American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction

American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction proposes a new theory of American poetry showing that two characteristics mark the vast, contentious literature. On the one hand, several of its major poets and critics claim that America needs a poetry equal to the country’s own distinctiveness. On the other hand, American poetry welcomes techniques, styles, and traditions that originate from outside the country. Its influences range far beyond America’s borders. The force of these two competing characteristics drives both individual accomplishment and the broader field. The story moves through historical periods and honors the poets’ artistry by paying close attention to the verse forms, meters, and styles they employ. Its examples range from Anne Bradstreet, writing a century before America’s establishment, to the poets of the Black Lives Matter movement. Individual chapters consider how other major figures such as T. S. Eliot, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson emphasize convention or idiosyncrasy and turn to American English as an important artistic resource.

Rhythmus (Rhythm)

The lexeme Rhythmus has a long history of its own. In the context of Goethe’s thought, it needs to be approached via both his theoretical discussions of the term and his handling of rhythm in his literary work. Goethe conceives of rhythm in terms of its materiality, and its major philosophical opportunity is the intense connection that it offers between subject and object. Goethe’s attitude to meter—that is, rhythm organized for the purposes of poetic production—was ambivalent: although he mastered any number of different verse forms, he remained suspicious of poetic rhythms that were too metronomic. The creative tension of rhythm is an implicit theme in various works and is explored through two examples in this entry: the poem “Der Musensohn” (1774/1800; The Son of the Muses) and the character Mignon from the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship).

Spectres of Euripides: Time, Translation and Modernism in H.D.’s Euripides

The modernist period was one of intense engagement with antiquity. It was also a period concerned with radical ideas about time put forward by Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein that questioned traditional understandings of the relationship between past and present. This article considers these two aspects of the modernist period through H.D.’s translations of Euripides: it argues that H.D.’s equivocal position in literary modernism and the imagist movement (as demonstrated by her translations from Hippolytus), her prosodic experimentation with Greek verse forms in her translations from Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis and finally her emphasis on temporal themes in her Freud-inspired translation of Ion can be all read in such a way to cast new light on the complex temporalities of the translation of classical texts and the modernist reception of the classics.

Disordered Verse vs. Early Romanian Vers Libre

The article is devoted to the Romanian vers libre genesis and its identification among disordered verse forms in the Romanian poetry of the beginning of the 20th century. Our investigations are based on the innovative methods of verse analysis suggested by the Russian poetic science which are based on the quantitative analysis. By means of statistical analysis of the disordered oeuvres – verses without rhyme, meter and formal stanza – we found out that not all oeuvres with such features may be referred to as vers libre. Among such forms there are the oeuvres which do have some systematic characteristics coinciding with classical, tonic or heteromorphic forms.

Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda

Published posthumously, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: Historia setentrional (1617) was the triumphant capstone to a remarkable run of works written, revised, or concluded in the wake of the first part of Don Quixote (1605). Cervantes would leave his inventive stamp on every major genre of literary entertainment then fashionable: myriad verse forms, drama, pastoral and chivalric novels, the novella, the Menippean satirical dream, and the Heliodoran adventure novel, along with others as interpolated tale, incident, or passing characterization. The last four years of his life, which saw a rapid succession of publications, suggest a veteran writer used to taking his time but now acutely aware it was running out. Proud of the 1605 Quixote’s wild popularity, Cervantes was also anxious to shape his literary legacy so that it would not be swallowed up by its run-away success.

Verse Forms and Metres in Livonian Humanist Poetry: David Hilchen and his Ancient Models

The aim of this paper is to give an account of verse forms in David Hilchen’s poetry. In the paper the metrical structures and rhythmic regularities in poems gathered from different periods of his creation are studied and the results are compared with the data from ancient Latin authors. Some aspects of the prosodic features in Hilchen’s verse are discussed as well. The paper will demonstrate the prosodic and rhythmic variety of the metres used, which resembles the rhythmic preferences of ancient models and early modern verse.

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.

Gothic Secret Histories and Representing Australian Colonial Deaths at Sea: The Case of Captain Charles Wright Harris and the Wreck of the SS Admella (1859)

Extant ephemera documenting the wreck of the SS Admella off the South Australian coast on 6 August 1859 offers a compelling story of real-life maritime calamity characterized by death and extraordinary heroism. The much less written about account, however, is the story lying in between ‘official accounts’ of the wreck, and those that emerged in the contemporary reports of the day, including a body of verse termed ‘Admella poetry’. Verse forms and telegraphic reports of the wreck appear to be at odds with other witness statements, and official records have corrupted details from either telegraphic reports or published survivor statements, or both. This re-reading of one of the key heroic fatalities in the story of the wreck of the SS Admella – 37-year-old Captain Charles Wright Harris, a passenger aboard the Admella – theorizes on his death at sea as mapping plural histories. I argue that the account of the event preserved as political and bureaucratic memory – and its counterpoint – the account of the event preserved in the popular press and Admella poems, characterizes an alternative Victorian cultural memory, a gothic secret history concerning the wreck of the SS Admella and colonial deaths at sea.

Introduction

This chapter states, and briefly explains, the main claims of the book: that early evangelicalism must be understood as a central aesthetic movement of the eighteenth century; and that to understand early evangelicalism as it first took shape requires sustained attention to its prolific poetry. The chapter situates the book, which is the first history of early American non-hymnal poetry, within the current scholarship of early American culture and poetry, early evangelical history and hymnody, and British eighteenth-century enthusiasm. The author defines evangelicalism (as primarily a way of feeling and doing “authentic” Christianity) and then three new terms this study introduces: revival poetry (a constellation of verse forms, which addresses the tendency to associate evangelical poetry soley with hymnody); poet-minister (a revitalized role at the nexus of the affective sermon and aesthetic oriented conversion); and print itinerant (an evangelical conception of print within the new practices of itinerancy). The author concludes with a narrative summary of the book and each of the chapters.

The Rhubarbarian’s Redress: Tony Harrison and the Politics of Speech

Taking up the persistent question of poetry’s sociopolitical capacities by considering how Harrison’s poems depend on the power of local speech, this article examines how they cast his working-class northern English dialect in meter and rhyme as a way to scrutinize social hierarchies. Marshaling various forms of speech, including his own vernacular, into traditional patterns of poetry, Harrison interrogates classist notions about nonstandard speech and its relation to that tradition while exploring the disturbances produced by class separation. Where poetry scholarship in general and Harrison scholarship in particular often place demotic registers in opposition to traditional verse forms, this article argues that it is precisely the working relationships Harrison finds between verse forms and speech forms that upend hierarchies in his poetry, making new music out of local parlance.