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This paper examines the work of a group of Railwaymen Poets, whose verse has been collected as part of the Piston, Pen and Press project. It explores their writings both as part of an emerging theme of accident and loss poetry surrounding the railways in Victorian culture but also more specifically as interrelated texts produced by workers sharing common experiences. Whilst many wrote about all manner of subjects, not just the railway accident, public fascination with accident reporting allowed them to both pursue their literary endeavours and also to use poetry as a form of catharsis. Their poetry, this paper argues, should be read as a collective expression of emotion around the dangerous and loss-ridden nature of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunities to celebrate the success of the firm, its leaders and, by extension, its employees, were numerous in the mid-Victorian period: banquets, dinners and outings, annual gatherings, pleasure trips and excursions, processions around the mills, or ceremonies directly related with the employer's family. The purpose of this paper is to analyse some of these large communal events organized in textile mills in order to better understand the practices and meanings of paternalism on the side of the workers. The first part of this study of paternalism 'from below' explores the feudal structure of paternalism and the complex role played by deference in the large communal events organized in textile factories. The second part, about the large social events organized by captains of industry turned philanthropists, Titus Salt and Samuel Courtauld, examines the display of power in 'the theatre of paternalism' and raises the question of a possible circumvention of the paternalistic model on the part of workers. The last part is about the specificities of laudatory poems praising captains of industry and thanking them for the outings and celebrations they organized for their employees. It analyses how this specific poetical subgenre offers a space for renegotiation of paternalism and social boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses a study on the use of poetry in capturing grief and connecting people to the world, which references a research paper by Katrin Kerber et al., published within the issue. Topics discussed include the definition of poetry, a comparison between poetry and music, and the method used in the study.

This paper presents and analyses the poem 'Tea and Bread'. It is about content and process, about a struggle for survival as an asylum seeker in a UK city and about exploring poetic transcription, as pioneered by sociologist Laurel Richardson, as representational practice in public health. The asylum seeker, known by the pseudonym of Peter, was interviewed as part of a project to compare the destitution of the past with that of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creator of the TV series Penny Dreadful John Logan has stated that he drew inspiration for the first three seasons (2014–16) from English Romantic poetry. Characters in the series read and recite Blake, Clare, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth; comment on the nature of poetry; and make emotional connections through poetic affinities. Simultaneously, the structure of the series is gradually revealed to the audience as a pattern of doublings and couplings, of mirrors and parallels—all of which can be associated with the poetic device of rhyme. Rhyming shapes the sensory and cognitive experiences of the audience of the series; it also reflects the order of the diegetic universe, be it a freakish correspondence of incongruous things or God's plan. Since these aesthetic choices seem to be part of the creator's highly self-conscious design, the series becomes an adaptation of Romantic poetry, not only directly using the historical Romantic texts, but re-enacting in its organization the epistemological practice that rhyme is for English poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentence form has drawn a great deal of scholarly attention since the appearance of William Caplin's Classical Form in 1998. Few publications, however, have considered the origins of the form and many seem to assume that it emerged from instrumental repertoire in the late Baroque period. This article reveals important connections between sentences and poetic texts in early popular song, especially in seventeenth-century British ballads, short-meter hymns, and German folk tunes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Tallis's gravestone has been lost, but its rhymed epitaph is well known from a transcription in John Strype's 1720 edition of the Survey of London. An earlier, longer and demonstrably more accurate version of Tallis's epitaph, dated December 1585 (the month after the composer's death), can be found in the poetic miscellany Cambridge University Library Ms. d d.5.75. The epitaph was almost certainly written by Henry Stanford, the scribe of d d.5.75, who at the time was tutor to the Paget household, a hotbed of Catholic sympathies and a musical centre where 'songes of Mr Byrdes and Mr Tallys' were sung. This new source offers a glimpse into the complex social and political realities of Tallis's last years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the adaptation of poems in recent biographical films which take poets as their subjects. Examples include The Edge of Love (Dir. John Maybury, UK, 2008) which takes as its subject Dylan Thomas, Bright Star (Dir. Jane Campion. UK/Australia, 2009), John Keats, Regeneration (Dir. Gillies MacKinnon, UK, 1997), the First World War poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and Pandaemonium (Dir. Julien Temple, UK, 2001), the Romantics William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It considers poetry in these films as acts of double adaptation: the poems are both themselves the subjects of the adaptation process and are simultaneously used in these films to support, underline or illustrate the adapted narrative of the life of the poet that the film proposes. The biographies of literary figures are contested sites of meaning in intellectual culture, which makes their adaptation into other media particularly ripe for dissection and critical analysis. However, it is the process of adapting the works of the poet for a different medium to which I turn particular attention here. Though film and poetry are sometimes compared as media—with critics arguing for parallels between the work of some filmmakers and poetic composition—there are no sustained studies of the transferal of pre-existing poems from the page to the screen. In this article, I catalogue some of the strategies used within poet biopics to perform, adapt, or interpret poetry in a different medium, and how this is used within the overall framework of the story of the poet’s life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay reconstructs a forgotten crisis in American letters and film: President Theodore Roosevelt's unpopular campaign to make ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ the nation's poem in 1908 and the poem's popular film adaptation in 1911. As the cinematic response to poetry's failure as a national art, the Vitagraph film became a collectivist hymnal for the nation's dream of assimilation. Featured prominently in American poet Vachel Lindsay's pioneering work of film theory, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), the adaptation effectively reasserted the popular roots of the otherwise genteel ‘Battle Hymn’ poem and by doing so helped to modernize poetry's communal function and the nation's literary tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on several recent critical stances that invite adaptation studies to be more comprehensive (avoiding a ‘piecemeal nature’ of research) and to focus not on cinema's losses but on cinema's gains in the process of adapting from text to screen. The subject matter of this article is an overview of creative choices or ‘imagistic substitutions’ by Italian directors. Italian cinema—perhaps more than any other national cinema—heavily relies on literature and strongly emphasizes the creative possibilities in the hands of directors. This article analyses several film examples according to a specifically cinematographic, artistic, and even painterly point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]