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This article begins by examining the military and colorful parrot-like outfit that Tomas Rodaja wears before he departs for Italy and connects it with the classical literary practice among Roman elegiac poets that uses birds as symbols of allusion to past poets. In this sense, Cervantes adopts the imitative ability of the parrot in order to camouflage some scenes of the novela before the major transformation of Rodaja into glass. In so doing, Cervantes creates various situations that contain elements of Latin love elegy. If Rodaja's experiences are interpreted with this poetic genre in mind, he resembles Ovid during his early career as a poet of love elegies. In sum, in the beginning of the novela, Rodaja embodies the figure of Ovid during his initial steps into the poetic tradition of the Latin love elegy.

In a New York Times review of MaddAddam , the final instalment in Margaret Atwood’s eco-apocalyptic trilogy, Andrew Sean Greer notes “[w]hat a joy it is to see…Atwood taking such delicious pleasure in the end of the world.” If critics such as Timothy Morton and Michael Branch have lamented the dominance of elegiac, melancholic rhetoric in ecological writing and (in the case of Branch) pleaded for more humor in both literary theory and practice, this article unearths how humor operates on crucial rhetorical and narrative levels in the climate fiction of Atwood and Ian McEwan. It analyzes how several comic modes—from satirical dark humor to slapstick—draw attention to ethical and epistemological quandaries raised by climate change and ecological risk in distinctive ways that merit further study. Drawing historical and generic comparisons to satirical modes prevalent in twentieth-century science fiction and film, and especially to the dark humor made emblematic by Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove , the article decrypts how Atwood’s MaddAddam and McEwan’s Solar offer incongruously funny representations of ecocatastrophe that—like Kubrick’s famed nuclear-age spoof—serve both to distract from and snap us out of the paralysis of fear, encouraging a self-reflexive mode of reading. In Solar , absurd and slapstick humor marks the rise of an egotistical, Nobel Prize-winning scientist who steals a colleague’s work to develop a technology capable of averting catastrophic warming. In the end, this invites a pragmatic question framed in a light-hearted manner: who cares how the climate crisis is solved, and whether efforts are intellectually honest or affectively in earnest, as long as solutions are found? Meanwhile, Atwood’s novel proves more traditional in its turn to familiar sci-fi conventions of technological satire and dark humor to imagine a post-human future following mutually intertwined eco and techno-catastrophes. In her work, critiques of biotechnology, late-market capitalism, and its irreversible ecological consequences are framed in bitingly comic terms; but this does not prevent the trilogy from retaining a sense of hope and ethical urgency.

Omaar Hena. Global Anglophone Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, de Kok, and Nagra. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Pp. xiv, 200. US$90. Here are two arguments you have likely encountered if you read postcolonial poetry: 1. Poet P, who uses English or European techniques, shows that we can consider those techniques wholly apart from their origins, because P uses them so well to present her non-English or non-European life, Those techniques are, simply, part of the global literary scene, available for all poets equally. 2. Poet Q, who claims to eschew English or European techniques, demonstrates that poets must eschew them in order to represent non-English or non-European lives. Newly independent nations, especially those of the African diaspora, need a brand-new "nation language" (Kamau Brathwaite); large, optimistic, non-European countries require a new, unrestrained kind of language with "the quality of sprawl" (passim, Les Murray's name for the wide-open, honest Australianness that his poetry also pursues). Omaar Hena's Global Anglophone Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, de Kok, and Nagra is a largely persuasive study of four Anglophone postcolonial poets that demonstrates how and where both of these arguments can be wrong. Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, Ingrid de Kok, and Daljit Nagra are all, as Hena claims, "receiving and repurposing canonical literary forms" (2), among them epic, pentameter, end rhyme, florilegium, elegiac lyric, and dramatic monologue. Hena does more with modes and genres than with forms in a strict sense, caring more for history than for acoustics--though he can certainly hear the latter. All four of these poets are nationally, if not internationally, honored for their mastery of modes and forms. And yet, despite what the word "mastery" suggests, Hena finds that these poets show what forms, modes, and genres cannot do. Their poems demonstrate "how aesthetic uses of language can sometimes make legible their own limitations before social realities" and how poets can use literary form to show the limits of "structural inequalities" that limit what art and artists can accomplish (162, 43). Hena accurately argues that Nagra's poems of mimicry and persona--with their foolish-wise Black British and Asian characters--point to the stereotypical expectations integral to the British multiculturalism that has given Nagra his success in the United Kingdom: without the cultural bias that these comic poems mock, there would be no basis for the comedy. De Kok's lyric and elegiac poems--traditional in mode, though written in free verse--show how "a marginal writer must link up with the cultural capital of authors recognized as central to the Anglo-American cultural core ... to become legible in the global North" (159; emphasis in original). Walcott accomplished a similar linkage in Omeros (1990), an epic that Hena argues is conscious of what it appears to have lost in making those links, in adopting European symbols and sounds. In Omeros, both the system of ocean currents that the sailor Achille must traverse and the world literary system that Walcott has traversed--with its fish and pirogues, its hexameters and its nationalisms--propose "an aesthetic model of globalism" hemmed in "by ... the inequities of the global literary marketplace" and global inequity more generally (29). The closer Walcott gets to success and power (both aesthetic and institutional) through his command of literary forms, the farther he seems from the relatively powerless, marginal St. Lucia that he wants to represent. Put more baldly: you can write St. Lucia in a way that makes St. Lucia seem important and legible in Manhattan and Islington, or you can write St. Lucia in a way that makes you seem close to the real St. Lucia, but you cannot do both at once. Hena argues that this circle cannot be squared. It can, however, be made into a subject for an epic poem, boosted by puns and dialect spellings, as in the name of Achilles canoe: In God We Troust. …

The author of Le Mal des fantomes has something of the revenant. Until recently, Benjamin Fondane's problematic posterity has relegated him to the fragile margins of the canon, partly due to the relative scarcity of his works. Most of these works only reappeared in the early eighties, almost forty years after Fondane's death at Auschwitz in 1944. The publishers Plasma, which went bankrupt in 1983, and Paris-Mediterranee, which ceased activity in 2009, both helped republish Fondane's most essential works, but with little publicity. In 1989, Monique Jutrin published the second monograph on the work of this poet, existentialist philosopher, and polemist, Benjamin Fondane ou le periple d'Ulysse. (1) In 1997, Jutrin founded the Cahiers Benjamin Fondane, now in their 17th annual issue; Fondane's works have reappeared, this time through the well-established Editions Verdier; and monographs are being produced at the remarkable rate of close to one per year. (2) Alluding to Stendhal's famous remark, Fondane once claimed he might find a readership in 1980; history seems to be bearing out his claim. (3) Born Benjamin Wechsler in Jassy, Moldavia in 1898, the future Fondane began publishing at fourteen, and soon adopted the pseudonym Benjamin Fundoianu. Emigrating to France in 1923 and gallicizing his pseudonym to Fondane, he became one of Andre Breton's most ferocious critics and a disciple of the anti-rationalist philosopher Lev Shestov. His subtle, original, and deeply sophisticated polemical essays include the Faux Traite d'esthetique (1938), a philosophical pamphlet critiquing Surrealism and Roger Caillois. Fondane is often read in light of philosophers, as in Bruce Baugh's recent dual study of Fondane and Jean Wahl (Baugh 33-51). But where Levinas is concerned, the most convincing resonances begin, not between the philosophies of the two thinkers, but between Levinas's philosophy and Fondane's poetry. (4) I have elsewhere studied the points of contact between Fondane's most iconic poem, called the "Preface en prose," and Levinas's conception of ethical speech, a kind of discourse that recognizes the authority and fragility of the Other without coercion. Here, I focus instead on Fondane's elegiac long poem "Le Mal des fantomes" (1943). (5) In this powerful elegy, history appears as an oppressive, violent force of erasure. And while the poem cannot itself preserve the singularity of an individual existence, it nonetheless bears witness to that existence, provoking an awareness of the reader's own fragile and transient inner life. That inner life, and human interiority in general, necessarily lie outside of History, according to both Levinas and Fondane. This position opposes, as both Levinas and Fondane consistently do, Hegel's totalizing conception of History. Yet this conception of interiority as extrinsic to History represents a game of qui perd gagne. Levinas and Fondane intend to preserve interiority as a space of infinite possibility or pure potentiality, to safeguard interiority from the closure and fixity of History. Yet in excluding interiority from History, these thinkers also define it as necessarily lost or missing, as perpetually unrecorded and unrecordable. I argue, in short, that for both Fondane and Levinas, interiority constitutes the elegiac object par excellence. Fondane discusses Hegel's conception of history at length in his last philosophical essay, "Le Lundi existentiel et le dimanche de l'histoire" (1945, posthumous). Fondane critiques Hegel's notion that History is utterly rational, because it requires that Hegel maintain, for instance, that war can be "necessaire" (Le Lundi existentiel 66). In other words, a rational history implies rationalizing all the evils of history. To make matters worse, for Hegel as Fondane reads him, the finite is inauthentic, a kind of unreality in the face of the infinite Spirit: "[L]'idealisme de la philosophie consiste en la non-reconnaissance du fini comme etre veritable" [Hegel]; le fini, le dechire, le meurtri existent, sans doute, mais ne saurait avoir voix au chapitre; si, pourtant, ils elevent leur voix, on la tiendra pour une lamentation sterile, une plainte sentimentale, un pur reflet de besoins et d'appetits. …

