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Sir Orfeo is a retelling of the Orpheus myth that allows the hero to keep his bride. This paper counters readings of the poem as a vindication of married love by focusing on its reception in the shadow of a significant omission: both Virgil and Ovid state that after losing Eurydice, Orpheus gave up loving women; Ovid adds that Orpheus loved boys. The significance of these missing conclusions is explored for readers of the poem from its scribes to their patrons and their patrons' families. The paper shows the usefulness of a reception-oriented approach for queer readings of the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the contributors to Donald Allen's legendary The New American Poetry anthology, we find at least a dozen queer poets, several of whom were directly involved in the struggle for gay liberation. This article goes in search of their British counterparts, looking at work associated with the so-called British Poetry Revival. Beginning on the cusp of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, I revisit Allen Ginsberg's trip to England in 1965, and argue for the significance of work by his friend Harry Fainlight. I go on to examine in detail Lee Harwood's love poems for John Ashbery and the stifled reception they've received in criticism. The article makes use of fresh archival resources, including Harwood's papers at the British Library and collections relating to the Gay Men's Press at the Bishopsgate Institute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper places seventeenth-century writer Mary Carey's elegies for her lost children in the context of her complete manuscript, a life narrative that combines elements of the mother's legacy and the confessional narrative with a dialogue between body and soul. My goal is to examine the poems' emotional work in a devotional context that dramatizes the regulatory power of Carey's "emotional community." Using recent work on affect theory, I argue that embodied "affections" that are pushed to the margins (literally) of her prose work find expression in her poems--even at the cost of contesting the poems' own explicit semantic meanings--by way of powerful distortions and blockages at the prosodic level. These features, which I associate with the tradition of performed oral lament (and particularly maternal lament), create a contestatory space for Carey's silenced maternal body to make itself felt as a force that has the potential to disrupt deeply ingrained aspects of her emotional habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victorian Bengal saw a number of young writers, working under the influence of Orientalist scholarship, Romantic literary theory, and English poets like John Milton and Lord Byron, attempt to translate the great Sanskrit epic Rāmāyana into a modern world epic. This paper juxtaposes two such attempts: Romesh Chunder Dutt's Rāmāyana (1898) and Michael Madhusudan Dutt's Meghnādbadh kābya ("The Slaying of Meghanada," 1861-2). Read together, I argue, these poems embody two very different ways of recasting a colonial text as worldly. Where Romesh repackages the Rāmāyana within a comparativist rubric that telegraphs its resemblances to Homer or Milton, Madhusudan projects a blasphemous worldliness that stresses his ability to break with the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an exhaustive work of poet Thomas Gray in the field of literature. In the fall of 1761, Gray, celebrated author of the poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and future professor of modem history at Cambridge, offered to help his college friend, Thomas Warton. Had Gray been less choosy, he wouldn't have had much difficulty finding what he wanted. Wallpaper was not a rare commodity in the mid-eighteenth century, especially in England, where the wallpaper trade was then concentrated. Gray may have been unsure how to treat a poem in an antique style but of modern vintage, but the eighteenth century did not lack a vocabulary for this kind of hybridity.

