In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 126.1 (2005) 127-133 [Access article in PDF] Aristophanes' Frogs: Brek-kek-kek-kek! on Broadway Mary English Montclair State University e-mail: [email protected] Aeschylus: Answer me—why should the dramatic poet be admired? Euripides: For cleverness and sound advice, and because we make the men of the cities better. Aristophanes, Frogs, 1008-1010 Thirty years ago, Robert Brustein, the dean of the Yale School of Drama, commissioned Burt Shevelove to (...) restage a production of Aristophanes' Frogs that Shevelove wrote during his graduate school days at Yale in 1941.1 The performances were to be held in the Olympic-size swimming pool of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Shevelove asked Stephen Sondheim, with whom he had collaborated on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, to compose the lyrics for the musical numbers and Carmen de Lavallade to choreograph the dance pieces. The cast included students at the Yale School of Drama (among the chorus were Christopher Durang, Meryl Streep, and Sigourney Weaver), and, as in 1941, members of the Yale swim team were assembled for the frogs. In addition to stripping the original Greek script of most of its topical allusions, Shevelove updated the comic agōn by replacing Aeschylus with Shakespeare and Euripides with George Bernard Shaw, whose detractors, much like Euripides' opponents, characterized him as "subversive" and "unpatriotic" and believed that his plays favored criticism over commitment. Broadway columnists traveled to New Haven to review the [End Page 127] performances, and, for the most part, the response was positive.2 Despite this acclaim, however, only a few other directors in the intervening years have dared to stage this imaginative adaptation.3The Lincoln Center Theater decided to mark its twentieth anniversary with a revision of this script that poses an answer to Aeschylus' question in Frogs, "Why should the dramatic poet be admired?" The production owes its very existence to the advocacy of Nathan Lane,4 who shrewdly decided to employ the talents of Tony Award-winning Susan Stroman as choreographer and director. Lane updated the original script, and he and Stroman convinced Sondheim to write additional songs for the libretto. In an interview with John Guare, Lane revealed that he saw Aristophanes' Frogs as speaking directly to challenges of our times: "There's something idealistic about the notion of someone believing that the arts can make a difference, that you can effect a change. Dionysos' dream to go down to Hades and bring back this great writer who could actually have an effect on the world, it's noble and touching and crazy—all at the same time. I found it moving, in light of what was going on in the world."5 Stroman, too, believed that Frogs could offer comfort not only to fifth-century Athenians embroiled in a thirty-year civil conflict but also to those trying to rebuild their lives after the recent terrorist attacks: "And when Nathan first brought this [script] to me, it was only a [End Page 128] year after September 11th. We were all still reeling. I think that's another reason I was attracted to the play immediately. Usually, when one grieves, you can go somewhere and have a little relief from it. But when September 11th happened, the entire city of New York was grieving. There was nowhere to go, and there would be nowhere to go for a very long time. No one was stepping forward who could truly speak about what just had happened. No one could find words to comfort us or explain these images we were overwhelmed with daily. There was no one to ease our hearts."6 Although the links that Lane and Stroman draw between fifth-century Athens and New York often work well—the topical jokes about George Bush elicited veritable "hooting and hollering" from the typically reserved Broadway theatergoers—the play's final message, that a dramatic poet, in this case Shakespeare, can save the world from its present woes (or at least help it along), seems unlikely to satisfy an audience whose... (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.

In English Perspectives Sisson presents half a century's reflection on politics. He pursues his early concerns through decades in which he developed an unusual combination of interests. Commitment to the continuance of the English tradition is an essential part of his work as a poet, translator and critic, as well as in such book as The Spirit of British Administration with some European Comparisons and The Case of Walter Bagehot, which addressed subjects overtly political. A review of The (...) Spirit of British Administration spoke of its 'agnosticism and empiricism', describing it as a 'brilliant attack on the theoreticians'. Sisson does not write on politics from the library or classroom but from years of work in Whitehall and first-hand acquaintance with government offices in a number of European countries. The centrality of this to the debate about Europe needs no special emphasis. Early essays collected here deal with matters surprisingly relevant to present controversies. One from 1940 wryly explores 'The Argument for Federal Union'. There are essays one the operation of government machinery abroad which throw more light on the subject than current public discussions on the EEC. Sisson stresses throughout those aspects of British practice which have importance beyond the immediate battles of the day. (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)

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)