Perhaps Laae amon's most significant addition to the Arthur story inherited from Wace is his addition of a dream vision preceding his account of the king's imminent downfall (13984-14005).1 Structurally, the dream vision narrative can be divided into two segments: the first (13984-14004), relates the fall of Arthur from the roof of a hall-the center of his earthly power-and his subsequent revenge on the traitors Modred and Wenhaver (Guenivere); the second (14004-15), presents Arthur alone in an uninhabited and potentially hostile wilderness. With the poem taking on a distinctly elegiac tone,2 Arthur is subsequently seized by a lion, transported into the sea where a fish ferries him to an unknown shore, leaving him alone and (in his own words) sick with sorrow. This dire predicton of Arthur's future contrasts sharply with the other Arthurian future predicted in the Merlinian prophetic passages in the Brut, a vision of political unity, military power, and poetic prestige, with Arthur's body radiating swords, fire, and his flesh and blood providing inspiration for oral poets.3 Although it could be argued that the dream vision simply adds to the drama of the fall of the best of kings, it seems to go beyond that, offering a more tragic vision of the world than do the prophecies. What does Laae amon accomplish poetically in contrasting the image of Arthur in the dreams to that of the prophecies? Examining the specific motifs of the dream vision, I find that it provides a counterstatement to the mythological figure of Arthur depicted in the prophecies, inverting the latter's depiction of the king's body as an extended metaphor for the kingdom, and positing a mortal Arthur subject to the vicissitudes of worldly fortune.This dream vision has received its share of critical commentary, but most readings focus on specific thematic elements of the dream. Francoise Le Saux, for instance, sees the dream as an extended example of the 'messenger' theme.4 Alice Sheppard sees in the vision evidence of Arthur's failure to perform the 'office' of kingship by maintaining reciprocal ties with his retainers.5 The mysterious beasts that appear later in the dream vision have drawn somewhat more critical commentary. Marie-Francoise Alamichel and Gloria Mercatanti interpret the lion and fish as Christological figures, sent to facilitate Arthur's salvation.6 More recently Gareth Griffith has argued for a less determined reading of the dream's typology, focusing on the 'allusiveness' of its prophetic vision.7Accepting Griffith's conclusion regarding the dream's 'allusiveness,' I argue that much of it can be resolved if we consider the dream as a counterstatement to the prophetic segments, especially in how they reenvision the metaphor of Arthur's body. The first of Laae amon's two Merlinian prophetic accounts occurs after Arthur's conception (9406-19), and the second after Laae amon's expanded narration of the foundation of the Round Table (11491-11503). The prophetic segments both center on a poeticized depiction of the king's body, of which Laae amon makes an extended metaphor for his kingdom and for the poetic tradition that springs from his deeds:Longe beoð ae uere; dae d ne beoð he nae uere.Pe wile þe þis world stant; ilae sten scal is worð-munt.And scal inne Rome; walden þa þae ines.Al him scal abuae e; þat wuneð in Bruttene.Of him scullen gleomen; godliche singen.Of his breosten scullen ae ten; aðele scopes.Scullen of his blode; beornes beon drunke.Of his eae ene schullen fleon; furene gleden.AElc finger an his hond; scarp stelene brond.Scullen stan walles; biuoren him to-fallen.Beorns scullen rusien. Reosen heore mae rken.Pus he scal wel longe; liðen ae eond londen.Leoden biwinnen; his laae en sette. (9406-19)[Long shall he live; he will never be dead. His fame will last as long as the world. And he shall rule the people of Rome. All in Britain shall bow before him. …

This article addresses the Pearl-poet's use of apostrophe in his elegiac dream vision. Drawing on classical and medieval discussions of this rhetorical device, as well as contemporary poetic criticism, it argues that the trajectory of apostrophe in the poem traces the development of the Mourner-Dreamer as he gains insight from the Pearl-maiden's lesson and moves toward consolation. The Mourner's calls to his lost pearl in the proem demonstrate the unproductive cycle of his sorrow. His apostrophes to the Maiden in the early part of his dream similarly threaten to undo the solace he gains in the earthly paradise. By contrast, the Maiden's three short apostrophes serve an exemplary function and show the Dreamer how to deploy apostrophe without getting caught up in the diversionary aspects of the device. In the closing frame of the poem, the now-awakened Dreamer uses apostrophe in a controlled manner that permits him to turn away from the isolation of grief. ********** THE Middle English dream vision Pearl is a poem about loss. It is also a poem about language. Throughout the poem, the sorrowful Jeweller struggles to articulate his grief. The use of apostrophe is the first and perhaps the best example of the Mourner-Dreamer's difficulties with language. The device opens the poem and returns at intervals in the proem, in the dream that follows, and twice more in the final scene after the Dreamer wakes. While few critics have overlooked the importance of the opening line--"Perle, plesaunte to prynce? paye" (1)--no one, to my knowledge, has offered an extended analysis of the poet's use of apostrophe. (1) This essay investigates the poet's use of apostrophe as a means of exploring the challenges that both the Pearl-mourner and the elegist face. I contend that apostrophe stands at the crux between the successful elegy and the depressing failure of the incomplete work of mourning. (2) In the funereal garden before his dream, the Mourner's apostrophes bring him no consolation; indeed, they only redouble his sorrow. In his dream, apostrophe threatens to undo the solace he manages to gain from the salutary landscape and the encounter with the Pearl-maiden. As I will argue below, the Maiden's apostrophes stand in contrast to the Dreamer's wayward speech. Whereas his calls to the lost pearl are predicated on intense feeling and indicate a forfeiture of emotional control, her brief apostrophes are reserved and carefully meted. These exemplary utterances demonstrate for the Pearl-mourner the appropriate measure of apostrophic expression. The Mourner bears this lesson back to the waking world. When he rises from the mound where he slept, he deploys the device with care and solemnity. Apostrophe can thus be read as a gauge for the Dreamer's progress through and beyond his grief. APOSTROPHE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Apostrophe is particularly important to the elegist. The core principle behind the apostrophe, to give voice to and converse with an otherwise silent (and possibly absent) entity, is remarkably similar to one of the idealized goals of the elegy, to conjure the deceased, to have her turn back from the grave and toward the speaker. Both apostrophe and elegy depend on an element of invocation--a hope, if not a belief, that the poet can do things with words. "[T]o apostrophize," writes Jonathan Culler, "is to will a state of affairs, to attempt to call it into being by asking inanimate objects to bend themselves to your desire." (3) The apostrophizing poet reaches out to the object of the address, and the elegizing poet aims to overcome the distance between the quick and the dead. It should be no surprise, then, that so many elegies make frequent use of the device. (4) The definition of apostrophe is deceptively simple. In its broadest sense, the term refers to any poetic address, but is generally understood to mean a direct address to unhearing and unresponsive entities-insentient objects, natural forces, animals, abstract emotions or concepts, or absent persons. …

In Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” the banality of Civil War memory underwrites apathy toward civil rights struggle. Lowell depicts a nation ironically unified in its servility to commercial interests and its indifference toward historical sacrifice and resistance to racial equality. Under such conditions, elegiac commemoration becomes impossible, and Lowell’s poem functions as a meta-elegy: a lament for a failure of memory. These conditions persist and confront Lowell’s successors, Claudia Rankine, Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young, who carry forward the legacy of “For the Union Dead” as they confront contemporary versions of the banality of memory and the perpetuation of racial violence.

When in Book 1 of his Epistles Horace reflects back upon the beginning of his career in lyric poetry, he celebrates his adaptation of Archilochean iambos to the Latin language. He further states that while he followed the meter and spirit of Archilochus, his own iambi did not follow the matter and attacking words that drove the daughters of Lycambes to commit suicide (Epist. 1.19.23-5, 31). (1) The paired erotic invectives, Epodes 8 and 12, however, thematize the poet's sexual impotence and his disgust during encounters with a repulsive sexual partner. The tone of these Epodes is unmistakably that of harsh invective, and the virulent targeting of the mulieres' revolting bodies is precisely in line with an Archilochean poetics that uses sexually-explicit, graphic obscenities as well as animal comparisons for the sake of a poetic attack. Epodes 8 and 12 may, in fact, offer Roman culture's most overtly misogynistic tone. (2) In spite of the vehemence in the speaker's verbal assaults, he is reacting to his own perceived sexual weakness. In fact, Horatian iambic continually notes the unmartial status and weakness of the speaker's body. He is programmatically imbellis acfirmas parum (Epod. 1.16) and his final appearance is that of an enervated old man: he is jaundiced, breathless, feverish, and aged on account of Canidia's powers (Epod. 17.21-6, 31-4). (3) Accordingly, I posit here that bodily invective in Epodes 8 and 12 functions metapoetically. I call attention to the repetition of stylistic terms--mollitia, inertia, and rabies--within Epodes 8 and 12, and show how these two poems can be seen as part of Horace's ongoing project to distinguish his own emerging iambic project from the incipient genre of Roman love elegy. (4) To these two elegiac terms, mollitia and inertia, the Horatian iambic speaker adds the quintessentially iambic rabies, a term that the poet Horace himself will later call the emotion that first generated iambic poetry. My reading thus suggests that Horace was well aware not only of the tropes and topoi of Roman love elegy, (5) but also of its vocabulary of style that routinely associates the human bodies of its characters with the central stylistic qualities of the poetic genre. While critics have disputed the chronology, (6) most agree that Horace's Epodes were published soon after Actium, in approximately 31/30 BCE, and were followed by the publication of Propertius's Monobiblos and Tibullus's Book 1 in 28 and 27 BCE, respectively. (7) We thus have evidence in the intergeneric dialogue that I draw out of Epocies 8 and 12 for the existence of two-way influence between the poets of Roman iambic and elegiac erotic poetry, what Peter Heslin (2011, 60) has aptly called "an extended process in which each poet defined himself against the other[s]." Furthermore, Horace's poems articulate an iambic refusal to valorize these terms that generally characterized effeminacy or other failings of normative Roman masculinity in broader Roman discourses of gender and sexuality. Iambos, despite its transgressively obscene content, thus serves to uphold and reinforce the status quo in a period where elite Roman masculinity was challenged through social forces, upset by the political instability of the Triumviral period, and was witness to the emergence of alternative masculinities in the sartorial self-expression of Roman elites like Caesar and Maecenas and in the poetic aesthetics of Roman love elegy. (8) For many decades, Epodes 8 and 12 were considered so obscene that they were censored from publication and ignored by critics of Horadan iambic. (9) By the late 1980s, however, these Epodes began to be re-evaluated as an integral part of Horace's first lyric collection. (10) William Fitzgerald's groundbreaking study (1988) argued for the interrelation between the political, invective, and erotic poems of the Epodes, and has laid the foundation for much later criticism focused on the sociopolitical context of the Epodes' production and on Roman sexuality. …

