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This paper constitutes a radical re-reading of W. S. Graham’s long poem, The Nightfishing (1955). It begins by attending to the poet’s brief but significant time spent in New York and how the resonant influence of Marcel Duchamp may have unexpectedly influenced Graham’s composition of The Nightfishing, which has previously been read as a metaphysical journey out into language-as-ocean, and while such a reading is valid, it is also selective; this paper, instead, reads The Nightfishing as equally – if not more – indebted to Graham’s parallel experiments with and interest in what he calls ‘already made phrases’. John Cage is introduced as a comparable second-generation Duchampian, and whose experiments with tape-recorders form an important parallel example to Graham’s own interest in vocal materiality. The paper thereby provides a new transatlantic inflection to Graham’s verse-composition, and reveals it as structured by the indeterminate qualities of recording equipment, radio, quotation, citationality, and sampling. In this light, his work becomes recontextualised as a curation of found voices – a reading that relates also to larger questions of intention, contingency, and the critic’s own mode of composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elegiac poems by Australian late modernist poet Martin Johnston (1947–90) expose key anxieties about lyric poetry after American mid-century late modernism. Johnston, like other of his contemporaries, experimented with elegy in order to rethink the lyric in ways conscious of innovative mid-century and post-1960s developments from American poetry. Johnston’s discomfort with elegy and the elegiac tradition, and his subsequent effort to expand upon the concept of the dead poet since romanticism using social poetics, illuminate wider tendencies in late modernist poetics shared with other Australian peers. This essay insists that the late modernist question of social poetics can be studied via the tentative process the antipodean poet Johnston adopts in his complex relationship to elegiac lyric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delineates the socio-historical imagination underpinning the works of Miraji, one of the pioneers of Urdu poetic modernism. It argues that the ‘modernism’ attributed to Miraji’s poetry is best understood as the culmination of, as well as a veritable departure from, a specific diachronic movement internal to the history of modern Urdu literature. Presenting the idea of ‘naturalness’ as one of the principal catalysts of this internal movement, this paper demonstrates how Miraji attempted to reorient the trajectory of modern Urdu poetry by adopting an equivocal poetic language, which challenged the moral, social, and political imports of this politico-aesthetic discourse of ‘naturalness’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a symbolic enunciation of Black subjection and resistance, the cry has functioned as a central trope in negritude poetics. This essay revisits the trope by focusing on another geography of the negritude imagination beyond the francophone world. I analyse how the work of two women poets from the African archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, Alda Espírito Santo (1926–2010) and Maria Manuela Margarido (1925–2007), reorients the cry as a modality of decolonial critique. I argue that they intentionally mobilize the sonorous force, intensity, and frequency of the cry in their poetry to grapple with the colonial ritual of terror in the Portuguese empire. In the intersection of mourning and resistance, the cry functions as both a critique of colonial violence and the voicing of radical hope for a decolonial future. This essay brings postcolonial and decolonial thought into conversation with lyric studies as it maps out the connection between Espírito Santo's and Manuela Margarido's poetry, intellectual work, and political activism. It illuminates the entanglement of the voice, power, and resistance in negritude poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is concerned with the ways in which lyric poetry, as a certain kind of literary practice, reconfigures and reimagines dominant constructions of the liberal subject. In so doing, it focuses on the work of Susan N. Kiguli, a Ugandan poet whose 1998 collection, The African Saga, was published in the wake of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government's attempts to improve the position of women in Ugandan society. Although these (neo)liberal reforms were successful in bringing more women into the orbit of national politics and the economy, they relied on a process of recognition that, when analyzed using the work of Kelly Oliver, appears to do little to change patriarchal structures. This essay argues that four poems in The African Saga – "I am Tired of Talking in Metaphors," "Where am I?", "Deconstructing You," and "The Swing" – constitute an attempt to move beyond the version of the female liberal subject implied in the government's rhetoric. Through a sustained manipulation of personal pronouns and syntax, the poet articulates a lyric subjectivity that is characterized by movement, constant change, and a redeployment of the desire for recognition that is central to liberalism. This subjectivity, which is highly adaptable yet firmly embodied, therefore cannot be "recognized" within the government's liberal politics. It is also articulated against deconstructive theories of subjectivity which, according to