We have become estranged from the cosmic movements, according to Bataille. We are confined by the error linked to the representation of ‘the stationary earth’. We have negated the immersive immanence of the whole and made nature into a fixed world of tools and things. How then do we recognise ourselves as part of the ‘rapture of the heavens’? Bataille urges us to consider life as a solar phenomenon, the free play of solar energy on the earth. This paper argues (...) how Bataille’s cosmic vision anticipates both planetary and ecological thinking. This entails a base materialism of difference based on a radical Nietzschean and Heraclitean theory of becoming and flux. This thought is developed along Bataillean concepts such as the movement of the whole, the labyrinthine, and compound beings, ipseity, as well as the concept of a communifying movement. This materialism paired with Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere lays the foundation for the laws of the general economy, which also constitutes an economy inclusive of a general ecology: a tragic vision of Gaia and Dionysos. Finally, poetry is considered, as a way we might reconnect with the universe and stimulate ecological imagination. (shrink)

Lvcilivs, fr. 965 :quaenam uox ex te resonans meo gradu remoram facit ?Mr. Housman in the first number of the Classical Quarterly refuted and pulverized the attempt of Marx to emend this passage by writing quoia nam. ‘ Ex tecto ’ and ‘ ex aede’ have been suggested; but it is obvious that if ‘ ex aede’ is to be contemplated, emendation may go on S0009838800019431_inline1—scores of words could be found that would make sense. There is no context. If the (...) passage is to be emended at all, I suggest that Lucilius wrotequaenam uox EXTVOORERESONANS. (shrink)

Platón realiza dos críticas a la poesía imitativa en la República. En laprimera, establecida en los libros II y III, Platón parece criticar suavementela poesía prohibiendo solamente una parte de la poesía imitativa. La segundacrítica, desarrollada en el libro X, parece establecer una crítica más drásticaa la poesía imitativa que elimina la posibilidad de cualquier tipo de poesíaimitativa en la polis. Se han propuesto muchas interpretaciones diferentespara explicar este aparente conflicto. Defenderé la interpretación clásicade Tate, de acuerdo con la cual (...) no hay un conflicto aquí porque Platóndistingue dos tipos de imitación y es siempre consistente preservando unade ellas y desterrando la otra. (shrink)

The likeness of sound between rhyming words is arbitrary, but words have meanings. Thus rhyme schemes carry an implicit meaning over against the explicit meaning of the lines in which they occur. The use of "death" and "breath" and other rhymes in Swinburne illustrates this duality, especially in his great sonnet addressed to Death. This prompts a discussion of the role of meter and rhyme in the physiology of dreams and memory, the human propensity to make rules, translations of Dante, (...) the comic rhymes of Noel Coward, and the real meaning of Seinfeld. (shrink)

Interpretations of Plato’s consideration of poetry often see his position either as a rejection or an admittance of only a certain kind. This article offers a more complex analysis: questions concerning the nature of justice and poetry should be taken as mutually illuminating inquiries. This constitutes Plato’s hermeneutics which shows how understanding poetry ideally effects a metanoia (new understanding) that requires the harmony between ethical deliberation and narrative self-understanding. The dialogue is a mimesis of this process, and the conclusion in (...) Book X does not represent Plato’s final position but the trajectory of the dialogue when such a metanoia is incomplete. (shrink)

There are two problems discussed in the article. The first one is the phenomenon of mass literature and semiotic approach to it. According to Lotman, mass literature of the 20th (and 21st) centuries is not so much an object of semiotics as of sociology. However, it is possible to consider mass literature of earlier times as an object of semiotics of culture. Lotman discusses Russian mass literature of the 18th and 19th centuries as such an object in the article “Massovaya (...) literatura kak istoriko-kulturnaya problema”. Considering mass literature a dynamic factor of the semiotic system, Lotman distinguishes its main features: a high degree of automatization and syndrome of retardedness. In the second part of the article the author discusses the phenomenon of mass poetry in contemporary Lithuania. This kind of mass literature is much more similar to the phenomenon discussed by Lotman than to the mass literature of the postmodernist epoch. Lithuanian mass poetry employs the codes of national romanticism (the end of 19th century) and considers itself an ignored part of high culture. This sort of poetry unknown to Western societies exhibits archaising tendencies in the modern postsoviet culture. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to familiarize the Polish reader with Poets and the Poetry of Poland, the first extensive anthology of the Polish literature published in English in the United States by Paweł Sobolewski. Particular emphasis was placed on the characteristics of this work, recreating the traces of reception of this work and showing the most important sources on which the author relied. The presented article also points out the importance of Sobolewski’s literary and cultural activity, as he (...) initiated multifaceted, often pioneering projects, becoming one of the leading Polish diaspora activists in the 19th century’s United States, also active in the American community. This paper was partially based on the source materials collected by Mieczysław Haiman at the Polish Museum in America, to which the access was possible thanks to a Kościuszko Foundation scholarship. The historical analysis of the sources based on the descriptive-historical paradigm was adopted as the basic tool. Noteworthy, the Poets and Poetry of Poland was the crown work of Sobolewski’s many-year mission, related to the desire to make Americans familiar with the Polish culture and to present it in representative forms. The anthology, including the translations of the works of 60 authors from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, gave an insight into the multi- faceted recognition of the biographies and literary works of eminent Polish poets, mostly belonging to the times of Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Despite the strong inspiration from Rycharski’s textbook and other sources, the final shape of the volume was influenced by the editor’s personal experiences, his reading preferences and contact with the authors. The selection of works and the structure of the conducted argument reflect the spirit of affirmation for the great tradition created by the first generation of romantics and the significance of the November Uprising, in which Sobolewski took part. (shrink)

