“The Sound in Faith”

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Wendy Raphael Roberts
Keyword(s):  

Chapter 1 provides the first literary treatment of the transatlantic bestseller, Ralph Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets. The chapter argues that the poem makes visible how poetry and homiletics enabled each other and, as they did so, fused together the revivalist minister and the poet, the itinerant and the poem, and soteriology and verse form. Erskine developed an espousal poetics (a poetics based on the metaphor of Christ wed to the believer) that saturated the rhymed couplet with Calvinist thought and helped produce a lived affective theology. While scholars have conceived of the Augustan Age in terms of Alexander Pope’s heroic couplet primarily as an Enlightenement form, this chapter argues that early Evangelicalism contributed a different meaning to poetic form—what Roberts calls the “Calvinist couplet.”

Author(s):  
Yasmine Shamma

After suggesting (and agreeing) that Berrigan led the Second Generation New York School, this chapter treats the actual forms of Berrigan’s poems, focusing on his sonnets to show that these poets interpret poems as spaces in which to recreate rooms. Berrigan, perhaps more obviously than any other New York School poet, took deliberate steps towards integrating aspects of traditional poetic verse form: Where John Donne encouraged: “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms,” Berrigan retorts (repeated throughout his Sonnets): “Is there room in the room that you room in?” riddling the form with domestic, urban and aesthetic complications. Berrigan explained to an interviewer: “I always thought of each one of my poems, like the sonnets, as being a room. And before that, I used to think of each stanza as being a room.” Accordingly, this chapter examines Berrigan’s stanzas as rooms, arguing that this responsive poetic form functions organically.


PMLA ◽  
1914 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-498
Author(s):  
Arthur Beatty

To anyone who has followed the development of the theory of ballad origins, it is well known that there are two main theories in the field for our suffrages at the present time: the communal; and the individualistic, literary, or anti-communal theory. The last name of the second theory is indicative of the attitude of its upholders, for they have in truth been largely occupied with a criticism of the communalists, always demanding of them more and ever more light, and ever, like doubting Thomas, refusing to believe until an actual ballad dating from at least the time of Hereward the Wake is produced for their fingers to touch. The communalists, by an appeal to the well-established facts of folk-lore and ethnology, maintain that the ballads are the product of the communal stage of society in Europe, in which the populace held festive dances, and in which there was actual improvisation of certain traditional lyric narratives. These narratives had their verse-form determined by the dance; and the whole poem from beginning to end was the product of the people, and was not in any way composed by literary persons. Moreover, these ballads have been handed down by oral tradition, and live in the mouths of the people. Of course, there is no claim that one expects to find in the ballads of the collections anything which springs directly from the ancient source; all that is claimed is that the poetic form is handed down, and, so to say, the general ballad tradition. This claim of long descent is substantiated by the very features of the ballads as they exist to-day; by their impersonality, their refrain, their depicting of but a single situation, their use of incremental repetition. Thus, it is maintained, the ballad is not derived from any pre-existing literary material, but is the result of a primary impulse which is as old as man, and out of which the various forms of communal poetry spring. Finally, the ballad is not connected with the popular tale; “it follows an entirely different line and springs from an entirely different impulse.”


Author(s):  
Wendy Beth Hyman

Chapter 1, “Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance” traces the crucial relationship between poetics and philosophical materialism in the early modern period, explaining why erotic verse so readily lent itself to confronting questions about the nature of being and of knowledge. This chapter shows that for Renaissance poets—informed by Lucretius’ great analogy between atoms and alphabetic letters—there is poetic form in elemental matter. The writing of poetry was therefore often understood as a physical practice, while poetry itself was understood as ontologically complex and efficacious. As terms such as “figuration” reveal, poetic making has both metaphorical and literal elements, which come especially to the fore in the ubiquitous blazons depicting the face of the beloved. Within the syntax of materialist poetics, foretelling the decay of the love object is therefore tantamount to a kind of deconstruction or unmaking—making poetry actually “do” the work of time. Multiple traditions, from Aristotelian hylomorphism to idealizing Petrarchism, had prepared the way for the female body to function as a proxy for embodied matter which poets could “figure,” “make,” or “undo.” This chapter presents the object of erotic poetry becoming just that: a fictional construct subjected to the recombinatory shaping of the godlike poet. As later chapters will develop, the paradoxical loneliness of the carpe diem invitation emerges from this troubling strategy, for it is an invitational form addressed to an entity it has forever exiled as metaphysically other. This chapter thus provides both a theoretical framework and historical background for the project’s larger claims.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-78
Author(s):  
Frog