Kiguli, would construe it as an entity that is entirely relational in its construction. The essay concludes by considering how, in the case of Kiguli, the lyric poem does a certain kind of subjective-political work that is out of the reach of novels written in Uganda during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering that early modern poetic theory retains the classical genealogies and iconographies of lyric poetry as song to the accompaniment of a lyre, how can one account for lyrics which portray the poet's stringed instrument, frequently the lute, as antithetical to his or her poetic aspirations, as a recalcitrant tool that resists the poet's desires and thus engenders a lyric crisis? This article uses object-oriented ontology (OOO) to think through the lyric poet's relationship with the lute which, fractured between real object and its sensual qualities, withdraws its essential being from access yet involves the poet in a network of sensual and essentially aesthetic bonds with the instrument. By reading several early modern riddles, sonnets, and other lyrics about deviant lutes as encounters between human and nonhuman objects, the article traces the poetics of unlyric — a form of poetry that disentangles poiesis from musical subjectivity and harmony, articulating instead a vision of lyric as fraught negotiations between entities whose forces lie beyond the powers of human art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late sixteenth -- early seventeenth century, works of lyrical poetry appeared in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. One of the areas of literature that contained lyrical poetry was funeral literature, works mainly dedicated to the funerals of nobles or church elites. One of the more interesting works is Funebria (1603), written in Latin by Ioannes Kimbar. This work is dedicated to Isabella Bonarelli (1567-1602), the wife of Theodorus Lacki (1554-1610), an officer (rotmistrz) of the Grand Duchy. This article will focus on the lyrical poems that form the concluding part of Funebria, and will also explain how these lyrical poems stand out in the context of the Grand Duchy's funeral literature of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the work of poet Teresa Williams, highlighting her ability to create contemplative and evocative poems that explore themes of lightness and depth. Williams draws inspiration from emotional pain, beauty, and the music of language to create transformative and healing poetry. The article analyzes five of her poems, which touch on themes of exile, winter, and the power of art and music. Williams' work is praised for its ability to transmute light and create a sense of awe and wonder. [Extracted from the article]

The essay shows how the most comprehensive sixteenth-century printed collection of pre-Petrarchan lyric poetry, printed by the Giunti press in Florence in 1527 and known as the 'Giuntina delle rime', was conceived as a Dantean collection. The article argues that the 'Giuntina' can be understood in relation to a Florentine context that reacted in opposition to Bembo's codification, in his seminal dialogue Prose nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua (1525), of Petrarch and Boccaccio as supreme models for poetry and prose, and his devaluing Dante. This reaction led to the promotion of Dante's lyric poetry through a collection printed by the leading Florentine publishing house. The essay presents new evidence to show that the original programme of revaluing Dante that lies behind the collection and its scope seem to have undergone a transformation, which obscured the force of that re-evaluation in the final print of the 1527 anthology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lyric poetry, often regarded as the epitome of subjectivity in the realm of artistic expression, emerges from the depths of the poet's personal emotions. Hence, in the aesthetic landscape of the nineteenth-century Germany, it was excluded from the inventory of genuine art forms, all of which were deemed to be objective and disinterested. Associating lyric poetry with music in its origin and essence, Nietzsche extends his Schopenhauerian metaphysics of music to the lyric, making it a highly objective art reverberating from the abyss of existence, the Ur-Eine, expressing its intrinsic self-contradictory and agonizing nature. A similar understanding of the creative process of poetic composition in the lyric, which this article aims to elucidate, can also be found in some of Rūmī's ghazals and observations. These include a metaphysics of the unseen, a reunion through ecstasy and rapture, and a reflection and mirroring, initially through music and then through the lyric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ronald C. Egan, a renowned American sinologist, is best known for his accurate English translations, exquisite readings, and innovative perspectives on the aesthetic ideas and pursuits of ci poets such as Ouyang Xiu, Su Shi, and Li Qingzhao, as well as the scholar-official group of the Northern Song dynasty. However, through his longitudinal study of specific ci poets, he also shows a unique understanding of the development and evolution of ci lyric poetry in the Northern Song. An integrated analysis of Egan's scattered articles on Northern Song ci poetry indicates that gender is key to his understanding of the evolution of ci in the Northern Song. On this basis, Egan has conducted in-depth research on three aspects: the gender perspective of the lyrical protagonists