Gothic Literature

Gothic fiction From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.   

It needs sources or references that appear in third-party publications. Tagged since August 2011. It may contain original research or unverifiable claims. Tagged since August 2011. It is written like a personal reflection or essay and may require cleanup. Tagged since August 2011. This article includes inline citations, but they are not properly formatted. Please improve this article and others like it by correcting them.

Strawberry Hill, an English villa in the "Gothic revival" style, built by seminal Gothic writer Horace Walpole Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story". The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole. Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the Gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere. The ruins of Gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations—thus the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. In literature such Anti-Catholicism had a European dimension featuring Roman Catholic institutions such as the Inquisition (in southern European countries such as Italy and Spain). Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, Transgression, Excess, secrets, and hereditary curses. The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femmes fatales, monks, nuns, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, monsters, demons,

1

dragons, angels, fallen angels, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, the Wandering Jew and the Devil himself. Contents [hide]    o o       o o     o o o o o   o    

1 Archetypes in the Gothic Novel 2 First Gothic romances 3 Role of Architecture in the Gothic Novel 3.1 Background 3.2 Use in the Gothic Novel 4 Developments in continental Europe, and The Monk 5 Parody 6 The Female Gothic and the Supernatural Explained 7 The Romantics 8 Victorian Gothic 9 Elements of Anti-Catholicism 9.1 Historical Context 9.2 Specific Examples of Anti-Catholicism in Gothic Literature 9.2.1 The Castle of Otranto 9.2.2 Zeluco 9.2.3 The Monk 10 Shakespeare and the Gothic 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Stupid Servants 10.3 Female Empowerment and the Fiendlike Queen 10.4 The Marriage Plot 10.5 Distrust of the Church 11 Post-Victorian legacy 12 Prominent examples 12.1 Gothic satire 13 See also 14 Notes 15 References 16 External links

[edit] Archetypes in the Gothic Novel Similarities exist between different books of every genre, but perhaps that similarity is most closely connected in Gothic Fiction. Each character in almost every book of the genre can be classified into one archetype or another. As David De Vore states, ―The Gothic hero becomes a sort of archetype as we find that there is a pattern to their characterization. There is always the protagonist, usually isolated either voluntarily or involuntarily. Then there is the villain, who is the epitome of evil, either by his (usually a man) own fall from grace, or by some implicit malevolence. The Wanderer, found in many Gothic tales, is the epitome of isolation as he wanders the earth in perpetual exile, usually a form of divine punishment.‖[1] Below are classified different stock characters of the Gothic Novel along with examples from popular fiction in the genre. 

Virginal Maiden – young, beautiful, pure, innocent, kind, virtuous. Shows these virtues by fainting and crying whenever her delicate sensibilities are challenged, usually starts out with a mysterious past and it is later revealed that she is the daughter of an aristocratic or noble family. 2

o o

 o

o

 o o

 o o o

 o

o

Matilda in The Castle of Otranto – She is determined to give up Theodore, the love of her life, for her cousin‘s sake. Matilda always puts others first before herself, and always believes the best in others. Adeline in The Romance of the Forest - ―Her wicked Marquis, having secretly immured Number One (his first wife), has now a new and beautiful wife, whose character, alas! Does not bear inspection.‖[2] As this review states, the virginal maiden character is above inspection because her personality is flawless. Hers is a virtuous character whose piety and unflinching optimism causes all to fall in love with her. Older, Foolish Woman Hippolita in The Castle Of Otranto - Hippolita is depicted as the obedient wife of her tyrant husband who ―would not only acquiesce with patience to divorce, but would obey, if it was his pleasure, in endeavouring to persuade Isabelle to give him her hand‖.[3] This shows how weak women are portrayed as they are completely submissive, and in Hippolita‘s case, even support polygamy at the expense of her own marriage.[4] Madame LaMotte in The Romance of the Forest – naively assumes that her husband is having an affair with Adeline. Instead of addressing the situation directly, she foolishly lets her ignorance turn into pettiness and mistreatment of Adeline. Hero Theodore in The Castle of Otranto – he is witty, and successfully challenges the tyrant, saves the virginal maid without expectations Theodore in The Romance of the Forest – saves Adeline multiple times, is virtuous, courageous and brave, selfsacrificial Tyrant Manfred in The Castle of Otranto – unjustly accuses Theodore of murdering Conrad. Tries to put his blame onto others. Lies about his motives for attempting to divorce his wife and marry his late son‘s fiancé. The Marquis in The Romance of the Forest – attempts to get with Adeline even though he is already married, attempts to rape Adeline, blackmails Monsieur LaMotte. Vathek – Reviewers do not know what to do when a seemingly good character is made evil. It does not often happen in Gothic novels and therefore this reviewer has problems buying it. Furthermore, this reviewer seems to be so accustomed to the idea of only one evil villain that they state there should be a greater difference between the punishments both receive at the end of the novel. ―As to Nouronihar, I fear that it may be objected that she becomes too suddenly wicked. Some small discrimination of punishment however between her and Vathek may be somewhat aggravated, the end will be perhaps best answered in that way.‖[5] The Stupid Servant – acts as comic relief by asking seemingly stupid questions, transitions between scenes, brings news, messenger, moves plot forward Peter in The Romance of the Forest – whenever he brings information to people, he never gets to the point but prattles on and on about insignificant things. ―The reader…eagerly follows the flight of LaMotte, also of Peter, his coachman, an attached, comic, and familiar domestic.‖[6] Bianca in The Castle of Otranto – a gossip, helps characters get valuable news, provides comic relief

 o

Clowns – break the tension and act as comic relief Diego and Jaquez in The Castle of Otranto – they appear to talk about random things, and argue foolishly with each other in order to lighten the air of the novel.

 o

Banditti - Ruffians They appear in several Gothic Novels including The Romance of the Forest in which they kidnap Adeline from her father.

 o

Clergy – always weak, usually evil Father Jerome in The Castle of Otranto – Jerome, though not evil, is certainly weak as he gives up his son when he is born and leaves his lover. Ambrosio in The Monk – Evil and weak, this character stoops to the lowest levels of corruption including rape and incest. 3

o

o

Mother Superior in The Romance of the Forest – Adeline fled from this convent because the sisters weren‘t allowed to see sunlight. Highly oppressive environment.

 o

The Setting One could argue that the setting of the Gothic Novel is a character in itself. The plot is usually set in a castle, an abbey, a monastery, or some other, usually religious edifice, and it is acknowledged that this building has secrets of its own. It is this gloomy and frightening scenery, which sets the scene for what the audience should expect. Without a dark and imposing backdrop, the Gothic Novel would not exist. The importance of setting is noted in a London review of the Castle of Otranto, ―He describes the country towards Otranto as desolate and bare, extensive downs covered with thyme, with occasionally the dwarf holly, the rosa marina, and lavender, stretch around like wild moorlands…Mr. Williams describes the celebrated Castle of Otranto as ―an imposing object of considerable size…has a dignified and chivalric air. A fitter scene for his romance he probably could not have chosen.‖ Similarly, De Vore states, ―The setting is greatly influential in Gothic novels. It not only evokes the atmosphere of horror and dread, but also portrays the deterioration of its world. The decaying, ruined scenery implies that at one time there was a thriving world. At one time the abbey, castle, or landscape was something treasured and appreciated. Now, all that lasts is the decaying shell of a once thriving dwelling.‖[1] Thus, without the decrepit backdrop to initiate the events, the Gothic Novel would not exist. [edit] First Gothic romances

The Castle of Otranto (1764) is usually regarded as the first Gothic novel. This literary genre found its most natural settings in the very tall buildings of the Gothic style — often spelled "Gothick", to highlight their "medievalness" - castles, mansions, and monasteries, often remote, crumbling, and ruined. It was a fascination with this architecture and its related art, poetry (such as graveyard poets), and even landscape gardening that inspired the first wave of Gothic novelists. For example, Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto (1764) is often regarded as the first true Gothic romance, was obsessed with medieval Gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a fashion for Gothic revival (Punter, 2004; 177). His declared aim was to combine elements of the medieval romance, which he deemed too fanciful, and the modern novel, which he considered to be too confined to strict realism (Punter, 2004; 178). The basic plot created many other Gothic staples, including a threatening mystery and an ancestral curse, as well as countless 4

trappings such as hidden passages and oft-fainting heroines. The first edition was published disguised as an actual medieval romance from Italy discovered and republished by a fictitious translator. When Walpole admitted to his authorship in the second edition, its originally favourable reception by literary reviewers changed into rejection. The romance, usually held in contempt by the educated as a tawdry and debased kind of writing, had only recently been made respectable by the works of Richardson and Fielding (Fuchs, 2004; 106). A romance with superstitious elements, and moreover void of didactical intention, was considered a setback and not acceptable as a modern production. Walpole's forgery, together with the blend of history and fiction that was contravening the principles of the Enlightenment, brought about the Gothic novel's association with fake documentation. Clara Reeve, best known for her work The Old English Baron (1778), set out to take Walpole's plot and adapt it to the demands of the time by balancing fantastic elements with 18th century realism. The question now arose whether supernatural events that were not as evidently absurd as Walpole's would not lead the simpler minds to believe them possible. It was Ann Radcliffe's technique of the explained supernatural, in which every seemingly supernatural intrusion is eventually traced back to natural causes, and the impeccable conduct of her heroines that finally met with the approval of the reviewers. Radcliffe made the Gothic novel socially acceptable, ironically followed by an abrupt degradation of its renown. Her success attracted many imitators, mostly of low quality, which soon led to a general perception of the genre as inferior, formulaic, and stereotypical. Among other elements, Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the Gothic villain, which developed into the Byronic hero. Radcliffe's novels, above all The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), were bestsellers, although along with all novels they were looked down upon by well-educated people as sensationalist women's entertainment (despite some men's enjoyment of them). "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days – my hair standing on end the whole time." [said Henry] ... "I am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself. " [replied Catherine] — Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (written 1798) Radcliffe also provided an aesthetic for the genre in an influential article "On the Supernatural in Poetry" in The New Monthly Magazine 7, 1826, pp 145–52, examining the distinction and correlation between horror and terror in Gothic fiction (Wright 2007: 35-56). [edit] Role of Architecture in the Gothic Novel [edit] Background Architecture played a pivotal role in the Gothic novel, in terms of setting, as an inspirational source, as an important element of the plot, and as a reflection of the action of the story. The Gothic novel rose to popularity during a time when architecture was dominated by the Gothic Revival style. Both drew heavily on the ideas about the Gothic to elicit strong emotions, such as awe, terror or spirituality. The Gothic architecture of the 18th century has been called the Gothic Revival style, which was seen in both the decorative arts and architecture. Gothic Revival architecture featured elements such as pointed arches, towers, spires, large windows and castellation along the roofline.[7] This revival was more about 18th century ideas about Gothic architecture than the reality of the original Gothic period and buildings built in the Gothic Revival style often drew elements from Gothic churches and used them as decorative elements in 18th century domestic structures. These Gothic Revival architectural elements were associated with the past and with ideas of Romanticism. The style was used because it was believed to evoke feelings of awe, religious sentiment, and nostalgia. Two important examples of the Gothic Revival style in architecture were Strawberry Hill, built by Horace Walpole, and Fonthill Abbey, built by William Beckford, both early Gothic novelists. Both structures drew heavily on Gothic motifs, drawing elements from both Gothic period castles and churches to build private homes. While Fonthill Abbey collapsed 5

shortly after its construction, Strawberry Hill is still open for tours today and continues to serve as an important example of the Gothic Revival style. Just as Gothic Revival architecture aimed to draw on historical associations to set a mood, Gothic novels used Gothic architecture toward the same aim and enjoyed an equal level of popularity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. [edit] Use in the Gothic Novel Just as elements of Gothic architecture were borrowed during the Gothic Revival period in architecture, ideas about the Gothic period and Gothic period architecture were often used by Gothic novelists. Architecture itself played a role in the naming of Gothic novels, with many titles referring to castles or other common Gothic buildings. This naming was followed up with many Gothic novels often set in Gothic buildings, with the action taking place in castles, abbeys, convents and monasteries, many of them in ruins, evoking ―feelings of fear, surprise, confinement‖.[8] This setting of the novel, a castle or religious building, often one fallen into disrepair, was an essential element of the Gothic novel.[9] Placing a story in a Gothic building served several purposes. It drew on feelings of awe, it implied the story was set in the past, it gave an impression of isolation or being cut off from the rest of the world and it drew on the religious associations of the Gothic style. This trend of using Gothic architecture began with the Castle of Otranto and was to become a major element of the genre from that point forward. Besides using Gothic architecture as a setting, with the aim of eliciting certain associations from the reader, there was an equally close association between the use of Gothic architecture and the storylines of Gothic novels, with the architecture often serving as a mirror for the characters and the plot lines of the story.[10] The buildings in the Castle of Otranto, for example, are riddled with underground tunnels, which the characters use to move back and forth in secret. This secret movement mirrors one of the plots of the story, specifically the secrets surrounding Manfred‘s possession of the castle and how it came into his family.[11] The setting of the novel in a Gothic castle was meant to imply not only a story set in the past but one shrouded in darkness.[12] In The History of the Caliph Vathek, architecture was used to both illustrate certain elements of Vatheks character and also warn about the dangers of over-reaching. Vathek‘s hedonism and devotion to the pursuit of pleasure are reflected in the pleasure wings he adds on to his castle, each with the express purpose of satisfying a different sense. He also builds a tall tower in order to further his quest for knowledge. This tower represents Vatheks pride and his desire for a power that is beyond the reach of humans. He is later warned that he must destroy the tower and return to Islam or else risk dire consequences. Vathek‘s pride wins out and, in the end, his quest for power and knowledge ends with him confined to Hell.[13] In the Castle of Wolfenbach the castle that Matilda seeks refugee at while on the run is believed to haunted. Matilda discovers it is not ghosts but the Countess of Wolfenbach who lives on the upper floors and who has been forced into hiding by her husband, the Count. Matilda‘s discovery of the Countess and her subsequent informing others of the Countesses presence destroys the Counts secret. Shortly after Matilda meets the Countess the Castle of Wolfenbach itself is destroyed in a fire, mirroring the destruction of the Counts attempts to keep his wife a secret and how his plots throughout the story eventually lead to his own destruction.[14] The major part of the action in the Romance of the Forest is set in an abandoned and ruined abbey and the building itself served as a moral lesson, as well as a major setting for and mirror of the action in the novel. The setting of the action in a ruined abbey, drawing on Burke‘s aesthetic theory of the sublime and the beautiful established the location as a place of terror and of safety. Burke argued the sublime was a source of awe or fear brought about by strong emotions such as terror or mental pain. On the other end of the spectrum was the beautiful, which were those things that brought pleasure and safety. Burke argued that the sublime was the more preferred to the two. Related to the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful is the idea of the picturesque, introduced by William Gilpin, which was thought to exist between the two other extremes. The picturesque was that which continued elements of both the sublime and the beautiful and can be thought of as a natural or uncultivated beauty, such as a beautiful ruin or a partially overgrown building. In Romance of the Forest Adeline and the La Mottes live in constant fear of discovery by either the police or Adeline‘s father and, at times, certain characters believe the castle to be haunted. On the other hand, the abbey also serves as a comfort, 6

as it provides shelter and safety to the characters. Finally, it is picturesque, in that it was a ruin and serves as a combination of the both the natural and the human. By setting the story in the ruined abbey, Radcliffe was able to use architecture to draw on the aesthetic theories of the time and set the tone of the story in the minds of the reader. As with many of the buildings in Gothic novels, the abbey also has a series of tunnels. These tunnels serve as both a hiding place for the characters and as a place of secrets. This was mirrored later in the novel with Adeline hiding from the Marquis de Montalt and the secrets of the Marquis, which would eventually lead to his downfall and Adelines salvation.[15] Architecture served as an additional character in many Gothic novels, bringing with it associations to the past and to secrets and, in many cases, moving the action along and foretelling future events in the story. [edit] Developments in continental Europe, and The Monk Contemporaneously to English Gothic, parallel Romantic literary movements developed in continental Europe: the roman noir ("black novel") in France, by such writers as François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Gaston Leroux, Baculard d'Arnaud, and Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Albin, Madame de Genlis and the Schauerroman ("shudder novel") in Germany by such writers as Friedrich Schiller, author of The Ghost-Seer (1789) and Christian Heinrich Spiess, author of Das Petermännchen (1791/92). These works were often more horrific and violent than the English Gothic novel. The fruit of this harvest of continental horrors was Matthew Gregory Lewis' lurid tale of monastic debauchery, black magic, and diabolism The Monk (1796). Though Lewis' novel could be read as a sly, tongue-in-cheek spoof of the emerging genre, self-parody was a constituent part of the Gothic from the time of the genre's inception with Walpole's Otranto. Lewis' tale appalled some contemporary readers; however his portrayal of depraved monks, sadistic inquisitors and spectral nuns, and his scurrilous view of the Catholic Church was an important development in the genre and influenced established terror-writer Anne Radcliffe in her last novel The Italian (1797). In this book the hapless protagonists are ensnared in a web of deceit by a malignant monk called Schedoni and eventually dragged before the tribunals of the Inquisition in Rome, leading one contemporary to remark that if Radcliffe wished to transcend the horror of these scenes she would have to visit hell itself (Birkhead 1921). The Marquis de Sade used a Gothic framework for some of his fiction, notably The Misfortunes of Virtue and Eugenie de Franval, though the marquis himself never thought of his work as such. Sade critiqued the genre in the preface of his Reflections on the novel (1800) which is widely accepted today, stating that the Gothic is "the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded". This correlation between the French revolutionary Terror and the "terrorist school" of writing represented by Radcliffe and Lewis was noted by contemporary critics of the genre (Wright 2007: 57-73). Sade considered The Monk to be superior to the work of Ann Radcliffe. Other notable writers in the continental tradition include Jan Potocki (1761–1815) and E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822). [edit] Parody The excesses, stereotypes, and frequent absurdities of the traditional Gothic made it rich territory for satire (Skarda 1986). The most famous parody of the Gothic is Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (1818) in which the naive protagonist, after reading too much Gothic fiction, conceives herself a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side, though the truth turns out to be much more prosaic. Jane Austen's novel is valuable for including a list of early Gothic works since known as the Northanger Horrid Novels:

7

      

The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by 'Ludwig Flammenberg' (pseudonym for Carl Friedrich Kahlert; translated by Peter Teuthold) Horrid Mysteries (1796) by the Marquis de Grosse (translated by P. Will) The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) by Eliza Parsons The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale (1796) by Eliza Parsons Clermont (1798) by Regina Maria Roche The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath The Midnight Bell (1798) by Francis Lathom These books, with their lurid titles, were once thought to be the creations of Jane Austen's imagination, though later research by Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers confirmed that they did actually exist and stimulated renewed interest in the Gothic. They are currently all being reprinted by Valancourt Press (Wright 2007: 29-32). Another example of Gothic parody in a similar vein is The Heroine by Eaton Stannard Barrett (1813). Cherry Wilkinson, a fatuous female protagonist with a history of novel-reading, fancies herself as the heroine of a Gothic romance. She perceives and models reality according to the stereotypes and typical plot structures of the Gothic novel, leading to a series of absurd events culminating in catastrophe. After her downfall, her affectations and excessive imaginations become eventually subdued by the voice of reason in the form of Stuart, a paternal figure, under whose guidance the protagonist receives a sound education and correction of her misguided taste (Skarda 1986). [edit] The Female Gothic and the Supernatural Explained Characterized by its castles, dungeons, gloomy forests and hidden passages, from the Gothic novel genre emerged the Female Gothic. Guided by the works of authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, the Female Gothic permitted the introduction of feminine societal and sexual desires into Gothic texts. The Medieval society, in which Gothic texts are based, granted women writers the opportunity to attribute ―features of the mode [of Gothicism] as the result of the suppression of female sexuality, or else as a challenge to the gender hierarchy and values of a male-dominated culture‖.[16] Significantly, with the development of the Female Gothic came the literary technique of explaining the supernatural. The Supernatural Explained - as this technique was aptly named - is a recurring plot device in Radcliffe‘s The Romance of the Forest. The novel, published in 1791, is among Radcliffe‘s earlier works. The novel sets up suspense for horrific events, which all have natural explanations. An eighteenth-century response to the novel from the Monthly Review reads: ―We must hear no more of enchanted forests and castles, giants, dragons, walls of fire and other ‗monstrous and prodigious things;‘ – yet still forests and castles remain, and it is still within the province of fiction, without overstepping the limits of nature, to make use of them for the purpose of creating surprise.‖[17] Radcliffe‘s use of Supernatural Explained is characteristic of the Gothic author. The female protagonists pursued in these texts are often caught in an unfamiliar and terrifying landscape, delivering higher degrees of horror. The end result, however, is the explained supernatural, rather than terrors familiar to women, such as rape, incest, ghosts or haunted castles.[18] In Radcliffe‘s The Romance of the Forest, one may follow the female protagonist, Adeline, through the forest, hidden passages and abbey dungeons, ―without exclaiming, ‗How these antique towers and vacant courts/ chill the suspended soul, till expectation wears the cast of fear!‖[17] The decision of Female Gothic writers to supplement true supernatural horrors with explained cause and effect transforms romantic plots and Gothic tales into common life and writing. Rather than establish the romantic plot in impossible events Radcliffe strays away from writing ―merely fables, which no stretch of fancy could realize.‖[19] 8

English scholar Chloe Chard‘s published introduction to The Romance of the Forest refers to the ―promised effect of terror‖. The outcome, however, ―may prove less horrific than the novel has originally suggested‖. Radcliffe sets up suspense throughout the course of the novel, insinuating a supernatural or superstitious cause to the mysterious and horrific occurrences of the plot. However, the suspense is relieved with the Supernatural Explained. For example, Adeline is reading the illegible manuscripts she found in her bedchamber‘s secret passage in the abbey when she hears a chilling noise from beyond her doorway. She goes to sleep unsettled, only to awake and learn that what she assumed to be haunting spirits were actually the domestic voices of the servant, Peter. La Motte, her caretaker in the abbey, recognizes the heights to which her imagination reached after reading the autobiographical manuscripts of a past murdered man in the abbey. ―‗I do not wonder, that after you had suffered its terrors to impress your imagination, you fancied you saw specters, and heard wondrous noises.‘ La Motte said. ‗God bless you! Ma‘amselle,‘ said Peter. ‗I‘m sorry I frightened you so last night.‘ ‗Frightened me,‘ said Adeline; ‗how was you concerned in that?‘ He then informed her, that when he thought Monsieur and Madame La Motte were asleep, he had stolen to her chamber door... that he had called several times as loudly as he dared, but receiving no answer, he believed she was asleep... This account of the voice she had heard relieved Adeline‘s spirits; she was even surprised she did not know it, till remembering the perturbation of her mind for some time preceding, this surprise disappeared.‖[20] While Adeline is alone in her characteristically Gothic chamber, she detects something supernatural, or mysterious about the setting. However, the ―actual sounds that she hears are accounted for by the efforts of the faithful servant to communicate with her, there is still a hint of supernatural in her dream, inspired, it would be seem, by the fact that she is on the spot of her father‘s murder and that his unburied skeleton is concealed in the room next hers‖.[21] The supernatural here is indefinitely explained, but what remains is the ―tendency in the human mind to reach out beyond the tangible and the visible; and it is in depicting this mood of vague and half-defined emotion that Mrs. Radcliffe excels‖.[21] Transmuting the Gothic novel into a comprehendible tale for the imaginative Eighteenth Century woman was useful for the Female Gothic writers of the time. Novels were an experience for these women who had no outlet for a thrilling excursion. Sexual encounters and superstitious fantasies were idle elements of the imagination. However, the use of Female Gothic and Supernatural Explained, are a ―good example of how the formula [Gothic novel] changes to suit the interests and needs of its current readers‖. In many respects, the novel‘s ―current reader‖ of the time was the woman who ―lay down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame,‖[22] according to Jane Austen, author of Northanger Abbey. The Gothic novel shaped its form for female readers to ―turn to Gothic romances to find support for their own mixed feelings‖.[23] Following the characteristic Gothic Bildungsroman-like plot sequence, the Female Gothic allowed its readers to graduate from ―adolescence to maturity,‖[24] in the face of the realized impossibilities of the supernatural. As female protagonists in novels like Adeline in The Romance of the Forest learn that their superstitious fantasies and terrors are replaced with natural cause and reasonable doubt, the reader may understand the true position of the heroine in the novel: ―The heroine possesses the romantic temperament that perceives strangeness where others see none. Her sensibility, therefore, prevents her from knowing that her true plight is her condition, the disability of being female.‖[24] 9

Another text in which the heroine of the Gothic Novel encounters the Supernatural Explained is The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) by Gothic author Eliza Parsons. This Female Gothic text by Parsons is listed as one of Catherine Morland's Gothic texts in Austen's Northanger Abbey. The heroine in The Castle of Wolfenbach, Matilda, seeks refuge after overhearing a conversation in which her Uncle Weimar speaks of plans to rape her. Matilda finds asylum in the Castle of Wolfenbach: a castle inhabited by old married caretakers who claim that the second floor is haunted. Matilda, being the courageous heroine, decides to explore the mysterious wing of the Castle. Bertha, wife of Joseph, (caretakers of the castle) tells Matilda of the "other wing": "Now for goodness sake, dear madam, don't go no farther, for as sure as you are alive, here the ghosts live, for Joseph says he often sees lights and hears strange things."[25] However, as Matilda ventures through the castle, she finds that the wing is not haunted by ghosts and rattling chains, but rather, the Countess of Wolfenbach. The supernatural is explained, in this case, ten pages into the novel, and the natural cause of the superstitious noises is a Countess in distress. Characteristic of the Female Gothic, the natural cause of terror is not the supernatural, but rather female disability and societal horrors: rape, incest and the threatening control of the male antagonist. [edit] The Romantics

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) has come to define Gothic fiction in the Romantic period. Frontispiece to 1831 edition shown. Further contributions to the Gothic genre were provided in the work of the Romantic poets. Prominent examples include Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel and Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) and Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1820) which feature mysteriously fey ladies (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 33-5, 132-3). In the latter poem the names of the characters, the dream visions and the macabre physical details are influenced by the novels of premiere Gothicist Anne Radcliffe (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 132-3). Percy Bysshe Shelley's first published work was the Gothic novel Zastrozzi (1810), about an outlaw obsessed with revenge against his father and half-brother. Shelley published a second Gothic novel in 1811, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, about an alchemist who seeks to impart the secret of immortality. The poetry, romantic adventures and character of Lord Byron, characterised by his spurned lover Lady Caroline Lamb as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' were another inspiration for the Gothic, providing the archetype of the Byronic hero. Byron features, under the codename of 'Lord Ruthven', in Lady Caroline's own Gothic novel: Glenarvon (1816). 10

Byron was also the host of the celebrated ghost-story competition involving himself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John William Polidori at the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. This occasion was productive of both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819). This latter story revives Lamb's Byronic 'Lord Ruthven', but this time as a vampire. The Vampyre has been accounted by cultural critic Christopher Frayling as one of the most influential works of fiction ever written and spawned a craze for vampire fiction and theatre (and latterly film) which has not ceased to this day. Mary Shelley's novel, though clearly influenced by the Gothic tradition, is often considered the first science fiction novel, despite the omission in the novel of any scientific explanation of the monster's animation and the focus instead on the moral issues and consequences of such a creation. A late example of traditional Gothic is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin which combines themes of Anti-Catholicism with an outcast Byronic hero (Varma 1986). [edit] Victorian Gothic

Edgar Allan Poe was an important reinterpreter of Gothic fiction. By the Victorian era Gothic had ceased to be the dominant genre (in fact the form's popularity as an established genre had already begun to erode with the success of the historical romance popularised by Sir Walter Scott). However, in many ways, it was now entering its most creative phase. Recently readers and critics have begun to reconsider a number of previously overlooked Penny Blood or Penny Dreadful serial fictions by such authors as G.W.M. Reynolds who wrote a trilogy of Gothic horror novels: Faust (1846), Wagner the Wehr-wolf (1847) and The Necromancer (1857) (Baddeley 2002: 143-4). Reynolds was also responsible for The Mysteries of London which has been accorded an important place in the development of the urban as a particularly Victorian Gothic setting, an area within which interesting links can be made with established readings of the work of Dickens and others. Another famous penny dreadful of this era was the anonymously authored Varney the Vampire (1847). The formal relationship between these fictions, serialised for predominantly working class audiences, and the roughly contemporaneous sensation fictions serialised in middle class periodicals is also an area worthy of inquiry. Influential critics, above all John Ruskin, far from denouncing mediaeval obscurantism, praised the imagination and fantasy exemplified by its Gothic architecture, influencing the Pre-Raphaelites. An important and innovative reinterpreter of the Gothic in this period was Edgar Allan Poe who believed 'that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul'. His story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) explores these 'terrors of the soul' whilst revisiting classic Gothic tropes of aristocratic decay, death, and madness (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 181-2). The legendary villainy of the Spanish Inquisition, previously explored by Gothicists Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin, is revisited in "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842). The influence of Ann 11

Radcliffe is also detectable in Poe's "The Oval Portrait" (1842), including an honorary mention of her name in the text of the story. The influence of Byronic Romanticism evident in Poe is also apparent in the work of the Brontë sisters. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) transports the Gothic to the forbidding Yorkshire Moors and features ghostly apparitions and a Byronic hero in the person of the demonic Heathcliff whilst Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) adds The Madwoman in the Attic (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar 1979) to the cast of Gothic fiction. The Brontës' fiction is seen by some feminist critics as prime examples of Female Gothic, exploring woman's entrapment within domestic space and subjection to patriarchal authority and the transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such restriction. Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Cathy are both examples of female protagonists in such a role (Jackson 1981: 123-29). Louisa May Alcott's Gothic potboiler, A Long Fatal Love Chase (written in 1866, but published in 1995) is also an interesting specimen of this subgenre. Elizabeth Gaskell's tales "The Doom of the Griffiths" (1858) "Lois the Witch", and "The Grey Woman" all employ one of the most common themes of Gothic fiction, the power of ancestral sins to curse future generations, or the fear that they will. The gloomy villain, forbidding mansion, and persecuted heroine of Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas (1864) shows the direct influence of both Walpole's Otranto and Radcliffe's Udolpho. Le Fanu's short story collection In a Glass Darkly (1872) includes the superlative vampire tale Carmilla, which provided fresh blood for that particular strand of the Gothic and influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, Le Fanu, together with his predecessor Maturin and his successor Stoker, form a sub-genre of Irish Gothic, whose stories, featuring castles set in a barren landscape, with a cast of remote aristocrats dominating an atavistic peasantry, represent in allegorical form the political plight of colonial Ireland subjected to the Protestant Ascendancy (Eagleton 1995). The genre was also a heavy influence on more mainstream writers, such as Charles Dickens, who read Gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his own works, shifting them to a more modern period and an urban setting, including Oliver Twist (1837-8), Bleak House (1854) (Mighall 2003) and Great Expectations (1860–61). These pointed to the juxtaposition of wealthy, ordered and affluent civilisation next to the disorder and barbarity of the poor within the same metropolis. Bleak House in particular is credited with seeing the introduction of urban fog to the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film (Mighall 2007). His most explicitly Gothic work is his last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). The mood and themes of the Gothic novel held a particular fascination for the Victorians, with their morbid obsession with mourning rituals, Mementos, and mortality in general.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) was a classic Gothic work of the 1880s, seeing many stage adaptations. The 1880s, saw the revival of the Gothic as a powerful literary form allied to "fin de siecle" decadence, which fictionalized contemporary fears like ethical degeneration and questioned the social structures of the time. Classic works of this Urban Gothic include Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), George du Maurier's Trilby (1894), Richard Marsh's 12

The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), and the stories of Arthur Machen. The most famous Gothic villain ever, Count Dracula was created by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula (1897). Stoker's book also established Transylvania and Eastern Europe as the locus classicus of the Gothic (Mighall 2003). In America, two notable writers of the end of the 19th century, in the Gothic tradition, were Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers. Bierce's short stories were in the horrific and pessimistic tradition of Poe. Chambers, though, indulged in the decadent style of Wilde and Machen (even to the extent of having a character named 'Wilde' in his The King in Yellow). [edit] Elements of Anti-Catholicism [edit] Historical Context England‘s conversion from Catholicism to the Church of England stemmed from political, not religious causes. King Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon because she had only bore him one female heir, Mary, and he had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. However, Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage as it was against Catholic doctrine. To remedy this problem, Henry VIII changed England‘s official religion from Catholicism to the Church of England. In 1543, King Henry VIII pronounced himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. This reformation started a trend of anti-Catholicism in England. Because the king was head of the church and state, it was considered treasonous to oppose the Church of England. In late 16th century, many worried that the pope sought to regain control of England. As Steven Bruce states, antiCatholicism is used to ―defend the socio-economic and political position of Protestants against opposition that threatens it; and as a rationalization to justify and legitimize both the privileged position and any conflict with those who challenge and weaken it‖.[26] The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 eased discrimination of Catholics by allowing them to build cathedrals and practice their religion. However, a strong sense of anti-Catholicism can be seen in Gothic literature. [edit] Specific Examples of Anti-Catholicism in Gothic Literature In general, Gothic novels are placed in countries strongly associated with Catholicism, such as Spain and Italy. In the eyes of the readers, the characters are immediately associated with this religion; to the reader, the character‘s flaws are directly associated with their Catholic beliefs. This is especially prevalent in characters more directly associated with the church such as priests, monks, and friars. Because these characters are supposed to be a direct representation of the church and they are supposed to be characters of high moral standards, many authors write these religious characters to be especially egregious. The pattern of antiCatholicism in Gothic literature can be seen through many characters in specific. [edit] The Castle of Otranto In this short novel, Horace Walpole paints a grim picture of Catholicism through his character, Friar Jerome. Many sinful happenings revolve around Friar Jerome. Manfred, the lord of the Castle of Otranto, wants to divorce his wife so he will be able to marry the young and beautiful Isabella. In hopes of getting all he desires, Manfred tries to persuade Friar Jerome to find religious justification for divorce and convince his wife, Hippolita to give her consent to divorce. The reader later discovers that Friar Jerome has a son – Theodore. This brings to question the friar‘s religiosity. If friars are supposed to be chaste, how did Theodore come into existence? For sure, Friar Jerome had to have become a friar without his chastity. [edit] Zeluco John Moore spends much of the novel addressing the animosity between Protestants and Catholics. Zeluco, being a Sicilian, is no doubt a Catholic. Zeluco is devoid of morals. He only cares about his own interests. He abandons Countess Brunella‘s niece after impregnating her. Zeluco‘s first wife dies of a broken spirit once he 13

marries her for her money. His atrocious actions continue throughout the novel, culminating in the brutal murder of his own son. Moore has other immoral characters that are more closely connected to the Catholic Church. These other prominent Catholic characters include Laura and her family, Father Mulo and Father Pedro. Anti-Catholic sentiments can be seen in the interactions between Catholic and Protestant characters. Colonel Seidlits, a Catholic, was married to Madame de Seidlits, a Catholic. Both are strong in their religious convictions. Colonel Seidlits strongly believes it would be morally wrong to make an attempt to convert his wife to Protestantism. Madame de Seidlits, urged by Father Mulo, attempts to convert him to Catholicism on multiple occasions. The Colonel remains firm in his beliefs and remains a Protestant to his death. Father Mulo is unnecessarily long-winded implying that he is partly incompetent. Competent individuals are able to verbalize their opinions quickly and succinctly. Father Pedro, although intelligent when it comes to manipulating people, is incompetent in regards to proper moral conduct. Zeluco doesn‘t have trouble in bribing Father Pedro to become an accomplice in his malicious plans. Because he is the confessor of Laura, Madame de Seidlits, and the rest of that family, Father Pedro is able to manipulate each of them with ease. Father Pedro tragically convinces Laura to marry Zeluco. The man who made an oath to prevent spiritual, emotional, and physical harm from coming to an individual when possible ultimately brought the opposite to Laura. Without Father Pedro‘s intervention, Laura most likely wouldn‘t have married Zeluco and her son would not have been brutally strangled. John Moore more directly addresses the debate between Catholicism and Protestantism while Zeluco is a plantation owner in Cuba. Two characters, the physician and the priest, show a drastic distinction between the two types of people. The Cuban priest is depicted as nothing short of a blundering idiot. Most of what this character does and says does not follow the laws of reason. Much of what he does is based on emotion or falsehoods. The physician provides a stark contrast to this character. The physician is the one who engages in a debate with Zeluco in regards to slavery and the way Zeluco treats his slaves. Each time the priest is made to be a fool, the physician steps in to provide a voice of reason and logic. A much more minor character in Zeluco, George Buchanan is an anti-Catholic voice. He unremittingly tries to prevent any sort of relationship between his master, Mr. N—and Laura because while Laura is a Catholic, Mr. N—is a Protestant. Buchanan, who happens to be an Englishman, detests the thought of his master marrying a Catholic. There is no doubt that George Buchanan‘s sentiments on this subject reflect the prevailing belief in England. Moore‘s English readers of the time connect with this character because of this. [edit] The Monk Matthew Lewis creates one of the most anti-Catholic characters in Gothic literature. In the first few pages of the novel, the reader learns of a much revered, pious monk named Ambrosio. He soon falls into sin when Matilda, dressed as a boy, reveals her true identity. Upon seeing her ―beauteous orb‖ exposed as she threatens suicide if she can‘t have his love, he is thrust into a downward spiral into sin and his own destruction. Ambrosio is nearly killed when a snake bites him while he is in the garden with Matilda. This snake can be seen as a representation of the devil and the scene as a depiction of the monk‘s descent into sin. Ambrosio says ―surely Heaven sent that Serpent to punish‖. Nuns provide yet another representation of anti-Catholic sentiments in Lewis‘ novel. The first is Agnes. While visiting a nearby convent, Ambrosio discovers a letter from Agnes‘ lover, Don Raymond de las Cisternas. In it, Ambrosio and later the Prioress of the Convent of St. Clare learn of Agnes‘ plan to escape the confines of the convent to be with her lover. She is driven by her lustful desires to sin. When she entered the convent, Agnes made a solemn oath to God; to break this oath would be a terrible sin. The second character representing antiCatholic sentiments is the Bleeding Nun. Destroyed by lust, she was murdered by her lover and doomed to remain in unrest until her bones can be laid to rest. Indeed, the Bleeding Nun is yet another representation of an immoral Catholic. These two women are meant to draw a contrast between the morally upright Protestants of England and the morally devoid Catholics. [edit] Shakespeare and the Gothic 14

