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In 1829, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who was later to write "Das Lied der Deutschen," published one of the first scholarly articles on what was known as the Gaunersprache (rogues' language), Rotwelsch. His article included a poem in Rotwelsch he had written himself. Against the backdrop of Hoffmann's nationalist persuasion and participation in the nationalist project of Germanistik, this paper discusses the question of why he turned to writing in a language he portrays in the same article as hybrid and criminal. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of minor literature, this analysis of the poem itself and of its publication context concludes that Hoffmann participates in an older tradition of inverted minor literature in Rotwelsch, that is, a literature that a majority constructs within a minor language. Thus, Hoffmann's poem appears as an attempt at naturalizing Germanness by ascribing the artificial and deterritorializing aspects of any language to the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new interpretation of the "sufferings of Daphnis" as they are sung by the shepherd Thyrsis in Theocritus' first Idyll. While the common view is that Daphnis' wasting was caused by a stubborn commitment to fidelity or to chastity, this paper argues that it is rather a symptom of his sexual impairment. The argument rests on two main elements: the connections between Daphnis and other figures acting as Aphrodite's consorts, and the presence of lexical clues pointing to the sexual character of the cowherd's illness. Finally, I argue that Theocritus' enigmatic account of Daphnis' fate in the first Idyll is consistent with the pervading metapoetic discourse of the poem: impotence serves to highlight Daphnis' fecundity as the founder of bucolic song. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horace's Ode 1.12 is commonly thought to be alluding to the wedding between Augustus' nephew C. Claudius Marcellus and Augustus' daughter Julia in 25 b.c.e. but there are equally good poetic reasons for reading the poem instead as alluding to the young Marcellus' demise in the last quarter of 23 b.c.e. and to see it in direct dialogue with the epicedia for Marcellus composed by Virgil and Propertius. The present paper reviews the evidence for either dating and proposes that the poem actively resists and at the same time engenders historicist interpretations by virtue of lyric's ability to create its own historical temporalities. As a poem touching upon the thorny issue of the acceptability of imperial succession in a period when Augustus' life was in danger, Ode 1.12 can be read as actively engaged in a hermeneutic "conspiratorial" game with its readers, prompting them to question or imagine allusions to contemporary events at a time of utmost political instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses in Warsan Shire's poem Home why refugees have to leave their home. In so doing, it first explores the root causes behind particularly the displacement of Somalians, which becomes an inspiration for the poem and also argues that these causes may actually be similar ones which could be seen one way or another behind any act of the displacement anywhere across the world. Secondly, the paper responds to the criticisms which accuse refugees of leaving at once their home when they face any difficulties in life. In this sense, the poem becomes the voice of "refugees" and tells the world that "refugees" will not take all the risks in very dangerous and difficult journeys without any reasonable causes. As the paper discusses, what is also equally important is that "refugees," though exposed to very hard conditions of living during the journey and in the host country, are also labelled as "Other," which immediately brings about a negative condition, in which they are humiliated, discriminated and categorised as "us" and "them, making it difficult for refugees to integrate and eventually belong to the indigenous society. Finally, the paper debates that it is not the guilt of refugees who leave their home but the ones who create intolerable causes for their displacement from their home. The paper suggests that we are all responsible - United Nations, politicians, world leaders, writers, intellectuals, and academics and so on all over the world - not only for revealing the root causes behind the displacement of people from their home but also for annihilating them all together for a humanely world and living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Onion Skin" by Robert Lowell' which was first published in "Notebook 1967-68" in which the material qualities of the paper Lowell was using to draft it, his sensory experience of the typed text and the multiple versions of the poem became a subject of his poetic inquiry.

