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This article is a comparative study of the critiques of developments in Shona and Swahili poetry that began in 1970s Tanzania and 1980s Zimbabwe, after the introduction of regular patterns in Shona poetry (late 1950s) and of free verse in Swahili literature (late 1960s). These verse forms became the object of heated debate about the nature of ‘tradition’ and of ‘colonial’ innovation among scholars, intellectuals and poets. These debates went beyond notions of stylistic canons; rather, they focused on identity, as closely connected with tradition and the need for decolonization. The problem recognized in this paper is that this criticism became prescriptive, implying the risk of limiting verbal-artistic expression in terms of style and content. This article shows a continuity between these different contexts in relation to critical opposition to stylistic innovation and freedom of (expressing) thought. By comparing the poetry and philosophy of the Tanzanian poet Euphrase Kezilahabi and Zimbabwean poet Chirikure Chirukure, this paper problematizes the terms of these debates and proposes an inductive and aesthetic approach to texts that avoids prescriptivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the endings of the so-called fitts in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For the first time in the criticism of this renowned fourteenth-century alliterative romance of the Matter of Britain attention is called to a remarkable number of lexical and thematic features shared by the concluding sections of the poem's four compositional divisions. It is argued that the parallel fitt-endings serve to underline the units of Gawain as an orally delivered Arthurian narrative of the kind that was used as a form of entertainment at medieval round tables and generally at court. The rationale behind the parallel fitt-endings is discussed in terms of paratextuality, with emphasis on such typical paratextual effects as pointing to the genre and the mode of the text in question. Paratexts peculiar to medieval literature and to Middle English alliterative romance are pointed out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent studies of Victorian literary criticism have investigated poetry's place in the periodical press, little attention has been paid to the history of poetry published in large-circulation general newspapers. this essay discusses poetry published in The London Times during the 1860s, examining the literal place of poetry within the newspaper, its themes and formal characteristics, and its relation to authorship. I suggest that reading these poems in relation to their original material context raises theoretical questions about the history of reading, intertextuality, and poetry's function in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remi Raji, one of the loudest and most eloquent political poets in Nigeria today, sees his craft as a means of conveying serious social message to his land. Raji's consummate political theme, which is powered by what he calls "the nationalist imagination," is skillfully explored in his latest volume of poetry, "Lovesong for My Wasteland" (2005), more than in any of his previous collections. Following the tradition of the social commitments of African literature and evolving orature-based aesthetics that marries choreography to poetry (choreopoetry), Raji traces the history of Nigeria, in the symbolic forty-five verses of the volume, exposing the leadership failures and plunder of yesterday and today, and presenting a hope that is predicated on the people's collective stand to build their ravaged land. The business of this paper is therefore the exploration of Raji's political theme in his latest poetic effort to raise his society's consciousness to the collapse of national psyche and to redirect their attention toward a better tomorrow for which they have to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines traditional and innovating elements in a praise performance organized by a hereditary bard in 2002 for a twenty-year-old from a prominent family in Segu (Mali). It shows the importance of a detailed knowledge of the youth's network of social relationships for understanding the oral text. Special attention is given to the circumstances that led to the composition of a praise song for so young a person (a most unusual event), to its implicit and explicit views on familial and other interpersonal relationships, and to the articulation of images and references drawn from the older oral literature, including the Segu epic, with ones grounded in twentieth-century social experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent interest in Michael Oakeshott's work, his aesthetics have yet to receive an extended consideration. The paper surveys Oakeshott's writings on the character of art and provides a critical account of how his aesthetics complements his moral philosophy. Through his aesthetics Oakeshott provides his moral philosophy with an idea of authenticity. Societies and individuals that have failed to recognize the poetic dimension in the moral life suffer a corruption of consciousness. Far from the poetic dimension of the moral life being responsible for nihilism and aestheticism as some critics have argued, its recognition saves the moral life from becoming a pursuit of arbitrary preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on poet Arthur Hugh Clough. At one recent meeting of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western U.S. conference on The Victorian World, there were a surprising four papers on Clough, enough to create an entire Clough panel. This was one of the younger panels at the conference — a number of the presenters were graduate students or recent PhDs. Scholars are studying Clough's experimentation with style, his attempt to adapt Greek and Latin forms to the English hexameter, and his innovative use of genre. The current work on Clough suggests that a reinvigorated formalist criticism is emerging within Victorian poetry studies.

