Jahan Ramazani
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226083735
- eISBN:
- 9780226083421
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226083421.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter argues that poetry is vibrantly dialogic, a quality usually reserved for the novel. It proposes a “dialogic poetics” that would combine analysis of poetry’s interplay with other genres, ...
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This chapter argues that poetry is vibrantly dialogic, a quality usually reserved for the novel. It proposes a “dialogic poetics” that would combine analysis of poetry’s interplay with other genres, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of “dialogic,” and genre-specific analysis of poetry as poetry, in Roman Jakobson’s sense of “poetics.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, poetry metabolizes a variety of discursive forms, and this chapter focuses on three: the novel, theory, and the law. Ever since poetry lost its literary preeminence to the novel, it has sought ways both to assimilate, and to differentiate itself from, novelistic realism, plot, and character. Similarly, it has borrowed aspects of theory and philosophy, while showing poetry’s forms, figurations, and visual materiality to diverge from these abstract discourses. It has also recognized itself in the precision and narrative structures of the law, even as it has separated its polyphony and multifariousness from what it sometimes represents as the law’s narrow rationalism, its binary logic. In readings of poets from W. B. Yeats to Christopher Okigbo, NourbeSe Philip, and Lorna Goodison, the chapter traces poetry in the act of defining itself situationally and relationally, as it incorporates, and contends with, other discourses.Less
This chapter argues that poetry is vibrantly dialogic, a quality usually reserved for the novel. It proposes a “dialogic poetics” that would combine analysis of poetry’s interplay with other genres, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of “dialogic,” and genre-specific analysis of poetry as poetry, in Roman Jakobson’s sense of “poetics.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, poetry metabolizes a variety of discursive forms, and this chapter focuses on three: the novel, theory, and the law. Ever since poetry lost its literary preeminence to the novel, it has sought ways both to assimilate, and to differentiate itself from, novelistic realism, plot, and character. Similarly, it has borrowed aspects of theory and philosophy, while showing poetry’s forms, figurations, and visual materiality to diverge from these abstract discourses. It has also recognized itself in the precision and narrative structures of the law, even as it has separated its polyphony and multifariousness from what it sometimes represents as the law’s narrow rationalism, its binary logic. In readings of poets from W. B. Yeats to Christopher Okigbo, NourbeSe Philip, and Lorna Goodison, the chapter traces poetry in the act of defining itself situationally and relationally, as it incorporates, and contends with, other discourses.
Jahan Ramazani
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226083735
- eISBN:
- 9780226083421
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226083421.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system— “suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But this book reveals ...
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What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system— “suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But this book reveals modern and contemporary poetry’s dialogue with other genres and discourses, especially the novel, theory, the law, news, prayer, and song. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, it argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives. Exploring a heterogeneous array of English-language poets— from Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams to Frank O’Hara, Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, Lorna Goodison, M. NourbeSe Philip, and many others— this book shows that poetry both blends with other genres and distinguishes itself from them: the realism of the novel and the news’s empiricism, the abstractions of theory and the law’s social ordering, the ritualism of prayer and the voice-engrained melodies of song. In close readings of famous and little-known poems, the book demonstrates an interpretive practice that combines dialogic analysis, in this case of poetry’s absorption of closely related discursive forms, with genre-specific analysis of poetry’s persisting awareness of its difference. Even as poetry stretches to incorporate various genres, it puts on display the compression, dense figuration, self-reflexivity, and sonic and visual form by which it differentiates itself from the others it metabolizes. In this book, the first to trace poetry’s interactions with its discursive cousins, we understand what poetry is by closely examining its interplay with what it is not.Less
What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system— “suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But this book reveals modern and contemporary poetry’s dialogue with other genres and discourses, especially the novel, theory, the law, news, prayer, and song. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, it argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives. Exploring a heterogeneous array of English-language poets— from Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams to Frank O’Hara, Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, Lorna Goodison, M. NourbeSe Philip, and many others— this book shows that poetry both blends with other genres and distinguishes itself from them: the realism of the novel and the news’s empiricism, the abstractions of theory and the law’s social ordering, the ritualism of prayer and the voice-engrained melodies of song. In close readings of famous and little-known poems, the book demonstrates an interpretive practice that combines dialogic analysis, in this case of poetry’s absorption of closely related discursive forms, with genre-specific analysis of poetry’s persisting awareness of its difference. Even as poetry stretches to incorporate various genres, it puts on display the compression, dense figuration, self-reflexivity, and sonic and visual form by which it differentiates itself from the others it metabolizes. In this book, the first to trace poetry’s interactions with its discursive cousins, we understand what poetry is by closely examining its interplay with what it is not.
Cairns Craig
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748609123
- eISBN:
- 9780748652044
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748609123.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter is concerned with poetry, and looks at how symbolism is involved with association. It studies William Wordsworth's theory of poetry and unusual associative connections, and examines the ...
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This chapter is concerned with poetry, and looks at how symbolism is involved with association. It studies William Wordsworth's theory of poetry and unusual associative connections, and examines the importance of the nature of a poet's memory. The chapter then looks at associationism's claim that the world was necessarily invested with personal meanings, and considers the role of memories in association. The final sections of the chapter discuss W.B. Yeats' conception of the symbol and his belief that art recalled a transhistorical memory, and not the memory of individual human beings.Less
This chapter is concerned with poetry, and looks at how symbolism is involved with association. It studies William Wordsworth's theory of poetry and unusual associative connections, and examines the importance of the nature of a poet's memory. The chapter then looks at associationism's claim that the world was necessarily invested with personal meanings, and considers the role of memories in association. The final sections of the chapter discuss W.B. Yeats' conception of the symbol and his belief that art recalled a transhistorical memory, and not the memory of individual human beings.
