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Theodor W. Adorno's study of the fascist valences of jargon is also an evaluation of lyric poetry, which should be jargon-allergic. Poetry, for Adorno, should prioritize mediation and constellation, two concepts of patient, dialectical abstraction central to German critical theory that also organize, as self-conscious modernist problematic, the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The Jargon of Authenticity is a polemic against the kind of "immediacy" that Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism diagnoses as contemporary culture's language crisis. These two theoretical works reveal together that poeticized jargon and immediacy style are errors of both politics and aesthetics. Stevens's philosophical and citational reflexivity takes mediation as form, theme, and value, recognizing its critical and aesthetic force during the prehistory of the crisis of the contemporary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it possible to speak about the unspeakable as it is represented in music, lyric poetry, and tragedy? The answer is yes, if we adopt a purely aesthetic perspective. The answer is no, if we adopt the perspective of the transcendental subject as the metaphysical source of music, lyric poetry, and tragedy. In this paper, I conceptualize the nondiscursivity of music, lyric poetry, and Attic tragedy in the philosophical aesthetics of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. I also make a few incidental remarks to Plato's Socrates and Aristotle as well as the Theban plays by Sophocles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While I argue that the elasticity of Tuckerman's rhyme schemes and malleable Petrarchan divisions are literally and metaphysically expansive, I am using "dissolution" here to acknowledge the nineteenth-century context in which Tuckerman's subversive formal displays, which critics deemed "inept" and "defective", were seen as dismantling the sonnet form.[23] The poems form parallels between their neglected subjects and the sonnet's historical rejection of non-allegorized portrayals of decomposition. Moreover, had Tuckerman's peerless imagistic sonnets found their way into the poetic canon, their existence might have challenged the hard and fast divide we often erect between Romanticism and Modernism. iii. open endings Tuckerman is far from the only nineteenth-century American to complicate closure in his poetry; we need only look to Dickinson's trademark, resolution-forestalling dashes or to Whitman's resounding free verse vowels to acknowledge this fact.[39] Yet as a sonnet writer, Tuckerman's rejection of closure works through unprecedented means. Yet in such waste, no waste the soul descries ... For whoso waiteth, long & patiently, Will see a movement stirring at his feet - Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Sonnet V:II[1] i. wasted aesthetics One of the most gnomic moments in Ecclesiastes occurs at its end, when the book's final poem aligns the waning of life with a series of collapsing forms. In 1959, for instance, Samuel Golden opined that the sonnet was held "low in esteem" in Tuckerman's day.[25] A few decades later, poet Andrew Hudgins claimed that Tuckerman remains consigned to relative obscurity because "the sonnet was not a popular form" in his lifetime.[26] Yet Tuckerman was hardly writing in a geographic vacuum. [Extracted from the article]

The protocol of lyric reading is well-known: there is a speaker of the poem, who should not be confused with the poet; the dramatic situation of the speech act must be gleaned as context for interpretation and analysis; the poem itself should be the focus of interpretation, without considering the biography or intentions of the poet; historical context is only relevant insofar as it is "in" the poem itself. The most obvious interlocutor for the "Ode to the West Wind" is Coleridge's "France: an Ode", which Shelley thought "the finest modern ode."[22] It's also clear, as many have pointed out, that Shelley's poem is in conversation with Wordsworth's Intimations Ode. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated I PU i . 20 See I. J. Kapstein, "The Symbolism of the Wind and the Leaves in Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind,'" I PMLA i 51.4 (1936): 1069-79; Eben Bass, "The Fourth Element in 'Ode to the West Wind,'" I Papers on Language and Literature i , 3 (1967): 327-38; and James Rieger, I The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley i (New York: G. Brazillier, 1967), 169-71. 21 H. Buxton Forman, "How Shelley Approached the Ode to the West Wind", I Bulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Rome i 1.2 (1913): 9. 22 Abrams, "Structure and Style", 201. As Wolfson pointed out in her classic reading of Shelley's "Social Form", Shelley is "aware of the agency of readers (and by extension, publishers, booksellers) over his texts", and "is constantly investigating the project of communicating with other minds in poetic form."[80] In Wolfson's reading, Shelley's acute awareness of the fact that "The Mask of Anarchy" would not be published turns the poem's radical politics into a quasi-masturbatory aesthetic performance. [Extracted from the article]

The article features several Victorian women poets. Topics mentioned include the description of various views of lyric history in the monograph "Conversing in Verse: Conversation in 19th Century English Verse," by Elizabeth Helsinger, the depiction of the function of poetry among labor class in the work of Eva Dema, and the argument by women poets about culture, instability, gender, political, social, and racial issues.