This essay considers Ben Jonson's The Staple of News as a reflection on the notion of media and mediation. The newstrade provides the play's satiric subject, but it is my contention that commercial news also provides Jonson the opportunity to explore ideas about competitive media and the kinds of work they do to structure and mediate communication. I argue that the interdependence of old and new media, both in performance and print, provoked consumers and producers alike to experiment with new modes of media use and understanding, modes that revisit Jonson's familiar oppositions of poetry and news within a logic of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W. E. B. Du Bois writes that during the Civil War and Reconstruction, a fervor for the ideals of democracy "swept the land with its music and poetry." But studies of the poetry of the period (at least by white poets) typically offer a more muted account, reinforcing the view that race—specifically, white supremacy—held writers back from confronting the moment's prodemocratic possibilities. To understand the emergence of abolition-democracy with more clarity, we can look to the poet Richard Realf, a British-born antislavery activist, Union soldier, and Reconstruction administrator. It is worthwhile to elevate Realf's poetry alongside that of other white Union soldiers supportive of the Radical Republicans (like Ambrose Bierce, George Henry Boker, Henry Howard Brownell, Brett Harte, and George Nichols) because his poems trace the long development of abolition-democracy from Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s through its devolution after the Panic of 1873. They articulate with stridency a utopic vision of abolition-democracy as a horizon of possibility. They strive to cultivate a class-conscious solidarity for its further development. In so doing, they challenge simple narratives about US democracy foundering on race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research article discusses developments in contemporary Anglophone Singapore poetry where a proliferation of writers' groups and literary initiatives has led to efforts to define a localized Anglophone poetic tradition. Focusing on the debut collections of two young poets, Joshua Ip and Hamid Roslan, we argue that the presence of Singlish in their work functions as a site of hermeneutical openness that challenges a neocolonial articulation of Singaporean cultural formations centered on ideologies of standardized English usage, which have homogenized ethnic identities and supported a narrative of national progress. This article theorizes the heteroglossic potentialities of the intersubjective lifeworld found in Ip's and Hamid's poetics by discussing how they eschew any naturalized relationship between language as a semiotic system and sociohistorical being, in favor of a renewed query into Anglophone writing as an accumulation of asymmetrical and uneasy cultural relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the early circulation history of Hope Mirrlees's Paris. Published by the Hogarth Press in 1920, Paris was neglected for nearly ninety years, though it has recently been republished and reevaluated. By examining the surviving Hogarth Press order book, the essay shows that Paris , unlike more famous works by T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, rarely reached readers who might have appreciated and advertised its poetic experiments. The essay uses this history to reflect on what sort of poem Paris was in 1920, and what circulation history means more broadly for criticism's recovery of forgotten modernist poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Henry David Thoreau's botanical sketches, translation notebooks, and essays on migrant dwelling, this article reads Thoreau's ecology in the context of his engagements with Asian literature. According to Thoreau, poetry relinquishes independent subject-agency like plants, is regenerative like air, and resists stabilized meaning like celestial bodies. The article proposes an econational method of engaging with global literature that is developed through Thoreau's theories of texts as unstable oikoi (oikos being the root of eco) and nations as contingent communities. I argue that his poetics models the relations between texts and readers as open-ended networks rather than linear appropriations, and thus stands in contrast to transnational writing that preserves localized identities in the processes of exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates on Conceptual Writing and the viability of a poetic avant-garde demonstrate a collective difficulty in envisioning a modernist discourse that does not frame writing as following, and often struggling to keep up with, the visual arts. Around 1912, however, when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented the papiers collées and Gertrude Stein radically reconceptualized poetry out of her prose, modernist writing and art were absolutely contemporary; one could even claim that painting struggled to follow the linguistic innovations of poetry. Focusing on Picasso's Au Bon Marché, Stein's two prose portraits of the same department store, and Tender Buttons, I argue that Stein recognizes, early on, Picasso's semiological interventions on visual representation (foreshadowing later arguments by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and others) precisely due to his work's kinship with poetry, and that it is Stein's own, concurrent investigation into semiology and voice that establishes her as the central modernist figure for later poets such as Charles Bernstein, David Antin, Harryette Mullen, and Lyn Hejinian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article pursues a new reading of George Herbert's The Temple by means of careful attention to the book's typographic spacing. Spaces have traditionally been ignored or excised by Herbert's editors and critics. They constitute important evidence, however, of how Herbert's poems were interpreted by their earliest mediators. Herbert's printers employed the visual code of moveable type in order to connect the materiality of their work to Herbert's themes of spiritual fracture and regeneration. I read the distortion of spaces in The Temple, from the seventeenth century to the present, as an index for the changing history of interpreting Herbert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander Pope's famous dictum that "The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense " usually is taken to advocate straightforwardly that poetic sound can and should imitate meaning, in a kind of onomatopoeia writ large. This essay contends, however, that the real complexity of the line has not been recognized. Pope conjures a "seem"-ingly stable relation between " Sound " and " Sense " only to destabilize both terms and to raise fundamental questions about the material stuff of language. Indeed, reading Pope's " Eccho " alongside Enlightenment philosophy of language, this essay explores some sophisticated ways that poetry can participate in philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to shed new light on John Donne's poetry of argument by placing it in the context of early modern logic. I analyze university curricula and the intellectual practices they prescribed--especially the norms of academic disputation and of syllogistic reasoning--before applying logical categories to a number of religious and secular poems. Donne uses logical terms, concepts, and processes to address questions of selfhood and subjectivity, especially from a gendered perspective; to map horizons of human knowledge and cognition in encounters with mortality; and to encourage reflection on the seductive qualities of logical and poetic form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the topics of hosting and hospitality in the poems of W. B. Yeats, including "Coole Park, 1929" and "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931." Also cited are the effectiveness of hospitality as a social mechanism, Yeat's focus on the cultural productivity of hospitable practices, and his strained relationship with history, modernity, and Irish coloniality.