The article informs that hitorian T.S. Eliot's was a mind passionately longing for unity but penetratingly perceptive to plurality and difference. His literary theory, no less than his poetry, is greatly motivated by this productive but often very taxing tension. This paper studies a tension between historicist pluralism and essentialism on the nature of poetry and criticism. Recognition of the very different and changing forms of poetry and criticism is balanced against the equally recognized need for some sort of unity or structuring order and focus in these fields.

Ivan V. Lalić's poem "Voyage philosophique" from his collection Script1 is usually read as a travelogue, but in this work it will be read as criticism of the Enlightenment programme, wherein the destination of "Holland" would, in fact, be a metaphor for this spiritual movement. Lalić's "lyrical criticism" is compared with its contemporaneous postmodern criticisms of the Enlightenment and is placed within the context of his poetics as a testimony of the modern search for some other tradition, older than the Enlightenment, which has 'severed' it radically. It is this tradition that Lalić approaches truly poetically in his last poetic expression--the collection Four Canons. This collection fully reveals the concept of neomedievalism, the New Middle Ages. This work examines the relation between an implicit deviation from the Enlightenment and an explicit step into the tradition of neomedievalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The traditional Swiss cowherds' melody called the "Ranz des Vaches" has been famous for centuries for its uncanny ability to evoke extreme nostalgia. This paper analyzes a sonnet of Wordsworth's about his encounter with the "Ranz" in Switzerland in 1820. It examines both the statement and the poetic functioning of the sonnet, comparing it to Wordsworth's better known "The Solitary Reaper." The sonnet, I argue, reveals something of the mechanism by which we manage to identify with and empathize with the Other, even while hinting at the inherent limitations of that mechanism. The paper proposes, in passing, an explanation of the mysterious evocativeness of the "Ranz des Vaches," and also asks whether Wordsworth's sonnet, which has been criticized as particularly unevocative, might not require a special kind of reading, grounded in that very mechanism for relating to the Other that is the theme of the poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines John Berryman's Dream Songs from a psychoanalytic perspective. The paper formulates a means of discussing three factors that impinge on Henry's construction of himself: the heteroglossic nature of thought one's relationship to power and one's relationship to the metaphysical. Though other major mid-century "confessional" poets (such as Bishop and Lowell) had developed ways of interiorizing the modernist poetics of Eliot, Williams and Pound, the main lens through which the paper examines the interiorizing poetics of the Dream Songs is Shakespeare's tragic period, which Berryman had studied closely his entire career. Berryman found in Shakespeare's tragedies not only a means of dramatizing one's relationship to power and to God, but also the use of dramatic dialogue to represent an individual mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though six annotations by the playhouse bookkeeper comprise fairly slim evidence, I believe they provide conclusive proof that the scribe's copy for Dick of Devonshire, BL MS Egerton 1994, folios 30-51, was the playhouse copy as prepared for production by the company bookkeeper. These six annotations are indeed 'Playhouse Shadows' that identify the scribe's copy-text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This poem aims to present a reminder that the value of a presentation lies with the audience, not the speaker. Design/methodology/approach - This is in the form of a fictional poem. Findings - The poem reveals that hubris is alive, well and burgeoning in the academy. Research limitations/implications - Self-awareness and self-criticism are to be encouraged. Originality/value - Trite doggerel may still make a point and may even cause a smile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, the author compares and contrasts the literary theories of Canadian poets and literary scholars Jan Zwicky and Anne Carson, focusing particularly on the books "Lyric Philosophy" and "Wisdom & Metaphor" by Zwicky as well as Carson's "Eros the Bittersweet." It explores the competing approaches to defining and using the term lyric within their literary criticisms.

