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This paper treats a topos found in Greek poetry from the archaic to the Hellenistic period, involving a confrontation between antagonistic and contrasting species of birds. Tracing the continuities and distinctions among the uses of the conceit in Hesiod, Pindar, and Callimachus, I argue that on each occasion it serves poets as a means of articulating their literary personae and the ethical, stylistic, and generic choices shaping their compositions. Not just a means of poetic polemic, self-definition, and self-positioning, the avian terms used within the conceit also come to figure in the literary critical vocabulary of the late fifth century and its redeployment in Hellenistic times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the impossible embodiment and aesthetics of poet Wallace Stevens' poetry. It argues the opportunity given by Stevens on the readers of his poems in terms of sound, motion and sight. It attributes the engagement of readers to arts through physical changes in sensory architectures.

This article examines issues of race in the life and work of American poet Walt Whitman. Although Whitman's work and reputation suggest he was a proponent of social equality, his personal views belie that claim. The author wishes to stress the contradictions and ambiguity in Whitman do not detract from his poetry but instead enhance it.

In diaspora literature the experience of exile, displacement, and marginalization has become a subversive position from which normative boundaries of nation, ethnicity, and culture are contested. Myung Mi Kim's "Dura" poses similar kinds of challenges beyond these boundaries. "Dura" enacts an innovative nomadic poetics, which can be best understood in terms of Kim's theory of form as "interplay of mobile elements, actuated by the ensemble of movements developed within it." This notion resonates with Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's concept of rhizomatic deterritorialization and becoming. Drawing on Kim's theory of form and Deleuze's and Guattari's notion of rhizomatics, this essays reads "Dura" as "one long poem"—a nomadic poetic series that moves through multiple geographical locations and temporalities in its investigation of historical continuums which converge on and diverge from the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]