Regionalization without Vernacularization: The Place of Persian in Eighteenth-Century Sindh

This article examines a turn towards the region in two genres related to Persian poetry in eighteenth-century Sindh, the bayāẓ or poetic anthology and taẕkira or biographical dictionary. I argue that poets in Sindh’s premier city, Thatta, established Sindh as an organizing principle for poetry and the poetic community, initiating a process of regionalization in Persian after the end of Mughal rule. Notably, this was done without the patronage or encouragement of the regional successors to the Mughals in Sindh. These poets neither sought out vernaculars, nor predicated regionalization upon cultural difference. Rather, regionalization without vernacularization was the basis for their participation in the transregional enterprise of Persian poetry in a milieu where the Mughals and their officials were no longer sources of patronage or of poetic standards. The case of Persian poetry in Sindh calls for rethinking the function and status of Persian beyond its role as a language of power and for considering the role of Persian poets in bringing the region to renewed cultural salience in eighteenth-century Sindh.

“Hack and Rack the Growing Green”

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s environmental concerns are not only ecological but also “ecotheological” in that he addresses both the relation of organisms to one another and their connection to divinity. Ecotheology (creation-centered approaches to theology) differs from ecocriticism (literary criticism centered on environmental awareness), and there is a tradition of ecotheological thought within Catholicism, ranging from St. Francis of Assisi to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Pope Francis. In poems like “Binsey Poplars,” “As kingfishers catch fire,” and “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins’s Christian symbolism and ecotheological themes demonstrate that, for him, nature’s importance stems from its sacredness. These Hopkinsian strands are picked up by three contemporary poets—Denise Levertov, Pattiann Rogers, and Martha Silano—who, though not as orthodox as Hopkins in their religious views, nevertheless share his ecotheological impulses. These writers represent, together with their Jesuit predecessor, “a particular poetic community” that, like the God of Genesis, sees an inherent goodness and value in creation. These contemporary poets are examples of the many writers who have echoed Hopkins’s ecotheological concerns.

“MASTORAVA” AND “DORVYZHY”: POETIC PARALLELS

The article discusses the artistic and aesthetic parallels in the Erzya epic “ Mastorava ” and the Udmurt epos “ Dorvyzhy ”, which are heroic epics of the peoples of the Finno-Balto-Ugric world. The idea is being made that the poetic community between them is a consequence of the folk-cultural typology, although historical ties are also not excluded. The similarity of motives and plots is manifested in the pantheon, in views on the world order, in the nature of the relationship between gods and people, types of characters. It is stated that by the poetic nature Dorvyzhy takes a place among the classic European epics, he is related to them by themes, the socio-cultural status of the heroes (cultural and social demiurges), views on the first ancestors (giant people and people of a modern type), a description of the military clashes between princes as representatives of the highest level of Udmurt statehood and relations with neighboring peoples, the philosophical views of the Udmurt people on the past, present and future. We are talking about the main differences between “ Mastoravoi ” and “ Dorvyzhy ”: they consist in the features of the plots and composition, poetics and aesthetics of works, their ethnic philosophy and social utopia. “ Mastorava ” is optimistic about the future; in “ Dorvyzhy ”, the views on tomorrow are contradictory.

‘Rimbaud in Embryo’: Collaborative Reproduction in T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane

The reproductive metaphors that T. S. Eliot uses in his early theories of creativity are indicative of modernism's ambivalence towards collaborative authorship. Moving away from a critical tendency to read Eliot's collaborative practice primarily in terms of Pound's editorial signature, this article examines how modernist collaboration, as theorised by Eliot, is bound up with a fantasy of origins. Framed by Eliot's positing of ‘merging’ as ‘involuntary collaboration’, it considers the collapse that occurs between co-labour, imitation, and theft not only in Eliot's work but also that of Hart Crane. More particularly, the article explores how Eliot and Crane both make use of another poet's work to release their own poetic sensibilities; it also shows how ‘involuntary collaboration’ takes on a shadowy presence in their respective works. This highlights the complex role that fantasy and affect play within modernist poetry's collaborative practices and attempts to forge a poetic community.

(Conclusion) Other Bodies

Focusing on Rimbaud’s artistic activity in the Cercle zutique in the autumn of 1871, Chapter 5 proposes that we think of parody as a form of dialogical poetic critique, an artistic practice illustrating, in condensed form, the over-arching argument concerning poetic materiality that is at the heart of the present study. In the Album zutique we find Rimbaud at the center of an ephemeral poetic community that doubles as a sort of archive of the recently repressed Paris Commune, and we find Rimbaud himself gleefully pushing the limits not only of acceptable poetic and social behavior, but of French verse in its formal intelligibility too. Engaging in particular with a parodic sonnet that Rimbaud and Verlaine jointly composed, “L’Idole—Sonnet du trou du cul,” this chapter seeks to account for how the mode of writing—the poetics and politics—at stake in this collaborative sonnet goes “beyond the parody principle.”

Women’s Poetry in the Magazines

Nearly every monthly magazine published in the eighteenth century had a poetry section, a regular slot given over in each issue to poetic expression of all kinds, written by a broad range of writers, both male and female, provincial and metropolitan, amateur and established. This chapter assesses the place that women poets, both familiar and unfamiliar, occupied in the rich poetic culture that made magazines possible. Jennifer Batt’s case studies are drawn from national periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), London Magazine (1732–85) and British Magazine (1746–51), as well as from regional magazines. Collectively, these examples shed light on the possibilities that periodicals made available to female poets (of giving them a voice, a readership, a public profile and place within a poetic community). At the same, Batt demonstrates that women could be exploited by the medium and its editorial practices (publishing without author consent, for instance, or intrusive framing of poems) in ways that have overdetermined women poets’ critical reception.

A. C. Swinburne in the Round: Drama, Personae and Lyric Subjectivity

The first case study of this part of the book teases out of Swinburne’s metrical masochism a perversely chaste account of lyric community, in which poetic form works to imagine a chorus of voices. Starting with poem ‘Anactoria’, one of the best known poems of Poems and Ballads (1866), the chapter analyses the questions of genre and poetic community posed in Swinburne’s early work. Reading on through his oeuvre this impulse might find a natural outlet within Swinburne’s politically-engaged work of the 1870s, but what about the more Parnassian ‘A Century of Roundels’ (1883)? Close reference to this volume, enables the chapter to demonstrate models of lyric collectivity in poems that are far from any ’dramatic monologue’ model—and ultimately provides the tools to offer a fresh engagement with ‘Anactoria’. Comparison with the poems of Oscar Wilde helps focus the issues of poetic subjectivity and connect with Wilde’s infamous d commentary on Swinburne’s poetic subjectivity.