Search Results

Musical London will scarcely have recovered from its state of bewilderment over Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben before the second performance. The first impression is that Strauss's artistic position is not altered by this work. His great strength is his mastery over tones; he has chosen most happily when he calls his work a “Tone-Poem.” Whatever one may think of Ein Heldenleben as music, one must admit the newness, the power, and the extreme beauty of the sounds that proceed from the Straussian orchestra. Strauss's weakness lies in the fact that he is so often content with commonplaces as the germs of his inspiration. He is like a cook who can serve up mutton with such art that he does not always take the trouble to look out for venison. The work is divided into six sections; each, according to the Queen's Hall programme, duly labeled “The Hero,” “His Enemies,” and so on.

Daniel Defoe stayed in Edinburgh to engage in keeping the lines of communication open between England and Scotland and in defending the Union against those, such as the minister James Webster, who had suddenly turned against it. He wrote to Robert Harley on January 27 and again on February 2 that there might be anger if the treaty were returned to Scotland for further consideration: it might not be approved. The Defoe who had passed through the excitement of the Edinburgh mobs was not unchanged by his experience. He, who had depended so strongly on the popularity of his positions in his battles against Parliament, and who had escaped from the usual sufferings at the pillory through an appeal to the crowd, had experienced popular tumults directed against what he considered a good cause. The Scottish Parliament had simply ignored what were supposed to be popular petitions against the Union. In his poem celebrating the New Year of 1707, A Scots Poem, he attacked the intrusion of mobs into the real business of government.

In Autumn 1796, Coleridge assembled this privately printed pamphlet of twenty-eight sonnets by twelve poets, including four each by Southey, Lloyd, Lamb, and himself, and designed it to be bound up with the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles, who for Coleridge had created ‘a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world’ in poems that ‘domesticate with the heart’. The collection is viewed as an attempt by Coleridge to engage with the fraught domestic and personal problems of his friends Lamb and Lloyd, who were both in crisis. The chapter argues that it is an organised collection with a structured argument and a directed message, and that the result is virtually a ‘lost’ Conversation Poem, a dramatic ‘converse’ meditating on themes of self and society, friendship and social action, and moving from single lonely thoughts to a more integrated sense of ‘one common life’.

To understand better the dynamics of their development, contrapuntal interpretations of traditional literary works cannot be separated from historical and cultural environments. When a turn is made from the modern history of Bontsye back to the ancient history of the book of Job there are various problems. The problems identified are: the lack of firm criteria to associate any part of the poetic sections of the book of Job; unclear meaning of the “Poem of Job”; pressing concern whether the original Poem has suffered any deletions, and lastly, the lack of ability to analyze the structure of Job considering its original unusual dialect. The discussions of problems easily lead to an array of potential additions and subtractions to the original “Poem of Job.” R. H. Pfeiffer, based on the “Edomite theory”, suggested that the Poem of Job was a literary product of the school of Wisdom centered in Edom, making its language more of Edomite rather than Hebrew. A philologist named N. H. Tur-Sinai, on the other hand, believed that Job was originally written in Arabic. All these confusions with the original written language of Job pose a potentially serious problem. The best solution so far is playing Job against Bontsye. The Bontsye-model allows one to read the score of ancient biblical composition found in the more modern Yiddish interpretations. Pitting Job in terms of the Bontsye-model allows a better insight not only on the book of Job but also how they are connected with one another.

The “Poem of Job” like Bontsye Shvayg maintains a sharply critical line against pietistic worldview that a poet like Perets wished to address. The chapter mentions that to understand fully the “Poem of Job,” one must see what the poet wished to turn inside out for purposes of parody, both in broad and small scale terms. Perets wanted the same thing on a whole array of Yiddish themes though it is not as easy as it is in Bontsye since it has a relative wealth of contemporaneous information while Job does not. The two reasons for such is Job, as a literary work, clearly stands within the “Wisdom” tradition and literature within the Ancient Near East is remarkably conservative. The basic structure of the “Poem of Job” is said to be parallel to the “Theodicity” or “Babylonian Theodicity” with the dialogue between Job and his friends as actually an appeal to his God. There is also similarity of Ludlul to the “Poem of Job” which is sometimes called the “Babylonian Job.” The Dialogue/Appeal was an excellent way to show the transition of Job into Anti-Job keeping in mind that the innocent victim must always keep his complains within the bounds of propriety, thus being a “Righteous Sufferer.” At the same time, issues of justice and righteousness do play a role in the standard Dialogue/Appeal though in the end things do turn around right for God acts decisively and dramatically to restore the victim.

