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The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "The Prelude," by William Wordsworth, focusing on the section "Cambridge and the Alps" in Book 6 of the poem. It examines the role of the poem in determining biographical information about Wordsworth from the summer of 1790, when he and friend Robert Jones traveled in Europe and the Alps. The author discusses the poem in light of cartography and a letter written from Wordsworth to his sister during the European tour.

In the mid-1920s the poet W. B. Yeats was pleased to discover contemporary philosophers, Giovanni Gentile and A. N. Whitehead, whose metaphysical and educational philosophies seemed to coincide with his own commitments. Whitehead shares with Gentile a sense of reality as activity and an understanding of knowledge as constructed from abstractions that are open to evaluation and imaginative reconfiguration. Yeats was a Senator of the Irish Free State and took an interest in schooling. Soon after visiting a Montessori-inspired girls' school in Waterford, he began his poem 'Among School Children". (The text of the poem is printed at the end of this paper.) I argue that an awareness of the philosophical ideas Yeats had recently encountered should encourage restless rather than fixed interpretations of the poem and that this sense of restlessness and imaginative reconfiguration reflects the approach to education the three writers, at that time, shared: that at best our modes of apprehension provide only glimpses of reality and therefore each child's understanding and learning must be kept moving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I apply current ecologically centred methodologies in the humanities to explore the familiar image of the bird-soul in The Seafarer in close relation to the real seabirds that are one of the most striking aspects of the maritime environment of the poem. Far from appearing as mere background incidentals, the poet's treatment of the seabirds we first encounter resonates with contemporary ornithological knowledge, and suggests that they feature specifically as species that best convey the ascetic trials and endeavours of the sea-going speaker who observes, listens to and names seabirds. The curious essence of seabirds as creatures that are always at home on the seas, and yet journeying to a home elsewhere, establishes them as what I term "native foreigners", a paradox that highlights the seafarer's conflicting yearnings and reflects the difficult earthly/celestial dynamic in the poem's perceptions of the soul's journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the image of the maternal in Hayyim Nahman Bialik's poetry and short prose. Contrary to most prior critical evaluations, which have viewed the autobiographical or symbolic mother in Bialik's works as a monolithic representation of misery, helplessness, and self-sacrifice, this paper emphasizes the mother's portrayal as a feared, loathed, and highly ambivalent object of identification vis-à-vis the emergence of the romantic Hebrew male poet. In a reading that spans from Bialik's early lyric poetry to his mature epic "Yatmut" (Orphanhood), the author traces the development of the mother image over the course of the poet's adult life and compares it to maternal images in the works of other romantic poets (William Wordsworth, for example). She also draws parallels between the ambivalent knot through which the poet is bound to his mother, and a similar ambivalent knot that cements the bond between national poet and his "people." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper involves a close reading of Herman Melville's poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” published in Melville's 1866 collection Battle-Pieces. Realizing that Melville's poem is one of the first descriptions (ekphrases) of a photograph in verse, the paper explores how Melville's poem uses physiognomy to describe the subject of the photograph: an American Civil War general, who is only identified as “the Corps Commander.” In this way, Melville's poem reflects the nineteenth-century philosophical and popular notions of photography. These notions came to regard photography as a Neoplatonic medium capable of recording and revealing the inner character of its subjects. Relying on these conceptions of photography, Melville's poem describes the photograph of the Corps Commander as having the power to reveal the Platonic absolute of American masculinity, and thus it comes to hail the photograph as a semi-sacred image that has the power to draw Anglo-Saxon American men into a common brotherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers poetry criticism of the unfinished poem "The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream," by John Keats, focusing on his use of the term wild Indian leaf. It is said that tree leaves were used as paper in India and that Keats would likely have used the word savage to refer to East Indians rather than to Native Americans.

This paper considers how Arun Kolatkar’s 1976 Commonwealth Prize winning sequence Jejuri constitutes a challenge to the interpretation of postcolonial poetry. In particular, it is concerned with examining the interpretive demands Jejuri makes of its readers, arguing that its microcosmic spatial and temporal composition requires the reader to dispense with his or her own sense of exteriority to, or distance from, the text. At the same time, Kolatkar’s use of cross-cultural and trans-historical imagery situates Jejuri within a macrocosmic, global network that implicitly compels the reader to adopt an interpretive position undetermined by national or cultural preconceptions. Jejuri is thus a sequence that prompts specialist postcolonial readers to question the set of methodological practices they work within. Moreover, the interpretive demands made of the reader confirm the ethical imperative of the act of reading more generally, requiring the non-specialist audience to also abandon preconceptions about the meaning of the sequence. This paper draws on Edward Said’s notion of worldliness in order to suggest that Kolatkar’s sequence requires a particular kind of critical response: one that is attentive to the historical and cultural specificities of the text, and yet one that is able to acknowledge the wider political implications of reading the poems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]