Consistently at the beginning and end of books and major sections of De Architectura, Vitruvius reflects on the order in which he presents his material (e.g. 2.10.3; 4.3.3). He frequently stresses that the design of his treatise follows a particular ordo, but never makes explicit what this ordo actually is. The underlying structuring principle, however, is crucial to understanding the treatise’s literary design and architectural theory. On the macro level, as has been little appreciated to date, Vitruvius presents his material in the order in which a city is built from scratch – beginning with the choice of the correct site and the laying out of walls (book 1) and the collection of building materials (book 2), continuing with the construction of different types of building (books 3-7), and finally securing the future flourishing of the city by supplying it with water (book 8), clocks (book 9) and defence mechanisms (book 10). As we read the De Architectura book by book, the matrix of a city comes into being, adaptable according to local conditions or the size of the community (Fritz, 132-3). I argue that this macrostructure also creates an implicit parallel between the creation of a city and the creation of the text itself. As the treatise unfolds, the ideal city comes into being – the De Architectura. On the lexical level, the dominant metaphor Vitruvius uses to describe his own text is not the city (or any type of architecture) but the body. The implications of the corpus-metaphor have been explored in detail (Callebat 1989, McEwen 2003, Oksanish 2011). By using it, Vitruvius suggests that unlike his predecessors’ smaller projects, his own work is an organic whole, made up of its membra, its constituent parts. The metaphor conveys the perfect wholeness and completeness of the treatise as well as its harmonious proportions. What it does not readily seem to provide, however, is a natural ordo, a principle of arrangement. This is delivered instead by the process of city construction. The relation between the metaphor of the body and the more subtle, implicit metaphoricity of city construction lies at the core of Vitruvian architectural theory. The two source domains melt seamlessly into one another, since the city is both the result of human design and like a natural organism which grows and develops in accordance with nature – an ideal expressed, for example, in the famous Dinocrates-anecdote (2.praef). For Vitruvius, the city offered a natural ordo for a book on architecture, but I propose that the macrostructure of city-building also stands at the beginning of a larger trend in early Augustan literature, which relates to the contemporary concerns of colony foundation, as well as to the Augustan project of ‘re-founding’ Rome. The parallel between city and text appeals to a group of authors writing at the same time as or just after Vitruvius, who set up their projects and textual foundations explicitly to parallel or rival Augustus’ own building of a new Rome. For example, Propertius (4.1A) and Manilius (Astronomica 2.772-87) explicitly compare their literary undertaking to the construction of a city in order to make a point about literary ambition and prestige as well as (in the case of Manilius) arrangement (Fantham, Welch 25-7, Schindler 252-72). Their poetic cities even display the same combination of organic growth and human construction as Vitruvius’ macro-city. Analysis of the macrostructure of the De Architectura thus not only offers important insights into Vitruvian conceptions of architecture and literary ambition, but also throws new light on Vitruvius’ position within the literary environment of early Augustan Rome. Callebat, L. (1989), ‘Organisation et structures du De architectura de Vitruve’, in Geertman, H. and de Jong, J. J. (1989) (eds.), Munus non ingratum : proceedings of the international symposium on Vitruvius' De architectura and the hellenistic and republican architecture, Leiden 20-23 January 1987, Leiden, 34-8. Fantham, E. (1997), ‘Images of the city: Propertius’ new-old Rome’, in Habinek, T. and Schiesaro, A. (eds.), The Roman Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, 122-35. Fritz, H.-J. (1995), Vitruv: Architekturtheorie und Machtpolitik in der romischen Antike, Munster. Gros, P. (1992), Vitruve. De L’Architecture. Livre IV, Paris. Gros, P. (1994) (ed.), Le Projet de Vitruve: Objet, destinataires et reception du De Architectura, Rome. McEwen, I. K. (2003), Writing the Body of Architecture, Cambridge MA. Oksanish, J. M. (2011), Building the Principate: A Literary Study of Vitruvius’ “de Architectura”, diss. New Haven. Schindler, C. (2000), Untersuchungen zu den Gleichnissen im romischen Lehrgedicht, Gottingen. Welch, T. S. (2005), The elegiac cityscape: Propertius and the meaning of Roman monuments, Ohio.

Sometime after William of Orange’s landing in Britain, the Tory writer Aphra Behn seems to have been solicited by Gilbert Burnet—counselor and propagandist for William and Mary—to write a coronation ode on behalf of the new sovereign. In response, Behn crafted an ode of refusal, addressed not to the king or to the public but directly to Burnet himself. In this poem, “A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Dr. Burnet” (1689), Behn strikes a tone quite different from that found in her earlier political verse: the characteristic amplification and hyperbole of the conventional panegyric is replaced with sarcasm and understated wit. Her refusal is consistent with her steadfast support for the House of Stuart and with her hostility to parliamentary and popular power. But in its emphasis on private political feeling, it is also surprisingly consistent with certain tenets of liberal thought. Rather than speaking in the odd mixture of the vatic and the abject called for by ceremonial verse, it bases its claims on an elegiac voice of dissidence, a right of refusal, and a rhetoric of isolation and individual exceptionality that is closely aligned with our understanding of liberalism as a practice based on the sacred natural rights of the individual, and with acts of conscience. The poem is thus not only an expression of a conscience-driven refusal of the revolution’s outcome: it is, more precisely, an assertion of a sacred individual right to that dissent, as well as an affective and elegiac embrace of the virtual exile and loneliness that results. The sacral qualities of divine-right kingship are in this poem transferred to the individual conscience. Though Aphra Behn was a devoted supporter of the Stuart monarchy, seeing her merely as a Tory writer obstructs us from seeing other implications of her thinking, particularly the way her proto-Jacobitism is genealogically linked to liberalism. In this essay, I call attention to a less-visible facet of her politics by reading her ode to Burnet not simply as a refusal of political modernity but also, more specifically, as a desecration of

For me, the Byzantine period is like a closet with many drawers. If I want something, I know where to find it, into which drawer to look. --Constantine Cavafy (qtd. in Sareyannis and Haas 113) Constantine Cavafy's poetry renders an "illustrious" Byzantine past as a new world, one both alien and familiar to us at the same time. (1) These poems that are tied to the places and people of the Byzantine world are made vivid and tangible through a remarkable set of poetic figurations. His Byzantium is a place brought to life through an exquisite materiality, and key poems such as "In the Church," "Waiting for the Barbarians," and "After the Swim" testify to the importance of this realm in his verse. (2) These poems, which span through his years as a mature artist, therefore serve as touchstones for thinking about how he anchors his poetic universe of Byzantium in the fabric of sensory perception. Materiality in Cavafy's work has received its most extensive exploration in Karen Emmerich's recent doctoral dissertation, which pursues the path of the materiality of the physical manuscript tradition, taking as its inspiration the "visual turn" in literary scholarship (256). (3) Emmerich's work demonstrates Cavafy's awareness of the importance of the physical traces of his work as a writer, corroborating what we will see emerge in the texts: an extraordinary sensitivity to the experience of the Byzantine places and objects he evokes. Cavafy's Byzantine poems conjure up a palpable reality as the essence of their exploration of that overlooked period (Mahaira-Odoni 16). The overt appeal to the senses in Byzantine liturgy and visual culture grounds his depiction. Through a close reading of these poems, we can interpret these themes that shape his depiction of a Hellenic past in general and the Byzantine Empire in particular. "In the Church" inscribes that layering of the past, namely the medieval Byzantine world, onto the experience of the present. It is such poems that have led to the recent characterization that "his faith was a matter less of belief than of pious observance" (Raphael 4). The opening exclamation shifts to an enumeration of the church fittings, rendered in Daniel Mendelsohn's translation as, I love the church--its labara, the silver of its vessels, its candelabra, the lights, its icons, its lectern. (1-3) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The discrete objects--not the building or the people of the church--absorb the watchful attention of the poem's speaker. This opening list lingers over the shimmering things; the enticing gleam of the metal defines the vessels (see Fig. 1). This quick inventory manages to capture a sense of initial observation, the unfolding perceptions on first stepping into the church. The suggestion that the shimmering quality of these things stands for the church might seem perversely superficial, but, on the contrary, Cavafy builds his Byzantine world from this transcendent materiality. His conjuration of the light-infused space of the Eastern Church rests also on centuries worth of Orthodox theology that interprets the material essence of these objects as intrinsic to their liturgical function. (4) While only relatively recently have scholars of Byzantine art history begun a more serious investigation of "new materiality" within the study of visual culture, Cavafy many decades ago displayed a prescient understanding of how Byzantine structures once were and continue to be experienced. The ecclesiastical space of "In the Church" is defined by its resplendent surfaces, by the sensory experience of actually being fully present in a place. Other poems such as "Apollonius of Tyana in Rhodes" and "Of Colored Glass" utilize similar strategies for imparting upon their objects a special status as bearers of meaning (Bowersock, "Cavafy" 188-89). "Of Colored Glass," for example, offers an "elegiac tribute" to the tribulations of the final centuries of Byzantium through this corporeity Geffreys, Eastern Questions 107). …

The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates with the wish to return to a more artisanal, purer past--when images still had a handmade quality, an aura. Susan Sontag On Photography One of Thomas Bewicic's engravings, "Jane Bewick Pulling Hair from a Horse's Tail" (A General History of Quadrupeds [1792]), shows at centre a large cart horse, its tail being pulled by a young child, while a woman (her mother or nursemaid) appears in the upper right background running over a stile by a cottage toward the impending disaster. At the left side of the picture, two lovers are heading off into a small forest, their relationship paralleled by the two horses in the far left middle ground. Thus this vignette (which OED defines as "an ornamental or decorative design on a blank space in a book or among printed matter, esp. at the beginning or end of a chapter or other division, usually one of small size or occupying a small proportion of the space; spec. any embellishment, illustration, or picture uninclosed in a border, or having the edges shading off into the surrounding paper; a head-piece or tail-piece" [1751]) incorporates a narrative, becoming a miniature version of the normally much larger "story-picture" or genre painting. The engraving has a "handmade," authentic quality, yet it is in fact one of countless reproductions, made possible first by Bewick's innovative use of the hard end grain of boxwood for engraving. Technological change makes seeing faster by effecting the wider dissemination of images. Is this development in itself evil? Or is it the inevitable result of our collective impulse to transmit art to ever-increasing numbers of viewers? In considering these questions, I thought of two historically and generically different art forms and how these two forms might be said both to fulfill this wish and yet, ironically, to express the unfulfillable, elegiac desire to fix time. The first is the vignette and the second is the Vine. Vines are six-second looping videos that anyone can produce and upload to the Internet via the website Vine: they are prodigiously popular. By August 2014, Vine boasted over 100 million viewers each month, with Vine loops playing over a billion times per day (Honan). Like vignettes, Vines are elliptical, often humorous, and usually narrative in form: many are fragmentary sketches or recorded moments featuring one or more performers; others are more complex. As in the Bewick engraving, some Vines develop a narrative to which the viewer, via the loop, returns repeatedly in order to play out the story to its more or less satisfying conclusion. As Susan Sontag has said, "Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle" (109-10). More than most media, Vines radically miniaturize experience, transforming ordinary daily events into spectacle. Olan Rogers's Vine Lost Keys uses six one-second shots to dramatize loss and recovery: shot one, we see Rogers standing in a room in an obviously suburban house and asking "Where are my keys?" Two, we see him, his back to the camera, in another room, throwing cardboard boxes. Three, we see him throwing up his arms in a hallway, screaming, in front of a door. Four, he appears beating his right fist against the door frame. Five, we see him in a backyard at a distance, again raising then dropping his arms. Six, he is sitting on a doorstep outside when he opens his left hand and sees the keys. …

Melville’s poem “The Portent” presents readers with a haunted vision of the divided American landscape before and during the Civil War. Through the speaker’s apostrophe to the Shenandoah—a metonym for the shadowy presence of fugitive slaves, dissident bodies, and dead soldiers in the Valley—the poem dislocates the reader into the ethical position of literary witness, suggesting the power of poetry to make visible shadows otherwise unseen. The tenuous moment between looking and seeing, speaking and awaiting reply, threatens the reader’s ability to read the poem coherently, and this essay argues that Melville’s play with the conventions of apostrophe and prosopopoeia ultimately poses a deeper relation between the act of reading and the encounter with a face not one’s own.