Christopher Okigbo conveyed in his poetry the sense of patriotism and personal anguish at the monstrosity of a benighted nation. Some critics have argued that Okigbo was not only obsessive in his depictions of metaphors that incarnated the recurring trope of death, but also embodied a death wish culminating in his death in the Nigeria-Biafra war. They further argue that he embodied a suicidal impulse that motivated his general conduct and death in that battle. Unfortunately, only a handful of scholars have sought to contest this view and to illuminate Okigbo's self-immolation in the name of a higher duty. To be sure, suicide and martyrdom may go beyond the question of dying to the problem of laying one's death dramatically at someone else's door. Following Kant's theory of the ethical act, this paper undertakes a critical intervention that reappraises some of Okigbo's poetry as well as documented accounts of his life in order to identify him appropriately: is he a genuine martyr or a mere suicide who presides ritually over his own dismemberment, or both? Examining lines of his poetry that have been misread as embodying his 'haunting' death-wish, on the one hand, and evidence of his self-giving impulse, on the other, the paper seeks to articulate how Okigbo as a tragic poet transcends his destiny by submitting to it--victor and victim at once. In its conclusion, the paper reconciles Okigbo's will to heroic action with the symbolic meaning that is locked in his poetry in order to justify his ascension to the rank of martyr. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three ancient poets—Sappho, Theocritus, and Catullus—provide neglected evidence for Greek wedding poems composed in hexameters. Theocritus, Idyll 18 and Catullus in Carmen 62 are usually thought to reflect Greek wedding songs originally sung in lyric or choral meters; but why did Sappho, herself a lyric poet extraordinaire, compose some of her wedding poems in hexameters, a meter that she hardly uses elsewhere? This paper suggests that the Greeks traditionally performed at least one kind of wedding poem in dactylic hexameters. This in turn leaves open the possibility that when Theocritus and Catullus use hexameters in their wedding poems, they, too, are imitating the content and the form of this neglected genre. This is a circular argument of sorts, but one familiar to scholars seeking to make sense of the earliest fragments of ancient Greek poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on aphasic poetry by Chris Ireland, exploring how her poems create an aesthetic equality that challenges communicative hierarchies between aphasic patients and their surroundings. The paper delves into the pathological, poetical, and sociocultural implications of aphasic depictions of sounds caused by both society and aphasia, highlighting the potentials and perils of poetic approaches to language impairment.