Poets, like other men, have their speculative moods. Some poets have been widely read in the literature of philosophy and have wrestled continuously with the intellectual problems of their times. From Euripides to Mr. Eliot large expanses of dialectical argument have appeared in verse, and in our own tongue Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth and many other supreme writers have questioned the semblance of nature and mind, and have sought to trace the ideal forms of reality. Men of letters in every (...) generation have naturally discussed the problems of knowledge and existence and have offered emphatic opinions on them. The views of poets have been accorded particular honour and attention. Illustrious poets have declared that poetry opens a more penetrating road to truth than that which is provided by science or academic philosophy. Certain modern critics repeat these claims. “The mind of man,” writes one, “has a knowledge of truth beyond the near-truths of science and society. Poetry tells us this truth.” I will not pause here to inquire whether anything of value can be observed of poetry in general any more than can be stated of prose in general. Nor do I wish to enter into the subject of poetic truth. The questions I desire to raise concern assumptions about the philosophical ideas of poets. Recent criticism has shown a notable tendency to fasten on these ideas. The tendency revives the practice of the nineteenth century when theologians, philosophers and literary thinkers were fond of expounding the rational systems of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. The present vogue of this prosaic treatment of poetry may be due to a strong recoil from the literary fashion prevalent a generation ago which minimized the intellectual feature in the art of poetry. (shrink)

The poet Tony Harrison has created work for the stage and television, and even assumed the role of poet/journalist, writing newspaper reports in verse from war-torn Bosnia. His work is underpinned by a belief in the political nature of the act of writing. He has generally attracted a non-working-class readership; nevertheless, he has never abandoned his quest for a ‘democratic’ poetry. Much of his work has taken the form of a poetry of immediate response to current events. He has also (...) been insistent, at times, on where his poetry should be published. When he wrote ‘Initial Illumination’ for The Guardian, for example, he argued it should not appear in the ‘literary’ section, but on the news pages. Harrison sees himself as a ‘war poet. He uses his position as a public intellectual to engage in a struggle against dominant discourses and ways of seeing and to bring audiences to confront the horror of war. The article focuses in particular on his Gulf War poem, ‘A Cold Coming’, in which he uses strategies such as ekphrasis, to position the reader as a kind of ‘secondary witness’ of a war that had been turned by the media into a distant, anaesthetised spectacle. (shrink)

A Vaiṣṇava Poet in Early Modern Bengal: Kavikarṇapūra’s Splendour of Speech. By Rembert Lutjeharms. Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 360. $99.

The Poet's "Caressive Sight": Denise Levertov's Transactions with Nature The scientific consciousness which broke with the holistic perception of life is credited with "unweaving the rainbow," or disenchanting the world. No longer perceived as sacred, the non-human world of plants and animals became a site of struggle for domination and mastery in implementing humankind's supposedly divine mandate to subdue the earth. The nature poetry of Denise Levertov is an attempt to reverse this trend, reaffirm the sense of wonder inherent in (...) the world around us, and reclaim some "holy presence" for the modern sensibility. Her exploratory poetics witnesses to a sense of relationship existing between all creatures, both human and non-human. This article traces Levertov's "transactions with nature" and her evolving spirituality, inscribing her poetry within the space of alternative—or romantic—modernity, one that dismantles the separation paradigm. My intention throughout was to trace the way to a religiously defined faith of a person raised in the modernist climate of suspicion, but keenly attentive to spiritual implications of beauty and open to the epiphanies of everyday. (shrink)

