworth in Arnold's prose and verse, but in concen­ tration, form, and polish, in intensity, it is the premier one. It does help us to see more clearly the roots of Arnold's view, later fully enunciated, that, as he puts it in his essay on Wordsworth, "poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to English Studies in Can ad a, ii, 2, Summer 1976 life." This view of poetry is implicit in the whole and in each part of "Memorial Verses." But the poem is not didactic in this sense-Arnold is neither expound­ ing a theory of poetry in it nor making an oblique comment on the situation of the poet in the mid-nineteenth century, especially the poet Matthew Arnold. He is attempting, as in the Wordsworth essay, to pay a tribute to Wordsworth which shall be a discriminating assessment, which shall be neither supercilious and condemnatory nor adulatory and fawning. The poem is a remarkable attempt to take a balanced view of Wordsworth in the midst of funeral passion for him (a passion which Arnold shares). And it is an attempt to do so according to those "law s" to which Arnold in his criticism pays so much obeisance, the "laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty."2 In other words, the poem is not didactic in a second sense either, that of being versified polemic almost indistinguishable from prose, as some of Arnold's lesser poetry of this same period is. It "says" a great deal about Wordsworth and Arnold's passion for him, but it does so at least as much by indirection as by direct statement, and it does so by exploiting much of the array of poetic rhetoric available to Arnold. The poem opens with a five-line introduction and general statement of the occasion and an indication of the method Arnold is to employ to assess Wordsworth for the age: Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease. But one such death remain'd to come; The last poetic voice is dumb...

Lingvistik, systemdigtning og Grundtvig

Linguistics, systemic poetry and GrundtvigBy Hellmuth ToftdahlIn this brief essay Grundvig5s poetics is juxtaposed with the view of poetry that, in Denmark, has been put forward by, among others, the poet and critic Per Højholt and supported by Niels Egebak. The following points are argued against:1. The assumption that any linguistic expression that is shaped along traditional lines determined by communication is lifeless and distant and leaves the listener or reader unaffected.2. The assumption that any linguistic expression gains life and becomes exciting only when, somehow or other, it breaks down the conventions surrounding the process of communication.From this it is concluded:1. By absorbing the blocks of linguistic material with which he is faced, the reader does not experience a finished work of art, but has to produce the work for himself2. The linguistic act becomes revolutionary in so far as the linguistic universe of the reader is undermined from within by the poison that has been smuggled in with the linguistically revolutionary text. An unprejudiced attitude is indoctrinated without arguments, but by causing the reader’s linguistic universe to disintegrate, without giving him a chance to defend himself. The poet forces the crisis of identity upon the reader.The young Grundtvig’s thoughts supply an interesting alternative or supplement to the view of literature that has been outlined above. To him poetry was not only a means of communication, it also possessed a magical power that might be transmitted to the receiver, counteracting his tendency to stagnation, and giving him the powers of expressing himself. According to Grundtvig, poetry originated in a vision, i. e. a spontaneous experience of universal rationality. To the individual this experience appears absurd only if he is over-occupied with his own brief history. A sound human being is convinced that reason exists, but that it is a waste of energy to brood over its nature. Time will show what truth is.To Grundtvig all ideologies were pitiful attempts to make a substitute for religion. True poetry frees man from the fetters that he has imposed upon himself, and gives rise to a feeling of freedom, of participation in an outer, organic reality.

Keats and The Chemistry of Poetic Creation

Keats often imagines the poetic process (the way poetry is created or conceived) as a flight from reality to some dreamworld of imagination. At other times it seems an identification with and heightening of the concrete and actual. What mediates between these two apparently contradictory views of aesthetic experience are certain fundamental analogies borrowed from contemporary science, in particular chemistry, that underlie his whole view of the poetic imagination and its operation. Keats's favorite metaphors for poetic creation reveal how the imagination transmutes material phenomena or sensations into poetic or “essential” form in accordance with the principles of ethereal chemistry described by such a writer as Sir Humphry Davy and by a process remarkably akin to that of chemical distillation. The essential forms of poetry derive their reality both from the identity of material phenomena and the transforming power of the mind. Later, however, Keats's attitude toward this process undergoes a notable change. Thus the Hermes episode in Lamia can be read as a parody of his whole earlier sense of the poetic process and its authenticity. Keats's knowledge of and reliance on science becomes an integral part of the more ambivalent view of poetry that characterizes his later career.