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The article reports that like several poems by Wallace Stevens, the composition of his wartime poem "Esthétique du Mal" was partly shaped by the dimensions of the legal notepad sheets on which it was drafted. Topics include examines when critics address the genesis of Stevens's poems, they reflexively recall the image of Stevens composing his poems on walks to and from work.

This article traces a relationship between Dickens and the Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, who declared several times his longtime love for Pickwick Papers. While offering an introduction to Pessoa's life and thinking, the question which is posed is what Pessoa gained from Dickens, and here the significance of the different personae whom he created in his poetry needs to be taken into account: the pseudonyms he adopted which were more than that, but were other imagined lives, called "heteronyms." The relation of these to the concept of "Boz" and the other names Dickens adopted, and the concept of the "posthumous" in both Dickens and Pessoa, and the relationship of the real life to the imagined life, are all topics for investigation. They bring out more complexity in Dickens; they illustrate further how much the poet learned from him, and how much Dickens enabled him to survive and produce work which forms a significant contribution to European literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of books related to English literature received by the journal. These books include "Recovering Christina Resetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics," "Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present," and "The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief."

The enthusiasm of Sabine Huynh, a French writer and poet, who translated some of the poems and published them with the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah[1] in 2020 as I Survivre à Son Histoire i , made me realize that these poems are important communication. At this moment the cold enters my bones from the wind between the cracks that let me peek at the countryside I am leaving forever that cold remains Footnotes 1 Karen Alkalay-Gut, "Survivre à son histoire", Foundation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. They became teachers of Esperanto in order to escape to Palestine through the international Esperanto conference in Sweden but were sent back to Danzig for their lack of papers. [Extracted from the article]

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]

In The Waste Land's centenary year, this article considers Dickens's pervasive impact on T. S. Eliot's poem. Echoes and allusions in The Waste Land , as well as direct references in Eliot's letters, range across Dickens's work from Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend. Attention is paid, for example, to precedents for Eliot's "waste land" in Dickens's urban landscapes; a shared interest, in Dombey and "A Game at Chess," in Shakespeare's Cleopatra; images of imprisonment; and the "Problem of Dickensian Allusion" that arises from the sheer extent of the connections that might be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Della Cruscanism, a circle of European late-eighteenth century sentimental poets and Newspaper Poetics. Topics include Della Cruscanism began when a group of English and Italian friends living in Florence, Italy published privately a collection of poetry called The Florence Miscellany, and Della Cruscan poetry, was to become a common feature of all of the most widely read newspapers of the late eighteenth century.

This paper offers a fresh perspective on the representation of the Muse(s) in Pindar. Two recent studies addressing this issue have argued for a clear distinction between the epinikia and the cult songs. This paper aims to reassess this approach and to offer a different perspective on the problem, focusing on the metaphors applied to the relationship with the Muse(s). While the image as drawn by Kantzios and Maslov emerges as simplistic, some of the metaphors can be linked to the given genre because they are based on analogies to the context of performance, which also enhance the cognitive effect of the poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new reading of the Tithonus/Dawn couple in Sappho's Tithonus poem. It identifies three elements lurking beside the Tithonus/Dawn couple: eros, chronos , and gêras. It suggests that eros, chronos , and gêras haunt this heterosexual couple, altering the power dynamics between them, just like the third element looming beside the couple in the queer couple theory of Lee Edelman (2004) and Brilmyer et al. (2019). In Sappho's representation of Tithonus and Dawn, these three elements entangle themselves with the couple at different stages through integration, destabilization, and conjunction, thus establishing alternative models to the heterosexual couple norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A personal narrative is presented in which the author shares his experience for visiting the Melville Society Archive in New Bedford Whaling Museum, which include use of resources on Clarel and Melville's development as a poem that clarify thinking about the poem's composition and structure.

