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W. B. Yeats: Among the Deepening Shades

Alan Gillis

in Irish Poetry of the 1930s

This chapter begins by arguing that the fact Yeats is hardly associated with the 1930s constitutes a serious blip in literary history, and sets out to rectify this hiatus. It discusses the complexity ... More

This chapter begins by arguing that the fact Yeats is hardly associated with the 1930s constitutes a serious blip in literary history, and sets out to rectify this hiatus. It discusses the complexity of his late verse and symbolism, his arguments with other modernists, his revisionism of Ireland’s recent past, and focuses on his radical idea of ‘tradition’. The chapter offers in-depth interpretations of ‘Vacillation’, ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, aspects of A Vision, ‘The Statues’, ‘Byzantium’, his controversial late ballads, including the ‘Blueshirt’ poems, and ‘Lapis Lazuli’. Reading the aesthetic structure of his philosophy of history in the light of his poetry’s style and form, and vice versa, the chapter locates what it terms ‘inclusive disjunction’ at the heart of his poetic. It delineates the precise form of Yeats’s right-wing nihilism, but also his capacity for envisioning the possibility of transformations towards social harmony. It reads such remorseless dialecticism in the light of ideas from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, arguing that although his conservative politics were worlds apart from theirs, his poetry’s engagement with contradiction and ruptured idealism creates an authentic and multidimensional aesthetic radicalism that has not yet been accounted for.Less

Dissenting Forms: The Brownings

Kirstie Blair

in Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion

Chapter 4 focuses on Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with a particular concentration on two major works of the 1850s, Christmas-Eve and Aurora Leigh. It argues that the dissenting, ... More

Chapter 4 focuses on Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with a particular concentration on two major works of the 1850s, Christmas-Eve and Aurora Leigh. It argues that the dissenting, Congregationalist background of these poets (and their consequent opposition to the Anglican revival of forms) is more evident in their poetry than critics have observed. After locating both poets within dissenting culture, using their letters and early poems, the chapter discusses Christmas-Eve in depth and argue that its varying structures and playful form and content are a deliberate dissenting take on religious poetics. Similarly, EBB’s poetics, particularly after she became interested in Swedenborg in the 1850s, reveal a rejection of what she perceived as the cold formality of the High Church in favour of an understanding of form as organic and natural though infused with the spiritual.Less

The Stigma of Meter

Meredith Martin

in The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860--1930

This chapter resituates Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose name has become synonymous with metrical experiment, within the prosodic, philological, and theological debates of his time. His commitment to ... More

This chapter resituates Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose name has become synonymous with metrical experiment, within the prosodic, philological, and theological debates of his time. His commitment to defining accent and stress in English was a critical turning point in his thinking about his identity as a Catholic and as an Englishman. It argues that his attempt to create a new English meter was a particularly Victorian engagement with poetic form, national identity, and the English language. Broader movements in comparative philology (particularly those associated with scholars such as Max Müller and Richard Chevenix Trench) influenced Hopkins's attempts to reconcile the history of English and the materiality of meter with his Catholic beliefs. Hopkins is used to prove that even the most obscure and alienated-seeming poet must be read as part of the broader debate about what meter can do for the quickly changing nation. Hopkins's successes and failures, anticipate later attempts to examine the constituent parts of meter and the English language.Less

Poetic History, Ireland, and the Thirties

Alan Gillis

in Irish Poetry of the 1930s

This chapter discusses the English bias in current conceptions of the literature of the 1930s. It recasts the historical context of the 1930s in terms of global events and proceeds to locate Irish ... More

This chapter discusses the English bias in current conceptions of the literature of the 1930s. It recasts the historical context of the 1930s in terms of global events and proceeds to locate Irish literary history within this broader context. A revisionary overview of Irish history during the decade is offered, followed by a critique of prevailing literary approaches, which are seen to simplify Irish poetry of the time by creating a sharp split between Irish modernist poets and overtly ‘Celtic’ poets. This simplified dichotomy censors the kind of complications found in Louis MacNeice and W. B. Yeats, among others, and an argument for their central importance is made. The chapter then proposes a new method of literary historiography based on aesthetic form, seeking to fuse the tenets of New Criticism and Marxist aesthetics, and adapting ideas from Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious and Hayden White’s Metahistory to explore how poetry represents history.Less