Cefalu offers the first sustained assessment of the ways in which recent contemporary philosophy and cultural theory -- including the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Eric Santner, Slavoj Žižek, and Alenka Zupancic -- can illuminate Early Modern literature and culture. The book argues that when selected Early Modern devotional poets set out to represent subject-God relations, they often encounter some sublime aspect of God that, in Slovenian-Lacanian terms, seems "Other" to himself. This divine Other, while sometimes presented directly as (...) a void or empty place, is more often filled in and presented instead as some form of divine excess. While Donne, and to a lesser extent Traherne, disavow those numinous aspects of God that might subsist beneath such excesses, Crashaw, and especially Milton, attempt to represent the intimate relationship between any creature’s and God's intrinsic alterity. Cefalu introduces new ways of theorizing not only seventeenth-century religious ideologies, but also the nature of Early Modern subjectivity. (shrink)

In the introduction to Conversing with Antiquity, David Hopkins argues that modern writers on the reception of classical poetry generally belong to one of two main critical traditions: Historicism and Reception Aesthetics. The Historicists, on the one hand, emphasize the importance of a poem's original context. Modern translation, according to this group of critics, often impedes our ability to understand a poem by obscuring its original context with anachronistic layers of interpretation and ideology. The Reception Aestheticians, on the other hand, (...) emphasize the importance of the modern reader. Such a reader, if sufficiently disinterested, can render aesthetic judgment in a way that aids our understanding of a poem despite that reader's own distance from the circumstances of the poem's original production. Modern translation, according to this second group of critics, thus augments rather than diminishes our knowledge of classical verse. Hopkins himself strives to mediate these two critical extremes, at once insisting on the power of modern translation to draw more than contingent meaning from its classical sources, and recognizing that no translator exists in a vacuum, somehow independent of literary influence, let alone history. It is in this manner that Hopkins arrives at the conception of transhistorical dialogue that forms the basis of his book. Accordingly, the best way to consider the reception of classical poetry in translation is to investigate not only what classical poetry carries across the divide of time and circumstance to transform its modern inheritors, but also what those modern inheritors send back across that same divide in their translations to guide our understanding of the classical past. (shrink)

Ever since the work of Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, English-language Kierkegaard scholarship has struggled to do justice to the literary-poetic as well as theological-philosophical aspects of the Danish authorship. The first part of this paper traces the development of this debate, noting how Kierkegaard, often in the journals and papers, comments on specific intellectual and doctrinal claims of the Christian faith. The debate between these two ways of reading and understanding is frequently viewed as an impasse. (...) In a second part, the paper endorses and makes a case for a way of reading Kierkegaard neither as “a non-doctrinal literary provocateur” nor as a “non-literary dogmatist.” For all of the difficulty that they pose to interpreters, Kierkegaard's literary stratagems are designed to challenge a reader to wrestle with doctrinal claims amid the struggles of personal existence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The English Polydaedali:How Gabriel Harvey Read Late Tudor LondonNicholas PopperHarvey and GauricoIn 1590 Gabriel Harvey read his copy of Luca Gaurico's 1552 Tractatus Astrologicus, a collection of genitures and commentaries for cities and individuals.1 Harvey had spent the previous twenty-five years at Oxford and Cambridge, mastering Greek and Latin, earning renown as a rhetorician, and promoting English letters. He was a well-known partisan of the French Calvinist (...) Peter Ramus, whose works on curriculum reform had sparked vicious [End Page 351] controversies in the English universities. But Harvey read Gaurico far removed from the schools where he had acquired fame and notoriety as an orator and poet. He had recently relocated to London, where he daily faced a dense, active city unlike his native Saffron Walden and the university towns. Nevertheless he read as he always had, carefully recording his reactions in the margins of the printed text, filling blank spaces with his own commentaries on the subjects presented by Gaurico. The notes disclose an experience of reading that intervened in contemporary debates regarding technology, astrology and utility.2 They also place Harvey among a group of scholars in London in the 1590s, such as Francis Bacon and Hugh Plat, who were examining the benefits local artisans might offer the commonwealth and reconsidering the intellectual status of craft knowledge.Harvey read and annotated Gaurico on several occasions, but the particular strain of notes that I will follow, united by a common ink and hand, engages the learning and erudition of Gaurico's subjects.3 Concentrated almost [End Page 352] exclusively in Book Four, which discussed learned men, these annotations evaluate the poets, philosophers, philologists, and others whom Gaurico had canonized as especially learned.There are only spare annotations prior to Book Four. On the title page of Book Two, devoted to churchmen, Harvey observes the quality of the individuals Gaurico presented and details his own method of evaluation:The most excellent Exemplars of this century [are] in Gaurico, and Cardano: Giovio, and Guiccardini. There are as many of the wisest men as of the greatest actors. Still others live, whether inferior, equal, or superior. And it is of interest to every skillful artificer, to know those most outstanding in their class, and the most celebrated professors of all. Certainly it is very profitable to observe exquisitely the most perfect artificers either of the world or of neighboring nations, or at least of your own people, and to consider with most cunning reason what it is, where it comes from, and what is most excellent. But seriously, and solidly, and always to the point, seeing that singular things are efficacious and are useful to polytechnoscopy. It is judicious to avoid all trivial detail, and to consider only the most pregnant theorists and practitioners of operating.4The notion of a sophisticated form of active knowledge labeled "polytechnoscopy" is the most striking element of this passage. This term seems to have been Harvey's own invention, with no direct precedents; nor was it adopted or used by others after him.Harvey repeatedly referred to polytechnoscopy in his notes. A carefully designed triptych annotation on the title page of Book Four clarifies it as a category uniting practice and knowledge. To the left Harvey wrote, "it is my task to observe the most excellent examples of this age which are useful for polytechnoscopy." On the right, "a polytechnic, polymechanic, polydaedalic, and almost panepistemic book; and likewise sufficiently polychristian. For philologists should be skimmed through; while polytechnics should be examined closely; as I did not only in the Lives of Giovio, but also in those of [End Page 353] Laertius, Eunapius, Philostratus, and others."5 The related Greek descriptors "polymechanic" and "polydaedalic" shed further light on polytechnoscopy. This constellation of terms refers to a method of garnering information by deploying technical knowledge. While not a systematic discipline, its practices—active applicability, craft expertise, observation of experience—constitute a significant realm of learning.In the central panel of the triptych, Harvey notes:[I] compared [this] to Giovio's Elegies of Learned Men. Give me the best man outdoors, and his image at home. For even true life is... (shrink)