described by ci poets; changes in the form, content, and patterns of writing ci poetry; and new phenomena in ci criticism. His research further enriches the details of the evolution of Northern Song ci poetry and expands its historical research horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue in this essay that in some circumstances lyric poems written from the colony or the postcolony move in the direction of expressive totality by engaging with multiple worlds of reference at once. György Lukács suggested that the totality that we find in epic poetry and, to a lesser extent, in the novel, is absent from lyric poetry. In a re-reading, inflected by the Covid-19 pandemic, of two mid-twentieth-century Bengali poems written by Bishnu Dey (1909–1982), of which I provide the English translations, I illustrate how lyric poems about disaster, enacting a disorientation of the senses and a dissolution of the fixity of reference, creates transpositions across multiple worlds. In the case of these particular poems, the worlds are those of Greek myth and Indian myth, parallels among which weave intertextually together in an expressive totality. It follows that, alongside other genres, poetry too continues to be a resource with which to think our contemporary moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If virginity had a sound, it would sound like the Virgin Mary, according to devotional sources from New Spain intended for the indoctrination and spiritual contemplation of cloistered nuns. This article traces that allegory from its inception in reflections on biblical narratives of Mary's life to some of the most complicated theological musings on the nature of the Virgin's soul. Through the lens of gender and voice studies, this essay examines rare literature, music manuscripts, and visual art of New Spain and shows how virginity was socially constructed and deployed as a type of sonic instruction of Mary's essence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores how Cervantes endeavours to make inaudible music sound in the text. In sung music, the characters hear a melody and, in some inexplicable way, we readers read a nonexistent melody. It is not a matter of imagining a melody, but of imagining that we have imagined one whose void and nonexistence we don't perceive. This process is possible owing to the reader's musical memory that is activated by enunciation in the text. The emotion of the characters is an important means by which the reader connects with sung music that is neither described nor heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various approaches to rhythm or poetry have presented impediments to the theorisation and study of poetic rhythm. These include choices regarding the etymology of rhythm, the dismissal of relations between music and poetry, and the tendencies to see rhythm either as contrary to metre or conflated with it. This essay explores options and alternatives that enable understandings of rhythm in accord with our experience of music and poetry. A consideration of the affinities and comparability of both arts reveals viable entryways into poetic rhythm, including the practices of early modern poetry, particularly in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este ensayo analiza la influencia de la poesía amatoria en la lírica devocional eucarística en el amplio mundo hispánico partiendo de tres villancicos compuestos en Puebla por Gaspar Fernández a inicios del siglo XVII. Concordancias con fuentes españolas e italianas ponen en evidencia la circulación de la lírica devocional a nivel transatlántico. El carácter sensual con el que se refiere a la presencia real de Cristo en el Santísimo Sacramento refleja la fiel adaptación de la tradición cancioneril al lenguaje eucarístico. Dicho carácter se traduce de manera literal en el paisaje sonoro local de la festividad de Corpus Christi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines black and indigenous voices in two of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's villancicos: the 1676 Assumption cycle and the 1677 set for the feast of St. Peter Nolasco. Methods of musical and literary interpretation with roots in Western legibility guide prior research on subaltern figures in these pieces. As a result, their unscripted auditory fabric remains difficult to draw out with the critical tools at hand. In response, I propose a framework of 'un-listening' that challenges the inscribed bounds of audibility and attunes our critical ear to Afro-Mexican and Nahua auralities in Sor Juana's villancicos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aural culture and poetics in the early modern Hispanic world: sound, rhythm and music [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on his 'Epístola a Mateo Vázquez', this article studies how Cervantes captured through multiple poetic resources the soundscape of Mediterranean captivity and war. The epistle establishes a series of sonic archetypes that appear with striking persistence in the author's later literary output, which signals not only the potential presence of trauma but also a nascent critique of heavy artillery. By privileging the auditory, this analysis demonstrates how Cervantes' lyric voice summons the sonic resonances of fury as both martial and poetic power, compelling readers to contemplate the trans-Mediterranean violence that the Lepanto veteran and captive writer experienced firsthand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a close examination of sixteenth-century