Le sage et son mystique

The Sage and His Mystic. A Look at the Correspondence Between Henri Pourrat and Jan Čep Henri Pourrat (1887-1959) is inextricably linked to his region of Auvergne and his work as well as his personality have left an indelible mark there. Although his influence gradually faded away after the Second World War, it can be measured by a veritable mass of letters exchanged with countless correspondents. He enjoyed a reputation as a writer, the success of which was confirmed by the award of the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française to the whole of Gaspard des montagnes in 1931 and by the award of the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1928. Jan Čep (1902-1974) was the translator of his works into the Czech language. Pourrat had sympathy for him because of the poetic inspiration that Čep drew from the same sources as him-self, that is, from the rustic world of the countryside, from its myths and legends. Pourrat perceived Čep as mystical because his work emanates from the deep metaphysical dimension. Faith thus plays the role of a bridge between the two men. For both of them it is the moving force in their lives. This is a full literary and spiritual contact that this article highlights.

“The Blood Jet Is Poetry”: Sylvia Plath’s Practical Poetics

This essay discusses the nature and function of poetry and poetic inspiration as central themes in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, an aspect of her poetry that has elicited surprisingly little critical attention over the years. Here, I trace the poetological strand in Plath’s poetry through four poems: the early ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ (1956), ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (1961), and, finally, ‘Ariel’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ (both October, 1962). These poems all engage with and raise issues that relate to poetics in different ways. Read together, these four poems demonstrate the centrality of poetological themes in Plath’s poetry—how they in different ways represent and debate the genesis, nature, form, and function of poetry.

Commerce after Money

This chapter addresses the extractive logic of the poet Edward Young. It shows how his late masterpiece Night Thoughts at once extends and complicates the imperialism of his earlier work. At the heart of the analysis is Young’s notion that movement somehow generates depth, so that the mobility of a gold coin produces inner value, immaterial worth ready to be drawn out by its user. The treasure, on Young’s strange view, lies within the gold. Night Thoughts applies this thinking to the spiritual realm. Instead of assuming that it is God who extracts souls from bodies—as workers remove ore from mines—the poem suggests that souls can extract themselves from materiality through religious and poetic inspiration. Then they can delve into the interiorities of other angelic beings and exchange thoughts and feelings with them. Closing the chapter are a comparison to Charles Johnstone’s popular it-narrative Chrysal (1760–5) and a reading of Ignatius Sancho’s gushing praise for Night Thoughts.

The symbolism of the ring in the play by N.S. Gumilyov “Child of Allah”

The article is devoted to the study of the symbolic meaning of the image of the ring in the play by N.S. Gumilyov “Child of Allah”. The cultural semantics of “Solomon’s ring”, its rootedness in the traditions of the East, are traced. It is concluded that the ring in the play serves as a connecting link between the divine name and poetic inspiration. The article first pointed to a number of uses of the ring in Ancient Iran. Such a diverse semiotics of the ring found its refraction in the play N.S. Gumilyov “The Child of Allah”. In this play, the ring plays a key role. The ring defines the world poles of good and evil. Performed by Oriental motifs, Gumilyov’s play at the same time does not repeat or develop any of the semantic definitions of the ring mentioned in the article. In the article we turn to the mysterious meaning of the ring in this work. Thus, the ring in the play “the Child of Allah” has an Association with the magic rings of Eastern fairy tales.

Distributed Cognition and the Phenomenology of Modernist Painting and Poetry (Rilke and Cézanne)

Contemporary views of consciousness, long anticipated by phenomenology, suggest that cognition includes a distribution across motoric and perceptual experience and is in important ways interwoven with the surrounding environment. This paper takes up implications for aesthetics, demonstrating how such an understanding of consciousness is expressed in analogous ways in modern poetry and painting, particularly in works that have been the object of phenomenological study. An aesthetics of embodied cognition can illuminate the common resources of vital human intentionality in artworks across different media, including Cézanne’s painting and Rilke’s poetry and poetics, and both can be conceived not only as aesthetic but as cognitive artefacts. Merleau-Ponty’s claim that philosophy, visual art, and poetry share a common aim and the poetic inspiration Rilke took from Cézanne and other visual artists can be better understood by considering art and literature from a cognitive standpoint.