Focusing on Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room , this paper uses a cognitive-theoretical approach to explicate how the novel produces the sensation that Jacob is an “unknowable” protagonist; in doing so, I address an ongoing debate in the critical literature on whether the elegiac construction of the text should be read sincerely or satirically. These two issues are linked and mutually enlightening: by analyzing Woof’s textual strategies in relation to cognitive-narratological work on cue inconsistency and source monitoring, we can clarify the elegiac impulse in the novel and obviate the sincere/satirical opposition constructed by critics. Ultimately, my analysis of Woolf’s compositional techniques suggests that Jacob’s Room is at once a sincere expression of bereavement and grief in the wake of the loss of life in World War I, as well as a critique of England’s educational, political, and social institutions.

Amores 1.7 has long been considered a problematic poem. Its subject matter, the physical assault of the puella by the poet-speaker, is often viewed as distasteful (James 2003, 184), and there are difficulties of interpretation. Opinions of the poem vary, although critics no longer see it as a "sincere expression of regret" on the part of the poet-speaker (e.g., Barsby 1993, 91, quoted in James 2003, 184; Fraenkel 1945, 18 and Wilkinson 1955, 50, both quoted in Khan 1966, 880; Greene 1998, 84). The poem is read, for instance, as a humorously exaggerated and disingenuous description of the poet-speaker's reaction to his attack on his puella, designed to rationalize and minimize his responsibility (Barsby 1973, 91; Cahoon 1988, 296); as an expression of continued violence against women (Greene 1998, 84); and as a tour de force that turns an angry lover into a subservient underling (Olstein 1979, 297). Commentators agree, however, that the poem is embedded in a strong literary and elegiac tradition that includes quarrels and physical force as a part of erotic interactions. (1) In this article I argue for another interpretation of this poem that locates Amores 1.7 firmly in the elegiac topos of the lover's violence. Specifically, I examine Tibullus 1.10.51-66 and Propertius 2.5.21-6, two poems to which Amores 1.7 has direct verbal and thematic connections. (2) My intention is, first, to focus on the characters of the rusticus and the poeta in Tibullus 1.10 between whom Tibullus draws a contrast when it comes to the battles of love, and, second, to discuss how Propertius in 2.5 objects to Tibullus's description of a drunken rusticus as a rapist, a scene that, in his view, should not have been written. Finally, I argue that in Amores 1.7 Ovid confronts and redirects the topos of elegiac violence by creating a poeta who is also a rusticus. (3) Rusticitas is a quality that Ovid disdains and one that his elegy is designed to combat, (4) but in Amores 1.7, Ovid's poet-speaker gradually reveals that he has actually engaged in the behavior of Tibullus's rusticus by physically attacking his puella. Ovid thus combats the parochial and exclusionary conventions of Propertius and Tibullus who define the elegiac lover ostensibly as a peaceful man. At the same time, however, Ovid's poet-speaker punctuates his revelations with a high degree of epic features that show that, despite his uncouth behavior, he is a poet and a learned poet at that. As I suggest here, Ovid, by creating a poet-speaker who is a poeta as well as a rusticus, reworks both Tibullus, who has created a distinction between the behavior of a rusticus and that of a poeta, and Propertius, who believes that any poet who describes the behavior of a rusticus is himself behaving as one. In the final poem of his first book, Tibullus creates a distinction between the rusticus and the poeta which calls on earlier themes in his poetry and connects the rusticus with the soldier. (5) After a series of contrasts between war and peace which ends with a disquisition on the types of love that involve both war and peace (51-66), Tibullus begins his final section with the rusticus, who, drunk after a festival, beats and rapes his wife: (6) rusticus e lucoque vehit, male sobrius ipse, uxorem plaustro progeniemque domum. sed veneris tunc bella calent, scissosque capillos femina, perfractas conqueriturque fores; (51-4) The countryman, himself hardly sober, brings home from the sacred grove his wife and offspring in his wagon. But then the battles of love grow hot and the woman laments her torn hair and her broken gates. Tibullus describes the condition of the rusticus with a form of litotes (male sobrius), (7) and we realize quickly that his drunkenness is ugly as Tibullus moves from the journey home (51-2) to the assault. His language is strong. He chooses bella to define the action of the rusticus, and its contrast with the noun veneris emphasizes his brutality. …

Seneca’s Phoenissae imbues Antigone’s canonical pietas with elegiac associations. Her appeals to her father recycle familiar topoi from amatory poetry, especially the amator ’s pledge to follow ( sequor ) the beloved anywhere. Her father, in turn, is often disturbed by her physical proximity and attempts to escape further incestuous temptation ( timeo post matrem omnia ). In the end, however, Oedipus capitulates to his daughter’s elegiac rhetoric and responds to her in similarly amatory terms. In this way Seneca subverts the loyalty that defined Antigone in prior literary treatments to create the potential for an incestuous sequel to his earlier tragedy of Thebes.

Experiencing Stravinsky: A Listener's Companion. By Robin Maconie. (Listener's Companion.) Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013. [xxx, 243 p. ISBN 9780810884304 (hardcover), $45; ISBN 9780810884311 (e-book), $44.99.] Timeline, bibliography, discography, index. In 1972, a new writer specializing in the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and the European avant-garde published a still-valuable article on the last music published by Igor Stravinsky. Robin Maconie made a number of tantalizing critical observations therein, at once analytically grounded, emotionally tinged, and interpretively suggestive, as evident in the following quotation: "More than the text, more than the period nostalgia, it is the music's sense of finality that moves the listener.... It is an effect due entirely to cadential movement, and one realises with a shock how much Stravinsky's music had always resisted the ultimate inevitability of a final resolution. Even in his own elegiac works the cadence is always harmonically inconclusive and rhythmically compromised, so that the listener is left with the impression that the decision to end is open and voluntary" (Robin Maconie, "Stravinsky's Final Cadence," Tempo no. 103 [1972]: 19). This richness of perspective survives intact into Maconie's recent venture on Stravinsky, which like the above, showcases writing of the same fine essay-review variety. Experiencing Stravinsky marks the inaugural monograph of Scarecrow's new series of companions for listeners aimed toward general readers. According to the series editor, Gregg Akkerman, "The Listener's Companion is a series devoted to giving readers a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers. It does so by describing in lay terms the structures and historical contexts that serve as the ground for our experience when we listen to representative examples" (p. ix). This first book in the series, however, falls short of forcefully demonstrating the joint aim of "giving readers a deeper understanding of music by teaching them how to listen to key works by major musical artists and composers from recognized musical genres" (p. i). The book's preoccupation leans more toward how to think about Stravinsky's music than toward specifics of how to listen. Perhaps for any writer in this series, the most daunting challenge involves sheer methodology: the question of how to write a book for a general, intellectual, musically-interested body of readers wishing to engage directly with a super-mediated body of music. With Stravinsky the problem reaches staggering proportions, given the ever-increasing pile of scholarly commentary about him. A related colossal problem of how to write engagingly about a master composer's complete oeuvre, without deteriorating into collections of program notes and superficial observations, and which rewards reading by music specialists and the musically illiterate alike, clearly remains one each contributor to this series of listener's companions must face anew. In the present volume, Maconie succeeds admirably in bravely heading the way toward reconciling these irreconcilables. Such a tricky enterprise permits only partial success. If the quotation in the first paragraph above offers a litmus test for those likely to appreciate Maconie's critical style, then a broad audience of readers indeed should welcome this author's book on Stravinsky's music. The book best serves as a companion, though, versus a genuine guide. Readers uninitiated into the rudiments of music theory and history stand about as much to gain from this book as they would from Maconie's writing in 1972 on the temporal linearity associated with German romantic tradition as holding greater attraction for the elder Stravinsky than tonal stasis. Meanwhile, readers already familiar with Stravinsky's music surely can have perceptions sharpened from reading this text. Bibliographic data on the verso of the title page specifies the subject classification "criticism and interpretation," not "music appreciation. …