vihuela books to understand the ways in which vihuelists affected courtly poetry in Renaissance Spain. Analysis of their cancioneros in the light of other poetry collections and accounts of the aulic life reveal aural and performative aspects of the production and consumption of poetry that otherwise would have remained hidden to literary studies. These aspects range from voice register of the singer to tempo and musical ornamentation, but also textual manipulation of ballads and sonnets—which they help popularize among courtiers—and management of noise and interruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augustine, therefore, is not only concerned to trace what Marvell was reading but the methods that discipline how he reads - and how these disciplines of reading imprint themselves in the poems. Andrew Marvell is a man with many biographies. Marvell's poems always unsettle the "probable truths" of their various speakers by pitting I pro i against I contra i , even when - as in "An Horatian Ode" - Marvell chooses a verse form that is conventionally univocal. [Extracted from the article]

10 Doderer, I Die Strudlhofstiege i , 9. 11 Doderer, I Die Strudlhofstiege i , 9; von Doderer, I The Strudlhof Steps i , 9. 12 Doderer, I Tangenten i , 524. When does Heimito von Doderer's novel I The Strudlhof Steps i (1951) begin? The transition from diary to novel - from life to art - takes place through a process of what Doderer calls ' I Aussonderung i ' [selection].[14] That which sets the notebook apart from the novel and makes it stand on its own feet becomes evident in Doderer's I Carnet Rouge i entry from October 8, 1944. [Extracted from the article]

Until now, only three Latin poems by Garcilaso de la Vega have been extant. In this study, I present two newly discovered odes by Garcilaso: one addressed to Pietro Bembo, and another addressed to Johann Alexander Brassicanus. I also present new critical editions of the three previously known poems in the light of the new witness. I argue that the poems constitute sophisticated meditations on the purpose of encomiastic literature and the nature of lyric poetry. In this way I aim to provide a better understanding of Garcilaso's Latin odes and restore his reputation as a consummate Latin poet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores structures of attention in the lyric poetry of James Schuyler. Arguing for a poetics of distraction and boredom, I suggest that Schuyler's idiosyncratic use of the parenthesis functions as a formal strategy for confronting readerly distraction in the long-form lyric, breaking the reader's attention to produce new forms of rhythmic and temporal engagement. Through readings of Roland Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text and Camera Lucida, I show how the digressional parentheses in Schuyler's poems open up syntactical spaces which house the body of both speaker and reader, substituting the cerebral for the corporeal to induce states of textual pleasure and recode readerly attitudes to boredom. This paper situates itself in relation to contemporary questions of attention in twenty-first century culture, proposing models for both writing and reading poetry that might engender continued engagement with the lyric form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far from simply a miscellany of what are now canonical poems, Keats's 1820 volume (1820) puts forward a consistent program of radical poetics. "We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us." I argue that 1820 unfolds a theory and practice that experiment with what poetry refusing a "palpable design" might look like. The romances in 1820 are read thematically as dramas of successful or unsuccessful attempts at controlling the desires of the other. In all the poems the poet seeks to disclose in form and language something acting beyond the reach of the poet's knowledge and management. He formulates lyric poetry as ephemeral and performative, poetic language as independent of its maker's orchestration as "venturing syllables" and as "Chattertonian" (native English) and not "Miltonic" ("artful" and imposed), stanzas as occasions for expansive, that is, paratactic, syntax, and furthermore as deformances of the monumental sonnet form. This project, the article concludes, explains Keats's displeasure at his editors' inclusion of Hyperion, a poem whose "march" is "undeviating" and written with a "god's" foreknowledge, in a book that experiments with the idea of a poet only as facilitator of an independent artistic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores portrayals of childhood in Coleridge's poetry in the light of the poet's own objections to Wordsworth's description of a child as a philosopher in Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Coleridge suggests that by forcing adult ideas of rationality upon the child, Wordsworth undermines the uniqueness of childhood as a separate form of consciousness with its own ways of thinking and communicating. I argue that Coleridge avoids this deficiency in his own poetry by using the musical dimension of the lyric to celebrate childhood in its own language. The pre-literate child's off-page tears, gurgles, and whimpers can be heard in the adult speaker's infant-directed speech. The speaker's acoustic choices allow the reader to 'read' the moods of the child in the melodic part of the lyric (melos) and anticipate a time when the child will be able to join its opsis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch-Flemish