scholarly journals Dylan Thomas’s “In the White Giant’s Thigh”:A Wild Love of Art Song

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
S. Bharadwaj
Keyword(s):  
Art Song ◽  
Art Songs ◽  
The Political ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Alternative Process ◽  
Literary Reputation ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
Common Man ◽  
Dylan Thomas

In the poem “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” Dylan Thomas projects the contemporary poets’ wild passion for Eliotian amoral art song and their suffering and the contradistinction of his own occasional love of Yeatsian Grecian altruistic art song and his delight. The poem is at bottom optimistic as it offers the metaphysical and the metempirical wild lovers an alternative process of art song and also carries salvation to transcend their sorrowful failure. It is Thomas’s faith in the Yeatsian process of transfiguration and transformation, the possibility of deliverance from the bondage of experience and ignorance that assures him of success and appeal in his art songs, that Auden repudiates in his metaphysical process of transgression and transmigration and his immortal vision of aesthetic amoral art song. The poem implies that Auden, as a result of his continual ignorance of the human reality of life and death, his stoic love of metaphysical art and reality, loses his grandeur and literary reputation and stoops to the level of a common man susceptible to hatred and indignation, violence and vengeance like the victims of his art songs, the political, the war and the Movement poets who remain equally ignorant of the metaphysical process and the reality of breath and death.

scholarly journals Dylan Thomas’s “Over Sir John’s Hill”: The Motif of His Art Songs

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
S Bharadwaj
Keyword(s):  
Art Song ◽  
Art Songs ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
Tragic Vision ◽  
Dylan Thomas

In the last dramatic art song “Over Sir John’s Hill,” Dylan Thomas reiterates that the motif of his art songs has been the Yeatsian introspective process of individuation and integration, transfiguration and transformation, the mortal vision of Grecian altruistic art song as seen in his early poem 18 Poems. His Yeatsian process of tragic happiness, his warm impersonal art, his paradoxical sensibility that makes him an artist of success and popularity in contrast to W.H. Auden’s Eliotian motif of metaphysical process of self-annihilation and immortal art, his aesthetic amoral impersonal art, his tragic vision of art song which deprives him of his grandeur and influence. However, the main thrust is extending to the dismembered and discontented Auden the very same process of regeneration that Thomas has offered to the victims of Auden’s art song while ignoring everything about … allegations of tilting, toppling and conspiracy against him. The song also testifies to his Yeatsian cosmopolitan culture maintaining his equanimity and magnanimity when he confronts an atmosphere of envy and ill-will, and hatred and violence.

scholarly journals Dylan Thomas’s “In Country Sleep”: His Paradoxical Sensibility

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. p12
Author(s):  
S. Bharadwaj
Keyword(s):  
Early Phase ◽  
Art Song ◽  
Art Songs ◽  
Dylan Thomas

In “In Country Sleep”, Dylan Thomas offers the Yeatsian paradoxical sensibility, the process of magnanimous impersonal art as salvation to the tumultuous Auden who condescends to the mortal levelling charges of conspiracy, war mongering, tilting and toppling against him as his performance as an artist of Yeatsian pagan altruistic art songs has undone his success, popularity and appeal among the contemporary poets. Auden, despite the loss of his grandeur, continues with the Eliotian metaphysical process of aesthetic amoral art song that has made him great in the early phase. The time-conscious political poets of the thirties, while heading towards the romantic ideals of their early phase, mounts up their rage against Thomas for his deviation in the later art songs from his early poems of pity. The young Movement poets commend Auden’s early poem for the parable of pure poetry and aesthetic success and defends his avenging move against Thomas. The introductory poem implies that it is Thomas’s introspective process of individuation and integration, coherence and co-existence, his paradoxical sensibility, his tragi-comic vision of Grecian altruistic art song that guards his sober and benign functioning as an ardent emulator of the pagan altruistic tradition of Hardy, Yeats, Houseman and Blake, as a poet of reconciliation, harmonization and cosmopolitan culture analogous to his functioning in the early poem 18 Poems.