[edit] Introduction The connections between Shakespeare and Gothic fiction may not be directly obvious upon first consideration; yet, the Gothic genre of literature has been influenced to a great extent by Shakespearean characters and themes, as well as by Shakespeare‘s own personal views and beliefs. John Drakakis argues that at the most basic level of commonality, "Shakespeare‘s investment in the resources of the supernatural, his predilection for spectres, graveyards, the paraphernalia of death, moving statues, magical transformations, and the emphasis on the ‗nonrational‘ as a category of human experience all render his plays open to the descriptive term 'Gothic'".[27] But, beyond the supernatural alone, both Shakespeare and the Gothic share collective anxieties concerning ponderous themes of identity, marriage, and the role of women, among others. These anxieties, Chris Baldick argues, are a result of Gothic fiction‘s characteristic obsession "with old buildings as sites of 'human decay' ... with the material evanescence of human life," and the works of Shakespeare address a congruent obsession.[28] Both Shakespeare and the Gothic present this decay of humanity through archetypical characters and common themes, and Gothic writers continually referenced Shakespeare both directly and indirectly in their own works. Ann Radcliffe has been deemed the "Shakespeare of Romance Writers" for her treatment and referencing to Shakespeare‘s works.[27] In her novels, particularly The Italian, which includes direct quotes from Shakespearean plays at the beginning of many of its chapters, Radcliffe consistently uses Shakespeare to further her narratives and to stimulate and excite reader comprehension. [edit] Stupid Servants Both Shakespeare and Gothic writers rely heavily on stock characters, like the ―stupid servant,‖ to forward the narrative. These characters are stereotypical, one-dimensional, and very predictable. They generally function as comedic relief, which tends to occur in the most dramatic of moments. Shakespeare was well known as deviating from classical tradition in his use of characters for comedic relief. In Macbeth, the drunken porter‘s scene serves as comedic relief in the midst of the play‘s most dramatic event, Macbeth‘s murdering of King Duncan.[29] Gothic fiction also often uses lower class characters as both comic relief, and to move the plot forward. In Ann Radcliffe‘s The Romance of the Forest, Peter is talkative, foolish, and comedic. His attempt to relate a particular story to his master takes an extended length of time, with his master constantly urging, "Is it impossible for you to speak to the point?" and "Do be less tedious, if it is in thy nature," to which Peter responds with an even lengthier delay.[15] Similarly, The Castle of Wolfenbach uses stock characters for both comedic effect and to forward the narrative. Pierre and Jacqueline‘s main role in the novel is to set up the story. They are the true believers in the haunting of the castle, and they refer Matilda Weimar to Bertha and Joseph before they disappear from the story altogether, having served their purpose. Bertha and Joseph, in turn, lead to Matilda‘s introduction to the Countess of Wolfenbach. Bertha meets a timely death once she has served that purpose, but not before providing a bit of comedic relief. Her confident assertion that she is safest from the castle ghosts on the ground floor since they, "were some of high gentry, I warrant, who never went into kitchens," is purely comic. Similarly, Matilda‘s servant, Albert‘s, excessive fear of the ghosts leaves him comically "buried under his clothes ... drops of perspiration down his face" and unable to sleep, the complete opposite of masculinity.[30] This use of stock characters for comic relief and plot development originated with the works of Shakespeare, and was imitated in Gothic fiction. [edit] Female Empowerment and the Fiendlike Queen Judith Cook argues that "women in Shakespeare‘s plays ... defy their families and marry for love, disguise themselves as boys and follow their hearts, play a decisive part in determining their own fate".[31] Though somewhat more submissive, the women in Gothic fiction inherit similar traits. Matilda Weimar, in The Castle of Wolfenbach, though a damsel in distress, is still an empowered Gothic heroine. She is honest and courageous in defying her lecherous uncle, braving the supernatural threat of ghosts, helping to rescue the Countess of Wolfenbach, and ultimately marrying her true love, the Count de Bouville.[30] In Matthew Lewis‘s, The Monk, Matilda (first known as Rosario), dresses as a man in order to enter the monastery and gain the confidence of Ambrosio, the object of her affection. Her character parallels Shakespeare‘s Rosalind, in As You Like It. Both women disguise themselves as boys in order to get to the man they love, and to achieve their most ardent desires. However, Lewis takes Matilda‘s power even farther, giving her supernatural abilities and a superior 15

wickedness to any man. Matilda‘s character in The Monk represents another common archetype between Shakespeare and the Gothic, the ―fiendlike queen‖. Identified by Judith Cook, the ―fiendlike queen‖ originated with Shakespeare‘s Lady Macbeth. Cook describes Lady Macbeth as ―a great, bad woman who we hate, but whom we fear more than we hate,‖ whose most disastrous traits are the ―excess of that strong principle of self interest and family aggrandisement not amendable to the common feelings of compassion, failure and justice‖. Cook goes on to define Lady Macbeth‘s ―greatness‖ in terms of her sheer ―courage and force of will-not intellect".[31] Lady Macbeth is the villain the reader loves to hate, and, to some extent, can also identify with as an emblem of female empowerment. Like The Monk‘s Matilda, and Shakespeare‘s Lady Macbeth, Vathek‘s Carathis, directly mirrors Lady Macbeth. Her control over her son, Vathek, is just as strong and damning as Lady Macbeth‘s control over her husband. She is a woman well versed in ―occult‖ magic, and possessing the same destructive ambition as Lady Macbeth. Even after being damned to the depths of hell, Carathis uses her last moments of leisure to assert herself as queen. After speaking to Elbis, ―she assembled all the choirs of Genii, and all the dives to pay her homage ... thus marched she, in triumph, through a vapor of perfumes," attempting to dethrone Hell‘s agents and unrelenting in her pursuit of knowledge until her ―haughty forehead‖ becomes ―corrugated with agony ... her right hand on her heart, which was to become a receptacle of eternal fire‖.[32] Though reduced to anguish in the end, Carathis, like Lady Macbeth and other Gothic heroines, still embodies a strong female character, empowered and ambitious. [edit] The Marriage Plot The marriage plot began to appear in literature in eighteenth century England, as a result of ongoing debates concerning the regulation of marriage. The Marriage Act of 1753 made marriage ceremonies within the church mandatory, and helped prevent clandestine, or invalid, marriages as deemed by the state. The act contained ―nullity provisions that allowed the state to override the church-sanctioned vow‖ if they deemed it necessary. Many argued that the state had no right to regulate a ―sacred Christian right‖ and ―that the act shored up oligarchy by creating barriers to marriages between the rich and the poor and among the population at large."[33] As a result, these new regulations spurred the use of the marriage plot as a focus for both reflection and entertainment in 18th and 19th century literature, with Shakespeare being one of the earliest writers to employ the marriage plot in his works. Each of Shakespeare‘s plays either focuses on, or contains a subplot, concerning the development of the lovers‘ relationship and their subsequent fate. Characteristically, the lovers in Shakespeare‘s plays must either end up married or dead. Romeo and Juliet die for their love, while Ferdinand and Miranda, in The Tempest, are united in marriage. The overarching goal is always a marriage, even if it is an undesired marriage. Sometimes one lover is even substituted for another. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the young lovers are entangled in a triangle in which, due to Puck‘s mistake, magic causes Lysander‘s love for Helena and his abandoning of his first love, Hermia. Much of Gothic fiction employs the same use of the marriage plot in its works, with the romantic couple either marrying, dying, or substituting for another lover. Like A Midsummer Nights Dream. in The Castle of Otranto, one female lover is substituted for another. Here, however, it is not the result of a magical mistake, but rather a solution to the death of Theodore‘s original lover, Matilda.[34] Marcie Frank argues that much of Gothic fiction involves this kind of ―melancholy marriage‖ in which marriage must be met by some means, whether the union is desired or undesired, and that marriage remains a ―hallmark convention supplying a certain degree of coherence across the genre."[35] Following the premise A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theodore replaces his original love for another simply for the sake of being married by the end of the novel. After briefly mourning Matilda‘s death, he settles for marrying her best friend, Isabella, ―with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul." The novel is referencing, and poking fun at, both Shakespeare and the legal intervention regarding marriage in the 18th and 19th centuries. In The Monk, while Agnes and Don Raymond eventually marry, Antonia and Lorenzo‘s marriage is thwarted by Antonia‘s death. After being raped by Ambrosio, Antonia‘s virtue is no longer intact for her marriage to Antonio, and the only other option is for her to die. In these novels, marriage becomes the primary and most important achievement, while those who cannot marry must meet death instead. [edit] Distrust of the Church 16

The cultural and religious aftermath of the Protestant Reformation left their mark on Gothic fiction. Gothic novels tended to be set in countries outside England, primarily in Italy or Spain, known to be the centers of the Catholic Church. The settings, as well as the archetypical ―evil clergy,‖ directly connect the failures and flaws of the characters to their religious beliefs, and perpetuates the anti-Catholic sentiments often articulated in Gothic literature. In her novels, Ann Radcliffe continually quotes Shakespearean passages to both further her narrative and excite reader recognition and response.[36] In The Italian, Radcliffe uses Shakespeare to reinforce her own distrust of the Catholic Church. Chapter V of The Italian opens with, ―What if it be a poison, which the friar subtly hath ministered?-----,‖ a direct quotation from Act IV, Scene III of Romeo and Juliet during which Juliet is afraid the friar has poisoned her sleep potion.[37] These direct references to Shakespeare by Radcliffe show the immense influence which he had over Gothic fiction and its writers. ―As it stands, the quotation appears to bolster and reinforce the anti-Catholic sentiments of [Radcliffe‘s] novel,‖ and ―implies that Shakespeare shares with Radcliffe [and other writers of Gothic fiction] a distrust of the motives and actions of Catholic friars,― while displaying the strength of Shakespeare‘s influence on Gothic fiction.[38] [edit] Post-Victorian legacy

Pulp magazines such as Weird Tales reprinted and popularized Gothic horror from the prior century. Notable English twentieth century writers in the Gothic tradition include Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Hugh Walpole, and Marjorie Bowen. In America pulp magazines such as Weird Tales reprinted classic Gothic horror tales from the previous century, by such authors as Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton and printed new stories by modern authors featuring both traditional and new horrors (Goulart 1986). The most significant of these was H. P. Lovecraft who also wrote an excellent conspectus of the Gothic and supernatural horror tradition in his Supernatural Horror in Literature (1936) as well as developing a Mythos that would influence Gothic and contemporary horror well into the 21st century. Lovecraft's protégé, Robert Bloch, contributed to Weird Tales and penned Psycho (1959), which drew on the classic interests of the genre. From these, the Gothic genre per se gave way to modern horror fiction, regarded by some literary critics as a branch of the Gothic (Wisker 2005: 232-33) although others use the term to cover the entire genre. Many modern writers of horror (or indeed other types of fiction) exhibit considerable Gothic sensibilities—examples include the works of Anne Rice, as well as some of the sensationalist works of Stephen King (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 464-5, 478; Davenport-Hines 1998: 357-8). The Romantic strand of Gothic was taken up in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938) which is in many respects a reworking of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Other books by du Maurier, such as Jamaica Inn (1936), also display Gothic tendencies. Du 17

Maurier's work inspired a substantial body of 'Female Gothics,' concerning heroines alternately swooning over or being terrified by scowling Byronic men in possession of acres of prime real estate and the appertaining droit de seigneur. Gothic Romances of this description became popular during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with authors such as Phyllis A. Whitney, Joan Aiken, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, Mary Stewart, and Jill Tattersall. Many featured covers depicting a terror-stricken woman in diaphanous attire in front of a gloomy castle. Many were published under the Paperback Library Gothic imprint and were marketed to a female audience. Though the authors were mostly women, some men wrote Gothic romances under female pseudonyms. For instance the prolific Clarissa Ross and Marilyn Ross were pseudonyms for the male writer Dan Ross and Frank Belknap Long published Gothics under his wife's name, Lyda Belknap Long. Another example is British writer Peter O'Donnell, who wrote under the pseudonym Madeleine Brent. Outside of companies like Lovespell, who carry Colleen Shannon, very few books seem to be published using the term today.

William Faulkner's novels and short stories exemplified the Southern Gothic genre. The genre also influenced American writing to create the Southern Gothic genre, which combines some Gothic sensibilities (such as the Grotesque) with the setting and style of the Southern United States . Examples include William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, and Flannery O'Connor (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 418-56). Contemporary American writers in this tradition include Joyce Carol Oates, in such novels as Bellefleur and A Bloodsmoor Romance and short story collections such as Night-Side (Skarda 1986b) and Raymond Kennedy in his novel Lulu Incognito. The Southern Ontario Gothic applies a similar sensibility to a Canadian cultural context. Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Barbara Gowdy, and Margaret Atwood have all produced works that are notable exemplars of this form. Another writer in this tradition was Henry Farrell whose best-known work was the Hollywood horror novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960). Farrel's novels spawned a subgenre of 'Grande Dame Guignol' in the cinema, dubbed the 'Psycho-biddy' genre. Other notable contemporary writers in the Gothic tradition are: Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black (1983); Patrick McGrath, author of The Grotesque (1989); Poppy Z. Brite, author of Lost Souls (1992) and Exquisite Corpse (1996); and Caitlin R. Kiernan, author of Silk (1998) (Davenport-Hines 1998: 377-8; Baddeley 2002: 84-7). The themes of the literary Gothic have been translated into other media. The early 1970s saw a Gothic Romance comic book mini-trend with such titles as DC Comics' The Dark Mansion Of Forbidden Love and The Sinister 18

House of Secret Love, Charlton Comics' Haunted Love, Curtis Magazines' Gothic Tales of Love, and Atlas/Seaboard Comics' one-shot magazine Gothic Romances. There was a notable revival in twentieth century Gothic horror films such the classic Universal Horror films of the 1930s, Hammer Horror, and Roger Corman's Poe cycle (Davenport-Hines 1998: 355-8). In Hindi cinema, the Gothic tradition was combined with aspects of Indian culture, particularly reincarnation, to give rise to an "Indian Gothic" genre, beginning with the films Mahal (1949) and Madhumati (1958).[39] Twentieth century rock and roll music also had its Gothic side. Black Sabbath's 1969 debut album created a dark sound different from other bands at the time and has been called the first ever "Goth-rock" record (Baddeley 2002: 264). Themes from Gothic writers such as H. P. Lovecraft were also used among gothic rock and heavy metal bands, especially in black metal, thrash metal (Metallica's The Call of Ktulu), death metal, and gothic metal. For example, heavy metal musician King Diamond delights in telling stories full of horror, theatricality, satanism and anti-Catholicism in his compositions (Baddeley 2002: 265).

The gothic novel was invented almost single-handedly by Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto (1764) contains essentially all the elements that constitute the genre. Walpole's novel was imitated not only in the eighteenth century and not only in the novel form, but it has influenced the novel, the short story, poetry, and even film making up to the present day. Gothic elements include the following: 1. Setting in a castle. The action takes place in and around an old castle, sometimes seemingly abandoned, sometimes occupied. The castle often contains secret passages, trap doors, secret rooms, dark or hidden staircases, and possibly ruined sections. The castle may be near or connected to caves, which lend their own haunting flavor with their branchings, claustrophobia, and mystery. (Translated into modern filmmaking, the setting might be in an old house or mansion--or even a new house--where unusual camera angles, sustained close ups during movement, and darkness or shadows create the same sense of claustrophobia and entrapment.) 2. An atmosphere of mystery and suspense. The work is pervaded by a threatening feeling, a fear enhanced by the unknown. Often the plot itself is built around a mystery, such as unknown parentage, a disappearance, or some other inexplicable event. Elements 3, 4, and 5 below contribute to this atmosphere. (Again, in modern filmmaking, the inexplicable events are often murders.) 3. An ancient prophecy is connected with the castle or its inhabitants (either former or present). The prophecy is usually obscure, partial, or confusing. "What could it mean?" In more watered down modern examples, this may amount to merely a legend: "It's said that the ghost of old man Krebs still wanders these halls." 4. Omens, portents, visions. A character may have a disturbing dream vision, or some phenomenon may be seen as a portent of coming events. For example, if the statue of the lord of the manor falls over, it may portend his death. In modern fiction, a character might see something (a shadowy figure stabbing another shadowy figure) and think that it was a dream. This might be thought of as an "imitation vision." 5. Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events. Dramatic, amazing events occur, such as ghosts or giants walking, or inanimate objects (such as a suit of armor or painting) coming to life. In some works, the events are ultimately given a natural explanation, while in others the events are truly supernatural.

19

6. High, even overwrought emotion. The narration may be highly sentimental, and the characters are often overcome by anger, sorrow, surprise, and especially, terror. Characters suffer from raw nerves and a feeling of impending doom. Crying and emotional speeches are frequent. Breathlessness and panic are common. In the filmed gothic, screaming is common. 7. Women in distress. As an appeal to the pathos and sympathy of the reader, the female characters often face events that leave them fainting, terrified, screaming, and/or sobbing. A lonely, pensive, and oppressed heroine is often the central figure of the novel, so her sufferings are even more pronounced and the focus of attention. The women suffer all the more because they are often abandoned, left alone (either on purpose or by accident), and have no protector at times. 8. Women threatened by a powerful, impulsive, tyrannical male. One or more male characters has the power, as king, lord of the manor, father, or guardian, to demand that one or more of the female characters do something intolerable. The woman may be commanded to marry someone she does not love (it may even be the powerful male himself), or commit a crime.

9. The metonymy of gloom and horror. Metonymy is a subtype of metaphor, in which something (like rain) is used to stand for something else (like sorrow). For example, the film industry likes to use metonymy as a quick shorthand, so we often notice that it is raining in funeral scenes. Note that the following metonymies for "doom and gloom" all suggest some element of mystery, danger, or the supernatural. wind, especially howling

rain, especially blowing

doors grating on rusty hinges

sighs, moans, howls, eerie sounds

footsteps approaching

clanking chains

lights in abandoned rooms

gusts of wind blowing out lights

characters trapped in a room

doors suddenly slamming shut

ruins of buildings

baying of distant dogs (or wolves?)

thunder and lightning

crazed laughter

10. The vocabulary of the gothic. The constant use of the appropriate vocabulary set creates the atmosphere of the gothic. Here as an example are some of the words (in several categories) that help make up the vocabulary of the gothic in The Castle of Otranto:

Mystery

diabolical, enchantment, ghost, goblins, haunted, infernal, magic, magician, miracle, necromancer, omens, ominous, portent, preternatural, prodigy, prophecy, secret, sorcerer, spectre, spirits, strangeness, talisman, vision

Fear, Terror, or Sorrow

afflicted, affliction, agony, anguish, apprehensions, apprehensive, commiseration, concern, despair, dismal, dismay, dread, dreaded, dreading, fearing, frantic, fright, frightened, grief, hopeless, horrid, horror, lamentable, melancholy, miserable, mournfully, panic, sadly, scared, shrieks, sorrow, sympathy, tears, terrible, terrified, terror, unhappy, wretched 20

Surprise

alarm, amazement, astonished, astonishment, shocking, staring, surprise, surprised, thunderstruck, wonder

Haste

anxious, breathless, flight, frantic, hastened, hastily, impatience, impatient, impatiently, impetuosity, precipitately, running, sudden, suddenly

Anger

anger, angrily, choler, enraged, furious, fury, incense, incensed, provoked, rage, raving, resentment, temper, wrath, wrathful, wrathfully

Largeness

enormous, gigantic, giant, large, tremendous, vast

An Example The 1943 Sherlock Holmes film, Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (one of the classic Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce films), contains all the elements of the gothic. Here is a brief rundown of the items above: 1. Setting. It's not quite a castle, but it is a huge mansion with several levels, including a basement and a hidden sub-basement. Dark and drafty. Ominous. 2. Atmosphere of Mystery. It's a multiple murder mystery, with cryptic notes, hidden passageways, wind, lightning, and everyone a suspect. 3. Ancient Prophecy. There is the Musgrave Ritual. Obscure, compelling, ancient. 4. Omens and portents. The crow at the tavern, the intrusive lightning strike, the taunting notes from the butler. 5. Supernatural or inexplicable events. How the victims died. The lightning seems to strike at just the right time. 6. Overwrought emotion. The female lead screams and panics a bit. 7. Women in distress and 8. Women threatened by a male. Toned down here, but the murderer had designs on the heroine. 9. The wind blows, signs bang into the wall, lightning, a few characters are trapped in various ways. Elements of Romance In addition to the standard gothic machinery above, many gothic novels contain elements of romance as well. Elements of romance include these: 1. Powerful love. Heart stirring, often sudden, emotions create a life or death commitment. Many times this love is the first the character has felt with this overwhelming power. 2. Uncertainty of reciprocation. What is the beloved thinking? Is the lover's love returned or not?

21

3. Unreturned love. Someone loves in vain (at least temporarily). Later, the love may be returned. 4. Tension between true love and father's control, disapproval, or choice. Most often, the father of the woman disapproves of the man she loves. 5. Lovers parted. Some obstacle arises and separates the lovers, geographically or in some other way. One of the lovers is banished, arrested, forced to flee, locked in a dungeon, or sometimes, disappears without explanation. Or, an explanation may be given (by the person opposing the lovers' being together) that later turns out to be false. 6. Illicit love or lust threatens the virtuous one. The young woman becomes a target of some evil man's desires and schemes. 7. Rival lovers or multiple suitors. One of the lovers (or even both) can have more than one person vying for affection.

Gothic Literature includes poetry and novels (between 1764 and 1820) by William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, and others. The genre is characterized by supernaturalism, melodrama, and sensationalism. 1. Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares by Robert Mighall. Oxford. From the publisher: "This is the first major full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with a rich store of historical sources, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction is an historicist survey of nineteenth-century Gothic writing - from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle." Sponsored Links Who Moved My Cheese?Official site of the #1 book on change, by Dr. Spencer Johnsonwww.whomovedmycheese.com Story Books For ChildrenSale On Kids Activity & Craft Books Free Home Delivery. Limited OfferFirstCry.com/Books-CD-Games BooksBuy books @ attractive pricing, Free & Fast Delivery across India!landmarkonthenet.com/books 2. American Gothic: An Anthology 1787-1916 by Charles L. Crow (Editor). Blackwell Publishers. From the publisher: "This collection brings together, and sets into dialogue, Gothic works by a number of authors, men and women, black and white, which illuminate many of the deepest concerns and fears of nineteenth-century America." 3. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction by Jerrold E. Hogle (Editor). Cambridge. From the publisher: "Fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying genre from the 1760s to the end of the twentieth century." 4. Handbook to Gothic Literature by Marie Mulvey-Roberts. New York University Press. From the publisher: "Through a wide and eclectic range of brief essays written by leading scholars, The Handbook to Gothic Literature provides a virtual encyclopedia of things Gothic. From the Demonic to the Uncanny, the Bronte sisters to Melville, this volume plots the characteristics of Gothic's vastly different schools and manifestations." 5. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality,Gothic,the Uncanny and Literature by Julian Wolfreys. Palgrave Macmillan. From the publisher: "In what ways can authors in the nineteenth century be read so as to acknowledge the various phantom effects which return within their texts? In what ways do the traces of such 'ghost' writing surface in the works of Dickens, Tennyson, Eliot and Hardy?" 6. Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions

22

by Cannon Schmitt. University of Pennsylvania Press. From the publisher: "Rife with sexuality, chaos, confusion, and terror, the Gothic has seemed to many of its recent readers to be a subversive genre, resisting enforced gender constructions of straitened notions of rationality, disinterring that which has been forbidden or repressed." 7. Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic by Justin D. Edwards. University of Iowa Press. From the publisher: "Works of gothic literature by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, are placed in the contexts of nineteenth-century racial 'science' and contemporary discourses about the formation of identity." 8. Modern Gothic: A Reader by Allan L. Smith (Editor). St. Martin's Press. From the publisher: "This lively collection of essays aims to chart the survival of the gothic strain: the dark, the forbidding, the alienating, the fantastic, in a spectrum of popular and high cultural forms of representation." Sponsored Links Tshirts with Funny QuotesWide Range of Stylish T-Shirts Easy Return. Free Shipping. Buy NowInkfruit.com/Pay_On_Delivery The Gothic Writers GuildGets your Art out there Where it can be seen!www.gothicguild.org 9. Gothic Modernisms by Andrew Smith, Jeff Wallace (Editor). Palgrave Macmillan. From the publisher: "The contributors explore how the Gothic influences a range of writers including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, Elizabeth Bowen, and Djuna Barnes." 10. Companion to the Gothic by David Punter (Editor). Blackwell Publishers. From the publisher: "'A Companion to the Gothic' provide a series of stimulating insights into Gothic writing and its history and genealogy. It also offers comprehensive coverage of criticism and the various theoretical approaches the Gothic has inspired and spawned."

Paul Murray's top 10 gothic novels  o o o  

reddit this guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 August 2004 00.00 BST Article history Paul Murray is an Irish diplomat and writer. His biography of Lafcadio Hearn won the Koizumi Yakumo literary prize in Japan in 1995. His latest work, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker has just been published by Jonathan Cape. Here he chooses his top 10 novels in the older gothic tradition. 1. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole Horace Walpole published what is generally recognised as the first gothic novel almost two and a half centuries ago. The Castle of Otranto (1765) created a confluence of medievalism and terror that has mutated and endured ever since. Stoker may have paid an oblique tribute by featuring Walpole's kinsman, the 17th century prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, in Miss Betty (1898), his next novel after Dracula. 2. History of the Caliph Vathek by William Beckford 23

William Beckford's History of the Caliph Vathek (1786) merged the 18th century fashion for oriental tales with the newly-established gothic tradition. Byron and Mallarme, among others, admired this work, which HP Lovecraft considered caught well the "shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit". A fascination with, and fear of, the east was a feature of the gothic novel. 3. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe Radcliffe's 1794 work anticipates Stoker's ability to describe landscapes unseen by the author. The final chase of Count Dracula across Europe by his righteous band of pursuers also recalls Radcliffe at her considerable best. She has a masterful ability to suggest the supernatural without ultimately invoking it. Hugely, and deservedly, popular in her time. 4. The Monk by Matthew Lewis One of the most vicious, rip-roaring and entertaining novels of the entire gothic genre. Written by an MP, its reactionary political message - an attempt to revive the horror of the intertwined threat of the Spanish and the Papacy at a time when they had been displaced as the main threat to the British state by the new ideology of the French Revolution - is clearer in retrospect. It shocked even Byron when it appeared in 1796. 5. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Together with John Polidori's The Vampire (the first fictional vampire tale), Frankenstein (1818) emerged from the high jinks, featuring the Shelleys, Matthew Lewis, Polidori and Byron, at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816. It created a monster rivaled only by Count Dracula in the global consciousness. It also contains a reference to the monster as a vampire and anticipates Dracula's multiple narrator technique. It marks a confluence of the gothic and romanticism. 6. Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin Representing the beginning of the Irish gothic tradition in 1820, it is considered by some the greatest of all gothic works. Representing a significant stride in the evolution of the genre, Melmoth profoundly influenced some of the most important writers of the 19th century, including Scott, Thackeray and Baudelaire. Balzac grouped Melmoth with Moliere's Don Juan, Goethe's Faust and Byron's Manfred as one of the supreme allegorical figures of modern literature. Maturin's relative, Oscar Wilde, symbolically took the name Sebastian Melmoth when he went into exile following his release from prison. 7. Salathiel the Immortal by George Croly Now almost forgotten, the Reverend George Croly was a friend of the Stoker family. In Salathiel the Immortal (1829), there are similarities of predicament between Salathiel and Dracula (as well as with that of Melmoth the Wanderer). Salathiel led the mob which promoted the death of Jesus, in return for which he was condemned to the misery of the undead state. A reshaping of the Wandering Jew legend which underlies so much of the gothic genre, including Melmoth the Wanderer. Like Maturin, Croly was a Church of Ireland clergyman. 8. Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Pecket Prest Published in 1847, the year of Stoker's birth, this penny-dreadful contained over 800 pages of often confusing text. It did, however, create some of what would become the stock characters of the vampire tale, especially its central European vampiric aristocrat with ambitions to be master of a great English house and a taste for the blood of young virgins. He is possessed of glittering eyes that fascinate his victims and fang-like teeth. The staking of one of his victims established one of the most potent images of the genre while the elderly and wise Admiral Bell anticipated Van Helsing. Varney represented the first full-length vampire novel in fiction and probably also the first significant fantastic adventure story. 24

9. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Like Oscar Wilde's slightly later Dorian Gray and Stoker's Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1887) achieved a dramatic effect by bringing the terror of the primitive, or the peripheral, 'other' home to the heart of empire. A play based on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was put on at the Lyceum by the actor Richard Mansfield in 1888 with limited success. Like Dracula and Frankenstein, it became a major magnet for movie makers and is now embedded in the mass consciousness. 10. Dracula by Bram Stoker Don't believe those who tell you that Dracula (1897) does not need to be read: no movie to date has done justice to a long and complex work. Arguably the greatest, certainly the most popular gothic novel of them all. It has been reinterpreted afresh by each succeeding generation, a sure sign of a masterpiece, and still generates oceans of critical comment, some of it profound, some unintentionally hilarious, much of it just plain silly. Stoker would have been amazed (he replied to one earnest American correspondent that he clearly knew more about Dracula than he did himself!).

Purposes and Definitions of the Arts  o 





Purposes Poetry and other Arts "Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is syntax, grammar and logical continuity, which together form the carrier-wave of plain sense within which its deeper meanings are broadcast.", Don Paterson, "The empty image: new models of the poetic trope", "Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature", Jonathan Culler, "Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.189 "Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank", Kant, "Critique of Judgement", p.215 25



o 

 o  





o o o

o

o o o

o

"Hegel declares that poetry is supreme among the arts, combining music's apprehension of the inner life of the mind with the determinate phenomenal character of sculpture and painting. In contrast to many of his contemporaries who make similar claims, however, Hegel never wavers in insisting that poetry is the crisis of art as much as it is its triumph. Poetry's uniqueness stems from the fact that the subject and the object of poetry, the medium and the message, are one and the same. Unlike painting or sculpture, poetry can deal with any and every topic in any and every fashion because in the final analysis what poetry really expresses is the mind's apprehension of itself to itself in itself", "Derrida, Hegel, and the Language of Finitude", Jan Mieszkowski, Postmodern Culture, May 2005 Poetry and Ritual "I suggest that what artists do in all media can be summarized as deliberately performing the operations that occur instinctively during a ritualized behaviour: they simplify or formalize, repeat (sometimes with variation), exaggerate, and elaborate in both space and time for the purpose of attracting attention and provoking and manipulating emotional response", Dissanayake, "Aesthetic Incunabula", Philosophy and Literature - Volume 25, Number 2, October 2001. "all art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment", T.S. Eliot, The Dial 75 Poetry and Life "poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry", Hollander, "Melodious Guile", Yale Univ Press, 1988, p.15 "Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves" George Oppen, "An Adequate Vision: A George Oppen Daybook", ed Davidson, IR 26:5-31, p.29. "Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry", A.E. Housman, "The Name and Nature of Poetry" (lecture), 1933. "The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true", 333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333Harold Monro, "The Future of Poetry", Poetry Review, January 1912 "artworks not only mime nature; they also mime the accepted modes of miming", Stephen H. Blackwell, "The Quill and the Scalpel", Ohio State University Press, 2009, p.88 "art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it", Adorno,"" "What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object", Ramachandran, 1999 "It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with separate 'particulars,' for such rows do not exist.", Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, p.27 "The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent", Jacobson "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing", Samuel Johnson, "Johnson on Shakespeare" (ed. Walter Raleigh), 1908. p.16 "All Poetry, to speak with Aristotle and the Greek critics (if for so plain a point authorities be thought wanting) is, properly, imitation. It is, indeed, the noblest and most extensive of the mimetic arts; having all creation for its object, and ranging the entire circuit of universal being", Richard Hurd, "Discourse on Poetical Imitation", 1751 "Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter", "Slip-shod Sibyls", Germaine Greer, Viking, 1995, p.3 26

o o

o

o o

o

o

o

o o o

o o o o

o o

o  o

"I want poetry not to be like reality but to be as impossible as reality" - Keston Sutherland "The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force", Cocteau, p.12, "La Mort et les Statues", Paris, 1977. "The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us", Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry". "If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear", Valéry, "Reflections", p.64, Collected Works 13:142. "The non-mimetic character of language is thus, in a certain way, the opportunity and the condition for poetry to exist. Poetry exists only to 'renumerate' in other words, to repair and compensate for the 'defect of languages'" Gerard Genette, "Valéry and the Poetics of Language" "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important" - Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 1917 (in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lemon and Reis, Univ of Nebraska Press, 1965), p.12 "Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words" - Wei T'ai, 11th century. "No longer do we accept the 'sublimation model' according to which 'the function of art is to sublimate or transform experience, raising it from ordinary to extraordinary, from commonplace to unique, from low to high'", Rosalind Krauss, October 56, [spring 1991]:3) "A poem points to nothing but itself. Information is relative. A poem is absolute", EM Forster, "Anonymity: An Inquiry", 1925. "Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation" - Brodsky, "On Grief and Reason", Hamish Hamilton, 1996) "The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive", Auden, in "The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939", ed Mendelson, Faber, p.371 "The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE", BLAST "The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead" - C. Day Lewis "Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit", Valéry "If the value of poetry is seen as dependent on posterity, and thus in opposition to strategies of intervention in the present, particularly to interventions with any serious prospect of political effectivity, then contemporaneity is mortgaged to aesthetic ambition", Drew Milne, "Agoraphobia, and the embarrassment of manifestos" (Parataxis, republished in Jacket 20, 2002). "Verbal art is experienced as aesthetic because it exploits to the full every option for making verbal behaviour difficult", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.217 "most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter", Wallace Stevens, "Two or Three Ideas" in "Opus Posthumous", Samuel French Morse, Knopf, 1975. "Poetry is always the most impure and most conservative of the arts", Monroe K. Spears, "Dionysus and the City", OUP, 1970, p.111 Definitions "So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find exceptionally suggestive, apposite, or musical - are usually adjudged to be 'poetic'. ... The work of the poet is to contribute a text that will firstly invite such a reading; and secondly reward such a reading.", Don Paterson, "The empty image: new models of the poetic trope",

27

o

o o o

o

o

o

o

o o

o o o o o

o o o o o

"The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified", Jonathan Culler, "Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.191 "Literature is the question minus the answer", Roland Barthes "Poetry is language in orbit", Seamus Heaney, " Sunday Independent", 25 September 1994 "poetry is to be distinguished from the other arts, according to Lessing, Kant, and Heidegger, by its freedom from intuition and its disavowal of imitation. In effect, poetry renders the world by making illusory and even impossible images of things - by rendering the world as what it is not", Daniel Tiffany, "Infidel Poetics", Univ of Chicago Press, 2009, p.38 "uniquely, poetry is concerned as much with the processes and material of language as it is with its use as an efficient medium of exchange", Richard Bradford, "Poetry: The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p.3 "poetry is the most versatile, ambidextrous and omnipotent of all type of speech or writing, yet, paradoxically, it is the only one which is unified by a single exclusive feature, that which enables us to identify it and which separates it from every other kind of linguistic expression. This element is the keystone of my definition of poetry and it is called 'the double pattern' ... One half of the double pattern is made up of devices, effects, habits and frames of reference that poetry shares with all other linguistic discources ... The other half of the pattern pulls against this, it announces the text as a poem by marshalling aspects of language into patterns that serve no purpose elsewhere in language yet which play a role in the way the poem is structured and, most significantly, in how it discharges meaning.", Richard Bradford, "Poetry: The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p.25-28 "Poetry is about language. It shows us that language is brittle, magical, untrustworthy, arbitrary, but unlike a philosophical essay on such topics, it does not enable us to answer back. It demonstrates that, on the one hand, language creates it, that consciousness and language are coterminous but also that we can step outside it", Richard Bradford, "Poetry: The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p.261 "When [oxygen and sulphur dioxide] are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum", T.S. Eliot, "Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot", p.41 "[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom", Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes" "Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing", James Longenbach", The Art of the Poetic Line", Graywolf, 2009 "[poetry is news] brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo", Milosz "Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy", JS Mill, "What is Poetry", 1833 "What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them", Paz, "L'Arc et la lyre", 1965, p.46 "Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance", Wallace Stevens, "The Necessary Angel", 1951, p.116 "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins", Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800 "[Poetry is ] An integral/Lower limit speech/Upper limit music", "A" 12, Zukovsky, p.138 "poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible", Genet, "Our Lady of the Flowers", 1963, p.293 "the poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such", Ron Silliman, "The New Sentence", Roof, 1987 "poetry is a verdict rather than an intention", Leonard Cohen "Art's effect is due to the tension resulting from the clash of the collocation of elements of two (or more) systems [of interpretation]. This conflict has the function of breaking down automatism of perception and occurs simultaneously on the many levels of a work of art ... All levels may carry meaning", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.xv 28

o

o

o

o

o

o

o

o

o

o o o o

o o o o o o o o o o

o

"Poetic language features an iconic rather than a predominantly conventional relationship of form and content in which all language (and cultural) elements, variant as well as invariant, may be involved in the expression of the content.", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.xxi "certain supplementary restrictions imposed on the text compel us to perceive it as poetry. As soon as one assigns a given text to the category of poetry, the number of meaningful elements in it acquires the capacity to grow [and] the system of their combinations also becomes more complex", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.33 "in several ways, one of which is entirely specific to it, poetry contains repetitions in the signifier which thus work to foreground the signifier. This feature can stand as a definition of poetry", Antony Easthope, "Poetry as Discourse", Methuen, 1963, p.16. "The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order ... all great art ... harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self", "The Seven Basic Plots", Christopher Booker, continuum, 2004, p.552 "[Poetry is] that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them." - Banville "In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs", Frye, "Anatomy of Criticism", p.74 "[Literature is a form of language that] breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence", Foucault, "The Order of Things", p.300 "Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer", John Constable, PN Review 159, V31.1 (2004), p.40 "A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.", William Carlos Williams, "Selected Essays" "The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act" - "101 Sonnets", Don Paterson, Faber and Faber, 1999, p.xiv. "[a poem is] a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words", Valéry, "Complainte d'une convalescence en mai" "a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning", Valéry "As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry" - "Short and Sweet", Simon Armitage, Faber and Faber, 1999, p.xiii. "A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years", Ginsberg "verse is the vehicle of exploration rather than the versification of a pre-conceived idea", Peter Armstrong, Other Poetry II.22 "[a poet's work] consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms", Valéry "True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful", Goethe. "Art is the placing of your attention on the periphery of knowing", Robert Irwin, Arts Magazine, Feb 1976. "The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.", Valéry, Tel Quel "it is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is" - I.A. Richards "a poem shouldn't mean but be", Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" "to write a poem is to find a way from exile into pilgrimage" - Gunn? "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things", T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", 1919. "[the poet's mind is] a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feeling, phrases and images, which remain there until all the particles, which can unite to form a new compound are present together", T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", 1919. 29

o

o o o o

o o o

o

o  o

o

o

o  

"the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes" - T.S. Eliot. "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting" - Robert Frost "Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event" - Lowell "poetic effect [is] the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.", - D.Sperber and D.Wilson, "Relevance", Blackwell, 1986, p.222) "[the poetic function is] the set (Einstellung) towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake [which] by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects", Jakobsen, in "Style in Language", (ed T.A. Sebeck), Cambridge, 1960, p.356 "the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry", William Empson, "Seven Types of Ambiguity", Penguin, 1961, p.21 the "meaning of poetry is its 'tension', the full organised body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it", Tate, quoted in "Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry", O'Connor, Univ of Chicago Press, 1948, p.143 "What is common to all modern poetry is the assertion or the assumption (most often the latter) that syntax in poetry is wholly different from syntax as understood by logicians and grammarians", Donald Davie, "Articulate Energy", 1955 "Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.", Octavia Paz "Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.", Marianne Moore, "Poetry", Reception "se un branco di musica lascia ancora a un uomo la possibilità di scegliere tra il ruolo passivo dell'ascoltatore e quello activo ... un'opera letteraria ... lo destina a un unico ruolo, quello dell'interprete", (if a piece of music lets the audience choose between an active and passive role ... the reader of a literary work is doomed to an interpretive role), Brodskij, "Dall'esilo", p.50 "[for Fish], poetry is generically characterized not by any formal quality distinguishing it from prose, but by the activity of the reader, who gives one kind of attention to prose and another kind to poetry. Nor does the supposed rich excess of meaning provide a useful means of defining poetic language, since the reader can readily supply that excess in the act of reading", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.115 "We might think of poetry as the most compelling, forceful use of language, but we must also consider whether that is because we give that force and that richness to the language. That is, poetry may be demanding to read because we think of a poem as a powerful, concentrated use of all the resources of language", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.117 "The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive", p.19 "a work of (whatever) art can be either 'received' or 'used'. ...'Using' is inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it ... When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to 'receive' significant words is always, in one sense, to 'use' them, to go through and beyond them to an imagined something which is not itself verbal", p.88 from "An Experiment in Criticism", CS Lewis, CUP, 1961

o

o

"I do share Jacobson's sense that the characteristic response associated with the reading of poetry, at least in postmedieval Western culture, is a feeling of intensified referentiality combined with (and inseparable from) a heightened awareness of the aural qualities of language", Derek Attridge, "Peculiar Language", Methuen, 1988, p.135 "I regard literary reception as generally characterised by subjectivity, fictionality, polyvalence and form orientation", "Understanding Metaphor in Literature", G.Steen, Longman, 1994.

