Primitive Passions, Blinding Visions: Arthur Rimbaud's “Mystique” and a Tradition of Mystical Ekphrasis

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poem ◽  
Literary Description ◽  
Central Panel

In 1935 the Dutch scholar Johannes B. Tielrooy argued that Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem “Mystique” (c. 1872) was an ekphrasis, or literary description, of the central panel of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's altarpiece Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1432). Although this hypothesis was deemed credible for a number of years, it is now thought to be unlikely that the painting inspired the poem or that the poem is an instance of ekphrasis. However, Tielrooy's ekphrastic interpretation can still be used to reveal elements of the poem otherwise hidden to the reader. I demonstrate the potential of Tielrooy's speculative practice, what I call mystical ekphrasis, by juxtaposing Rimbaud's poem with a chromolithographic representation of one of Jean Fouquet's illuminations, with which the poem also has possible but not conclusive links.

George Eliot’s Promise of More

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Literary Description ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter recovers the aesthetic significance of a reader’s mediated relation to the objects and experiences represented in realist fiction. When George Eliot’s intrusive narrators in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch cue readers to form impressions that are as distinct as possible, they expose the indeterminacy that persists in the most concrete passages of literary description, alerting us to the limits of how much we can ever know about a fictional world. By drawing on the aesthetics of indeterminacy advanced by Edmund Burke, this chapter reveals that Eliot’s commitment to narratives of disillusionment exists in tension with a surprisingly Romantic aversion to finitude, and that literary realism enchants ordinary things by freeing them from the solidity and determinacy they possess in everyday life.

The Emergent Prose Poem

2011 ◽  
pp. 318-329
Author(s):  
Andy Brown
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poem

Prose Poem for Dr. John

CHEST Journal ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 271
Author(s):  
Katherine R. Redeker
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poem

Direct analysis of the central panel of the so-called Wyts triptych after Jan van Eyck

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (11) ◽  
pp. 1500-1509 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Deneckere ◽  
F.-Ph. Hocquet ◽  
A. Born ◽  
P. Klein ◽  
S. Rakkaa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Direct Analysis ◽  
Central Panel

Form and History in Modern Arabic Poetics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huda Fakhreddine
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fundamental Forces ◽  
Modern Arabic

Modern Arabic poetic forms developed in conversation with the rich Arabic poetic tradition, on one hand, and the Western literary traditions, primarily English and French, on the other. In light of the drastic social and political changes that swept the Arab world in the first half of the 20th century, Western influences often appear in the scholarship on the period to be more prevalent and operative in the rise of the modernist movement. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental forces that drove the movement from its early phases is its urgent preoccupation with the Arabic poetic heritage and its investment in forging a new relationship with the literary past. The history of poetic forms in the first half of the 20th century reveals much about the dynamics between margin and center, old and new, commitment and escapism, autochthonous and outside imperatives. Arabic poetry in the 20th century reflects the political and social upheavals in Arab life. The poetic forms which emerged between the late 1940s and early 1960s presented themselves as aesthetically and ideologically revolutionary. The modernist poets were committed to a project of change in the poem and beyond. Developments from the qas̩īdah of the late 19th century to the prose poem of the 1960s and the notion of writing (kitābah) after that suggest an increased loosening or abandoning of formal restrictions. However, the contending poetic proposals, from the most formal to the most experimental, all continue to coexist in the Arabic poetic landscape in the 21st century. The tensions and negotiations between them are what often lead to the most creative poetic breakthroughs.

Creative Confinement and Narratives of Violence: Charles Baudelaire, Shumona Sinha and Assommons les pauvres!

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
SONYA STEPHENS
Keyword(s):  
Political Power ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Social Challenges ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spleen De Paris ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship between Baudelaire’s prose poem, “Assommons les pauvres!” (Le Spleen de Paris, 1869) and Shumona Sinha’s 2011 novel of the same title. Focusing on questions of reading and intertextuality, from Baudelaire’s reference to Proudhon to Sinha’s engagement with the prose poem and Le Spleen de Paris more broadly, it explores forms of confinement and creativity, the connections between narrative and freedom and the ways in which lyrical subjectivity and literary form reflect the social challenges of each period. In expressing socio-cultural and linguistic alienation, these texts centre the textual in an exploration of the marginal, thereby demonstrating that the connection between them goes beyond a critical act of violence and the presumed equality or dignity it confers, to represent a shared interrogation of universalism, multiculturalism, and authorial and political power.

Prose Poetry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Anglophone World

This is the first book of its kind — an introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. The book introduces prose poetry's key characteristics, charts its evolution from the nineteenth-century to the present, and discusses many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. The book explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.

scholarly journals Celestial Aspects of Hittite Religion, Part 2: Cosmic Symbolism at Yazilikaya

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eberhard Zangger ◽  
E.C. Krupp ◽  
Serkan Demirel ◽  
Rita Gautschy
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Central Anatolia ◽  
Astronomical Observation ◽  
Main Chamber ◽  
Far North ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Symbolic Image ◽  
The Bronze Age ◽  
Central Panel

Evidence of systematic astronomical observation and the impact of celestial knowledge on culture is plentiful in the Bronze Age societies of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Europe. An interest in astral phenomena is also reflected in Hittite documents, architecture and art. The rock-cut reliefs of 64 deities in the main chamber of Yazilikaya, a Hittite rock sanctuary associated with Hattusa, the Hittite capital in central Anatolia, can be broken into groups marking days, synodic months and solar years. Here, we suggest that the sanctuary in its entirety represents a symbolic image of the cosmos, including its static levels (earth, sky, underworld) and the cyclical processes of renewal and rebirth (day/night, lunar phases, summer/winter). Static levels and celestial cyclicities are emphasised throughout the sanctuary – every single relief relates to this system. We interpret the central panel with the supreme deities, at the far north end of Chamber A, as a reference to the northern stars, the circumpolar realm and the world axis. Chamber B seems to symbolise the netherworld.

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