PART ONE. Mid-Twentieth-Century Poetry

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-294
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Century Poetry

Double Affirmation: Medievalism as Christian Apologetic in the Arthurian Poetry of Charles Williams

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-96
Author(s):  
Sørina Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
European History ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
Embodied Theology

In his unfinished cycle of Arthurian poems, Charles Williams developed a totalizing mythology in which he fictionalized the Medieval. First, he employed chronological conflation, juxtaposing events and cultural references from a millennium of European history and aligning each with his doctrinal system. Second, following the Biblical metaphor of the body of Christ, Blake’s symbolism, and Rosicrucian sacramentalism, he embodied theology in the Medieval landscape via a superimposed female figure. Finally, Williams worked to show the validity of two Scholastic approaches to spirituality: the kataphatic and apophatic paths. His attempts to balance via negativa and via positiva led Williams to practical misapplication—but also to creation of a landmark work of twentieth century poetry. . . . the two great vocations, the Rejection of all images before the unimaged, the Affirmation of all images before the all-imaged, the Rejection affirming, the Affirmation rejecting. . . —from ‘The Departure of Dindrane’ —O Blessed, pardon affirmation!— —O Blessed, pardon negation!— —from ‘The Prayers of the Pope’

Towards a Minor Poetry: Reading Twentieth-Century French Poetry with Deleuze–Guattari and Bakhtin

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Daisy Sainsbury
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Language System ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Poetry Reading ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Minor

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of minor literature, deterritorialization and agrammaticality, this article explores the possibility of a ‘minor poetry’, considering various interpretations of the term, and interrogating the value of the distinction between minor poetry and minor literature. The article considers Bakhtin's work, which offers several parallels to Deleuze and Guattari's in its consideration of the language system and the place of literature within it, but which also addresses questions of genre. It pursues Christian Prigent's hypothesis, in contrast to Bakhtin's account of poetic discourse, that Deleuze and Guattari's notion of deterritorialization might offer a definition of poetic language. Considering the work of two French-language poets, Ghérasim Luca and Olivier Cadiot, the article argues that the term ‘minor poetry’ gains an additional relevance for experimental twentieth-century poetry which grapples with its own generic identity, deterritorializing established conceptions of poetry, and making ‘minor’ the major poetic discourses on which it is contingent.

Being Numerous

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Language Poets

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

Harold Monro, Poetry Anthologies and the Rhetoric of Textual Materiality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Collier
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Textual Politics

This chapter meditates upon the role of the poetry anthology and its claims on literary value at the turn of the twentieth century. By sorting the output of poets, the anthology might seem to stabilize literary value; but like all print artefacts in the period, the anthology was overproduced, and therefore could also be seen as positing multiple, competing canons. The anthology form was in flux in these years as well, with such familiar conventions as tables of contents and the grouping of poems by poet not having emerged as norms. In this context, the textual materiality of anthologies became a complex system for intervening in debates about value. The chapter revisits the most popular anthologies of the era—Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse—to sketch out the emerging codes of the anthology form. Poet and publisher Harold Monro, the chapter argues, pursued a more egalitarian textual politics than these popular anthologies, particularly his underappreciated 1929 anthology, Twentieth Century Poetry. The chapter reads the content and the metatexts of Twentieth Century Poetry as asserting a catholic vision of modern poetry as vital to everyday life.

Introduction: “Rash-Fresh, Re-Winded, New-Skeinèd Score”

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Daniel Westover
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Century Poetry

Hopkins is the “consummate incendiary,” the fire-starter of much twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and a much more significant influence than has previously been acknowledged. Hopkins's still-burning fires ignited the imaginations of early Modernist writers, later twentieth-century poets, contemporary American writing, and modern Caribbean poetry. Hopkins’s "enduring newness" (his linguistic innovations, his metaphysical insights) continually breaks forth in new contexts and with new and surprising meanings.

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