30

Form (back to top)   

 

 



  

   

 

  

"Much contemporary 'free-verse' is in fact blank verse", Fiona Sampson, "Poetry Writing: The expert guide", Robert Hale, 2009, p.41 "Many poetry tutors don't like to discuss [line endings] at all; there is such a taboo on discussing this most personal aspect of poetry", Katy Evans-Bush, in "Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.194 "Syllabic meter in English is a compelling measure because it is clear, simple, consistent, and regulates phonemic flow, albeit minimally", Rothman, in "Meter in English: A Critical Engagement", David Baker (ed), University of Arkansas Press, 1996, (p. 207). "Personally I have a dread of the sonnet. It must contain 14 lines and a man must be a tremendous poet or a cold mathematician if he can accommodate his thoughts to such a condition", Edward Thomas "Personally I enjoy writing in a form first, then playing the same set of words through variations of different forms, lengthening the poem, shortening it, until it either 'clicks' into the right form (Robert Frost again), or decides that it wants to be 'free' verse. The move into free verse is always a pleasant surprise for a poem that has passed through so many cages and narrow ways. And such a poem bears the voice-print of strictness and discipline while also appearing to be merely spoken, inevitably, as if improvised on the spot. Your working must never show. Art must conceal art", David Morley "Form is content-as-arranged; content is form-as-deployed", Helen Vendler "Can form make the primary chaos ... articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plentitude? In my opinion the answer is yes", Lyn Hejinian in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.622 "Writing's forms are not merely shapes but forces, too; formal questions are about dynamics... Form does not necessarily achieve closure, nor does raw materiality provide openness", Lyn Hejinian in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.618 "It seems that in Ireland radical 'content' is permissable only through conventional 'form'", p.164, Trevor Joyce in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "we ... have no choice but to write in free verse", Bly, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Harper and Row, 1990, p.38 "Instead of treating verse as a by-product of prose, I suggest that verse is composed directly: that lines are the units of composition. Since lines are not linguistic units, they must be produced by other than the normal linguistic processes, and I will show that this is why lines take on 'poetic' characteristics", Nigel Fabb, "Why is Verse Poetry", PN Review, V36.1, p.52 "In a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, the form everything", Schiller, "On the Aesthetic Education of Man", 1795, xxii.106 "Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini", Paul Muldoon, "Irish Times", 2003 "Poetic formalism is a bit like keeping a bale of hay in your garage to remind you of the horse-power that preceded automobiles", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.130 "Only new contents permit new forms. Indeed they demand them. For if new contents were forced into old forms, at once you would have a recurrence of that disastrous division between content and form", Brecht, "Uber Lyrik", 1938, p.16 "Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it", Doris Lessing, "the golden notebook" (Preface), Flamingo, 1972, p.10 "the primary reason for reading is pleasure, and, dry as it sounds to say so, the primary source of poetic pleasure is form. The content of a poem may be personal to the point of narcissism, self-involved to the point of autism, but its form - that is, any feature that gives the poem cohesion and keeps it from drifting into chaos - is communal, inclusive, even cordial.", Billy Collins, 2006 "The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush ... and shed the perfume of impalpable form", Whitman "I would contend that the constraints of form are spurs to the imagination: that they are in fact the chief producers of imagination", George Szirtes, Poetry, Feb 2006 "Formal writing is, in fact, a beautiful device for liberating the essential powerlessness of the artist, Keats's negative capability. Outsiders may see formal composition as rule-fixated grind: practitioners know it as rule31

forgetting delight ... I have heard it said that the least talented writers benefit the most from practising form. This is only partly true ... In general ... form urges all degrees of ability to optimum performance", Carol Rumens, "The Creative Writing Coursebook", Julia Bell & Paul Magrs (eds), MacMillan, 2001, p.226  o

o

"Ingarden's treatment of the structures of objects of art is indebted ... to both Aristotle's primary stress, in the Poetics, on the stratified structure of the work of art itself, and to Lessing's attempt, in the Laocoon, to set psychologistic questions aside in the interests of general problems of structure.", p.8 "The formal unity of the work derives from the essential inner-connectedness (sic) of these four strata.", p.11 From "Selected Papers in Aesthetics/Roman Ingarden", P.J. McCormick, The Catholic University of America Press, 1985.



 

 







  



  

"I think there is a 'fluid' as well as a 'solid' content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms", Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect" in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound "vers libre has not even the excuse of a polemic; it is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art", T.S. Eliot, "Reflections on Vers Libre" "I began to suspect that the vaunted strictures of the New Formalism were rather like the rules in a household with small children: tiny attempts at maintaining order, frequently reiterated, and rarely observed.", Eliot Weinberger, "What Was Formalism?", Jacket 6 "Regular rhythm and rhyme schemes work for me as a kind of drilling rig to mine for meanings that lie beneath the original idea of the poem", A. Adams, "Rialto 38", 1997, p.45 "metre with its tendency towards statement rather than exploration ... It has long been recognised that metrical verse encourages a tendency towards reflection and introspection while free verse acts as a vehicle for expressing the immediate, capturing the sense of the moment as it happens", Ian Parks, p.14, Acumen 51, 2005 "metre always fixes at least two characteristics of the line. The metre always fixes the length of the line (with controlled variation) ... In English, stress maxima are fixed in place. In Welsh, rhyme is fixed in place. In Irish, word boundaries are fixed in place", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.142 "formal complexity has a function irrespective of whether it is mirrored in the concept of the poem; I suggest that we experience these shifting formal contradictions and complexities at aesthetic", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.185 "While there is a general tendency [Greek dactylic hexameter, Vedic Sanskrit, etc] for the end of the line to be metrically strict, there is also a general tendency for the very final syllable to show some metrical looseness", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.175 "form is never more than an extension of content, and content never more than an extension of form opposition", Creeley or Olson "History and politics can play a part: they propose questions. In poetry the answers come not as arguments but as form" - Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets", 1998, p.1 "[Words] already have what the artist first wants to give them - meaning - and fatally lack what he needs in order to shape them - body. I propose that the nature and primary function of the most important poetic devices - especially rhyme, meter, and metaphor - is to release words in some measure from their bondage to meaning, their purely referential role, and to give or restore to them the corporeality which a true medium needs.", Burckhardt, "The Poet as Fool and Priest", ELH 23 (1956), p.279 "When the correct device is also the expected one and by definition outworn, the act of composition will bristle with difficulties, with unforgivable wrong choices. The device itself will be parodied, distorted, or avoided in such a way as to make its absence very remarkable", "The Chances of Rhyme", R.Wesling, Univ of California Press, 1980. "a new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms", Robbe-Grillet, "For a New Novel", Grove-Evergreen, 1965, p.17. "In all beautiful art the essential thing is the form", Kant, "Critique of Judgement", p.214 "[free verse is the] direct utterance from the instant, whole man ... [, the ] soul and mind and body surging at once, nothing left out", D H Lawrence, "New Poems", 1918. 32





   

 o o

"The difficult thing about learning to write free verse is that you have to improvise what you consider to be interesting enough rhythms to exist on their own, and they have to be different for each line. So I think it's easier to write well in metrical poetry, when you can", Thom Gunn, quoted by Potts in The Guardian. "I think I read my poetry more by length than by stress - as a matter of movements in space than footsteps hitting the earth. I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre ... It all depends on the pause - the natural pause, the natural lingering of the voice according to the feeling - it is the hidden emotional pattern that makes poetry, not the obvious form", D H Lawrence, letter to Edward Marsh "Forms are unlike those sent by the IR, they are not to be filled in" - Alan Rawsthorne "Form is regarded not as a neat mould to be filled, but rather as a sieve to catch certain kinds of material", Theodore Roethke, in "A Poet's Guide to Writing Poetry", Mary Kinzie, p.345 "form isn't a container (of content) but rather a rule for generating a possible 'next move'", Foreman, "How to write a play", p.229 "It has been suggested that free verse is inferior to metrical verse because it provides nothing against which to make variations. [Louis] Simpson's ear is so good that some of his poems suggest ... that free verse can be rewardingly varied by the occasional use of meter" - "Compulsory Figures", Henry Taylor, Louisiana State Univ Press, 1992, p.46 "Meter is perceived in the actual stress-contour, or the line is perceived as unmetrical, or the perceiver doesn't perceive meter at all", p.262 "It follows ... that the notion of norm and variation is not relevant to traditional meter", p.268 from "Collected Essays", JV Cunningham





 o

o

"The governing principle of much Persian poetry is circular rather than linear; rather than a logically sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken centre", Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 25, p.9 "As stress-languages, English and German allow for great flexibility in the formation of lines; the French alexandrine however is based on syllable count, and so effective versification becomes a matter of observing certain norms: the caesura dividing the two hemistichs, the avoidance of hiatus, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, and so on", Marjorie Perloff, "Lucent and inescapable rhythms: metrical 'choice' and historical formation" "Aristotelian logic, the reigning mode until the time of Coleridge and Hegel, analyzes the forms of coherence found in completed acts of thought. What Coleridge proposed as a dynamic supplement, in his idea of method as 'progressive translation', is a logic of the activity of thinking ... the miming of the writer's choices at transition points and of the reader's shifting attention.", p.113 "The principal of expressive variation from a metrical norm, according to Paul Fussell in Poetry Meter and Poetic Form, 'is certainly the primary source of metrical pleasure for the modern critical reader' ... Such patterns - of expectation, delay, and resolution - exercise the grasp of grammar and the delicacy of anyone's ear.", p.151 from Wesling, D, "The New Poetries", Associated University Presses, 1985.







"The further in anything, as a work of art, the organisation is carried out, the deeper the form penetrates ... the more capacity for receiving that synthesis of ... impressions which gives us the unity with the prepossession conveyed by it", Hopkins, "Notebooks", p.96 "In poetry deviations from the vraisemblable are easily recuperated as metaphors which should be translated or as moments of a visionary or prophetic stance; but in the novel conventional expectations make such deviations more troubling and therefore potentially more powerful", J. Culler, "Structuralist Poetics", Cornell UP, 1975, p.198. "on the simplest level, form functions for any poet as a kind of scaffold from which the poem can be constructed. Stravinsky maintained that only in art could one be freed by the imposition of more rules, perhaps because these rules limit the field of possibilities and escort us rapidly beyond the selection of tools and media 33





  



 



 

   o

to laying the first stone of the work itself. For the reader, on the other hand, the shared language of the poem functions as a map through the terrain of a new idea ... The effect of form on the reader is like the hypnotist's dangling fob watch ... We are hypnotised or spellbound by form, because the traditional aural techniques of verse ... are designed to fix the poem in the memory ... But think of the unconscious effect of form on the poets themselves ... Any degree of difficulty in a form requires of the poet that s/he negotiate with the medium, and compromise what s/he originally 'spontaneously' intended to say ... surely this is precisely the function of 'form in the traditional sense' - that serendipity provided by negotiation with a resistant medium." - Michael Donaghy, "binary myths" (Andy Brown ed.), p.16. the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE Olson, Poetry New York No 3, 1950. "In the classical system, the length or shortness of syllables is fundamental, but there was also a beat accent, and the two never corresponded exactly. In the European system the beat is fundamental, but still the two never correspond. This sets up a descant. The natural rhythm of the spoken language, that is the rhythm of syntax, of meaning, also never or nearly never coincides with the metrical units even for a single line. When is does so, it produces the gigantic clang of a final closure ... But sometimes the ground-rhythm is very obscurely established; in that case the moment it becomes clear is an important and tense one", "The Noise Made by Poems", Peter Levi, Anvil, 1977, p.77. "free verse is inherently more private in character [than metrical poetry]", Jonathan Holden, Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry, Univ of Columbia Press, 1986, p.73 "I will do what I will do, the free verse poet says to his audience, and it is not yours to wonder why. He versifies by fiat", Timothy Steele, Missing Measures, Univ of Arkansas Press, 1990, p.283 "the distinction of metre is regular and uniform, and not, like that which is produced by what is usually called POETIC DICTION, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices upon which no calculation whatever can be made. In the one case, the Reader is utterly at the mercy of the Poet, respecting what imagery or diction he may choose to connect with the passion; whereas, in the other, the metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit because they are certain, and because no interference is made by them with the passion, but such as the concurring testimony of ages has shown to heighten and improve the pleasure which co-exists with it.", Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800 "the free verse, now dominant not only in the US but around the world, has become, with notable exceptions, little more than linear prose, arbitrarily divided into line-lengths", Marjorie Perloff, "The Oulipo Factor", Jacket 23 "The poetic line seems highly problematic nowadays and it sometimes seems better to avoid it altogether", Frances Presley, "Poetry Review", V98.4, 2008 "Not only hapless adolescents, but many gifted and justly esteemed poets writing in contemporary nonmetrical forms, have only the vaguest concept, and the most haphazard use, of the line", Denise Levertov", On the Function of the Line", 1979 "The term structure which we have used so often, is a metaphor from architecture, and may be misleading when we are speaking of narrative, which is not a simultaneous structure but a movement in time.", "The Great Code", Northrop Frye. "Constraints are interesting interfaces between processes and products", Cris Cheek "Sequence and contiguity are inescapable features of sentence-processing, of meaning creation" .. "duple patterns ... are optimally contrastive, and lend themselves most readily to both local and larger-scale contrasts" "Against Transcendental Gossip: The Symbolic Language of Rhythm" (in PN Review 123), Chris McCully, p.44. "The poetic spirit requires to be limited, that it may move within its range with a becoming liberty ... it must act according to laws derivable from its own essence", Schlegel, quoted by Coleridge. "vers libre has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it", Pound, "A Retrospect", 1918. p.93 - "1) coupling need not occur solely between two lines (as in the cases with rhyme) but may arise within equivalent syntactic positions in one line; 2) coupling which primarily foregrounds one element (a phonic one, for instance) tends, secondarily, to foreground other elements (semantic ones); 3) coupling on the semantic level involves opposed as well as parallel features ...; 4) coupling is not solely a microcontextual trait." 34

o

o o

p.97 - "Modernist verse perforce employs couplings in many ways different from couplings which arise in traditional verse. Two differences between a Modernist coupling and a traditional coupling involve the assumption of nondeleted syntax and accurate 'positioning' through meter" p.98 - types of cohesion: phonic, grammatical, rhetorical and semantic. p.110 - "[free verse] is based not on the recurrence of stress accent in a regular, strictly measurable pattern" and it "treats the device of rhyme with a similar freedom and irregularity", "The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics", Preminger and Brogan, Princeton University Press, 1993 from "Modernist Form", J. S. Childs, Associated University Presses, 1986.

   





"The only reality in literature is form; meaning is a shadow-show", Valéry "Form in literature is an arousing and fulfilment of desires. A work has form insofar as one part of it leads us to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence", Kenneth Burke, "Counter-statement", 1931 "Forms can only expose other forms, and the new ones seem transparent only by highlighting the opaqueness of the old", ra page, "hyphen", Comma Press, 2003, p.x "The poet who writes 'free' verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor." - Auden, "Writing" (from "The Dyer's Hand") "La nuova fase della poesia in rete richiede un intervento sulle forme, dunque, perché le questioni di forma sono questioni di contenuto; e di nuovi contenuti ha bisogno la poesia in rete" (the new phase of online poetry demands changes in form, because questions of form are questions of content, and online poetry needs new content), Valerio Cuccaroni, "Poesia, Giugno 2010", p.51 Books - "Vision and Resonance", John Hollander. "Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse", R.D. Curton, Longman, 1992. "Lines and 'Lines'", Sinclair, J.McH, 1972, in B.B. Kachru and H.F.W. Stahlke (eds) Current Trends in Stylistics, Edmonton, Alberta: Linguistic Research Inc. "Cohesion in English", Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R., 1976, London:Longman. "The Web of Words", Carter, R. and Long, M., 1987, London: Longman. "Linguistic Structures in Poetry", SR Levin. Poetry/Prose (back to top)





   



"Gothic novels were strong from 1800-1825, sporting novels seem to run from 1820 to 1860, while imperial romances run from 1850 though 1890, and so on for over 40 genres. What is most interesting, however, is that the genres seem grouped into six periods of creativity and they disappear in clusters as well. Consequently there is an almost complete turn-over in genres every 25 years or so, that is, roughly a generation", Moretti, F., "Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History", "New Left Review 24" (quoted by William L. Benzon in PsyArt) "la differenza tra prosa e poesia non viene più avvertita come quantitativa o tecnica, ma come qualitativa: lo stile è infatti percepito come prodotto di una sensibilità particolare e irripetibile", (the difference between prose and poetry no longer derives from issues of quantity or technique, but of quality: the style is in fact perceived as a product of a particular and unrepeatable sensibility), Fiorenza Lipparini, "L'oscurità nella poesia moderna", in "Lettere Italiane", LXI, N.2, 2009, p.293 "Prose invents - poetry discloses", Jack Spicer, "The Collected books of Jack Spicer, letter", p.15 "Prose is much more heraclitean [than poetry], it begins with change and seeks only to find ways of managing it", Godzich and Kittay, "Emergence of Prose", U of Minnesota P, p.197 "in prose you start with the world/ and find the words to match; in poetry you start/ with the words and find the world in them.", Charles Bernstein, "Dysraphism", 1983 "Perhaps one of the more interesting developments in poetry over the last fifty years has been its overlap with short story writing. It's unsurprising that poetic language has relaxed into an easy colloquial manner but maybe what wasn't expected is the way poetry's taken on the subject matter of prose forms", ???, "Seam 27", 2007, p.53, "There are two chief classical sources of the long line - the epic hexameter and the dithyrambic lyric: the first stands for heroic endeavor. the second for ecstatic utterance ... Hopkins used the long line in several ways - as a container of heterogeneity [or] to creep up on something by a chromatic series of words ... Whitman ... also 35









 o

o

used it to signify intellectual and speculative difficulties", Helen Vendler, "The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham", Harvard Univ Press, 1995, p.72 "isometric breathing is the basis for regular lines, orderly and successive ones. But the gaze has no such isometric rhythm: a gaze can be prolonged at will, held for inspection, meditated on, and periodically interrupted ... what utterance becomes is the tracking of the gaze.", Helen Vendler, "The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham", Harvard Univ Press, 1995, p.83 "In contemporary European literature, 'poetry' hardly consists exclusively of work with line breaks; 'short prose' no longer necessarily implies 'fiction' or 'short story'", John Taylor, "The Antioch Review", Summer 2007, p.574 "Everyone grasps that hospitals operate as factories of feeling - humming production lines of dread and despair, of hope and renewal. Poems start here; novels finish here", Boyd Tonkin, "New Writing 15", Evaristo and Gee (eds), Granta/British Council, 2007, p.281 "'poetry' is a genre, with fiction, drama, and the various nonfiction genres (autobiography, travelogue, epistles, journalism, and so forth), whereas 'verse' is a mode like prose, and again, any of the genres may be written in either of the modes", Turco, The Book of Forms, 2000, p.250 "An important difference between poetic and non-poetic text is that for ordinary language the number of structural levels and their meaningful elements is restricted and known to the speaker in advance, whereas for the poetic text it remains for the reader or listener to establish the nature of the aggregate of code systems that regulate the text. Therefore, any system of regularities can in principle be perceived as meaningful in poetry", p.68 "Prose is a later phenomenon than poetry, arising in a period of chronologically more mature esthetic consciousness ... notwithstanding its seeming simplicity and closeness to ordinary speech, prose is esthetically more complex than poetry", p.24 From "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976







 



  



"In poetry it is the choice of expression that determines the content, whereas in prose it is the opposite; it is the world the author chooses, the events that happen in it, that dictate its rhythm, style, and even verbal choices", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p.313 "The terms poetry and prose are incorrectly opposed to each other. Verse is, properly, the contrary of prose ... and writing should be divided, not into poetry and prose, but into poetry and philosophy", Rev William Enfield, "Monthly Magazine", II (1796), p.453-6 "Much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science", Wordsworth, "Wordsworth's literary Criticism", p.21 "No truth, it seems to me, is too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too exalted to be expressed in prose", AE Housman "poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; 'purer' in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can't do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do", "An Experiment in Criticism", CS Lewis, CUP, 1961, p.97 "I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but only somewhat when I say that a poem is the city of language just as prose is its countryside. Prose extends laterally filling the page's horizon unimpeded, while poetry is marked by dense verticality, by layerings of meaning and sound. Cities and poetry also share compression, heterogeneity, juxtaposition", Cole Swensen, identitytheory.com "Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose." - Basil Bunting "all the modern experiments in reading seek to make the poem end as a novel and the novel as a poem" Mallarme, 1892, letter to Georges Rodenbach. "In Bakhtin's scheme of genres, poetry is characteristically monological. ... 'Stream of consciousness' is a belated rearguard action to confine the novel within the linguistic modes and norms of poetry" - Charles Lock, Stand 2(4)/3(1), p.81 "Many great novelists begin by aspiring to poetry or drama ... there may be only one major poet who would have preferred to have been a novelist: Boris Pasternak", Charles Lock, Stand 2(4)/3(1), p.74 36

 



 

   

 



 o

o o o

o o

"neither meter nor rhyme are sufficient conditions for an identification of a text as a poem" - "Linguistic Structures in Poetry", S.R. Levin, The Hague:Mouton, 1962 "Prose ... must return to its only purpose; to clarify to enlighten the understanding. There is no form to prose but that which depends on clarity. If prose is not accurately adjusted to the exposition of facts it does not exist ... Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystallization of the imagination - the perfection of new forms as additions to nature", WC Williams, "Imaginations", New Directions, 1970, p.116-17, 140. "the insistence that poetry partake of the lofty and sublime ... meant that poetry abandoned large areas of subject matter as 'unpoetic'. These areas were eagerly seized on by the newly enfranchized medium of prose .. In essence [the free verse reform] took away from poetry what had always been its distinguishing and defining characteristic, metre, and offered in metre's place nothing which prose could not already accomplish much better", Dick Davis, Poetry Durham, 28, p.33. "So often, when reading 'free' verse, I can see no reason why a line ends where it does; why the poet did not write it out as a prose-poem", Auden, "On Technique", Agenda V10.4, 1972. "the lines allow for the visual interruption of the phrase (or sentence) without necessarily requiring a temporal interruption, a pause. ... I can ... set in motion a counter-measure that adds to the rhythmic richness of the poem" - Bernstein, "An Interview". "The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower" - Michael Longley in "How Poets Work", Tony Curtis, 1996, Seren, p.118. "to have the virtues of good prose is the first and minimum requirement of great poetry", T.S. Eliot. "Verse is always struggling, while remaining verse, to take up more and more of what is prose, to take something more from life and turn it into 'play'", T.S. Eliot, "Prose and Verse", The Chapbook 22, 1921, p.9 Samuel Johnson's style is a "species of rhyming in prose ... each sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza", William Hazlitt, Complete Works (ed P.P. Howe), 1931, V6, p.102 "Too many poets today think that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry" - Samuel Johnson, 1777 "In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters which are moved about according to the rules, without being visualised at all in the process ... One only changes the X's and Y's back into physical things at the end of the process. Poetry, in one aspect at any rate, may be considered as an effort to avoid this characteristic of prose ... It chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new, and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters.", Hulme "What line breaks add to prose prosody is a connection between eye and ear which emphasizes the nature of the language by ... creating units of intent and emphasis, and by contouring the melodic pitch changes in the narrative-line", Diane Wakoski, "Eye & Ear: A Manifesto" in "The Ohio Review", V.38 (1987), p.17. p.108 - "Conventions associated with lineation appears to have emerged originally from the economic needs of the book-trade in Alexandria ... First the size of the rolls was standardised so that they were easier to transport. Later the lines contained in the columns of prose writing in any one roll were made almost equal in length. ... By this standard length, payment of the scribe and the price of the book were fixed." p.1 - "Old English text is written continuously across the page, filling the valuable vellum from left to right margin" p.20 - "colour ... in early Middle English texts is sometimes used to mark the beginning of a metrical unit in texts without lineation" p.101 - "the practise [of lineation in English poetry] is clearly not established for late Old English poetry in the mid-eleventh century and that it is well established, especially for socially valued reproductions of texts, by the end of the fourteenth century." p.114 - "The practice of bracketing lines in various ways to indicate rhyme schemes is also frequently encountered in manuscripts with the dominant one verse per line layout" p.25 - "The interrelating of sound pattern and visual line is so well established that modern poetry, even when without traditional metrical regularity or rhyme scheme, may encourage us to read in a certain way according to the line breaks." From "The Written Poem", Rosemary Huisman, Cassell, 1998. 37

 o o o

"Obtrusive irregularity (poetic deviation) and obtrusive regularity (parallelism) account for most of what is characteristic of poetic language" "The feeling of 'heightening' in poetic language is, in part, nothing more than the consciousness that it is strange and arresting by the side of common usage." "in judging [traditional modes of foregrounding and contrivances] we clearly have to take account of the different standards of different periods. We live at a time when poetic heightening for its own sake, i.e. the contrived distancing of poetic language from 'ordinary' language, tends to be avoided by poets and condemned by critics. Our demand for a justification of parallelism is stronger than that of other ages." From "A linguistic guide to English poetry", Geoffrey N. Leech, Longman, 1969.











"an abundance of blank verse lines in English prose usually indicates an incursion of solemnity or melancholy". F Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" story has examples, p.114, "Oulipo Compendium", Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (eds), Atlas Press 1998 "I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose; it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge make reading poetry seem more natural" - William Empson, "The Complete Poems of William Empson", John Haffenden, Penguin, 2000. p.112. "In the classical period, prose and poetry are quantities, their difference can be measured ... modern poetry is a quality sui generis and without antecedents. It is no longer an attribute but a substance, and therefore it can very well renounce signs, since it ... does not need to signal its identity outwardly: poetic language and prosaic language are sufficiently separate to be able to dispense with the very signs of their difference. ... modern poetry is opposed to classical art by a difference which involves the whole structure of language, without leaving between those two types of poetry anything in common except the same sociological intention. ... modern poetry, since it must be distinguished from classical poetry and from any type of prose, destroys the spontaneous functional nature of language, and leaves standing only its lexical basis", Barthes, "Writing Degree Zero" "Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified", Barthes, "Myth Today" "we read prose, we listen (albeit internally) to poetry", ra page, "hyphen", Comma Press, 2003, p.xiii See also "New Meaning and Poetic Vocabulary ...", B.Watten, "Poetics Today" (V18:2) and my The End of the Line for Modern Poetry article. Linear/Spatial Form (back to top)



  o o

"The least effective method of describing landscape is by cataloguing all the things in it. Language is successive and contrastive, space is simultaneous and without emphasis. .. A method of rendering landscape ... by minimal signs distributed around a suggested shape .... Carefully breaking down the successive feature of language structure, so that A does not disappear when we move onto B", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.199 "Spatial Form (modernist poetics) gives unity to a literary work by a pattern of interconnected motifs that can only be perceived by 'reading over'", "The Art of Fiction", Lodge, p.82 "the internal conflict between the time-logic of language and the space-logic implicit in the modern conception of the nature of poetry." "The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time ... modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity" 38

From "Spatial Form in Modern Literature", J. Frank, Sewanee Review (1945) (see also "Spatial Form: Thirty Years After" in "Spatial Form in Narrative", Smitten and Daghistany, Cornell Univ Press, 1981)  

 o

o

"[Frye] argues that whatever literary structure is in itself, it must be spatial to the critic", "Beyond Formalism", G.H. Hartman, Yale University Press, 1970, p.13. "Deconstruction of the image: 1) presented as inherently deceptive (Ashbery); 2) word as Image (Concrete); 3) Images give way to syntax. "Making strange" now occurs at the level of the phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster (Coolidge, Bernstein, Andrews, Gertrude Stein)", "Radical Artifice", Marjorie Perloff, 1991, University of Chicago Press p.87 - "When ordinarily unassociated elements are juxtaposed, they constitute a 'place of indeterminacy' (Ingarden) that the reader is called upon to determine. But if this determination is not logically possible, if the relation between the two is undecidable, something else appears in this gap. Eliot and Pound spoke of 'emotion'" p.98 - "the order of words (in most languages) is meaningful, whereas the order of saccadic recurrence (in most visual acts) is not." From "The Poetics of the Mind's Eye", C Collins, Univ of Pennsylvania, 1991



 





"Browning ... makes a conscious and concerted effort to disrupt the linearity of time ... through interior and exterior monologues, and through the juxtaposition of opposing points of view", "Modernist Form", J. S. Childs, Associated University Presses, 1986, p.72. "Abrupt and disordered syntax can be at times very honest, and an elaborately constructed sentence can be at times merely an elaborate camouflage", "A B C of Reading", Erza Pound, p.86. "We no longer think or need to think in terms of monolinear logic, the sentence structure, subject, predicate, object etc. We are as capable or almost as capable as the biologist of thinking thoughts that join like spokes in a wheel-hub and that fuse in hyper-geometric amalgams", Erza Pound "In the past, various bridges have been found to fill the gaps of short poems: Rhyme, melody, common religious and social outlooks, and, in the individualism of the Renaissance, the person of the poet. Thus, to bridge the gaps in the disparate images of a metaphysical poem, a reader must evoke the figure who would join the elements, and this has remained generally the mode of gap-filling until the advent of Imagism in the twentieth century." - Jerome Mazzaro, in Salmagundi No. 22-23, p.184. "collagism is mostly frowned on by English critics (and many poets, too), for whom consistency of tone and unwavering vision are taken to be supreme virtues" - John Lucas, Other Poetry, II.27 Meaning (back to top)



  





"We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other", Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, No.531 "Riddles tend to be visual and conceptual, charms tend to be aural and hypnotic", Elenor Cook, "Poetry, WordPlay, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens", Princeton, 1988, p.16 "Nonsense is a play against sense, a reversal of values, whereas magic operates in a different system altogether", p.44, "The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens", Anca Rosu, Univ of Alabama Press, 1995 "I'm ... mildly distressed at not being able to give a satisfactory account of my work because in certain moods this inability seems like a limit to my powers of invention. After all, if I can invent poetry, why can't I invent the meaning?", Ashbery, "Other Traditions", p.2 "Expressive realism finds [the guarantee of text's meaning] in the author's mind, or in the world we know, or in the conjunction of the two - the author's perception of the world we know. New Criticism is uncertain whether to locate it in language or in human experience. Frye finds it in human anxieties and aspirations. The readertheorists finally invoke a reader, variously defined ... and this reader constitutes the authority for the meaning of the text.", Catherine Belsey, "Critical Practice", Routledge, 1980, p.52 "Meaning in practical communication is achieved through a kind of speed in which an action of understanding annuls the multiple possibilities opened by words themselves and prevents our falling into the abyss.", "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982, p.49 39



  o o o

o

"In Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts ... The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms", "Statutes of Liberty", Geoff Ward, Macmillan, 1993, p. 73-74. "The New Sentence", Ron Silliman, Roof, 1987, discusses means of inhibiting integration of words into higher grammatical levels and keeps "the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language".(p.63). p.1 - "Until recently ... most critics assumed, like Dr Johnson, that great literature was universal and expressed general truths about human life, and that therefore readers required no special knowledge or language" p.36 - "We refuse to allow a text to remain alien and outside our frames of reference; we insist on 'naturalising' it, and effacing its textuality" p.53 - "During the second half of the eighteenth century, commentators began to question whether Pope was a poet at all and to suggest that he was a clever versifier who put prose into rhyming couplets and lacked the imaginative power required of true poetry." p.144 - "Derrida - People desire a centre because it guarantees 'being as presence'. logocentrism (entering into an argument about x by mentioning not- x admits to that axis). diff'erance = defferal." From "A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory", R Seldon, P Widdowson, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993



 







 





I.A. Richards - misreadings are commmonly caused by: failure to make out plain sense; poor sensuous apprehension; erratic evocation of imagery; susceptibility to mnemonic irrelevancies; stock responses; overfacility or inhibition of emotions; irrelevant adherence to belief/doctrines; rigid technical/critical preconceptions "Language ... is an infinitude of used or potential poems waiting to be moulded into new realities" - Friedrich, "The Language Parallax", Univ of Texas Press, 1986. "The Pursuit of Signs", J. Culler, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. p.219 "literary work should be regarded not as an object whose properties the student seeks to know but rather as an experience of the reader, so that false starts, errors, changes of mind are to be thought of, not as undesirable experiences of ill-prepared students, but as part of the experience, and thus part of the meaning of the work" (Stanley Fish, "Self-Consuming Artifacts"). "When presented with a word we first of all perceive a 'sphere of meaning'. This general impression is invariably in terms of qualities which we would associate with the word", "Microgenesis and Aphasia", Heinz Werner, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1956, 52, 347- 53. "the problem of the poet, if he is to produce work which forces his readers to experience real perception, is how to make recognition difficult and perception inevitable. The poem should give an immediate impression of having a 'message' function, in order to achieve unity, but not more than an impression need be provided at the most accessible 'levels' of the poem.", "Poetic Truth", Robin Skelton, Heinemann, 1978. p. 88. "According to phenomenological principles, an object can never be described satisfactorily merely from one perspective ... the artistic imagination foreshortens the perspective towards the material object", HH Rudnick, "Analecta Husserliana IV", Kluwer,??? "The individual differences among concretizations enable us to establish what belongs to the work itself and what belongs to the concretizations conditioned by contingencies", Ingarden, "Literary Work of Art", 336-37. "Their structure is an integration of dissonant meanings that exhibits a Gestalt-like new meaning that is not reducible to the integration - this new meaning is referred to by I.A.Richards as 'the resultant meaning', by Paul Henle as 'induced content', and by Max Black as a 'created similarity'" ("Philosophy of Rhetoric", "Language, Thought and Culture", "More about Metaphor"). "The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be ... to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him." T.S. Eliot, "The Use of Poetry", 1933 "This is the first century which has tried to appreciate all the art works that ever were, anywhere ... Four major thinkers, Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud, gave grounds for the belief that the artist often does not know what he is doing", William Empson, "Argufying", Chatto & Windus, 1987, p.147. See also my The Scale of Meaning article. 40

Truth/Beauty (back to top)  

 

  

    

"What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth", Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey "["Beauty is truth, truth beauty"] strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary use. ... The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or perhaps the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me", T.S. Eliot, "Dante", 1929 "poetry is seeking to make not meaning but beauty", Basil Bunting, Stand V8.2, p.28 "I don't believe that one can dehistoricize and decontextualize cultural production and come up with anything that isn't stripped of a large measure of its liveliness. Isolation in the realm of bestness does, of course, tend to focus on a poem's beauty.", Lyn Hejinian, "The Best American Poetry", 2004, p.11 "From beauty no road leads to reality ... The power of beauty affects the naked being, as though he had never lived", Hannah Arendt, "Rahel Varnhagen", p.88-89 "Beauty reveals everything because it expresses nothing", Wilde "although it is possible to reach what I have stated to be the first end of art, the representation of facts, without reaching the second, the representation of thoughts, yet it is altogether impossible to reach the second with having previously reached the first ... no artist can be graceful, imaginative, or original, unless he be truthful", Ruskin, "Modern Painters", Vol III, p.133-9 "Art is not truth. It is a lie that makes us realize truth", Braque "In the traditional idea of form we naturally find beauty as the pacifying meeting between the visible and the true", F. Carmagnola, "Parentesi perdute", Guerrini & Associati, 1998, p.44 (my translation) "We always take it for granted that all that is beautiful is art, and that all art is beautiful ... This identification of art with beauty is the root of all the difficulties of judgement", Herbert Read, "The Meaning of Art", 1955 "Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical", Auden, "The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays", 1963, p.336. "Every poem starts out as either true or beautiful. Then you try to make the true ones seem beautiful and the beautiful ones true", Larkin, "Larkin at 60", p.113. Obscurity/Ambiguity (back to top)











 

