Search

The article critiques the poetry of American poet Adrienne Rich. It addresses changes in the tone and temper of Rich's feminism, the poet's mode of seeing and saying, and strategies for rescuing language from the oppressors' structures of meaning. Poems include "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children," "Yom Kippur 1984," and "Transcendental Etude."

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]

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]

This paper examines a poem written by Anne Carson in 1999 in response to a drawing by artist Betty Goodwin titled Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988). The critical issue both artist and poet explore is interrogation. For Goodwin, interrogation relates to the history of torture, forced disappearances and other state-perpetuated atrocities. Torture is not an overt theme in Carson's poem but it remains central to the poem's broader exploration of the meanings of interrogation as a mode by which Western culture has sought knowledge, truth, and certainty, which have as their stakes the objectification of others. Arguing that the poem retrieves a connection between the notion of truth (alethêia) and the ancient Greek practice of basanos — or truth by torture — the paper explores the formal strategies the poem uses to challenge the legacy of rationalist epistemology. Like Goodwin, Carson evokes and then refuses the grid-like structures of containment of syntax and sense. She also refuses to subject her words' visual other to an interrogation by refusing to picture the picture; she will not frame, name, or make the image speak. Referring to the writings of Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze praises the capacity of art to offer "a new image of thought."1 This paper shows how, in refusing representation as its central operational mode, the poem reaches "to the edge of the thinkable" to demonstrate art's capacity to offer its own uncertain form of thinking that, in its dynamism, provisionality, and conditionality, brings into being "that which does not yet exist."2 In so doing, Carson's poem draws on and draws out interrelationships that heal the subject–object split Goodwin's art evokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Exeter Book poem, “The Wonder of Creation”, named in the standard edition “The Order of the World”, is at the centre of the paper. It is a much-neglected Old English poem, yet interesting intellectually, and often difficult. Vanity is important in it, idle lustas “vain desires”, are central to it. There is more in it than the negative teaching that all life is vanity, for there is hope of a better realm. The temptation of Vainglory, the seventh Capital Sin, worthless glory, is a theme in Old English homiletic literature: the wish for false joys is a vanity. That is a theme in Cynewulf's poetry and in the prose of the Blickling Homilies. That a life of prayer and fasting enables man to fight the devil is a serious homiletic message. Our First Parents experienced unprofitable desires. Original Sin is mentioned in this paper, but not every healthy, hearty meal shares in that fundamental theological concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]