Zukofsky, Louis (1904–1978)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Jennison
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Black Mountain

Louis Zukofsky was an American avant-garde poet active from the 1920s upto the 1970s. Zukofsky’s masterwork long poem, ‘A’ (in company with his many other shorter works of poetry and prose), had a profound effect on the shape and development of American poetics. His work can be counted as a major influence on the Black Mountain, Beat, and Language poets, and on other contemporary poets working in conversation with the historical avant-garde. Major themes in Zukofsky’s work include the materiality of language, formalism, the place of the poem in history and politics, the musical structure of poesis and vice versa, and translation. Zukofsky was born to working-class, Orthodox Jewish, Yiddish-speaking parents in the Lower East Side of New York City. His poetic career began following his graduation from Columbia University with an MA in English. A parody of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, entitled ‘Poem Beginning ‘The’’, received the admiration of Ezra Pound. The poem features one of Zukofsky’s signature formal techniques: the strategic parataxis (juxtaposition) of high and low cultures, placed in the service of an anti-reactionary, and sometimes Marxist and revolutionary, avant-garde poetics. Zukofsky’s epistolary relationship with Pound was extensive, and the older poet would be a lifelong object of admiration — and negation — for Zukofsky.

Beckett's Early Verse and the Modernist Long Poem: A Study of ‘Enueg I’

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-213
Author(s):  
Sławomir Studniarz
Keyword(s):  
Long Poem ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Underlying Network ◽  
Experimental Works ◽  
The Cantos ◽  
Semantic Dimension ◽  
Psychological Dimensions

The premise of the article is the contention that Beckett studies have been focused too much on the philosophical, cultural and psychological dimensions of his established canon, at the expense of the artistry. That research on Beckett's work is issue-driven rather than otherwise, and the slender extant body of criticism specifically on his poetic achievements bears no comparison with the massive exploration of the other facets of Beckett's artistic activity. The critical neglect of Beckett's poetry may not be commensurate with the quality of his verse. And it is in the spirit of remedying this oversight that the present article is offered, focusing on ‘Enueg I’, a representative poem from Echo's Bones, which exhibits all the salient features of Beckett's early poetry. It is argued that Beckett's early verse display the twofold influence, that of the transatlantic Modernism of Eliot and Pound, and of French poetry, specifically the visionary and experimental works of Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and the surrealists. Furthermore, the article also demonstrates that ‘Enueg I’ testifies to Beckett's ambition to compose a complex long Modernist poem in the vein of The Waste Land or The Cantos. Beckett's ‘Enueg I’ has much in common with Eliot's exemplary disjunctive Modernist long poem. Both poems are premised on the acutely felt cultural crisis and display the similar tenor in their ending. Finally, they both close with the vision of the doomed and paralyzed world, and the prevalent sense of sterility and dissolution. In the subsequent analysis, which takes up the bulk of the article, careful attention is paid to the patterning of the verbal material, including also the most fundamental level, that of the arrangements of phonemes, with a view to uncovering the underlying network of sound patterns, which contributes decisively to the semantic dimension of the poem.

‘Making Strange’: Non-Translation in The Waste Land

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Jason Harding
Keyword(s):  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
Reading Key

This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and estrange the poetic form, particular instances of non-translation in the poem—from the epigraph to the wild cacophony of different languages at the end of the poem—are seen as covert and coded expressions of powerful affect. This chapter considers these experimental disruptions of form in the social and political contexts of post-war avant-garde revolt and recognition of individual and collective trauma.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Academic Career ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Bachelor's Degree ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Postgraduate Studies ◽  
Post War

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was an essayist, editor, playwright, poet, and publisher. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He is perhaps best known for his long poem The Waste Land. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Eliot’s postgraduate studies in philosophy took him to the Sorbonne in 1910/11 and to Oxford in 1914. Once he arrived in England, however, he spent much of his time in London. There he met two of the most influential people of his literary life: the American poet Ezra Pound and a young Englishwoman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom Eliot would marry in 1915 after a four-month courtship. Pound encouraged Eliot, who had been planning an academic career, to keep writing poetry and to submit "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Poetry magazine for publication. In addition to writing poetry, Eliot also took a position with Lloyd’s Bank in 1917, managing foreign accounts. Pound and Eliot frequently collaborated and critiqued each other’s work throughout the 1920s and 1930s and remained friends until Eliot’s death, despite divergent political and religious paths. The most famous of these collaborations, The Waste Land, has been documented in a published facsimile edition of the poem (1972) that reveals Pound’s numerous comments on Eliot’s manuscript. The Waste Land is revolutionary both in its form, free verse, and its subject matter, which links urbanization, technology, sexuality, and post-war alienation to dozens of classical allusions in seven languages. The poem is a pastiche of voices and fragments linked both thematically and tonally.