Concentrating on the major works of Dofine, Marvell, Vaughan and Herbert, Richard Willmott has provided an anthology of metaphysical verse for readers coming to the poetry for the first time. Metaphysical poetry is notorious for its 'difficulty'; in this selection Richard Willmott provides detailed explanatory notes giving in depth information on the period, the poets and 'metaphysical style' and, to ensure a full understanding, line by line exegesis of the poems themselves is given where necessary. The anthology contains about 20-25 (...) poems for each poet represented and a further section of other contemporary poetry which elucidates themes or approaches in the work of the four main poets in the collection and encourages readers to relate an individual poem to a broader context. (shrink)

This second installment in a chronologically arranged, three-part sequence continues the author's examination of Anglo-American literati who, in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, turned — in acts of combined xenophilia and xenophobia — to Russian literature and literary theory in order to escape the dominant influence of avant-garde movements in France. These Anglophone writers found in Russian exemplars a responsible, morally rigorous, and pragmatic, yet philosophically sophisticated, alternative to what they described as the amoral, superficial, and pretentious aestheticism of (...) French literary culture. Part 2 treats the poetry and criticism of the English “Movement” poet Donald Davie in light of his turn, in 1958, toward the example of Boris Pasternak as a way of escaping the influence of French Symbolist poetics and the post-Symbolist poetics of anglophone modernism. Although Davie understood that Pasternak was as much a modernist as T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, he also argued that the Russian's poetry, unlike theirs, sought, on explicitly moral grounds, to maintain conventional syntax and purity of diction, with the result that Pasternak's verse communicates with the reader more as prose than as music does. (shrink)

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural, and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon, the point of departure for Vasco da Gama's voyage to India as commemorated by Pessoa's forebear, the poet Luís de Camões. Pessoa grew up in Anglophone Durban, acquiring a lifelong love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon, from where he would never again leave, he set himself the goal of travelling throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, (...) to be an explorer of inner worlds. He published very little, but left behind a famous trunk containing a treasure trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, mainly in Portuguese but also a substantial amount in English and French. Pessoa is now acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and he has emerged over the last decade as a forgotten voice in twentieth-century modernism, taking his rightful place alongside C.P. Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges. Pessoa was also a serious student of philosophy and himself a very creative philosopher, yet his genius as a philosopher has as yet hardly been recognized at all. (shrink)