In the mid-1920s the poet W. B. Yeats was pleased to discover contemporary philosophers, Giovanni Gentile and A. N. Whitehead, whose metaphysical and educational philosophies seemed to coincide with his own commitments. Whitehead shares with Gentile a sense of reality as activity and an understanding of knowledge as constructed from abstractions that are open to evaluation and imaginative reconfiguration. Yeats was a Senator of the Irish Free State and took an interest in schooling. Soon after visiting a Montessori-inspired girls' school in Waterford, he began his poem 'Among School Children". (The text of the poem is printed at the end of this paper.) I argue that an awareness of the philosophical ideas Yeats had recently encountered should encourage restless rather than fixed interpretations of the poem and that this sense of restlessness and imaginative reconfiguration reflects the approach to education the three writers, at that time, shared: that at best our modes of apprehension provide only glimpses of reality and therefore each child's understanding and learning must be kept moving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze Octavio Paz's theoretical and political thought vis-à-vis his view of the poet as a member of an exclusive brotherhood. By tracing the displacement of Paz's thought from philosophical discourse toward literary language and poetic expression, I establish how (in opposition to Hegel's dialectic) Paz defined poetry and the poetic experience as superior forms of knowledge that could serve as the foundation for a poets' brotherhood, as well as being the ideal cognitive instruments with which to think about the origin of community at large and to develop a subversive critique of it. I trace Paz's evolving view of the decline of both the poets' brotherhood and the subversive power of poetry during the twentieth century, as he grappled with the profound transformations in language and communications provoked by the development of technology. I examine this transition in his thinking, which occurred between the first and second editions of El arco y la lira, to discuss the trajectory that guided him to the position that he assumed as an intellectual when he finally returned to Mexico in 1971. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together the poetry of authors T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) and César Vallejo (1892-1938), comparing and contrasting their perceptions of time as simultaneity, following the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Simultaneity is for both poets a way of reconnecting with the past, and making the present a more endurable experience. This paper looks specifically at Vallejo's 'A mi hermano Miguel', Trilce VI, LXI, LXIV, LXV and 'Fue domingo en las claras orejas de mi burro . . . ', and at Eliot's 'Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar', The Waste Land and Four Quartets ('Burnt Norton', 'The Dry Salvages'), arguing how it is possible to discern in both authors a use of time which is a union of past, present and future, allowing both Vallejo and Eliot to reconnect with a past irremediably lost and perpetually sought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has as its main concern a reexamination of Stephen Gray's 1977 poem "Hottentot Venus" in the light of two events that occurred after the poem's publication: first, the return of the remains of Sara Baartman (Gray's Hottentot Venus) to South Africa and their ceremonial burial; second, the publication of a biography of Baartman by Clifford Crais and Pamela Scully, a work that has much to say on the production of knowledge and the uses made of this. The paper compares Gray's poem with a poem on Baartman by Diana Ferrus and with Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, focusing on the attribution of agency or its absence. This discussion leads into an examination of the ethics of representation (especially the representation of the Other and of suffering), surveying, first, historical studies of the representation of Khoekhoe, Bushmen, and other marginalized peoples of southern Africa, then novels that attempt such representation or that problematize this by Dalene Matthee, Yvette Christianse, and Zoe Wicomb, and addressing views on the ethics of representation by, among others, Antjie Krog, Susan Sontag, and Alice Walker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As they depart the Garden of Eden at the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve must “choose their place of rest” in the world. Most scholarly treatments of this “rest” place it in the eschatological context of Hebrews 4. Our paper highlights the neglected worldly significance of rest in Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve come to understand rest in relation to work, speech, understanding, eating, and sexual expression, both before the fall and after. Our article enables readers to identify with “our first parents” in seeking a “place of rest” in this world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since his translation of Aeschylus's Oresteia, produced at the National Theatre in 1981, Tony Harrison has been closely associated with ancient Greek literature, especially that of the dramatic poets. And while his work since the 1980s has often drawn on fifth-century BC Athenian drama, his training as a Classicist is steeped in Latin poetry, particularly that of Virgil. Little has been written, however, about the place of Virgil or Latin poetry more broadly, in Harrison's poetic imagination. This is largely because of the relative paucity of works by Harrison which explicitly engage with Latin poetry. This paper will argue, however, that there is as much to learn from the absence of explicit engagement as there is to learn from the works that do engage with the Latin poetic tradition, particularly when it comes to the influence of Virgil's Aeneid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I apply current ecologically centred methodologies in the humanities to explore the familiar image of the bird-soul in The Seafarer in close relation to the real seabirds that are one of the most striking aspects of the maritime environment of the poem. Far from appearing as mere background incidentals, the poet's treatment of the seabirds we first encounter resonates with contemporary ornithological knowledge, and suggests that they feature specifically as species that best convey the ascetic trials and endeavours of the sea-going speaker who observes, listens to and names seabirds. The curious essence of seabirds as creatures that are always at home on the seas, and yet journeying to a home elsewhere, establishes them as what I term "native foreigners", a paradox that highlights the seafarer's conflicting yearnings and reflects the difficult earthly/celestial dynamic in the poem's perceptions of the soul's journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figurative pointing and painting in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's poetry create unique intersections of voice, person and gender whence lyric in the neuter or third person may speak. This paper follows her use of deixis (from the epideictic tradition), the gesture of pointing at and describing a person or an object, as a way to trace her subjectivity to the point of origin for the invective or praise, while exploring her navigation of the third and first persons within that tradition. Though the lyric traditionally operates on the first-person/ second-person dialectic, Sor Juana's productive use of the epideictic in her lyric poems opens a space for the neuter, or ternary logic, in a