Re-Imagining Ireland’s Early Modern Past

Historians—Protestant and Catholic—associated with the Nation newspaper who were identified as members of Young Ireland constructed a romantic narrative of Ireland’s history in English verse that lauded heroes who had created an Irish nation by resisting English intrusion. This successful venture was designed to cultivate national sentiment among people with limited schooling. The more serious intellectual endeavour of Young Ireland was to sponsor a reasoned prose narrative of Ireland’s past to honour all—regardless of origin or denomination—who had fashioned an inclusive Irish nation. This proved less successful because it required their Catholic members to suppress memories of past injustice. Also, Catholic Church authorities, suspicious of the liberal agenda of Young Ireland, encouraged a counter-narrative that would dwell on past sufferings and celebrate those who had become martyrs for Catholicism rather than heroes of some imaginary Irish nation state.

Ezra Pound's Poetry between Victorianism and Modernism: A Historical-Biographical Analysis

This paper examines the short poems of Ezra Pound, a group of works that have long been the subject of academic discussion in the field of literary analysis. Although Ezra Pound is typically considered a Modernist poet, some clear elements of Victorianism can be discerned within his revolutionary forms of poetry. The paper will offer a historical and biographical background to Pound's work before moving on to an analysis and discussion of the poet's short poems. While previous studies of Ezra Pound's poetry have adopted various critical approaches, we believe that this is the first study that compares the influence of Modernism and Victorianism on the work of this important figure in English verse of the early twentieth century.

Grammar, Prosody, and the Place of Accent in Elizabethan Criticism

The Elizabethan poets and critics realized that the English verse line was neither merely syllabic (like French verse) nor quantitative (like Greek or Latin verse), but, they argued, governed by the regular disposition of accents. What seems obvious to us was not so to them. Accent did not belong to any metrical system known to sixteenth-century humanists; it pertained to the spoken pronunciation of the individual (Greek or Latin) word, and to the teaching of grammar, where it was known as prosody. The chapter outlines the place of accent in ancient and early modern grammatical theory before discussing George Gascoigne’s revolutionary theory of English metrical accent. It then looks at some subsequent developments in thinking about verse and accent in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and consider grammar as a neglected place of criticism.

Kennings in Old English Verse and in the Poetic Edda

To shed light on questions pertaining to the similarities and differences between kennings in Old English and in the Poetic Edda, a survey is undertaken of the density of kenning use in the two corpora. The likeliest conclusion to be drawn from a comparison of findings is that the two poetic traditions are rather similar in regard to kenning use. In both traditions, kennings are notably simpler and less riddle-like than in skaldic poetry, though the Edda contains a few kennings of sufficient complexity to suggest skaldic influence. Although kennings, on average, occur more frequently in Old English, the incidence is broadly similar to that in the Poetic Edda. Kennings are not uncommonly explained by the use of variation (apposition) in Old English, but less commonly in the Edda, although the difference does not specifically suggest discrepant attitudes toward kenning use in the two traditions, since variation is rare in the Edda under all circumstances. Although the possibility of the influence of one tradition upon the other cannot be ruled out, the similarities, in the main, are probably best explained as the result of common inheritance. This explanation garners support from the number of instances in which more or less precise cognate kennings appear in the two bodies of literature.