The Anthology Which First Introduced Nietzsche to the English-speaking World Originally published in 1901, the result of several years of translation work by the very first generation of Nietzscheans in Britain and America, Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet is a comprehensive selection of Nietzsche's writings, from The Birth of Tragedy through to the final works of 1888. Arranged topically with reference to the original sources, the book still stands as one of the finest anthologies of Nietzsche's writing (...) in English and a worthwhile introduction to his thought on a wide range of subjects. This new edition also includes an appreciation of the editor and translator Thomas Common, whose tireless work promoting and translating Nietzsche over nearly twenty years was instrumental in bringing him to a wider audience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:English Classical: The Reform of Poetry in Elizabethan England STEPHEN ORGEL Roger ascham, writing in the 1560s, in the course of a treatise on education, urged the reform of English poetry on classical models: “Our English tongue, in avoiding barbarous rhyming, may as well receive right quantity of syllables, and true order of versifying... as either Greek or Latin....”1 He cites as an example of right (...) quantity of syllables and true order of versifying this translation by the scholar and poet William Watson of a verse from the Odyssey: All travelers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses. For that he knew many men’s manners, and saw many cities. This does not sound much like English poetry, but if we count it out we can see that it does, more or less, follow the quantitative rules. The trouble is that the rules have little to do with English pronunciation. Vowels are long by position (followed by two consonants) regardless of how they are pronounced ; moreover, Watson makes vowels long if they are stressed (such as the a in “travelers” and “manners” and the i in “cities”), again regardless of how they are pronounced. For the Elizabethans, this was a problem not with the rules, but with English, both in its dissimilarity from the classical tongues and in the variety of spelling and pronunciation at the time—proponents of quantitative verse in English observe that a necessary first step would be to stabilize the language, as Gabriel Harvey wrote to Edmund Spenser, “there is no one more regular and justifiable direction, either for the assured and infallible certainty of our English artificial prosody particularly, or generally to bring our language into art and to arion 27.2 fall 2019 frame a grammar or rhetoric thereof, than first of all universally to agree upon one and the same orthography.”2 But even with a stable orthography, the application of quantitative rules to English is problematic. To begin with, it is not clear in what sense an English vowel can be said to be long or short—to consider the vowels in stressed syllables invariably long, as Watson does, is entirely arbitrary. There is obviously a difference between the a sound in “rat” and in “rate”; such vowels are now described as short and long, but in pronunciation, they may or may not be of equal extension : thus, the a in “rate” is not, in speaking, longer than the a in “rat,” it is simply pronounced differently; whereas the i in “rise” is certainly longer than the i in “rid.” If quantity means length, English vowels are too erratic to serve—Harvey observed to Spenser that in some quantitative hexameters Spenser had sent him, “the,” “ye” and “he” were treated as short, but “me” was long.3 The issue is especially vexed in the case of vowels that are long by position. The most common examples in English are the -ing endings of participles, which are invariably unaccented and stubbornly short when spoken. In fact, Thomas Campion confronted precisely this problem; and his way of dealing with it gives a clear sense of how willed the whole quantitative system in English necessarily was: For though we accent the second [syllable] of Trumpington short, yet is it naturally long, and so of necessity must be held of every composer.4 What can “naturally” mean here? Are the rules of Latin prosody laws of nature? Harvey had a clear sense of the practical problems, writing to Spenser, “in short, this is the very short and long: position neither maketh short nor long in our tongue,” and concludes that some other rule must be found for English “that should as universally and canonically hold amongst us as position doth with the Latins and Greeks.”5 The larger assumption behind Ascham’s and Harvey’s proposals for a new poetry was that the “barbarous” England 44 english classical of the time could be rectified by the application of classical rules. A return to the classics held out the promise of culture and civility—not only in poetry, of course, but poetry seemed a particularly clear example. Nobody thought the transformation would be easy; a hectoring... (shrink)

This book is one philosopher's response to the poetry of R. S. Thomas. It examines the poet's struggle with the possibilities of sense in religion: R. S. Thomas has described his poetry as an obsession with the possibility of having 'conversations or linguistic confrontations with ultimate reality'. Some attempts at giving meaning to religious belief cannot withstand the assaults of criticism. In R. S. Thomas's verse, however, there emerges a hard-won celebration of the worship of a hidden God; a rare (...) achievement in contemporary poetry. In plotting the course of the development of the poetry, the book brings out its many similarities with the thrusts and counter-thrusts of argument in the philosophy of religion in the second half of the twentieth century. The book should be of interest not only to admirers of R. S. Thomas, but to philosophers, theologians, students of literature, and to anyone concerned with questions concerning the sense or senselessness of religious belief. (shrink)

This guide focuses primarily on the sometimes difficult or obscure poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell, but it also deals with some of the lesser poets who can legitimately be included under the heading of metaphysical poets.