"I cambiamenti [verso l'oscurità] sono graduali e riguardano tutti i livelli del testo, dal lessico, alla metrica ...; dalla sintassi, che comincia a seguire le onde associative del pennsiero, ai trope", (the changes [towards obscurity] are gradual and exist at all levels of the text, from diction, to metre ...; from syntax, which begins to follow the associative waves of thought, to tropes), Fiorenza Lipparini, "L'oscurità nella poesia moderna", in "Lettere Italiane", LXI, N.2, 2009, p.293 "One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most 'intellectual' piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?", Geoffrey Hill, "Paris Review", 2000 "why should I start trying to read something ... if I later discover that I have wasted my time? Such questions reveal an overwrought case of contracting the Protestant work effort on the part of their posers. They overstate and reinforce values belonging to phallogocentric investiture", cris cheek in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 , p.253 "Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading?", Keats, letters, p.52-3 "Its alleged obscurity is due not to its own nature, which is to enlighten, but the darkness which it explores, and must explore: the dark of the soul herself and the dark of the mystery which envelops human existence", StJohn Perse, "On Poetry", p.11 "There is a certain glory in not being understood", Baudelaire, The Structure of Modern Poetry (Friedrich, p.4) "difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. If you write as if you had to placate or in any way entice their lack of interest, then I think you are making condescending assumptions about people", Geoffrey Hill 41



 o o

o

o

"The relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can only approach that reality by indirect means.", Richard Wilbur, Quarterly Review of Literature 7, p.189 4 types of difficulty Contingent (by far the most common). Problems can (at least in theory) be looked-up - "Contingent difficulties arise from the obvious plurality and individuation which characterize world and word.", p.33 Modal - the work is "inaccessible", "alien", "not poetry". Doubts about purpose. But there may be a liking/understanding issue. "Modal difficulties lie with the beholder", "modal difficulties challenge the inevitable parochialism of honest empathy", "Current man seeks to efface [the distinction between Contingent and Modal difficulties]. We are ashamed to concede any modal inhibition, to confess ourselves closed to any expressive act however remote from our own time and place", p.32. Tactical - "source in the writer's will or in the failure of adequacy between his intention and his performative means", p.33. Some poets feel they must create new words and syntactic modes, for how else can they say new things? But once people understand the words, these too will be shop-worn. So instead revitalise old uses; undermine, distort. "We are not meant to understand easily and quickly". "'Contingently' and 'modally' Wallace Stevens's 'Anecdote of the Jar' is transparent" - Clear message: "however simple[], the work of art [] sets ordinance upon the surrounding chaos of the organic" but "It is the last two lines that obstruct and unsettle" "This rich undecidability is exactly what the poet aims at. It can be made a hollow trick (as it often is with the syntactic instabilities in Dylan Thomas)." Or it can make us "reach out towards more delicate orderings of perception" Ontological (breaks the poet/reader contract). "At certain levels, we are not meant to understand at all ... But again we ask: for whom, then is the poet writing, let alone publishing? .. It is not so much the poet who speaks, but language itself", p.45 From "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972

 o o

"It is precisely because poetry is ambiguous that it becomes irreducible, in that a particular arrangement of words may contain so much meaning that it could not possibly be put any other way", p.43 "a poem's exactness or appropriateness comes from its being simultaneously complex and irreducible, rather than unambiguously monovalent", p.44 From "Form and Function" by NS Thompson (in PN Review V29.5)

  

 o o

"The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity" Wittgenstein. "you must hide profundity. Where? On the surface", Hofmannsthal, the Chandos letter. "clarity can mislead: the precise, specific, concrete image offers us a thousand things to take up which are not to the author's purpose. The blurred or generalized meaning avoids that danger", I.A. Richards, "How to Read a Page", p.80 "modes of obscurity are important signifying structures in literature and carry distinct kinds of meaning which are not secondary to an anterior obscured content" (p. 18). "the work of art is not here considered an illusory copy of a true and real object, but a true and real reproduction of an illusory reality" (p. 65). From "The Uses of Obscurity", Allon White, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

 o

p. 28 - "The demands of metre allow the poet to say something which is not normal colloquial English, so that the reader thinks of the various colloquial forms which are near to it ... It is for these reasons ... that an insensitivity in a poet to the contemporary style of speaking, into which he has been trained to concentrate his powers of apprehension, is so disastrous, can be noticed so quickly, and produces that curious thinness of blurring of texture" 42

o

o

p.160 - "In so far as an ambiguity sustains intricacy, delicacy, or compression of thought, or is an opportunism devoted to saying quickly what the reader already understands, it is to be respected .... It is not to be respected in so far as it is due to weakness or thinness of thought, obscures the matter in hand unnecessarily, ... or, when the interest of the passage is not focussed upon it, ... if the reader will not easily understand the ideas which are being shuffled ... The question is here one of focus; and it is in modern poetry, when the range of ideas is great and the difficulty of holding the right ones in mind becomes acute, ... that ambiguity is most misused." p.167 - "It is tactful, when making an obscure reference, to arrange that the verse shall be intelligible even when the reference is not understood." From "Seven Types of Ambiguity", W. Empson, The Hogarth Press, 1984

 o

o

o o

p.95 - "The play of subjectivity on the perception of ambiguity forms a substantial portion of psycholinguistics and psychological studies on the phenomenum" ("Student Performance in Recognizing and Interpreting Ambiguity in Poems and Paintings", Weil (unpublished PhD Thesis, New York Univ). ... "However, readerrelativity could become a stumbling-block in a theory-orientated study ... The hypothetical reader ... has been described as (a) an ideal reader (Culler) ... , (b) a mock reader (Gibson) ... , (c) a super-reader (Riffaterre) ... , (d) an informed reader (Fish) ... , (e) an implied reader (Iser) ... , (f) an intended reader (Wolff) ... " p.113 - (ambiguity) frustrates the question of 'which is the intended meaning?' and ... (indeterminacy) frustrates the question of 'what is the intended meaning?'. By analogy, it is a rabbit-duck representation versus a Rorschach inkblot. "And in truth ambiguity may often add strength. An idea suggested is more weighty: simplicity of statement excites contempt", "On Style", Demetrius (254) p.116 - "potentially ambiguous words possess distinct, disparate but clear meanings which are relevant as alternatives in a given context, although there is uncertainty which to select as more appropriate. Any lack of clarity lies at the pragmatic level where the intended meaning is not clear to the reader. In the case of obscurity, on the other hand, lack of clarity occurs at the semantic level itself. ... Obscurity is, therefore, different from ambiguity, but it can provide the latitude for ambiguity to occur in." From "Lexical Ambiguity in Poetry", Soon Peng Su, Longman, 1994

 







"One of two kinds of clearness one should have - either the meaning to be felt without effort as fast as one reads or else, if dark at first reading, when once made out to explode", Hopkins, "Letters to Bridges", p.90. "The proliferation of resemblances extends an object. The point at which this process begins, or rather at which this growth begins, is the point at which ambiguity has been reached" - "The Necessary Angel", Wallace Stevens, 1942 "Obscurity in a poem must be a tool. It is there to force the reader to ask questions which will direct him toward an understanding of the poem. Any question which does not directly increase our understanding of the poem distracts from it.", Stephen Dobyns, from "Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory". "Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry" - William Empson, "Argufying", 1987. "The general public ... has set up a criterion of its own, one by which every form of contemporary art is condemned. This criterion is, in the case of music, melody; in the case of painting, representation; in the case of poetry, clarity. In each case one simple aspect is made the test of a complicated whole, becomes a sort of loyalty oath for the work of art. ... instead of having to perceive, to enter, and to interpret those new worlds which new works of art are, the public can notice at a glance whether or not these pay lip-service to its own 'principles'" "The Obscurity of the Poet", Randall Jarrell See also my Obscurity and Not so Difficult Poems articles.

43

Metaphor (back to top) 



 





  o

o o o

o

"Metonymy moves attention from thing to thing; its principle is combination rather than selection. Compared to metaphor, which depends on code, metonymy preserves context, foregrounds interrelationship. And again in comparison with metaphor, which is based on similarity, and in whicch meanings are conserved and transferred from one thing to something said to be like it, the metonymic is unstable. While metnymy maintains the intactness and discreteness of particulars, its paratactic perspective gives it multiple vanishing points", Lyn Hejinian, "Poetics Journal", 8, 1989 "One can sum up modern poetic technique by calling it the rediscovery of metaphor and the full commitment to metaphor. The poet can legitimately step out into the universal only by first going through the narrow door of the particular ... Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks not saying it at all. but the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether", Cleanth Brooks, "Irony as a Principle of Structure" "Metaphor is the whole of poetry. ... Poetry is simply made of metaphor ... Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing" , Frost "Poets coin new metaphors that either reveal underlying mappings in existing conceptual metaphors, or - more often - they innovate new conceptual mappings, their metaphorical turns of phrase being both a surface form and a declaration of a deeper conceptual one ... As a rule, metaphors based on primary connotations of the vehicle need not declare their ground; metaphors based on secondary connotations generally have to", Don Paterson, "The empty image: new models of the poetic trope", "The ground is not merely the declaration of a shared attribute; the ground opens up a conduit whereby the tenor can be infected with aspects of the vehicle; it is therefore an active field, and directs sense from the vehicle towards the tenor, presenting an original and dynamic conceptual blend.", Don Paterson, "The empty image: new models of the poetic trope", "As a rule, the comparison should be close enough to the poem's concerns to appear to the reader as natural enough to draw on its argumentative or thematic circuitry, and distant enough to arrest the reader within its felicity and originality, without breaking the spell of the poem.", Don Paterson, "The empty image: new models of the poetic trope", "But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception", Aristotle, "The Poetics" p.51 - "With respect to ... existing basic metaphors ..., there are three stances that poets have chosen... 1) to versify them in automatic ways ... 2) to deploy them masterfully, combining them, extending them and crystallizing them in strong images 3) to step outside the ordinary ways we think metaphorically ... by employing them in unusual ways, or otherwise destabilize them and thus reveal their inadequacies for making sense of reality" p.65 - "We have now identified the following sources of power of metaphor: The power to structure ... The power of options ... The power of reason... The power of evaluation ... The power of being there" p.67 - "Poetic thought uses the mechanisms of everyday thought, but it extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways that go beyond the ordinary...Extending...Elaborating ... Questioning ... Composing" p.71 - "The mode of metaphorical thought that poets use and invoke in their readers goes beyond ordinary metaphoric thought by including these elements: - The novel extension of the metaphor to include elements otherwise not mapped - The imaginative filling in of special cases - The formation of composite metaphors Explicit commentary on the limitation of conceptual metaphors, and the offering of an alternative." p.89 - "Complex metaphors grip us party because they awake in us the experience and knowledge that form the grounding of those metaphors, partly because they make the coherence of that experience and knowledge resonate, and partly because they lead us to form new coherences in what we know and experience." From "More than Cool Reason", G. Lakoff and M. Turner, University of Chicago Press, 1989.

 o o

"In literary reading, metaphors may function as important cystallisation points for the feeling of subjectivity, polyvalence, fictionality, and form-as-meaning", p.36 "Metaphor is often regarded as a miniature work of verbal art", p.49 44

From "Understanding Metaphor in Literature", G.Steen, Longman, 1994. 

 o

o

"I have come to believe that what seems poverty is sometimes economy; and that this economy in metaphor produces effects which I call 'poetical'", "Purity of Diction in English Verse", Donald Davie, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, p.1 p.339 - "figures of speech may be characterized by overspecified ends and indeterminate middles. ... the strength of the end terms depends on our seeing the elided members of the chain. ...; the more clearly we see them, the stronger the metaphor which collapses that chain " p.348 - "Human life, like a poetical figure, is an indeterminate middle between overspecified poles always threatening to collapse it....Art narrates that middle region." From "Beyond Formalism", G.H. Hartman, Yale University Press, 1970

 o o o

p.14 - "Symbol and metaphor, as opposed to analysis, can allow insight without consequences because perceptions are not stabilised and categorised." p.57 - "Marx, like Darwin, recognised that the avoidance of teleology tended to give greater emphasis to analogies within the natural order" p.80 - "whereas in allegory the one-to-one correspondence of object and meaning is sustained, in analogy the pleasure and power of the form is felt in part because it is precarious" From "Darwin's Plots", Gillian Beer, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983 See also my Metaphor and Simile article. The Arbitrary Sign (back to top)

 







"No one should fear that the contemplation of signs will lead us away from the things in themselves; on the contrary it leads into the interior of things", Leibniz, "letter to Tschirnhaus" "The fundamental principle of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign does not prevent us from distinguishing in any language between what is intrinsically arbitrary - that is, unmotivated - and what is only relatively arbitrary. Not all signs are absolutely arbitrary. In some cases, there are factors which allow us to recognize different degrees of arbitrariness, although never to discard the notion entirely. The sign may be motivated to a certain extent", Saussure, "Course in General Linguistics", (trans. Roy Harris). London, 1983, p.130 "Arbitrary and conventional is a fitting description of distinctive sounds, less so of words, even less of sentences, and beyond that scarcely fits at all", "Language. The Loaded Weapon", Bolinger, Longman, 1980, p.18 "Context and use (Wittgenstein's twin criteria) erode the arbitrariness of the sign, making it very difficult for us as readers to free up even phonemes from their referential dimension(s)", Miles Champion, "binary myths", (Andy Brown ed.), p.41. "Take a bunch of roses; I use it to signify my passion. Do we have here, then, only a signifier and a signified, the roses and my passion? ...But on the plane of analysis, we do have three terms; for these roses weighted with passion perfectly are correctly allow themselves to be decomposed into roses and passion: the former and the latter existed before uniting and forming this third object, which is the sign.", "Myth Today", Barthes, p.121. Writer/Reader (back to top)



"What the mystified liberal or smug conservative reader sees as engrossing content purveyed through transparent and powerfully harmonic, undissonant language, radical critique sees as the naked balls and chains of ideology, elastic and insidiously self-reproductive", Bob Perelman in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.377



45

o

o

"text comprehension nowadays is devised as a creative endeavour. This naturally lessens the gap between 'usual'/'non-poetic' and 'poetic' reading ... Furthermore, the dependance of the reading process on extratextual information is qualified to explain the phenomenon of found poetry", p.4 Strategies for reading poetry include these principles/assumptions: "Optimum Analysis (attention to surface structures); Integration (work is a unified whole, title expected); Subjectivity (free to refer to emotions, speculations and associations); Evaluation (work can be judged); Alternativity/Aestheticalness (non-utilitarian); Assimilation (interpretation regulated by expectation); Accomodation (tolerance of difficulty, etc) ; Generalizing (expected to contain a message); Weak Polyvalence (one meaning per reader) ; Maximum Coherence (readiness to make sense of everything)", p.6 From "Reader's Strategies in Comprehending Poetic Discourse", P.Begemann in "Approaches to poetry: some aspects of textuality, intertextuality and intermediality", J.Petofi and T.Olivi (eds), Walter de Gruyter, 1994.









 



 





 o

"A text is a set of performances which resemble each other ... Performances can be ranked ... This ranking correalates with 'authority' of the performance. ... The spoken version of a text might be thought more 'authoritative' than the written version", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.137-8 "Because of a complex web of issues, some having to do with print, law, and money, we now tend to think of the author as an important presence in the poem", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.94 "[the author is] a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circuulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction", Foucault, "What is an Author?" "We read according to an undeclared handicap system, to the specific needs of the author. We meet the novelists a little way, the poets at least halfway, the translated poets three-quarters of the way; the Postmoderns we pick up at the station in their wheelchairs.", Don Paterson, "The Book of Shadows" "The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself" - "Tristram Shandy", Laurence Sterne "When he thinks of the points which you have omitted, he becomes not only a hearer, but a witness ... To press home every detail, as though your hearer were a fool, seems like casting a slur on his intelligence" - "On Style", Demetrius (222) "Creativity on the part of the author involves structural innovation, the ability to generate an, in principle, infinite number of different structures. But the reader's creativity is expressed by functional innovation: the ability to imagine what a text could mean" - "The Bounds of Interpretation", Schauber and Spolsky, Stanford University Press, 1986, p.119 "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author", Barthes, "Death of the Author". "the reading process can be represented as a one-sided bargaining process of imperfect information ... mutual interdependence (reflexivity) fixed order of play one-sidedness of the communicative process possibility of limited pre-play communication (e.g. by means of publishing, advertising, generic conventions) inability to make side-payments or binding agreements", "The Role of Game Theory in Literature Studies", Peter Swirski in "Empirical Approaches to Literature", ed Gebhard Rusch, 1995, p.41 "Even if a poet is pragmatically dedicated to transmitting a message, the temporal delay involved in preparing an artifact (poem as message) plunges the activity into a perceptual realm distinct from the intersubjective circuit of a communications environment", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.40. "The movement in the arts away from representation and toward simulation, away from the dynamics of reading and interpretation and toward the dynamics of interaction and play, would indeed suggest that literature as we know it has other worries beyond the power of the image", David Ciccoricco, "Reading Network Fiction", Univ of Alabama Press, 2007, p.4 "Ordinary speech is ephemeral, meant to be reacted to and forgotten. Markov chains in speech, therefore, work mostly forward and over a fairly short span. In literature they can also work backward, and there can be more than one chain running at a time", p.35 46

o o

"in arriving at the meaning of an unknown term in a context where the rest is known, the best meaning is that which contributes least to the sum total meaning of the whole context." (Joos Law), p.57 "Since communication theory has pretty well established that human interpretation of language is a stochastic process in which the highest probability is always acted on as if it were a certainty, I should submit that when this sharp rise in probability is reached, we no longer question the significance of the parallel", p.100 From "Constituent and Pattern in Poetry", A.A. Hill, Univ of Texas Press, 1976 Sound (back to top)



    





 

 o

o

o

"In the human voice, the vowel carries the bulk of the feeling in its complex tonal and quantitative discriminations, while the consonants which interrupt that breath makes the bulk of the sense ... It is this exaggerated prominence given to the vowel that primarily distinguishes the characteristic noise of the poem", Don Pasterson, "Poetry Review", 97:3, 2007 "Poets have lamented the lack in poetry of any such notation as music has for suggesting sound. But it is there and always has been there. The sentence is the notation", Frost, "???", 1941 "To [Elizabeth Bishop], the images and the music of the lines were primary. If we comprehended the sound, eventually we would understand the sense", Dana Gioia "The sounds, acting together with the measure, are a kind of extended onomatopoeia - i.e., they imitate, not the sounds of an experience ... but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture", Denise Levertov "[belief in the iconic function of] the phonetic effect of a poem ... is almost always completely fallacious", John Crowe Ranson, "Wanted: An Ontological Critic", p.38 "The line is from 'The Eve of Saint Agnes': And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old. ... I had been dizzily in love with it for months before I became consciously aware of its extraordinary symmetry. Moving inward from each extremity, we see the letter D at either end, moving through a succession of Ls, Ss, Ps and Ns. D - L - N - S - L - P - N - L - P - L - N - D - S - L - D. This may be bollocks to you, but I thought it a miracle. I still think it remarkable", Stephen Fry, "The Ode Less Travelled", Arrow Books, 2007, p.312 "We benefit from a growing awareness of the interactions - cumulative, contradictory, dislocatory - between meaning and syntax in a literary style. A statistical analysis which shows that sound effects in Pope are likely to coincide with lexical meanings whereas in Donne there is a discordance, probably intentional, between phonetic effects and semantic units, is more than ingenuity. It may induce fundamental insights about the differences in the relations of feelings to expressive means as between metaphysical and Augustan poetics", George Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays, OUP, 1972, p.160 "the proportion between the vowels and consonants in a language will shew the relative influence of the feelings and of the understanding over the people who speak it. ... The vowels express what is felt: they come more immediately from that part of the body which is less under the dominion of the will ... In consonants on the other hand ... one beholds something like the operation of the formative principle on the raw material of language, the shaping and modifying and combining or syllabling action of the intellect.", Julius Hare, quoted in "Tennyson" by Donald Hair, p.63 "sound enacts meaning as much as designates something meant", Charles Bernstein, "Close listening: Poetry and the Performed Word", 1998, p.17 "Some avant-garde theorists have turned to sound as a means of dismissing 'voice', which they see as irredeemably mired in humanism's illusions of a monologic, self-present lyric speaker", p.222, Kathleen Crown in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "From the 1920s onwards, the question whether sounds, as such, possess 'meaning' has stimulated research ... the assumption of a conventional meaning potential of individual sounds seems justified. For this potential to be activated, however, semantic stimuli must be present", p.21 "Patterns immediately recognised could possibly influence meaning construction from the very start, thus gaining an 'autonomos' semantic function, whereas others may be chronologically and semantically subordinate to lexical meanings", p.10 "top-down (knowledge-based) and bottom-up (stimulus-based) processes combine", p.17 47

o o

"The more obvious a pattern, the more significant its contribution to the meaning may be (the more probable an 'autonomous' semantic function)", p.17 Factors affecting obviousness of a pattern include "distance between equivalent sounds; frequency; degree of similarity; size of repeated segment; stress/unstress; statistical frequency of repeated sound; lexical category (function words vs content words); position (on line); stylistic convergence (parallel patterns on other textual levels", p.18 from "Reader's Strategies in Comprehending Poetic Discourse", P.Begemann in "Approaches to poetry: some aspects of textuality, intertextuality and intermediality", J.Petofi and T.Olivi (eds), Walter de Gruyter, 1994.















  

 

"Not infrequently I have found myself explaining to students of literature, supposedly past the training level, that no assonance occurs in some such line as The lonely dove moves not with mothlike wing", A.A.Hill "Constituent and Pattern in Poetry", Univ of Texas Press, 1976, p.14 "Alliteration can be used as a stylistic effect in English by making it coincide with recurrent strongly stressed syllables preceded by a pause that is at least minimal. Since French lacks the stress and pause patterns of coontrast found in English, alliteration becomes merely pointless repetition", A.A.Hill "Constituent and Pattern in Poetry", Univ of Texas Press, 1976, p.15. "sound in its due place is as much true as knowledge (and all that mere claptrap about information and learning). Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared place", J.H.Prynne, letter in The English Intelligencer "And it is that focus of attention on the materiality of language as it does its work of bringing meaning into being that has so often been interpreted as mimetic or iconic representation, because the experience is unquestionably one of increased vividness or intensity of signification ...it creates what Valéry calls the "illusion" (and in literature illusions are what matter) of a more direct involvement in those qualities than language normally attains. And it is only an apparent paradox that this illusion is created - as Jacobson realized by means of a heightening of our apprehension of the medium that stands between us and direct experience itself. Understood in this way, onomatopeia might be seen as a model of all literary language", Derek Attridge, "Peculiar Language", Methuen, 1988, p.154 "The operation of nonce-constellations is probably more significant than genuine phonesthemes in onomatopoeic effects; see, for instance, John Hollander's exemplary account in Vision and Resonance, p.157, of Tennyson's regularly cited murmuring bees.", Derek Attridge, "Peculiar Language", Methuen, 1988, p. 152 "poetry is not the only area where sound symbolism makes itself felt, but it is a province where the internal nexus between sound and meaning changes from latent to patent and manifests itself most palpably and intensely", Jakobsen, "Linguistics and Poetics", p.373 "Bunting would say that you should hear the 'meaning' of the poetry purely in the sound...Word patterns which may at first appear dense and complicated on the page become articulated and clarified, resonating across the poems' structure. The subtleties and echoes of language which hold a poem together are revealed by the process of sounding it", Richard Caddel, "Basil Bunting: Complete Poems", Bloodaxe, 2000, p.12 [a poet] "must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre", Frost, letter to John T Bartlett, 1913. "the proliferation of 'oo' sounds that rhyme in [Plath's Daddy] ... a sound that is both babyish, and associated with erotic excitement", "The Other Sylvia Plath", Tracy Brain, Pearson, Education Ltd, 2001, p.62 When Ajax heaves some rock's vast weight to throw The line too labours and the words move slow Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main Pope, "Essay on Criticism". "Take care of the sense and the sounds will look after themselves", Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", chapter 9 (the Duchess to Alice) "But precisely because [the pun] is such a mini-phenomenon, it dramatizes the differential or, as de Saussure calls it, diacritical relation of sound to meaning. ... Split the atom of sound (and speech is fission) and you detonate an astonishing charge of meaning", "Beyond Formalism", G.H. Hartman, Yale University Press, 1970, p.341. 48





 o o

o

"Bellflowers, seldom seen now, stellar, trim.- Note the triple statement of the el(l) sound counterpointed against the duple m; the narrowing of el(l)'s vowel to ee and i - boldly interrupted by recapitulation of ow; and the modulation of s through st to t" (Of Talisman, by Peter Dale, W.G. Shepherd in Agenda 33.1. In 'on the wet road between the chafing grass' (from Auden's "The Watershed") "'chafing' ... allows us to hear through its lingering vowel and caressing fricative the whisper and friction of wind along a hillside", Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, p.123 p.22 - "sound awakens in us a sudden awareness of our physical existence in time." p.55 - "The remarkable result of Valéry's treatment of sound and sense as consciously separated variables is that it allows the semantic components of the poem to take on structural value and the structural values of the poem to take part in a semantic or signifying action in turn" p.84 - "Through sound we are never allowed to forget the substance of consciousness as 'being'." From "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982



   



 o

o

o

o

"The ear is satisfied when the metre is balanced and the rhyme struck, but the sentence is incomplete and the mind seeks its satisfaction in resolution of the sense... By the counterpoint - a kind of suspense - created between the arrangement of sounds and the construing of sense, a pace builds and a drama develops", Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets", 1998, p.30 "having verse set to music is like looking at a painting through a stained glass window" - Valéry "the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from its meaning", T.S.Eliot, "The Music of Poetry", 1942. "poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music", Pound, "ABC of Reading", 1991, p.4 "Music (or sound) must thus be regarded as another dimension of language not less important than syntax and semantics, although it is usually underestimated because we are accustomed to viewing sound as a conventional, material carrier of meaning", Anca Rosu, "The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens", Univ of Alabama Press, 1995, p.14 "The classic prejudice persists, however, that sound is secondary to meaning. The prejudice has been challenged by John Hollander, who, seeking to show the relation between sound and poetic meaning, discovers that sound pattern can play the role of an allegory or metaphor of the poem's content the role of sound in language becomes clear only when expression becomes artistic, so that language exceeds its purely representational function", Anca Rosu, "The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens", Univ of Alabama Press, 1995, p.17 p.1 "The attempt will be made to show first that such terms as 'musical' and 'non-musical' are not only subjective or intuitive descriptions of poetic qualities, but may be defined in terms of phonological skew, i.e. deviation from the normal proportional distribution of sounds in poetic language" p.20 "In summary, it can now be said with some certainty that the conspicuous presence or absence of certain consonant sounds in a poem can help to determine whether the reader will be inclined to perceive that poem as 'musical' or 'non-musical' in tone. The statistics suggest that many sounds have both a positive valence for 'musicality' and a negative valence for 'non-musicality' [or v.v.] Then there is a third class consisting of sounds which apparently have a valence (either positive or negative) for only one of the two qualities. And finally, there are a few consonants [that] have no valence for either of these qualities." p.84 "one of the characteristics of 'tenderness' at least as chosen by this reader, may be a predominance of the reduced vowel in unstressed syllables, whereas 'aggressive' poems may be characterized by a tendency to fill even the unstressed metrical positions with full vowels ... 'tenderness' may be characterized by a tendency to use long vowels in stressed syllables in preference to short ones, in order to slow down the poetic rhythm" p.96 - "there is evidence of something very close to metaphoric quality in the tendency to associate a few types of language sounds with certain quantitative measures, such as frequent occurrence of high front vowels in words which denote smallness ... (Thus, for example, French poets are careful to avoid the word 'nuit' in passages which evoke a night mood, because the 'bright' vowel would intrude...)" From "Sound and Sense in the Poetry of Theodor Storm", Alan B. Galt, Herbert Lang, 1973



49

o

o

o

p.51 "As my analysis of the mechanism underlying the statistical correlations between back vowels and such qualities as 'mystic obscurities' and 'hatred and struggle' may suggest, far from being confined to nonaesthetic processes, cognitive poetics provides powerful tools for understanding the relationship between aesthetic qualities and their nonaesthetic perceptual conditions as well as the significant relationships between two or more aesthetic qualities" p.66 "It would appear, then, that the impressionistic-subjective distinction concerning the 'beauty' of some speech sounds and the 'ugliness' of some others can be translated into two pairs of objective or intersubjective opposites. First, the latest acquisitions [the sounds learnt latest by babies] may assume greater emotional or aesthetic intensity than earlier ones, for better or worse. Second, within the late acquisitions, continuous and periodic sounds are beautiful, whereas the interrupted, aperiodic sounds are ugly" p.129 "there is a widespread (presumably intercultural) intuition that the rounded back vowels are dark" From "What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?", Reuven Tsur, Duke Univ Press, 1992













"the nearly universal correlation between the inherently higher-pitched front vowels like English ([i], [I], [e], ...) and smallness and brightness (vs. the lower-pitched back vowels like [u],...[o]..., commonly associated with bigness and darkness). Such relations form part of the lexical fabric of English", Patrizia Violi (ed), "Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language", Brepols Publishers, 2000, p.29 "The function of sound is, first, to establish differences between words and, second, to create a myriad of formmeaning identity associations across words" Patrizia Violi (ed), "Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language", Brepols Publishers, 2000, p.37 "The poet who substitutes visual tricks for a surface of articulated sound limits his range of feeling; he gives up the primary means by which feeling can be symbolised and apprehended", Harvey Gross, "Sound and Form in Modern Poetry", Univ of Michigan Press, 1964, p.23 "Hardy's prosody often fails as an expressive form. In too many of his poems the versification is clumsy, neither subtle nor emphatic. Words are forced into the metrical patterns; the meters themselves are frequently inappropriate to the subject", Harvey Gross, "Sound and Form in Modern Poetry", Univ of Michigan Press, 1964, p.42 "A purely graphic theory of prosodic measurement has inevitable limitations. Because the ear dominates prosodic theory, auditory phenomena will continue to take precedence in the writing and analysing of verse. Where auditory patterns are strong, typography will be considered secondary. Where auditory patterns are weak, poetry will be accused of being prose. Many readers feel that strong visual patterns do not compensate for the loss of rhyme schemes and scansions.", p.72, "William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure", Stephen Cushman, Yale Univ Press, 1985 "If we know the topic and basic mood of a given poem, we can predict in what direction and approximately in what measure the relative frequency of certain sounds is likely to deviate from an index number based on statistics of the standard language", "Communication in Poetry", Ivan Fónagy, in Word 17 (1961), p.194 Language (back to top)



  

"in late antiquity, [...] stress replaced length as a salient feature of European speech and [...] meters based on accent and/or fixed syllable count eventually supplanted the quantitative meters of classical poetry (Another such transformation occurred in the wake of the Norman Conquest, when, along with other developments, the flexional forms of Old English broke down under the influence of French, and the largely falling rhythms of Anglo-Saxon prosody gave way to the principally rising rhythms of Middle and Modern English verse)", Timothy Steele, "Able Muse Anthology", 2010, p.xiv "the appearance of prepositions, conjunctions and verbs at the end of lines has a purpose: to increase the language's fluidity and that sense of recreated feeling", Will Daunt, "Envoi", issue 150 "the language of poetry is the language of paradox", Cleanth Brooks, "The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry", Harcourt Brace, 1947, p.3 "Grammar as repressive mechanism, regulates free circulation of meaning (the repression of polysemeity into monosemeity and guided towards a sense of meaning as accumulated, as surplus value of signification)", McCafferty, "Notebooks", p.160 50













 





    o

o

o

o

"[the open text] invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierachies", Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure", p.272 "The poetic text exists in the field of intersection of many semantic systems, many 'languages.' Information about the language of a communication, its reconstruction by the hearer, the 'schooling' of the hearer in a type of belletristic modeling new to him often constitutes the text's basic information", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.107 "Do not tenses, must they not also be kicked around anew, in order that time, that other governing absolute [with space] must be kept, as must the space-tensions of a poem, immediate, contemporary to the acting-on-you of the poem?", "Projective Verse", Olson, p.56 "Like a demonstrative, the impersonal pronoun 'it' must always send the reader back or forward to some other noun or phrase. Throughout Ashbery's poem, the word 'it' imparts this momentum of allusion without ever supplying a clear referential destination", Steve Connor, in "Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory", Easthope and Thompson (eds), Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991 "It is this tension between language as a means of self-expression, the self as a construct of language. and the poem as a constructed object with an existence independent of the author that provides a framework of ideas within which contemporary poetry operates", Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p.92 "The vertical axis downwards ... need not structure the reading - for it does not structure the text ... Secret meaning is not a hidden layer but a hidden organisation of the surface", Andrews and Bernstein, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Southern Illinois UP, 1984, p.33 "[translation is like] kissing through a handkerchief", R.S.Thomas "[Literature] opens up a kind of foreign language with language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becoming-other of language, a minorization of this major language, a delirium that carries it off", Deleuze, "Essays Critical and Clinical", Univ of Minnesota Press, 1997, p.5 "Such poems set up structures which operate like perpetual motion machines, enacting poised antimonies opposites equally charged, abiding no exclusive resolution, and operating to create fields of force. The polarities or terminals, in other words, do not annihilate each other's meanings; and we live in the charged field between them, so instead of the vertigo of neither we can have the electricity of both. That is not, as some theorists would have it, the failure of language, but its power", Heather McHugh, "Broken English", Wesleyan University Press, 1993, p.18 "Kristeva situates poetry at the border of language ... for Kristeva the music of poetry is a psychotic return to the babble of the infant who does not yet differentiate between himself and the rest of the world", Fiona Sampson, , in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997, p.262 "Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information is not used in the language-game of giving information", Wittgenstein, "Zettel" "a language seems so much truer and more expressive when we know it less . . . . words need a certain ignorance to keep their power of revelation", Blanchot, "The Work of Fire", Stanford, 1995, p.176 "deduce all poetry from the very principle of language", Mallarmé "The major vocabulary of the 1940's has death in it, mind in it, thing, time and world in it, concepts more withdrawn than the common traditional God, day, life, man, love, which it also maintains. To the hand and heart it has added head. For traditional fair, sweet, soft, it has substituted old, little, white, adjectives too, withdrawn from directest appreciation." p.408 "Much of the writing of Frost, Manifold, Warren seems like metaphysical poetry. The structure is like, with its emphasis on linear control and meditative repetition; the proportioning is like, with more verbs than adjectives in narrative, reasoning, and clausal organization; the tone is like, purposely roughened by particles of speech as talk is", p.431 "It may be that the twentieth-century poetry worked against nineteenth, as seventeenth against sixteenth, that is, as an age of self-consciousness against an age of enthusiastic affirmation. At any rate, the dominance of the personal, of death, of the thing concept, of rhyme and argumentation, are characteristic of both reacting periods", p.432 "[twentieth-century] poetry has emphasized the ordering and altering powers of human perception, with both feeling and abstraction more implicit than in any other century, and situation explicit", p.493 51

o

o o

o

o

"Verbs are the most stable, the least changing ... The great change in the five centuries is the loss of find, tell, think, and the gain of hear, fall, lie ... Of the major nouns of the 1540's, [day, God, heart, life, love, man, time, king, lord], all but king and lord are primary still for the 1940's.", p.497 "[The 1940's] reach back ... to an earlier time for only one word, the thing of the 1540's; otherwise they preserve no majority term which the 1840's have not also preserved", p.498 "sound has moved increasingly into the structure, from its boundaries ... In its relation to sense, sound is neither so harmonized in onomatopeia as in the eighteenth century, nor so melodized in expressiveness as in the nineteenth; it returns, as for some poetry in the nineteenth century, to the catching up of speech tones and accents", p.511 "As a whole, there are three groups of poets in the period: those who, like Millay, Auden, Frost, Warren, and others, use a proportion of about 8-14-11 [for Adjectives, Nouns and Verbs], with more verbs than adjectives; those who, like Yeats, Stevens, Eliot, tend to balance adjectives and verbs at about 9-18-9; and those who, like Thomas and Sitwell, at about 10-23-8, use more adjectives than verbs, with a high number of nouns. ... The first group is similar in proportion to the Wyatt and Cowley group in the 1640's ... we may fairly call them all 'metaphysical' ... Then the second group ... we may fairly call 'romantic'. These poets carry on the balanced mode which came into being after ... the 1740's ... The third group, finally, has its fullest sources in the 1740's", p.513 "Limiting adjectives, those of number, amount, degree .. have shown a decline through the five centuries", p.532 From "The Primary Language of Poetry in the 1940's", Josephine Miles, Univ of California Press, 1951











   o o

"Metalepsis (a figure with a hidden term which interpretation recovers) ... has the advantage of working with a temporal sequence rather than spatial patterning (which latter is how most figures work - that is, synchronically). As poetry takes place in the tension between synchronic and diachronic, any figure mapping this is most helpful", "Against Coercion: Games Poets Play", Eleanor Cook, Stanford UP, 1998, p.103 "We must learn to parse sentences and to analyse the grammar of our text, for, as Roman Jakobson has taught us, there is no access to the grammar of poetry, to the nerve and sinew of the poem, if one is blind to the poetry of grammar", George Steiner, "No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995" "the most important question to be asked of any poetic diction concerns its purity or impurity. And that is a question which is never or very seldom asked by modern critics", Donald Davie, "Purity of Diction in English Verse", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, p.90 "magician and trickster are the 2 position left once language slides from the world. The magician seeks to reconsile language and reality, the trickster accepts the rupture and exploits the resulting possibilities" "Dialectic of Enlightenment", Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979, Verso, p.60-72. "As language becomes more international and more technical, it will become also less capable of supplying the symbols of literature; and then, just as the development of mechanical devices has compelled us to resort to sport in order to exercise our muscles, so literature will survive as a game", E. Wilson, "Axel's Castle", 1961?, p.225. "Bate realizes that the eighteenth century's claim [is] that the past inheres in language, that language can be and is used up by the past and hardens into tradition", P.A. Bove, "Destructive Poetics", Columbia UP, 1975, p.51. "If we find continuous-scale contrasts in the vicinity of what we are sure is language, we exclude them from language", C. Hockett, (in 'Structuralist Poetics', Culler, p.14) p. xvi - "Not to squander creative energy on the vain attempt to express experience in language, but to attempt instead to re-stimulate the sources of expressive experience to which language itself has access." p. xviii - "Valéry exploits the self-referentiality of language in order to escape the self-referentiality of literature" From "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982



"In general, the experimentalists developed the abstract potentialities of language without absolutely opposing its normal referential function. They seem to have agreed, at least in so far as language is concerned, with Kandinsky's view that the abstract retains 'the timbre of the organic' rather with Mondrian's idea that any 52

 