Letitia Landon faced two seemingly contradictory complaints from contemporary critics: that her writing was mechanical and repetitive, and that it was overly personal, suggesting vanity and egotism. Each is a familiar criticism of lyric poetry, yet Landon's willingness to court them both in her work suggests a paradoxical dependency of intimacy on cliché. This essay explores the implications of Landon's intimate clichés for broader understandings of lyric, sociability, and the highly gendered publishing environment of the period. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, it reframes a typically representational debate about lyric in communicative terms. Finally, it suggests that Landon's repetition can be understood as an ethical project to defend common experience from the advocates of rural solitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of lyric poetry—how it works, what it does, and how to define it-- benefits from close comparison to the theory and practice of reading comics. Comics and lyric poems, as a medium and as a genre, share with each other features that they do not share with other genres and media: these features may prove basic to the phenomenology of reading either, especially when creators notice and use them. Both comics and lyric poems rely on breaks between units—line breaks and panel borders—which can be regular or irregular, and which guide a reader's experience. Both connect semantics to something else: voice and sound, for lyric poetry, visuals in the case of comics. Both invoke complex, sometimes contradictory, reader-controlled relations to the passage of time. And both display an unusual capacity for reader involvement and reader identification, through face and figure in comics, through voice and fictions of voice in lyric. These parallels can help us read canonical lyric, such as a stanzaic elegy by Wilfred Owen: they suggest that credible fictions of persons remain at the root of lyric experience. Those fictions seem more powerful, and friendlier, seen in particular comics that focus on friendly, willing or eager readers, and in particular in the superhero comics series Gwenpool Strikes Back, by Leah WIlliams, David Baldéon and collaborators. Williams and Baldéon's lighthearted, self-conscious treatment of their Marvel Comics heroine points to the seriousness with which readers and listeners require fictions of belonging, an experience of seeming present and feeling heard, in order to take part in these foundational literary kinds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the intriguing prominence of inscriptions on surfaces such as metal, wood, stone, and flesh in books 3 and 4 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. It argues that in their formal organization, rhetorical configurations, and classical genealogies, these inscriptions replicate the principal characteristics of lyric poetry. In foregrounding the conjunction of language and matter, these lyric inscriptions offer a mechanism of thinking through the nature of poetic creation out of available linguistic resources. As a result, lyric emerges as the foundational form of poetry whose affordances are indispensable to Spenser's epic undertaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that George Herbert's lyric "The Water-course" draws on the forms of Renaissance funerary epigraphy and specifically on the technique of conflated-line inscription known as " versus concordantes " found on intramural monuments in the period. Understanding Herbert's poem in relation to this technique allows us, broadly, to see one point of connection between lyric poetry and epigraphy. This article argues for the reclassification of "The Water-course" as a pseudo-inscriptional epitaph, demonstrates its links to the poems around it at the close of "The Temple," and shifts our understanding of its stanza form, uncovering its links to a group of meta-poetic sexain lyrics inside Herbert's collection that reflect ambivalently on the moral status of poetry writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the subject of waiting in the poems of Thomas Hardy by examining his works in the 1925 poetry collection "Human Shows, Far Fantasies, Songs and Trifles." Also cited are Hardy's poem "Waiting Both," how waiting indefinitely involves mental work of looking and knowing, and the focus by Hardy on continuity and temporality in his lyric poetry.

