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In her long poem Solitude (1938) Vita Sackville-West explores the contrast between Nature and books and between Nature and the Christian God as she questions the purpose of life and suffering. While writing in solitude about solitude, the writer is connected to a vast community of other writers and readers. In this paper I show how Sackville-West uses classical allusions as a bridge between pagan Nature and Christian English literary history. From contemporary documents, especially her letters to Virginia Woolf, we can also see how Sackville-West kept an awkward balance in her own life between shyness and desire for connection with others which is reflected in her project of writing new verse in essentially traditional forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a comparative analysis of the original with the translation, this paper attempts to demonstrate the influence of Lucan's bellum civile on Hölderlin's poetic language and theory of cognition, over and above the contemporary, political interest of the text in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Although Hölderlin only translated verses 1-590 of the first book, it is there that Lucan uses poetic techniques which seem to have inspired the German poet. The most important of these is the linguistic and thematic development of the obscure; in its density, it may have represented to Hölderlin the ideal of the sublime. In particular, Lucan's light-metaphors seem to have left traces in Hölderlin's poetic œuvre. The interpretation focuses on a divination-scene which Lucan presents as an aesthetics of the terrifying, the radical breaking apart of gods, humankind and nature. In this cosmic chaos, the mediating function of the poet must be reconsidered: if he can no longer be a mediator, then the possibility of linguistic representation as a whole is called into question. A closer look at the last verses translated by Hölderlin shows the extent to which these doubts end in the aporia of speechlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influence of Virgil on Martin Luther, paying special attention to a short verse composition of Luther's in Latin, Adversus Armatum Virum Cochlaeum, based on the first lines of the Aeneid. The study suggests that an adequate understanding of Luther's relationship to and use of Virgil needs to take into full account the fact that the Reformer not only knew Virgil's works and quoted from him frequently, but also himself composed verses based on Virgil's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"For Once, Then, Something" (1920) is the only poem Robert Frost ever composed in a classical meter: it is written in phalaecean hendecasyllabics. What led him to depart, in that single instance, from his declared commitment to native English meters? So far no scholar or critic has ventured to say. This paper offers an explanation, and points to a greater subtlety in Frost's engagement with Latin poetry than is usually proposed. Frost's poem is, among other things, a response to hostile critics. Scholars of Catullus - and Catullus was Frost's favorite Roman author - have pointed to a link between hendecasyllabics and the poetic mode of rebuttal to one's critics. That poets in the English tradition understood this link can be demonstrated by adducing two hendecasyllabic poems of Tennyson's: "Hendecasyllabics" (1863), in which the poet fires back at his magazine reviewers, and "The Gentle Life" (1870), in which he attacks his leading critic. An ardent admirer of Catullus, Tennyson naturally turned to the hendecasyllabic as the appropriate vehicle for such a response. I argue that by casting his own retort in hendecasyllabics, and by emulating other stylistic features in Catullus' hendecasyllabics, Frost places himself within this tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal, discursive and contextual elements all play a part in the reception of ancient texts in modern poetry and drama. This article examines the simile as a formal technique which also generates and transmits intertextual relationships. It is argued that the simile also provides a model which illuminates the nexus between Walcott's technique and the ways in which audiences read and experience his work. The first section identifies ways in which the Homeric simile operates structurally within the epics and suggests that it acts as an agent of perspective transformation, changing the audience's perception both of the internal dynamics of the poem and of how the audience itself relates to the work. The second part of the paper explores this approach in relation to Walcott's Omeros, with particular emphasis on the relationship between Philoctetes/Philoctete and the anonymous narrator of the poem. The third section examines a broader application of the simile model in relation to performance of a modern work closely linked with a single ancient text, Walcott's Stage Version of the Odyssey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the 11th century, a humanist circle of clerical poets, living around the central valley of the Loire, was writing poetry in classical language and metre. Baudri of Bourgueil, who wrote an impressive corpus of Latin poems, was an expert in the language, style, verse, motifs and genres of the classical and later antique pagan and Christian poetry, and treated theological as well as profane and explicitly ancient topics. About 1107, when he was urged to become bishop and to abandon his personal independence and quiet monastic life, he gave voice to his disgust of the new ecclesiastical burden by a long poem in elegiac distichs. This paper tries to show the ancient genres Baudri has used and transformed and even inverted in order to describe his special situation. Therefore, in imitating the ancient genres, far from showing only his literary culture, he was rather using them in a very specific and personal way. This use of literary traditions can best be analyzed in terms of intertextuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]