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The article offers poetry criticism of the unfinished poem "The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream," by John Keats, focusing on his use of the term wild Indian leaf. It is said that tree leaves were used as paper in India and that Keats would likely have used the word savage to refer to East Indians rather than to Native Americans.

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "The Prelude," by William Wordsworth, focusing on the section "Cambridge and the Alps" in Book 6 of the poem. It examines the role of the poem in determining biographical information about Wordsworth from the summer of 1790, when he and friend Robert Jones traveled in Europe and the Alps. The author discusses the poem in light of cartography and a letter written from Wordsworth to his sister during the European tour.

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]

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 article presents and analyzes a newly discovered poem by the 19th-century English author Christina Rossetti. Introductory details are given describing the Victorian periodical "The Court and Society Review," edited by Alsager Vian, where the poem was published. The poem "New Year, New Love" is then presented in full. Commentary on its themes and features is also included.

The article discusses the inscriptions on the Ruthwell Cross, which forms part of what has come to be called "The Ruthwell Crucifixion Poem," which was the subject of research by scholar John M. Kemble. The similarities between this poem and "The Dream of the Rood." It is noted that in a paper written in 1840, Kemble failed to identify the speaker of the Ruthwell poem as the Cross. Scholar Pamela O'Neill and her rejection of the idea that the Cross speaks to the dreamer in the Ruthwell poem is discussed.

This article has four main aims. First, it confirms that Francesco da Buti’s commentary, the most extensive as well as one of the more important vernacular exegetical works on Dante’s poem, circulated in two authorial redactions, released in 1394 and 1396 respectively. Second, it focuses on the interpretation ofParadisoXXVII, 136–38, one of the most debated passages in the entire poem, as it appears in Buti’s 1396 revised gloss, so far only accessible in manuscript form. Third, it provides a case study of the relationship between Dante’s early readers and Boethian material on Circe. In addressing these topics, the paper pinpoints the complexity of uncovering sources within the tradition of Dante commentary, given the extent of compilation, and the dangers of viewing similarity in expository technique as evidence of borrowing. Finally, it shows the importance of studies of the manuscript tradition and of work on critical editions of Dante commentaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper examines the image of the maternal in Hayyim Nahman Bialik's poetry and short prose. Contrary to most prior critical evaluations, which have viewed the autobiographical or symbolic mother in Bialik's works as a monolithic representation of misery, helplessness, and self-sacrifice, this paper emphasizes the mother's portrayal as a feared, loathed, and highly ambivalent object of identification vis-à-vis the emergence of the romantic Hebrew male poet. In a reading that spans from Bialik's early lyric poetry to his mature epic "Yatmut" (Orphanhood), the author traces the development of the mother image over the course of the poet's adult life and compares it to maternal images in the works of other romantic poets (William Wordsworth, for example). She also draws parallels between the ambivalent knot through which the poet is bound to his mother, and a similar ambivalent knot that cements the bond between national poet and his "people." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper involves a close reading of Herman Melville's poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” published in Melville's 1866 collection Battle-Pieces. Realizing that Melville's poem is one of the first descriptions (ekphrases) of a photograph in verse, the paper explores how Melville's poem uses physiognomy to describe the subject of the photograph: an American Civil War general, who is only identified as “the Corps Commander.” In this way, Melville's poem reflects the nineteenth-century philosophical and popular notions of photography. These notions came to regard photography as a Neoplatonic medium capable of recording and revealing the inner character of its subjects. Relying on these conceptions of photography, Melville's poem describes the photograph of the Corps Commander as having the power to reveal the Platonic absolute of American masculinity, and thus it comes to hail the photograph as a semi-sacred image that has the power to draw Anglo-Saxon American men into a common brotherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article critiques two published collections of poetry including "White Papers," by Martha Collins and "A Map of the Lost World," by Rick Hilles. Particular focus is given to how Collins and Hilles explore social, political and historical themes in their work. The author also offers insights on common poetic techniques used in American poetry.