Louis MacNeice: The Living Curve

Alan Gillis

in Irish Poetry of the 1930s

This chapter discusses Seamus Heaney’s idea of Louis MacNeice as a vital means of holding Ulster, Ireland, and England within the purview of a single imagination. It argues that such an idea, to be ... More

This chapter discusses Seamus Heaney’s idea of Louis MacNeice as a vital means of holding Ulster, Ireland, and England within the purview of a single imagination. It argues that such an idea, to be accurate, must register MacNeice’s extreme antagonism towards Ulster and Ireland. This antagonism is contextualized within the intense culture of propaganda and rising ideological terror throughout the 1930s. Such a context spurs MacNeice’s interest in the relationship between empiricism and abstraction, which is key to his aesthetics. The chapter traces the multifaceted idea of time in his verse and explores his poetry’s simultaneous striving towards representing newness and registering social reality. Focusing on the figuration and musicality of his poems, the centrality of these to his growing political commitment is discussed, moving into a major interpretation of his masterpiece Autumn Journal. His critical treatment of Ireland is then contextualized within his broader concern for the political agency of poetry in general.Less

Conclusion

Geri L. Smith

in The Medieval French Pastourelle Tradition: Poetic Motivations and Generic Transformations

This study has shown generic transformation and the emerging concepts of author as concurrent, intimately intertwined, and mutually influencing phenomena. Genre itself is an important subtext in all ... More

This study has shown generic transformation and the emerging concepts of author as concurrent, intimately intertwined, and mutually influencing phenomena. Genre itself is an important subtext in all of the works addressed here, and provocative intergeneric play marks the creative manipulation of the pastourelles as an established poetic form. One can observe through its transformations the kinds of factors that play into the evolution and dynamic potential of literary categories. What that powerfully reveals, and what has remained true throughout the ages, is that genre responds to cultural conditions, and is a product of the infinitely complex and personal relationship between the artist, the text, and his or her social, historical, and literary moment.Less

Poetry as Performance

Kathleen McCarthy

in I, the Poet: First-Person Form in Horace, Catullus, and Propertius

This chapter examines the performative model of positioning the agency of the poet in relation to the speech and events depicted in the storyworld. This model hews more closely to the norms ... More

This chapter examines the performative model of positioning the agency of the poet in relation to the speech and events depicted in the storyworld. This model hews more closely to the norms established by traditional performed poetry. In this case, the speaker knows that his words have the special status of poetry, and his speech may be formulated with an eye to audiences other than the named interlocutor. In contrast to the speaker of conversational poems, who is focused on trying to exert his will through speech, the speaker in this performative model embodies the mastery of poetic form and the assurance granted to an authorized performer. Poems built on this model are more likely to exhibit formal features that thematize the special status of address or that require suspension of thought or that highlight the poem's overall structure. One can easily see how the agency of such a speaker echoes the agency of the poet crafting the text. The chapter then considers Catullus's invective poems and Horace's hymns and dedicatory poems.Less

Mood and Trope in the Lyric

John Brenkman

in Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect

Lyric poetry plumbs the link between mood and trope, that is, feeling and language, affect and expression. Paul de Man exemplifies the linguistic turn in literary studies, especially in his readings ... More

Lyric poetry plumbs the link between mood and trope, that is, feeling and language, affect and expression. Paul de Man exemplifies the linguistic turn in literary studies, especially in his readings of Rousseau and Baudelaire. The binary logical impasse of interpretation to which his insights inevitably lead (“aporia”) is countered in this chapter by the triadic mood–understanding–discourse. In poetic discourse, it is argued, trope provokes interpretation and interpretation discloses mood. The affective labyrinth of Baudelaire’s poetry and its duality of spleen and ideal occasion an attempt to give methodological consistency to the Heideggerian triad. Two problematics come to the fore, the question of subjectivity in the poetic triad mood–I–trope and the question of pathos and poetic form, the relation of the poet’s suffering and creativity. Another angle on mood and trope, as well as pathos and form, is found in the poetry of Li-Young Lee, for whom exile, family, and the past century’s “diary of fires” create layers of memory and dream, imagination and witness. Via Lee and Baudelaire, the question of the lyric comes into focus anew, reviving the dialectical approaches of Hegel and Nietzsche to the “self” in poetic creation.Less