  







  o o

allusion to natural forms interferes with a work's capacity to capture pure reality", "Language in Modern Literature: Innovation and Experiment", Korg, J, Barnes and Noble, 1979, p.165. a new language/is a kind of scar/and heals after a while/into a passable imitation/of what went before - "Moise Eire" (Selected Poems) Eavan Boland "...the loss of the relative innocence of language is often both the justification and subject of much recent work... A poem, for New Criticism, was an integrated whole, harmonious and reconciling. Its formal equanimity provided a glimpse of a mythic world lived more fully in preindustrial ages, and thus provided consolation for the spoilations of twentieth-century experience. By contrast, recent criticism has tended to stress textual disarray.", Rick Rylance, "Tony Harrison's Languages, Contemporary Poetry meets Modern Theory", ed Easthope and Thompson, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991 p.53 "We feel all around the words" - Colin Falck "the word is a bundle and meaning sticks out of it in various directions" - Mandelstrom "Language, according to Saussure, is not a mere tool devised for the re-presentation of a pre-existent reality. It is rather, a constitutive part of reality", "Modern Literary Theory (3rd Edition)", Rice and Waugh, Arnold, 1996, p.3. "Words gain their fluctuating meanings from the fluctuating contexts in which people put them. What matters are the relations between these contexts, not the relation of words to reality", Rorty about Derrida, from the Times Higher, Nov 2004. "An abstract noun in the possessive case followed by an adjective and a concrete noun ... is a nineteenth century favorite... In the twentieth century it was succeeded in favor by another phrase...in which the first noun is usually concrete and the second abstract. Thus: 'the pale dawn of longing'", "Anatomy of Criticism", Northrop Frye. "Linguistics and Poetics", Jakobson. The 6 factors involved in the sending and receiving of any message are: sender, receiver, message, context, contact (the medium), code. A poetic message is distinguished by the dominance of the message. "the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination." "I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in Grammar", Nietzche, "Twilight of the Gods" p.74 - "Why, one might ask, have paratactic constructions that so stretch our readerly horizons emerged so pervasively in twentieth-century poetry." p.143 - "According to Roman Jakobson's now familiar tropology, metonomy and metaphor are the two poles of language ... Some topics, such as affects, moods, and complex concepts, provoke that other linguistic pole, metaphor." From "The Poetics of the Mind's Eye", C Collins, Univ of Pennsylvania, 1991

 o o

o

punctuation may be grammatical-logical or rhythmical-oratorical. Lack of punctuation "may create ambiguities and force the passive reader to become active", p.27. "there was a movement away from rhythmical-oratorical punctuation to grammatical-logical usage between about 1580 and 1680 ... It was only in the decade of the 1840's that the grammatical-logical theories finally triumphed.", p.55 (quoting Mindele Triep). The text may reflect whether it's for listening or reading - visual/aural elements, difficulty, length, poet/audience relationship. From "Reading and Listening", B. Engler, Franke Verlag Bern, 1982.



punctuation "reveals how writers view the balance between spoken and written language", Baron, "Alphabet to email", Routledge, 2000, p.167 Meter (back to top)



"[For Coleridge] All genuine creation ... derives from the generative tension of opponent forces, which are synthesized, without exclusion, in a new whole. The imagination, in creating poetry, therefore echoes the 53

 



creative principle underlying the universe", "meter turns out to be one of the products of that conflict and resolution of contraries" , "the mirror and the lamp", M.H. Abrams, OUP. 1953, p.119,121 "the absence of a metrical frame accounting for the agreement or variation of every syllable ... makes exact and subtle variation and suggestion impossible", Ivor Winters "The demands of metre allow the poet to say something which is not normal colloquial English, so that the reader thinks of the various colloquial forms which are near to it, and puts them together; weighting their probabilities in proportion to their nearness", William Empson, "Seven Types of Ambiguity" "Its verses are the liquid, billowy waves, ... always moving, always alike in their nature as rolling waves, but hardly are two exactly alike in size or measure (meter), never having the sense of something finished and fixed, always suggesting something beyond", Whitman, in "With Walt Whitman in Camden", Traubel. Rhythm (back to top)



   

 



"The regular meter of formal poets is not a dull mechanical ticking, like a clock's; it coalesces out of the rhythms of randomly jotted phrases through a process of 'phase-locking'", Paul Lake in "The Measured Word", Kurt Brown (ed), Univ of Georgia Press, 2001, p.169 "most of the beauty of the lines and all their variety is gained by the skill with which the woof of speech-rhythm is continually thrown athwart the warp of the metrical type", Henry Newbolt, 1912 "The difference between the pattern of the line as speech and as metre is often recognised today as tension and is usually highly prized", Thompson, "The Founding of English Metre", Routledge, 1961, p.7 "The neo-formalists' perhaps unconscious exaltation of the iamb veils their attempt to privilege prevailing white Anglo-Saxon rhythms and culture", Ida Sadoff, Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia, APR, Jan 1990, p.8 "The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation - the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation- by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety", Yeats, "The Yeats Reader", edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2002), pp. 378-379, p.38 "Whether easy to recognise or not, rhythm is always the underlying power that governs the word", Calasso, "Literature and the Gods", Knopf, 2001, p.137 "The claims made by Pound, Eliot in his essay on Arnold, Empson, Hough, Spender and Martin are sometimes daring but they are mistaken. Rhythm cannot express shades of emotion; it does not operate only at a nonconscious level; it cannot express the poet's inner personality; and it is not similar to the rhythms of jazz. What, then, can rhythm actually do in a poem?", James Aitchison, "Quick Reciprocations: The Real Rhythms of Poetry", Agenda "Rhythm is neither outside of a poem's meaning nor an ornament on it. Rhythmic structures are expressive forms, cognitive elements", Harvey Gross, "Sound and Form in Modern Poetry", Univ of Michigan Press, 1964, p.12 Rhyme (back to top)

   







"The words to be rhymed should not only sound alike but they should enrich and deepen and enlarge each other", Wallace Stevens, "letter to Elsie Moll", 1909 "The chief pleasure of rhyme is the rage it inspires in its opponents", Valéry "I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing", Seamus Heaney, "Death of a Naturalist" "I would suggest two particular effects of rhyme: rhyme makes experience from within the body and so can produce unreasoned intimacy; rhyme destabilises the hierarchies of sense and so lends itself to radicalism", Gillian Beer, "The Guardian", January 13, 2007 "It is not, for instance, an accident that Japanese poetry lacks rhyme. In a language that permits only a very small number of sounds in the final position in phrase and sentence, rhyme occurs everywhere and cannot be used as added ornament", ???, p.15 "Ancient Russian poetry (psalms, popular lyric, epic) not only did not know rhyme, but even excluded it . Poetry was associated with song ... Rhyme was met only in spoken genres and could not be mixed with singing", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.56 "Full rhyme affords a basic, primitive pleasure to the literate and illiterate alike; partial rhyme directs itself not only towards the literate but also towards a sophisticated portion of the literate, the readers steeped deeply 54





 o o o

o o o o o

o

o

enough in poetry to appreciate its rarefied formal touches", Stephen Cushman, "Fictions of Form in American Poetry", Princeton University Press, 1993, p.55 "Rhyme is a non-essential element in verse. Minstrels poured forth their lays of war and love long before the chiming of similar sounds had been thought of. In our own language traces of it are to be found as far back as the tenth century, and although Chaucer may be said to have popularised it in his Canterbury Tales towards the end of the fourteenth century, and all succeeding poets have made us of it more or less, it was long looked down upon as a barbarous innovation, and is still regarded by some as a meretricious aid to 'poesie divine'. All the very greatest poems in all languages are rhymeless.", R.F.Brewer, "Art of Versification and Technicalities of Poetry", 1923 "A monosyllabic language with no grammar like Chinese clearly needs a good deal of formality in its rules to make poetry different from prose, whereas any language with long inflected words has to accent the words enough to distinguish the roots from the syntax. ... Japanese poetry no less than Greek could ignore rhyme for this simple reason, whereas English is enough like Chinese to make unrhymed melodious verse much harder to write than rhymed ... The crucial thing about English, as a language for poetry is that you cannot rhyme the subject with the verb, because either 'the cat distracts' and 'the nerves swerve' or 'the cats distract' and 'the nerve swerves'; this bit of grammar has been enormously helpful to English poetry by forcing it away from platitude." - William Empson, "Rhyme" (in "Argufying", Empson, Chatto & Windus, 1987, p.134). p.44 - "In Old Saxon, Icelandic, and Anglo-Saxon, alliteration was structural, other rhyme incidental." p.45 - "Before the consolidation of end rhyme in the vernaculars, rhyming effects seems to have been more various and inventive than at any time since." p.43 - "Since stressing and rhyming emerge in history at the same time [10th century latin hymns], very likely in symbiotic relation, that is no prima facie reason to believe that rhyme has any less part in the constitution of the line than meter" p.47 - "In the next phase of this history, the quarrel shifts from quantitative verse against rhyme to blank verse against rhyme" p.49 - "In the final quarter of the eighteen century the heroic couplet seems a trick used by all, but used badly" p.44 - "poetry in French reacted far more decisively than poetry in English to the early modernist war on devices" p.59 - "Wimsatt says rhyme of the highest sort repeats just the final syllable or syllables of the last words that are semantically unalike" p.78 - "Apparently rhymes are seamless only when the syntax leading up to them does not include effects of apposition or of parataxis or of interpolated parenthesis. The further back in the line or stanza one can trace the syntactic justification for a rhyme word, the easier it will be to afford the necessary slight shock of the unfamiliar" p.88 - "More than any previous period's work, modern rhyme exemplifies all points on the range [from echolalia to multiple sense], including the extremes. So these examples suggest that the same modernity that officially denies the device may also, if with some violence, find its renewal indispensable" P.98 - "As a language habit, rhyme seems a derangement, seems to say something only about language, but there is always the possibility that it is also telling us something also ourselves ... when we perceive that language, like nature in the scientists' estimation, is only partially organised, we regain incentive for basic discoveries. By boycotting puns and confining rhymes, English neoclassical poets wished to control this subversive likelihood of hidden perspectives within language and ourselves" From "The Chances of Rhyme", R.Wesling, Univ of California Press, 1980.





the cause of rhyme's aesthetic effect is "unexpectedness of the specific sequences of sounds, based on a deviation from stochastic distribution" - Jiri Levy, "The Meanings of Form and the Forms of Meaning", PoeticsPoetyka-Poetika II. "When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent ... Freed from its exacting task of supporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater effect where most needed", "To Criticize the Critic", T.S. Eliot, Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1965 55

   o o

"for three hundred years, apart from a few unconvincing attempts at analogies with music, rhyme was always viewed metrically" - "Semantic Rhyme: A Reappraisal", McKie, M., Essays in Criticism, XLVI;4, 1996,p.356 Rhyme "is the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre" - Oscar Wilde p.9 - rhyme "a thing trivial ... of no true musical delight" - Milton. p.10, p.93 - "rhyme is essentially a kind of stress ... a reinforcement of rhythm" From "The Art of the Rhyme", BJ Pendlebury, Chatto & Windus, 1971

 o

o

p.96 - "the need for rhyme makes a writer mix in the mind registers and topic fields in an unpredictable way and this enables surprising and imaginative expressions to be developed which will be enhanced if the rhyme also contributes as it should to the sonic structure of the poem" p.98 - "Rhyme, allied to metre and rhythm, may be regarded as an external constraint upon the writer, imposed by conventions a reader shares. These conventions form a contract between them, constitute a 'game' they both play.... While this contract presents many obligations it also has some benefits. For example, a poor rhyme is not necessarily seen as a dereliction on the poet's part but as an inevitable result of an intractability in the language and the rhyming contract entered into" From "An Introduction to Rhyme", Peter Dale, Agenda/Bellew, 1998





"Near rhymes can thus suggest a possible full rhyme that is not there, and yet is there as a ghost". Quoting Lying so close, they catch the sun, the spokes directed at the shin. from "Wading at Wellfleet" by Elizabeth Bishop, she notes the importance of the ghost rhymes "sin" and "shun" - "Against Coercion - Games Poets Play", Eleanor Cook, Stanford UP, 1998, p.224 Rhyme "provides the condensed formula of poetic language: identity and variation, obligatoriness and freedom, sound and meaning, unity and plurality, texture and structure", "Poetic and Non-Poetic Language", Edward Stankiewicz (in 'Poetics-Poetyka-Poetika I', ed. Donald Davie et al, 1961), p.16 See also my Rhyme article. Voice (back to top)



 



 

 

"The essential criterion of difference between a poem by Stevie Smith and one by W. H. Auden is ultimately a difference of personality, irrespective of literary theory. This is self-evident. It is also true of poems written by poets who tell us they deny the voice - all you hear is their voice", AC Evans, The Argotist Online "As soon as / I speak, I / speaks", Robert Creeley, "The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley", p.294 "In those poems that change me the speaker is most often the protagonist, not the narrator. The narrator knows he will survive the poem. The protagonist never knows if he will even make it to the end; the poem itself becomes the act of survival", Jorie Graham, in "Singular Voices" (ed Stephen Berg), p.93 "The work of art in its complete purity implies the disappearance of the poet's oratorical presence. The poet leaves the initiative to the words. The words ignite through mutual reflexes like a flash of fire over jewels. Such reflexes replace that respiration [of the poet] perceptible in the old lyrical aspiration or the enthusiastic personal direction of the sentence", Mallarme, Crise de vers, p.366 a dialogue develops between the person who wrote the first line and the other, who goes on writing. (Paz, in "Seven Voices", Rita Guibert, 1973) "When we open a first volume of verse these days, we listen to hear a distinctive voice, if we can, and if the voice is not already somewhat differentiated from its precursors and its fellows, then we tend to stop listening, no matter what the voice is attempting to say", "The Anxiety of Influence" (2nd edition), H.Bloom, OUP, 1997, p.148. "in order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it", Machado "the singularity of modern poetry does not come from the ideas or attitudes of a poet, it comes from his voice", "The Other Voice", Octavia Paz, Carcanet, 1992, p.153. 56

 o o

p.ix - "En somme, le Langage issu de la Voix, plutot que la Voix du Langage", XXII, 425-6. p.xvi - "What if the unifying action of the voice itself is taken as the 'meaning' of a poem, however?" From "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982 The Lyrical I (back to top)

 

  





"[the lyric genre is] a most compressed and lovely thing ... the highest form", Susan Howe, "The Birth-mark", 1993, p.171 "By the 1990s, with the rise of feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist theories, American poets were becoming self-conscious about the ideological implications of their medium, particularly lyric poetry's participation in upholding a patriarchal tradition and a belief in the "transcendental signified" ... Mark Jeffreys outlines various contemporary anxieties over and hopes for the lyric, noting that this materialist opposition comes from a perception of lyric's 'imperial assertion of self, the programmatic exclusion of otherness or difference, and the logocentric quest for presence'", Paul Otremba, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.55-56 "The whole question of who is speaking to whom is crucial to all of lyric poetry", Willard Spiegelman, in "Jorie Graham", Thomas Gardner (ed), Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2005, p.237 "I saw the lyric voice as one of the tools used to further the ends of colonialism", p.202, N. NourbeSe Philip in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "The poem simulates a lyrical I whose ghostliness scares away the old hermeneutic attitudes that, having become second nature, have attached themselves to the aftermath of tradition", Anselm Haverkamp, "Poetic Contruction and Hermeneutic Tradition" "Who was this 'I' speaking? What was speaking me? How far did the illusion of selfhood, that most intimate and precious possession, reach? How could the lie of culture be broken up if the lie of the self made by that culture remained intact?", Wendy Mulford, "The Redstockings Manifesto", p.31 "The empirical 'I' is quietened in the act of attention required to write a poem in the first place. ... In the emptying out of the self something is glimpsed that can't be emptied out", Kevin Hart, Salt 10, p.261 Visual Layout (back to top)











"The early avant-garde's play with poetic language as visual art grasped the change in poetic emphasis from aural to visual with the ascendency of free verse, and, further, moved poetry from weight on metaphor to emphasis on the material world, trying to put some physicality onto the poetry ... The influence of Cubism and Dadaism encouraged poets to see the page as verbal collage, and led to rediscovering Greek patterned poetry", Carol Ann Johnston, "APR", 2010, V39.3, p.45 "Typographical intervention, whether in the orthography of speech or in the shape of the page, comes to represent a devolution of authorial power that prefigures the devolution which was to be achieved in the second referendum of 1997", Cairns Craig, "Devolving the Scottish Novel", in "A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction", ed James F. English), 2006, p.137 "I prefer to read the poems of Wallace Stevens in the Electra typeface that was used for the 1954 Collected Poems ... For me, the experience and the pleasure of reading Steven's poetry are not just intensified by this typeface, they are intimately part of it, so that reading Stevens in another font seems unusual and even disconcerting. This is (I hope) by no means eccentric on my part", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.157 "Many of the older typefaces have historic contexts. Using a particular typeface can therefore add a subtle extra dimension to a book. The first edition of Edwin Morgan's Sonnets from Scotland for example was set in Scotch Roman ... Setting such a book in a distinctly English face, such as Caslon, for instance, would seem inappropriate unless you were doing it very deliberately to make an ironic point", Gerry Cambridge, "Sphinx", Issue 12, p.45 "It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he 57

 







can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech ", Olson, "Selected Writings of Charles Olson", p.22 "As poetry moved slowly off the tongue and onto the page, the visual appeal of an approximately square field on a sheet of white paper must have been impossible to resist", Don Paterson, "101 Sonnets", Faber, 1999, p.xvi "The change of the recording medium from human memory to scroll then book has 1) reduced impersonality of tone (no longer is there much collective re-editing) 2) increased imagery and descriptive passages (no longer is there a need to hold a crowd's attention) 3) increased the amount of the work that's immediately available Short Term Memory (STM) can rapidly be topped up." - "The Poetics of the Mind's Eye", C Collins, Univ of Pennsylvania, 1991, p.9 all arts in the twentieth century "have been hunted back to their mediums and there have been isolated, concentrated and defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself. To restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized", Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon" "This frame reinforces the impression that every poem aspires to a rectilinear condition, the shape of a mirror or a window... in our unconscious desire to locate the presence of the poet behind the frame of the words, we try to animate the poem itself ... and the poem itself seems to be returning our attention", "Wallflowers", Michael Donaghy, The Poetry Society, 1999. "The poetic text with its general striving toward maximal ordering implies the presumption of the graphic ordering of the text ... Just as the oral existence of a belletristic text is regulated by its performance (declamation), a written text must have appropriate signs of organisation. The graphic system performs this role", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.71 Genre (back to top)

 



 o o

"The major modernists tended to write as a matter of course in multiple major genres - but are most often remembered for work in a single genre", Lee Upton, "Southwest Review", 94.3 "genres bear within them accumulated tensions that school their practitioners and that create both predictable and unpredictable effects, given different contexts and different audiences. The pleasure of breaking style or breaking out of genre or blending or warping generic conventions lies in the realization of the events that transpire through the act of summoning the genre's leading features", Lee Upton, "Southwest Review", 94.3 "Every genre positions those who participate in a text of that kind: as interviewer or interviewee, as listener or storyteller, as a reader or a writer, as a person interested in political matters, as someone to be instructed or as someone who instructs; each of these positionings implies different possibilities for response and for action. Each written text provides a 'reading position' for readers, a position constructed by the writer for the 'ideal reader' of the text", Gunther Kress , Communication and Culture: An Introduction, New South Wales University Press, 1988, p. 107 "The functional and the structural genres of a text cooperate to allow innovation, by leaving a reader with ground to stand on while he or she learns to understand the meaning of the unfamiliar" - p.77 "the genre competence of an experienced reader is both nimble and creative, and has both historical types and ahistorical types available for use and adaption... The addition and deletion of conditions and the redefinition of terms within conditions do not threaten the stability of the system, which by its nature not only accommodates but welcomes change" - p.82 From "The Bounds of Interpretation", Schauber and Spolsky, Stanford University Press, 1986.

   

"All understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound", E. D. Hirsch, "Validity in Interpetation", (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965): 76. "communication is impossible without the agreed codes of genre" - "A history of English literature", Fowler, 1989, p.216. "genres are agents of ideological closure - they limit the meaning-potential of a given text" - John Hartley in "Cultural Studies", O'Sullivan et al., Routledge, 1994, p.128. "The effect which many identify with the Postmodern is produced by defeating readers' generic expectations." Thomas O. Beebee, "The Ideology of Genre". 58

Symbol, Myth, Allegory, Fantasy, Epic, Tragedy (back to top)   

"Tragedy is primarily an imitation of action, and that it is mainly for the sake of this action that it imitates the personal agents", Aristotle, "Poetics", 6.1450a-b "of the ancient poets, every reader feels the mythology tedious and oppressive", Dr Johnson "the goals of the epic and the saga modes are not always mutually exclusive -what's at stake for the epic is its culture's story of itself, its explanatory and enabling narrative "the tale of the tribe" ... the aims of a saga are less easily summarised except negatively: in being about genealogy (the spread of generations and their interactions and dispersal) rather than lineage (the validation of inherited rights or proof or lack thereof) it has multiple focal points", Hejinian, "The Grand Piano: Part 6", 2008 Florida, 1999, p.38

 











 





 

"Rather than imagine art as a window on the world, allegory tries to examine the models of judgement that form the window", Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, CUP, 1989, p.48 "An allegory is an extended analogy, arranged in narrative, in which nonhuman objects are personified and in which label-names are employed. It is to be distinguished from a roman à clef in that the latter is a similar analogy but one in which there is a human parallel for human persons and events", ???, p.68 "Deprived of a God to allude to, we seek allegories everywhere ... And as a result we are losing the gift for identifying the symbolic mode ... Where everything has a second sense, everything is irredeemably flat and dull ... We no longer even know how to enjoy the revelation of the literal, the sense of amazement at that which is, when the maximum of polyvalence coincides with the minimum of tautology: 'a rose is a rose is a rose.'", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p. 159-60. "It is a big difference whether the poet looks for the particular in the general or whether he sees the general in the particular. The former produces allegory, where the particular has validity only as an example of the general; the latter, however, is the actual nature of poetry; it expresses the particular without thinking of the general or without pointing at it. He who grasps this particular vividly gets the general with it at the same time without being aware of it, or only late." - J.W. Goethe, "Werke", Hamburger Ausgabe, Munich:C.H. Beck, 1973, vol. 12, pp. 470-71. the distinction between symbol and allegory is "between a 'concrete' approach to symbols which begins with images of actual things and works outward to ideas and propositions, and 'abstract' approach which begins with the idea and then tries to find concrete images to represent it." - Northrop Frye, "Anatomy of Criticism" "[symbolism is] where the symbol is founded on an intimate unity between the image that rises up before the senses and the supersensory totality that the image suggests [whereas allegory] designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin [referring] to a meaning that it does not itself constitute", Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality" "A fundamental distinction between symbolism and allegory is, perhaps, that the relationship between the symbol and whatever it symbolizes is a natural one, while in allegory the relationship of a sign and what it signifies is arbitrary", Robert Pack, "Wallace Stevens", Gordian Press, 1958, p.193 "What is characteristic of myth? To transform a meaning into form. In other words, myth is always a language robbery", Barthes, "Myth Today" "If SF is the literature of change, then fantasy is the literature of longing ... Fantasy often ends with the reestablishment of order, with evil conquered and good on the throne. SF often ends with the establishment of a new order, a new way of doing things, with the evolution to a higher order.", Treitel fantasy is "a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. it is not anti-rational, but para-rational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic; a heightening of reality", Le Guin, "The Language of the Night", 1992, p.79 "A work of fantasy compels a reader into a metaphorical state of mind. a work of realism, on the other hand, permits very literal-minded readings...Even worse, it is possible to read a realistic book as though it were not fiction at all", Jill Paton Walsh "the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history... Children as a class neither like fairy-stories more nor understand them better than adults do", Tolkein, Tree and Leaf "By literalizing the allegory of Nineteen Eighty-Four, [Angus] Wilson ironically deciphers its encoded antitotalitarian stance formulated in the wake of Fascist ascendancy. This effectively thwarts the naive 59

representational reading that would translate and reduce the bizarre surfaces of the novel into the commonplace predictability of a historically verifiable 'reality'. The text betrays a profound self-consciousness about the reception which awaits it; whereby postwar reading for realism refuses to acknowledge anti-realist fantasy on its own terms, but must convert it into fantasy 'about' something else", Marina Mackay, in Pretext: Volume 1, (eds Bell and Magrs), 1999 Quality (back to top)  















 





"In academic circles all evaluation is seen as a conspiracy to dominate via the articulation of criteria", Myers and Hedeen, "Unrelenting Readers", Story Line Press, 2004, p.18 "The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is - what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used", C.S.Lewis, "A preface to Paradise Lost", 1942, p.1 "good poems, i.e., those that bear poetic information, are poems in which all of the elements are simultaneously both expected and unexpected. Violation of the first principle makes the text senseless; violation of the second renders it trivial", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.123 The traditional C18 view was that "poetry is truth which has been ornamented by fiction and figures in order to delight and move the reader; the representation of truth, and nothing but the truth, is non-poetry; the use of deception or inappropriate ornaments is bad poetry ... To Wordsworthians poetry is the overflow or expression of feeling in an integral and naturally figurative language; the representation of face unmodified by feeling is non-poetry; the simulation or conventional expression of feeling is bad poetry", MH Abrams, "The mirror and the lamp", OUP, 1953, p.298 "To Plato, poetry had been bad because it aroused the emotions, and to Aristotle, poetry (or at least tragedy) had been good because it purged the emotions. To the Wordsworthians, poetry, because it strengthens and refines the emotions, is among the greatest of goods", MH Abrams, "The mirror and the lamp", OUP, 1953, p.331 "It is now plain that any debate over who is, or is not, a better writer, or what is, or is not, a more legitimate writing is, for the most part, a surrogate social struggle. The more pertinent questions are what is the community being addressed in the writing, how does the writing participate in the constitution of this audience, and is it effective in doing so", Silliman, "In the American Tree", p.xxi "The concepts of quality and value - and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself - are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theatre", Fried, "Art and Objecthood" (in 'Minimal Art: a Critical Anthology' ed Battcock), p.142 "Criticism about the novel is not so obsessed with the question of value, probably because the world of fiction is market led: If a book sells well, it is almost by definition (particularly in the current climate of cultural studies) 'valuable' and therefore worthy of study. The market has taken over the evaluative role of the critic but poetry does not generate so much money or interest. Its audience is smaller, a tight-knit community; its authorities are correspondingly more powerful", Vicki Bertram, in "Contemporary British Poetry", eds Acheson and Huk, State univ of NY Press, 1996, p.284 "multitude of causes, unknown to former times, now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind ... The most effective of these causes are the great national events taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of the occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", Wordsworth, Preface in Lyrical Ballads, 1802. "Most people writing poetry are better employed keeping rabbits" - Edith Sitwell "In a country in love with amateurs, in a country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so fragile and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the introduction of competent criticism" - Pound, 1914 "The language of Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare has now become so antiquated and obsolete that most readers of our age have no ear for them. Poetry has become much more polished and refined since", Edward Bysshe, 1702 "A sleeping nation has wakened to the realization that there is money to be made out of chopping its prose into bits. Something must be done shortly if the nation is to be saved from this menace. But what? ... . Probably the only hope lies in the fact that poets never buy other poets' stuff. When once we have all become poets, the sale 60



   





of verse will cease or be limited to the few copies which individual poets will buy to give to their friends.", PG Wodehouse, "The Alarming Spread of Poetry", The Uncollected Wodehouse "I see an awful lot of poems in quarterlies that prefer boredom to risk. Writing a well-wrought poem of careful irony and shades of alienated indifference or mild self- pity comes as easily now as rhymed quatrains about meadowlarks and nightingales to an earlier generation who looked out the window and like us, saw pigeons.", Marge Piercy, 1992 "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.", Oscar Wilde "one cannot review a bad book without showing off", Auden "No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing" - T.S. Eliot, 1933. "Now all these glaring improprieties of language may be traced back to one common root - the pursuit of novelty in thought. It is this that has turned the brain of nearly all the learned world of today", "On the sublime", (pseudo)Longinus (V), In "Companion Encyclopedia of the History of and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences", I. GrattanGuinness, Routledge 1994), "Birkhoff provided a quantitative measure of phonetic syzygy [a measure of poetic quality] in an 'aesthetic formula' M = (aa + 2r + 2m - 2ae - 2ce)/c. To 2 decimal places, 'Kubla Khan' comes out at 0.83 and 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' at 0.51." The Encyclopedia doesn't go into what a, r, m, e or c represent. To find out more, get" Aesthetic Measure", G. D. Birkoff, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. "The greatest literature operates, in other words, morally as well as verbally between two poles: dramatises the tension between the social check and the individual desire", P. Hobsbaum, "Theory of Criticism", Indiana University Press, 1970, p.221 Criticism (back to top)

 







 



 

"In general, editors constantly crave prose, while they have more poems than they know what to do with", David Yezzi, "The Rest Is Criticism", "Contemporary Poetry Review", Nov 2010 "[I]t's very hard for us, for me, to get over the desire for this elegant, seamless, logical discourse when writing criticism, because for one thing it has real power. People all of a sudden start to listen to what you say", Charles Bernstein, "Content's Dream", p.447 "For a few years [mid 1950s] there was a climate in both England and America in which literary criticism could make claims for intellectual centrality", Bernard Bergonzi, "Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture", OUP 1991 "by the 1950s, the imperial role of criticism had become almost commonplace. 'English' paraded its claims to be considered a kind of presiding discipline in the increasingly specialized universities, and the literary critic figured as the very model of the modern general intellectual", Stefan Collini, "Common Reading", OUP, 2008, p.258 "One of the hellish things you learn after ten years working in editing - I hardly dare confess this - is that you can hold a poem a yard away, and without having read a word know there's a 99% chance that you won't like it. Most often this is because any random two- or three-line passage appears to contain all the letters of the alphabet", Don Paterson, "???" "some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior", TS Eliot, "The Function of Criticism" "If you are working honestly as a critic, then there is an excellent chance - I would go so far as to say it is unavoidable - that you are going to piss somebody off.", David Yezzi, "The Rest Is Criticism", "Contemporary Poetry Review", Nov 2010 "It is not too much to say that Principles of Literary Criticism, which I.A. Richards published in 1924, contained a programme of critical work for a generation", Raymond Williams, "Culture and Society", Penguin, 1961, p.239 "Literary criticism ... takes as its subject matter, not a text, but the transaction between a reader and a text", Norman Holland, "Five Readers Reading", New Haven, 1975, p.248 "Criticism usually ignores boredom", Jonathan Culler, "Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.306 61





    

   

 







"Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall - which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people", Thomas Carlyle , "Signs of the Times", 1829 "Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon", D.H. Lawrence, "Phoenix", 1936 "The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it", D.H. Lawrence, "Studies in Classic American Literature", Mercury Books, 1965, p. 2 "Now creative writing has taken the place of theory", Julia Bell, "Times Higher Education", 10th July, 2008, p.40 "Like thatching or clog dancing, literary criticism seems to be something of a dying art", Terry Eagleton, "How to Read a Poem",2007, p.1 "Maybe fiction and theory are a bit closer. Theory and poetry are very far apart, and one might say that they were constituted to be so", Terry Eagleton, "Poetry Review", 82:1, 1992 "the era of literary theory crucially shifts interpretation's emphasis from the "what" of meaning (new criticism's "debilitating burden of paraphrase") to the "how" of meaning, the strangely "enabling" task of infinite interpretation ", Jeffrey T. Nealon , "The Swerve around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation", Postmodern Culture V17.3, 2007 "real critical judgment is dialectical; it proceeds not just from rule to example, but also from example to rule", Adam Kirsch, "The Modern Element", W.W.Norton, 2008, p.318 "I desire the merging of poetic activity with criticism, at the most deeply personal level, rather than their dissociation through analysis", Yves Bonnefoy, "The Lure and the Truth of Poetry", (preface) "Criticism must be transcendental, that is, much consider literature ephemeral & easily entertain the supposition of its entire disappearance", Emerson "critics and reviewers ... cannot give what the author, the artist, so foolishly looks for - imaginative and original judgement. What they can do, and what they do very well, is to tell the writer how the book or play accords with current patterns of feeling and thinking", Doris Lessing, "the golden notebook" (Preface), Flamingo, 1972, p.16 "criticism must consider both what is physically present in a text and, no less importantly, what is missing in terms of the reader's system of expectations.", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.xi "A 'juridicial' critical discourse on such writers is still appropriate in the periodicals, measuring how far particular literary products violate or conform to certain aesthetic-ideological norms; but this discourse must be conducted at a distance from the market, and it is the market, not critical discourse, which has the upper hand in determining what is acceptable", "The Function of Criticism", T. Eagleton, Verso, 1984, p.57. "I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text. This makes it an easy target. There's a kind of formulaic leftist rhetoric that's been developed in the wake of Foucault, which permits you to exercise a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion on anything from the phonebook to Proust. It's sort of an obviously easy way to write books, articles, and it produces work of very low intellectual quality. And so, this makes this kind of thing an easy target from the outside.", Rorty, interview in The Dualist, 2, 1995, pp. 56-71 "Empiricist common sense [urges] that the risk task of the critic is to get on with the reading process, to respond directly to the text without worrying about niceties of theory, as if ... the lack of any systematic approach or procedure ... were a guarantee of objectivity.", Catherine Belsey, "Critical Practice", Routledge, 1980, p.2 "if it is indeed the case that people approach literature with the desire to learn something about the world, and if it is indeed the case that the literary medium is not transparent, then a study of its non-transparency is crucial in order to deal with the desire one has to know something about the world by reading literature", Salusinszky, "Criticism in Society", Methuen, 1987, p.166 62



 



"We appreciate most works in part, some in so far as they correspond to our own predilections, others to the extent that we can recreate them in our own terms. But this is not the way in which we appreciate a masterpiece", P. Hobsbaum, "Theory of Criticism", Indiana University Press, 1970, p.30 "[Criticism] might contribute in a modest way to our very survival", "Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism", T.Eagleton, NLB, 1981,p.124 "[G. Wilson] Knight saw that his method had an analogy in physics and that he had replaced "character" and all such "rigid particles" by a field theory.... It is hard to think of a more important development for modern criticism than this change from particle to field theory, " "Beyond Formalism", G.H. Hartman, Yale University Press, 1970, p.12 "I think it is totally wrong if writers review each other's books... I find that idiotic, Truly idiotic", W.G.Sebald, Pretext 7, 2003, p.22 See also my Being Critical article. Movements (back to top)

 o

o

o

o o

 o

o

o  o

 o  o o

Romanticism "Juxtaposition can also be seen as a version of the reconsiliation of opposites so important to the Romantics", Cole Swenson, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.110 "English Romantics - man as a natural being in a natural world, informed by intense introspection and a belief in the stability and sovereignty of the individual ", Cole Swensen, "American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry", W. W. Norton, 2009 "[Romanticism is] that attempt, apparently doomed to failure and abandoned by our time, to identify subject and object, to reconcile man and nature", Rene Wellek, in "Romanticism reconsidered" (ed Northrop Frye), 1963, p.133 "Romanticism is rooted in torment and unhappiness and, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Germanspeaking countries were the most tormented in Europe", Hauser, "A Social History of Art", V3, p.166 "The whole exuberance, anarchy and violence of modern art ... its unrestrained, unsparing exhibitionism, is derived from [Romanticism]. And this subjective, egocentric attitude has become so much a matter of course for us ... that we find it impossible to reproduce even an abstract train of thought without talking about our own feelings", Hauser, "A Social History of Art", V3, p.174 Surrealism "Surrealist poetry extends a tendency traced in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French verse of making levels of figuration (what is literal, what metaphorical? etc.) increasing hard to decide", Timothy Clark, "The Theory of Inspiration", Manchester UP, 1997, p.209 "SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations", Andre Breton, "Le Manifeste du Surréalisme", 1924. "Surrealism has undertaken to realize, through an artistic movement, the spiritual intentions of Dadaism", Huelsenbeck, "Courier dada", 1958, p.72 Expressionism "Expressionism still exists in Germany, and every avant-garde tendency in Germany even today, is still infected with that old expressionism...Here [in England] it is most people's ambition to write a readable novel", W.G. Sebald, Pretext 7, 2003, p.24 Imagism "Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this", Wallace Stevens, "Opus Posthumous", p.61 Symbolism "The literary history of our time is to a great extent that of the development of Symbolism and its fusion or conflict with Naturalism", Edmund Wilson, "Axel's Castle", 1953, p.25 "Symbolist practice had three main aspects: first, the poem as a whole constituted the symbol ... not symbols in the poem; second, the 'vagueness' that was thought to be a musical analogue ... ; third, juxtaposition of elements 63

o

o o

o

 o

o  

with transitional links suppressed, In England and America, most Modernists were interested mainly in the third aspect", David Rollow, PN Review, V33, n.6, p.33 "Imagisme is not symbolism. The symbolists dealt in 'association', that is, in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word ... The Image is the poet's pigment ... The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech.", Ezra Pound, "GaudierBrzeska", p.97,99,102. "Symbolist poetry ... applied to the extensive poem the aesthetics of the short poem", "The Other Voice", Octavia Paz, Carcanet, 1992, p.26. "I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use 'symbols' he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk", Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect," in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound "What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation. Its artistic worth is measurable by the degree to which it remains, after interpretation, vital - no interpretation or cardiopulmonary push-pull can exhaust or empty it", Donald Barthelme, "Not-Knowing" Realism the "calculated demolition of the conventions of 'the' novel is a thrust into reality rather than a retreat into literature", Ronald Sukenick, in "Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow", ed. Raymond Federman, Swallow Press, 1975, p.40. p.70 - Classic realism is 'illusionism', 'closure' plus a 'hierarchy of discourses which establishes the "truth" of the story', p.82 - "Classic realism cannot foreground contradiction" From "Critical Practice", Catherine Belsey, Methuen, 1980

o  

p.281 - "poetic realism is not incompatible with 'symbolic discourse' since in poetry the most concrete image tends to assume symbolic connotations" p.284 - "'art of process' ... is naturalistic not in the sense of imitating nature, but of wanting art to be nature." From "The Truth of Poetry", M.Hamburger, Metheun, 1982.