genre dominated by male subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I looked at the call for papers, “Poetic responses to Orlando” and paused. Should I contribute? And then I thought, how could I hide in the safety of my so-called normality and straightness when others may have become afraid to dance? So I invited my friends to join me in a poetic response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines foreignness in Mohja Kahfs poetry volume, E-mails from Scheherazad (2003), as a celebratory commodity rather than a literary trope to resist Arab women representations or to accentuate exilic voices. Drawing on Julie Kristeva's conceptualization of foreignness as internal personae and not a projection of an external locus of identity, this paper explores how the speakers in some of Kahfs poems view foreignness as festive rather than negative. In sharp contrast to the traditional conception of difference as publicly alienating, foreignness to the Arab-American speakers becomes a distinctive mark that they uphold and celebrate. Examining foreignness in Kahfs poems through Kristeva's lens provides a sense of uniqueness to the immigrant's experience. The notion of recognizing the foreigner in ourselves, that Kristeva provides, subverts the general perception of foreignness as external and intruding. Kahfs poetry can be perceived as a negotiation of foreignness, which is not an estranging element that incurs resistance but rather as a celebratory part of the human consciousness that should be jubilantly defined rather than politically defended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term posthumanism does not come readily to mind in discussions of the modernist writer T.S. Eliot, but the present article argues that applying a posthumanist lens to readings of Eliot might offer up new ways of approaching his work. Critiques of humanism, the de-centering of the human, the notion of the subject as an empty center, and the re-configuration of consciousness are thematic axes where posthumanism and Eliot's Four Quartets can be seen to converge. These convergences show how Eliot might be considered as anticipating certain aspects of posthumanist thought. This paper argues that these posthumanist strategies serve the broader scope of Eliot's project in Four Quartets, by pointing the way toward the creation of a morally and socially responsible consciousness. It is this consciousness, envisioned by Eliot in response to the devastations of war and social unrest, that, I argue, could be applied to addressing the social upheavals of our own present-day global society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Juan Gelmans declared affinities with the Spanish mystic poets or with Sephardic texts, along with the titles of collections such as Traducciones, Notas, and Citas y comentarios, underscore the significant presence of the written tradition in his poetics. In this essay, however, I argue for the importance of the oral tradition in arriving at a fuller understanding of Gelmans work. Many of Gelmans poems have their roots in ancient expressive modes that connect poetry to song, lamentation, incantation or curse, modes that often operate in ways distinctfivm those of the written word. This line of inquiry leads us to reflect on oral poetry as a verbal act more commonly associated with a public voice than with a private one, given that orality implies by definition a communal exchange. In this paper I examine two particular manifestations of the oral tradition, the charm and the lament, in order to explore the complex relationships between orality and writing, and by extension, between the intimate and the communal voice in Gelmans work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will reevaluate Catullus's venom in poems 41 and 43 (the so-called 'Ameana Cycle') to show that his attacks on Ameana are in fact veiled criticisms of Mamurra's loathsome poetry. Catullus's descriptions of Ameana substantiate this reading: her physical features are disproportionate and ill suited to Roman conceptions of beauty, she is entirely without wit, and despite her patent imperfections, she has no idea how hideous she really is. The use of a poetic mistress in this manner has parallels within the Catullan corpus, and is also referenced in the work of Martial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some recent scholarship insists that the four poems W.B. Yeats wrote touching the biography of Major Robert Gregory are classic representations of elegy. Yet, throughout these four 'elegies' - 'The Shepherd and the Goatherd,' 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,' 'An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,' and the unpublished 'Reprisals' - one can detect veiled (as well as shockingly naked) criticisms of Gregory. This paper explores the complicated, often thorny relationship between Yeats and Gregory and seeks to challenge the notion that Yeats ever cared to glorify Gregory in any of the four poems. 'An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,' in particular, which is commonly read as a kind of ars poetica tribute to Gregory, is in fact an anti-war poem written by one of the era's most outspoken disparagers of anti-war poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ovid's narrative of Phaethon's failed attempt prematurely to emulate his father in his unique expertise can be read as a reflection on the virtues and limits of Lucretius' philosophical poetry. The paper suggests that, while he gives much credit to the De Rerum Natura's literary quality and its striving for the sublime, Ovid also critiques the hubristic connotations of Lucretius' rejection of divine authority and agency from the workings of nature. The second part of the article explores how this particular version of the myth touches upon issues of poetic authority, political positioning, and Oedipal competition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since its 1953 publication, John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet has incited debate. The text's dialogue with the first published poet of colonial North America has been described as a factual study, a redaction of adultery and a veiled critique of modern society. It is seldom noted, however, that Berryman's strategy of “modulat[ing]” his voice into Anne Bradstreet's raises key questions regarding his reappropriation of her life and writing. Does Homage's conscious ventriloquism problematize its status as a “historical” poem? And how might this revised understanding illuminate the work's relation to America's origins? This paper proposes a more multifaceted context for Homage's composition than has hitherto been recognized. Through mapping the poem's rewriting of history, I demonstrate it to be the product of both national and literary anxieties: if voicing Bradstreet enables Berryman to interrogate the American Dream's legacy, her canonical status casts scrutiny upon the contemporary poet's role in an age of sociopolitical tensions. Foregrounding Berryman's public self-positioning in Homage invites a reassessment of his engagements with society that liberates his oeuvre from “confessional” designations. As a result, it opens the way for readings that might situate Homage and The Dream Songs within the wider tradition of American epic poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "The Bridge" by Hart Crane. Topics discussed include codification of the Algonquin "princess" Pocahontas as the mythical mother of the U.S.; Pocahontas's conversion to Christianity and marriage to Rolfe; and difference between Pocahontas and the rest of her people.