SummaryThe writings of the very popular American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963) reveal an unusually specific and detailed knowledge of science. This was particularly evident among the poems of his penultimate volume, Steeple Bush, of 1947. Several of these poems confronted with basic insights issues raised by the period's ‘new physics’. Among those, especially Frost's epigram ‘A Wish to Comply’ wittily confronted an important epistemological difficulty in particle physics. Such science must induce a belief in the fundamental importance of entities invisible (...) to any physical human senses except those aided by complex apparatus used in abstruse experiments. Recondite scientific issues are confronted in other poems published in Steeple Bush such as ‘Skeptic’ (which meditates on the ‘red shift’ evidence for an expanding universe), but these poems are clearly derived from popular theoretical expositions, not practical experience. ‘A Wish to Comply’, on the other hand, clearly records an actual experience of a failed Millikan ‘oil drop’ experiment. This event evidently led to the poet to fake a report of his own observation of an electrically charged oil droplet, for reasons of social pressure. In meditating on these circumstances the epigram opens questions relating to scientific ‘systematic error’, the suppression, ‘trimming’ or ‘cooking’ of experimental data, and a bias toward confirmation of highly respected opinions. Although Frost did not live to know it, two of these questions have been latterly opened in regard to Millikan's own reports of his original oil drop experimental data. (shrink)

This chapter seeks to characterize the voice of the poet within the Iliad, and to show that a better understanding of the poet’s voice helps to explain several distinctive and puzzling features of Iliadic narrative. The chapter looks at the poet’s relationship to the Muses, and his temporal and spatial self-positioning within the world of the Trojan war, all of which illustrate the divine perspective he offers on that war.

Perhaps the best way to understand Harold Bloom's enigmatic theory of "poetic misprision" is to avoid the immanent critique altogether. It is best described, rather , as a synthesis. Bloom seems to have taken Aristotle's mimesis and linked it to Freud's concept of sublimation,1 with particular emphasis on the role that sublimation plays in "the family romance." Even if one were to hedge a bit and take into account the fact that neo-Freudian re-evaluations of orthodox psychoanalysis have succeeded in extracting (...) the purely sexual component out of the psychodynamics of sublimation, one is still left with the notion of sublimation as anxiety producing. Thus it is that, according to Bloom, the modern poet, in particular, sublimates his imitation of a strong precursor poet. Since the emphasis today is on desexualizing libido, Freud's original sexual vocabulary seems to have survived for its metaphorical value alone; the "unconscious fear of castration," for example, is simply a metaphor for "the poet's fear of ceasing to be a poet," a man's fear of ceasing to be a man. No matter how much we "modernize" Freud, the fact will always remain that the psychoanalytic context is the context of psychopathology: "a variety of the uncanny." · 1. See Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill , pp. 625-26. David D. Cooper is an associate in the department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Using the critical paradigm developed in the present essay, he has written a book on Thomas Merton's poetry. See also: "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression" by Harold Boom in Vol. 2, No. 2; "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again" by Jerome J. McGann in Vol. 2, No. 3. (shrink)

This article proposes a role for aesthetic judgment in our practical thought. The role is related to those moments when practical reason seems to give out, when it fails to yield a judgment about what to do in the face of a choice we cannot avoid. I argue that these impasses require agents to create, but that not any creativity will do. For we cannot regard a response to one of these problems as arbitrary or capricious if we want to (...) act on it. We must instead regard that response as justified by the problem itself. I suggest that this combination of creativity and normativity is characteristic of aesthetic judgment and this makes it a promising candidate for making these very difficult choices. (shrink)

Paul Davis explores the personal and cultural significances of translating as a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct for the five principal poet-translators of what was the golden age of the art in England: John Denham, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope.

George Santayana was not only a poet but also a philosopher whose style, concerns, and even positions drew in his own time and continues to draw in ours the attention of poets and, more broadly, literary authors. He was, in short, a poet's philosopher. In so characterizing Santayana, however, there is no slight of his strictly philosophical achievement. The philosophical finesse with which he treated complex topics is, indeed, nowhere more evident than in his rigorous analysis of poetic utterance. The (...) author of this essay explores Santayana's nuanced account of poetic utterance and, then, interprets Santayana's own literary accomplishments, including his philosophical writings, in light of this account. Given the attention which Angus Kerr-Lawson has paid to the rhetorical strategies and literary qualities of this singular philosopher, it is fitting to contribute such an essay to an issue in his honor. (shrink)

(2008). Latin Poet‐Doctors of the Eighteenth Century: the German Lucretius (Johann Ernst Hebenstreit) Versus the Dutch Ovid (Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens) Intellectual History Review: Vol. 18, Humanism and Medicine in the Early Modern Era, pp. 91-101.