Marías examina en cada poema el grado de confluencia entre las experiencias del autor histórico y de su hablante poético, y la construcción de éste en tres campos: el psicológico (si es feliz y está satisfecho o al contrario); el ético (si se considera a sí mismo virtuoso, un aprendiz en la senda de la sabiduría, o un ser errado); y el literario (qué tan importante es su condición de poeta dentro del texto). Marías atribuye la ausencia de autoras en su corpus a "la escasez de mujeres poetas en el Quinientos hispano" (101). Marías, Clara. [Extracted from the article]

Philosophers discussing lyric poetry often focus on first personal expression as a mark of the "lyric," which has resulted in a narrow characterization of the nature of intimacy in lyric poetry that focuses on the individual poet, poetic voice, or reader. In this article, I highlight a valuable way in which some works of lyric poetry can engage us in a kind of intimate relationship that connects the reader with the voice of the poem through the use of the second person. In illustrating my claims, I focus on Claudia Rankine's collection of poems Citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on literary genre most associated with music and Allen Grossman's idea of "the virtual poem," before going on to consider what that model might have to say about the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It mentions lyric poetry positions itself in the ode as commentary on an ideal music that belongs to the remote past. It also mentions techniques in time acquire quasi-institutional status as signifiers of poetry's music.

The article offers information the most striking intersections between differing types of unconventional desires in English and French lyric poetry at the turn of the twentieth century. It mentions the forms of passion that involve women's sexual adventures in the guise of a Renaissance; and also mentions the serious contemplation of a handsome man and the pale fragility of a sexually inexperienced woman, blur customary distinctions between the sexes.