o

o o  o

o 

"It is reasonable to presuppose that author, text and reader are closely interconnected in a relationship that is to be conceived as an ongoing process that produces something that had not existed before. ... Since the advent of the modern world there is a clearly discernable tendency toward privileging the performative aspect of the author-text-reader relationship. ... Closed systems, such as the cosmos of Greek thought or of the medieval world picture, gave priority to representation as mimesis because of their overriding concern that whatever existed - even if it eluded perception - should be translated into something tangible. When the closed system, however, is punctured and replaced by open-endedness, the mimetic component of representation declines ... The process then no longer entails reaching behind appearances in order to grasp an intelligible world in the Platonic senses, but turns into a 'way of world-making'." - Wolfgang Iser, "The Play of the Text" in "Realism", L.R. Furst (ed), Longman, 1992. p.206 "Realism is essentially the democratic art", Gustave Courbet, 1861. "Language is a form, it cannot possibly be either realistic or unrealistic.", Barthes, " Myth Today" Formalism "The Formalists were excited by the collisions of different genres and styles ... Nevertheless it should be stressed that the focus of Formalist analysis remains upon the literary, and the relationship between form and content is a difficult area for Formalist theory", Rick Rylance, "Debating Texts", OUP, 1987, p.35 formalism is "a method ... of revealing the human content of art by a study of its formal properties", Geoffrey Hartman, "Beyond Formalism", Yale Univ Press, 1970, p.42 Oulipo

64

o

o

o o o

o o o

o

o o  o

 o

o

o

o o

o

o o

"If nothing else, Oulipian techniques might provide, at last, a shared language of form within which the mainstream and experimental camps can continue to wage their wars of attrition", Simon Turner, in "Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.130 "The Oulipians have very much arrived, and their presence on the scene could well prove to have a profound effect upon our long-held conceptions of literary form, potentially and irrevocably altering the course of contemporary British poetry", Simon Turner, in "Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.116 "Precisely because the author is made aware of constraints, he or she must find, within language, resources that would otherwise not be found", Joseph Tabbi, "Poetics Today", 31:1, p.48 "Constraints are not ornaments: for the writer, they help generate the text; for the reader, they help make sense of it", Baetens and Poucel, "Poetics Today", 30:4, p.613 "Once we recognize that the frenetic drive to innovate via revolt has bankrupted so many twentieth-century avant-gardes, it is not surprising that we should now encounter a broad upsurge in constraint-based art", Baetens and Poucel, "Poetics Today", 30:4, p.622 "the conversion of the active reader into a writer is certainly one of the major consequences of constrained writing", Baetens and Poucel, "Poetics Today", 30:4, p.623 "authors and readers of constrained writing have a strong predilection to work in groups", Baetens and Poucel, "Poetics Today", 30:4, p.624 "By 'working under constraint' they have raised their level of consciousness because - their dictum - if an author does not define his or her constraint, the constraint will in turn define their work for them", "Memory and Oulipian Constraints", Peter Consenstein, Postmodern Culture v.6 n.1 (September, 1995) "in Queneau's and Le Lionnais's view, after the exhaustion of the generative power of traditional constraints, only mathematics could offer a way out between a nostalgic obstinacy with worn-out modes of expression and an intellectually pathetic belief in 'total freedom'" - p.40, "Oulipo Compendium", Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (eds), Atlas Press 1998 "An oulipian writer is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape", Queneau "Oulipo: the continuation of literature by other means" (after Clausewitz) Hermeneutics hermeneutics is traditionally concerned with "the question of what is involved in the event of understanding a text, and the question of what understanding itself is", Palmer, "Hermeneutics: Interpretational Theory in Schleiermaher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer", p.10 New Criticism "the key points is that [New Criticism] grew out of their practical interest in writing poetry ... founded upon the sort of technical discussion of poetic problems that would occur among a group of poets", Myers, "The Elephants Teach", Prentice Hall, 1996, p.130 "The New Criticism was caricatured as an extension of technological domination, explication being now seen as at best an evasive activity, at worst a form of manipulation", Graff, "Professing Literature", Univ of Chicago Press, 1987, p.240 "The ideal poem in New Critical terms was self-contained, refined, precisely formed, detached, and difficult in the sense that it required, and rewarded, careful study", Cole Swensen, "American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry", W. W. Norton, 2009 "lyric became a metaphor for the New Criticism [and its reactionary ideology]", Virginia Jackson, "Dickenson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading", Princeton UP, 2005, p.93 "the New Critical valorization of the lyric as the dominant poetic form is due in part to the fact that the lyric, which can relatively easily be understood as a free-standing verbal object, is teachable in a class", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.15 "The New Critical distrust of emotion in poetry may be seen to emerge partly from its perceived function as a teaching method and partly from its emphasis on the objective nature of the poem", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.75 "New Criticism has a tendency to endow aesthetic form with moral and cultural significance", ??? "The New Critics never fully succeeded in theorizing the relationship between the poem made of words, the verbal icon, and the language within which it exists and signifies....They consistently urged that there was no distinction between form and content, that texts cannot be understood as ideas wrapped in emotions, or meanings decorated with imagery", Catherine Belsey, "Critical Practice", Routledge, 1980, p.17 65

o  o

o

o

o  o

o

o

o

o

o

 o o o

"cutting itself off from all discourse except the poetic, it increasingly isolated literary criticism from all other concerns.", Catherine Belsey, "Critical Practice", Routledge, 1980, p.20 Structuralism "structuralism is not particularly interested in meaning per se, but rather in attempting to describe and understand the conventions and modes of signification which make it possible to 'mean'", "Modern Literary Theory (3rd Edition)", Rice and Waugh, Arnold, 1996, p.22. "Structuralism ... starts off from the observation that every concept in a given system is determined by all other concepts of the system and has no significance by itself alone ... there is an interrelation between the data (facts) and the philosophical assumptions, not a unilateral dependence", Garvin, "a Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style", vi "The failure of the structuralist program is pretty much a matter of history. Attempts to treat literature as if it had the structure of a language ... or to see literary structures as the result of basic structures of human thought, or to causally link differences in languages with incommensurable differences in modes of conceptualizing the world either failed to be convincing or proved trivial. Although the promise of structuralism was exaggerated, the intellectual investment of quite a few critics was too heavy for it to be abandoned without a struggle. The claims of structuralism therefore underwent a process of increasing moderation", "Literary Meaning", W.V. Harris, Macmillan, 1996, p.76. "Structuralist Analysis typically searches for hierarchical strings of binary oppositions" - "Studying Literature", Goring, Hawthorn and Mitchell, Arnold, 2001 Post-Structuralism "oddly, the last people in the humanities who are still talking about 'absolute truth' are the Post-Structuralists in the business of demolishing it", Alan Bilton, "An Introduction to Contemprary American Fiction" Edinburgh University Press, 2002, p.11 "In retrospect, it seems clear that the era of poststructuralism was characterized by a decisive intensification of attention to the process (rather than the product) of interpretation", Jeffrey T. Nealon , "The Swerve around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation", Postmodern Culture V17.3, 2007 "In the classical, Aristotelian view, experience is a doorway to the apprehension of essence; experience is understood as a real and immediate presence and therefore as a reliable means of knowing. In the PostStructuralist Althusserian view, experience is a product of ideology. It is a sign mediated by other signs" ... "empirical facts are always ideological productions", Diana Fuss, "Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference", Routledge, 1980, p.114 "This is a descriptive title that is sometimes used almost interchangeably with deconstruction while at other times being seen as a more general, umbrella term", "Studying Literature", Goring, Hawthorn and Mitchell, Arnold, 2001, p.169 "For some [Post-Structuralism] is a matter of a more radical reading of Saussure, for others it is the moment at which Structuralism becomes self-reflective. It is sometimes taken as a critique of Structuralism, sometimes a development of it. [...] If one wanted to date the appearance of Post-Structuralism then 1966/7 would be a reasonable place to start [...] The moment of Structuralism and the moment of Post-Structuralism almost coincide in terms of their appearance and adoption in Anglo-American literary theory. [...] if the categories of literature and literary studies do not refer to things-in-themselves, but are constructed in difference then the act of criticism which articulates that difference cannot be viewed as subordinate. Rather, it is of equal importance to the literature it studies", "Modern Literary Theory (3rd Edition)", Rice and Waugh, Arnold, 1996, p.114-5. "The key difference between structuralism and poststructuralism is located in the latter's more radical extension of Saussurean linguistic theory. Structuralism recognised [that signifieds' ] relationship with their signifiers [was] arbitrary. However, once this relationship has been fixed in language, signifier and signified become defined and stable. Poststructuralism denies that stability of this kind is possible", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.181 Deconstructionism "Deconstruction can be seen as poststructuralism at its most radical", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.181 "deconstruction is undoubtedly anarchic", Derrida, ", Negociations", p.22 "Deconstruction is not a method of anything, or a philosophy of anything. Deconstruction is a response to a text that bears in mind the 'other' which the text excludes or covers up... It can come in any form that is suitable to the text to which it is responding... Jacques Derrida deconstructs works of philosophy in a philosophical style: 66

o

o

o

o o

 o

o

o

o

o

o

Angela Carter deconstructs stories in a narrative style...Deconstruction objects to purity and closed-off stories...Deconstruction is a way of worrying about limits and borders between things (the world, philosophy, fiction, politics, gender), including worrying about its own borders and practices", Robert Eagleton, in "Contemporary British Fiction", Lane et al, Polity Press, 2003, p.202 "Deconstruction measures language which itself opens into an infinitude, each word in its connection with other words forming images, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, settings, characters, ideas ....Each of these fractal in themselves; a scene opening to color, memory .... What is unmeasurable within one opening is measurable in another; what is measurable through one opening itself opens up to what is no longer measurable", "Mots d'order", J. Natoli, State Univ of New York Press, 1992. p.62. "deconstruction ... gave a new source of commentary to a field that seemed to have pretty well exhausted what there was to say about literature" "deconstruction opened a wholly new field by concentrating on [literary texts'] contradictions.. Moreover, the goal of commentary could be shifted from demonstration of a thesis to the exhibition of intellectual play.", "Literary Meaning", W.V. Harris, Macmillan, 1996, p.66. "Deconstruction's dual sensibility, at once stoically conformed to the ineluctability of metaphysics and enraptured by a jouissance or mise-en-abyme which promises to shatter that whole enclosure, has doubtless a particular historical source: it mixes the left pessimism of the post-1968 period with a discourse which continues, as it were, to keep the revolution warm.", "The Function of Criticism", T. Eagleton, Verso, 1984, p.99. "[Deconstruction] is able to outflank every existing knowledge to absolutely no effect", "Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism", T.Eagleton, NLB, 1981, p.103. "Deconstruction is a strategy for revealing the underlayers of meanings 'in' a text that were suppressed or assumed in order for it to take its actual form ... Texts are never simply unitary but include resources that run counter to their assertions and/or their authors' intentions", "Introducing Postmodernism", Appignanesi and Garratt, Icon Books, 1999, p.80 Modernism "[in retraining] the poetry reader away from the old joys of memory and sentiment and song, the secondary modernist project cut deep into the root and sap of the art ... a centuries old, bright partnership between poet and reader has been injured. An ancient trust has been hurt", Eavan Boland, "The Wrong Way" (Herbert and Hollis (eds)) "Modernism and, more specifically, Modernist poetry represent the terminus of literary history. All subsequent and forthcoming development - postmodernism includerd - are extensions, mergers or revivals of established Modernist and pre-Modernist precedents ", Richard Bradford, "Poetry: The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p.120 "In contemporary poetry, it is striking how often the tools of the modernists are used to summon a factitious authority and prestige, to obscure premises that would not bear plain examination. Still worse is the use of the ludic, fracturing techniques of postmodernism, which emphasize the poem's difficult texture in order to conceal its absence of genuine insight, accuracy, and challenge. As with any moment in the history of poetry, perhaps, our own is littered with the corpses of once-vital techniques ... Fraudulent self-exposure, which makes no inner demand on poet or reader, and otoise expermentalism, which mistakes novelty for discovery, are typical of the bad poetry of our time, just as other kinds of badness characterised earlier periods", Adam Kirsch, "The Modern Element", W.W.Norton, 2008, p 12-13 "[Milosz] convinces us that modernism was not actually modern, but the necessary conclusion of four centuries of art and thought about art: it was the desperate attempt to make art alone a sufficient source of value ... Only what came afterward - the postmodern - is really new ... The question for us, which we have yet to answer and seldom even ask properly, is whether the postmodern will mean the dawning of nihilism or of a new, transformed humanism", Adam Kirsch, "The Modern Element", W.W.Norton, 2008, p.222 "What the theorists of modernism and postmodernism have done is to encourage poetry that needs justification, critical props, excuses for the wilfulness of self-indulgent individuals - as if most needed any further excuse", Peter Forbes, "Poetry Review", Spring 1996, p.3 "Modernist poetry, so keen to be difficult and to problemize the reader's reactions, develops out of and is at one with institutional acacdemia. If The Waste Land is in important ways the product of the Harvard elective system, and if The Cantos are lecture notes write large ...", Robert Crawford, "The Modern Poet", OUP, 2001, p.197 67

o o o

o

o

o o

o o

o

o

o

o

o

o

o o  



"The family had been absent from most modernist poetry", Robert Crawford, "The Modern Poet", OUP, 2001, p.239 "A tendency towards anti-poetry is inseparable from almost every variety of twentieth-century modernism", Michael Hamburger, "The Truth of Poetry", Carcanet, 1982, p.234 "For many decades Cambridge has been a focus in English poetry of a kind of metaphysical modernism ... a serious and total commitment to poetry as the supreme record of the transaction between self and the world", Peter Riley, "Reality Studios V8.4, 1986" "Unlike their distinguished predecessors, the German and English romantics of the early nineteenth century, the modernists have not sustained hope in the possibility of unifying subject with object or human being with nature", Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism, Harvard Univ Press, 1992, p.37 "Drawing so strongly on both anthropology and dialect and aiming to outflank the Anglo-centricity of established Englishness through a combination of the demotic and the multicultural, Modernism was essentially provincial phenomenum", Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature, OUP, 1992, p.270 "Modernity is that which is ephemeral, fugitive, contingent upon the occasion; it is half of art, whose other half is eternal and unchangeable", "The Painter of Modern Life", Baudelaire, 1861 "The modern spirit was a combination of certain intellectual qualities inherited from the Enlightenment: lucidity, irony, scepticism, intellectual curiosity, combined with the passionate intensity and enhanced sensibility of the Romantics, their rebellion and the sense of technical experiment, their awareness of living in a tragic age", Cyril Connolly, "The Modern Movement", 1965 "In all the arts, however, modernism first manifests itself as an intensified aestheticism", Monroe K. Spears, "Dionysus and the City", OUP, 1970, p.58 "The drive toward form and then through it, to art and then beyond it and back to reality, truth, immediate experience; and the incorporation of this whole process into art - these are central to modernism", Monroe K. Spears, "Dionysus and the City", OUP, 1970, p.63 "The modernist assault on forms has, in all probability, no exact parallel in literary theory ... it challenges the idea of form itself and resolves that challenge by forcing new demands on every artistic medium", Ihab Hassan, "The Dismemberment of Orpheus", OUP, 1971, p.9 "Modernism is by no means the only movement whose ambitions led it, at times, to rage against everthing that make social life worth living ... The extreme ambition of what may be the purest Modernist work shares the same critical perspective as the apocalyptic conscious, but it lacks its [religious] consolations", Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, CUP, 1989, p.422 "In part, this Modernist poetics is a response to, and a short-circuiting of, the Romantic poetics of revolution and self-fashioning, for what is does is attempt to dispense altogether with the notions of selfhood, individuality and personality", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.55 "I would be tempted to define crucial aspects of modernity in terms of the drastic reduction of internal language and of the concommitant inflation of public verbalization, of 'publicity' in the full sense of the term", "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972, p.58 "Radical modernism in European poetry is, I believe, largely derived from Mallarmé's practice and from Heidegger's theoretic metaphor, and from the image of Müderlin in Heidegger", "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972, p.33 "For the Novel written in England modernism was never so much in opposition to realism as in fact instantiating a new realism, with detailed psychological description replacing external social observation", Steven Earnshaw, "Literature and Culture in Modern Britain", Bloom and Day (eds), Longman, 2000, p.64 modernism was driven by "a feeling that form and subject-matter are [or should be] structurally identical", Graves and Riding "through the modernist ballet, exploiting its unique combination of snob appeal, the magnetism of vogue ... and elite artistic status, the avant-garde broke out of its stockade", p.182 "'modernism' rested on the rejection of nineteenth-century bourgeois-liberal conventions in both society and art, and on the perceived need to create an art in some way suited to the technologically and socially revolutionary twentieth century", p.515 "in the first half of the century 'modernism' worked, the feebleness of its theoretical foundations unnoticed, the short distance to the limits of development permitted by its formulas ... not yet quite traversed... Formal avantgarde innovation and social hope were still welded together by the experience of world war ...", p.515 68



"The equivalent of 'modernism' in chess, the so-called 'hyper-modern' school of players of the 1920s ... did not propose to change the rules of the game, as did some. They merely reacted against convention ... by exploiting paradox - choosing unconventional openings ... and observing rather than occupying the centre. Most writers, and certainly most poets, in practise did the same", p.518 From "Age of Extremes", Eric Hobsbaum, 1995, Abacus

 o o

o

o

o o

o

o

o o o

o o

o

o

Post-modernism "For many researchers working in humanities departments, the cry is now: Postmodernism is dead, long live Modernism!", Andrew Thacker, "The Times Higher Education", 11th Aug 2011, p.41 "post-modernism ... has revolutionized the world of the visual arts (including film) while poetry has (arguably, at least in its mainstream manifestations) remained virtually untouched", Adam Fieled, in "Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.33 "Despite an emerging consensus that postmodernism is over, recent political events have highlighted the need for the type of ethical thinking advanced within the post-Heideggerian tradition, for example by ... Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, in order to combat manifestations of what Lyotard has termed 'the inhuman", Paul MarchRussell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.233 "If, for the modernist writer, the city existed as a space onto which s/he could map their own psychological terrian, for the postmodernist writer the city is experienced as a rapidly changing domain in flight from ... rational and official discourse", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.159 ""Postmodernism" generally names the disorganisation of the cultural field since the 1970s", Vincent B. Leitch, "Living with Theory", Blackwell, 2008, p.105 "[Postmodern writing] turns out to be mimetic after all, but this imitation of reality is accomplished not so much at the level of its content, which is often manifestly un- or anti-realistic, as at the level of form", Brian McHale, "Postmodern Fiction", Metheun, 1987, p.38 "[postmodernism is] an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place", Jameson, "Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", Duke Univ Press, 1991, p.ix "postmodernism fiction simply carries to its logical and questionable extremes the antirationalist, antirealist, antibourgeois program of modernism, but with neither a solid adversary (the bougeois having now everywhere co-opted the trappings of modernism and turned its defiant principles into mass media kitsch) nor solid moorings in the quotidian realism it defines itself against", Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment", 1980 "postmodernism springs in large part from the rout of modern Marxism",Terry Eagleton, "London Review of Books", 21st June, 2007, p.13 "quaint being the exact word for postmodern conceptions of nonreferential extremity", p.340, David Marriot in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "a great deal of contemporary American poetry (the postmodern, rather than traditional poetry) is much more closely linked to English Romantic literature than is usually acknowledged", Lyn Hejinian, (letter to Alison Mark), 1995 "[in postmodernism] instead of being rejected, conventions are actually embraced and exaggerated", Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism, Harvard Univ Press, 1992, p.30 "Romantic or quasi-romantic elements are, in fact, rather prominent in many classic works of the 'high modernist' period ... But if we turn to many of the aesthetic works and ideologies associated with the term postmodernism, ... the lingering vestiges of romanticism seem to have been banished almost entirely", Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism, Harvard Univ Press, 1992, 343-344 "even the postmodernists don't really understand one another's writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads", Katha Pollitt, The Nation (10th June) 1966 "No one model for Postmodernist poetry prevails today. Instead, two radically opposed models (with several variants) compete for hegemony. The first takes the basic demand on contemporary poetry to be continuing the ideals of avant-garde experiment, but adjusting them to meet the social and epistemological conditions that contemporaneity imposes. The second insists on a conservative faith that poetry best addresses its society by relying on fairly constant ideals of lyrical expression. Ironically, each of these perspectives bases its appeal on 69

o

o o

o o  

claims that it can liberate us from what prove to be almost the same set of 'Modernist errors' .. modernist poetry negates a vital sense of life, because of excessive formalism The modes of presenting human agency become severely problematic The conjunction of impersonality with the imperative to formal autonomy severely reduces the social and psychological powers that can be claimed for poetry The ultimate sign of the Modernist failure is the conservative political sympathies that so many Modernist poets adopted late in their careers ", (p.380-383), Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, Charles Altieri, CUP, 1989 "post-modernism rejects originality and stresses the inevitability of appropriation in creative work. The prefix 'post' signals a foundational debt and an unabashedly reactive position that departs from a modernist make-itnew credo", Alice Fulton, in "The Measured Word", Kurt Brown (ed), Univ of Georgia Press, 2001, p.112 "where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies", Lyn Hejinian, in "The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E book", p.29 "Lyotard's distinction rests upon the idea that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, ultimately draws its legitimacy from agreements made by participants in a language game... In this sense all knowledge is narrative knowledge, for all knowledge depends for its legitimacy upon values and beliefs constructed and confirmed by a process of telling, and so an active relationship between addressor and addressee", "Postmodernism and Performance", Nick Kaye, Macmillan, 1994, p.18 Jean Baudrillard has suggested that the acceleration of modernity has reached escape velocity from the gravitational pull of any grounding in reality or history - "The Year 2000 has Already happened" "I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse ... making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit", p.xxvii "a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern", p.79 From "The Postmodern Condition: a report on Knowledge", Lyotard, 1984

o

o

o

o o

o o

"I think that I offered the same alternative Stanley Fish did, and I think that Fish and I are basically saying the same thing: you can have the benefits of so-called European post-modern thought without the nonsense. You can have the benefits in plainer language. You can have what's good about them without the jargon and the complexity.", Rorty, interview in The Dualist 2, 1995, pp. 56-71 "In contrast to the isotropic space of modernism, postmodern space aims to be historically specific, rooted in cultural, often vernacular, style conventions, and often unpredictable in the relation of parts to the whole. In reaction to the large scale of the modern movement it attempts to create smaller units, seeks to break down a corporate society to urban villages, and maintain historical associations through renovation and recycling.", John A Agnew and James S. Duncan (eds). "The power of place". London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. "I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, 'I love you madly', because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say 'as Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.' At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence", Eco, "Postmodernisn, Irony, the Enjoyable" "Postmodernism, in contrast [to modernism] tends to retain the relativism while abandoning the belief in the unified underlying reality", "Studying Literature", Goring, Hawthorn and Mitchell, Arnold, 2001, p.269 "Postmodernism writing requires a different ontological base-line from either social or psychological realism since it is the epistemological notion of reality which is at issue from the very outset ... Postmodern thought claims that the ability to represent reality is always compromised because reality is not 'out there' to be discovered and described, but is a construct of language and narration", Steven Earnshaw, "Literature and Culture in Modern Britain", Bloom and Day (eds), Longman, 2000, p.64-5 "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences", Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Postmodern Condition", 1979 "by the early eighties the term has shifted from a description of a range of aesthetic practices involving playful irony, parody, parataxis, self-consciousness, fragmentation, to a use which encompasses a more general shift in thought and seems to register a pervasive loss of faith in the progressivist and speculative discourses of 70

o

o 





modernity. Postmodernism is now used to express the sense of a new cultural epoch in which distinctions between critical and functional knowledge break down as capitalism, in its latest consumerist phase, invades everything including the aesthetic, the post-colonial world and the unconscious, leaving no remaining oppositional space" - Patricia Waugh in "Postmodernism: A Reader", Edward Arnold, 1992 "the urge to identify and celebrate the category of the Postmodern has been so strong as to produce by backformation a collective agreement about what modernism was, in order to have something to react against" "Postmodern Culture: An introduction to Theories of the Contemporary", Connor, Blackwell, 1989 "Postmodernist culture and technology have systematically problematized the distinction between the public and the private not only through the emergence of new media and social realms such as television and the Internet, but also through sustained analyses of how this distinction can work not only to separate factually different social domains, but to perpetuate specific ideologies", p.37. "But the [Postmodernist] narrative technique differs from that of high-modernist and late-modernist novels in two fundamental respects: the differing accounts or flashbacks are not linked to the voice or mind of any narrator or character configured with a view toward psychological realism, and they tell event sequences in contradictory and mutually exclusive versions", p.53. "postmodernist repetition strategies seem designed precisely to preclude moments of epiphany and privileged insight ... The present is trapped in its own mutations", p.58. From "Chronoschisms", U.K. Heise, CUP, 1997

 o

o

 o o

o

 o

o o

o

o

Concrete "Concrete poetry begins by assuming a total responsibility before language: accepting the premise of the historical idiom as the indispensable nucleus of communication, it refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality without history - taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the idea", Brazilian concrete poetry manifesto, 1958 "In New York the last decadent stages of poetry can be seen in the move by 'Concrete' poets recently toward the use of actual objects and theatre. Can it be that they feel the unreality of their art form? ... Ironically, many of them call themselves 'Conceptual Poets'", Kosuth, "Collected Writings", MIT Press, 1991, p.24,35 Objectivism "Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the 'subject' and his soul", Charles Olson "Objectism [sic] is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the 'subject', and his soul by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature .. and those other creatures of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects", Charles Olson, "Projective Verse", p.59 "Olson objected to the use of similes, symbols and comparisons in poetry, regarding them as interferences which would turn consciousness away from the object rather than towards it", N.H.Reeve and Richard Kerridge, "Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne",Liverpool University Press, 1995, p.40 Language Poetry "Language poetry can be defined as self-referential and self-conscious, placing it clearly in the line of transition from modernism to postmodernism", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.101 "Language poetry ... seems to have nourished poetic practice in marked nondenominational ways.", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.24 "Rather than asserting poetry's traditional alignment with the individual's creation and experience of beauty, the Language poets stress its capacity to inspire critical thought about culture, ideology and community. This emphasis does not mean a rejection of intimacy or response", Kimberly Lamm, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.136 "where a traditional voice poem might find itself mired in the devitalised language of consumer culture, or trapped in a formulaic account of inspiration or deep feeling - and where an exemplary language poem might find itself risking an aesthetics of elitism and irrelevancy", p.235, Kathleen Crown in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "I want to make a case for syntactic and rhetoric effects which have been systematically denigrated in Language writing", Bob Perelman in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.375 71

o

o

o o o

o

o

o

o o o

o

 o

o

 o

o

o

"I want to make the case that contact with familiar social structures in language is a crucial element for politically and poetically ambitious work", Bob Perelman in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.376 "Language poets and new formalists must move from the issues of art - what is collected, withheld, made special - to considerations of audience, who will be walled out from these technologies, these new museums of language", Lyn Emanuel, in "Poetry after modernism" (ed Robert McDowell), p.220 "it is plausible to regard the return of irony as a demonstrable (if unintended) contribution of language writing to current American poetry", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.211 "A more pervasive assumption is that language poetry is passé, or else something to surmount", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.16. "The legacy of language poetry has been disseminated into the environment of poetic innovation at large; and ... there's something about this legacy of innovation and women that go together", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.18. "Language poetry draws on aspects of the French Oulipo schook with its structural games, and preoccupation with the making and breaking of new kinds of formal rule; as Oulipo evolved in conjunction with Tel Quel in France, so Language poetry (though many of the poets might deny this) has developed not just out of the French-influenced work of the early Ashbery but also alongside the growth of poststructuralism in US academia", Robert Crawford, "The Modern Poet", OUP, 2001, p.283 "Since ... Language writing successfully both created new readership networks and intervened in existing ones, their poetic critique of commodification carried considerable authority", p.133, Peter Middleton in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "The most impressive political work of that loosely affiliated group of recent American exploratory poets known as 'language poets' had less to do with the politics of the sign than it had to do with the on-the-ground labor of sustaining networks of presses, distributors, and readers", p.148, Keith Tuma in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "One of the cardinal principles - perhaps the cardinal principle - of American language poetics ... has been the dismissal of 'voice' as the foundational principle of lyric poetry", Perloff, Critical Inquiry 25, (1999), p.405 "The language writers operate within that tension between word without referent and word with direct referent", Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p.16 "[in language poetry] the attempt is not to articulate the curve of experience but to create a formal linguistic construct that itself shapes our perception of the world around us", Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect, CUP, 1985, p.230 "The idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference is as bothersome and confusing as the assumption that the primary function of words is to refer, one to one, to an already constructed world of things", Andrews and Bernstein, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Southern Illinois UP, 1984, p.ix Elliptical "Elliptical poems are obsessed with both persons and personality. Like parataxis, which most employ, they can be read as both symptom and critique of the culture and world they spring from", Hannah Brooks-Motl, "The Dark Horse", Summer 2008 "the most exciting younger poets treat voice and self and identity neither as givens nor as illusions but as problems ... [they] do not represent speech, or stream-of-consciousness, or a program for breaking up subjects and systems; instead it's performance and demonstration - if you can hear me through all this noise, I must be real", Burt, "The Elliptical Poets", in "American Letters and Commentary 11", p.46-50 Hypertext "[h]ypertext is certainly a new way of writing (with active links) [but] is it truly a new way of reading? And is all that jumping around the same as creating a new text?", Aarseth, "Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature", 1997, p.78 "Some say that by playing with hypertexts we escape two forms of oppression: having to follow sequences already decided on by others, and being condemned to the social division between those who write and those who read. This seems silly to me", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p.10-11 "Hypertextual narrative has much to teach us about freedom and creativity. That is all well and good, but it is not everything. Stories that are 'already made' also teach us how to die.", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p.15 72

o

With hypertext "The text becomes a present tense palimpsest where what shines through are not past versions but potential, alternate views.", Michael Joyce, "Of Two Minds: hypertext, Pedagogy and Poetics", Univ of Michigan Press, 1995. Change/Avant-garde (back to top)

 









   







   

"the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center", Salvatore Quasimodo "Gay men growing up in the mid-century in Scotland necessarily found tricks of concealment, and the 'avantgarde' offered an environment in which creativity could be engaged in without too much awkward selfrevelation and without having to decide exactly how serious one was about what one was writing", D.M.Black, "The Dark Horse", 26, Winter/Spring 2011, p.74 "When traditional means of introducing motifs are debunked during the development of new schools of poetry, of the two kinds of motivation used by the old school (the traditional and the realistic) only the realistic remains after the traditional declines. This is why any literary school which opposes an older aesthetic always produces manifestoes in one form or another about 'faithfulness to life'", Boris Tomashevsky, "Thematics" "So, while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what is conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another ... Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be, a return to common speech", Eliot, "The Music of Poetry", 1942 "Committed to the integration of poetic, philosophic, and social experiment, the Athenaeum group was, essentially, the first European avante-garde", Daniel Tiffany, "Infidel Poetics", Univ of Chicago Press, 2009, p.28 "Historically the avant-garde is the heir to the aristocratic coterie or court circle of artists and intellectuals. But whereas the aristocratic coterie of medieval and Renaissance times had no commitment except to itself and posterity and consequently felt free to cultivate the disinterested pursuit of art and ideas apart from the rest of society, history has imposed upon the modern avant-garde the duty not only of disinterestedly cultivating art and ideas but of educating and leading an aimless body of philistine taste and opinion. ", , "The Fate of the Avant-Garde", Partisan Review, 1957 "Publishing categories become literary movements when the control shifts to the critical conversation among readers", Orson Scott Card, "Nebula Awards Showcase 2008", Ben Bova (ed), Penguin 2008, p.232 "as far as I can determine, there hasn't been a new kind of science fiction since the late 1970s", Orson Scott Card, "Nebula Awards Showcase 2008", Ben Bova (ed), Penguin 2008, p.236 "A literary movement can die by dissolving its boundaries; it doesn't have to be killed", Orson Scott Card, "Nebula Awards Showcase 2008", Ben Bova (ed), Penguin 2008, p.237 "[from 1960] the poetic avant-garde was drawn into the mainstream of American literary life: since then there has been no avant-garde, though there have been poseurs", Robert von Hallberg, "American Poetry and Culture 15", p.13 The twentieth-century avant-garde liked to embrace boredom as a way of getting round what is considered to be the vapid 'excitement' of popular culture", Kenneth Goldsmith, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.362 "Robertson suggests that current fetishizations of the paratactic fragment in avant-garde poetry have thus far 'buttresse[d] foundational opacities which also encrypt symbolically maintained metaphysics of difference'", p.32, Huk in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "If there are distinctions between a mainstream centre and an experimental margin, they are no longer sustained by availability or visibility", Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p.2 "For the avant-garde, artistic institutions divided the experience of art from the experience of life", Paul MarchRussell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.210 "Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry", Jean-Paul Sartre "No avant-garde American poet accepts the ... thesis that a poem is an end in itself", Kenneth Rexroth, 1957 "Futurism was the first avant-garde movement of the 20th century to move with ease, and to encourage such movement, between genres and media, and in that it set a pattern for other avant-gardes to come", AH Caesar and M Caesar, "Modern Italian Literature", Polity Press, 2007, p.145 73

 

 



 







 











"as with experiment at any time, whatever fractious and discolating business was in the [] air became an influence", Richard Ford, "The Granta Book of the American Short Story", Granta, 1998, p. ix "Apart from the Black Arts Movement, the avant-garde has rarely been linked to pupularism, even when (as in the case of Dada) it's been resolutely anti-elitist", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.181 "The avant-garde is launched by the bourgeoisie and is locked in a decaying orbit around it", Paul de Mann, "The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde", Indiana UP, 1991, p.81 "The original notion of experimental literature as an avant-garde movement parallel to abstract visual art loses its general validity at the moment when this literary vanguardism was reduced to typographic and sound poems. The true counter-movement to conventional, descriptive use of language is based rather on the discovery that one can move in language as if in another world, without having to cling to connections, objective facts, and events", Heissenbuttel, quoted in "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", Salt, 2003, p.109 "Any avant-garde activity is of course potentially a first exploration; but unless the terrain is subsequently inhabited, there is no reason to accredit an avant-garde with reconnaiassance as such", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.108 "Innovation in poetry is less contested (or ignored) now, and this is largely attributable to both the number and variety of women", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.42. "the avant-garde is the force that ... has insistently tested democracy's boundaries, probing its exclusions, its willingness to shut out people who refuse to sign up to majority tastes and values ... it is the avant-garde, in all its uncomfortable strangeness, that helps protect democracy from one of its own worst enemies - itself", Caroline Levine, "TLS", Nov 16, 2007, p.17. "Simply to write in English in forms considered experimental by English or American standards cannot function as it does for those to whom the dominant language is the mother tongue; to do so it to affirm what they reject: that Standard English is always already the center to be decentred", p.262, Nancy Gish in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "As long as an experimental writer whose signature is female aligns herself with the language poets, for example, ... she has a place on the literary map. The price she pays ... is twofold: the question of gender will be erased, declared a non-issue, and at the same time it is less likely than if her signature were male that she will become one of the stars", Marianne DeKoven, "Women's Review of Books" (4.2) 1986, p.13, "What kind of cultural work is a literary text doing? is a question that should be more frequently, and more complexly, asked of writers and critics of experimental writing", Caroline Bergvall in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 , p.353 "Almost all readers can perceive that these innovative poems immediately incite a question: Is this really a poem?", Peter Middleton in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 , p.128 "From the United States it can sometimes seem that the struggles of exploratory poetry in Britain today duplicate the struggles of "language poetry" ten of fifteen years ago", p.148, Keith Tuma in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "If a single question can be said to have synchronised the American poetic avant-garde between 1970 and 1989, it was surely the question 'what is language?'", p.88, Steve Evans in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 "the argument against the viability of the avant-garde today rests on the assumption that there is no real resistance to the new, no stable norm from which the defiant artist may depart", David Lehman, "The Last Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets", Anchor, 1999 "If we are all postmodernists, we are none of us avant-garde, for postmodernism is the institutionalisation of the avant-garde", David Lehman, "The Last Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets", Anchor, 1999, p.11 "Born of the institutions of Imperial French culture, the avant-garde has ever since maintained a type of parasitic relationship with the dominant apparatuses of official taste and of moral and intellectual permission even if this relationship fashions itself as an 'adversary relation'", Louis Armand, "The Avant-Garde in the Era of Post-Ideology", Louis Armand (ed.), "Litteraria Pragensia", 2006. p.6 "[the avant-garde] gains its special status [through its critique of] the main body of the culture to which it is reacting", Roger Shattuck, "The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts", Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1984, p.74. 74









 











 

 o

o o o

"There was rapid transfer and interaction between different countries and different capitals, and the deep mode of the [early avant-garde], as in modernism, was precisely this mobility across frontiers", Raymond Williams, "The Politics of the Avant-Garde", 1989, p.59 innovative writing is marked by two central concerns: 1) it "offers the perspective of the multiple 'I'" and, 2) it "recognizes the importance of the materials of writing to writing itself, an engagement with its medium", L.P. Glazier, "Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries", Univ of Alabama Press, 2002, p.22 "Poetic revolutions are poetic performances motivated by a realization that the valence of marked/unmarked categories has reversed within the performative domain", Anthony Lombardy, "The New Formalist, V1.No. 12", p.79 "It used sometimes to be argued that the next stage in the history of the novel was always an anti-novel, which in turn became the novel that had to be countered with another anti-novel. But this seems not to be true...there is a long history of avant-garde fiction which never ceases, as it should on this theory, to be avant-garde", Frank Kermode, "pieces of my mind", Allan Lane, 2003, p.315 "Latter-day discussions of avant-garde, alternative, experimental, innovative or investigative cultural products generally are species of nostalgia.", David Kennedy, Jacket 26, 2005 "The fact is that the British poetry scene is reactionary, nostalgic and prejudiced. The reputations of many of its star turns depend on an exclusivity that maintains an embargo on true diversity. Experimentalism is beyond the pale, as is pretty much anything that amounts to a conviction.", Gregory Woods, Magma, Autumn 2003 "The poetic avant-garde sees the body of poetry as rotten and open to invasion; in fact, to clear the rot away is seen as a necessity. The avant-garde is aggressive, and there's no avoiding it, though it perceives itself as being ethical and necessary." - John Kinsella, "Spatial Relationships". "it is generally accepted that [the world of high culture, the elite arts, and, above all, the avant-garde] anticipated the actual breakdown of liberal-bourgeois society by several years", "Age of Extremes", Eric Hobsbaum, 1995, Abacus, p.178 "A genuine avante-garde, it will be argued, needs a measure of unpopularity in order to consolidate its philosophical and economic independence from the culture from which it in turn borrows its formal effects. In even the best narrative art, that independence looks sorely stretched", "The Art of Today", Brandon Taylor, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995. p.168 "a new literature requires new institutions, and these institutions are as much a part of its aesthetic as the literary works that they weave into the social fabric", Bernstein, "Provisional Institutions" (in Arizona Quarterly 51), p.144 "the great changes in literature are non-literary in origin; and the same causes that produce the new work produce, in time, its audience. Wordsworth's poems did not produce Wordsworthians", Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry", 1940. "Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished", Wordsworth, "???", ???. "[Roy Fisher] maintains a dialogue of sorts with the habits he's trying to break - closure, epigram, consolation, 'realism' - which is of course rather an English way of proceeding", O'Brien, The Deregulated Muse, Bloodaxe, 1998, p. 122 p.30 - "Poetic Influence - when it involves two strong, authentic poets, - always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist." p.68 - "It seems true that British poets swerve from their precursors, while the American poets labor rather to 'complete' their fathers." p.148 - "If this book's argument is correct, then the covert subject of most poetry for the last three centuries has been the anxiety of influence, each poet's fear that no proper work remains for him to perform." p.150 - "By the 1740's, at the latest, the anxiety of style and the comparatively recent anxiety of influence had begun a process of merging that seems to have culminated during our last few decades." From "The Anxiety of Influence" (2nd edition), H.Bloom, OUP, 1997 75