literary project De eenzame uitvaart (The lonely funeral) consists of city-based groups of poets who write poems and perform them at funerals of fellow citizens who died lonely and often anonymously. At first sight, this project could be considered as a revival of the genre of occasional poetry and, more generally, as an exponent of the 'revenge' of the lyric in the twenty-first century. This revenge, a term borrowed from Thomas Vaessens, implies that contemporary poetry no longer functions as a marginal and elitist genre but has reconquered its popular status and societal value – in short, its heteronomous function. This paper aims to question this idea of the lyric's revenge by analysing the ambitions (as expressed by the initiators of the project) and a selection of poems of De eenzame uitvaart. It contends that the project is founded on a firm belief in the potency of the lyric and its specific language but that this belief is often contradicted by the hesitant rhetoric of the actual poems. This discrepancy between great ambitions and hesitant practice is interpreted as a symptom of the contemporary status of the lyric, which takes revenge yet only reluctantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'lyric' is a celebrated mode of expression and a catch-all term used to describe a great deal of admired poetry, including ancient works, Romantic poetry and contemporary poetry. However, no-one agrees on exactly how 'the lyric' might be defined or how the lyric 'I' might be understood – some see this as an autobiographical 'I' and others interpret it as a persona enabling lyric poets to activate language in particular ways. Furthermore, although the term lyric has been applied to short forms of poetry, it has much less often been applied to prose poetry. Yet prose poetry, which often invokes the quotidian, is frequently lyrical and often employs the lyric 'I'. Importantly, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, prose poetry written by American women has found new and experimental ways to position the lyric 'I' and, in doing so, much of it transgresses conventional lyric boundaries in order to re-assess and critique the experiences of women. Khadijah Queen's book, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On provides a powerful example as it makes use of a compelling lyric voice that comments on the everyday experiences of women as they are objectified in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a counter-intuitive attempt to read the events of August 1819 in relation to the phenomenon of seriality. Departing from the Revolutionary tradition of the journée, and therefore perhaps not really a bounded 'event' at all, Peterloo was instead, in James Chandler's account in England in 1819, an ongoing breach in systems of representation. I argue that analyses of popular serial forms in media studies, which emphasize the open-endedness of seriality, can help to account for some of the peculiarities of the treatment of time and happening in post-Peterloo poems by John Keats and (more marginally) by P. B. Shelley. Situating these poems in relation to early forms of serial perception in the period, and to Marx and Baudelaire's later Romantic approaches to seriality in the wake of the 1848 Revolution, I argue that seriality can help us to understand the ways in which lyric poems meet revolutionary thought in their shared questioning of the hyperbolic breach in historical time that we associate with each of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings Petrarch's (1304–74) lyric poetry into dialogue with Barthes's notion of "idiorrythmie" (idiorrhythmy) as outlined in his lecture course Comment vivre ensemble (How to Live Together). It explores both the idiorrhythmic aspects of Petrarchan desire and the traits of lyric utterance through which they are expressed, with a focus on canzone 126 of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Vernacular Things). The article begins with a study of Barthes's exposition of idiorrhythmy: its medieval origins in the monastic communities of Mount Athos and the productively unstable and improvised character of the "living together," and apart, that it implies. Most significant for the analysis that follows is idiorrhythmy's relationship to eros, Barthes's idea that idiorrhythmy preserves a space for the body's desires in opening to interruptions, deviations, and digressions. The remainder of the article offers a close reading of Petrarch's Rvf 126, focusing on one image in the poem that, like Barthes's idiorrhythmy, is rooted in fantasy and embraces errancy: the image of a flower that turning and falling around the poet's beloved seems to speak of love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shakespeare's procreation sonnets enjoin a young man to sire an heir so as not to deny his beauty to posterity, employing the persuasive techniques of poetry to facilitate the act of childbearing. While existing studies of reproduction and early modern literature have focused on literature's discursive and ideological effects, the procreation sonnets invite us to consider the direct, material involvement of poetry in the reproductive process. This essay argues that the procreation sonnets represent their efforts as a form of reproductive labour, drawing links between the craft of poetry, the artificial propagation of plants, and various forms of early modern matchmaking. The sonnets show that poetic production and biological reproduction are interwoven and mutually dependent. While the commemorative work of poetry appears to be an alternative to physical procreation, it is nevertheless contingent on biological reproduction: the sonnets may only preserve the image of the young man "So long as men can breathe". But the sonnets also draw attention to ways in which they work to condition biology, acting upon the body in a manner analogous to nursing or grafting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present essay, I explore the status of clouds in the lyric and epic poetry of early modern Portuguese poet, Luís Vaz de Camões (1524?