Practitioner Criticism: Poetry

This chapter places Lawrence’s poetics, as developed in his poetry, in relation to his responses to other poets and poetic tendencies or movements, such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Symbolism and Aestheticism as well as contemporary free verse, Realism and Imagism. Lawrence knew and corresponded with many poets throughout his career, from Yeats and Pound to Amy Lowell and H. D. The extent to which he assimilated or resisted such diverse influences is the focus of this re-evaluation of Lawrence’s paradoxical status as an outsider inside. His poetics elude simple definition. So dissimilar are the kinds of verse to which Lawrence responded that his general openness to old and new voices, alike, helps account not only for this maverick status, but for the sheer variety of verse forms practiced in his poetry. Through the poetry of Whitman, Lawrence recovered the sense of ‘wonder’ that he had felt as a child hearing the Bible and listening to church hymns. Poetry also became a form of play. He soon discovered, too, how much work, or ‘groping’, was entailed in writing and resisted falsifying perfection. Double-edged, the ‘jagged’ edges perceived by Conrad Aiken became a signature trait. Dialectical and conflictual relationalism inflects his Whitmanesque style.

Imagism and Imagery in the Selected Poems of Major Imagist Poets

This paper explores imagism and studies the intrinsic literary features of some poems to show how the authors combine all the elements such as style, sentence structure, figures of speech and poetic diction to paint concrete and abstract images in the mind of the readers. Imagism was an early 20th century literary movement and a reaction against the Romantic and Victorian mainstreams. Imagism is known as an Anglo-American literary movement since it borrows from the English and American verse style of modern poetry. The leaders of the movement set some rules for writing imagist poems. The authors of the group believed that poets are like painters; what the painters can do with brush and dye, poets can do it with language i.e. painting pictures with words. The poems are descriptive; the poets capture the images they experience with one or more of the five senses. They believed that readers could see the realities from their eyes because the texts are like a painting. In this paper, six poems by six prominent leaders of the movement will be scrutinized according to the main principles of the formalistic approach which is the interpretation and analysis of the literary devices pertained to the concrete and abstract images drawn by the poets. The poems are: In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound, Autumn by T. E. Hulme, November by Amy Lowell, Oread by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and Bombardment by Richard Aldington

Echoes of Sapphic Gods and Goddesses, Immortality, Eros and Thanatos in the Work of Modernist Women Poets

In the context of Modernism’s constant return to the past that results in self-knowledge and innovation, certain women writers found Sappho’s writings relevant for their own poetic endeavours. My article will mainly focus on the mythological aspects of both Sappho’s and the modernist women’s poetry. Invocations of and allusions to gods and goddesses and other mythical figures, which involve introspection and expressing certain erotic concerns in stylised ways, will be discussed in order to show how all these women poets innovated. and, in many different ways, significantly enriched the literature of their times. Critics have mainly focused on H.-D.’s poetry in relation to Sappho’s, most likely because the modernist poet had also translated (or adapted, according to most scholars) a number of Sappho’s poems. As regards other modernist women poets, such as, for instance, Amy Lowell or Marianne Moore, critics have refrained, for various reasons, from analysing their work in relation to Sappho’s. There are very few critical accounts of Sappho’s influence on their (and even H.-D.’s) poetry, and this article will, perforce, draw on these, but aims, all the while, to provide new and relevant insights.

Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity

“Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity” considers the politics of late twentieth-century feminist reclamation work in modernist literary studies. Many prolific women artists were doubly left behind, first by the New Critics, and then, several generations later, by feminist scholars who, in their work recovering women artists lost to New Criticism’s masculinist narrative did not find a place for them in what quickly became a narrow, and predictable, feminist canon. This chapter focuses on Amy Lowell and Edith Sitwell, women whose multiple roles as poets, editors, and critics allowed them significant access to power and with it, the opportunity to mentor and support other women. And yet, as the chapter demonstrates, they did not. Despite rich personal relationships with women, neither Sitwell nor Lowell had significant or lasting professional relationships with other women. Their subsequent exclusion from feminist modernist literary criticism perhaps tells us as much about the identifications and interests that drove late twentieth-century feminist recovery work as it does about the inclusion of more now-canonical figures.

The Dinner at Gonfarone's

The Dinner at Gonfarone’s is organised as a partial biography, covering five years in the life of the young Nicaraguan poet, Salomón de la Selva, but it also offers a literary geography of Hispanic New York (Nueva York) in the turbulent years around the First World War. De la Selva is of interest because he stands as the largely unacknowledged precursor of Latino writers like Junot Díaz and Julia Álvarez, writing the first book of poetry in English by an Hispanic author. In addition, through what he called his pan-American project, de la Selva brought together in New York writers from all over the American continent. He put the idea of trans-American literature into practice long before the concept was articulated. De la Selva’s range of contacts was enormous, and this book has been made possible through discovery of caches of letters that he wrote to famous writers of the day, such as Edwin Markham and Amy Lowell, and especially Edna St Vincent Millay. Alongside de la Selva’s own poetry – his book Tropical Town (1918) and a previously unknown 1916 manuscript collection – The Dinner at Gonfarone’s highlights other Hispanic writing about New York in these years by poets such as Rubén Darío, José Santos Chocano, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, all of whom were part of de la Selva’s extensive network.