 

 o o

"What does not change/is the will to change", Olson, "Kingfishers" "Each time a new stylistic mode introduces itself, the genre it arrives in goes slightly further into isolation. Whatever the discipline, modernisations take their art in one direction, outwards. ... Consequently, with each new movement there's less common ground between the genres to enable artists to migrate", ra page, "hyphen", Comma Press, 2003, p.ix "Culler celebrates contemporary academic theory as a replacement for the (apparently extinct) literary avantgarde", p.33 "It has become a critical commonplace in recent years to proclaim the end of the avant-garde. According to Andrew Ross, Andreas Huyssen, and other theorists of postmodern culture, the lines between popular culture and avant-garde (high) culture and between mainstream and oppositional aesthetics have been blurred in all the arts...Postmodernism, they claim, revealed the 'high modernist dogma' of avant-gardism as fundamentally sterile and outmoded", p.55 From "Poetic Culture", Christopher Beach, Northwest University Press, 1999



"As a form of human behaviour, experimental writing clearly belongs with play: immature members of the group dress up in eccentric clothing, walk in eccentric ways (on one foot, for example), paint their faces, make non-linguistic noises, refuse to speak in words, make up imaginary languages. In developmental psychological terms, games serve to rehearse people (or monkeys or cats) in complex behaviour patterns, needing practice; [...] Young animals play the games most suited to their inner state and developmental needs at any time; games are not arbitrary but pre-selected by innate self-organizing learning programs. [...] What the avantgarde seem to be playing at is practice making up rules and telling other people what to do and disapproving of them if they don't comply. " - Andrew Duncan, Angel Exhaust 9 Prose/Narrative (back to top)













"Perhaps more than any other form of fiction, science fiction, science fiction abounds in examples of writers working together on an individual work - ... in shared-world books or in novels in which a successful senior author works with a junior partner", Darren Harris-Fain, "Understanding Contemporary Science Fiction", Univ of South Carolina Press, 2005, p.122 "When reading an eighteenth century novel we speed up and slow down, and the rhythm of our reading is a recognition of structure: we pass quickly through those descriptions and conversations whose functions identify; we wait for something more important, at which we slow down ... With a modern text that we cannot organise as the adventures of a character, we cannot skip and modulate our speed in the same way", Jonathan Culler, "Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.306 "Brigid Brophy's In Transit (1969) posed a fundamental challenge to conventional modes of characterisation and narrative progression: the gender of her central character remains undefined throughout a novel that presents two alternative conclusions, printed side by side on the page in double columns", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.88 "The unprecedented and unrepeated growth of the magazine industry, which underpinned the growth and popularity of the short story genre, was the catalyst, if not the source of twentieth-century critical dismissal of the form", Sarah Whitehead, "Reader as consumer: the magazine short story" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.79 "The growth of the magazine industry at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century maps the most important chapter in the history of the short story and has directly influenced the nature of the form as it exists today ... The magazine story has imbued the short story genre as a whole with the value of the disposable, the appeal of the marginalized and the inexorable link between literature and consumer culture", Sarah Whitehead, "Reader as consumer: the magazine short story" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.82 "I propose that ... microfictions are [] small, and subtle, epiphanies ... reached not by some narrative trick, but by a realisation that the moment depicted in the microfiction has changed everything, that there has been a shift in what the reader believed or expected, and that this has had significance", Howitt-Dring, H. , "Making micro meanings: reading and writing microfiction" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.54 76





 



 



   







    o

"Because microfiction could be viewed as stories working solely by implication, I feel that they have been mistrusted and sidelined in literature. ", Howitt-Dring, H. , "Making micro meanings: reading and writing microfiction" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.56 "Stealing poetic techniques, truncating those of prose, it seems like the offspring of some ill-fated alliance, but in fact microfiction uses the best parts of both genres and is a genre in its own right, as it functions and speaks in a new and different way to both.", Howitt-Dring, H. , "Making micro meanings: reading and writing microfiction" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.57 "The Novel is a moral form. It's about cause and effect", Anne Enright, "BBC R4 interview", 2011 "I suggest that the internal tension in the heart of every story between the theme and the plot constitutes, after all, its chief resemblance to life. ... In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied", C.S. Lewis, "On Stories" "A short story has to choose between being either an anecdote or a picture and can but play its part strictly according to its kind. I rejoice in the anecdote, but I revel in the picture", Henry James, "New York Editions", preface to V.10 "We may safely generalize that short story writers, as a class, from Poe to Paley, incline to see how much they can leave out, and novelists as a class, from Petronius to Pynchon, how much they can leave in", John Barth, "" "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them", Ernest Hemingway, "" "[The short story and the novel] are very discontinuous. For me, they each bear greatly different relations to time. The novel, I think, has a mimetic relation to time. The novel simulates the flow of time, so once you get very far into a novel, you forget where you began - just as you do in real time. Whereas with a short story the point is not to forget the beginning. The ending only makes sense if you can remember the beginning.", Russell Banks, "The Paris Review", 1998 " unlike the novel, the short story is invariably literary", Joyce Carol Oates, "New York Review of Books", June 29 "[the] well-written short story is not suited to the sound bite culture: it's too dense; its effects are too complex for easy digestion", William Boyd, "" "that is often how novels are read, fifteen minutes at a time. You can't read stories that way", Lorrie Moore, "The Paris Review", 2001 "the short form is particularly adept at exploring the dynamic between narrative and the urban environment. Short stories have a long tradition of depicting encounters between strangers. This intermixing invariably happens in municipal public space", Jim Hinks, "ReBerth", Comma Press, 2008 "One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name", George Saintsbury, "The English Novel", chapter 1 "Since art is a means of imposing order upon experience, it puts under erasure, as Derrida would say, all the flux and nonlinearity that constitutes life, but then reinscribes it through narration", Gordon E. Slethaug, "Beautiful Chaos", State University of New York Press, 2000, p.xv "the short story is not only closer to the epic than the novel, since chronological time cannot be fully rendered, but it is also more fully a product of the disenchanted age", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.121 ""the progression, the unfolding of personality ... requires space and therefore belongs by definition to a larger [text than a short story], a symphonic plan", Wharton, "The Writing of Fiction", 1997, p.37) "it may well be that the novel's time as a major art form is up, as the 'times' of classical tragedy, grand opera, or the sonnet sequence came to be", Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion", Lord John Press, 1967, p.11 "during the nineteenth century, the novel became more painterly", James Wood, "How Fiction Works", Vintage, 2009, p.62 "for the seventeenth century reader (as for Aristotle), versimilitude meant integrity of character and conformity with an idea of human nature, while for the modern reader, who has been taught to distrust this notion, and consequently cannot rely on models of "natural" behaviour, the idea of verisimilitude is transposed from the realm of psychological motivations to the realm of the statistical probability of external events", p.59 77

o o o

"From the reader's point of view Plot Holes are much more disturbing than Cheap Plot Tricks, because the latter are immediately recognizable, while the former arouse the suspicion: Am I stupid?" , p.66 "The rejection of Cheap Plot Tricks by some audiences is symptomatic of their distrust of plot as an adequate way to represent reality", p.69 "Cheap Plot Tricks continued their decline in modernism, together with heavily plotted stories. But as Dannenberg observes, they are presently enjoying a minor revival because their contrived and conventional nature can be used in support of the postmodernist/structuralist view that language constructs, rather than reflects reality", p.70 from "Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design", Marie-Laue Ryan, "Narrative", Vol 17.1

 



   





   

  





"Many poets are good at complication but handle the resolution badly", Aristotle Poetics, (8.6, 30) "the optimum relationship between narrative and narrated time seems to be about 1:1. Extended passages of the modes which seem either very fast or altogether stopped are not nowadays in favour", Helmut Bonheim, "The Narrative Modes", D.S. Brewer, 1982, p.46 "Not so many modern stories end in death, whereas the stories of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville often do ... Also available is the wedding, which is a staple of the novel. But less than one percent of short stories end with it", Helmut Bonheim, "The Narrative Modes", D.S. Brewer, 1982, p.138-9 "Short stories tend to ironic endings, which novels do not", Helmut Bonheim, "The Narrative Modes", D.S. Brewer, 1982, p.167 "In Ireland, maybe because we don't have that great tradition of the Victorian novelist, short stories have grown as rapidly as in America", William Trevor, "Guardian Review", 05/09/2009 "to enjoy a novel we must feel surrounded by it on all sides ... In order to establish its own inner world it must dislodge and abolish the surrounding one", Ortega y Gasset, "Notes on the novel", 1948 "Metamorphosis is thus an indispensable motor in almost all narrative. If Kafka seems so singular a narrator it's because he denounced the effect ... Meanwhile he writes a story entitled Metamorphosis to ridicule the act itself", Paolo Mauri, "Buio", Einaudi, 2007, p.110 (my translation) "This sensation of the multiplication of possibilities, very strong in me, has always turned me away from narration; and I regard the streams that flow from others with the admiration of a man for whom the contemplation and analysis of a glass of water are quite sufficient to absorb his time and curiosity", Paul Valéry, "Collected Works of Paul Valéry, II, 88" "Planting is, quite simply, the use of disguised coincidence in the resolution of a conflict: the coincidence is disguised by planting it somewhere in the opening of the story and then keeping it alive throughout the story until it is needed for the ending", AH Jaffe and V.Scott, Studies in the Short Story, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, p.156 "a short story is to a novel as a hot air balloon is to a passenger jet", Seán Ó Faoláin "my characters are galley slaves", Nabokov "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way.", E.M. Forster "The art of the storyteller lies, of course, in surprise, but the art of surprise must come from the continuous knowledge that the reader, in his anxiety, is always playing for safety. It is the storyteller's business to make the path of safety into a path of change and danger", V.S. Pritchett "there are three rules to writing novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are", Somerset Maugham "as usual, I am bored by narrative", Virginia Woolf, "A Writer's Diary", 1929. "While fiction is a mode of travel into textual space, narrative is a mode of travel within the confines of this space." Narrative and State Transition. Narrative v non-Narrative elements. Narrative Grammars - trees, graphs, stacks (frames), "Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory", M.Ryan, Indiana University Press, 1991. p.5. "The story is a site of disruption or resistance through which the text is fractured, brought up against its own otherness to itself. ... The story deforms what gives it form; in other words its form is uneasy, precarious, and at best provisional, it never entirely accommodates the material which it nevertheless makes intelligible", Levinas, quoted in "After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory", Colin Davis, Routledge, 2004, p.89, 146 "Every human experience is a life in search of a narrative. This is not simply because it strives to discover a pattern to cope with the experience of chaos and confusion. It is also because each human life is always already 78









an implicit story. Our very finitude constitutes us as being who, to put it baldly, are born at the beginning and die at the end.", Richard Kearney, "On Stories", Routledge, 2001 "The institution of writing and reading serious novels is like a grand old Middle American city gutted and drained by superhighways. Ringing the depressed inner city of serious work are prosperous clonal suburbs of mass entertainments. ... What remain, mostly, are ethnic and cultural enclaves. Much of contemporary fiction's vitality now reside in the black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay and woman's communities, which have moved into the structures left behind by the departing straight white male. The depressed literary inner city also remains home to solitary artists who are attracted to the diversity and grittiness that only a city can offer, and to a few still-vital cultural monuments (the opera of Toni Morrison, the orchestra of John Updike, the museum of Edith Wharton) to which suburban readers continue to pay polite Sunday visits", Franzen, "Harper's Magazine", April 1996, p.39 "metanarrative comments can even support the illusion of authenticity of the narrated story ... This is particularly the case in the story-orientated and genre-specific forms of metanarration found in many seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels... Since the 1970s however, metanarrative expressions tend to be a metafictional means of destroying the aesthetic illusion", Angar Nünning, in "The dynamics of narrative form", John Piper (ed), 2004, Walter de Gruyter, p.34 "In Elizabethan prose and other precursors of the seventeeth-century novel, metanarrative expressions tend to be realistically motivated, of limited number, and relatively isolated .... In most seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury novels a larger number of metanarrative expressions than in Renaissance prose occurs. Prior to Sterne, however, they do not serve primarily as a means of destroying the aesthetic illusion ... Beginning with Laurence Sterne and then in Romantic narrative prose, a basic change took place concerning the importance and functions of metanarration, which, from the late eighteenth century onwards, began to play a more central role, developing in the direction of metafiction. ... In realistic nineteenth-century novels, metanarrative expressions again have quite different functions: ... they primarily serve to create a trust-inducing conversation between the explicit narrator and the narratee. ... The ubiquity of metanarrative expressions since the beginnings of the novel ... tends to decline in modernism", Angar Nünning, in "The dynamics of narrative form", John Piper (ed), 2004, Walter de Gruyter, p.40-45 "the characteristics that make schizophrenic stories unlike the standard narrative form are much the same as those that differentiate traditional from modernist literature in general", Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism, Harvard Univ Press, 1992, p.159 The Visual Arts (back to top)

  o o

"Pound and Stevens ... became for poetry what Picasso and Mondrian were to painting", Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, Charles Altieri, CUP, 1989, p.10, "Simple to transport, display, document, and insure, Conceptual art in several of its forms risked becoming a ready answer to the dealer's prayer for formal novelty combined with radical pretension". p.34 "affluent, white, male gay taste he characterised in terms of ornamentation, an interest in the luxurious proliferation of detail, an oblique angle of vision, fantasy, theatricality, and 'in terms of content, an interest in, an identification with, the underdog'" Edmund White, p.145 From "The Art of Today", Brandon Taylor, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995

  

  

"Writing is fifty years behind painting", Brion Gysin, "Cut-Ups Self-Explained", 1958. Simonides called painting mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture "All the studies of Williams agree that he takes the analogy with painting literally and strives for an equivalency of words. Stevens' relation to painting is a far more figurative and conceptual one", Costello, "Effects of an Analogy", p.66 The Surrealists insisted on the fundamental relations between the arts. (p.73) "Wallace Stevens and Modern Art", Glen MacLeod, Yale U.P., 1993. "The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering", Stevens, "Opus Posthumous", ed Milton Bates (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, p.203) "Paint not the thing but the effect it produces", Mallarme. 79















"To succeed, romanticism depends on a very delicate adjustment between ardour and detachment. In landscape painting such an adjustment is comparatively easy to maintain", Carlos Peacock, "Painters and Writers", The Tate Gallery, 1949, p.5. "Many creative writers have been myopic (Keats, Tennyson). Shelley was long-sighted. The world through blunted sight: an inquiry into the influence of defective vision on art and character", P.D. Trevor-Roper, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1988. p.31. "by the time they have reached the upper end of the primary school their skill often seems to have stagnated and they have generally lost interest in drawing ... often they do not possess the graphic skill to express [their good ideas] in an acceptable way - acceptable to themselves as well as to adults" Maureen Cox, p.17, Times Higher, Feb 23rd, 199? "in each visual configuration, be it simple or complex, there exists a built-in trajectory for the observer's gaze." p.25 of "Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts", C. Gandelman, Indiana Univ Press, 1991, quoting "Eye Movements and Visual Perception" in Image, Object, Illusion. "Paintings, like women, are ideally silent beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to the sublime eloquence properly to the manly art of poetry. Paintings are confined to the narrow sphere of external display of their bodies and of the space they ornament, while poems are free to range over an infinite realm", Mitchell, Iconology, p.109-110. "this romantic wit differs from the metaphysicals ...Both tenor and vehicle.. . are wrought in a parallel process out of the same material ...The river landscape is both the occasion of reminiscence and the source of the metaphor by which the reminiscence is described", Wimsatt, "The Structure of Romantic Imagery" (essay). Books - "Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature", Wylie Sypher, (New York: Random house, 1960). "The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting", Wendy Steiner, (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1982). "Classical Literary Criticism", TS Dorsch, Baltimore: Penguin 1965. p.91, "Ars Poetica", Horace. "Ut Pictura Poesis", R. Lee, Norton, 1967. "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting", Dryden, 1695. "Laocoo"n, Lessing, 1766, "Method in the Study of Literature in Its Relation to the Other Arts", Giovannini, J of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8 (1950), 185-195. See also my Painting and Poetry article. Science (back to top)



 



  

"Any distinctive language interests me, whether it's that of football or knitting, but scientific language is very beautiful. Each word opens a world. And scientists need metaphor to describe things that they don't fully understand yet.", Jo Shapcott, "The Guardian", 24th July 2010 "Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods", W. H. Auden, "The Dyer's Hand", p. 62 "The whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one", Schlegel, "Fragments", 14, No. 115 "There's no better evidence for the relevance of Snow's chasm between the two than the nature of the attempts by literary intellectuals to bridge it ... In general, if, as we have seen, all attempts to bridge the gulf between Snow's two poles have failed ... do we need to bridge the gulf in the first place? After all - to put it in the most simplistic terms - art and science are performing very different functions", Roger Caldwell, in "PN Review", v35.6 (2009, Jul-Aug), p.20-21 "as free verse broke the pentameter, fractal verse can break the poem plane or linguistic surface", Alice Fulton, in "Feeling as a Foreign Language", Greywolf Press, 1999, p.5 "digression, interruption, fragmentation, and lack of continuity will be regarded as formal functions, rather than lapses into formlessness", Alice Fulton, in "Feeling as a Foreign Language", Greywolf Press, 1999, p.58 "As Lisa Steinman has shown, developments in science and technology had an important influence on Modernist poetics in America in the 1920s and 1930s ... Yet the feting of the scientific as a new aesthetic also became part of an elision which equated science with a hard, dry objective voice, which in its turn became equated with masculinity", Deryn Rees-Jones, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997 , p.268 80

  









 



  

 o

o o

o o

"In general, scientists discover past art, whereas artists invent future science", Argyros, "Blessed Rage for Order", p.345 "authors are reacting not to science as such, but to a more general set of ideas pervasive in the culture", Hayles, "The Cosmic Web", Cornell University Press, 1984, p.24 "Art and physics, like wave and particle, are an integrated duality: They are simply two different but complementary facets of a single description of the world", Leonard Shlain, "Art and Physics", William Morrow, 1991, p.24 "We show that famous intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard and Deleuze have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology: either using scientific ideas totally out of context, without giving the slightest justification ... or throwing around scientific jargon in front of their non-scientist readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning", Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, "Fashionable Nonsense: postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science" Picador, 1998, p.x "one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant", Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, "Fashionable Nonsense: postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science" Picador, 1998, p.153 [both literature and mathematics] "proceed from postulates, not facts; both can be applied to external reality and yet exist also in a 'pure' or self-contained form. Both, furthermore, drive a wedge between the antithesis of being and non-being that is so important for discursive thought", Frye, "Anatomy of Criticism", 1957, p.351 "there may be something like a scientific approach incorporated into something which may still be poetry, but not vice versa", Miroslav Holub, "Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science", Robert Crawford (ed), OUP, 2006 "poetic appropriations of science are more akin to a negative theology of science", Drew Milne, "Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science",Robert Crawford (ed), OUP, 2006 "The rival ways of looking at the world - the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the redblooded passionate creations of the artist - constitute the modern incoherence. Both appear equally true, equally valid, at times, but are fundamentally incompatible", Peter Watson, "Ideas", Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005, p.610. "The scientists' distrust of the senses that poets distrust so deeply also has a liberating, stimulating effect on the imagination and even on reality", Emily Grosholz, in "The Measured Word", Kurt Brown (ed), Univ of Georgia Press, 2001, p.84 "I never wanted to write something which would be labelled a scientific poetry. I think it is a nonsense", Holub, in "Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions 2", Neil Astley (ed), 2006, p.34. "Contemporary scientists often talk about 'beauty' and 'elegance'. Artists hardly ever do", Siân Ede, Times Higher, Aug 5, 2005, p.19 "Nothing deep turns on the choice between these two phrases - between the imagery of making and finding ...Physics is the paradigm of 'finding' simply because it is hard (at least in the West) to tell a story of changing physical universes against the background of an unchanging Moral Law or poetic canon, but very easy to tell the reverse sort of story", Rorty, in "On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism", 1983, p.77 "the science advocated by the [literary] experimentalists involves two things. First it involves a Baconian mistrust of generalisation... Second, it involves an interest in quasi-mathematical procedures designed to produce a feeling or image which is instantaneously persuasive", p.225 "Modern attempts to make poetry scientific... reflect the anxiety that poetry and art are dying", p.225 "because many advances in modern science result from innovations in apparatus, experimental poets aim for technical novelties, hoping to produce the kinds of 'breakthroughs' and 'discoveries' that modern science has made", p.227 "The aesthetic belief that poetry should be elusive or obscure appears to find confirmation in modern science", p.227 "When modern poets emulate scientific procedure, they emulate it in two principal ways. Either they pursue a methodology that has a rigidity considered to be scientific, or they collect and present particulars in a manner which they regard as analogous to scientific data gathering", p.260 From "Missing Measures", Timothy Steele, University of Arkansas Press, 1990 81

 o

o

 

  o

o o

Francois Jacob from Stand 2(4)/3(1), 2001 "In the imaginative phase of scientific processes, in the formation of hypotheses, the scientist operates like an artist. It is only afterwards, when critical testing and experimentation are involved, that science draws away from art and goes down a different track" (p.118) "It is by undoing what he or she perceives as reality in order to remake it differently that the painter, the poet, or the scientist builds up a vision of the universe. Each fashions a personal model of reality by choosing to highlight aspects of experience judged to be most telling, and discarding those that seem uninteresting. We live in a world created by our brains, with continual comings and goings between the real and imaginary. Perhaps the artist draws more on the latter and the scientist on the former. It is simply a matter of proportion, not of nature" (p.120) "there is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature", W. Whewell, "The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences", 18?? "The Science of Art", Martin Kemp, Yale University Press, 1990. p.251 Friedrich von Schelling - "Art constitutes the ideal of science, and where art is, science has yet to attain to" (from "System of Transcendental Idealism" - 1800) "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.", Paul Dirac p.130 - "At first glimpse one might suspect that literature would be closer to the sciences than other art forms, because sciences also use words and depend on syntax for expressing their findings and formulating ideas. ... [but] There is no common language and there is no common network of relations and references. Actually, modern painting has in some ways come closer to the new scientific notions and paradigms, precisely because a painter's vocabulary, colours, shapes and dimensions are not congruent to the scientist's vocabulary." p.132 - "In the use of words, poetry is the reverse of the sciences. Sciences bar all secondary factors associated with writing or speaking; ... poetry tries for as many possibilities as it can." p.143 - "The emotional, aesthetic and existential value is the same ... when looking into the microscope ... and when looking into the nascent organism of the poem" From "The Dimension of the Present Moment", M. Holub, Faber and Faber, 1990



"art is made to trouble but science reassures" - Braque See also my Science and the Arts article. Writing and Society (back to top)





 





"Writing, as anyone who's ever tried it knows, is a profoundly lonely pursuit. It's something that happens in the private space between the writer and language", , "The Practice of Poetry", Robin Behn and Chase Twichell (eds), 2001, Quill/HarperResource, p.xvii "Every attempt to socialize writing and reading fails; poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader, or that reader's sitting within herself in a theater", Harold Bloom "The poetry pf hit count trebles in February, on the run up to Valentine's Day", Anne Stewart, "Acumen", May 2010, p.37 "The main reason why contemporary poetry is generally ignored or misunderstood is historical. The reading public lost touch with poetry when modern poets lost touch with their audience early in the 20th century. This separation can be traced back to the response of the earlier Romantic poets to the Industrial Revolution", Neil Astley, "Staying Alive", 2002, p.461 "the wider public, whose understanding of poets is two hundred years out of date and whose awareness of poetry is either a hundred years behind the times or else still stuck in the 1960s", Neil Astley, "Staying Alive", 2002, p.462 "Much damage has also been done to the public's perception of poetry by attempts to make poetry more "relevant"", Neil Astley, "Staying Alive", 2002, p.462 82



 





 

    

 o

o o

o

o o

"The phenomenal growth of interest in poetry of all kinds since [1992] has been one of the most rewarding aspects of running the Forward Prizes", William Sieghart, "The Forward book of poetry", Forward Ltd, 2008, p.11 ", "The fact is that virtually all poetry is now under some kind of institutional supervision", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.30. "During a recent research project into reading habits conducted at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, a cross-section of the public nominated poetry to be the most annoying category of book currently published .... after a sustained period of reading poems, thirty six complained of headaches or migraine, twenty-seven suffered indigestion, and two became argumentative resulting in violent exchange .... eighty-two of the hundred people tested did fall asleep for prolonged periods at some point during their reading of poetry. ... Of the twenty [sic] that were reading only first collections, forty-five became tense and highly agitated, thirty-eight were lethargic and dulled and three were recorded as feeling nauseous, while one particular man became sexually aroused and had to be physically removed from the building.", "The Rialto", (Summer 2009), p.59 "A typical poet in North America finds it necessary to relocate every year for the first few years after college, and every several years for a couple of decades after that. The poet becomes disconnected, never developing a true sense of place or of community outside the community of the printed page. The typical poet teaches", Sam Hamill, "A Poet's Work", Broken Moon Press, 1990, p.29 "Seizing on a traditional trope of the poet as exceptional individual, certain individuals receiving health-care who feel themselves to be exceptional apparently adopt poetic discourse as part of that role", Fiona Sampson, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997, p.261 "You do not put yourself into your writing, you find yourself there", Alan Bennett, "???" "poetry isn't really an open system; it's a combination of odd institutions, personal networks, hoary traditions, talent and blind luck. It's both an art and a guild, in other words", David Orr, New York Times, November 21, 2004 "When we were judging [The Booker] we tried three different voting systems and each time a different winner emerged", Rowan Pelling, the Observer, March 9, 2008 "as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines", Macaulay, 1825. "It is already, I think, fair to say that a majority of print, as it is emitted daily, is, at least in the broad sense of the term, a caption", "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972, p.198 "Democratic nations naturally stand more in need of forms than other nations, and they naturally respect them less", Tocqueville, "Taken as a whole, literature in democratic ages can never present, as it does in periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity, science and art ... Style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose ... The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste", Tocqueville, "Democracy in America", 1840. xii-xiii - "'culture' ... means all those practices, like the arts of description, communication,and representation, that have relative automony from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure ... Secondly [...] culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society's reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. ... In time culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation or state... Culture in this sense is a source of identity" xiii - "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them." xxviii - "We are still the inheritors of [the] style by which one is defined by the nation, which in turn derives its authority from a supposedly unbroken tradition. In the United States this concern over cultural identity has of course yielded up the contest over what books and authorities constitute 'our' tradition." xxix - "the battle within [American identity] is between advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex but not reductively unified one. This opposition implies two different perspectives, two histiographies, one linear and subsuming, the other contrapuntal and nomadic." p.9 - "in the English and French cases, the sheer distance of attractive territories summoned the projection of far-flung interests" p.84 - "imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other." 83

o o

p.93 - "The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include the accumulation and differentiation of social space." p.229 - "To deal with [importing the foreign into Europe], a new encyclopaedic form became necessary, one that three distinctive features. First was a circularity of structure, inclusive and open at the same time: Ulysses ...Second was a novelty based almost entirely on the reformation of old, even outdated fragments ... Third is the irony of a form that draws attention to itself at substituting art and its creations for the once-possible synthesis of the world empires... Spatiality becomes, ironically, the characteristic of an asthetic rather than of political domination." from "Culture & Imperialism", E.W. Said, Chatto & Windus, 1993.

  



   

 

  o o

"My generation haven't had criticism; they've had marketing.", Paul Farley, The Guardian, April 2005 "We felt that the main prizewinners should touch on ... the big issues of death and love", Matthew Sweeney, New Welsh Review, No. 40. "A course called Verse Making was available at Iowa in 1897, and from 1906 to 1925 George Pierce Baker taught a drama workshop at Harvard, the first graduate writing course in the country" [In 2009 the USA had 822 degree programs in creative writing. 37 of these award Ph.Ds. There were 153 creative-writing M.F.A. programs. The first British master's-degree program in creative writing opened in 1970. The first undergraduate degree program was in 1991], Louis Menand, "Should creative writing be taught?", New Yorker, June 8, 2009 "The survey found that the gender gap was most pronounced among poetry readers, with women outnumbering men by nearly three to one. This finding was confirmed by research commissioned by the Arts Council of England for National Poetry Day which discovered that the majority of poetry books are bought by women over the age of 45", MsLexia, 2001) "When I sit down to write I often don't know whether it's a poem or a critical piece that's going to be produced", David Kennedy, "binary myths" (Andy Brown ed.), p.16. "the writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation", James Fenton "the London Magazine ... found itself embroiled in a quarrel which was to result in its editor, John Scott, being killed in a duel" - "The Function of Criticism", T. Eagleton, Verso, 1984, p.37 "My maxim would be for God's sake write about what you don't know! For how else will you bring your imagination into play? How else will you discover or explore anything?", Graham Swift in "The Agony and the Ego", ed. C. Boylan (Penguin). "Don't write about what you know - write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself - you aren't as interesting as you think", Tracy Chevalier, "Her FAQ" "The art really is in isolating yourself and letting as few things into your head as possible. To only admit those things into your head that come from a direction where no one else ever looks", W.G. Sebald, Pretext 7, 2003, p.22 "The more homogeneous a society is, the more writers it will produce, but the less good writers", W.G. Sebald, Pretext 7, 2003, p.22 p.25 - "the urge to create ... must always be partly the need to escape everyday reality" p.49 - "Most mature artists know that great general knowledge is more a hindrance than a help." From "The Tree", John Fowles, The Sumach Press, 1992.

  o o

"an intelligent writing which ... can defend itself and knows when to speak and when to answer and when to be silent", Socrates, Phaedrus "To my mind [workshops] represent the infantilisation of a perfectly serious subject and are mostly a waste of time" "My own line is that the poem begins with inspiration and ends in publication, not just completion" From "The Times Higher", Don Paterson, June 30th, 2006, p.16 84

 o

o

(from Psychology Today, April 1987) - "Nancy Andreasen has tracked 30 students from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. 80% had mood disorders (30% is average amongst similar people who are non-writers). 43% had some degree of manic-depressive illness (10% is average). 2 committed suicide over the 15 years of the study", p.74 "A great many writers find relating both painfully difficult and beside the point. The same qualities that make them writers - self-direction, independence, intelligence, skepticism, a love of solitude - also incline them in the direction of isolation, alienation and a carelessness about relating.", p.125 From "Living the Writer's Life", Eric Maisel Miscellaneous (back to top)

 o

o

o o o

o

o

o

America "One could persuasively argue that in America the most influential theory of literature since World War II has been creative writing", RM Berry, "Theory, Creative Writing and the Impertinence of History", in "Colors of a Different House" (ed Bishop and Ostrom) NCTE (USA), 1994, p.57 "A significant difference between the poetry culture of the United States and that of the United Kingdom is that work regarded as Other to the Mainstream, in the UK, never receives established prizes.", Carrie Etter, "Infinite Difference", Shearsman, 2010 "Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one", W. H. Auden, " The Dyer's Hand", p. 367 "Hecht's strengths - seriousness, intelligence, formal discipline - are all rare in American poetry", Adam Kirsch, "The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry", Norton, 2008 "American poetry finds itself at a moment when idiosyncrasy rules to such a degree and differences are so numerous that distinct factions are hard, even impossible, to pin down ... The product of contradictory traditions, today's writers often take aspects from two or more to create poetry that is truly postmodern in that it's an unpredictable and unprecedented mix ... Today's hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first-person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a villanelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in ancient traditions. Considering the traits associated with "conventional" work, such as coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm closure, symbolic resonance, and stable voice, and those generally assumed of "experimental" work, such as non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture, fragmentation, immanence, multiple perspective, open form, and resistance to closure, hybrid poets access a wealth of tools ", Cole Swensen, "American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry", W. W. Norton, 2009 "[US poetry derives from] "English Romantics - man as a natural being in a natural world, informed by intense introspection and a belief in the stability and sovereignty of the individual" [or the French] - "Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme - Rimbaud captured in the simple statement, "We must be absolutely modern," which refused sentimentality as much as his "I is an other," ", Cole Swensen, "American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry", W. W. Norton, 2009 "In the United States, the golden age of artistic inhibition was probably the period immediately following the Second World War, which saw the convergence of two forces. One was a sudden rise in the prestige of psychoanalysis. The second was a tremendous surge in ambition on the part of American artists ... But, as the bar rose, so did everyone's anxiety, and the doctor was called. Many, many writers went into psychoanalysis in those years, and they began writing about the relationship of art and neurosis", Joan Acocella, "Blocked: Why do writers stop writing?", New Yorker, June 14, 2004 "Much contemporary American poetry isn't interested in the aural effects British readers have been trained to associate with poetry; British readers may find American poems' line breaks arbitrary, the arrangement of lines or stanzas bizarre or arbitrary, the narrative sense muddled and obscure.", Hannah Brooks-Motl, "Aristocracies of One", in "Contemporary Poetry Review", 2009

85

o

o o o o

o

o

o

o

o

o o

o o

o

o  o

o

"What is different between American and British poetry is that, in the last few decades or so, American poetry hasn't needed to worry about combating or complicating its mainstream because it hasn't had one. ", Hannah Brooks-Motl, "Aristocracies of One", in "Contemporary Poetry Review", 2009 "It does make sense to talk about "mainstream poetry" in the UK in a way that it does not in the US", Hannah Brooks-Motl, "Aristocracies of One", in "Contemporary Poetry Review", 2009 "From Bryant on there is scarcely one American poet whose work, if unsigned, could be mistaken for that of an Englishman", Auden, "Faber Book of Modern American Poetry", 1956, p.i "[the rise of the creative-writing workshop is] the most important event in postwar American literary history", Mark McGurl, "The Program Era", Harvard, 2009 "As McGurl notes, virtually all the major figures in Latino literature have been American academics. The same is true of Asian-American novelists, many of whom have held university appointments, and of Native American writers. ... These writers have a special relation to the "outside contained on the inside" feature of academic creative-writing programs, and many of the most celebrated have been accused of inauthenticity", Louis Menand, "Should creative writing be taught?", New Yorker, June 8, 2009 "Career success as a poet and tenure in an English department have become ever more intertwined. For example, of the last eleven Pulitzer Prize winners, ten have either held faculty positions at a college or university or have extensive university teaching experience", Jay Ladin, "Parnassus", 2006, V29, p.120 "Not surprisingly, the US poetry field strikes many critics as increasingly carnivalesque and chaotic. If there is a center or axis, it is probably represented by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop poem. This is the selfconsciously prosaic confessional lyric of 20-40 free-verse lines", Vincent B. Leitch, "Living with Theory", Blackwell, 2008, p.103 "I do not think anyone in the States would argue that US male poets far outnumber US female poets; in the States, the most influential poets living - on almost anyone's list - are mostly women. Why are things different in Albion?", Catherine Wagner, "Jacket 34" "the contemporary [American] University remains the most sweeping patron that poetry has ever known; it maintains and defines its traditions, employs and trains its practitioners, and hosts a huge section of its audience", Kevin Walzer, "The Resurgence of Traditional Poetic Form and the Current State of Poetry's Place in American Culture", Edwin Mellon Press, 2001, p.100 "If at times it reads more like a history of the American University than a history of American poetry, that is because those two histories are largely inseparable", Kevin Walzer, "The Resurgence of Traditional Poetic Form and the Current State of Poetry's Place in American Culture", Edwin Mellon Press, 2001, p.97 "America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres", Emerson, "The Poet", 1842 "American poetry is characteristically tendentious, over-committed, programmatic, self-conscious, often - even in its moments of grandeur - provincial and jejune", Roy Harvey Pearce, "The Continuity of American Poetry", Princeton Univ Press, 1961, p.4 "an obsession with form has been widespread in American poetry", John Hollander, "Vision and Resonance", Yale Univ Press, 1985 "Just as in their political thinking Americans are apt to identify the undemocratic with monarchy, so, in their aesthetics, they are apt to identify the false conventional with rhyme and meter", Auden, "The Dyer's Hand and other essays", Vintage, 1968, p.364 American poets are "challenged by their culture and so driven more deeply than others into the erotic and instinctual resources of the individual psyche", Gelpi, "The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet", Harvard Univ Press, 1975, p.xii "All the developments in English verse since 1910 are due almost wholly to Americans", Pound, "How to Read", 1931, p.43 Britain "I cannot bear the fantastically dull poems of the British avant-garde who write like a cargo cult with battered copies of Ashbery and Olson to worship", William Logan, "Reputations of the Tongue", University Press of Florida, 1999, p.263 "Other countries, especially the US, have long envied the vitality of Britain's literary culture", Prof Kevin Sharpe, "Times Higher Education", 25th Feb, 2010, p.27