The article examines the mediums of Romantic poetry, particularly manuscript albums and printed literary annuals, to analyze the links between poetic form and the different material forms it takes. Also cited are the arguments for historical poetics in the New Lyric Studies, the proposed Book Historical poetics to recognize how materiality shapes poetry and its historical poetics, and Andrew Piper's poetics of miscelleaneity that includes gift books, literary annuals, and manuscript albums.

This essay seeks to establish the relation between a seldom recognized register of non-erotic yet sexual language within Andrew Marvell's poem "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" (1650) and two fresh contexts: first, Ben Jonson's Cary-Morison Ode (1629-30), and second, grotesquely sexualized depictions of Cromwell in ephemeral Civil War propaganda produced between 1645-1650. I argue that Jonson's doubled Pindaric poetics, as well as the shadow of anti-Cromwellian satire, shape a consistent vein of innuendo running through Marvell's masterpiece. These analyses suggest that Marvell's famously divided praise for Cromwell in "An Horatian Ode" is more sharply ironic than has recently been thought, and form the basis for a larger argument concerning Marvell's disruptive, double negative, or queer episteme in both poetry and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers three historical poems by John Lydgate. I argue that, in his Siege of Thebes, Troy Book, and Fall of Princes, Lydgate uses poetic form to write about history in the negative. Rather than try to represent history in form, that is, he draws his reader's attention to the matter of history that his forms exclude. By attending to the way that Lydgate invokes this leftover quantity of historical matter, which he terms the "surplus," I cast light both on Lydgate's own theory of form and the theories of form found in his Lancastrian contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay on the reticent style of presenting the fraternal tensions of the brothers of "Beowulf" to show how their relationships are conceived by Anglo-Saxon poetry readers is presented. It offers a history of Medieval Studies on the text of "Beowulf" and examines the way biological brotherhood is represented through what are said and the unsaid. The author relates how aesthetic style of allusiveness, laconism and silence invite readers to speculate on the meanings of restraint in the poem.

The article offers poetry criticism of rhymes as described by the book "Defence of Poesy" by Philip Sidney, in which the author describes the important of rhyme in poetry. The article goes on to discuss historical criticisms regarding rhyme by poets, including William Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and John Milton.

The article talks about poet William Shakespeare's couplets and "A hundredth good pointes of Husbandry" by Thomas Tusser presents criticisms on the as per authors Rosalie Colie and Paul Fussell. The article identifies Shakespeare's couplets and distinguishes it from the concise sequences. It notes that husbandry has a strong impact in "Sonnets" by Shakespeare and notes the writing and reading style of Tusser's book.

The article explores author George Eliot's adherence to the principles of metrical time, power in blank verse and the matter of ideas in her poetry notebook housed in Yale University's Beinecke Library in New Haven, Connecticut. It presents examples of metrical effects and discusses the differences between medium, matter, and manner which form the various aspects of representation in poetry. It explores Eliot's prose reflections on organicism, organic form and the importance of versification.

The article explores the literary value of the Middle English poem titled "Pearl." Topics discussed include the manifold singularity of the poem provided by the fact that only one copy exists, which gives rise to different forms of interpretation of the poem by readers, the ways in which the manifold singularity of the poem adds to its literary value and the reasons why the relationship between uniqueness and value is important in reading the poem.

An essay is presented about the poetry of Natasha Trethewey which illustrated the notion of form. Topics discussed include Trethewey's Storyville cycle of poems "Bellocq's Ophelia" as proof text to capture what is appealing and appalling within the iconography of the female body and racialization as a visible formal process.

A criticism of the verse-novel "Denzil Place: A Story in Verse" by Violet Fane is presented. It focuses on the content and form of the book, looking at how it was received in Victorian London, England. Other topics of the article include the use of blank verse in narratives, common themes of adultery in verse-novels, and the relationship between time and lyric verse in the book.