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Amistad" by Elizabeth Alexander. It explores how the poem illustrates the genre of the history poem to represent issues of language and translation, that are central to the freedom of the Africans. It also examines how the poem speaks from several perspectives, encompassing different legal and national discourses that defined the rebellion, both for its participants and for the public.

This essay offers poetry criticism of the poem "The House of Fame" by Geoffrey Chaucer. It explores the use of imagery and symbolisms. The use of temple's narrative glass walls in the poem as a method to link writer and the reader is explained. The author provides a critical interpretation of the poem and offers meaning on the images used.

Roman Jakobson, who had left Russia in 1920 and in 1941 took refuge in the USA from the Nazis, was one of the main figures in post war linguistics and structuralism. Two aspects of his work are examined in this article. Firstly, Jakobson purifies his linguistic theory of pragmatic references. Secondly, he develops his own diplomatic mission of mediating between East and West. In this article, I argue that these two aspects did not develop independently from one another. Instead I claim that his theory is designed to slip through the Iron Curtain, while at the same time providing the means to analyse ways of acting politically by using language. This argument is unfolded in two steps, each consisting of two parts. First, I compare the theory of pronominal expressions as developed by Emil Benveniste to Jakobson’s theory of shifters. While Benveniste focuses on the relation of language and its subject using language, Jakobson introduces a model of communication to allow maximal formalisation of language. According to this even the category of person can be freed from its reference to a subject which would be understood as having a place in space and time. Then, Jakobson’s theory of shifters is studied in relation to his analyses of poetry. For this, two examples are chosen: Jakobson’s text on two poems by Russian poet Alexandr Blok, and his text on a poem by Bertold Brecht. In both texts, the theory of shifters—and the alleged purification from pragmatic aspects of language use ensuing from this theory—is challenged by the simple fact that they focus on the pronoun of the first person plural. According to Jakobson, the category of number does not belong to the shifters. Rather, number quantifies participants of the related event. The pronoun ‘we’ is at the same time a shifter and a non-shifter, as it refers to the speech event and the related event. Thus the pronoun ‘we’ opens up the possibility to include or exclude the participants of a communicative situation, and thereby enables the speaker to act socially or even politically by using language. The article concludes by coming back to the historical situation in which Jakobson developed his analyses of poetry. Analysing poetry seems to have been a passe-partout for him, a seemingly harmless subject that allowed him to get a foot in the door of remote and secluded lecture halls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the poem "Georgics" 4.158-83, by Virgil is presented. It outlines Virgil's description of his bees' division of labour and likens it to that of the Cyclopes as they fashion Jupiter's thunderbolts. It examines the question raised in the lines 177-8 of synthetically coherence and relevancy causing to ask if whether Virgil states that love of having, drives or motivates the Cecropian bees.

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Elegy" by Sextus Propertius. It states that the poem demands a response and announces itself as significant. It presents the poet-lover's dream of imagining ways on how to save his lover after being shipwrecked. It points on the generically conventional character of the poem named Cynthia and the poet's attempt of rescuing her permits the love story to continue.

The article focuses on the commentary "Comento," by Angelo Poliziano in 1480 regarding the book "Silvae," by Publius Papinius Statius. It says that the commentary is remarkable in observing the recondite and erudite nature of the said book which appealed to Poliziano. It mentions that Poliziano relates the preface in "Silvae" to the tales of Orpheus and Achilles to show the conception of evolution in poetry. Moreover, Poliziano dealt with the communication idea in the multitude of audiences.

This essay offers poetry criticism of the poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." It provides a critical interpretation of its stanzas and offers different meanings behind several elements including green knight, the lady's role and wounds. It examines three representative cases including the concerns of various ladies and the different type of interventions. It also analyzes the importance of women to the poem's action.

This article offers poetry criticism of the poems "Anticlaudianus" by Alain de Lille and "House of Fame" by Geoffrey Chaucer. It provides a critical interpretation of the two poems and cites the influence of de Lille's works on Chaucer. It depicts the differences between their literary production and the various concerns which unite them. It also examines the allegory, operation of language and nature of the works.