Introduction: The Form of Love Poetry, Philosophy, and the Closeness of Loving Reading

James Kuzner

in The Form of Love: Poetry's Quarrel with Philosophy

This introduction shows how The Form of Love joins conversations about whether and how literature in general and poetry in particular can think distinctively. Philosophers, critics, and poets often ... More

This introduction shows how The Form of Love joins conversations about whether and how literature in general and poetry in particular can think distinctively. Philosophers, critics, and poets often invoke familiar—and useful—contrasts to distinguish poetry from philosophy: the particular versus the abstract, pleasure versus explanation, form versus matter or truth. Such helpful, if contestable, considerations can remain rather general, and when they do engage concretely with how poems think distinctively, they tend not to give poems the slow regard needed to reveal the full amplitude of how poetic form enables novel conceptions of love. Endeavoring to give John Donne’s “Batter my heart” this kind of attention, the introduction risks what could look like a conservative focus on texts in hopes of revealing what is most radical about those texts. It also outlines a form of loving reading that might be uncritical or anti-critical (or at least postcritical), in hopes of showing how poetry thinks as other forms of thought cannot.Less

Poetic Forms and Rhythmic Types

Nicholas Stoia

in Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form

Chapter 3 examines the poetic forms and rhythmic types of the “Sweet Thing” scheme in early blues, country, and gospel music. Approaching the scheme through its rhythmic profile and poetic form ... More

Chapter 3 examines the poetic forms and rhythmic types of the “Sweet Thing” scheme in early blues, country, and gospel music. Approaching the scheme through its rhythmic profile and poetic form yields an accurate description of its consistent musical characteristics while simultaneously allowing enough flexibility to accommodate its substantial variation, especially with respect to its diverse harmonic progressions and melodic designs. Through a comparison of the rhythmic types identified in this chapter with the rhythmic characteristics of the earlier English, Scottish, Irish, and American sources, it becomes more apparent which ancient songs are the main sources for which modern variants of the scheme: “Captain Kidd” and “The Frog’s Courtship” each left their distinctive rhythmic fingerprint on the multitude of songs they each spawned, and this mark is still evident in many twentieth-century realizations of the “Sweet Thing” scheme.Less

Conclusion: Reading Word Order, Slowly

Helma Dik

in Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue

This concluding chapter begins with a brief review of the preceding chapters. It then discusses how to read word order slowly. It is argued that order is bound up with the essence of communication ... More

This concluding chapter begins with a brief review of the preceding chapters. It then discusses how to read word order slowly. It is argued that order is bound up with the essence of communication between individuals and thereby, with the essence of what makes drama work. Word order is one dimension of what a Greek clause communicates, and it is worth paying attention to.Less

Introduction

Seeta Chaganti

in Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages

This book argues that in bringing dance-based perceptual practices to their encounter with poetry, medieval audiences experience a poem’s form as strange footing, virtual forces that hover askew of ... More

This book argues that in bringing dance-based perceptual practices to their encounter with poetry, medieval audiences experience a poem’s form as strange footing, virtual forces that hover askew of worldly measures of time and space, existing between the real and the unreal. To make this case, Strange Footing reenacts prevalent traditions of performing and representing dance, such as carole and danse macabre.Less

“Dredful Fotyng”: Reenacting Danse macabre’s Poetic Form

Seeta Chaganti

in Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages

This chapter argues that the experience of danse macabre poetry’s form is a temporal and spatial disorientation. The danse macabre spectacle conditions the reader/viewer to bring these perceptual ... More