–1580). Through a close reading of the elegy "O poeta Simónides, falando" (The poet Simonides, speaking) and the Adamastor episode in canto five of Os Lusíadas (1572), I analyze Camões's poetic rendering of clouds and storms at the Cape of Good Hope and their connection to sixteenth-century theories of the "machine of the world." To flesh out these theories, I explore more contemporary poetic work on clouds, sponges, and nets. Finally, I build on the account of "desiring machines" found at the beginning of Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia to link Camões's account of Cape storms to broader notions of machines, desire, empire, and human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I examine how both Claudia Rankine in Citizen and Ben Lerner in The Topeka School present innovative modes of voicing and listening by using free indirect style to relate inner voice and social discourse. Discussing these literary works is only part of my focus, though, for the following reason: theorists of free indirect style haven't tended to consider that style in terms of how a person relates to their own inner voice, nor have they related the style to lyric poetry; similarly, theorists of lyric haven't related lyric to free indirect style; therefore, innovative approaches such as Rankine's and Lerner's call for a reconsideration of the theories and criticism around inner voice, free indirect style, and lyric, and that reconsideration forms a major part of this essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an optic for understanding the genre of the Marathi love lyric, lavani (lāvaṇī), and its emotionality. The genre reached its greatest popularity during the turn of the nineteenth century, receiving broad popular support as well as patronage from the Maratha State. Often contrasted with the povada (povāḍā), defined essentially as a heroic ballad that recounts the feats of larger than life historical persons, the two have been seen in tandem, paired for their characterization of masculine valour and feminine eros. Each genre, relying on the other to form a complete picture, providing the appropriate context in a dialogue of genres. Despite the contrast and obvious references to warfare in the povada, however, most scholars have not acknowledged the eros of lavani as a product of its historical circumstances. Instead, generations of scholars have often characterized lavani as immoral, about women who are ready to swindle heroic men out of their hard-earned riches – riches earned from plunder and warfare in the eighteenth century. In this article, I steer away from moralizing discourses, and instead historicize the lavani's aesthetics and emotionality within the contexts of warfare, displacement, and slavery – the material conditions under which lavani reached its apex. I consider the emotional language of the lavani as a desire for social intimacy, attachment, and protection, rather than an attempt at duplicity. The Maratha State frequently sold slaves for revenue generation, and often even granted slaves in lieu of payment; these activities disproportionately affected women. In reading the lavani genre, especially the woman's voice, within its historical contexts, therefore, I argue for a materialist understanding of the lavani's emotionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adaptation of texts by contemporary British-Somali poet Warsan Shire for Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade, released in 2016, raises several questions about poetic representation in the twenty-first-century mediascape. Shire's poems, which have been composed for a variety of media, ranging from print distribution to audio recordings to online circulation, serve as transitions between the musical tracks in Lemonade, thus accompanying the overarching narrative of black female empowerment. Frictions between image and text present the starting point for an enquiry into the changes that contemporary lyric poetry undergoes when it "becomes pop." Shaped by processes of circulation and reappropriation, Shire's poems emerge as "memetic media." Does this "meme-ification" of poetry, the digital mobilization and de-contextualization of poetic form, in turn affect the dynamics of poetic representation? A close reading of the texts as they are integrated into the visual album shows how Shire's poems enter into a dialogue with Lemonade's imagery, while remaining impervious to the narrative of positive transformation. In becoming "meme," these poems retain their refractory qualities, thus presenting a design of lyric poetry for the contemporary mediascape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary lyric series deploy many strategies from forensic (courtroom) rhetoric to persuade their readers that an injustice has taken place. Ekphrasis is one of the primary overlapping strategies in both forensic rhetoric and the lyric, documenting what cannot be seen, what has been lost, or framing an object