86

o

o

o

o

o

o  o

o

o

o

o

o o

o

o o

"Huk concludes that, rather than being formally conservative, some UK poets are tackling the same difficult issues as their most experimental American counterparts, only approaching these issues via a postmodern critique of empiricism", Vicki Betram, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997 , p.190 "The British resistance to modern art and ideas is tangled up with a nostalgia for the wonderfully and morbidly over-developed culture of childhood", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.303 "There is a distaste in Britain for speculative philosophy. This may go back to the church settlement of 1662, when peace seemed to depend on theological compromise. There is a connection between weakness in building philosophical speculations, distaste for political innovations, and lack of imagination in poetry", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.305 "For the socially repressed and incompetent Brits, [poetry] functions much like alcohol - it's a mask that we can put on when we want to slip the bonds of buttoned-up convention ... if one of the main reasons people turn to poetry these days is as a facilitator that allows a degree of cultural remission when it come to the expression of emotions, then the reason men are more drawn to it is presumably that men need it more ... poets enjoy a special license to express their emotions in public - a licence usually denied to men more than to women", Ross Cogan, "'Englishness' and the McPoets" in Acumen 59, September 2007 "British poets, on the whole, have not gone as far in the direction of anti-poetry as their contemporaries in other countries; but, notoriously, they have not gone as far in any direction whatever for a very long time", Michael Hamburger, "The Truth of Poetry", Carcanet, 1982, p.262 "Sometimes I wonder if England ever came to modern art at all", Donald Hall, "Faber Book of Modern Verse", 1966 Italy "The populations gathered within the present borders of the Italian Republic experience perhaps more than those of any other country in the world of similar geographical and population size, a native condition of internal and external plurilingualism", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.95 "in a country where translations of foreign novels dominate the literary market, Italian writers have been very responsive to contemporary writing abroad", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.249 "Historically, the identification of 'culture' with education and literacy, as well as with the high arts, seems to have been more resilient in Italy than in many other countries", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.3 "The homosexual movement echoed many of the practices of feminism - the collective-based structure, the emphasis on beginning with the personal, the critique of psychoanalysis, the celebration of the body and sexuality, the critique of the bougeois family and of formal politics", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.153 "During the 1960s and 1970s the economic importance, if not the prestige, of Milanese publishing grew to a point where the Italian publishing industry was a largely monocentric system", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.190 "Ultimately, it could be said, television in Italy has occupied the entire space that in some other countries is shared with the popular press", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.206 "In Italy, the position of women writers has been made more difficult by their absence from the technical and formalist experimentation traditionally associated with literary avant-gardes (the most influential avant-garde movement of the post-war period - the Gruppo 63 - was made up entirely of men)", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.249 "In England and in France accounts of the rise of the novel describe the slow evolution of a genre over at least two centuries; historically linked to the romance, its attention was on the the 'private' person and the issues were love and courtship. marriage and the family. Not so in Italy. Here the rise of the novel is associated with one book - Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.249 "The absence of a reading public and a flexible and responsive written language were to continue to plague the novel in Italy until the 1980s", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.250 "The early nineteenth century had seen an animated debate in Italy between the Classicists and Romantics over the morality of the novel as a genre ... together with a general disquiet about its appropriateness to an Italian culture which allegedly excelled in poetry and the epic. What was absent from the debate then ... was the 87

 o o o  o o  o o

o o o o o o o o o  

question of what constitutes a novel. There is a remarkable, and refreshing, lack of concern about the definitions of narrative genres, which has continued to the present day", Forgacs and Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.258 Words are ... "Words are locked coffins in which the corpses still lie breathing", Don Paterson "words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap", Tzara "Words/are the wise men's counters, they do but/reckon with them, but they are the money/of fools", Andrew Crozier, "The Veil Poem" The Long Poem "a long poem will always be felt ... to be something unnatural and hollow", J.S. Mill, 1838 "[a long poem is] simply a flat contradiction in terms", E.A. Poe, 1848 Thoughts, feelings "One sheds one's sicknesses in books, repeats and presents again one's emotions to be master of them", D.H.Lawrence "The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all", TS Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" "negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason", Keats, "Letter to George and Thomas Keats", December 22, 1817 "Creative writers have traditionally suspected the intellect, analytical thought, of being the enemy of creativity", Philip Gross, "" "The problem with most free verse is that it locates wisdom in the self and not in language", Glyn Maxwell, "Bloodaxe Books catalogue", 1995 "Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings", Umberto Eco, "The Independent", 1995 "The word 'therefore' is no more stale than the word 'dawn', and has just as much imagery about it", William Empson, "Argufying in Poetry", 1963, p.170. "It is a fundamental mistake of grammarians and writers ... to suppose that words ... are the immediate representatives of things ... Words correspond to thoughts", Coleridge, "letter to James Gillman", 1827 "The logical faculty has infinitely more to do with Poetry than the Young and the inexperienced, whether writer or critic, ever dreams of", Wordsworth, letter of 14th Sept, 1827. "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth", Larkin, "Required Writing", p.47. p.182 - "Eliot observed that to continue to develop stylistically, a writer had to continue to develop emotionally." p.187 - "Style; sensibility and technique distinctively brought together, frees the writer from the weight of her own personality, gives to her an incandescence of personality, so that what she can express is more than, other than, what she is." From "Art Objects", J. Winterson, Jonathan Cape, 1995.

o o o o o o  o

"intelligence, of which an important function is the discernment of exactly what, and how much, we feel in any given situation", T.S. Eliot, The Egoist, iv (1917), 151. "no ideas but in things", W.C. Williams, A Sort of Song. "Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler", Nietzsche, "The Gay Science", s 360. "Our most important thoughts are those which contradict our feelings", Valéry, "Oeuvres" 2:642, 764; Collected Works 14:470, 9:177. "Nature has no outline. Imagination has", Blake "Imagination ... is nothing but decaying sense", Hobbes, "Leviathan", I,2. He went on to add that, when its decay has made it fade, it becomes what we know as a "memory". Quotes about the famous "I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.", Evelyn Waugh 88

o

o o o o o o o

o

o o o o o  o

o

o

o

o  o o o  o

"Miss Austen's novels ... seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow", Ralph Waldo Emerson "[Plath] was always a posthumous person, but it took her years to acquire a posthumous style", Helen Vendler", "Last Looks, Last Books", Princeton University Press, 2010, p.69 "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.", Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A. S. Gruzinsky), 1 November 1889. "You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse", Tolstoy (to Chekhov) "Mr Yeats has once and for all stripped English poetry of its perdamnable rhetoric. He has boiled away all that is not poetic - and a great deal that is", Pound, "Poetry Review", 1:2, 1912 "[Keats was] a poet who respected semblances. ... [Shelley] had no eyes", William Morris, in "William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary" by E.P.Thompson, 1977, p.10 "He is this afternoon writing a poem with great spirit: always a sign of well being with him. Needless to say, it is an intensely dismal poem", Florence Hardy, letter to Sidney Cockerell "Wordsworth was technically incompetent at least until 1801 ... The early poems, when they succeed, do so by virtue of invention; the language is as nearly irrelevant as it can be in poetry", Donald Davie, "Purity of Diction in English Verse", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, p.112-3 "Blake, in fact, gives us so good an introduction to the nature and structure of poetic thought that, if one has any interest in the subject at all, one can hardly avoid exploiting him", Northrop Frye, in "Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism and Society" (ed Bloom), Cornell UP, 1970, p.234-5 "What I like most about Eliot is that though one of his hearts, the poetic one, has died and been given a separate funeral ... he continues to visit the grave", Graves, "The Crowning Privilege" "[Elizabeth Bishop] was a poet's poet (John Ashbery called her a writer's writer's writer) but she was not a lesbian's lesbian", Fenton, "The Strength of Poetry", OUP, 2001, p.127 " [Rilke,] the Santa Claus of loneliness", Auden. "[P.G. Wodehouse is] English Literature's performing flea", Sean O'Casey. "Ashbery is modernism's last aesthete, a case of aestheticism so arrested he is often mistaken for a monument ", William Logan, "Reputations of the Tongue", University Press of Dreams "Dreams and reading have much in common. In both we generate images out of a limited visual field. These images move and disturb us ... yet they arrive without overt explanations and require us to work for meaning", Lindsay Clarke, from The Creative Writing Coursebook, Macmillan "Dreams and poems are engaged in some of the same tasks and use some of the same tools. Both, in my experience, somehow know and can convey unappealing truths to which the waking person, the person living her daily life in prose, seems to lack access", Rachel Hadas, The Formalist V14.2, p.51 "Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word - a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you", Alice Oswald, BBC web site, 2005 "At first I thought I couldn't sleep through it. Then I found a way of transposing the sounds into images so that they entered my dreams without waking me up.", Cage, "Radical Artifice", Marjorie Perloff, 1991, University of Chicago Press, p.xiv "For the common man it is the dream, if at all, that binds together in a new rationale, disparate elements. The job of the poet is to let the binding happen in daylight.", "Art Objects", J. Winterson, Jonathan Cape, 1995, p.75 Beauty "beauty is nothing/but the beginning of terror", Rilke, "The First Elegy" "A work is never beautiful unless it escapes the artist in some way", Sartre "La beauté sera CONVULSIVE, ou ne sera pas", Breton. Fractals "Just as fractal science analysed the ground between chaos and Euclidean order, fractal poetics could explore the field between gibberish and traditional forms", Alice Fulton , "Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions", Thumbscrew No 12 - Winter 1998/9 89

o

o

o  

"Fractals may be the most complex and the most subtle examples of patterns found in both mathematics and poetry ... When poets borrowed ideas from fractal geometry and applied them to the reading and writing of poetry, they made a remarkable intellectual leap", M. Birken and A.C.Coon, "Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry", Rodopi, 2008, p.167 "As free verse broke the pentameter, fractal verse breaks the poem plane. The poem plane is analogous to the picture plane in painting: a two-dimensional surface that can convey the illusion of spatial depth. ... Just as paint fosters illusions of proximity and distance on canvas, words can suggest spatial depth on paper. A fractal poem can do this by shifting its linguistic densities: The poem's transparent, 'easy' passages impart the sensation of negative space; they vanish into meaning when read rather than calling attention to their linguistic presence. More textured language, on the other hand, refuses to yield its mass immediately. The eye rests on top of the words, trying to gain access, but is continually rebuffed", Alice Fulton, in "The Measured Word", Kurt Brown (ed), Univ of Georgia Press, 2001, p.119 "Narrow spectral bands" of scale, p.68 "the fractal nature of our contrived taxonomies", p.191 from "Mots d'order", J. Natoli, State Univ of New York Press, 1992.

 o

o

o

o o

o o

 o

o

 o o 

Old Age "any middle-aged editor who doesn't talk to poets in their 20s about the contemporaries they're reading is in danger of publishing only young poets who sound like the now-middle-aged ones they grew up with", Don Paterson, "The Guardian", 21/01/11 "In middle age I think most posts' style changes in the sense that they are reaching behind their carefully constructed artifice to the innocence of vision they started out with", Harry Clifton, "The Poetry Paper", Issue Seven, 2010/11 "With the exception of Eric Mottran, I have not found a single [UK post 1950] critic who has a distinguished record of writing about the poets younger than them", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.21 "Young poets should have no individuality", Derek Walcott, "???", 1980 "After working on one's poetry for several years, it is normal for the primitive autobiographical drive to come to an end. At this point, you have the time to devise new ways of working; a new generator of the unpredictable is needed, and this is supplied by chance or indeterminate procedures, combined with rules chosen to generate new decisions. Of course, if you believe only in autobiographical poetry, this temporary pause is not liberation, but a source of depression, neurosis, and eclipse", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.39 "It's strange, being old. One thing that's clear: inspiration becomes rarer, and imagination less intense and spontaneous", Donald Hall, APR, Mar/Apr 2005 "The aging process almost always brings to the poet the secret conviction that he has settled for far too little ... All his lifelong struggle with 'craft' seems a tragic and ludicrous waste of time", Dickey, "The Young American Poets" (ed Carroll), 1968. Memory "each art has a different relation to forgetting. From that standpoint, poetry is privileged. A person reading a Baudelaire sonnet cannot skip a single word. If he loves it he will read it several times and perhaps aloud. If he adores it, he will learn it by heart. Lyric poetry is a fortress of memory", "The Curtain", Milan Kundera, Faber & Faber 2007 "Not only is memory the mother of the Muses, as the Greeks called her; she is also the mother of the modes. Her first and continually youngest child is perception, but her seemingly eldest children are retrospection and assertion" - "The Poetics of the Mind's Eye", C Collins, Univ of Pennsylvania, 1991, p.116 Similarity "We meet with the fact that recurrence also implies difference, that coincidence on one level only highlights non-coincidence on another", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.58 "every act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike", Bronowski, "Science and Human Values" Part/Whole 90

o

o 



"My knowledge of the world exists validly only in the moment when I am transforming it ... Discontinuities, wave breaks, cell divisions, collapsed structures, boundaries between tissue kinds: where inner workings are unknown the only reliable participations are imaginative", Allen Fisher, "Brixton Fractals", 1985 "Blake attempted...to interrupt the ordinary processes of this central dynamic structure by feeding into it complex information that it could only reject or reconfigure ... His defiance of the institutional structures of knowledge and the technological divisions that correspond to them resulted in unorthodox works that seemed ungainly if not ugly and shocking to his potential audience, who in their aversion have sometimes perceived a mind operating out of control", p.16 "The concept of an isolated episode or accidental occurrence seems to have been anathema to him. Whenever he found a broken connection between A and B, he read it as a defect and attempted a remedy", p.18 From "The Cambridge Companion to William Blake" (ed Morris Eaves), CUP, 2003

o

o

o o o o o o  o o

 o

o

o

o



"Just as an alien body falling into a supersaturated solution causes the precipitation of crystals, i.e., reveals the true structure of the dissolved substance, the "alien word" [citations, etc] by its incompatibility with the structure of the text activates that structure", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.109 "Jabes, like the German Romantics, holds that the fragment is our only access to the infinite. I tend to think it is our way of apprehending anything", Rosamarie Waldrop in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.614 "All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn. It is the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page", McHugh, "Broken English", Wesleyan Univ Press, 1993, p.75 "It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial.", Louise Gluck, "Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry", Ecco, 1994, p.74 "a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination", Barthes, "The Death of the Author" "There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones" - On a Raised Beach, MacDiarmid "the ruins of my being [are] fragments of the divine", Hesse "Even where art insists on the greatest degree of dissonance and disharmony, its elements are those of unity", Theodor Adorno, "Asthetische Theorie", Suhrkramp, 1970, p.235 Religion "I cannot see that poetry can ever be separated from something which I should call belief, and to which I cannot see any reason for refusing the name of belief", Eliot, "???",1927 "Religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry", Santayana, "Interpretations of Poetry and Religion", 1900, (preface) Madness "I'm with the former Director of the Poetry Society of Great Britain, Christina Patterson, who said, 'If you knew as many poets as me, you'd certainly hesitate to say that poetry improves communication skills: or indeed mental health!'", Fiona Sampson, "Poetry Writing: The expert guide", Robert Hale, 2009, p.183 "The empty phrases into which the amateur poet invests his or her feeling are difficult to distinguish from the machine poems of the psychotic - except by their relative linguistic inertia, the dearth of twist or pun.", John Wilkinson in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.369 "[impoverishment is] the single most distinctive feature of schizophrenic language, often manifest[ing] itself in utterances that sound, to many listeners, like 'empty philosophising', 'fruitless intellectualizing' or 'pseudoabstract reasoning '", John Wilkinson in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.366 "In a 1993 book called "Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament," the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison argued that manic-depressive illness was the source of much of the best poetry produced from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. ... in "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain," by Alice W. Flaherty, ... Flaherty thinks that mood disorders may jump-start the literary imagination.... But she goes further, speculating at length on which parts of the brain are responsible for literary creativity and its interruption.", Joan Acocella, "Blocked: Why do writers stop writing?", New Yorker, June 14, 2004 Gothic 91

o

o

 o

o

o o

o

o

o

o

o

o

o      

"The Gothic imagination turns upon a fear of object, in particular the individual's anxiety of becoming subject to forces beyond its control", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.127 "The chief anxiety of Gothic is possession, so that personal identity is dismembered, either by invasion of the body .. or by physical transformation", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.193 Women "it is my experience as an editor, one confirmed by many editors I have spoken with, that it is far harder to find women poets who are interested in writing criticism", David Yezzi, "The Rest Is Criticism", "Contemporary Poetry Review", Nov 2010 "Women columnists still make their fortunes by attacking other women ... Is it, in fact, a time-honoured way to get a book contract or a political appointment. Trashing one's own gender remains a path to advancement", Erica Jong, "The Guardian", April 12, 2008 "According to Dame Rebecca West, unhappiness is still the keynote of contemporary fiction by English women", Elaine Showalter, "Towards a Feminist Poetics" "The gender-based dichotomy between public and private speech is arguably the most significant factor in the historical marginalisation of women writers", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.140 "Many Women are unable to take themselves seriously as writers until they reach a certain age, with the waning of family commitments alongside the waxing of self-confidence and considered abandon", Linda France, "Sixty Women Poets", Bloodaxe, 1993 "Destabilizing language, form, narrative has historically been the task of both modernist and postmodern innovation. But there is a central problem with these two twentieth-century movements of linguistic and formal critique. The problem is Gender Politics", Rachel Blau DuPlessis in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.589 "[AJP] Taylor also observes that '[c]asualties were about three times heavier in proportion among junior officers than with common soldiers', a factor which cannot be ignored in the study of a body of women's poetry which is almost exclusively middle class. ... Ouditt observes that war is 'isolating and annihilating for women who live their lives through their men and who then lose their entire investment'", Gill Plain, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997, p.27 "maintaining the division between poetry for so-called therapy and poetry as high-art is, according to Hooley, 'the last bastion of male authority'. This idea seems slightly excessive", Declan Long, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997 , p.93 "looked at from a woman's perspective it is precisely those relational, interactive and heterogeneous processes that form societal and cultural texture, and provide the material for transformation into art", Helen Kidd, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997 , p.101 "It is interesting how the preoccupation with love, in life or literature, has been turned against women ... The heightened states of emotion out of which male poets were creating poetry were praised as revolutionary; the heightened states of female emotion were denigrated and dismissed as second-rate", Louise Bernikow, "The World Split Open", The Women's Press, 1974, p.5 "The dilemma of the student of poetry who is also passionately interested in women is that she has to find value in a mass of work that she knows to be inferior", p.xi "poet is always male and muse always female...conscious efforts to weaken this gender-specificity seem to be ineffectual ...Either [women] must impersonate the muse herself or impersonate the male poet", p.xv "This is not to say that we should not work at reclaiming women's work but simply that we should be aware that we are more likely to find heroines than poets", p.xxiv "By the second half of the eighteenth century women poets were so numerous that their writings had lost all novelty value", p.53 "Like many other female poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is her own subject matter; first she constructs a self and then she writes about it", p.399 "Among male poets suicides are not only relatively few, but also peripheral", p.401 From "Slip-shod Sibyls", Germaine Greer, Viking, 1995 92

o o  o

o o

o

o

o o

 o o o o

"Women writers might be unique, but their singularity was rarely held up as exemplary", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.9. "Age is important because it takes a generation (at least) to overcome a dominant paradigm", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.10. Mainstream "The conventional or mainstream poem today is a univocal, more or less plain-spoken, short narrative often culminating in a sort of epiphany. Such a form must convey an impression of closure and wholeness no matter what it says", Rae Armantrout, "Sagetrieb", 11.3 (1992) "mainstream verse ... tends to lean heavily on the subjectivity of poets as a perceived wellspring of universal wisdom", Adam Fieled, in "Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.34 "Speaking broadly, there are two general modes in UK & US poetry ... one is a product focussed aesthetic, the other is a process-based approach. The product focussed aesthetic relies on clarity of context, presenting selfcontained, more or less complete thoughts and evincing a concern for descriptive accurary when considering the external world. It is, to caricature slightly, occupied with realizing recalled events, sometimes through memory's distorting effects, while keeping failings of language under discursive control. This is often also called 'mainstream'. ... Its weakness is that it can rely too heavily on rhetorical commonplaces, or conceits, and can easily feel naively decorative to the more philosophically concerned, or sentimental or even redundant in its efforts to describe the outside world convincingly. The process-led approach ... is concerned with poetry as a way of speaking about the world that simultaneously presents the difficulties of doing so. ... To the young contemporary ear, being too 'product' in approach can end up sounding pompous or over-wrought; old hat. Too experimental or 'process' focused can seem solipsistic and, again, but differently, over-wrought ... So, we have a popularising neo-surrealist ironic school in evidence, growing out of a collision between the 'product' and 'process' approaches outlined; a poetry of the absurd, ironising meaning-making, which in fact one can find moving and meaningful, allegorically", Nathan Hamilton, "", Rialto 70, 2010, p.4-5 "Poetry book contests privilege serious poems over humorous ones; pathos over wit; 'sincerity' over virtuosity; they eschew satire and persona; and devalue variety in favor of consistency of theme, form, tone, and 'voice'. A swerve into the ineffable in the last few lines of each poem will keep your work 'open' and 'risky' in conformance with current MFA workshop practice. Prefacing poems with epigraphs from fashionable poets (usually in translation) will let the judge know that you are or aspire to be professionally hip", David Alpaugh, "Rattle e.5", 2008, p.14 "the [mainstream] work appears spoken in a natural voice; there must be a sense of urgency and immediacy to this 'affected naturalness' so as to make it appear that one is reexperiencing the original event; there must be a 'studied artlessness' that gives a sense of spontaneous personal sincerity; and there must be a strong movement toward emphatic closure", Charles Altieri, "Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry", CUP, 1984, p.10 "Elegies, childhood reminiscences, ironic anecdotes and holiday-cottage nature poems typify the contents of the average slim volume", O'Driscoll in "In Black and Gold...", ed C.C. Barfoot, Rtadopi, 1994, p.199 "poems are embedded in what are alternately weighty and witty anecdotes that serve to keep the audience more less awake and geared up for their next poetic shot", "Radical Artifice", Marjorie Perloff, 1991, University of Chicago Press, p.78 Publishing "To be any good, it seems, a magazine, like a Romantic poet, has to be of erratic appearance, insult the respected, and die young", Jeremy Teglown, "Grub Street and the Ivory Tower", OUP, 1998 "Publishing a book of verse is like dropping a rose petal in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo", Don Marquis (quoted on p.10 of the Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997) In the US there are 900 regular buyers of hardback poetry books and 2500 regular buyers of paperback poetry books. "everybody wants to be a poet", The NYT, Aug 29th, 1979, p.C17, M. Kakutoni "in the late 1940s, America was a nation of 150 million people, with an annual total of 8,000 book titles per year of all types and something under 200 publishing poets who were active enough to generate books. Today, the United States has twice as many people, but is now publishing, according to Bowker, over 290,000 book titles per year, of which some 4,000 titles alone are poetry. There must be somewhere between ten and twelve thousand publishing poets in the U.S. today in contrast with 200 fifty years ago.", Ron Silliman, "Silliman's Blog", Thursday, June 14, 2007 93

o o o o o

 o

o

 o

o o o 



In 2002 "fewer than 25 books of short stories were produced by mainstream publishers. And two thirds were by writers from abroad." - Debbie Taylor, Mslexia, Spring 2003. "The reading public of the 1850s was ten times that of the 1750s ... A Dickens does not create, but is created by, his public", Stephen Potter, "The Muse in Chains", Jonathan Cape, 1937, p.183 "In 1892 Walter Besant ... calculated that there were approximately a hundred novelists living in Britain living by their writing", "London Review of Books", 2nd Nov, 2006, p.12 "three-quarters of all periodical literature in the late 19th century was fiction, and serialisation could be highly lucrative", "London Review of Books", 2nd Nov, 2006, p.12 "A recent Arts Council study notes that only four per cent of the total sales of the best-selling 1000 poetry books in 1998-1999 were of contemporary poetry. The Arts Council study identifies Faber as responsible for 90 per cent of the sales ... and notes that collections by Seamus Heaney account for 67 per cent of these sales", staple 54 Authenticity "given that young age and small literary community of [Australia], a wholly disproportionate number of writers have made their name there on the basis of dishonest claims about authorship", Melissa Katsoulis, "Telling Tales", Constable & Robinson, 2009, p.10 "Most hoaxes have an air of sadness about them. Rejection by parents or publishers and a bitterness that overflows into a lack of self-respect are what characterize their perpetrators", Melissa Katsoulis, "Telling Tales", Constable & Robinson, 2009, p.136 Prose poem "Perhaps the greatest challenge of the prose poem (as opposed to "flash fiction") is to compensate for the absence of the margin. I try to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. I cultivate cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference, etc. 'Gap gardening,' I have called it, and my main tool for it is collage", Rosmarie Waldrop, "???" "the prose poem requires ... not only the talent but the works and reputation of an accomplished metricist to make it successful", H.T. Kirby-Smith, "The Origins of Free verse", Univ of Michigan Press, 1999, p.258 "If lack of ability safely disguises itself for a time in bad free verse, the ultimate refuge of bankrupt talent is the prose poem", H.T. Kirby-Smith, "The Origins of Free verse", Univ of Michigan Press, 1999, p.255 "No matter what the preliminary prose form, the prose poem must deviate at some level from the convention in order to establish itself as other. This deviation may rest at the level of the larger structures of convention, resulting in parody of the older, traditional genre ... or it may be more profoundly disruptive, mangling syntactic and semantic structures", p.82 "Above all, the prose poem is a heterogeneous form - not as a simple compromise between poetry and prose, but as a form that almost inevitably brings diverse genres of prose into tension with one another", p.90. From "A Tradition of Subversion", M.S. Murphy, Univ of Mass. Press, 1992.

o

o

 o

o 

"English mainstream poets seem to have regarded the prose poem as a peculiarly foreign affair and one to be avoided apart from those times when there was a public questioning of identity and language,", David Caddy, in "Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.103 "Rosemary Waldrop describes as 'gap-gardening' the way the prose poem 'turns' on its inner disjunctions, as it lacks the more traditional turning of the line to effect that motion. Containment and movement find a balance", Karen Volkman, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.54 Workshops "The Romantic student arrives expecting affirmation of her genius - anything less than praise is a failure to recognize her inherent worth as a writer. The theraputic student has already completed his work by arriving with poem in hand. Both students have no interest in work - they simply want to be rewarded for who they already are", Jason Schneiderman, "American Poetry Review", Mar/Apr 2010 "a workshop's primary function is to make explicit what the writer feels about his or her own work but can't quite put into words", Jason Schneiderman, "American Poetry Review", Mar/Apr 2010 Omissions, Gaps 94

o

o o o  o

o

o o o o

o

o o o o

o

o

o o

"For (Pierre) Macherey, a work is tied to ideology not so much by what it says as by what it does not say. It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absenses, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt", Terry Eagleton, "Marxism and Literary Theory", p.34 "To understand a literary style, consider what it omits", Mason Cooley "We tend to define our poets by that aspect of sensibility they actually must lack and strive towards", Jorie Graham, "Denver Quarterly", V 26, no 4 "The true artist may be best recognised by his acts of omission", Pater, "Appreciations with an Essay on Style", p.18. Miscellaneous "In the 50 years preceding Wordsworth's publication of the preface, several momentous changes were taking place in the realm of "letters" which placed in question the basic verbal criteria of poetry. More precisely, neoclassical poetics and the preeminence of poetry as the only classical genre (even drama was written in verse) came under pressure from the gradual introduction of vernacular writing into school curricula and from the development of a vernacular canon (in English), which included for the first time the nebulous genre of prose fiction. ... it was inevitable that a new supergenre - called "literature" - would emerge to encompass the various levels of diction ranging from poetry to prose fiction to prose essay", Daniel Tiffany, "Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch" "Challenges to the integrity of poetic language in the latter part of the eighteenth century, culminating in Wordsworth's attack on poetic diction, provoked reactions from various poets and critics reasserting the "peculiarity" of poetic language - a development essential to the conditions leading to the emergence of poetic kitsch. ", Daniel Tiffany, "Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch" "writing poetry is essentially exploratory. It's not about healing, but about opening up the wound", Fiona Sampson, "Poetry Writing: The expert guide", Robert Hale, 2009, p.183 "Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality", Schiller, "On the Naive and Sentimental in literature" "For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line", John Kinsella, "Poetry Review" (V 95.4, 2005) "Poetry in not - as my friend Bill Matthews once quipped - criticism in reverse. A poem's aim isn't to start with a conclusion and then disguise it", , "The Practice of Poetry", Robin Behn and Chase Twichell (eds), 2001, Quill/HarperResource, p.18 "In the context of modernist formal change, the stanza may both be seen as giving spatio-temporal shape to ordinary language, or to fragment or do violence to it", Stefan Holander, "Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language", Routledge, 2008, p.125 "Whitman's extreme subjectivism is, as is frequently the case in modernist poetics, an objectivism", Stefan Holander, "Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language", Routledge, 2008, p.31 "A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity - he is continually informing - and filling some other body", Keats, "Letter to Richard Woodhouse", October 27, 1818 "if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all", Keats, "Letter to John Taylor", February 27, 1818 "The emergence of digital literature firmly refuted the concept of the author as the originator of any incontrovertible truths folded within a literary works and, by extension, all discourse", Theodoros Chiotis, in "Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.75 "The relationship between poetry, the most elevated and exclusive of literary discourses, and the imperatives and demands of political commitment is especially problematic. Poetry's formal and linguistic modes of expression, its characteristic qualities of allusiveness and compression, are largely inimical to the polemical and ideological nature of political statement", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.120 "Chekhov referred to just such compositional motivation when he stated that if one speaks about a nail beaten into a wall at the beginning of a narrative, then at the end the hero must hang himself on that nail. A prop, in this case a weapon, is used in precisely this way in Ostrovsky's "The Poor Bride"", Tomashevsky, "Versions of Formalism" "the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him 'personal'", TS Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" "The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor", Tony Hoagland, "Poetry", September, 2010 95

o

o

o

o o

o

o

o

o

o o

o

o o o o

o

"Inspiration, in its Romantic form of a state of super-creativity, is an aspect of 'modernity' in the sense of that condition in which the writer 'no longer knows for whom he writes', a situation contemporary with the demise of patronage, the professionalisation of the writer, and the emergence of mass audiences", Timothy Clark, "The Theory of Inspiration", Manchester UP, 1997, p.11 "enthusiasm is an overwhelming case of residual orality ... Poetic inspiration is becoming the 'natural' insistence of more genuine modes of language, token of a 'truer' or deeper self which addresses, and depends upon, an ideal of bonding communal feeling", Timothy Clark, "The Theory of Inspiration", Manchester UP, 1997, p.76 "Automatism can be read as the culmination of an aspect of French Romanticism, taking up Rimbaud's programme of a derangement of all the senses to deliver the writer's habitual self over to a realm in which 'I' is an other", Timothy Clark, "The Theory of Inspiration", Manchester UP, 1997, p.197 "Fish does not share Bakhtin's acute sense of the problem of language as he feels he can dispense with the notion of a 'true' reality", Alsop and Walsh, "The Practice of Reading", 1999 "Poetry and code - and mathematics - make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations", Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, "DOVETAILING DETAILS FLY APART ALL OVER, AGAIN, IN CODE, IN POETRY, IN CHREODS" "Interfaces called transparent allow us to interact/do what we're supposed to do without being aware of how the effects are obtained. We should perhaps speak instead about their opacity, given that we cannot see through them to the machine", Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, "DOVETAILING DETAILS FLY APART ALL OVER, AGAIN, IN CODE, IN POETRY, IN CHREODS" "It is the role of the artistic coder to question the coding languages, both through self-reflection and by using them for unintended purposes. These coders introduce multiplicity where none existed and challenge definitions of intent for the entire environment of programming language, machine and system", Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, "DOVETAILING DETAILS FLY APART ALL OVER, AGAIN, IN CODE, IN POETRY, IN CHREODS" "In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends ... They are still a minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response", F.R. Leavis, "Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture", Gordon Fraser, 1930 "Nothing is more definite, complete and single-minded than the ending of a detective story. It is less a resolution than an erasure", Susan E. Sweeney, "The Cunning Craft", (ed Walker and Frazer), Western Illinois Univ Press, 1990 "the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of speaking", Robbe-Grillet "This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give to the reader; and in doing so they turn language against its own project of conceptual division, and use it to heal itself - and in the process - paradoxically - to articulate new concepts that it can't yet accommodate.", Don Paterson, "The empty image: new models of the poetic trope", "Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that overlap in the sets of their attributes. ... Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and some of the cognitive metaphor theorists, people can read through to an underlying mapping, but only when the surface metaphor is new to them.", Don Paterson, "The empty image: new models of the poetic trope", "I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others", V. S. Naipaul, " Nobel lecture", 2001 "I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit", Edmund White "in poetry the music comes first, before everything else, everything else: until the poem has found its music, it's merely verbal matter, information", C. K. Williams, "The Threepenny Review", Spring 2010 "Most poets I know discovered poetry around the same time they discovered masturbation. And probably for the same reason. Poetry gives us a place to explore our passions, to play with possibilities, to open ourselves up to the ecstatic", D.A.Powell, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.81-82 "Which of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the 96

o

o o

o

o

o

o

o o o

o o

o 



undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience? It was, above all, out of my exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable interrelations, that this haunting ideal was born", Baudelaire "Irony seems to have become problematic in the postmodern poetry world ... For one thing, it seems too easy ... The superciliousness of irony is not the only count against it, however. It has been said that irony is politically paralyzing, that it delights at pointing to problems instead of imagining solutions", Rae Armantrout in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.674-5 "In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted", Bakhtin, "The Diaglogic Imagination", Univ of Texas, 1981 p.286. "The 'open text' often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers", Lyn Hejinian in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.619 "in description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene. .. This personal absorption is what we mean by 'style.' It is strange that we would choose so oddly surfacey a word - style - for this most soulful aspect of writing. We could, perhaps more exactly, call this relation between consciousness and its subject 'integrity.' What else is the articulation of perception?", Patricia Hampl, "The Dark Art of Description",Iowa Review. Spring 2008. Vol. 38.1 "In describing the body, Victorian writers had for the most part confined themselves to that which was most expressive about it: its overall shape; or its most characterful component, the face; or a particular feature (eyes, nose, mouth). Edwardian writers chose instead to describe the flesh between features", David Trotter, "T.S. Eliot and Cinema",Modernism/Modernity 13.2 (2006), p.243 "At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment", Breton, "???" "The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft", Prof Nicholas Royle, "Times Higher Education", 10th July, 2008, p.40 "poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry", Schlegel, "Fragments", 51, No. 238 "Rather than attempting to reduce noise to a minimum, literary communication assumes its noise as a constitutive factor of itself", Paulson, "The Noise of Culture", Cornell UP, 1988, p.83 "At moments when change outraces our ability to comprehend it, every system of explanation registers the strain. Oppositions that have long structured thought and guided action slip out of alignment, leaving a culture awash in information it cannot process", Adalaide Morris, "Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science", Robert Crawford (ed), OUP, 2006 "Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.vi "a statue of Apollo in a museum does not seem naked, but attach a tie to its neck and it will strike us as indecent ... The text is one of the components of an artistic work, albeit an extremely important component ... But the artistic effect as a whole arises from comparisons of the text with a complex set of ontological and ideological esthetic ideas", Yury Lotman, Ardis, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", 1976, p.23 "To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of lifeforces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them", p.176 "Functions of technical information, historic record, analytic argument, which are integral and obvious to Dante's use of verse are now almost completely a part of the 'prosaic'", p.180 From "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972

o

"The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much [of the] charged substance is previous poetry", "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972, p.21 97

o

o

o

o

o o o o o

o o o o o o o o  

"Ashbery has consciously rejected transparency, received notions of realism in poetry, and confession, all of which were (and still are) believed to be allegorical narratives that naturally culminate in revelation, universal truth, or epiphany. All too often, these states of illuminated insight are familiar and border on cliché. The revelation is not something the poet discovers in the process of writing, but is something he or she already possesses, and must figure out how to package. Such poems are full of detachable symbols and images, triggers that set off the reader's sympathetic Pavlovian response. Ashbery is against both the predictable and the detachable, which allows a poem to be reduced to a theme or be summed up.", John Yau, APR, May/June 2005, p.46 "The stopgap [Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa'] accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p.206 "a particular ikon [an aid to devotion] may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.", "An Experiment in Criticism", C.S. Lewis, CUP, 1961. p.17 "Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.", p. 11, "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia", Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 1987 "after auschwitz, lyric poetry is no longer possible", Adorno "Give a man a mask and he will reveal himself", Oscar Wilde "No passion in the world is greater than the passion to alter someone else's draft", H.G. Wells "one of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another", Larkin, in "Twentieth Century Poetry: Critical Essays and Documents", Martin and Furbank (eds), 1975, p.247. "In short, Kristeva prizes poetry for combining both the constative and performative aspects of discourse, which corresponds to the symbolic and semiotic dimensions of the human mind", "Studying Literature", Goring, Hawthorn and Mitchell, Arnold, 2001, p.361 "The text as airport. Nothing stops here but thousands walk through everyday", Caroline Bergvall, "binary myths" (Andy Brown ed.), p.57. "these capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection", "The Mating Mind", Geoffrey Miller, Doubleday, 2000, p.3?? "I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been", William Empson, "Poetry at the Mermaid". "If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices", Susan Howe. "reality, the oppressor's tongue", A Rich "a collection of commonplace aphorisms on borrowed stilts", Auden? "There are no happy marriages in art - only successful rape", Suzanne Langer p.6 - "[The poets whose works are paraphrased] share the kind of frustration that the scientist undergoes when he sees his work confused with technology and engineering". p.196 - "Artists need not be intelligent; art always is" From "Poets, Poems and Movements", T.F. Parkinson, UMI Research Press, 1987.

o

o 



"Their attitude toward art in general was somewhat condescending, but, rather like Huxley, the Logical Positivists were perfectly willing to differentiate between the metaphysics they abhorred and works of art, to which they allowed a certain value .", W.V. Harris, "Literary Meaning", Macmillan, 1996, p.71 p.145 - "An assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent that the contextual effects achieved when it is optimally processed are large. An assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent that the effort required to process it optimally is small." p.219 - "whereas a direct answer leaves the hearer free to process the information offered in whatever way he likes, an indirect answer suggests a particular line of processing in the computation of contextual effects. Peter: Is Jack a good sailor? ... Mary: ALL the English are good sailors." 98

From "Relevance", D.Sperber and D.Wilson, Blackwell, 1986 o o

o

o o

"the poet fabricates linguistic receptivity to the creative desires already abundant in the rich, unconsummated material of reality", "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982, p.44 Three "sources of inspiration" in art are " A direct impression of outward nature, expressed in purely artistic form. This I call an "Impression" A largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, the nonmaterial nature. This I call an "Improvisation" An expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, which comes to utterance only after long maturing. This I call a "Composition." " From "Uber das Geistige in der Kunst", Kandinsky. "[Forrest-Thompson's] concept of suspended naturalisation - the resistance to that urge to 'reduce the strangeness' - undoubtedly owes its origins to Keats's concept of negative capability, 'when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason", Alison Mark in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.116, (Keats letters, 22 Dec, 1817) "In [premature naturalisation's] anxiety to get at the 'meaning' behind the words it would overlook the meaning of the words", Forrest-Thompson, "Poetic Artifice", p.163 "the problem of referentiality in capitalistic culture can no longer be understood solely in terms of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism ... The speed of financial speculation, which has transformed the world into a single global day, is fundamentally based on communication and not on production", David Marriot in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 , p.339

99