The enslavement of Africans did strike the young, hopeful and radical Romantic poets of nineteenth-century England as the most blatant example of human oppression and the clearest example of humans being deprived of liberty. Although their poetry refers to and draws on the imagery of African slavery, the major poetic figures of the Romantic Movement in England rarely spoke directly against the slave trade and colonial slavery. Thus the issue of slavery, the transatlantic trade, and Britain's role in it, though (...) well established in the nineteenth-century historical context, remained a subject only partially explored by the English Romantic poets, who were, at the time, more preoccupied with British domestic policy and the enslavement of their own nation. (shrink)

The American Scholar An Address, Man the Reformer, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Friendship, Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet, Character, Manners, Essays: Gifts, Nature, Politics, New England Reformers Worship, Beauty -/- English Traits -/- (Harvard Classics, Vol. V.).

Over time, we in English departments have resigned ourselves to prophecies of doom. Our discipline is said to be in terminal decline, and civilization with it. Usually, it is our own fault: the value of our work, so the story has gone, is threatened from within, whether by submission to esoteric theories on the one hand, or by dissipation into the banalities of cultural studies on the other. Our only hope, they tell us, is the immediate restoration of the (...) old pieties, as these were cemented in the nineteenth century: literature teaches moral values; poets redeem from decay the divine element in mortal beings; a knowledge of the best that has been thought and said makes us more humane.Moral panics come and go .. (shrink)

Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_ is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the _Tractatus Coislinianus_, which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle’s dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

Between 1934 and 1942 Heidegger delivered three series of lectures on Hölderlin’s poetry. The discussion of “Der Ister” was the last of these, although Heidegger continued to think and write about Hölderlin into the 1960s. William McNeill and Julia Davis’s recent translation of the “Ister”— volume —is the first of the Hölderlin lectures to appear in English.

Wordsmiths and Warriors explores the heritage of English through the places in Britain that shaped it. It unites the warriors, whose invasions transformed the language, with the poets, scholars, reformers, and others who helped create its character. David and Hilary Crystal drove thousands of miles to locations throughout Britain, David providing the descriptions, Hilary the full-colour photographs. Their book reflects the language's history starting with Anglo-Saxon arrivals and ending in London with apps for grammar. In between lie encounters with (...) places associated with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Wycliffe, Tyndale, Johnson, Murray, and numerous others. Among its many joys are the unexpected discoveries the authors make at every stage of their epic journey. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Women Englishing Homer RICHARD HUGHES GIBSON Seven kingdoms strove in which should swell the womb / That bore great Homer; whom Fame freed from tomb,” so begins the fourth of “Certain ancient Greek Epigrams ” that George Chapman placed at the head of his Odyssey at its debut in 1615.1 The epigram was no mere antiquarian dressing for the text. It suggests a historical parallel with the translator’s (...) own feat—for this Odyssey appeared on the heels of Chapman’s 1611 Iliad, the first complete English translation of Homer directly from the Greek. Indeed, the title page of that Iliad boasted, “Never before in any language truly translated” (italics mine). In “Englishing ” Homer (as he put it), Chapman had vanquished not only local rivals but also the whole international field.2 Through Chapman, England bore Homer anew. Yet within a few decades challengers appeared. An octogenarian Thomas Hobbes published an Odyssey translation in 1675 and an Iliad the following year. Alexander Pope’s versions (Iliad, 1715–1720; Odyssey, 1726) were bestsellers in the next century, yet others soon enough sought to better them, including the poet William Cowper (Iliad, 1791; Odyssey, 1809). The rate of Homeric production then intensified in the nineteenth century, becoming in Edith Hall’s apt phrase a “national pastime” in Victorian Britain—and, I would add, in the United States too.3 In the 1860s, a new English Iliad or Odyssey debuted nearly every year, making Matthew Arnold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford, seem prescient in selecting “On Translating Homer” as the topic for his 1860 lecture series. Anglo-American output of new English Homers has been steady ever since. The opening decades arion 26.3 winter 2019 of our century have been especially high-yielding—more than ten new Iliads and eight new Odysseys have appeared in print alongside fresh editions of twentieth-century favorites. Digital versions now circulate, too. To Chapman we might thus reply: Once seven Greek cities strove to be Homer’s nurse; now seventy tomes vie to be his English verse. Run down the complete bibliography, and a pattern already hinted in my list of notables becomes pronounced: name after name after name belongs to a man. Flip around a bit, and one can often find traces of women in these volumes. Hobbes, for example, argued in the preface to his translations that women have as “just” a “pretence” (in the sense of “claim”) as men to the moral education afforded by heroic poems, though one might cynically read this as a marketing strategy.4 Pope readily acknowledged his debt to the scholarship of Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, Homer’s first French female translator, and listed prominent female supporters in the subscription lists at the front of his editions.5 Women thus long factored into the business of “Englishing” classical texts, though almost exclusively as paying audience members. For more than four centuries, Homer’s English audience listened to a boys’ choir. That tune has only just begun to change thanks to the efforts of three women: the classicist and nonfiction writer Caroline Alexander, who became the first woman to publish a complete English Iliad in 2015; Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who published the first English Odyssey by a female translator in 2017; and the poet Alice Oswald, whose selective translation of the Iliad, Memorial, appeared in 2011.6 By virtue of their appearance in such short order, these books have been, and surely will be henceforth, grouped together. And rightly so: ending the male monopoly on the English channel to Homer is a major development. The Homeric epics have not only shaped Western culture; they enjoy enduring prestige. You still need to know Homer to fancy yourself “well-read.” These three books are thus 36 on women englishing homer potent symbols. They mark the passage of English-speaking women from the audience of male efforts to curate and transmit tradition to participants in those endeavors—from the subscription lists, we might say, to the title page. We sell these translations short, though, if we allow their collective meaning to obscure the patent differences in Alexander’s, Wilson’s, and Oswald... (shrink)

