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Critics have long drawn attention to the moralizing tenor of Fray Luis’s opening ode, as well as to its profound links with Horace, and in particular his secondEpode. These approaches, however, have not often been combined. This paper seeks to show that understanding the nature of the poem’s link to Horace is in fact key to revealing its moral content, by providing a reconsideration of the evidence that ties Fray Luis’s poem toEpode2, before arguing that the crux of the Spaniard’s interaction with his Roman forebear lies rather in hitherto-unremarked Horatian parallels for the central images of the garden and the sea, whose interaction underpins the development of the Spanish ode. This study therefore offers a new reading of Fray Luis’s most famous poem, while also throwing important light on his practice of poetic imitation, and in particular his much-cited relationship with Horace, thus providing support for the recent scholarly trend to view Horace as a thematic source for his Spanish successor, as well as a stylistic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most poetry-generation systems apply opportunistic approaches where algorithmic procedures are applied to explore the conceptual space defined by a given knowledge resource in search of solutions that might be aesthetically valuable. Aesthetical value is assumed to arise from compliance to a given poetic form – such as rhyme or metrical regularity – or from evidence of semantic relations between the words in the resulting poems that can be interpreted as rhetorical tropes – such as similes, analogies, or metaphors. This approach tends to fix a priori the aesthetic parameters of the results, and imposes no constraints on the message to be conveyed. The present paper describes an attempt to initiate a shift in this balance, introducing means for constraining the output to certain topics and allowing a looser mechanism for constraining form. This goal arose as a result of the need to produce poems for a themed collection commissioned to be included in a book. The solution adopted explores an approach to creativity where the goals are not solely aesthetic and where the results may be surprising in their poetic form. An existing computer poet, originally developed to produce poems in a given form but with no specific constraints on their content, is put to the task of producing a set of poems with explicit restrictions on content, and allowing for an exploration of poetic form. Alternative generation methods are devised to overcome the difficulties, and the various insights arising from these new methods and the impact they have on the set of resulting poems are discussed in terms of their potential contribution to better poetry-generation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is devoted to the influence of Chodasevič’s poetic technique on Mandel′štam's poetry. We make an attempt to analyze Mandel′štam's lateNovye stichi(“Ne govori nikomu … ”, “Kuda kak strašno nam s toboj … ” and “My s toboj na kuchne posidim … ”), which are connected to each other through the theme of fear. From the point of view of the poetic technique, these texts are also connected to each other through the literary device of the unexpected twist of meaning, which was associated with Chodasevič’s lyrics in Mandel′štam's consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, with the benefit of hindsight, Thomas Pringle’s poetry demands of his twenty-first-century readers that they measure its commitment to manumission by the balance between the syllables of his ethnographic poetry and force of his advocacy for manumission. The two measures, though, necessitate interdisciplinary forages into his work, albeit that the risk of either full leverage or attenuation may result from any interdisciplinary exercise that straddles history, anthropology, and literature. This paper ascribes primacy to that risk. It proceeds to point out a trajectory of earlier over-simplistic ethnographic poetry from a white colonist that, upon reflection, gives way to the later scripts of manumission of his work. It disavows anahistoricalreading of Pringle’s poetry that imposes his anti-slavery sentiment as informing his poetry in general and ethnographic poetry in particular, and so demonstrates that Pringle’s ethnographic poetry – unlike his celebrated manumission epistolary archive – does not support a singular reading of a humanizing intention. Pringle’s poetic sensibility – however much laudable – remains at odds with his political convictions: he inaugurates a Calibanesques axis through which Southern Africans in the settler colony vacillate between ‘Othering’ silence and colonized ‘voicing’. All told, Pringle’s ethnography poetry is shown to render the indigenous subjects as Calibanesque and, by that very fact, ‘cannibalizes’ him as he devours and usurps their right to self-representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various papers published in this issue including one by Lis Moller on the Mark Stig Ballads, one by Gunilla Hermansson on poetry in Swidish and Danish Romanticism, and one by Gry Hedin on Johan Thomas Lundbye as mediator between art and science.

In this paper I propose a reading of Coleridge and Hölderlin using Stanley Cavell’s philosophical theory of acknowledgment and avoidance as an interpretive rubric. I argue that recognition (acknowledgment) of the skeptical limits of reason and the imagination allow Hölderlin, through his poetical theory, philosophy and practice, to overcome the epistemological limits of the romantic imagination; this factor is instanced in his poetry. On the other hand, Coleridge's work remains trapped within skeptical limits because of his “avoidance” of this ontological recognition, which is due to his continued desire for an intellectual intuition. I further my argument by using the hermeneutics of Heidegger as a secondary tool in reading both poets and in helping to illuminate their relative poetic and philosophical positions. Both poets ultimately recognize the limits of our imaginative autonomy; however, they articulate these limits in very different ways – ways that are useful keys in unlocking the work of Coleridge and Hölderlin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers performance poetry as a method to explore lived experiences of disability. We discuss how poetic inquiry used within a participatory arts-based research framework can enable young people to collectively question society’s attitudes and actions towards disability. Poetry will be considered as a means to develop a more accessible and effective arena in which young people with direct experience of disability can be empowered to develop new skills that enable them to tell their own stories. Discussion of how this can challenge audiences to critically reflect upon their own perceptions of disability will also be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Editors have constructed the firstSolomon and Saturn Dialogueas consisting of three different texts: a more or less complete poem, a prose “fragment” inserted into the manuscript and another poem with significant losses due to manuscript damage. In this paper, I argue that we should read these fragments as a single, generically varied, composition. By analogy with individual works such as the Old Norse wisdom poems, charms and Boethius’Consolation of Philosophy,as well as with the many manuscripts that merge verse and prose, we can read the verse, prose and verse of the first twelve pages of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College manuscript 422 as a scribally if not authorially single work combining both genres. This leaves us with a single integrated work in which Saturn approaches Solomon with a request for help with wisdom; in response, Solomon provides Saturn with various descriptions of the Pater Noster and its powers in mystical and spiritual terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]