Art, understanding of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Lyas
Keyword(s):  
Alternative View ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Economic Organizations ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church

Art engages the understanding in many ways. Thus, confronted with an allegorical painting such as Van Eyk’s The Marriage of Arnolfini, one might want to understand the significance of the objects it depicts. Similarly, confronted with an obscure poem, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, one might seek to understand what it means. Sometimes, too, we claim not to understand a work of art, a piece of music, say, when we are unable to derive enjoyment from it because we cannot see how it is organized or hangs together. Sometimes what challenges the understanding goes deeper, as when we ask why some things, including such notorious productions of the avant garde as the urinal exhibited by Marcel Duchamp, are called art at all. Some have also claimed that to understand a work of art we must understand its context. Sometimes the context referred to is that of the particular problems and aims of the individual artist in a certain tradition, as when the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields is understood as a contribution by its architect to the vexing problem of combining a tower with a classical façade. Sometimes the context is social, as when some Marxists argue that works of art can best be understood as reflections of the more or less inadequate economic organizations of the societies that gave rise to them. The understanding of art becomes a philosophical problem because, first, it is sometimes thought that one of the central tasks of interpretation is to understand the meaning of a work. However, recent writers, notably Derrida (1972), query the notion of the meaning of a work as something to be definitively deciphered, and offer the alternative view of interpretation as an unending play with the infinitely varied meanings of the text. Second, a controversial issue has been the extent to which the judgment of works of art can be divorced from an understanding of the circumstances, both individual and cultural, of their making. Thus Clive Bell argued that to appreciate a work of art we need nothing more than a knowledge of its colours, shapes and spatial arrangements. Others, ranging from Wittgenstein to Marxists, have for a variety of different reasons argued that a work of art cannot be properly understood and appreciated without some understanding of its relation to the context of its creation, a view famously characterized by Beardsley and Wimsatt (1954) as the ‘genetic fallacy’.

The Long Poem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jaussen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Long Poems ◽  
Historical Rhetoric ◽  
Organizational Principles ◽  
Poetic Work

In its most basic sense, the ‘long poem’ refers to any extended poetic work, from the long lyric to the epic. Within the context of modernism, the long poem emerged as a significant genre, channeling the authority and scope of the epic yet rejecting many traditional epic devices. Most notably, many modernist long poems abandoned narrative, replacing it with other organizational principles, ranging from symbolism to collage. The practice became particularly significant within the context of Anglo-American modernism, largely due to the influence of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, although the long poem can also be considered a transnational genre, with examples in French, such as Saint-John Perse’s Anabase (1924), and Spanish, like Federico García Lorca’s sequence Poeta en Nueva York (1940). One of the most famous and influential examples of the genre is Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922. Adapting mythological themes, literary allusions, and a symbolic framework, Eliot’s work combined the traditional historical rhetoric of earlier long poetics, from Chaucer to the Arthurian legends, with the language and concerns of World War I England.

Satire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Lehman
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Final Version ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Lock In ◽  
Standards Of Beauty

The second chapter treats the formal role played by satire in the drafts of The Waste Land, focusing in particular on T. S. Eliot’s parody of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock in an early version of “The Fire Sermon.” In Eliot’s hands, satire becomes a means of responding to a specifically modernist crisis in aesthetic judgment: the seeming impossibility of distinguishing, after the collapse of traditional standards of beauty, popular charlatans from individuals of real talent. By placing The Waste Land under the sign of satire, Eliot attempts to distinguish his long poem from the wasteland of literary history that it recollects. The disappearance of satire from the final version of The Waste Land following the editorial suggestions of Pound, and Eliot’s replacement of his earlier satirical method by the so-called “mythical method” reflect satire’s failure to accomplish its task.

“To Begin on Again”: A Study of Early Cinema’s Unique Influence on Modernist Literature

Film Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-81
Author(s):  
Maria Mutka
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
First World War ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

This article examines the intersectionality of modernist literature and the advent of cinema, particularly in the context of the incomparable tragedies of the First World War in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Avant-garde writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot utilized cinema-inspired techniques in some of their most famous literary works, including Ulysses and “The Waste Land.” These techniques are especially salient in light of how much both the First World War and cinema altered societal notions of time, space, and motion.

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