The legalisms from the “Poem of Job” reflect the poet’s innovation. The author produced a legal metaphor which will be considered largely without reference to the Dialogue/Appeal in the “Poem.” The chapter raises one issue that is usually avoided—the question of God’s righteousness. Though this was presented in the poem “according to the rules” as wholly conventional testimonies, the use of legal metaphor makes it clearer that all is not quite as conventional as how it seemed at first. The Hebrew term “rib” seems to be the very essence of the “Poem of Job” from a legalistic standpoint. “Rib” as used in the Bible is an early affirmation of the rule of law-and-order over the law-of-the-jungle. The poet was able to bring legal metaphor in Job when he feels that God resisted giving proper legal recourse and the said legal metaphor reached its climax at the conclusion of Chapter 31. It is remarkable that Job’s legal strategy results into definitive juridical results. The chapter also connotes that Job’s persecution of God from a legal standpoint goes beyond what makes the legal system work. It also explains how the poet gave the most ironic turn to his legal metaphor when God throws Job’s case out court in Theopany which allows Him to put Job back in the role of a mortal as defendant and Him as Prosecutor, Judge, and the Ultimate Authority.

The chapter discusses probable reasons why scholars have difficulties in attempting to characterize the genre of the book of Job as it freely moves from one theme—motif, stereotype, and conventions—to another, especially in the “Poem.” As seen from the close analysis of Perets’ Bontsye Shvayg, a deep and abiding anger serves as motivation for the best parodistic work. This both cases allowed the authors to produce works of such magnitude they could not be ignored nor surpassed. Two major points are being accounted for in the rethinking and reshaping of the “Poem of Job”: first, the existence of additional material such as the Elihu speeches, and second, how the “Poem of Job” was not altered much by the Israelites and/or by the Jews as to bend their efforts to supplement it. In addition, Eliezer Greenberg wrote “Y. L. Perets and Bontsye Shvayg in the Warsaw Ghetto” which shows certain affinities to the pronouncements of Elihu who both attacks Bontsye and Job respectively. Sadly though, both writers took in the original too, “straight”, without recognizing the parodistic elements. The last great addition that essentially completes the canonical form of the book of Job is its prose supplements achieving an end with a remarkable degree.

As time continues, the book of Job has been under many editorial hands and some have gone beyond changing the text itself, thus these are referred to as editorial interventions. It is necessary to note though that regardless of how the texts were modified, the changes did materially alter and soften the Job in the “Poem,” making his pronouncements jive with the traditional view. Large modifications of Job occured in the earliest translation of the book which has become known as the Old Greek version of Job (i.e. inclusion of genealogy, loss of innocent children) and not in the Hebrew version. A version of Job which vociferously argues his rights in the presence of God still maintains his hope and trust in the Almighty, a part of the book that effectively resolves the apparent contradictions between “Job the Patient” and “Job the Impatient.” The chapter also shows that the Masoretes are not to be blamed for the change of Job for it was only their way of preserving a well-known tradition. This change is also seen as a reclamation rather than an alteration. The Jews of ancient times read Job for the same reason that Bontsye Shvayg is read at present—to find a figure to represent their suffering and loss, someone they could identity with and whose endurance gives them hope too. This is also the main reason why they sustained an image of a “patient Job” in the same way the people of our modern time sustain an image of “silent Bontsye.”

This examines Anna Akhmatova's two great late poems Requiem (1935–62) and the famously difficult Poem without a Hero (1940–65). In Requiem, Akhmatova embraces her role as a “world-historical personage.” In a sequence of ten lyrics and various supplementary texts, she challenges Soviet historiography and, as a result, the Soviet Union itself. Requiem, as this chapter shows, is continuous with both the Stalin epigram and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's memoirs. Meanwhile, Poem without a Hero considers if complicity is always a condition of dissent and if there is a way to oppose totalitarianism without replicating its worldview. The poem attempts to realize a different kind of dissent—one that does not promote Soviet utopianism or the Mandel'shtams' utopian anti-utopianism.

This chapter surveys the impact of Muslim culture on conceptions of just war and the righteous warrior in the literature and laws of medieval Christian Spain. The first part contrasts the image of Islam in The Song of Roland and in The Poem of the Cid. These two works highlight the contrast between the parochialism of French chivalry and the pluralism of Spain. The second section is an analysis of Las Siete Partidas, a legal code dating from the reign of Alfonso X of Castile (1252–84). The possibility of a link between Spanish “pluralism” and the Malikite inclination to interpret shari‘a with an eye to the public good seems to underlie the more accommodating tendencies of Averroes. The final section focuses on the work of Vitoria, Soto, and the Second Scholastic as an attempt to reinvigorate pluralism against the imperial claims of both the papacy and the Habsburgs. The rise of Grotius marks a defeat in which the lawyers of an emerging Europe of nation-states triumph over the Aristotelian moral theology of Aquinas and the Second Scholastic.

On December 1872, George Smith, one of the first to undertake the deciphering and listing of the thousands of cuneiform tablets from Assurbanipal's library discovered at Nineveh, announced that he had found a narrative which was too exactly parallel to the one in the Bible for the coincidence to be attributable to mere chance. This account, in 200 lines, formed the ‘XIth Canto’ of the famous Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, in search of immortality, having come to the very end of the world to question the hero of the Flood, learns from his lips how the cataclysm had come about in earlier times. Although the Epic of Gilgamesh has a very long literary history, the account of the Flood did not immediately form part of it, but was inserted later, having been plucked from another literary piece where it originally belonged: the Poem of the Supersage.

