SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE AND THE POLITICS OF RHYME

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Morlier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Rhyme Scheme ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese

ALTHOUGH VICTORIAN REVIEWERS uniformly praised Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the “sincere” poetic voice of Sonnets from the Portuguese, they often blamed her for faulty craft. In structure and rhyme scheme the poems in the sequence recall the Petrarchan tradition, suggesting the idealized love that accompanies it, yet their varied syntax and diction seem more conversational than ideal. Enjambment usually destroys the integrity of octave and sestet. Then in the Sonnets Barrett Browning continued her use of odd rhymes, which had been raising critical eyebrows since earlier poems. For example, in the most famous sonnet — XLIII, “How do I love thee?” — Barrett Browning rhymed the noun phrase “put to use” (9) with the infinitive “to lose” (11) and rhymed “faith” (10) with “breath” (12). Victorian reviewers, somewhat disoriented, offered a variety of explanations for these apparent technical lapses. Some attributed them to a defective ear for music (“Review of Poems” 278; [Massey] 517).1 George Saintsbury — taking the lead from the controversy over the “cockney school” of poetry — reproved Barrett Browning, born to the educated classes, for relying out of laziness on vulgar pronunciation to force rhymes instead of taking the time to discover correct ones (280–81). Even her poet-friend and correspondent, Mary Russell Mitford, wondered if isolation at Wimpole Street had led to an overly narrow experience with proper pronunciation of English (reported in Horne 458; see also Hayter 38–39). Victorian reproofs and anecdotes like these followed Barrett Browning’s work into the formalist twentieth century.

The Creole of Mon Louis Island, Alabama, and the Louisiana Connection

1991 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Exact Nature ◽  
Louisiana French ◽  
Language Data ◽  
New Evidence

Louisiana French Creole (LFC) has clearly been undergoing decreoli-zation in the twentieth century; its exact nature is difficult to determine, since the only evidence from the previous century available up to now has come from literary texts of that time. Language data was elicited from elderly informants whose parents were the last monolingual creole speakers living in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama. Since communication between the speakers of New Orleans Creole and Mobile Creole was quite commonplace, Mon Louis Island Creole (MLIC) represents new evidence relating to nineteenth century LFC. This study presents an analysis of the MLIC and LFC noun phrase and verb phrase. Mon Louis Island (MLI) speakers use two-stem verbs which are not attested in nineteenth century LFC texts. On the other hand, there are developments in LFC, such as preposed definite articles, that were not documented in MLIC. Thus, the MLIC data might help distinguish the features already present in the nineteenth century from those which represent more recent changes in LFC.

scholarly journals ‘A FONDNESS FOR BEING SAD’: SOME PORTUGUESE SOURCES FOR ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S POETICS OF MELANCHOLY IN SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE (1850)

Diacrítica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Paula Guimarães
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Great Similarity ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Depressed Woman ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Luis De Camoes ◽  
Letitia Landon ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese

In seeing melancholy as the antithesis of poetic creativity, the Victorians often broke with the traditional Renaissance and Romantic attitudes of equating melancholy moods with artistic or poetic genius. This article proposes to explore how, initially viewed as an emotional and ‘depressed’ woman poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to resist and escape the sickening disempowerment or abandonment which had affected poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, and engage in a new poetics of melancholy in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). It demonstrates how the poet plays this poetics out in most of her later sonnets, where she indeed attempts to prove that good poetry can be written without melancholy, even if she herself does not always succeed in this deliberate rejection of ‘dejection’. The article thus intends to suggest, through a brief comparative analysis, that her apparently contradictory poetics of melancholy very probably derived from a specifically Portuguese poetic tradition, namely the ‘fondness for being sad’ of Luís de Camões, as well as the sorrowful love of Mariana Alcoforado’s epistles (1669) and of Soror Maria do Céu’s mannerist poems, an influence that is supported in the great similarity of motives and language that can be found in the respective texts.

Wounded Utterance: Trauma and Italy’s Second War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems Before Congress and Last Poems

2019 ◽  
pp. 125-156
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Napoleon Iii ◽  
Political Trauma ◽  
Traumatic Impact

Chapter 4 traces the traumatic impact of the 1859 Second Italian War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning ’s Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Despite voicing enthusiastic support for unification, Barrett Browning’s poems also recognise the Risorgimento’s failures and costs. ‘Napoleon III. in Italy’, ‘Mother and Poet’, ‘Died . . .’, ‘The Forced Recruit’ and ‘A Tale of Villafranca Told in Tuscany’ explore the uses and limits of lyric utterance, using familial and intergenerational motifs to demonstrate how a performative poetic voice that ushers Italy into being conflicts with the historical trauma that precludes speech and severs the correspondence between words and deeds. EBB attempts a kind of wounded utterance, exploring a poetics of recognition that acknowledges the deep roots of political trauma embedded in the nation-making process while accepting and respecting the wartime suffering and grief that are beyond the powers of poetic convention and speech.