The Political Misery of the Common Man of West Bengal

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dhrubajyoti Bhattacharjee ◽  
Pramod Kumar
Keyword(s):  
West Bengal ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Man

Sidney's Verse Adaptations to Two Sixteenth-Century Italian Art Songs

1970 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank J . Fabry
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Art Song ◽  
Art Songs ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
National Anthem ◽  
Italian Art ◽  
Sister Arts

It is well known that Sir Philip Sidney modeled eight of his thirty-two 'Certaine Sonnets’ upon existing ‘tunes,’ as he called them. To date, only one, relatively unimportant, musical model is known—the current Dutch National Anthem, to which Sidney wrote CS 23, ‘Who hath his fancy pleased.’ The result of this association of the sister arts is a simple, metrically precise, stylistically dull lyric whose numbers are directly proportioned to the regularity of its musical model. Of his other models, one, ‘The Smokes of Melancholy,’ appears to have been an English consort song; the others (five Italian, one Spanish) are probably variant forms of the villanella, a type of sixteenth-century art-song written for three or four voices and distinguished by its rhythmic lightness, its homophonic (chordal) structure, and its mildly satirical or openly vulgar text.

Norman Salsitz, as told to Richard Skolnik

1998 ◽  
pp. 354-355
Author(s):  
Jerzy Tomaszewski
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Rich Family

This chapter examines how Richard Skolnik spent many hours taping the recollections of Norman Salsitz, who was born in the small Polish town of Kolbuszowa in 1920. These tapes are the basis of a book on the life and death of the shtetl until 1942. It is one of the most important sources concerning the internal life, social structure, economic conditions, traditions, and slow changes going on between the two world wars in a typical rural Jewish community. Salsitz was born into a traditional, hasidic, relatively rich family. He began early to participate in business life, and his descriptions of economic conditions, including social stratification, are vivid. Significant also are Salsitz's recollections of the political attitudes of both Jews and Poles. The Salsitz family was equally committed to Polish patriotic traditions and the Jewish way of life, but Polish attitudes towards Jews differed substantially from Jewish attitudes towards Poland and Polish identity. Jews felt patriotic towards Poland, but still suffered from some of the antisemitism of their fellow townsfolk.

The King's Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England

1973 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. L. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Formal Group ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Scene

The rise and fall of the house of York is a story which sits uneasily towards both revolutionary and evolutionary interpretations of fifteenth-century England. Indeed, in general, attempts to tidy away the political process of Lancastrian and Yorkist times into the displacement of one type of régime by another always fail to convince. They do so because as a régime neither Lancaster nor York kept still long enough to be impaled on a categorical definition. The political life and death of both dynasties composes the pattern, changing yet constant, of a set of variations on the theme of an aristocratic society pre-dominantly kingship-focused and centripetal rather than locality-focused and centrifugal. In so far as the political process conformed to the social order, the households of the great were the nodal connections in which relationships of mutual dependence cohered. Those retinues, fellowships, affinities (for the vocabulary of the time was rich in terms overlapping but with nuances of descriptive emphasis) have now been studied both in their general conformation and in several particular instances; I have here attempted for the central affinity of the king over one generation not a formal group portrait but a sketch focused on the middle distance of figures in a landscape. The meagreness of household records in the strict sense is a problem we must learn to live with. But it would seem sensible to make a virtue of necessity and follow the life-line of what evidence there is to the conclusion that if an understanding of the household is only possible by attending to its wider context, so an understanding of that wider political scene requires some attention to the household.

Last Acts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Art Of Dying

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

The Politics of Richard Wright

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Social Connectivity ◽  
Black Authors

Richard Wright left readers with a trove of fictional and nonfictional works about suffering, abuse, and anger in the United States and around the globe. He composed unforgettable images of institutionalized racism, postwar capitalist culture, Cold War neo-imperialism, gender roles and their violent consequences, and the economic and psychological preconditions for personal freedom. He insisted that humans unflinchingly confront and responsibly reconstruct their worlds. He therefore offered not only honest social criticisms but unromantic explorations of political options. The book is organized in five sections. It opens with a series of broad discussions about the content, style, and impact of Wright’s social criticism. Then the book shifts to particular dimensions of and topics in Wright’s writings, such as his interest in postcolonial politics, his approach to gendered forms of oppression, and his creative use of different literary genres to convey his warnings. The anthology closes with discussions of the different political agendas and courses of action that Wright’s thinking prompts—in particular, how his distinctive understanding of psychological life and death fosters opposition to neoslavery, efforts at social connectivity, and experiments in communal refusal. Most of the book’s chapters are original pieces written for this volume. Other entries are excerpts from influential, earlier published works, including four difficult-to-locate writings by Wright on labor solidarity, a miscarriage of justice, the cultural significance Joe Louis, and the political duties of black authors. The contributors include experts in Africana studies, history, literature, philosophy, political science, and psychoanalysis.

Segmentary State Formation and the Ritual Control of Water Under the Incas

1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 480-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gose
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The One ◽  
Divine Kingship

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to.be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political structure barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult.1I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically ashuacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that transcended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical reproduction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre-Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.

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