scholarly journals You Can Never Be Sure

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Spaide
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
John Berryman

Abstract If you had to name the genre of The Selected Letters of John Berryman, how many different answers could you give? This essay considers a handful of approaches to reading poets’ correspondence and to the particularly disordered case of Berryman’s letters. After reading the letters the predominant way we approach modern poets’ correspondence today—as an assemblage of documentary evidence that stands alongside but not in place of a biography—this essay proposes a fruitful alternative: to focus less on their sender and more on their addressees. In that broader light, The Selected Letters is the best book ever assembled on what John Berryman needed from, and could provide for, anyone who wasn’t John Berryman. The remainder of the essay surveys what Berryman offered several generations of poets, from peers like Elizabeth Bishop, to near-contemporaries like Adrienne Rich, to poets working today. What many contemporary poets have found most useful—and most objectionable—in his work may be a permission-granting hostility, which they have wrested away and turned back on Berryman himself. After speculating about lessons we could take from Berryman’s example, this essay concludes on a central question raised by his tumultuous reception: how can you ever be sure?

Dylan Thomas and American Poetry: ‘a kind of secret, but powerful, leaven’

2019 ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Philip Coleman
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
Broad View ◽  
John Berryman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dylan Thomas ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

In The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (2013), John Goodby argues that ‘[t]he scope of Thomas’s impact on US poetry is remarkable, and it testifies to his characteristic hybrid ambivalence’. In the spirit of elaborating on this observation, this chapter considers how a number of quite different American poets have engaged with Thomas’s work, including Charles Olson, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, and Denise Levertov. The essay also brings into focus the more explicit dialogue established throughout the poetry of John Berryman, for whom Thomas was a constant and almost familial figure from the 1940s to the end of his career. In Dream Song 88, Berryman imagines Thomas in the afterlife ‘with more to say / now there’s no hurry, and we’re all a clan.’ In this chapter, the idea of American poets belonging to or seeking to belong to such a ‘clan’ is examined, up to and including the work of a number of contemporary poets and schools of verse. The chapter takes a broad view, then, of the many ways Thomas has influenced the writing of poetry, and in doing so scrutinises the way the history of American poetry has so often been narrated.

Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery.

1978 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 300
Author(s):  
William Stafford ◽  
David Kalstone
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
Robert Lowell ◽  
James Merrill

The Fire That Breaks

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Derek Walcott ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Substantial Influence ◽  
John Berryman ◽  
Charles Wright ◽  
Geoffrey Hill ◽  
Ivor Gurney ◽  
Denise Levertov

The Fire that Breaks traces Gerard Manley Hopkins’s continuing and pervasive influence among writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Not only do the essays explore responses to Hopkins by individual writers—including, among others, Virginia Woolf, Ivor Gurney, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, Denise Levertov, John Berryman, Charles Wright, Maurice Manning, and Ron Hansen—but they also examine Hopkins’s substantial influence among Caribbean poets, Appalachian writers, modern novelists, and contemporary poets whose work lies at the intersection of ecopoetry and theology. Combining essays by the world’s leading Hopkins scholars with essays by scholars from diverse fields, the collection examines both known and unexpected affinities. The Fire that Breaks is a persistent testimony to the lasting, continuing impact of Hopkins on poetry in English.

scholarly journals Bodies and self-disclosure in American female confessional poetry

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. SV33-SV56
Author(s):  
Carmen Bonasera
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Confessional Poetry ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Louise Gluck

Far from being a mere thematic device, the body plays a crucial role in poetry, especially for modern women poets. The inward turn to an intimate autobiographical dimension, which is commonly seen as characteristic of female writing, usually complies with the requests of feminist theorists, urging writers to reconquer their identity through the assertion of their bodies. However, inscribing the body in verse is often problematic, since it frequently emerges from a complicated interaction between positive self-redefinition, life writing, and the confession of trauma. This is especially true for authors writing under the influence of the American confessional trend, whose biographies were often scarred by mental illness and self-destructive inclinations. This paper assesses the role of the body in the representation of the self in a selection of texts by American women poets—namely Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück—where the body and its disclosure act as vehicles for a heterogeneous redefinition of the female identity.

God and Elizabeth Bishop

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Walker
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth Bishop

Ruler Visibility and Popular Belonging in the Ottoman Empire, 1808-1908

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darin Stephanov
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Group Consciousness ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Point Model ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
National Movements ◽  
Tanzimat Reforms ◽  
The One

‘What do we really speak of when we speak of the modern ethno-national mindset and where shall we search for its roots?’ This is the central question of a book arguing that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching, and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements, and, after the empire’s demise, national monarchies. The book discusses the themes of public space/sphere, the Tanzimat reforms, millet, modernity, nationalism, governmentality, and the modern state, among others. It offers a new, thirteen-point model of modern belonging based on the concept of ruler visibility.

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