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY IN CHARLOTTE SMITH'S POETRY HAS ATTRACTED much attention in recent years. With discussions usually focusing on the two mature works, The Emigrants (1793) and Beachy Head (1807), a portrait has emerged of Smith as a kind of author-historian with diverse interests in natural and political histories. Scholars of her work have yet to note the topic's significance in her earliest poetry, and no sustained analysis of its initial appearance as a subject of serious interest for Smith has been offered hitherto. Although over the course of her career she would gradually depart from the restrictive sonnet form for the freedom of blank verse in order to explore ideas of greater complexity and depth, her earliest sonnets contain the genesis of her unique melding of local history and emotional inflection that she helped popularize in loco-descriptive verse. Of primary interest are her sonnets to the Arun River. First published in the third edition of Elegiac Sonnets in 1786, they memorialize locally-born poets William Collins, William Hayley, and Thomas Otway, and demonstrate that Smith was interested both in the history of her Surrey homeland and in the poet's role as chronicler of local legends. In the absence of any existing study into how Smith presents the issue of history in these poems, a brief overview of them is organized thematically at the outset of this essay and is followed by a discussion of their engagement with various poetic traditions. In the Arun River sonnets, Smith celebrates the literary history of her surroundings at Woolbeding House, an ancient stone-built home in Sussex, near Midhurst, where she resided with her family for roughly two years. (1) She and her children moved to Woolbeding in the spring of 1785, after having spent several difficult months in Normandy in an effort to flee her insolvent husband Benjamin's creditors. (2) The series consists of four poems. Sonnets xxvi and xxxn describe the poet's perception of the ghostlike presence of Thomas Otway, who was born in nearby Milland in 1652, with his father serving as rector of Woolbeding's All Hallows Church. Sonnets XXX and XXXIII pay tribute to Sussex-born poets William Collins and William Hayley, as well as Otway, and praise the region as enchanted for poetic creation. (3) Smith describes Otway, Collins, and Hayley as poets of her own sensibility, whose presence can be felt by their present-day "kindred spirits" through the land. (4) In the four sonnets, the process by which these kindred spirits preserve the life stories of their famed ancestors, particularly Otway's, is one of Smith's primary themes. In particular, the Arun sonnets focus on the endurance and fortitude of the poets' life stories. The topic of how the past is preserved--both verbally and on the historic page--also recurs in these and in the later Sonnet XLVI, "Written at Penshurst in Autumn 1788." The latter work is her early poetry's most extensive and overt exploration of the artist's role as historian, but its relevance to the sequence is lost on us unless we grasp the significance of the Arun sonnets written two years earlier. In Sonnet XXVI, "To the River Arun," she describes a process of verbal storytelling, in which the tale of Otway is handed down through time and becomes a kind of local lore. On thy wild banks, by frequent torrents worn, No glittering fanes, or marble domes appear, Yet shall the mournful Muse thy course adorn, And still to her thy rustic waves be dear. For with the infant Otway, lingering here, Of early woes she bade her votary dream, While thy low murmurs sooth'd his pensive ear, And still the poet--consecrates the stream. Beneath the oak and birch that fringe thy side, The first-born violets of the year shall spring; And in thy hazles, bending o'er the tide, The earliest nightingale delight to sing: While kindred spirits, pitying, shall relate Thy Otway's sorrows, and lament his fate! …

CONSERVATIVE CLERGYMAN RICHARD POLWHELE INCLUDED CHARLOTTE Smith among "the Unsex'd Females" in his 1798 satire of women writers, failing to notice that Smith had effectively "unsex'd" herself in constructing her original Petrarchan poetic identity. (1) With her first small volume of poetry titled Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays, Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park entered the English literary marketplace in 1784 as a Petrarch for her era, aspiring to both the lifetime recognition and lasting fame achieved by her laureled fourteenth-century Italian predecessor. Petrarch's Rime sparse, the frequently expanded and revised sequence of sonnets and songs lamenting his failure to win reciprocal recognition from his beloved Laura, gave Smith her model for forging her own virtual community of poems and readers. Her poetic persona took shape as an "unsex'd" Petrarch seeking an affective connection with readers through what Smith refers to in her Preface as "sensibility of heart": shared feelings of isolation and frustrated desires transmitted primarily though not exclusively in sonnet form. (2) Smith acknowledges her debt to Petrarch most obviously in the small sequence of three sonnets "From Petrarch" that appear in her first two editions of Elegiac Sonnets, but her reading and radical reenactment of the Rime sparse is deeply embedded throughout this introductory collection that established her as a popular poet. The first two editions of Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays--printed within months of each other in London and in Chichester, respectively, and containing the same nineteen poems in slightly different orders (3)--suggest that Smith's reading of Petrarch imbued her with poetic ambitions as strong as those of the canonical male Romantic poets who succeeded her. Although she deviates from Petrarch's sonnet rhyme scheme and names no equivalent to his Laura, Smith's speaker emulates Petrarch's in giving sonnet form to the affect of alienation and in making poetry a proxy for love. The intensity of Smith's early homage to Petrarch becomes diluted as Elegiac Sonnets expands through seven more editions and a second volume before her death in 1806. Readers who encounter her work in later and larger collections, including those produced in the recovery of her work since the 1990s, see Petrarch as one of several male voices she assumes or echoes. Critics who recognize a feminist strain in Smith sometimes underestimate or overlook her collusion with Petrarch, who is often read as a misogynist for objectifying Laura and denying her autonomy. (4) Daniel Robinson, for example, has acknowledged that Smith's "extensive poetic conversation" with Petrarch dominates these original editions, but he and others, including Kathryn Pratt, Karen Weisman, Theresa Kelley, and Edoardo Zuccato, read Smith as resisting or challenging the Petrarchan tradition by granting more voice or agency to Laura. (5) Smith may well have had reason to identify with Laura: Susannah Dobson's popular Life of Petrarch, published in 1775, presented Laura as the mother of many children who was trapped in an unhappy marriage. (6) The same profile fit Smith when she first began to publish after an early, arranged marriage, the birth of eleven children in eighteen years, and time spent in debtors' prison with her problematic husband. (7) However, Smith had stronger motivation to identify with Petrarch's speaker, who paradoxically proclaimed his agency impaired by Laura's repeated refusals to acknowledge him with love or pity. Smith's agency was restricted by the social and legal structures of her place and time that left her "[s] tripped by marriage of a separate identity and autonomous property." (8) In the 1784 editions of Elegiac Sonnets, Smith modeled her speaker after Petrarch's to elicit from readers an intellectual and emotional reciprocity missing from her immediate circumstances. In Smith's lifetime, Petrarch and Laura had returned to British culture on a wave of French texts, creating multiple opportunities for encountering the pair as reconstructed "heroes of sensibility. …

Stephen Gill. Wordsworth's Revisitings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+265. $45. This masterful, sensitive, and instructive book begins by citing a passage from an unpublished draft of "Michael" in evidence of its theme, the continuous textual life of Wordsworth's imagination over the half-century in which he was a writer: thus it is That in such regions, by the sovereignty Of forms still paramount to every change Which years can bring into the human heart Our feelings are indissolubly bound Together, and affinities preserv'd Between all stages of the life of man. Hence with more pleasure far than others feel, Led by his son this Shepherd now went back Into the years which he himself had lived ... Wordsworth's Revisitings offers the passage twice for how it "leads to the centre of [Wordsworth's] being as a man and a poet" (1). Indeed, these lines "go to the very heart of Wordsworth's deepest compulsions" (168). Their testament to a labor of "affinities preserv'd" may be turned to Gill's own distinguished record as a Wordsworth scholar. The many "stages" that are made pleasurably available here include not only Gill's authoritative modern biography of the poet (1989), but the rich trove of his study Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998), and the group labor of the Cornell Wordsworth series, the first volume of which to appear in print (The Salisbury Plain Poems, 1975), Gill edited. A Cornell Wordsworth textual philosophy that reads the author-approved last versions alongside startling first versions (and everything in between) animates the present study deeply. The book's methodology of gathering up the spoils of time, while making "sorties across the boundaries" of Wordsworth's published and unpublished work (21), indicates its range of interpretive moods: often elegiac in tone, but always restive. A complex Arnoldian interpreter of Wordsworth, Gill is unafraid to say how Wordsworthian eloquence can matter: "The one common bond of all human hearts is that we are mortal. What makes Wordsworth's poetry at its best so profoundly moving is the steadiness with which it confronts that fact and produces beauty from it. His poems about every kind of loss acknowledge 'the unimaginable touch of time' and yet uncover what sources of consolation and strength can be gleaned. Revisiting his own experience through the traces, both human and inanimate, of a life lived, Wordsworth continually checked his own sense of personal continuity against what Hardy called 'Time's mindless rote'" (9). The specific verbal echo is apposite: "the unimaginable touch of time" is a line Wordsworth "rescued" from a "discarded notebook," at once to mark and to outface passing time (23). However, Gill's topic is not quite the illimitable one of memory in Wordsworth. In observing the very centrality of the "drive to revisit" to Wordsworth's "imaginative life" (9), Gill distinguishes what he calls revisiting from retrospection. " Wordsworth's Revisitings is about the poet's continual return not to his past but to his past in his past writing" (10). Each of the book's six chapters explores this temporal dynamic for a given strand of Wordsworth's textual revisions. Since Gill's reading of The Prelude covers a pair of chapters, the strategy makes for five capsule accounts of Wordsworth's writing life. The organizing idea of Wordsworth's Revisitings is "that Wordsworth had a sense of his whole oeuvre--published and unpublished--as interrelated and interdependent" (36). Though by no means a revisionist in his literary historiography, Gill joins recent commentators on Wordsworth who chronicle how "[t]he poet's right of control, as creator, was exercised most imperiously through the power of determining what would emerge as the Wordsworth canon" (33). Following such "imaginative husbandry" (25) imparts a crucial dimension of the ordinary. Fits of minutia over revision admit much needed elements--compulsion, chance, and risk--through an anti-narrative force of contingency. …

The late pagan poet Rutilius Namatianus charted his journey back to his estates in Gaul in a lengthy elegiac poem De Reditu composed around A.D. 417. This paper examines Rutilius' descriptions of the various places he encounters in Book 1 of this poem, arguing that they are more metaphorical than some have recognized or considered. It will analyse the ways in which Rutilius' preoccupations with visualisation and personification convey the impression that the landscape is a living entity which is continually challenging attempts to contain it, both by the poet and other people he encounters on the voyage.

This essay considers Charlotte Smith’s treatment of the River Arun in her Elegiac Sonnets , focusing on how the river functions as a metaphor for literary influence and dramatizes her engagement with a range of poetic predecessors and contemporaries. In later editions of her sonnets, the sea replaces the river in importance and inscribes a rather different poetic outlook. In tracing the shift between river and sea, this essay offers a new way of situating and reading Smith’s sonnets as poems frequently celebrated for their innovation. This essay argues that the poems are nonetheless also deeply engaged with the literary past.

Of all the works written in 1786 in memory of Moses Mendelssohn, the elegiac cantata, Sulamith und Eusebia was the only one set to music, and that by a young Jewish musician, Carl Bernhard Wessely, to a text by the renowned German poet, Karl Wilhelm Ramler. Having been twice successfully performed in Berlin, it was the third performance of the piece, organized in 1787 by the maskilic Society of Friends of the Hebrew Literature in Konigsberg, which gained the most far-reaching resonance. The Maskilim had not previously –nor consequently –shown a concern for music, and considering the traditional ambivalence toward music in Ashkenazi Judaism, their engagement with the concert raises questions regarding attitudes to music and aesthetics in the Haskala and the role of music in the Jewish Enlightenment in general during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Tracing these events, the article begins to explore the significance of music, more than any other art, in early modern German-Jewish acculturation against the backdrop of the discourse about the civic improvement of the Jews and the politics of emancipation in Prussia during the 1780s. Focusing on the Konigsberg performance of the cantata in 1787 in particular, the article sheds light on the complexities within enlightened Jewish circles in Berlin and Konigsberg. Methodologically, the article demonstrates how music and aesthetics offer a historical prism that allows for a more differentiated view of the complexities that mark the Jewish Enlightenment and European Jewish modernization, its various cultural and ideological strands.

