Chapter 2. The Expression of Despair Arishima Takeo’s Modernist Poetry

2017 ◽  
pp. 34-52
Keyword(s):  
Modernist Poetry

Exile and the Republic: Thomas McGrath and the Legacy of Jefferson's America

Prospects ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
David Haven Blake
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Thomas Mcgrath ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Many ◽  
Usable Past ◽  
Willful Defiance

Of the many authorities Thomas McGrath rejected during his life, one of the most significant was the American Revolution, for his work explicitly questions the founders as a source of aesthetic and political creativity. “The National Past has its houses,” he writes in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, “but their fires have long gone out!” From his pronouncing the death of Virginia's deified presidents to his condemnation of the “local colorist” hunting for patriotic “HEADwaters” by which to camp, the poet's renunciation of the “false Past” amounts to a coherent commentary on the relations between American politics and modernist poetry (Letter, 315). E. P. Thompson has remarked in paving homage to his friend that “McGrath is a poet of alienation…. His trajectory has been that of willful defiance … At every point when the applause – anyone's applause, even the applause of the alienated – seemed about to salute him, he has taken a jagged fork to a wilderness of his own making.” Although his language strongly recalls that of Emerson's “Self-Reliance,” Thompson views McGrath as more than a romantic individualist. McGrath's alienation was not simply the estrangement that Marx saw afflicting all of capitalist society, nor was it a momentarily fashionable pose; rather, it was a calculated and thorough opposition to what Thompson calls “official culture” and its destruction of political, historical, and literary values. McGrath's refusal to make a “usable past” out of the American Revolution participates in this general defiance of “official culture,” as his work insistently reminds us that among the regular patrons of Monticello and Mt. Vernon were the many establishment poets well entrenched in bourgeois universities. In defying modernism's efforts to renovate the 18th century, McGrath makes a wilderness of his own, a wilderness which grows in opposition to the wellplowed fields of American empire.

‘Insane Thinking’: The Impressionism of Arthur Symons

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-147
Author(s):  
Robert Harris
Keyword(s):  
Causal Link ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Nervous Breakdown

This article explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and his definitions of impressionism, particularly as they are outlined in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). It begins by discussing the ideas of ‘unwholeness’ and insanity in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its theoretical underpinnings in the writings of Walter Pater and the artworks of James Abbot McNeill Whistler. The article argues that this theory of impressionism – with its emphasis on the partial and the personal – furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which in turn provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a hitherto unacknowledged shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary, and with the breaking open of rigid or outworn forms, seemed to pull apart under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The article concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.

Body and Soul: Modernism, Metaphysics, Rhyme

2017 ◽  
pp. 149-163
Author(s):  
Sean Pryor
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Body And Soul

This chapter approaches the problem of rhyme in modernist poetry by considering a longer history of ideas about rhyme, in which sound and sense are mapped against body and soul. This dualism encourages the suspicion which has so often been directed at rhyme as a poetic technique. Sketched out through analyses of classical verse and popular song, the metaphysics of rhyme is then tested through close readings of poems by W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence, written and published in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The chapter concludes that modernism resists inherited dualisms when its rhyming practice suggests a kind of song. For modernism, the soul in song, and of song, is not disembodied but embodied, not individual but collective.

The word among stones

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Barry
Keyword(s):  
Close Collaboration ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Urban Settings ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Special Regard ◽  
Artistic Heritage ◽  
Interpretive Scheme

In this chapter Peter Barry explores poems about stones, on stones and as stones. He shows how our ancestors had a special regard for stones particularly those that seemed out of place, such as glacial erratics. The Ringing Stone on Tiree is one such, bearing numerous cup marks from Neolithic times. He considers how poems have been placed in the environment on trails and paths, sometimes with a didactic purpose as part of an environmentalist interpretive scheme. Some of these have taken advantage of the expressive potential of the stones themselves, and of letter carvers who blend this with their own artistic heritage. Collaborations between carver and poet can make best use of the space between the words that come closest to Barry’s interest in avant-gardeorneo-modernist poetry(especially ‘concrete’ and ‘visual’ poetries). Barry also considers poems in urban settings, in projects involving close collaboration with councils, NGOs and communities, where the words have been incised on bridges, monuments, paths, or pavements, as by Alyson Hallett in Bath, Lemn Sissay in Manchester, Bill Herbert near Darlington, and Menna Elfyn and Gillian Clarke in Tonypandy.

Dropkin, Celia (1887–1956)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Legutko
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Stereotypes ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Usa ◽  
And Gender

Celia Dropkin, one of the greatest yet lesser-known Yiddish poets, revolutionized modern Yiddish poetry with her pioneering exploration of gender dynamics. Bold erotic motifs in Dropkin’s poetry shocked her contemporaries, while her poems, written mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, sound au courant in the twenty-first century. In her poetry, Dropkin addressed themes such as sexuality, love, artistic creativity, motherhood, and nature — as well as domination and sexual politics in man-woman relationships. Born in Bobruisk, Belarus as Tsilye Levin, she wrote her first poems in Russian at the age of 10. After her immigration to the USA in 1912, she began writing in Yiddish, making her literary debut in 1918. She was affiliated with modernist groups formed by Yiddish poets in America, such as Di Inzikhistin [Introspectivists] and Di Yunge [The Young]. During her lifetime, she published only one volume of poetry, In heysn vint. Her children reissued the volume after her death, updating it to include her short stories and reproductions of paintings that she created later in life. Dropkin’s modernist poetry shattered cultural stereotypes about the social and gender roles imposed on men and women, making her a path-breaking poet who ‘filled the stillness of Yiddish poetry with a passionate breath’ (Yakov Glatshtayn).

Modernist poetry in Arabic

1993 ◽  
pp. 132-179
Author(s):  
Salma Khadra Jayyusi
Keyword(s):  
Modernist Poetry
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