The sources cited within this issue are presented including

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 reads Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno as a "stuplime" forerunner to experimental poetry, arguing that theories and problems surrounding the avant-garde can help us situate the text as operating somewhere between an archive and a poem. I argue that Jubilate Agno , like many twenty-first-century experimental poems, is an archival project, and Smart's mechanical ciphers, citations, translations, wordplay, and repetition are formal choices deployed to transcribe natural histories and encyclopedias. This mechanical ciphering strains a reader's ability to attend to the literal information that Smart transcribes, foregrounding instead the labor of transcription and the idea of information. In other words, Jubilate Agno splits the difference between serving as a useful database and providing an information overload. As I argue, the formal and critical challenges posed by this poem-archive illustrate how eighteenth-century poetic experimentation was predicated on the existence of imperial archives and how this history continues to shape the poetic function of information and mechanism in contemporary poetry. Underlying this analysis is the problem of whether or how eighteenth-century studies can better inhabit its archives and texts—how do we acknowledge history without developing an acquisitive relation to violence, without making violence a commodity within the academy? Rather than answering that question, this essay will consider how Smart's formal choices, read through an avant-garde approach to information, confront us with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines apotheoses that occur in the last two books of Ovid's Metamorphoses and argues that they are modeled after previous rapes from the poem. In the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, Ovid uses rapina to mean "deification," a word only used elsewhere in the poem with the definition of "rape." Similar language of snatching also occurs in the deification of Romulus. Aeneas's apotheosis parallels rape through its evocation of nympholepsy. By insinuating that apotheosis is rape, Ovid seems to be commenting on the politicization of both rape and apotheosis in Roman mythmaking, especially for political reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the contrast between ostensible closure and foreseeable continuation is a crucial feature of Ovid's first exilic book. More broadly, the exiled poet's longing for the end of his punishment is more and more challenged by the emperor's alleged unwillingness to recall him--which forces Ovid's Tomitan carmen to keep on going, thus making it ultimately incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the De Raptu Proserpinae , Claudian refocuses the natural cycles of regeneration that color the myth of Proserpina and Ceres by placing a significant emphasis on the landscape in which his poem's events unfold: the island of Sicily. This paper argues that the focus on Sicilian landscape in the DRP makes manifest the central concerns of the poem, allowing Claudian to rearticulate the cyclical focus of his epic. Through an examination of the progression of DRP 's three extended Sicilian ekphrases, we can see how Sicily, and, specifically, the volcanic Mt. Etna as its figurative center, embodies the paradoxical cycle of destruction and renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rutilius Namatianus's poem De Reditu Suo , written around AD 418, is especially famous for its gloomy and almost "romantic" depictions of ruins and nocturnal landscapes. However, at a deeper level of reading, it thematizes an anxiety towards the ideas of origin, fatherhood/fatherland, and language that is systematically explored in this paper from different theoretical perspectives, most notably Lacanian psychoanalysis. This new insight into the underlying fears and hopes conveyed (and often silenced) by the poem allows a new interpretation of the piece in its entirety, which should ultimately be considered as a reaction to the collapse of classical logocentrism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the active landscape of documentary film in the early 1940s, the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a short screenplay advocating for public housing in Philadelphia. Despite its distinguished production team and Oscar nomination, A Place to Live (Brandon Films, 1941) has not been contextualized by scholarly work. This essay considers Rukeyser's narrative innovations as A Place to Live follows one family's desire for publicly funded housing. Rukeyser uses montage to establish a dialectical contrast between the conventions of male enunciatory authority and the film's female subject, who rises to an identificatory position that requires audience response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1931, when the fame of Emily Dickinson was still not well established in her home country, a Japanese scholar, Bunsho Jugaku, evaluated her poetry highly, specifying the unique, concise form of her poems as well as her love of nature. The Emily Dickinson Society of Japan was founded in 1980, eight years prior to the incorporation of the Emily Dickinson International Society in the United States. The fact that Dickinson's poetry is actively studied in Japan may well be due to the characteristics it shares with the Japanese love of nature and our cultural forms such as haiku and black-and-white drawings. According to a Japanese specialist in the history of sciences, Masao Watanabe, to Japanese there is no clear distinction between human beings and living things in nature. Furthermore, Japanese take pleasure in using their imagination to insert the unwritten in a poem or fill the white space in artwork. Tenshin Okakura calls such Japanese aestheticism "a worship of the Imperfect" in his book The Book of Tea. Therefore, it could be said that we Japanese are eager to study Dickinson's poetry because we feel in it some affinity with Japanese culture and our love of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the articles by Nandini Pandey and by Zara Torlone on Vergil's work and on the Harvard School approach. Topics include the ways that Vergilian texts provide an interpretation that is compatible with the Harvard-School method or with balancing the Harvard method with other methods, the influence of Vergil's poem "Aeneid" on Russian authors, and the diverse views of Harvard School's members.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various essays within this issue including one by David Paroissien on Charles Dickens' poetic construction, one by Murray Baumgarten on reader's exploration of urban palimpsest and one by Elana Gomel on the novel's urban space movement.