to serve persuasive ends. Returning to ancient definitions of ekphrasis as any kind of vivid description expands ekphrasis's scope from a "verbal representation of visual representation" to include descriptions of people and events. This article reads ekphrastic descriptions of violence against female bodies in recent poems by Natasha Trethewey, Tyehimba Jess, and Maggie Nelson to demonstrate how poets use the evidentiary function of ekphrasis. Documentary poets treat ekphrasis as a form of testimony, simultaneously subjective and factual. This article shows how ekphrasis straddles the boundary between the world as a material reality and our conceptions of it, inhabiting the liminal space where interpretation and ethical formation transpire. By composing imaginative ekphraseis of unavailable evidence, documentary poets challenge the hegemonic powers of the archive and empower us to imagine "what the body can say." By positioning ekphrasis within the frame of forensic rhetoric, documentary poetry transforms the reader into a witness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ever-increasing contemporary interest in the Victorian Age is testified to by a growing number of works engaging with the re-reading, re-writing, and revising of the long nineteenth century. This interest parallels a tendency to identify the Victorian literary tradition solely with the novel. By contrast, this essay focuses on Victorian and neo-Victorian poetry, arguing that issues of otherness/identity, and empathy/hostility are at the heart of Victorian poetic predicaments. Victorian models and themes are exploited by contemporary poets in order to deal with anxieties about local/global experiences, collective/individual identities, and host/guest interactions. Drawing on Rachel Hollander's definition of narrative hospitality, this essay proposes a definition of 'poetic hospitality' that takes the specific features of the poetic text into account, and focuseson poetry as a heteroglossic discourse. The dramatic monologue, is analysed as a privileged site for exploring neo-Victorian hospitality. This kind of poetic composition is generally written in a form that suggests a speech made by an individual character. In dramatic monologues, what appears to be a single voice is usually a composite one, signifying more than one identity amongst the speakers. The analyses of poems by A.S. Byatt, C.A. Duffy and Margaret show how dramatic monologues in neo-Victorian poetry may mobilise historical memory in order to allow new narratives to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides internal arguments, based on a close reading of the poem, proving that the poem is an elegy, and external arguments based on historical reseach, which lead to a rejection of the traditonally supposed identity of the person who is the subject of the poem, and provides the real identity of that person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Introduction to the special issue on Scott Walker briefly highlights the different disciplinary engagements of the essays that follow and offers its own analysis of Walker's last songs from the perspective of the tradition of lyric poetry. In this essay, Scott Wilson looks specifically at the 'New Songs' that were included in Sundog, Walker's collection of lyrics and assesses them with reference to Jonathan Culler's recent book Theory of the Lyric. Culler's book outlines four parameters of the lyric tradition from Sappho and Horace to Williams and Ashbury: enunciative apparatus, hyperbole, ritual and event (rather than mimesis or representation). In this Introduction, Wilson examines the contention that Scott Walker's lyrics mount a 'silent defence of this forgotten logic of the lyric' (Nicola Masciandaro) that has been displaced by the dominant novel-driven aesthetic whose fictional worlds and persona frame or showcase the implied subjectivity of the poet or novelist. In so doing, Wilson suggests that the lyrics of popular song have more in common with the ancient tradition of lyric poetry than modern or contemporary verse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses some of the forms of interaction between academic philology, the poetic avant-garde, and the public, demonstrating the role played by the material book in shaping the cultural impact of Dante's lyric corpus on twentieth-century culture. A survey of the historical treatment of Dante's lyric poetry between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lays the foundation for re-evaluating the earliest reception of Contini's edition of Dante's Rime and particularly its parallel genesis with Montale's Le Occasioni, resulting in two uncannily similar books of poetry published in the autumn of 1939: Contini's hermeneutics served as a hypotext for Montale's 1930s poetry, while Montale formed a key part of the intellectual milieu in which Contini was himself immersed. Through hermeneutics, but also through publishing strategies and personal relationships, Contini was able to portray Dante as a contemporary, avant-garde author, thus inspiring productive readings of medieval poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antonio Sebastiano Minturno (1500–1574) is remembered today primarily for his substantial contributions to Cinquecento poetics, aimed at establishing the lyric as a macrogenre alongside drama and narrative poetry (De poeta, 1559; L'arte poetica, 1564). Yet in addition to his poetological writings, Minturno also produced a significant number of other works, including a