ABSTRACT Carm. 3.12.3 contains the expression patruae verbera linguae, which has always been translated as "the lashing of an uncle's tongue." Though proverbially referring to the verbal scourging of the paternal uncle, the topical Roman disciplinarian, these verbera linguae can in fact also allude to the archaic practice of the ius osculi. The enforcing of this obsolete custom does not appear realistic, but, by alluding to it, Horace took a chance to explore the gender dynamics between male and female realms while simultaneously conjuring up the very Augustan preoccupation for righteous mores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Why does the term "girl" in early modern discourse designate both female children and fallen women, emblems of sexual innocence and emblems of promiscuity? This article investigates girlish sexuality in the love lyrics of Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller. Extending the trope of the young and unattainable woman backward in time to her childhood, these poets play with the slippage between "girl" as a father's term of affection and "girl" as a lover's endearment. If the mistresses of Petrarchan convention were unattainable because they consciously withheld sexual favors, the little mistresses of Marvell and Waller were even more so. I argue that it is precisely because these poets constructed female children as innocent and pure that they became objects of erotic attraction for adult men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract I argue that John Donne uses descriptions of bodily decay to explore the potential for intimacy between lovers and the role lyric plays in its creation. As the physical boundaries that delimit individual bodies dissolve, Donne envisions a moment when lovers might materially blend and fuse to a degree that would otherwise be impossible. The effects of this conceit are twofold: first, focusing on decay allows Donne to emphasize the role of corporeality and reject a Neo-Platonic hierarchy of being. And second, Donne uses this conceit to develop a theory of the lyric that emphasizes its ability to transcend material reality in order to create and maintain a hyperbolic vision of intimacy in the face of separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Claudia Rankine's 2004 poem Don't Let Me Be Lonely : An American Lyric is often hailed as experimental, combining documentary photographs, custom-made graphics, and written-word poetry. I argue that we can best understand the book's lyric project by anchoring it in one of the book's images, and reading both in conjunction with a genre with a related social project, the contemporary infographic map of the United States. These all display something crucial about twenty-first century political thought: a tendency to conflate, confuse, and equate the individual political subject with the wider system to which s/he/they are joined. Not only does articulating this mode of thought contextualize lyric subject experimentation as part of a wider socio-cultural trend, it also displays an impasse in contemporary political struggle. When we think systemically, we can link one instance of suffering to our social whole, and the racist, misogynist, transphobic, capitalist system that shapes our lives. But this mode of thinking displays a new political problem in the instant it seems to clarify another: though we understand that our social whole operates within and through every person, we cannot simply excise oppressive systems by targeting individuals. We can no more eradicate systemic racism by firing one racist police officer than we can eradicate homophobia by censuring one homophobic person. In contemporary political organizing, this impasse appears in the general experience of hopelessness many of us have when we look at our political landscape, one in which we are so full of desire for better lives, and so bereft of clear ways to give them to each other. Rankine's subtitle makes clear that her experimentation attempts to move beyond the single, limited lyric subject, aiming to be adequate to the social whole of the United States. While Rankine interrogates this poetic question textually, she does so more directly through one image of a human figure's internal anatomy, which shares a marked formal resemblance to contemporary infographic maps. Custom-made for the book, Rankine's image says immediately what more circumscribed poetic interrogation does not: we are our wider social system. The dynamics of the social whole of the United States exist in every one of us. Reading Rankine's image alongside the infographic maps, I show how this internet news media form popularizes and indexes what emerges in Rankine's text: a tendency to see the subject and system as one and the same. I elucidate the wider cultural heft of the infographic, which is explicitly associated with systemic thought and a collapse of epistemic distance between subject and system. The reading practice I employ in this argument is an instance of the enlivened methodology so urgently necessary in this social moment, one that requires us to reach outside of the text to the wider cultural world it aims to speak to and serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge of Guillaume de Machaut's literary and musical works is attested since 1380 in the Francophile court of Aragon, where his art exerted an influence that endured well into the fifteenth century. Catalan poets such as Andreu Febrer and Pere Torroella were greatly influenced by Machaut's poetry. This can be seen in the way they adapted the lay and ballade forms, and in the French section of chansonnier Vega-Aguiló (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MSS 7–8), an important witness to the poetry that originated with the troubadours and was fashionable in the Crown of Aragon until the end of the fifteenth century. This article approaches the role of Machaut's poetry and music in the construction of a literary canon in the Crown of Aragon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When, in an essay on the poet Théodore de Banville, Charles Baudelaire declares that "hyperbole and apostrophe are the forms of language which are not only most agreeable but also most necessary" in lyric, he leaves little room for understatement. Is understatement less necessary, less pleasing in lyric? What should one make of all the various moments in lyric poetry when poets moderate their language and say less then they mean? In recent years and thanks in large part to the work of Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, especially their Lyric Theory Reader, we have begun to question the conflation of poetry and lyric. As they have argued, the collapse of poetry into lyric is a critical invention and comes at the expense of attention to other poetic forms. If Baudelaire aligns lyric with hyperbole—and if lyric comes to stand for all poetry, for better and for worse, after Baudelaire—how dependent on hyperbole is our understanding of poetry, specifically after romanticism? What would it mean to think poetry not through hyperbole or apostrophe but through litotes, a trope that prominently figures poetic restraint? In this essay I track several uses of poetic understatement, specifically litotes, through to what M. H. Abrams names the Greater Romantic Lyric. Alongside a poetic tradition that embraces hyperbole is one that embraces understatement, litotes in particular, where the poet's minimal affirmation is accomplished through the weak work of double-negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the political implications of the musical dimension of antislavery ballads in the context of English abolitionism. It examines two ballads, William Cowper's "The Negro's Complaint" (1788) and Hannah More's "The Sorrows of Yamba" (1797), both of which were set to the tune of an older English song, Richard Glover's "Admiral Hosier's Ghost" (1740). Glover's ballad commemorates a Caribbean military victory over Spain, as well as a humanitarian disaster—the deaths of thousands of English sailors from yellow fever in Porto Bello (an outpost for the slave trade) under Robert Walpole's leadership. Drawing on Susan Stewart's theory of lyric possession, the essay argues that antislavery ballads by Cowper and More are formally haunted by the melancholy imperial context of Glover's song. It suggests that the project of constructing a political voice for the African slave in these ballads is compromised by the tune they conjure to broadcast that voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author reflects on several aspects of lyric poetry. It mentions Jonathan Culler draws attention to lyric poetry as a form of epideictic rhetoric. It also mentions lyric poetry's engagement repeat and reverse tenets of Emmanuel Levinas's argument against the engagement of literature with politics or ethics.