The poems of Sidonius contain several examples drawn from classical mythological sources and exhibit references to mythological subjects and figures. As panegyrics for Roman emperors, Sidonius's poems are situated in a highly political context. If Sidonius makes use of antique myths and gods in order to praise Roman emperors, his use of such literary models surely is an intentional and meaningful device. This paper aims to discuss the function of Apollo who, as god of the Muses, is the poet's source of inspiration and an important figure for the poetics of Sidonius's Carmina. [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]

This paper argues that Martial challenges Horace's lyric project in two epigrams of Book 10. In 10.68, the epigrammatist engages in literary polemic, at once contentious and humorous, by evoking Odes 1.7 and then scolding a Roman matrona for her inappropriate Greek blandishments. 10.63, the epitaph of another matrona and modeled on Odes 3.30, tops Horace's affirmation of his success and immortality. This veiled, playful engagement reflects attitudes toward Greek behavior apparent in other epigrams and contemporary satire and contributes to our scanty evidence for the early reception of the Odes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the evolution of the haunted landscape in T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." Topics discussed include the possibility of a science of religion, Eliot's interest in anthropology and alternative systems of belief, exploration of intellectual territory, and Eliot's paper "The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual" on so-called primitive societies by Western anthropologists.

ABSTRACT This paper discusses shared thematic ground between ancient erotic verse and modern Anglo-American popular music, and presents a "pop topos" assignment that asks students to illustrate ancient erotic topoi with modern popular music of their choosing, an activity the author has used successfully in an advanced Latin reading course on Roman elegy. By bringing familiar modern cultural artifacts into discourse with social and literary issues in ancient Greece and Rome, assignments such as the "pop topos" provide students an occasion for thinking about how Graeco-Roman literature can help inform the role of popular music in the ideological constructions of their own society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the interaction of Roman moral discourse and autonomous female voices in the Argonautica and Ovid's Heroides. It argues that Valerius' heroines use the moral language of the Heroides to reflect on the function of traditional language. By assigning culturally encoded roles to themselves and one another, these heroines present the audience with alternative versions of their stories that undermine the very terms they employ: they thus enact the problems inherent in using the language of the past to interpret the present. The cultural vocabulary that authorizes their voices to an internal audience presents a serious threat to the community, when coming from the mouths of marginalized characters. In illustrating the slippage between the roles of wife, witch, heroine and whore, Valerius invites his audience to consider the function of tradition, both social and literary, as a lens through which to understand the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General notions regarding Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Sargent Osgood are that an intertextual relationship between the poets lasted approximately one year before the infamous letter scandal broke them apart. Antithetical to these notions, it now appears that Osgood attempted to renew her relationship with Poe in summer of 1847 by publishing a pseudonymous effusion to him. "To — — —," provocatively signed "Anna F. Allan," calls out to Poe to strike his "wild lyre once more" for her. Given no apparent response, the following month another uncharacteristic Osgood poem, titled "Zarifa," was published. From this poem, Poe appears to have adapted a line for an unpublished couplet written on the back of the Stuart manuscript of "Eulalie." "Zarifa" demonstrates the manuscript was in Poe's possession at the time of the poem's publication, and it gives—with some confidence—an earliest date for Poe's couplet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides information on the archival collections of literary works by American poet Wallace Stevens in the John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester in England. Efforts of Frank Kermode, professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the university, to acquire Stevens' manuscripts for the college; Significance of the Rylands papers as a testament to the poet's sensitivity to the importance of the materiality of his texts; Participation of Stevens in the production of his poems.

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]

In the opening piece of his poetic corpus (Carm. 1), the 5th century Gallo-Roman poet Sidonius Apollinaris presents the reader with an archetypical situation: after Jupiter has been established as king of the universe by Natura, various gods and demi-gods offer various kinds of praise to their new master. The peculiarity of these expressions of praise, however, is that they do not consist of words but of sounds produced by musical instruments, as well as by applause, feet, and, in the very middle of the poem, even a hinnitus. I argue that this poem emphasizes "origins" at different levels: it is the first poem in the entire collection, and it works as a praefatio to the following poem, a panegyric to the emperor Anthemius, but I will also argue that this poem invokes nothing less than the original violent process of giving significance to sounds. But Jupiter's "semantic" abuse acquires a subversive value when considered in its own textual environment; this poem suggests in an exemplary way the violent and repressive substance of imperial panegyric. [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.