This chapter argues that the experience of danse macabre poetry’s form is a temporal and spatial disorientation. The danse macabre spectacle conditions the reader/viewer to bring these perceptual practices to the encounter with the poetic tradition. The audience’s habituation to dance’s virtual supplement allows them to perceive asymmetry, orthogononality, and untimeliness, even within the poet’s insistently regular huitain stanza.Less

Dance on the Surface, Dance in the Depths: Reenacting Form in the Middle English Carol

Seeta Chaganti

in Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages

The round dance’s virtual circles configure the medieval reader’s experience of English carol form. In this ductile experience of poetic form, the reader is aware of forces, irregular and uncanny, ... More

The round dance’s virtual circles configure the medieval reader’s experience of English carol form. In this ductile experience of poetic form, the reader is aware of forces, irregular and uncanny, supplemental to the evident regularity of the lyric’s stanzaic pattern. The chapter makes this case using the carols “A child is boren” and “Maiden in the mor lay.”Less

Introduction

in Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

Arab poets in general, and Palestinian poets in particular, have radically transformed the sound structures of their poems in order to modernize poetic forms by turning to free verse and prose poems. ... More

Arab poets in general, and Palestinian poets in particular, have radically transformed the sound structures of their poems in order to modernize poetic forms by turning to free verse and prose poems. Through these forms, poets, not “the sea,” stand sovereign over rhythms. Over the past seven decades, Arabic poems have become ever more silent, marked by ever more irregular rhythms. This book, an ethnography of “literary” transformation, investigates how forms of ethics, politics, epistemologies, and imaginaries have led to this prevailing silence in contemporary Arabic poetry. Drawing on interviews with forty-seven poets, including six women, the book shows how poets' emerging “silence” reflects contradictions and ambiguities of secular formations in modernity as movements in the sounds of rhythms, as well as beyond them. It argues that poetic forms and forms of life are inseparable and makes a number of assumptions about poetry, poets, and poetic form. It looks at the current Palestinian poetry, which is dominated by three forms: a traditional ode in use for more than 1,500 years and two modern arrivals, free verse and prose poetry.Less

An Even and Unaltered Gait: Jonson and the Poetics of Character

Rebecca M. Rush

in The Fetters of Rhyme: Liberty and Poetic Form in Early Modern England

This chapter explains why Ben Jonson's measured couplets were seen as a watershed in the history of English poetry. It argues that the battle between the couplet and the stanzaic poets in the 1590s ... More

This chapter explains why Ben Jonson's measured couplets were seen as a watershed in the history of English poetry. It argues that the battle between the couplet and the stanzaic poets in the 1590s ended in a sort of stalemate. The young couplet poets eroded the influence of stanzaic poets like Edmund Spenser by associating stanzas with a cowardly submission to mistresses, conventions, and continental rules of poetry. Nevertheless, their separation of verse from measure was not particularly congenial to most seventeenth-century poets, who continued to hold to the view that poetic form should reflect divine or social order. By instituting a reform of English verse that reconciled the argumentative freedom of the couplet school with the measure of the stanzaic poets, Ben Jonson made the couplet a fitting vehicle for his ethical poetry, which celebrates a circumscribed, private kind of liberty. In doing so, he developed concepts of lyric freedom and a separate poetic sphere that would be taken up and reinterpreted by the subsequent generation of poets.Less

‘A stranger borne / To be indenized with us, and made our owne’: Samuel Daniel and the naturalisation of Italian literary forms

Jason Lawrence

in Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England

This chapter explores how English poet Samuel Daniel consistently attempted to naturalise Italian poetic forms into English verse. It analyzes his works, from his earliest poetry in the Delia sonnets ... More

This chapter explores how English poet Samuel Daniel consistently attempted to naturalise Italian poetic forms into English verse. It analyzes his works, from his earliest poetry in the Delia sonnets to the pastoral play Hymens Triumph in order to understand how his imitative methods developed. It suggests that it is possible to trace the composition and construction of his sonnet sequence Delia to two separate phases and each phase reflects the predominant use of sources from a specific sonnet tradition (French and then Italian).Less