Strategic Self-Centering and the Female Narrator: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese

1989 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 75-91
Author(s):  
Sarah Paul
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Idealized Model ◽  
Radical Nature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Active Subject ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽  
Passive Object

As the first love sonnet sequence written by a woman in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese challenged the conventions of amatory poetry when it was published in 1850. The genre, which had always required its female inhabitants to maintain an aloof and icy silence, was not accustomed to female voices. Certainly a speaker like the narrator of Barrett Browning's sonnets, loudly proclaiming her right to adopt postures of adoration and unworthiness toward a male love object, had never before disturbed its rarefied spaces. The radical nature of the work, however, seems to have been lost on its nineteenth-century audience. Victorian readers saw nothing shocking or immodest about the sonnets and actually admired them a great deal, particularly because they seemed, oddly enough, to uphold an idealized model of devout and reticent femininity. Hall Caine called them “essentially feminine in their hyper-refinement, in their intense tremulous spirituality” (310–11), while Eric Robertson wrote that “no woman's heart indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could have laid itself bare more purely” (281). Twelve years later Edmund Gosse spoke of the cycle's “noble dignity,” “stainless harmony,” and “high ethical level of distinguished utterance” (11, 21). Neither these nor any other nineteenth- or early twentieth-century critic saw anything revolutionary in the sequence. Only in the past dozen years have feminist critics re-evaluating Sonnets from the Portuguese discovered within its self-deprecating stanzas an “enterprise of heroinism” asserting a woman's “right” to be the active subject of both poetry and feeling rather than their passive object.

scholarly journals The Vocal Music of Ana Sokolović: Love Songs for the Twenty-First Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Tamara Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Extended Vocal Techniques

Enchanted by the vocal music of Serbian-born Canadian composer Ana Sokolović, Tamara Bernstein visited the composer at her home in Montreal. Sokolović’s music draws on several sources, including the theatrical world and the culture of the Balkans. The extended vocal techniques in Sokolović’s music are rooted not in the avant-garde music of the twentieth century, but in the oral traditions and poetic voice of Serbia. It seems that the more the composer returns to her cultural roots, the more she embraces the universality of the human soul.

scholarly journals A Poetics of Reciprocity: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Ballads and Sonnets

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rose Harriet Sneyd
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽  
Social Act ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

<p>This thesis considers the way in which a selection of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (henceforth to be referred to as EBB) exhibits what I will refer to as a poetics of reciprocity. My focus is on EBB’s ballads of the 1830s and 40s, her amatory sonnet sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese, and those ballads found in Last Poems. Lyric poetry is, traditionally, said to be defined by a monologic lyric speaker. Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, pronounced that the mono-stylistic and cohesive nature of poetic language distinguished it from novelistic prose. However, it was, in part, Bakhtin’s insistence that poetry was by definition monologic that triggered my dialogic investigation of EBB’s poetry. Despite the range of work, both formal and temporal, that I consider in these three chapters, the discussion is nevertheless united by a consideration of EBB’s fascination with language, and her concomitant departure from the conventions of the monologic lyric speaker. In her early ballads, I explore EBB’s presentation of unreliable speakers and protagonists. These figures prove elusive to read because of their use of duplicitous or untrustworthy language, or they falter in the act of interpretation themselves. In EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, I consider the way in which the poet opts for the language of conversation to evoke, in a fresh and powerful manner, the love between her speaker and her beloved. I suggest that this strategy, in part, compensated for the way in which clichéd literary language used to describe the experience of loving had been drained of vigour. Finally, in Last Poems I consider EBB’s presentation of speech as a social act that is influenced by the speaker’s status in society. In these late ballads, women’s attempts to wield language in an effective way are demonstrated to be dependent upon various conditions that reduce or enhance the potency of their speech acts. While Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel,” in addition to the work of critics such as E. Warwick Slinn and Marjorie Stone, has been vital to the formulation of my thesis, I have, largely, relied upon a formalist approach to EBB’s poetry. In my close readings I examine EBB’s interrogation of language in her ballads and sonnets in light of her conscientious use, in particular, of metre and rhyme.</p>

scholarly journals A Poetics of Reciprocity: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Ballads and Sonnets

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rose Harriet Sneyd
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽  
Social Act ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