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax" by Andrew Marvell. It explores how language can operate to produce patriarchal power, as they interweave constructions of gender with representations of the natural world. It also outlines continuation of the Fairfax line through the marriage of Mary Fairfax.

This paper offers a new reading of Sappho's Tithonus Poem as a theory of choreia as (among other things) a distinctive technology of time. It focuses on the way the poem mobilizes animals linked to musical aetiologies to conjure a series of different choral assemblages that enable the dissolution of the individual ego into an impersonal or supra-personal form of immortality or persistence. The evocation of different musical animals (the tortoise of the opening couplet and the dancing fawns of line 6) primes the audience to recognize the likely resonance at the end of Sappho's song of the story that the eternally aging Tithonus became the singing cicada. In the poem's representation, these musical animals are not isolated, but cooperatively entangled with other beings or groups. These ensembles serve, in turn, as models for the conjunction of the aging ego/singer and the chorus of paides addressed, to figure the distinctive ontologies and temporality of the choral collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Horace's relationship with neoteric poetry in the context of Epodes 11 and 12 as signaled by Horace's use of meaningful names. Epode 11 focuses on Latin love elegy, but Epode 12 engages broadly with neoteric poetics through names associated with and references to that earlier poetry. This includes an adaptation of the lament from Calvus' Io. Horace creates a portrait of the mulier in Epode 12 that stands in contrast to the ideal neoteric woman. Horace's sexual failure with her dramatizes the poet's relationship with iambic invective, of which she is an allegorical representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" by Thomas Gray. Topics discussed include lamenting for the lost childhood from the perspective of author's adult self, different modes of constituting history such as natural laws and empirical inquiry, and troubling the exemplar model as an adequate mode of representing subjectivity.

The article offers criticism on the 15th-century riddle poem "I have a 3ong suster," written by an anonymous author. Topics examined include the definition of the word suster, which is believed to mean "beloved" or "sweetheart," possible sexual interpretations of the work and insights on the poem's exploration of identity.

The article presents criticism on the poem "La Male Regle," by Thomas Hoccleve. Particular focus is given to how Hoccleve's work examined identity, maintaining relationships and social acceptance. Additional topics discussed include Additional topics discussed include insights on the poem's speaker, how the poem examines good health, and rule breaking and law.

The article analyzes the poem "The New Arcadia" by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson. Particular focus is given to the roles of aestheticism and social realism in the poem. Other topics include empathy, equality, democracy and the relationship between form and function in the poem. Robinson's relationship with writer Vernon Lee is also discussed.

The article analyzes the poems "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats and "The Phoenix and Turtle" by William Shakespeare. According to the author, Keats used Shakespeare's poem as a source and model. Particular focus is given to representations of truth and beauty in both poems. Other topics include sexual love, intertextuality, and allegory.

This essay, reprinted from the 1968 volume of the journal, presents a literary critique of the poem "Easter 1916," by William Butler Yeats, focusing on the poet's engagement with the form of occasional poetry. Topics addressed include Yeats' use of stanzaic poetry conventions, the tradition of occasional poetry before and during Yeats' period, and Yeats' depiction of several characters within the poem.

The essay, reprinted from an earlier volume of the journal, presents a literary critique of the General Prologue from Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales." Focus is given to the prologue's focus on girdles, belts and similar objects as a theme in the work. Commentary highlights Chaucer's use of the objects to criticize the lack of virtues in the religious figures in the story.