Jeffrey Cox’s new book takes as its guiding thesis the rejection of the widely-held view of Wordsworth (1770-1850) as a poet whose only substantial work was produced from 1798 until about 1808. Thi...

The term "Philosophic lyric".--Introductory chapter.--The "return to nature"; Wordsworth's "philosophy of nature".--The period between Wordsworth and Meredith.--Wordsworth and Meredith as poets of nature.--Browning and Meredith as poets of man.--Conclusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.2 (2000) 299-307 [Access article in PDF] Brief Mention Translation, the Profession, and the Poets Peter Burian Amidst all the questions being raised these days about the health of classical studies in this country, one fact is undisputed: there is an enormous amount of translation going on. Much of it is good, and some of it sells extraordinarily well. Still, none of this is guaranteed (...) to make classicists happy, and for more than one reason. Some may be inclined to contrast the proliferation of translations with falling enrollments in language courses and to regard the emphasis on translation as misplaced or even as a sign of how far knowledge of Greek and Latin has declined. Others no doubt continue to feel that translation is a second-rate activity and somehow unworthy of the attention of serious scholars.The traditions of our discipline seem to have encouraged this disdain: translation is treated in our pedagogical practice as the most elementary stage of understanding a text. There is thus a somewhat shameful association of translation with trot. Translations are what we were constantly required to make and forbidden to use when we studied Latin and Greek, and they are what most of us still require our students to make and forbid them to use. But if the writing of translations is not very highly regarded within the profession, we reserve particular scorn for translations done by those who are not members of our guild. Conditioned as we are to value fidelity to the letter above all else, we may actually find ourselves professing admiration for the sort of musty and flaccid writing that seems to guarantee "accuracy" at the expense of style.Fortunately, despite such perhaps unconscious biases, translation of the classics is flourishing. For this we can thank, in the first instance, an active and able group of dedicated writers within and without the field who have made translating from Greek and Latin central to their creative lives. And we should acknowledge that--to borrow a phrase [End Page 299] from the great rogue translator Ezra Pound--"the thought of what America would be like if the classics had a wide circulation" is only thinkable about the classics in translation. Less than half a century ago, Bernard Knox still felt it necessary to begin the preface to his Oedipus at Thebes (1957) with the disarming notice that his book was intended not only for the classical scholar but also for "the 'Greekless reader,' a category which, once treated with scorn by the professors of more educated ages, now includes the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the planet." Truth to tell, of course, the overwhelming majority of humankind never knew Greek, or for that matter Latin, but the number--or at least the proportion--of those who do has certainly shrunk. Professorial scorn is no longer an option. Translation is our lifeline, and great literatures need great translations.In what follows, I simply raise a few questions about the translation of literary texts and its role in our profession and, in the process, mention (purely by way of example) a number of the recent American translations from Greek and Latin that I have found particularly useful, satisfying, and/or provocative.First, what is the right way to approach the translation of an ancient, canonical text? My answer is simply that there is no one right way. We must understand that different translations serve different purposes and need to be judged by different criteria. The first, or only readily available, translation into English of a little-known work is likely to have a different purpose from the retranslation of a text that has appeared in English many times, perhaps over many centuries; and the translators are likely to feel different obligations to the works and to their prospective readers. A "literal" version done properly remains one of the most useful contributions a classicist can make. Such recent additions to the Loeb Library as William Race's Pindar (1997) and the ongoing Aristophanes of Jeffrey Henderson (1998-) and Euripides of David Kovacs (1994... (shrink)