The emendation "Gaza" in line 3 of Crinagoras Anth. Pal. 9.284 has not been widely adopted due to the city's purported obscurity. This paper argues that not only would Gaza have been well known to the inhabitants of Mytilene (the home town of Crinagoras), it would have been associated with Pompey's generosity to Greek cities on his return from the East. The emendation thus restores a measure of political edge to an epigram expressing outrage over Caesar's treatment of Corinth, and illuminates the nature of its panhellenic commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medicine is firmly rooted in the sciences and derives much of its great power and influence from these roots. In this paper the author, with a career in clinical medicine, argues that there must also be room in medical practice for literature and poetry. He uses examples to build a case for this inclusion helping both patients and doctors in ways which are not in conflict with science but rather allow a much more complete and compassionate picture of the human interactions that are the essence of medicine. The paper argues that a greater understanding of literature and poetry written both by those inside medicine and those observing medicine from the outside can help in crucial ways to guide and sustain doctors, and thus their patients, when wielding the extraordinary power of scientific medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights a presentation focused on poetry and the genesis of the publication "The Woman Who Began at the End: 300 Letters From Paris," during the 2014 Callaloo Conference. The author discusses her book of poetry "Everytime a Knot Is Undone, A God Is Released," her sculptures and drawings exhibited at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York City, and her papers and manuscripts, including literary letters, which were acquired by Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Jan Zwicky suggests that Lyric Philosophy may be read as a "letter to a revered parent--with whom I have quarrelled, but by whom I still wish to be understood." Though the "parent" thinker to whom she refers is Freud, Zwicky's conversation with Simone Weil in Wisdom & Metaphor addresses Weil as a "foremother" in the act of making "herself clear to herself." This paper examines Weil's role in Wisdom & Metaphor and considers Weil as an influence in Zwicky's poetry, reading "relinquishing" in Zwicky's poetry and "decreation" in Weil's philosophy as metaphors that resonate and debate with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the modernist poetic revisions made by literary critic and editor Marianne Moore on the poems of painter Marsden Hartley, and the influence of those revisions on Hartley's paintings of Mount Katahdin in Maine. Topics discussed include the relationship between painters and poets, the professional affinity between Moore and Hartley, and the changes Hartley made on his paintings of the mountain. The editing style of Moore and her advice to Hartley as a poet are detailed.

Tang poetry, which still attracts a lot of research interest due to its unique value and wide audience, is one of the highest achievements of Chinese culture. Tang poetry data have the characteristics of multisource heterogeneity and complex association. In this paper, we construct a knowledge service platform, KnowPoetry, based on a domain-specific knowledge graph of Tang poetry to support data-driven research in the field of Tang poetry. We first acquire knowledge service requirements from Tang poetry researchers. Then, we construct domain ontology and propose a human-machine coordinated knowledge extraction framework. The framework extracts and merges entities of poetry, poet and poet experience, and multidimension relations among them from massive Tang poetry data. Finally, we construct a large-scale domain-specific knowledge graph. Based on the knowledge graph, KnowPoetry provides researchers with Tang poetry domain knowledge services including knowledge navigation, association analysis, and semantic query. This platform can support researchers in navigating and discovering the inner relationship between Tang poetry in terms of emotion and imagery, analyzing poet social circle and life experiences, and realizing multidimensional semantic query. In the experiment, we evaluate the effect of domain knowledge service in supporting Tang poetry research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the views of poet Wallace Stevens on the connection between money and poetry. Discussion of money as a kind of poetry; Manifestations of tenses of money.