This article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Troilus and Criseyde" by Geoffrey Chaucer. It provides critical interpretation of the poem and offers different meanings behind its several stanzas. It comments on the statement that Criseyde is alone when she seems to have a confidant in the persona of Pandarus. It explores several events on it particularly the various aspects of her friendlessness.

This essay discusses traditions of literary interpretation which have been popular in leftist political circles in the U.S. from the 1970s to the early 21st century. It focuses on a distinction between Marxist and multicultural approaches to the practice of symptomatic reading. The influence of the literary critic Fredric Jameson is noted, and issues such as humanism, materialism and causal necessity are addressed. Various understandings of the relationship between reading and history are analyzed, and a distinctively literary view of matter is advocated.

A literary criticism of the book "The Sacred Wood" by T.S. Eliot is presented. It explores Eliot's impressionistic criticism which is presented in the book. It examines the concepts of post-Romantic commentary style of poetry writing as understand and explain in Eliot's poetry. An overview of the book is also given.

This article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Clerk's Tale" by Geoffrey Chaucer. It outlines the basic undergarment which is the smock that speaks to readers of medieval literature through select details chosen by the author. It examines the detailed evocation of Griselda's costume that reinforces each major development in the plot. Thus, in his sartorial imagery, Chaucer follows literary convention, but with unexpected and inventive twists.

A literary criticism of the book "Ossi di Seppia," by Eugenio Montale is presented. It explores the influences brought by Petrarch, who has been seen as the lexical source of style and rhetorical strategies in Montale's poetry. It also examines the poetical models present in the poems included in the collection, as well as building of languages from historical terms.

This article focuses on the artist William Cowper and his texts narrating an encounter with a group of gypsies. It discusses that it is a passage often passed over by criticism, but close attention to his text is revealing. It mentions that such attention emphasizes the distinct but importantly connected ideas of ease and indolence, of being outcast and of wandering that permeates the poem, shedding a different light on them than that which has been widely known by criticism on the poem more generally.

A literary criticism of a poem by Sappho published as part of The Cologne papyrus (lines 9-20) is presented. The author analyzes the poem's language, focusing on a metaphor that compares the movements of the chorus of young girls that Sappho is addressing to that of a deer. Previous interpretations of the line in question are addressed and the author considers Sappho's use of an adjective meaning "nimble," classically used to describe men running in battle, to describe her female subjects.

The article presents a perspective on the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe. Being noted are Poe's incantatory techniques, which further the general effort to nullify the words with which it is made. The author stresses that Poe's poetry is pure negation and that it does not acquaint with supernal beauty that a writer could respect for the major tales which are great and trail-blazing realizations of inner experience. Moreover , the author states that Poe was deep into his own transcendentalism and is ready to claim it as the only authentic form.

In 1909, Forster delivered a scathing lecture about Rudyard Kipling, which outlines the political dangers implicit in Kipling's aesthetic. This introduction to the lecture briefly examines Forster's critique of Kipling's politics and aesthetic found in both the lecture and subsequent reviews of Kipling's work. Central to Forster's critique is his conviction that contemporary culture is and should be moving from authoritarian to democratic political systems. While Forster acknowledges Kipling's power and skill as a writer, he suggests that Kipling's aesthetic genius belongs to an earlier stage in the world's development, when authoritarian political models dominated. Within Forster's aristocratic democracy, Kipling's poetry is not only found wanting; it is politically debilitating and dangerous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 analyzes the poetry in the manuscript "4QInstruction." The author emphasizes that the alteration between bicola and tricola and the dominance of grammatical parallelism within and between verses is an important aspect of the text. The poem's verses is similar with the language and syntax of the biblical commandment to honor parents in Exodus 20:12 and Deuteronomy 5:16.