The Middle English Pearl is known for its mixture of genres, moods and various discourses. The textual journey the readers of the poem embark on is a long and demanding one, leading from elegiac lamentations and the erotic outbursts of courtly love to theological debates and apocalyptic visions. The heterogeneity of the poem has often prompted critics to overlook the continuity of the erotic mode in Pearl which emerges already in the poem’s first stanza. While it is true that (...) throughout the dream vision the language of the text never eroticizes the relationship between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden to the extent that it does in the opening lines, the article argues that eroticism actually underlies the entire structure of the vision proper. Taking recourse to Roland Barthes’s distinction between the erotic and the sexual to explain the exact nature of the bond which connects the two characters, the argument posits eroticism as an expression of somatic longing; a careful analysis of Pearl through this prism provides a number of ironic insights into the mutual interactions between the Dreamer and the Maiden and highlights the poignancy of their inability to understand each other. Further conclusions are also drawn from comparing Pearl with a number of Chaucerian dream visions. Tracing the erotic in both its overt and covert forms and following its transformations in the course of the narrative, the article outlines the poet’s creative use of the mechanics of the dream vision, an increasingly popular genre in the period when the poem was written. (shrink)

There are many significant philosophical issues in Shakespeare's creation, unrecognized by literary critics, especially those who are unfamiliar with both old and new philosophical ideas and trends, such as the linguistic turn in contemporary philosophy. This book also uncovers certain underlying trends: naturalistic and humanistic, anti-scholastic, anti-war, anti-racist, and a Stoical stance.

Using Catford’s shifts (1965), this study is an attempt to investigate four English translations by Clarke (1879), Davie (1882), Edwards (1911) and Wickens (1984) of selected poems from the Bustan of Saadi, the eminent Persian poet and writer. Five poems were randomly selected from the Bustan. Every line of the selected poems was investigated by the raters and placed in the related shift type specified by Catford (1965), namely level shift and category shift which in turn includes class shift, (...) unit shift, structural shift, and intrasystem shift. Some lines were placed under more than one shift type as more than one change could be identified in them. The results revealed that the structural shift was the most frequently used shift by the four translators of the poems in the Bustan. Level shift followed by unit shift were the next most frequently used shifts. It was found that the four translators had a somewhat similar trend in terms of using shifts towards translating the selected poems of the Bustan of Saadi. Also, it can be concluded that structural and level shifts were inevitable in some places during the translation process. (shrink)

One might say that Clare is almost by virtue of that label alone a political poet. “Peasant poet” is a contradiction in terms from the perspective of English literary history, or of the longer history of the literary pastoral. The phrase must refer to two different social locations, and as such makes social place an explicit, problematic concern for the middle-class readers of that poet’s work. To Clare’s publisher and patrons in the 1820s, as to his editors in the (...) 1980s, the language, the forms, the sentiments, and even the punctuation of his poetry are further markers of class difference for an audience invited to read him as a peasant poet. In recent collections concerned to recover the politics of English poetry these signs of difference are highly valued.2 They seem to mark Clare’s work as what Fredric Jameson terms “strong” political art, that is, “authentic cultural creation … dependent for its existence on authentic collective life, on the vitality of the ‘organic’ social group.”3At the time his poems were published class difference in English rural life was a political issue sufficiently charged to make publisher and patrons wish to minimize its marks in Clare’s poetry. On the one hand, a clearly understood hierarchy was the form of social stability that rural scenes staged for their urban middle-class audiences. Evidence of class difference confirmed the survival of this hierarchy and the reader’s position in it. Clare’s poetry of place affirmed a system of social as well as geographical differences felt as a traditional—and essential—aspect of English national identity. On the other hand, however, the countryside was precisely where the erosion of the hierarchical relations of deference and responsibility was particularly noticeable, and disturbing, in the years after 1815. Sporadic outbreaks of protest against low wages and unemployment in 1816, 1822, and 1830 realized dramatically for the middle and upper classes what one might call a rural version of the process Marx was later to term alienation: the known and familiar inhabitants of the rural scene—laborers, village artisans—were suddenly made strange to their middle- and upper-class neighbors, so much so that many observers were convinced that they must be strangers, intruders from another pace .4 The elements of difference, or strangeness, in Clare’s poetry—the marks of his identity as rural laborer—thus also risked awaking specific anxieties among his early readers. Clare’s editor and publisher, John Taylor, punctuated, regularized meter, and replaced some of Clare’s unfamiliar local vocabulary. Nonetheless, his two most important early patrons, the evangelical aristocrat Lord Radstock and the middle-class Mrs. Emmerson, objected to some lines as “radical slang” and others as “vulgar.” The language of class risked rejection as politically subversive. Especially in an already politicized rural scene, the peasant poet could not be a neutral figure. 2. Both A Book of English Pastoral Verse, ed. John Barrell and John Bull and The Faber Book of Political Verse, ed. Tom Paulin restore Clare’s original orthography and lack of punctuation to support the label “peasant poet.”3. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 : 140. Elizabeth Helsinger is associate professor of English and general studies at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Her Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder was published in 1982. The present essay is part of a book in progress on representations of the rural scene in Victorian England. (shrink)