Starting from the well-known correspondence between Odes 1.7.30-31 and Aeneid 1.198-99, this article finds a deep intertextual relationship between 1.7 and the Aeneid (Book 1, especially, but also Books 4,6,7, and 8), anchored by correspondences of occasion and theme (speeches of arrival, dining, and wine). The article argues for Vergilian priority, explaining Horace's (largely corrective) emulation of the Aeneid in terms of his literary self-positioning as lyric poet. Further confirmation of Horatian dialogue with the Aeneid is found elsewhere in the "Parade Odes" (1.1-9) as well as in 1.11 and 1.18. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines one of the decision-making moments in Petrarch's editing of his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf), when he erases the ballata "Donna mi vene spesso ne la mente" from the partial holograph Vaticano Latino 3195 and inserts the madrigal "Or vedi amor che giovenetta donna" over the erasure, creating a dynamic, palimpsestic relationship between the erased ballad and the Rvf. This shift in the making of the text represents the heart of the artistry of Petrarch's visual poetics. The study of erasures and palimpsests in the partial holograph and other significant early witnesses helps us understand and trace the history of the work and affects our consideration of modern and contemporary editions of the text. The Petrarchive digital edition of the Rvf () implements new solutions, in the encoding and presentation of the edition, for exposing and highlighting the dynamic, palimpsestic features of Petrarch's visual poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the auditor and the auditor-function in understanding the genre of the dramatic monologue. Topics include the genre's purpose of self-understanding or self-revelation in the use of gratuitous speech, the role of the auditor as an immediate and active interlocutor, and the dramatic monologue as a form of rhetoric performance. Other topics include the split views of the auditor as superfluous to the form or necessary for the genre, and the works of poet Augusta Webster.

The article presents author's comments on the collection of Dante Alighieri, Irish poet lyrical poetry in the fourteenth century. It mentions that author, Gianfranco Contini claims that the corpus of Dante’s lyric poetry is magnificent. It focuses on Dante who organized his lyrics in series outside the Vita nuova and the Convivio.

The article examines the ways in which playwright William Shakespeare dealt with the problem of outmodedness or the falling out of fashion of his sonnets in the 17th century. Topics discussed include the factors that can lead to a literary style falling out of fashion, the ways in which an outmoded form of literature in one era can be revived in the future and the ways in which Shakespeare used the concept of outmodedness to separate his sonnets from other similar forms of literature.

An essay is presented that analyzes the poetry of the late romantic writer John Clare. Topics discussed include a challenge to the conventional critical identification of lyric, historicist critics who emphasized how the genre's definitions have shifted overtime, Clare's unpublished poem "Hope of Home" during his life and his sustained critique of landscape enclosure.

An essay is presented which looks at the roll of letters about the property disputes from the 1420-1450s of the gentry family, the Armburghs. Topics discussed include a separate section in different handwriting consisting of expressions of love from a man to a woman, languages used in the medieval letters, a lyric in a medieval sermon manuscript and a comparison between poet Emily Dickinson and medieval lyric.

The article discusses the importance of listening and the use of words which helps in expressing various life forms in lyric poem. The author mentions various poets such as A. R. Ammons, John Donne and Emily Dickinson and how they use words to convey an idea in their poems. Topics include the connection one feels with another person when a sound is heard, the poem provides the reader a heighten experience of a word and the use of continuity in poetry to express life.

The article offers information on the poetry from Dante Alighieri, with the importance of friendship with life and testifies to a semantics of friendship. It focuses on his lyric poetry to the Commedia, tracking the word amico and using its itinerary through his works to reconstruct the poet’s thoughts and feelings on amicitia. It focuses on his interactions between long-ago friends, and semantics of friendship.