This chapter presents a reading of Poem 51 by Cattulus. In lines 5–6 Catullus says that Lesbia's sweet laughter deprives him of all his sense. Catullus then illustrates the various symptoms of his condition in lines 7–12: his tongue becomes stuck, he feels feverish, he gets ringing in his ears, and his eyes cloud over. Evidently his response to Lesbia's sweet laughter is one of severe shock. Line 13 is a paradox: the likely cure is no cure at all but the opposite. Line 14 explains the paradox and is itself paradoxical: since rest induces not calmness and quiet but unrestraint, Catullus is deprived of the very curatives required by his condition.

This chapter addresses the crisis in ‘gestural’ painting of the late 1950s in the context of O'Hara's collaboration with Norman Bluhm: the Poem-Paintings. It places these works provocatively alongside the gestural aesthetics of Situationism, arguing that the ‘realization of gesture in urban situations’ practised by the Situationists in Europe was analogous to O'Hara's practice of ‘productively debasing poetry’. It also reconsiders O'Hara's relationship to Abstract Expressionism, particularly the influential conservative version advanced by professional art critics.

This chapter sketches out a framework of invariant parameters that inform fictionalized treatments of “creative debuts,” drawing primarily on Nabokov's “First Poem” and Babel's “My First Fee”/“Answer to Inquiry” with occasional reference to Chekhov's, Andreev's, and Sholom Aleichem's stories. Despite obvious differences (for example, the absence in Nabokov's text of the “sexual initiation” motif, so central to Babel's), the two stories share several constitutive topoi: semi-ironic first-person reminiscing mode; acknowledgement of juvenile imitativeness; role of parent figures; subversive Bloomian play with literary “fathers”; and some others.

Created over a couple of Sunday mornings in the Fall of 1960, the twenty-six collaborative Poem-Paintings of the artist Norman Bluhm and the poet Frank O'Hara represent what Bluhm later called a spontaneous ‘conversation’ between the painter and the poet. In this essay, Catherine Gander adopts a number of pragmatist positions to reconsider these overlooked works as essential examples of verbal-visual interaction that extend their ‘conversation’ to greet and involve us in a relationship that is at once interpersonal, integrated, and embodied. The works, Gander argues, constitute what John Dewey terms ‘art as experience’; in their back and forth exchange of verbal and visual gesture, abstraction and denotation, the Poem-Paintings are the ‘cumulative continuity’ of ‘the process of living’, dramatising the shifting, spontaneous and multiple dimensions of interpersonal conversation, and in so doing, indicating a new path toward interconnective and equal exchange between word and image.

How did music – both in terms of its sound, its lyrics, and its associated recording technologies – encourage St. Mark’s affiliated poets to get their tracks on vinyl and ensure their poetry and poetics became ever more oriented towards a punk-inflected performance aesthetic? This chapter answers this question in part by turning to John Giorno. Giorno, a performance poet active in the St. Mark’s scene since the mid-1960s, who was in many ways downtown’s court jester. Star of Andy Warhol’s durational film Sleep, lover to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, founder of a pirate radio station broadcast from the bell tower of St. Mark’s Church, organizer of L.S.D fueled poetry performance parties at the Poetry Project, Giorno was perhaps the preeminent figure in the downtown scene determined to refigure poetry as populist outlaw happening. This chapter moves further by exploring how Giorno made the move to vinyl and live performance not just because of earlier examples drawn from the broader history of performance poetry, but because he was determined to mark a break from the urbane literariness associated with the first generation New York School poets.

This chapter shows two epigraphs— Ishmael Reed's Black Power Poem and Frank Schaeffer's Christianity Is Truth Rather Than Religion— explaining the mutual attention with which emergent multiculturalism and the conservative Christian resurgence regarded one another. Though progressive multiculturalism and the conservative resurgence were regarded as simple oppositional terms, both were reactions against the vaguely religious liberal consensus on civil rights that preceded them. In addition, the two sought to reenergize specific religious traditions, with consequences for their communities and for the question of how those communities should live. The chapter argues that multiculturalism and the conservative Christian resurgence were mutually entangled responses to the civil rights consensus of the 1950s and 1960s.

Transformations brings together several currents of Anne Sexton’s themes and methods and can be read as both a masked autobiography and transitional or gateway work from her mid to late poetry. This chapter analyzes the voice and tone she conjures to create the persona of witch/crone/teller and closely looks at the kinds of metaphors and images she employs to create her distinctive dramas. It compares her retellings to the original Grimm texts and also looks at some of her earlier poems as precursors while considering how, in her hands, the tales turn into both theatrical performances and case studies.

“Anne Sexton and The Wild Animal” discusses the bestiary poems from Anne Sexton’s 45 Mercy Street in the context of the book as a whole. It also investigates the idea of a feral, metaphysical “I” in other American poets, including Sylvia Plath.