This article presents a new theory on the origins of the common Finnic tetrameter as a poetic form (also called the Kalevala-meter, regilaul meter, etc.). It argues that this verse form emerged as a creolization of the North Germanic alliterative verse form during a period of intensive language contacts, and that the Finnic ethnopoetic ecology made it isosyllabic. Previous theories have focused on the trochaic, tetrametric structure and viewed other features of poetic form as secondary or incidental. This is the first theory to offer a metrically driven explanation for the distinctive features of the poetic form: the systematic placement of lexically stressed short syllables in metrically unstressed positions and systematic yet unmetricalized use of verse-internal alliteration. The emergence of the poetic form may be viewed simply in terms of hybridization, but its formation as a central mode for epic and ritual poetry demands consideration of social factors. Creolization is considered a social process of hybridization at the level of sign systems that is characterized by a salient asymmetrical relation of power, authority or other value in the cultural sign systems being reconfigured from the perspective of the society or groups involved. An argument is presented that North Germanic contacts also produced systematic verse-internal alliteration in Finnic languages. Discussion then turns to the distinction between the origin and spread of the poetic form. The poetic form’s uniformity across Finnic language areas in spite of its ‘foreign’ metrical features along with the range of genres with which it was used are considered indicators of the poetic form’s spread with language, forming an argument that the tetrameter emerged within an environment that also produced Late Proto-Finnic, and then spread with Late Proto-Finnic language and culture through areas where other Finnic language forms were spoken.


Sendebar ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 7-29
Author(s):  
Tanya Escudero

While an essential component of poetry, form has been frequently overlooked in research on poetry translation or has been addressed under rather prescriptivist approaches, with notable exceptions (Holmes 1994, Jones, 2011, among others). This paper deals with the translation of the poetic form from a descriptivist perspective from a corpus of 69 Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets published between 1877 and 2018. It addresses, particularly, the outer form or macrostructure of the poems using one sonnet of each translation as a prototype. This analysis will serve as a basis for classifying these translations according to James S. Holmes’ metapoem forms and for proposing a revision of this model. While there are certain forms or patterns repeated throughout, the diverse solutions show that there is no single favoured way of rendering these sonnets, not even during a specific period (beyond the preference for verse over prose).


2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 4-5

Abstract Spinal cord (dorsal column) stimulation (SCS) and intraspinal opioids (ISO) are treatments for patients in whom abnormal illness behavior is absent but who have an objective basis for severe, persistent pain that has not been adequately relieved by other interventions. Usually, physicians prescribe these treatments in cancer pain or noncancer-related neuropathic pain settings. A survey of academic centers showed that 87% of responding centers use SCS and 84% use ISO. These treatments are performed frequently in nonacademic settings, so evaluators likely will encounter patients who were treated with SCS and ISO. Does SCS or ISO change the impairment associated with the underlying conditions for which these treatments are performed? Although the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (AMA Guides) does not specifically address this question, the answer follows directly from the principles on which the AMA Guides impairment rating methodology is based. Specifically, “the impairment percents shown in the chapters that consider the various organ systems make allowance for the pain that may accompany the impairing condition.” Thus, impairment is neither increased due to persistent pain nor is it decreased in the absence of pain. In summary, in the absence of complications, the evaluator should rate the underlying pathology or injury without making an adjustment in the impairment for SCS or ISO.


2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Brigham ◽  
James B. Talmage ◽  
Leon H. Ensalada

Abstract The AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (AMA Guides), Fifth Edition, is available and includes numerous changes that will affect both evaluators who and systems that use the AMA Guides. The Fifth Edition is nearly twice the size of its predecessor (613 pages vs 339 pages) and contains three additional chapters (the musculoskeletal system now is split into three chapters and the cardiovascular system into two). Table 1 shows how chapters in the Fifth Edition were reorganized from the Fourth Edition. In addition, each of the chapters is presented in a consistent format, as shown in Table 2. This article and subsequent issues of The Guides Newsletter will examine these changes, and the present discussion focuses on major revisions, particularly those in the first two chapters. (See Table 3 for a summary of the revisions to the musculoskeletal and pain chapters.) Chapter 1, Philosophy, Purpose, and Appropriate Use of the AMA Guides, emphasizes objective assessment necessitating a medical evaluation. Most impairment percentages in the Fifth Edition are unchanged from the Fourth because the majority of ratings currently are accepted, there is limited scientific data to support changes, and ratings should not be changed arbitrarily. Chapter 2, Practical Application of the AMA Guides, describes how to use the AMA Guides for consistent and reliable acquisition, analysis, communication, and utilization of medical information through a single set of standards.


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Young Sellar
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document