Close Encounters

This chapter explores the metaleptic incursions of deities into various spheres of narrative and acts of narration, focusing on two cases in Latin love elegy. It first sketches some of the key dynamics of divine epiphany in Greco-Roman poetry from Homer on, differentiating epiphanies in which the divinity inspires the poet from those in which characters receive prophetic information. In Latin love elegy, these categories can overlap, since the elegist is both the hero of his own story and simultaneously the omniscient extradiegetic narrator. So in [Tibullus] 3.4, Apollo appears to the poet Lygdamus, but, instead of acting as the god of poetic inspiration, simply informs Lygdamus of the infidelity of his puella Neaera, tells the story of his own love affair with Admetus, and offers advice about love. This epiphany is compared with its primary intertext, the visit of Amor to the exiled poet in Ovid, Ex Ponto 3.3. The chapter argues that elegy, as a genre in which author and narrator usually share a name but fulfil multiple narrative functions, is especially liable to a strong form of metalepsis; and that these two poems in particular use metaleptic divine epiphany to elide the differences between gods and poets, revisit the Augustan-era obsession with who has the authority to say what to whom, and thereby show how the forces of elegy destabilize hierarchies beyond those of gender and class. The chapter suggests in conclusion that both poems may owe something to the lost work of their predecessor Gallus.

Drugs as intoxicants

In this chapter, I discuss the poetic inspiration that was associated in the Renaissance with such concepts as furor poeticus (poetic madness), ecstasy and enthousiasmos. I show how Joannes Six van Chandelier gives poetic madness a material foundation by linking it to exotic drugs such as cachou. I then show how Six, in a poem addressed to his doctor, Simon Dilman, and to the theologian Johannes Hoornbeeck, emphasises both the medical and the religious dangers of furor poeticus. Here Six presents himself as a weak and fragile rhymester, but in a positive sense, to distance himself from negative associations that poetic madness gave rise to, such as the thirst for divine knowledge and perfection. In other texts, some of which were addressed to the pastor Pieter Wittewrongel, we see how Six distinguishes between a Christian and a pagan ecstasy.

Zen and the “Image” in Tang Poetry

The purpose of the title of this piece is to suggest that behind the bland exterior of the average medieval Chinese poem (at least in English translation) there may lurk processes of composition entirely unsuspected by the modern reader, aspects of the Tang poem that might repay greater study. This approach, namely meditation as a method of creative inspiration, was far from universal in the poetry of the Tang period, since it seems to have arisen within specific historical circumstances, and though references to it remained and were handed down to later ages in widely read works, it is at present unclear how actively it was practised in later times. However, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that an interest in poetic imagery remained strong in East Asia, raising the possibility that it was this aspect of poetic practice there caught the attention of English language poets in the United Kingdom at the start of the twentieth century as they cast about for new models to replace the poetry of Victorian times. The hope is that drawing attention to this approach to poetic inspiration in this essay may serve as a challenge to the current lack of interest in Chinese poetry translation in the United Kingdom.

Shakespeare's Notation: Writing Sound in Much Ado about Nothing

In Act 5 of Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare Dramatizes Two Consecutive Episodes in Which Writing Poetry is Mixed suggestively with singing, recalling, or imitating music. The first comes when Benedick sings or speaks several lines from the popular ballad “The God of Love.” The second is Claudio's musical rite of contrition for slandering Hero and (he believes) causing her death. In both cases, poetry is produced through writing practices that are interwoven with song. Indeed, Shakespeare yokes literacy and aurality together in the same keyword, noting, which referred both to writing and to musical notes, and which (as scholars have long observed) is how nothing was pronounced in early modern English. Benedick seeks poetic inspiration from the notes of balladry, then bemoans his inability to versify in rhyme. Claudio not only sees that his epitaph is notated, read aloud, and hung on the tomb; he calls for a corresponding hymn to be sung. Taken together, the scenes attune us to forms of poetic making that are irreducible to writing or language—those overdetermined categories in literary studies that have enabled our neglect of the role that nonverbal sound has played in poetic composition.