series of poems in the volgare published under the title Rime et prose del Sig. Antonio Minturno (1559). What is more, Minturno referred to his own poems time and again in order to support his poetological positions and to exemplify his theoretical approaches to poetry and to literature in general. Although Minturno himself quite obviously saw a close connection between his poems and his poetics, his lyric oeuvre has received surprisingly little scholarly attention so far. The present paper seeks to fill this lacuna by investigating the nexus between theory and poetic practice in Minturno's works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the extent to which historical memory, including the symbolism of Auschwitz-Birkenau, can be considered not only in terms of its close connections to both Polish and Jewish national and political imaginaries, but also in terms of its entanglements with survivors' memories of nature. I analyse the presence of the post-camp space of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Helena Birenbaum's poetic testimonies. This is a space that has often been described as tainted and contaminated while being treated as a lifeless "landscape of death" and cemetery. Readings of Birenbaum's testimonial poetry alongside archival and field research conducted at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum have enabled me to talk about grey and green camp's landscape. I have sought to demonstrate that such spaces function in Auschwitz testimonies under the cover of metaphorical constructions and poetic images that I call "the green matzevah," that contain significant analytical and empirical potential. I explore how the camp's dead grey zones have over the years turned into green matzevahs, i.e. terrain that has experienced post-traumatic curating by invasion of plants. I argue that drawing attention to the world of nature as represented in testimonies can expand knowledge of the camp, challenging the martyrological framing that prevailed under communism and help to imagine how to preserve a memory of this place when there are no human witnesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of analysis of The Wife's Lament based on a presumed, underlying narrative have produced interpretations that are contradictory and competing. As a lyric poem, The Wife's Lament is more profitably approached through its non-narrative elements, especially metaphor and intertextuality. Two major metaphors control The Wife's Lament: "Wife as exiled retainer"—currently uncontroversial—and "Wife as seer from beyond the grave." The latter metaphor is supported by a verbal parallel from Old Frisian and by character analogues from the Poetic Edda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published in 1896 in London, The Mystic Flowerly Land: A Personal Narrative of a Visit to China was one of the three major works written by Charles Halcombe (b. c.1865) that were set in China. As one who first worked as an editorial staff for the North China Daily News then an Imperial Maritime Customs Officer in China, Halcombe's The Mystic Flowerly Land contained a range of archives, folklore and legends that he presumably heard and collected during his seven-year sojourn in China. From appropriating the styles of Romantic lyric poetry and Victorian popular urban sketches to citing Chinese and English newspaper cuttings, Halcombe textually recreates a mystic flowerly land to his intended readers. By invoking the concept of the palimpsest in this essay, I explore his acts of palimpsesting, as well as reveal the 'palimpsestuous' condition – 'a simultaneous relation of intimacy and separation' in Sarah Dillon's terms – in the narrative. My paper will show that the textual and visual entanglements within the narrative ultimately reveal the ambivalent attitude of the writer and the various, and at times conflicted, cultural assumptions that underline the portrayal of China in the long nineteenth century [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses about his poem "Away My Grievance." Topics include the poem stated to have come out of the exhaustion of writing of his first collection "Sphinx," and the author mentions that his lyric subject would be driven and sustained by the properties of the lyric mode and by the capabilities of poetic form and lyric's effects come about through the combination powerful tropes, inscription and vocalisation.

The article focuses on landscapes of mourning in nineteenth-century English poetry and elegy depends upon place as a kind of deflection from grief and mourning. It mentions elegiac poetry become increasingly problematic and intensely ambivalent and complicated elegiac poetics of place. It also mentions burial powerfully shaped both spatial and temporal images in Tennyson's composition.

This essay presents a comparative analysis of writings by Antonio Machado (1875–1939) and W. B. Yeats (1865–1939). It contends that Athenian republicanism illuminates key aspects of both writers' political thinking. The essay's opening sections highlight the importance of language in Aristotle's concept of man as a political animal. Machado's and Yeats' writings are then analysed under three headings: freedom, equality and fraternity. The essay concludes that the dialogical model of selfhood which finds expression in Machado's and Yeats' writings, parallels the republican concept of the polis as a community of interdependent citizens who search for the 'good life' together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]