An essay is presented on the literary critic and poet Marianne Moore, focusing on her place within a cohort of 20th century modernist poet-critics who engaged in critical agonism, the author's term for mutual critique and engagement. Assessments of Moore's poetry by critics including Ezra Pound, Mark Van Doren, and Gorham B. Munson are cited and the impact of sexism on critical views of her work is explored.

The article discusses the history and development of English lyric poetry during the early modern period. It describes long-held literary theories regarding the influence of poets Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard on English poetry and explores challenges to critical literary theories regarding the primacy of Wyatt's and Howard's influence. The ways in which printing innovations and marketing strategies, along the personal tastes of the reading public, contributed to the revolution in English literature in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The article examines dialect poetry, the underlying context of poems made by William Barnes as well as discusses the literary canon. It mentions that dialect poetry had most likely been ignored by writers and that its literary admirers frequently lack the technical expertise to analyze its typical features. It relates that the William Barnes Society is among the institutions who provided care in preserving the literature through publishing articles and books related to it. It further affirms that English poetry has dominated over the dialect ones since it has been the major and standard language being taught in schools.

The article focuses on John Keats's secondhand relation to classical literature. It is said that Keats's repeated trashing has rooted from the connection of refuse and the art. It is cited that sensing the resemblance between the objects preserved under glass and those in landfills could acknowledge sources for the modern museum. It is mentioned that Keats's urge to generate capital out of his poems yielded an excess poetry and wasteful production, in which his museum poems fluctuate between a view of art as bourgeois functionalization and a view of art as physician to all men.

This article critiques the poem "Well-Wrought Urns," by John Donne.

This article examines selfhood and identity relative to poet Andrew Marvell. Marvell's narrative is a veritable etiology of the self: a dramatic and determining story of eros and abuse, and of wounding and incapacity. The poem "The Unfortunate Lover" is the supreme text of his imagined life. It is rationalized by some that the poem is an exercise in the arrangement of images and emblems.

The author comments on Christina Rossetti's canonical poem "Goblin Market." He notes that it continues to captivate with its critical yet ambivalent assessment of the overlapping spheres of Victorian economics and politics despite its deceptive form. He argues that the poem's language of economics rehearses a form of desire and a mode of enjoyment based on self-negation. He also presented his reactions to the poem in five sections each offering close-reading criticism.

The article examines the textual interior of the poetry of writer Thomas Hardy. Hardy's poetry does not organize, rationalize or valorize objects it takes. It does not bring them under a concept of the aesthetic. The materials incorporated by the poetry retain an awkward empirical quiddity even if they are assembled in a recognizable value-form.

The article focuses on the poetic work of Virgil entitled "Georgics," which has yielded valuable insights concerning the transformations to which literary texts and the practice of interpretation are susceptible. The author points out that one can detect the exegesis of Virgil's self-presentation in the poem as poet-perceptor, and an attempt to recast conventional claims about the instrumentality of literary texts which imply the educational legacy of Virgil.

The article presents a comparative analysis of Edwin Arnold's poem "Light of Asia" and Richard Phillips' poem "The Story of Gautama Buddha." They were driven by a Protestant belief in the truth-telling authority of the most ancient textual sources. They unavoidably participated in the appropriation of Buddhism from its indigenous contexts by attempting to turn it into a purified textual object of Western knowledge. They were able to identify the culture-specific elements of Buddhist practice and doctrine from those elements that were duplicated across nations/cultures/ languages.

This article focuses on the writing of poet Walt Whitman. In a notebook entitled "Words," Whitman writes the word "absences," tags a dash onto the end of it, and then adds the parenthetical phrase, "his mind was full of absences." This page is certainly no more odd than many others in the poet's writings on language. There is something peculiarly significant about the juxtaposition of absence and apostle, a fortuitous placement that offers a unique opportunity for understanding how Whitman himself envisioned the relationship between the scene of writing and the scene of reading.

The article discusses writer Virgil's work "Georgics," as a scientific text. Of all the literary works of classical antiquity, Virgil's Georgics, a didactic poem on the subject of husbandry written in the years 37-30 B.C., was deemed by eighteenth century British writers an unparalleled model of literary perfection. Writer John Dryden esteemed the Georgics the divinest part of all Virgil's writings, and Joseph Addison judged it the most complete, elaborate, and finish piece of all antiquity. The presence of the Georgics was also registered in literary forms far beyond poetry, from travelogues, scientific treatises, and manuals of husbandry, to essays, novels, and conduct books.