<p>This thesis considers the way in which a selection of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (henceforth to be referred to as EBB) exhibits what I will refer to as a poetics of reciprocity. My focus is on EBB’s ballads of the 1830s and 40s, her amatory sonnet sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese, and those ballads found in Last Poems. Lyric poetry is, traditionally, said to be defined by a monologic lyric speaker. Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, pronounced that the mono-stylistic and cohesive nature of poetic language distinguished it from novelistic prose. However, it was, in part, Bakhtin’s insistence that poetry was by definition monologic that triggered my dialogic investigation of EBB’s poetry. Despite the range of work, both formal and temporal, that I consider in these three chapters, the discussion is nevertheless united by a consideration of EBB’s fascination with language, and her concomitant departure from the conventions of the monologic lyric speaker. In her early ballads, I explore EBB’s presentation of unreliable speakers and protagonists. These figures prove elusive to read because of their use of duplicitous or untrustworthy language, or they falter in the act of interpretation themselves. In EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, I consider the way in which the poet opts for the language of conversation to evoke, in a fresh and powerful manner, the love between her speaker and her beloved. I suggest that this strategy, in part, compensated for the way in which clichéd literary language used to describe the experience of loving had been drained of vigour. Finally, in Last Poems I consider EBB’s presentation of speech as a social act that is influenced by the speaker’s status in society. In these late ballads, women’s attempts to wield language in an effective way are demonstrated to be dependent upon various conditions that reduce or enhance the potency of their speech acts. While Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel,” in addition to the work of critics such as E. Warwick Slinn and Marjorie Stone, has been vital to the formulation of my thesis, I have, largely, relied upon a formalist approach to EBB’s poetry. In my close readings I examine EBB’s interrogation of language in her ballads and sonnets in light of her conscientious use, in particular, of metre and rhyme.</p>

“Some Interchange of Grace”: “Saul” and Sonnets From the Portuguese

1987 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 55-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Rose Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Robert Browning ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽  
The Way

That Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had an influence on each other's poetry is difficult to doubt but more difficult to prove; their similar backgrounds and shared experiences, and a reticence in both to discuss their working habits, generally make attempts to fix possible influences between them problematic at best. Two periods of their shared lives, however, do provide an unusually clear record of the way each affected and was affected by the other's writings: the first, from their introduction in January 1845 until their marriage in September 1846, during which time Browning completed the last two numbers of his Bells and Pomegranates series and Elizabeth Barrett wrote her Sonnets from the Portuguese, and the second in 1855, when Browning published Men and Women. Their courtship letters show that they considered themselves engaged in a unique poetic as well as personal partnership, and their poetry of this time, together with Browning's 1855 volume, reveals that their creative interaction was more extensive than even they realized. Of particular note is the way that Browning's first version of “Saul” helped to shape the theme and imagery of Sonnets from the Portuguese, which in turn influenced his later conclusion to “Saul.”

scholarly journals Entrenchment inhibition: Constructional change and repetitive behaviour can be in competition with large-scale “recompositional” creativity

2019 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Tantucci ◽  
Matteo Di Cristofaro
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
American English ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Cognitive Architectures ◽  
Repetitive Behaviour ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis paper addresses creativity as inhibition of repetitive behaviour. We argue that entrenchment and constructional change can be in competition with large-scale creative attempts of recomposition of constructions’ internal constituency. After undergoing chunking, the recurrent usage of a construction may be significantly counterbalanced with new attempts of entrenchment inhibition (viz. inhibition of entrenchment). These are cases where speakers opt for more compositional and less predictable ways to express a similar meaning of a conventionalised form. We focus on the constructionalisation of noun–participle compounds (e.g. snow-covered) in the Historical Corpus of American English. During the second part of the twentieth century, speakers increasingly inhibit the usage of conventionalised noun phrase–past participle forms in favour of more compositional strategies involving the same internal constituents. This entails that constructional change not only affects the meaning of the chunk that undergoes constructionalisation but also the way speakers creatively rediscover its internal constituency. These results additionally aim to inform research in cognitive architectures and artificial intelligence, where creativity is often merely considered as a problem-solving mechanism rather than a potential process of inhibition of automatised behaviour.

Particle placement in Late Modern English and Twentieth-century English: Morpho-syntactic variables

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Rodríguez-Puente
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
British English ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Particle Verbs ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This article surveys possible factors affecting particle alternation in British English between 1650 and 1990. When particle verbs are transitive, the speaker is presented with two possible choices: verb-particle-object (VPO) or verb-object-particle (VOP). Research has shown that there are a number of phonological, morphological, semantic and discourse-functional variables which may affect the speaker’s choice. The present article focuses on the influence of six morpho-syntactic variables, namely the noun phrase (NP) type of the direct object (DO), the length of the object, the complexity of the DO, the presence of a directional prepositional phrase (PPdir), the type of determiner of the object NP and the type of particle. The data show that, although the VPO order tends to be the predominant one, some of these variables can determine the type of arrangement selected by the speaker. The results are also compared with previous research on Middle English, Early Modern English and Present-day English, showing that the tendencies observed have changed over time.

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