This article argues that the figure of the dog functions in Horace's Epodes as a cipher for trauma. my title takes its inspiration from freud's "talking cure," but my contention is that Horace accomplishes an inversion of this psychoanalytic method in his Epodes. I argue that Horace's rehabilitation of Archilochean iambus in the image of attack animals in Epode 6 at this particular pass in roman history involves a rehabilitation of the iambic dog and a refocusing of the rabid rage--punning on the semantic link between rabies (anger) and rabies (disease)--that characterized not only the Triumviral period, but also the biography of Archilochus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new reading of the Muse in Empedocles' Physica. I aim to show that she is integrated into the poet's physiological conception of the cosmos and that she also plays a central role in the furtherance of his eschatological purposes. Empedocles, it will be suggested, first put the Muse at the service of the philosophical logos, and in taking that step, he embraced and transcended the conventions of Muse-invocation not only in epic-didactic poetry but in the lyric and elegiac traditions as well. On this reading, the "Muse of the agathos logos" will emerge as a strikingly innovative creation, one that was to exercise a powerful and enduring influence on Greek and Roman conceptions of the goddess Muse in relation to the mind of the poet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a fresh reading of Pindar's Pythian 12, an ode composed for a victorious aulete, which demonstrates its engagement in current musicological debates concerning innovations in instrumentation, relations between the musical and vocal elements in choreia, and the status of the pipes. In ways that intersect with these issues, Pindar anticipates a motif that resurfaces in later Attic drama and other texts concerning the origins of choral lyric and that identifies women's lament as the prototypical form of song. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many experimental American poets have succumbed to the seductions of post-structuralist thought, resulting in increasingly thorny lyrical meditations. At times this appropriation of a philosophical stance--and an abstruse vocabulary--has created monstrous poetic forms that exist in limbo between rigorous philosophy and lyric poetry. In exemplary ways, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's poetry incorporated the language of post-structuralism, transforming her early lyricism into strange hybrid texts that enact ideas put forward by Derrida and Lacan. But at what cost? Her work became imprisoned in the language of theory rather than liberated, forcing her to interpret theory through a lens of Chinese philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the Victorian poets Robert Browning and Thomas Hardy. The essay discusses Browning's influence on Hardy, the elements of case logic, role play and the discourse of interruption in the lyric poetry of Hardy as well as offers an analysis of poems by the two men. The essay argues that the foundation of Browning's poetry helped Hardy to alter the future of the lyric.

The article follows the lead of Aldon Nielsen and Lauri Ramey in clarifying more concretely some of the countours of the adventurous African American lyric using the example of protest poet Audre Lorde. It demonstrates how Lorde's lyric practice highlights self-contradictory wrinkled in the logic of identity politics and how her work calls for a more capacious conception of poetic innovation. It cites Lorde's lyric practice where a woman confronts and resists all manner of discursive erasure.

The article presents "The Ballad of Emmett Till," designed as a fast-paced series of personal and first-accounts of Emmett Till's saga where the narrative is told through speech interlaced with song. The ballad is a story of Emmett's quest and his pursuit of happiness, liberty and of life. It is based on the 1955 Mississippi murder of Till who whistled at a white woman. His mother's decision for an open-casket funeral is believed that have started the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Scholarly comment on Propertius 2.34 stretches back to antiquity, but there is more to learn from its salient intertext, the growing corpus of Virgilian epos, about the elegy's difficult text and interpretation, and inversely about contemporary knowledge and opinion of that intertext. Propertius synopsises each of Virgil's works, including the inchoate Aeneid, accurately in terms of form but tendentiously in terms of content. Propertius' "optimistic" readings suggest that, with the "anxiety of influence," he recognised in Virgil the elegiac sensibility his synopsis emulously erases. Structural (including "stichometric") allusions militate against Ribbeck's transposition of lines 77-80 and recommend Barth's division at line 25 (without at the same time severing thematic continuities that also make a unitary reading of the elegy meaningful). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to an essay by Steven Connor on art and aesthetics. The author discusses the idea of lyric poems being characterized as aesthetic objects in the twentieth century and suggests that aesthetic theory has become concerned with singularity and transpersonal states rather than aesthetic judgment. Other topics include the definition of art and the idea of artworks as a form of activity.

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]

Recent scholarship has focused on the way in which Horace avoids speaking of a returning golden age in his later lyric poetry, despite the fact that Virgil had done precisely this in the sixth book of his epic. I argue that Horace realized that the concept was a problematic one. Many of the golden ages constructed by earlier poets were marked with characteristics that could never be achieved in reality. Horace therefore avoids the terminology, instead defining the new age on his own terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homer in general, and Helen in particular, were of great interest to the lyric poets. This article examines ways in which major fragments of Alcaeus, Ibycus, and Sappho select and combine aspects of the Iliadic Helen in order to pursue various poetic agendas, providing diverse perspectives on the complex issues of Helen's choice, agency, beauty, and eroticism. Since Helen, like Pandora, is a kalon kakon, it proves impossible to praise or blame her unambiguously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the elegiac composition in the poetry books of Maximianus based on the intellectual context of history and the literary context of Ovidian elegiac tradition. It mentions that the poems of Maximianus offered a first-person account of his erotic travails which presents a history of his life from his youth to his death. It also presents a summary of the first elegy of Maximianus and a comparison between his elegiac lover in "Elegy 5" and "Ovid" in his "Amores."