A poet, his mission, his making and evolution and various definitions of purposes of composition of poetry will be delineated. -/- The spiritual, philosophical and social conditions and their influence in the making and evolution of poet and writer and their craft will be dealt with. -/- The duty of poets, critics and readers in the celebration of composition of poetry and literature as part of culture and civilization will be presented. The committed and free-lance poets will be compared and (...) contrasted. -/- The poet and his relation to composition of poetry in view of the poet's social, emotional and intellectual makeup will be elaborated. -/- Also the writers and poets all over the world are suffering from unwritten censorship implemented by governments, terrorists, zealots of - religion, region, caste, community, gender- like historical and natural divisions. The Travails of literary creation and creators will be discussed. A critical observation on this will be presented together with experiences of the author - physicist - as a poet. -/- . (shrink)

If patriotism can thus be seen as an incentive or as an instigation even in such a recondite science as epistemology, how much more readily can it be seen to perform such functions in other studies more immediately or inextricably bound up with communal human life? I pass over instances that occur to me—for instance, the Victorian Jesuit, Father Hopkins, declaring that every good poem written by an Englishman was a blow struck for England--and profit instead, if I may, by (...) the presence among us of Edward Said. I do not know, and it is none of my business to know, what passport Said presents at the international frontier. But it is surely common knowledge among us that he has deep and feelingful and intimate allegiances to the state of Lebanon. Who of us has failed to connect this with his books Orientalism and The Question of Palestine? The point is that, having made this connection, none of us thinks the worse of Said. On the contrary, we recognize that he has a special stake in such topics and therefore speaks on them with a special authority. Unless I am mistaken, that stake and that authority are, in a perhaps extended sense, patriotic. And whatever our speculative objections to the idea and the principle of patriotism, in practice we recognize it and we honour it.What I am questioning, it will now be plain, is the principle of "disinterest." "The disinterested pursuit of knowledge"—it is what in our distinct disciplines all of us have paid lip-service to, and perhaps more than lip-service. But when we come right down to it, is it what we believe? The honest patriot declares an interest; and if we are wise, we take note of the declaration, making allowances and reserving doubts accordingly. But what are we to make of the scholar who declares no interest, who claims implicitly to be truly disinterested. Can we believe him? And if we cannot, what guidance do we have as to what reservations to make, what doubts to entertain? I am of one mind with my Marxist colleagues who, from a political position very far from mine, warn us to be especially suspicious of the scholar who claims to have no axe to grind. We, all of us, have axes to grind; the crucial distinction is between those who know this about themselves and those who don't.Let me make myself clear. When I urge that the terms "patriotism" and "patriotic" be reinstated in our discourse, and particularly in those forms of our discourse that may be called "interpretation," I do not imply that patriotism is a nobler, a more elevated instigation than sundry others, mostly ideological, of which we are more aware. The point is precisely that of these others we are aware because we share a vocabulary which acknowledges them, whereas "patriotic" has been banished from our vocabulary, and so the reality which the word represents is left out of our calculations. Let me admit for the sake of argument what I do not in fact believe-- that patriotism is a concept and a sentiment so besmirched by the unholy uses made of it that, if mankind is to survive, patriotism will have to be eradicated. Even if that were the case, it remains true that patriotic interest and incitement are very far from having been eradicated from the world that we in fact inhabit, and try to interpret, here and now; and if we try to work within a vocabulary that pretends otherwise, we condemn ourselves to producing interpretations that are drastically partial and perhaps disastrously misleading. The point is not whether patriotism is a good thing or a bad thing but simply that it is; it exists, as powerful factor which we all in our hearts acknowledge even as our vocabulary refuses to. And when we speak in this context of "the world," we certainly include in that world ourselves, who offer to interpret it. Every one of our interpretations is coloured by the fact that we, the several interpreters, are British or American, French or Italian or Russian or whatever. If we think otherwise, we deceive ourselves; and yet where, in any of our currently acceptable vocabularies, determined as all of them are by the glib rationalism of the Enlightenment, do we find that momentous fact about ourselves acknowledged? Where is it acknowledged, for instance, in the vocabulary of feminism that "woman," as conceived by an American writing about Italians, cannot help but be significantly different from "woman" as conceived by an Italian looking at Americans? Or again, an Italian woman may well, we must suppose, be an Italian patriot; but where, in the current vocabulary of feminists, is that dimension of her "woman-ness" allowed for? Let it be acknowledged only so as to be deplored; but let it in any event be acknowledged. At the moment, it isn't.Donald A. Davie, the distinguished poet, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and honorary fellow of Saint Catharine's College, Cambridge and of Trinity College, Dublin. He has edited The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, and his Collected Poems 1950-1970 appeared in 1972. His latest publications are Dissentient Voice and These the Companions; Recollections. (shrink)