Poem Into Song Helsinger, Elizabeth
New literary history,
09/2015, Letnik:
46, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Much attention has been given to what happens when a song becomes a poem—particularly in the case of the “artifactualization” of the ballad and folk song when it is collected and circulated in print ...(its “remediation,” as Maureen McLane more neutrally puts it). Such medium-shifting was widespread in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, with the collecting, editing, and printing of old songs and ballads. This essay looks at the question from the other side: what happens when a poem becomes a song? Some have argued that the passage from poem to song is a struggle for mastery that the poem must lose. But history suggests something different: that the traffic between poem and song, between verse written and song musically performed, has always flowed in both directions, and that some poems, like some songs, not only survive transmemberment but thrive. With this history in mind, we should not be surprised to find that some poets look to the idea of song not only for what it might do for poetry, but also for how their poetry might affect popular cultures of song. William Blake, John Clare, and William Morris offer three examples of poets who seek to intervene in the culture of song, to purify its popular language, and thus to restore to song and song verse possibilities that, each believed, song had lost in an age of commercial remediation for large audiences.
The article analyses an alternative approach to Romani nomadism within the emerging field of Romani literature by comparing hetero-images of Romani nomadism with the Roma's own accounts of mobility. ...It starts by discussing romantic literary images of nomadic 'Gypsies' and entrenched
fictional views of Romani nomadism, and contrasts these with self-representations of Romani authors. It focuses on the counter-hegemonic relationship between hetero-representations and self-representations of nomadism, arguing that Romani self-images are able to grasp the complex reality of
Romani nomadism and understand the dual nature of Romani mobility, as both a survival mechanism and a socio-economic strategy.
John Clare's allusions to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers he knew as 'the old poets' breathe gratitude and solidarity. If they offered him, as Mina Gorji has said, 'a means of ...establishing himself canonically, linking himself and his fate to poets who were neglected, and had since risen to fame', they were also a way of extending a friendly hand to a legion of writers he warmly envisioned in an 1827 letter to George Darley as 'half unknowns who as yet have no settled residence in the Land of Fame but wander about it like so many Pilgrims who are happy to meet a stranger by the way to make themselves known or heard once in a century'. One absorbing instance of this is Clare's adoption of some lines by Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell (1561-1595) in the final stanza of his widely-discussed poem, 'The Flitting'.
The peasant-poet John Clare (1793-1864) used the word 'knowledge' in a way which still has not found its way into the OED. John Barrell explains that the phrase 'out of my knowledge' is common enough ...in the early nineteenth century, although it is not listed in the O.E.D. Less well known, perhaps unknown, is the very similar use of the word 'knowledge' at the beginning of chapter seventeen in Pride and Prejudice by John Clare's contemporary Jane Austen (1775-1817).
On "Rural Architecture," "The Ruined Cottage," "The Old Cumberland Beggar," and other texts that deal with human dwellings, on the other hand, he observes, "In Wordsworth it is precisely a ...receptiveness to the individual façade- to the face or surface as the articulation of a body or building-that is the very fountain of our moral experience" (44). If, as M.H. Abrams famously observes, late 18th century literary values shift from mimesis toward expressivism, terms like "representative," "imitate," "mirror," and "reflection" nonetheless pervade the Preface and Wordsworth's other writings about writing. ...Offord allows Wordsworth to name another related tension himself: what Wordsworth calls "similitude in dissimilitude" (Offord 127). The representation of this woman-and other people who share some of her circumstances, such as the Mad Mother and the Female Vagrant-often involves a major element of alienation, though "the breakdown of secure cultural identity might yet offer genuine commonwealth" (139). There is no guarantee of light at the end" (186). ...a final, though not concluding, tension emerges: "The conservative and transformative forces in Wordsworth's verse cannot be neatly separated out.
In this essay, I describe some of the basic tools that non-dictionary genres use to define objects and words. To show how description of the natural world relates to definition-making, I closely ...examine passages from the journals of Meriwether Lewis and a letter by John Clare, and point out the procedures that they share with the dictionary for creating an identifiable description of an object. To show how writers have implemented the dictionary’s form into poetry, I closely examine poems by Dan Beachy-Quick, Emily Dickinson, and A. Van Jordan, each poet providing a different method of integrating elements of the dictionary into verse. I also briefly discuss why the imagination influences how we talk about the dictionary.
Clare on Wordsworth Hodgson, Andrew
The Wordsworth circle,
03/2017, Letnik:
48, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Timothy Webb suggests that these lines show Clare "concerned to discover in Wordsworth an alternative nature to the artificial one presented by gardens" (Webb 230), pointing out their allusions: ..."briar" and "broomwood," for instance, crop up in "The Waterfall and the Eglantine," which Clare acknowledged as a favourite; Wordsworth's "Beggars" describes "a weed of glorious feature" as "beautiful to see" (18); and "the aged huntsman" recalls "Simon Lee. The next two lines, "I love to stoop and look among the weeds, / To find a flower I never knew before", might be taken as developing this thought ("critics might overlook them, but I love unearthing as-yet undiscovered poets") - though the accuracy of describing Wordsworth in 1841 as a dweller among the poetic "weeds" is dubious. Or, if one regards the poem as a defence of Clare's fidelity to nature in spite of his admiration for Wordsworth's more "human" enterprise, the lines might also be read as a preparation for the final couplet: I love to stoop and look among the weeds, To find a flower I never knew before: The sense that Wordsworth's poetry is troublingly out of reach colours the first mention of Wordsworth in Clare's correspondence, a note to his friend Octavius Gilchrist in December 1819, accompanying the return of a copy of Wordsworth's poems (letters 23-4).2 Only at this early stage of Clare's development does De Quincey's account of his "depressed confidence" hold water. Clare passes no comment on the poems themselves, but included with the...