This paper uses the first book of Ovid’s Amores to explore the rhythms created by the relationship between quantitative meter and word-accents in Latin elegiac poetry. The first part explains how my analysis of the word-accents in relation to the quantitative meter reveals a single basic rhythm underlying the whole of each hexameter and pentameter line. The second part of this paper gives some examples of how attention to this pattern and its variations can be applied practically to illuminate additional layers of meaning in Ovid’s poetry.

This essay considers John Ruskin’s late lecture, “The Mystery of Life and Its Arts” (1868), in which the Victorian sage imagined he was giving up his career, in order to explore the central role played by scenes of leave-taking in his writings. Uniting a retrospective or elegiac gaze with a prospective or subjunctive finale, the valedictory speaker earns the authority of naming the character of his experience because it is something he may now leave behind. Ruskin’s valedictory gestures, focused in this lecture but stretching across his entire career, suggest that his obsession with failure also structured his understanding of professional authorship.

Soon after its publication in 1944, Caroline Gordon's The Women on the Porch--her sixth novel--generated two reviews in The New York Times. The first, by Orville Prescott, noted that the novel's dust jacket depicted "the figure of a young woman fleeing from the nameless terrors of a dark forest," and that the "encircling gloom that menaces her ... billows and eddies through the pages of [the] cryptic and peculiar novel" (17). Prescott also conveyed that Gordon's latest work wandered "through a series of spirals and convolutions of time and place and thought, slipping from the stream of consciousness of one character to that of another, from Tennessee to New York, from the present to the past" (17). The result was an "elusive [and] haunting," "taut and twisted," work that like the novels of "a number of her fellow Southern[ers]" shared "a preoccupation with death and decay and destruction ... [While] she does not engage in the ghoulish melodramatics of Faulkner ... her sense of doom and frustration is [just] as great" (Prescott 17). The second review, written by Lorine Pruette, similarly underscored the novel's modernist and gothic elements, specifically its thick shadows of the past, its depiction of the struggle between the Old and the New South, and its intricate narrative form--"a modified stream-of-consciousness technique ... [which] admirably evokes a mood" (BR6). Much of the other criticism that followed the initial publication of The Women of the Porch focused on the mythological framework of the novel, which is based on the saga of Orpheus's and Eurydice's descent into, and escape from, Hades; the heroic quests of the protagonists; and its innovation in structure. Agrarians Andrew Lytle and Brainard Cheney were among the first to recognize the literary merits of Gordon's novel. Cheney was particularly laudatory, describing it as "profoundly informed by tradition and history." The Women on the Porch, he predicted, would be a novel that would "last" because it not only gives "us a realism of [its] time but [also] characters, places, and situations which tend toward [the] symbolic representation of our experience" (Cheney 149-150). Despite this initial excitement, over the years The Women on the Porch has been marginalized in favor of earlier Gordon works such as Penhally (1931), Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), and None Shall Look Back (1937), which have come to dominate Gordon criticism. The Women on the Porch has been categorized either, at worst, as a "succession of frozen moments, each with its own prearranged meaning ... [with] no progression, no plot ... [just] the elegiac pattern of decline and fall" (Gray 157) or, at best, as "transitionary" in that it signals Gordon's movement away from grand historical novels about the Old South (Brown 367), and toward critiquing the Agrarian agenda espoused in earlier works. What has been lost in these analyses, however, is Prescott's and Pruette's original emphasis on the novel's gothic elements, which not only position it among many of the greatest contributions to the Southern Renaissance but also serve as a framework to examine some of Gordon's concerns with the Agrarian manifesto. In particular, the gothic elements in The Women on the Porch address the unresolved antagonism between the Old and the New South, the feasibility of their agenda in an increasing urban and industrial mid-twentieth-century South, and the role of women within this shifting social dynamic. This essay seeks to recuperate and expand upon these initial interpretations of The Women on the Porch by considering the novel as an example of Southern Renaissance literature which uses gothic elements to question the Agrarian cause--quite a daring project for Gordon given that she was married to one of the movement's founders and an unofficial member herself (Tunc, "Recuperating" 182-183). Only by placing the novel in dialogue with other prominent works of the Renaissance can its literary lineage be restored and its deep criticism of southern society be revealed. …

This article offers a new reading of the Muse in Empedocles’ Physica . I aim to show that she is integrated into the poet’s physiological conception of the cosmos and that she also plays a central role in the furtherance of his eschatological purposes. Empedocles, it will be suggested, first put the Muse at the service of the philosophical logos , and in taking that step, he embraced and transcended the conventions of Muse-invocation not only in epic-didactic poetry but in the lyric and elegiac traditions as well. On this reading, the “Muse of the agathos logos ” will emerge as a strikingly innovative creation, one that was to exercise a powerful and enduring influence on Greek and Roman conceptions of the goddess Muse in relation to the mind of the poet.

Introduction Scandinavia's longest runic inscription, the visually and textually imposing early ninth-century Rok stone, opens in a way that serendipitously illustrates the memory, media, and performance triad of this essay--"In memory of (aft) Vemoor stand these runes (runaR). And Varinn coloured (faoi) them, the father, in memory of his dead son. I say the folktale (sagum mogminni)." (1) Rok, just like several thousand other rune stones, is concerned with memory in a most basic and obvious sense, in that many stones were expressly carved and erected as memorials to--"in memory of" (aft)--dead people. (2) Expanding the sense of what is remembered at Rok, however, is a phrase that appears repeatedly throughout its text-both verbatim and implied--sagum mogminni, usually translated as "I tell the folk memory." (3) Clearly, a compound of the "folk memory" sort evokes, not the individual memory of a bereaved relative for a dead kinsman, but rather a different sort of memory, memory that is shared, memories that are at once cultural and communal, what we might more readily recognize with a different appellation--namely, tradition; (4) and, indeed, the Rok text alludes time and again to narrative traditions largely unknown to us now. The inscription's other repeated formulation sagum, "I say," "I tell," and so on, emphasizes the highly performative nature of the text, performances acted out both by its fictional (or perhaps historical) "I," and, more notably, by what must have been the repeated reading aloud of the text by each new viewer of the stone capable of the task. (5) One quickly understands, too, that the public declarations of sorrow and respect such memorial stones represent are meant as lasting elegiac "performances," acts to honor the dead that, given their lithic nature, are inherendy frozen in time. Yet these proclamations are also, as in the case of sagum, but now for the text in its entirety, re-enacted with each new attempt by a passerby to read the inscription. And it is not difficult to imagine that further performances--rituals or ceremonials of various sorts--accompanied the erection and dedication of such stones; it would be perverse to imagine that the stones were silently tipped into position without the accompaniment of familial or local ritualized behaviors of one sort or another. (6) Finally, one cannot help but be struck by the obvious self-conscious mediality of the monument. Not only does the text note its own corporeal existence--"stand these runes"--but the father's, Varinn's, role in the physical production of the monument is expressly referred to. Knowledge of runic writing, or runacy (a neologism meant to capture for runic writing the same sense "literacy" has for alphabetic writing; cf. Spurkland 2004), and thus of the written word as a medium for preserving, even enshrining, memories and thoughts, had been used in Scandinavia for half a millennium at the time the Rok stone was carved. Although the epigraphic system associated with Christianity would in time become the principal vehicle for the written word in northern Europe, (7) beginning roughly at the time of Rok, even exemplified by Rok, runic writing entered into an era of enormously expanded use. Throughout the Viking and the Middle Ages, Scandinavians were acutely aware of runic mediality, as they would also in time be about Latin and manuscript culture: the relationship between the self-conscious written text and its narrative was much more diverse and complicated than simply the fact of the story or sentiment being recorded, as a number of recent studies have emphasized, and as the example from Rok suggests. (8) In fact, it is anything other than happenstance that the Rok stone's opening focuses on memory, mediality, and performance: these functions were at the heart of such monuments, their production, and their performance. The paradigm shift we have witnessed in recent decades in Old Norse studies away from formalist approaches, which were long in vogue, and toward so-called performance and media studies, premises well-suited to the contextualization of our inherited goods to their cultural moments, was long in coming (cf. …

This article rcsituates the Marathus cycle, unique in Roman elegy for its focus on homoerotic love, within its wider elegiac context, arguing that the poems may he read as an encapsulation of elegy as a whole. It focuses on the interchangeability of male and female roles to illustrate how the characters that populate these elegies both typify and reinforce the norms of Latin love elegy while nonetheless retaining the centrality of elegy’s male speaker.