The article discusses various issues related to prize poems, minstrel contests, and romantic poetry. The writer of a prize poem cannot, like poet William Wordsworth, declare poetry to be addressing an audience that will come to appreciate it later. Poets in contests do not have the luxury to dictate the terms of their acceptance; the pleasure of an immediate, opinionated audience must rule the day if a prize is to be won, and the poet cannot afford to announce a negative judgment of that taste. Minstrel writing had traditionally celebrated the minstrel's ability to inspire listeners directly, with an oral performance appropriate to the moment of composition.

The article presents information on the poetic works of William Blake. His prophetic poem were enormously popular in the 1960s. Those poems promise that, after the apocalypse, young men will regain their polymorphous perverse sexuality and live in a state of eternal bliss. But in the less euphoric 1970s feminists argued that this androgynous utopia was inherently misogynistic. However, the recent resurgence of androgynous figures in films and novels as well as in men's wear and advertising suggests that it may be time to take another look at Blake's espousal of an androgynous utopia.

The article focuses on the literary works of John Heywood who was a musician, poet, dramatist and lifelong Catholic. In his poem "The Spider and the Flie," Heywood praises a state that never come to be, an absolutist but also populist regime that would hold off the depredations of agrarian capitalism. The mid-Tudor crisis shows not only the economic struggle between exploiting and exploited classes intrinsic to all modes of production but also a political struggle between two modes of production. In this model, a class of commoner capitalist farmers, merchants, and manufacturers rises and overthrows a class of feudal lords.

Discusses the spectre of the Reformation that haunted the poem 'Faerie Queene,' by Edmund Spencer in England during the late 1500s. Elizabethan response to the Reformation presented by the poem; Elements such as anti-clericalism that are contained by the poem; Implications on studies on the problem of libraries.

Focuses on the theme of the poem 'Amoretti and Epithalamion,' by Edmund Spencer. Influence of Spencer's social status on the contents of the poem; Implications for social classes in Ireland; Strategies used by Spencer to create social distinction and a control of property in Ireland.

Focuses on the characterization of the poem 'Squire's Tale' in Chaucerian text. Narration of Pegasus and its literary origin; Description of the concept and context of Chaucer; Claims on the individual poetic authority of the tale.

This essay highlights the rise of natural or ontological abstraction in eighteenth-century British empiricism. This natural abstraction differs from our conventional theories about abstraction in being understood as a feature of the world itself, rather than a feature of our relation to the world. The essay then positions William Wordsworth's The Prelude and Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric as significant poetic engagements with the fact of natural abstraction and the indirect or "collateral" modes of apprehension it entails. Focusing on the place in these poems of abstraction and collateral modes of apprehension (like free indirect style) alters our understanding of the history of lyric and romanticism's relation to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that poetry was a more congenial medium for Ralph Waldo Emerson at the point in his life when he prepared his 1876 book `Selected Poems.' Representations of Emerson's identity as a writer at the end of his career; 20th-century readers' underappreciation of Emerson's poetry; Publication of `May-Day and Other Pieces' in 1867; Ellen Emerson's description of the toll exacted by age and overwork.

Focuses on poetry from the First World War. Investigation of Wilfred Owen's and Siefried Sassoon's version of ethical passivity; Comparison to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas; Examination of the assignment of the passivity to the feminine in light of Owen's and Sassoon's homosexuality.

Examines the reference which Chaucer made about Gower and morality in the dedication of the poem `Troilus and Criseyde.' Contention that Gower's morality can not be taken at face value; Revelation of Chaucer's dedication; Description of R.F. Yeager's view of the dedication.

Discusses the lesbianism and romance in the poetry of Anne Bannerman. Relation of sexuality to literature; Comparison to the Romantic poetry by men and women; Definitions of female genius and lesbianism.

Presents an analysis of John Donne's poem, `Sapho to Philaenis.' Characterization of the poetic speaker in Donne's secular poetry; Economic, political and erotic tropes in Donne's poetry; Zero-sum economy of lesbian erotics; Speaker's notion about women; Breakdown in Donne's putative absolutism.

Examines the politically-charged representations of maternity in the poem `Absalom and Achitophel,' by John Dryden. Political and medical context of the poem's familial and sexual details; Dryden's effort to develop a pragmatic and contemporary defense of monarchial authority; Connection between generation and politics; Mother's primary role in conception.