The association of poetry and femininity … excluded women poets. For the female figures onto whom the men projected their artistic selves—Tennyson’s Mariana and Lady of Shalott, Browning’s Pippa and Balaustion, Arnold’s Iseult of Brittany—represent an intensification of only a part of the poet, not his full consciousness: a part, furthermore, which is defined as separate from and ignorant of the public world and the great range of human experience in society. Such figures could not write their own poems; the (...) male poet, who stands outside the private world of art, has to do that for them. The Lady of Shalott could not imagine someone complex and experienced enough to imagine the world beyond range of her windows, or to imagine her. A woman poet who identified herself with such a stock figure of intense and isolated art would hardly be able to write at all. Or, like the Lady of Shalott preparing her death-ship, she could write only her own name, only herself. For a man, writing poetry meant an apparent withdrawal from the public sphere , but for a woman it meant just the opposite: a move toward public engagement and self-assertion in the masculine world. She could not just reverse the roles in her poetry and create a comparable male self-projection, since the male in this set of opposites is defined as experienced, complexly self-conscious, and part of the public world and therefore could not serve as a figure for the poet. We can formulate the problem like this: a man’s poem which contains a female self-projection shows to distinctly different figures, poet and projection; in a woman’s poem on the same model, the two would blur into one.Furthermore, it’s not really poets that are women, for the Victorians: poems are women. The cliché that style is the man arises more readily and with much greater literalness and force when the stylist is a woman, and it is often charged with erotic intensity. The young lovers in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe describe their perfect love by singing that he is the sculptor and she the clay, he the singer and she the song. Ladislaw in Middlemarch tells Dorothea that she needn’t write poems because she is a poem. Edgar Allan Poe remarks in a review of Barrett Browning’s works that “a woman and her book are identical.” In her love letters Barrett Browning herself worried about the problem of her identity—was she her poems, were they she, which was Browning in love with? “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” he had written disconcertingly in his first letter, “… and I love you too.” […] As we can see in Tennyson’s The Princess, the lyric in particular seemed female to Victorians—private, nonlogical, purely emotional—and it is surely no accident that large numbers of English and American women began to publish poetry in the nineteenth century, when the lyric established its dominance. Victorian poems like Victorian women were expected to be morally and spiritually uplifting, to stay mostly in the private sphere, and to provide emotional stimulus and release for overtasked men of affairs.9 All this may have encouraged women to write poetry, but at the same time it made writing peculiarly difficult because it reinforced the aspects of conventional Victorian femininity—narcissism, passivity, submission, silence—most inimical to creative activity. Since women already are the objects they try to create, why should they write? 9. John Woolford points this out in “EBB: Woman and Poet,” Browning Society Notes 9 : 4. Dorothy Mermin is professor and chairman in the department of English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Audience in the Poem and is currently working on a critical study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (shrink)

We have been studying Middle English alliterative verse for over a century, but so far we lack an authoritative description of the rhythmic constraints that governed the poets who wrote alliterative verse. Though some scholars have tried to show the survival of Sievers's five types, few editors have dared, in the absence of a comprehensive and authoritative account of the meter, to emend or choose between the variants in the manuscripts on metrical grounds. Two factors largely account for this (...) state of affairs: the apparent variety of the verse form itself and the failure of students of the meter to distinguish the practices of poets from those of the scribes. (shrink)