Throughout English poetry one finds examples of poems that are metaphorized as architectural structures, as houses or churches built of solid enough materials to reliably contain ephemeral spirits and ideas. From Chaucer to Heaney, the writing of a poetic line has been linked with the construction of a sure foundation, the use of a carpenter's level, the solidity of physical enclosure. As a one-time architect's assistant, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was extraordinarily well positioned to make an informed entrance into this genre of architectural poems, and indeed, he embraced architectural theory as an aspect of his poetics. Famously, in The Life of Thomas Hardy, Florence Hardy-or Hardy himself-describes his poetry in terms of gothic building principles: He had fortified himself in his opinion by thinking of the analogy of architecture, between which art and that of poetry he had discovered, to use his own words, that there existed a close and curious parallel, each art, unlike some others, having to carry a rational content inside its artistic form.... [H]e carried on into his verse, perhaps unconsciously, the Gothic art-principle in which he had been trained. (1) In his poetry, Hardy works to link the two art forms in many ways, from publishing (in Wessex Poems) elaborate sketches of buildings alongside his words to writing poems about architects and architecture. However, in his Poems of 1912-1913, the elegiac sequence he wrote after the death of his first wife Emma, Hardy resists the impulse to place his poetry within an architectural frame, not only in subject (nearly all of the poems take place out of doors, and those that do not express a certain yearning for escape to unbounded places), but also, as I will argue, in the formal components of the sequence's poetics. In comparing these poems to Hardy's architectural drawings-particularly his sketches of St. Juliot, the church in whose shadow he first met Emma-it becomes clear that, as he goes about elegizing his estranged wife, he takes certain poetic steps to reverse the process of architectural construction. Instead, he builds a kind of poetics that take place outside, whose visual components break open, and whose careful symmetries crumble: they are poems that evoke elaborate ruins more than they evoke grand gothic monuments. Astonished by rekindled desire for a woman he once loved and from whom he had grown distant, the poet attempts to recapture the Emma of his youth, a woman who sought the freedom of nature and who had not been changed by the confinement of a long, unhappy marriage. If, at first, his poems concentrate on the ghost of the later Emma, who is the ghost of closed quarters and habitation, his poems begin to reach out more toward the earlier Emma, a ghost who haunts water, air, and cliffs. In so doing, his poems move away from confined spaces such as houses, rooms, and even graves, rejecting the idea of the elegy as providing a house for the dead. Instead, Poems of 1912-1913 represents a dismantling of poetic structure in order to revive a ghost who insists on the freedom of windy spaces in which she, as much as her elegist, can define the proportions of her existence. Hardy's elegiac move out of doors is remarkable when one considers the history of the elegy. In this monumentalizing genre, the desire to preserve a passing spirit within a physical, understandable space has often found urgency. In The Life of the Poet, Lawrence Lipking describes the tombeau tradition, in which poets seek to provide poetic tombs for great writers of the past in order to rectify the obscurity of unrecognized graves: "the tomb of the poet is built by other poets; their verses take him in." (2) Not only elegies for great poets, however, seek to conflate the poem itself to a physical space in which passing spirits might reside; the desire to build a poetic tomb or house for the dead appears in elegies for all classes of subject, and the space created by the poem is often more physically defined than it is in many of Lipking's tombeaux. …

Debates on the nature and representation of female emotions go back a long way, and literary tradition, shaped almost entirely by men throughout the ages, bears the stigmas of these debates. For this reason, critics have occasionally wondered about the motivations driving authors, both men and women, who endeavor to represent the expression of turmoil in the female psyche. If there is no doubt, for example, that "Fair Aude," who appears in the Song of Roland for no other purpose than to swoon and die, could only have been invented by a Turold who had no interest whatsoever in feminine sensibility, it is a different story for works in which heroines play a central role. We might recall, for example, the debate over Homer's identity which raged at the end of the nineteenth century: how could the author of the warlike Iliad have written the romantic Odyssey, in which enamored women and seductresses are represented so felicitously? In a period when women writers published their works under male pseudonyms, the works of Samuel Butler did not fail to intrigue and surprise their readers. In the absence of specific documentation of the bard's historicity, the argument that a woman wrote the Odyssey never truly caught on, though we are now much more open to the idea of dual authorship in Homer, male for the Iliad, female for the Odyssey. For Ovid, the documentation is much more certain, and to my knowledge, taking the paternity of the Heroides away from the male poet is out of the question. (2) In this canonical collection of epistles, the passion that drives the eighteen fictitious letters written by legendary heroines can be quite shaking. However, it is an illusion, a simple effet de reel ("reality effect"), as Barthes would say, the fruit of a splendidly successful labor of symbolic projection (88). Ovid was not a woman, and he did not have to be one to reproduce brilliantly the ambiguous torments of seduced and abandoned heroines. For quite some time now, stylisticians have been providing us with an explanation by demonstrating the artfulness, that is, the artifice, with which the Latin poet crafted the elegiac form of his epistles. (3) Ovid took the idea from grammarians and rhetoricians who would assign schoolboys pedagogical exercises in which they had to make illustrious historical or mythological characters speak in a language appropriate to their rank, age, and passions (Verducci 253 ff.). Whether Penelope writes to Ulysses (Letter 1), Phaedra to Hippolytus (Letter 4), Dido to Aeneas (Letter 7), Ariadne to Theseus (Letter 10), Medea to Jason (Letter 12), Sappho to Phaon (Letter 15), or Helen to Paris (Letter 17), the woman, scorned but still dignified, invariably denounces her fickle, cheating beloved all while begging him to return to her. In other words, the question is not whether the mythical heroine could have felt so burning a passion, but whether the author has learned to express the ardor of a frenzied heart according to the rules of verisimilitude and decorum. The success of the Heroides in the Renaissance is well-known; Ann Moss lists 71 full or partial Latin editions of them between 1499 and 1593 (66-79). (4) These moving monologues were first read in Latin, and then translated into French at the end of the fifteenth century by Octovien de Saint-Gelais. (5) This translation was an immense success, and printers frequently republished it at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as there are approximately fifteen known editions and manuscripts dating from between 1500 and 1546 (Brown 73)* Michel d'Amboise even devised responses to these fictitious letters in 1541, and Charles Fontaine, a friend of Clement Marot, produced a new translation of the first ten letters in 1552, adding a revised version of Saint-Gelais's translation of the remaining eleven. (7) As such, the influence of the Heroides on the birth of the elegy in France is not to be underestimated, as attested to most eloquently by the succession of imitations and counterimitations of them. …

David Simpson. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 292. $99. David Simpson's gorgeously written, audacious study gives us a haunted Wordsworth, an occupant and observer of a modern capitalist world's "ghost-ridden dark and twilight zones" (3). By characterizing him in these terms, Simpson is in part calling attention to how obsessively William Wordsworth's verse treats figures--like the discharged soldier of The Prelude, Book 4, the old Cumberland beggar, or Margaret in "The Ruined Cottage"--who are spooky in their de-animated, death-in-life demeanor and their tragic disconnection from human sociality. He is also underlining how Wordsworth's self-representations partake of the same spectrality, so that the poet somehow "wanders lonely" even when, as Dorothy Wordsworth's journals indicate, he ought by rights to describe himself as enjoying company. To approach this Romantic ghost world Simpson takes a path distinct from that followed by the many Romanticists who, while aligning Wordsworth and Freud, have foregrounded the elegiac strain in verse that seems forever to be rehearsing loss (of Lucy, of a younger self, of his brother John) and that brings the dead back only to lose them once more. The spectrality this book treats is likewise misapprehended if construed as a link connecting Wordsworth to the Romantic period's Gothic tales and ballads and so as yet another indication that a poet in his day perforce lived (as Thomas Love Peacock complained) "in the days that are past" and was obliged to make exploded superstition and premodern custom his stock-in-trade. On the contrary, the ghost-seeing recorded by Wordsworth's verse and demanded of his readers is not the product of a backward look, but rather, Simpson insists, a marker of this poet's ongoing relevance. Wordsworth's specters "express the conditions of their time, which is ... still our time and as far as we can see the time still to come" (11). The poetry in which they feature is the "vehicle of an unresolved history we still inhabit" (13), one reason Simpson has found himself returning to it, making this his third book on Wordsworth (Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real appeared in 1982, and Wordsworth's Historical Imagination in 1987). In its dramatization of indigence, dislocation, and disconnection, guilt and sorrow, Wordsworth's "poetics of modernity" represents, Simpson avers, a signal resource with which to theorize the conditions of human existence in a modern lifeworld shaped by the achieved dominance of the commodity form. In Specters of Marx--a key resource for this argument--Derrida pondered the claim about the "specter" "haunting Europe" that had opened Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto and noted that "there are several times of the specter." By returning, the revenant might testify either "to a living past or to a living future." The capitalist societies who post-1989 triumphally declared communism history--obsolescent, a dead end--should have remembered, Derrida suggests, that precisely in never dying the ghost remains both "to come-back" and "to come" (trans. Peggy Kamuf [Routledge, 1994], 99). Through brilliant readings of an immense range of Wordsworth's poems, Simpson seeks in a similar fashion to rebuke accounts of Wordsworth as history, a figure so distant in time from us as to be over and done with. (Generally this is his students' response, he notes in an Introduction whose attention to the travails of pedagogy will, for many academic readers, occasion gleams of recognition and remembered sensations of sad perplexity.) For Simpson, the ghostly figures in Wordsworth's works, rather than blasts from the past, "haunt the present from the present itself" (145). Thus Simpson's Wordsworth finally places little credit in the Burkean traditionalism and attendant notions of an organic social solidarity that he sometimes espoused. He is notable, rather, for his insight into the abstraction, hollowness, and deadness that commodification introduces into human relations. …

In the United States, Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000) is undoubtedly the most neglected major European Jewish and Holocaust writer, although Bassani’s novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), was made into an Oscar-winning film by Vittorio De Sica (1971). Yet in Italy Bassani, along with Primo Levi, is considered one of the two pre-eminent writers of Italian Jewry as well as one of the most important Italian writers of the twentieth century. Bassani was part of the Jewish community in Ferrara, Italy, that dates back hundreds of years. Focusing on twentieth-century Ferrara, he has written a series of magnificent historically inflected dramas of the human psyche living on the edge. Bassani’s stature grows when one reads his major works one after the other because they are episodes in a fully rendered fictional history of Ferrara that is strongly related to Ferrara’s actual history from 1860 to after World War II. Not only recurring characters but also recurring references to real historical events give authenticity to Bassani’s Ferrara.

