Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poets’ Investments of Belief in Sounds

2019 ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Natalie Gerber
Keyword(s):  
Speech Sound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Cognitive Studies ◽  
Metrical Pattern ◽  
Intonational Phrases ◽  
American Poets

Modernist American poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams insisted on the values of linguistic sound beyond the semantic. Stevens focused on the modulations of the sounds and lexical stresses of individual words within the meter. Frost and Williams focused on the less predictable intonational contours of phrases and sentences (although for Frost, the intonational contours play with and against the metrical pattern, whereas for Williams, lines tend to align with intonational phrases, turning prosodic speech tunes into a prosodic verse measure). Drawing on recent cognitive studies that pertain to the processing of speech sound and birdsong, this article suggests a need to revise critical assessments of the poets’ investments of belief in sound; it also considers why, given this research, Frost’s theory of sentence sounds has, perhaps unfairly, fared a worse critical reception.

Moore, Marianne

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett C. Millier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
National Geographic ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Long Time

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) is now considered a major Modernist poet, along with her friends Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bolligen Prize, she was for a time (roughly 1955–1965) the most recognizable American poet (alongside Robert Frost), and her tiny pale face, wrapped by a long braid of white hair, and topped by a black tricorn hat, was known by many more people than knew her poems. The fey charm of her celebrity obscured for a long time her unique contribution to the Modernist poetic enterprise. Moore was an editor, critic, and translator, and edited the modernist journal the Dial from 1925–1929. As a poet, she wrote elaborately structured (she often wrote in syllabics, counting every syllable in every line and stanza) contemplations of the animal world, but with an eye to finding analogies in animal behavior for humanity’s moral struggles. A lifelong resident of New York City, Moore encountered nature in circuses and zoos, and in the pages of the National Geographic magazine, and often made use of lines from that magazine and other prose work in her poems, included in quotation marks. In addition nature and animals, her work is notable for its broad range of somewhat quirky subject matter. The elaborate formal structures of her poems conceal their absolutely correct grammatical construction; Moore claimed that she called them poems because she didn’t know what else to call them. Immune to the influence of literary fashion, she pursued her own goals of “humility, concentration, and gusto” in the composition of rigorously crafted, utterly idiosyncratic art.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

scholarly journals Discursive Constructions of the Self in British Romanticism

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Christoph Bode
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Discursive Constructions

Abstract This essay examines how subjective identities are discursively constructed in William Blake and P.B. Shelley, making brief references to William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith. It is argued that, although the poets come up with strikingly divergent solutions to the challenge of self-modelling, they face the same fundamental problems of self-grounding, working as they do within the paradox-prone paradigm of a Romantic self that tries to constitute itself out of itself. Comparing these Romantic poets with twentieth-century poetic models of selfhood and identity in Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, this essay provides a tentative answer to the question of whether we continue to operate within the Romantic framework of discursive self-construction or whether in fact we have moved beyond this mode of self-construction.

“Home Burial” and “Dead Baby”: Poetic Perspectives in Medical Education

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois LaCivita Nixon ◽  
Delese Wear
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Medical Education ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Medical Training ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Good Care ◽  
Care Giving ◽  
Child's Death

This article illustrates the use and value of literature in increasing one's sensitivity and compassion in areas extending beyond the prescribed boundaries of medical training and practice. “Home Burial” by Robert Frost and “Dead Baby” by William Carlos Williams portray in different ways the anguish and despair of parents after a child's death. If anatomy, biochemistry, and micro-biology prepare health care providers for the clinical dimensions of their work, these poems attend to other attributes of good care giving.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document