In this paper, the author considers the origins of the rhyme, -aura, which has played an important role in Western poetry. Numerous studies have addressed questions pertaining to the history of aura in general, but none have focused on the matter of aura specifically as a rhyme. Within this narrower focus, the history of the aura-rhyme is shown to center on one critical moment, in which the aura-pun in Ovid's Metamorphoses is transformed into the aura-rhyme in Arnaut Daniel's song "En cest sonet." Through a comparative reading of these two texts, conclusions are drawn regarding the relation of puns to rhymes, nouns to names, and the problems of isolating the origin of a rhyme historically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract:The later manuscripts of Emily Dickinson are distinct in that, unlike the poems written before 1875—poems that Dickinson would transcribe onto clean bifolium sheets of paper and then either bind or group together into fascicles and sets—these later poems and poetic fragments have been left in their "worksheet" state; that is, scripted onto scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, bits of newspaper cutting and the like. Exploring the unique material and spatial qualities of five of Dickinson's later manuscripts, this essay examines the ways these relate to a writerly and readerly performance of the poems scripted therein. Its aim in doing so is to discover how meanings are generated through Dickinson's material poetics. This essay, structured through an intimate engagement with each page, is informed by the following line of inquiry: what meanings emerge through a sustained engagement with the material and spatial properties of the page in relation to its verbal message? How does such an engagement span the distance and difference between the poet-in-process in one spatiotemporal context and the reader in another, critically engaging with the traces of Dickinson's scriptural "voice"? Such questions are indicative of the essay's wider aim, which is to evince a nuanced appreciation of lyricism premised upon an embodied and relational encounter between a discursive "I" and "you." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the use of writing poems against war if they reenact rather than alter the binaries and brutalities of the war imagination they claim to protest? Why does so much contemporary war poetry only compound war's depleting effect instead of offering us energy for resistance? In "The Life of Poetry" (1949), Muriel Rukeyser defines poetry as a vital but underused national resource for a culture dominated by war. As a creative transfer of energy, poetry complicates and resists habits of imagination that sustain war. Using Rukeyser's analysis to contrast a representative poem from the volume "Poets Against the War" (2003) to several poems by Forche, Celan, James Wright, Blake,Yeats, Oppen, and Levertov, this paper discusses ways in which poetry about war and wartime can provide useful, life-giving energy without replicating the very violences it claims to oppose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In this paper I argue that the large truth claims made in Pindar's gnomic language have a correspondingly large cultural function since they instantiate the capacity for unprecedented conceptual invention within a culture that lacks any master discourse in which its own self-understanding is embedded. I discuss the famous "Nomos basileus" fragment and its handling by Callicles in Plato's "Gorgias," and by Hölderlin in his "Pindar Fragments." I argue that, by using Pindar's claim as a starting point for reflections of their own, these thinkers recognize its contingency, and future orientation, as vatic speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay brings to light an important area of Langston Hughes's work as a writer and an intellectual that has been neglected by critics and scholars. In the discipline of American studies, Hughes is known primarily as a "folk poet," yet in his life he produced an enormous body of work that cannot be contained by this limited categorization, in particular the writing he published during the height of the cold war. The general conception of Hughes is that he went into political hiding after 1953, following his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, for the rest of his career, steered clear of socialist projects such as the politicization of literature. But a reflection on his writing of the 1950s compels a different conclusion. Specifically, "The First Book of Rhythms," published in 1954, based on a writing workshop for young people Hughes conducted in Chicago, is the focus of this paper. It embodies the main themes and strategies that unified Hughes's prolific literary output during the cold war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although in post-modern discourse doubt has been thrown on the value of ideas of emotions and character, I argue in this paper that a cognitive approach to Shakespeare enables us to see these matters a comprehensible way. Plays such as those of Shakespeare are simulations that run on minds. As we run one of these simulations we take on the goals of a protagonist, and run his or her plans—as depicted in the play—on our own cognitive system. Because of the suggestiveness, which Eastern literary theorists have called "dhvani," of Shakespeare's work, his plays enable us to explore not just understandings of others, but of ourselves. Shakespeare's poetry along with processes such as empathetic identification, invoke our own memories and emotions in relation to contexts that the plays offer. Although plays are artificial, in running them as simulations they enable us to understand in ourselves, and also in others, more of the real relations between substance (inner goals and experience) and shadow (outer behavior) than is often possible in ordinary life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of prose in Greece has been linked to broader cultural and intellectual developments under way in the classical period. Prose has also been characterized as challenging poetry's traditional status as the privileged expression of the culture. Yet throughout the classical period and beyond, poetry was stilt regularly invoked as the yardstick by which innovation was measured. This paper investigates how poetry figures in the earliest accounts of prose style. Focusing on Isocrates, Alcidamas, and Aristotle, it argues that although each author distinguishes between the styles of prose and poetry, none is able to sustain the distinction consistently. The criteria for what constitutes an acceptable level of poeticality in prose were unstable. Moreover, the diverse conceptions of poetic style were tied to intellectual polemics and professional rivalries of the early- to mid-fourth century BCE and reflect competing aims and ideals for rhetorical performance in prose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critical analysis of "T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including Annotations of Ezra Pound," edited by Valerie Eliot. To students of twentieth-century modernism, 1971 was the year when Eliot published a facsimile edition of "The Waste Land's," pre-publication manuscripts. The event invited new accounts of the poem's genetics and fresh assessments of how those might bear on the understanding of the poem. His efforts were followed in 1977 by Lyndall Gordon's attempt at "Dating the Waste Land Fragments," a wide-ranging survey which addressed both the principal parts of "The Waste Land," and the various drafts and ancillary poems. In the end, however, Gordon remained divided over the claims of two sharply incompatible hypotheses for dating the principal parts of "The Waste Land," and concluded that the question was, at least for the present, "unresolved." "The Waste Land," is still a determinant of modernist consciousness, post-modernist also if it has come to that, and the profit may be that people shall learn a little more about the history of their own minds.