Contemporary critics who study women's literature often focus on the very act of speaking, or the possession of a write. The speaker in a poem seems to lend the women of her time a voice to express their feelings and in so doing offers a female perspective on social and cultural aspects of life. Adopting ideas from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own as well as Hélène Cixous's nolion of "writing the body," this article explores how women poets find a private space in their own rooms for examining "liberated" selves. A new conception of body and space is presented in these lyric voices. In contrast, in the voices of many critics, we hear a glaring double standard that exposes the persistence of patriarchal inhibition of women's freedom of expression. This dialogic tension between the voices reveals women's predicaments and their strong protests against the status quo in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a criticism and interpretation of Plautus "Bacchides" 884-9, in which the slave Chrysalus threatens to fetch a kitchen utensil to stab the soldier and make him more severely wounded than soricina nenia. The article discusses the articles written to unravel the mystery of confossiorem soricina nenia.

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 examines the poem "Venus and Adonis," by Philip Kolin. The unusual number of animals inhabiting the poem is noted. The animals in the poem are perceived in ways true both to Ovidian animism and to Darwinian evolutionary science. The poem's comedic first half is also analyzed.

This article presents information related to the poem "Wordes Unto Adam," by Geoffrey Chaucer. One word-Adam-has dominated criticism of Chaucer's witty, seven-line invective against scribal error and textual mistransmission. Some critics have explored the figurative implications of the name, arguing an analogy between Chaucer's erring scribe and the biblical Adam. A further trend has been to locate the poem within a tradition of complaints by artists against the transmitters of their work, an approach that generally finds little of specific importance in the name itself.

This essay presents a literary criticism of the poem "Le Xuan, Beautiful Spring" by Yusef Komunyakaa. The poem's one obscurity is explained when we know that "Le Xuan, Beautiful Spring" was the given name for Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, the sister-in-law of South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem, a very active player in the power politics of the early 1960s both in Vietnam and America. Komunyakaa has said that he often begins his poems by posing a central image that requires extrapolation. Here the image is a photograph of Madame Nhu, a souvenir. For those who have read Komunyakaa's poetry, it hardly needs demonstrating that sex and violence are inextricably linked in his imagination.

The article offers an approach to the questions surrounding the identification of Longus' character Philetas with the Hellenistic poet Philetas or Philitas. It argues that the fictional characters Daphnis and Chloe consult Philetas for, among other things, a lexical definition of "erês." Longus was famed in antiquity also for his critical writing, particularly his lexigraphical work the "ataktoi glêssai."

Analyses the poem "A Metrical History of Christianity," by Edward Taylor. Discussion of his sense of poetic vocation and Puritan poetics; The relation of the poem to Puritan storytelling approaches in prose and verse.

Focuses the letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the poet John Payne during the early 1870s. Criticism of Rosetti on Payne's work; Lack of general enthusiasm for Payne's poetry; Disintegration of the friendship of Rosetti and Payne.

Presents a literary criticism of the works of Virginia Woolf. Her endeavor to render the inner working of the mind; Suggestions that her work is poetic; Author's assertion that Woolf's modernism is not purely concerned with recording the subjective mind or heightened experience, but is deeply invested, stylistically and ideologically, in representing the ordinary; Lack of attention from the critics about her commitment to ordinary experience.

Comments on Bertolt Brecht's poem 'The Manifesto.' Reasons it is worthwhile to study the two great didactic poems of the Romans, Virgil's 'Georgica' and Lucretius' 'Of the Nature of Things'; Discussion on hexameter; Overview on the relationship of poetry to doctrine.

Presents a critical analysis of Robert Hayden's poetry. Application of the principles of the blues and the elegy to the concrete circumstances of Afro-Americans in Hayden's neighborhood, Detroit's Paradise Valley; Experiment with the eight-bar blues stanza and its ABCB ballad rhyme-scheme which Langston Hughes had employed in 'Sylvester's Dying Bed.'

Traces some of the major trends and debates in Ovidian studies, especially in work on `Fastsi' and `Metamorphoses.' Genre and allusion; Poetic authority and Augustan discourse.

Opinion. Discusses Sterling Brown, criticisms and poetry, with reference to singer William Butler Yeats. Background information on Brown; Reference to the book `Book of American Negro Poetry'; What was expressed in Brown's book `Southern Road.'