And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. --Percy Bysshe Shelley IN HER "NATURAL AND NATIONAL MONUMENTS--FELICIA HEMANS'S 'THE Image in Lava': A Note," Isobel Armstrong remarks that Hemans's poem is "clearly in dialogue" with Shelley's "Ozymandias" by virtue of "having its 'monuments' belong to dust and sand." (1) Among her many astute observations about the two poems, Armstrong notes the complexity of Shelley's phrase "Nothing beside remains," as the word "remains .... swings between noun and verb," at once suggesting an absence or lack as well as the broken remnants that continue to exist. (2) To take the idea even further, this presentation of the crumbling colossus recreates it as a form of remains, a corpse left behind as the only marker of a spirit long departed from the now-lifeless physical site; it is a partially failed and still failing attempt at immortality through materiality. The ruined monument becomes a strangely liminal art object, ambiguously isolated, without historical context, and therefore open to the free musings of poets. This liminality creates a pervading sense of loss that allows the poem to hover somewhere between the traditions of ekphrasis and elegy, and it is this intermingling of genres that Felicia Hemans adopts and adapts for even greater uses in her own poetry. Discussing the elegies of Felicia Hemans, Michael T. Williamson observes that "Hemans writes elegiac poems that lament the waste of women's psychic and imaginative energy on a world tainted by male death, deplore the absence of any commemorative interest in the histories of women, and represent dramatically disfiguring subject positions for women mourners." (3) While Williamson is speaking of Hemans's actual elegies, this observation fits well with her ekphrastic poetry, which is also haunted by comparable feelings of loss and mourning. Hemans's ekphrases parallel and intermix with her elegies in many ways; however, while it is true that the "engagement with the aftermath of death insistently shifts our attention away from the significance (or symbolic potency) of the dead and toward the living figure of the woman mourner" in her elegies, (4) the similar effect in Hemans's ekphrastic poetry has gone mostly unnoticed. The reexamination of Hemans's ekphrastic poetry from the elegiac perspective provides new insights into the poet's conception of the purpose of ekphrasis and the possibilities of a material afterlife. I will attempt to correct this oversight by examining the ways Hemans works to shift the engagement of her ekphrasis away from the object itself and onto the poem's speaker. The discussion will center on two of Hemans's better-known works, "Properzia Rossi" and "The Image in Lava," as examples of the way the poet creates a space for the speaker's elegiac personal mourning by "emptying" the central objects of meaning. Hemans in both cases provides typological characters--figures that may be taken as iconic representatives of their conditions--that are themselves divorced from their true histories and emptied of their individual meaning, allowing the poems' speakers to occupy this negative space with their individual interpretations and elegiac mourning. Unlike the ekphrases of her contemporaries, which muse on the positive, a person or object of provable independent physical existence, Hemans's poems muse on the negative, on spaces or topics whose existence is unprovable or mitigated by unbridgeable expanses. Hemans creates objects of contemplation that are ciphers, or what we might think of as ahistorical "empty icons," whose impersonal nature opens up the possibility of intensely personal investment. The voids at the center of her images are occupied by the speaker's personal reflections, not philosophical abstraction or the object's history or biography. These elegiac musings on the emptied and refigured images lead naturally to a concern with immortality, particularly the failure of the individual to continue after death. …

Ever since its discovery by Mukhtar Ali Isani in 1986, the poem believed to be Phillis Wheatley's last publication during her lifetime, "An Elegy on Leaving," has struck scholars as displaying an "atypical weariness and lack of hope" (Isani, "Elegy on Leaving" 611). From its opening lines, the poem evokes a scene of unwelcome departure from a pastoral haven: FAREWEL! ye friendly bow'rs, ye streams adieu, I leave with sorrow each sequester'd seat: The lawns, where oft I swept the morning dew, The groves, from noon-tide rays a kind retreat. (Wheatley, Complete Writings l02-03) John C. Shields, in his survey of Wheatley's "employ[ment] of [the] subversive pastoral," identifies it as "one of her bleakest, for she appears to bid adieu to the entire world of poetic creativity" ("Phillis Wheatley's Subversive Pastoral" 632, 646). Vincent Carretta, in his remarkable new biography of Wheatley, sees in the poem a "fittingly poignant farewell to more than just a life of seclusion" (189). Those who mark the propinquity of its publication to Wheatley's death--it was published only months before in the July 1784 issue of London's Arminian Magazine--welcome its uncharacteristic directness of pastoral sentiment; it symbolically sounds a mournful endnote for her tragically abbreviated life and work. This elegiac mood pervades most scholarly discussions of the poem, and few other substantive analyses exist. (1) Indeed, when compelled to discuss its literary merits in his introductory essay, Isani asserts that its "importance is mainly historical" and admits that the poem "does not escape the conventions of [Wheatley's] day" ("Elegy on Leaving" 612). The sensitivity of previous scholars to these differences in tone and quality between this poem and the rest of Wheatley's oeuvre is better explained, however, by new evidence that proves that the work is not Wheatley's after all. Rather, it is the work of English poet Mary Whateley (1738-1825), who included it as "Elegy on Leaving" in her 1764 collection Original Poems on Several Occasions (see Figure 1). Whateley was the daughter of a gentleman farmer of Beoley village in Worcestershire. (2) Though her mother was "barely literate" and her father owned only a "parcel" of "old" books, her close friendship with the daughter of the local vicar gave her access to an Oxonian's more substantial library (Messenger 15). Moreover, the location of her village in the Midlands brought her to the attention of William Shenstone, a landscape gardener and poet known for the pastoral mode, who acted as a mentor. She also came to the attention of poet and translator John Langhorne, who wrote the prefatory poem to her first book and commended her writing in the Monthly Review. (3) These two men introduced her to additional literary connections and assisted her in the publication of her verse. (4) In her early twenties, she moved to Walsall in Staffordshire, where she was to "keep house for her brother Henry" (Messenger 24-25). Though she was initially reluctant to move, she grew to appreciate the town's artistic and intellectual community. After returning to Beoley for a period and publishing her book, she came back to Walsall and married a local curate, John Darwall. Marriage and motherhood slowed but did not end her literary career; a widowed Mary Whateley Darwall published a two-volume work of poetry in 1794, the similarly titled Poems on Several Occasions. According to her biographer, Ann Messenger, the undated "Elegy on Leaving" was undoubtedly composed in 1759/60 as it "obviously chronicles her feelings about having to trade [the] rural peace" of Beoley for the more populous Walsall. Messenger admires the poem, which she deems "conventionally and simply pastoral," more for its insight into Whateley's emotions than for its art (24-25, 65), (5) an opinion that resonates with many Wheatley scholars' assessments of the misascribed work. The poems themselves are identical, with the exception of occasional changes in orthography, punctuation, capitalization, and italicization. …

Heather Dohollau (born 1925) is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, one novel and one collection of essays, all published in French: her adoptive writing language since 1966, after she moved to France as a young woman. She belongs to the rare women poets in French since the Renaissance to have received international critical attention in the form of several book-length publications, as well as two international colloquia, one of which took place in Cerisyla-Salle, and one film, La promesse des mots. (1) Dohollau has made an important and distinctive contribution to issues central to postwar French poetry: those of place, memory, exiles and returns, poetry's dialogue with the visual arts and philosophy, formal transitionality. Her life trajectory has been marked by successive losses and exiles: having lost her mother and left Britain as a young woman, she later had to leave the small island off the north Breton coast, Brehat, where for twenty years she led an insular or semi-insular life, and where two of her daughters are buried. Yet in her poems absence, without losing its emotional charge, finds a form of redemption: "[c]e qui nous appartient ne peut etre perdu, simplement detruit". (2) Poetry can give a place and a degree of embodiment to what is no more and what could have been, not by striking elegiac chords, but by cultivating a rich and protean relation with what eludes words. In this philosophically significant endeavour, Dohollau's language change plays a crucial role. In 1966, she elected her "daughter tongue", as she calls French, as her main poetic language. This choice provided her with a liminal stance which became the foundation of her poetics. Not only is she a bilingual poet, but she has almost always lived in linguistically dual areas (Wales, Brittany). The awareness of this duality, her own language change and her practice of translation have enabled her to cultivate a certain distance, or resistance, which she calls "difficulty" in her rapport to words. Thus, Dohollau is uniquely placed to contribute to the recent reassessments of language undertaken in philosophy and translation studies. She works with, not against, the limits of language as she sets out to explore the grey areas between words and what remains inarticulated. This purpose finds expression in an epigraph where she quotes Andre du Bouchet: De cette langue a l'autre Quelquefois sera touche au passage cc qui va hors de l'une et de l'autre (3) This essay explores the different manifestations of that which goes out of languages, and the different poetic strategies deployed to let it appear within a range of texts. First, I examine what eludes words because it eludes memory, or what Dohollau calls "La source intarrissable [sic] de l'oubli". (4) I then turn to the poem's refusal of closure and the risks of that venture: the idea that "[l]e poete vit de sa mort". (5) My last two sections examine the role of the unsaid as poetic resource and its embodiment within the textual space, as areas of unprinted whiteness. Electing "un manquement comme bien", Dohollau's poetics enacts her motto: "pour garder l'impossible intact"--a fragment from La Venelle des pones which her late friend Derrida once inscribed into a book which he sent to her. (6) 1. "La source intarrissable [sic] de l'oubli" The first "manquement" I shall investigate is that of oubli. Dohollau claims a positive value for this word, identifying it as the very substance of memory in the title "Memoire d'oubli". (7) Associated with birth ("l'oubli est critere de naissance"), (8) it even becomes a source of fulfilment in lines such as "nous comblant d'oubli" and "la source/intarrissable [sic]/de l'oubli", or in the idea of "un talisman/dont le manque me reveille soudain/et me penetre d'oubli". (9) This awakening to an absence that makes itself feel present enables Dohollau to redefine oubli as a potential interface with the past. …

DID NOT at all anticipate the emerging interest in the poetry of ordi- nary life or everyday life. I am enough of a modernist myself to believe we have plenty of ordinary life without asking our poetry to submit to it. But one would have to be a fool not to appreciate the appeal of the notion, especially when developed by as fine a literary critic as Siobhan Phillips, who has written by far the best account of Stevens' relation to this topic in her recent book, The Poetics of the Everyday. In general, the topic appeals because we want poetry to be about something, because we are suspicious about claims for the sublime with its temporality of singular events, and because we want poets not to be snobs but respectful of a common social order. The poetics of the everyday allows us to satisfy all three wishes. Of course, such naked satisfaction is forbidden to academic literary criticism. Yet when one reads Phillips one appreciates how such satisfac- tions can be embodied in intricate intellectual performances. There are, in fact, very good reasons why poets would engage the everyday, and why critics would value their thinking. Phillips' basic argument seems compelling: Stevens begins with something close to contempt for ordinary life, and for the temporality of repetition that is a necessary part of it. On the need for ecstatic time he was one with the modernists. But eventually he realized that there is no escape from alienation and its pseudo-heroics without reconciliation with the everyday. Phillips' formulation has the in- tense and pointed logic of a major critical mind: "Stevens can overcome dualistic malady (of 'The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad') with the com- monplace patterns that once seemed the malady's ground" (80). Even when he changed styles to embrace the process of thinking in time, it was only in The Rock that the Penelope of "The World as Meditation" could turn "the terrified farewells of 'The Auroras of Autumn' into the peaceful routine of 'An Ordinary Evening'" (108). Penelope's way of absorbing the sun through repetition "overcomes the elegiac" (108) that seems of a piece with wanting to live a life of exalted moments. I have no quarrels with Phillips' sharp account of Stevens' ultimate proj- ect, realized differently in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" and in