‘The lonely flight of Mind’

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-227
Author(s):  
Tom Walker
Keyword(s):  
Academic Work ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Louis Macneice ◽  
Professional Classicist

This chapter discusses E.R. Dodds’s relationship with modern poetry. While he is very much known as a professional classicist rather than poet, Dodds might still be enlighteningly thought of as a poetical scholar. This is not only in the sense that his scholarship relates to his attempts to write poetry or that he followed in the footsteps of his academic mentor Gilbert Murray. Rather, his academic work was partly informed by the modes of thinking and feeling that were embodied in the work of the modern poets he admired, while his words and ideas also had some impact on certain contemporary poets. The chapter then traces the intertwined relationship between Dodds’s developing scholarly interests—particularly in relation to questions of metaphysics and mysticism—and his engagement with modern poetry in the case of two of the poets he considers to have been the best of his lifetime: W.B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice.

scholarly journals ENGLISH MODERNISM AND AMERICAN ‘TOURISTS’

2018 ◽  
pp. 209-224
Author(s):  
O. Polovinkina
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Louis Macneice ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Modernist Studies ◽  
Good Soldier

In recent years, modernist studies have tended to nationalize issues, putting forward specific features of American and British modernist writings. This article treats Anglo-American modernism in terms of ‘the inverted conquest’ (A. Mejias-Lopez) with America ‘wrestling cultural authority from its former European metropolis’. The article starts with the subject of periphery and centre changing places, first in the imagination of American writers and then in reality. In F. M. Ford’s novelThe Good Soldierthe situation is seen as if the American would absorb the English. An American John Dowell outmatches and ultimately disparages ‘the good soldier’ and a superior Briton Ashburnham. The novel is analyzed as a result of pushing together two ways of writing - English and American (Jamesonian). Louis MacNeice treats the ‘Americanization of poetry’ inModern Poetry: A Personal Essay(1938). InAspects of Modern Poetry(1934) Edith Sitwell affirms the triumph of T. S. Eliot’s early poetry over ‘the bareness of the line’ in Housman’sA Shropshire Lad, famous for its poetical Englishness. A sort of latent urge to reaffirm Englishness against advancing Americanism is obvious in Virginia Woolf’s essays on American writers.

Modernism, Empiricism, and Rationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Dimensional Spectrum ◽  
Culture History ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rule Out

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

“Stay with me. Talk to me”: reader interaction strategies in modern poetry

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-436
Author(s):  
Olga Igorevna Severskaya
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
High Impact ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Communication Plan ◽  
Communicative Strategies ◽  
The World ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Communicative Context

The article is devoted to the consideration of a poetic text as a communicative phenomenon with a high impact potential. The author defines the features of poetic communication, which is both mass and interpersonal, and its main goal, which is the poet’s desire to communicate author’s vision of the world and thereby change the picture of the reader’s world, achieving empathy from it. Based on the understanding of the speech strategy as a cognitive communication plan, a program for generating and perceiving speech, the author talks about the fundamental reversibility of text-generating and interpretative strategies and offers own classification of strategies and tactics that are most often used in modern poetry. In this classification, the main communicative strategies of self-presentation and rapprochement with the reader are associated with auxiliary discursive strategies of actualizing, dramatizing and dialogizing the text and programming interpretations by tactics for highlighting objects and situations using sound “gestures”, pointing to the referent, framing, directly introducing the reader into the communicative context, attracting the recipient’s attention through appeals and pragmatic instructions, interrogation, and some others. Particular attention is paid to the multimodality of interactions and its specific manifestations in poetic discourse. The study is based on the material of Russian poetry of the 1980- 2000s using the methods of intent and discourse analysis.

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