Modern Poetry

ALEX PREMINGER AND T. V. F. BROGAN, CO-EDITORS -- This is a book of knowledge, of facts, theories, questions, and informed judgment, about poetry. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive, comparative, reasonably advanced, yet readable reference for all students, teachers, scholars, poets, or general readers who are interested in the history of any poetry in any national literature of the world, or in any aspect of the technique or criticism of poetry. It provides surveys of 106 national poetries; descriptions of poetic forms and genres major and minor, traditional and emergent; detailed explanations of the devices of prosody and rhetoric; and overviews of all major schools of poetry ancient and modern, Western and Eastern. It provides balanced and comprehensive accounts of the major movements and issues in criticism and literary theory, and discussion of the manifold relations of poetry to the other fields of human thought and activity-history, science, politics, religion, philosophy, music, the visual arts.
(This text was made available at the following website: https://www.pdfdrive.com/the-new-princeton-encyclopedia-of-poetry-and-poetics-d156857492.html)

This essay assesses the interpretative consequence of the now wide and uncontrollable dissemination of an error, identifying three variants in an early poem by Sylvia Plath entitled "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" (1957). The first of these variants is a sophistication introduced in the Pulitzer Prize-winning edition of her COLLECTED POEMS, which is used as the copy-text for most contemporary anthologies that include the poem. In order to isolate and characterize the additional variants, the two extant audio recordings of Plath reading the poem have been collated with the typescripts and printed versions. The essay asserts the textuality of the tape recordings in terms of a phenomenon the I call “aural sophistication,” concluding that the recorded voice is less valuable as an index of authority than as a witness of how subtle textual variations irrevocably affect interpretation. The effect of these three variants reveals a self-possession and resilience Plath rarely embodies in her poems, an uncharacteristic posture that manifests the poem’s relation to Emily Dickinson’s poetics of witness.

In this article, I would like to focus on four poems written with almost the same background: the German world at the beginning of the twentieth century. An additional factor connecting the four poems is their biblical theme: Abisag of
Sunem. The poems are ‘Abisag von Sunem’ (by Agnes Miegel); ‘David und Abisag’ (Erstes Buch der Ko¨nige, Kapitel 1.1–4)’ by Franz Theodor Csokor; ‘Abisag’ by R.M. Rilke; and ‘Abisag’ by Hedwig Caspari. Each poem presents a new reading of the biblical text. Furthermore, my interpretation will demonstrate
that this group of poems can be read as referring to two subjects: the generation gap and the lack of communication as its consequence. The use of the biblical story of King David and Abisag and its end with Solomon’s murder of Adonijah is employed as a key that allows a variety of interpretations of the diverse approaches to the general themes which concerned the writers at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Rabbinic, kabbalist and hasidic traditions perceive Joseph as an emblem of righteousness, a guardian of the Covenant, a symbol of Sefirat Yesod and a divine representation of the earthly zaddik. In various sources, Joseph's struggle with Zuleika, Potiphar's wife, is elevated to a mythological struggle of the righteous with the forces of evil, manifested as a seductive, demonic woman. Zuleika casts her net to capture Joseph and break the divine union of God and “Knesset Israel.” Avraham Shlonsky's account of the charged relationships between Joseph and Zuleika is a metaphor and a prism for his critical view of the Zionist-halutz ideology and its concepts of body, masculinity and sexuality. Reading Shlonsky's early poetry collected in the book titled Bagalgal (In the Wheel, 1927) while applying hermeneutical methods taken from the field of Jewish thought brings the array of references and allusions to Jewish traditional texts to the surface. These references range from the Bible through the Talmud and Midrash to Hasidism. This method yields two important contributions; first, it highlights the unique contribution of Shlonsky's poetry. Second, the reconstruction of the theo-political elements of Shlonsky's early poetry deepens our understanding of the theological undercurrents of what is considered “secular Zionist culture” and demonstrates the unique role of the modern Hebrew poet as a secular prophet of the Jewish national revival.

In describing beginnings and ends, Western science speaks the venerable language of dust. The Hebrew Bible tells us that "the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" and that it is "to dust [that we] will return." 1 Latter-day cosmologists relate that in the distant past the solar system was a cloud of dust and that it will revert to this state in the no less distant future. The prominence of dust in these grand narratives cannot entirely dispel the sense that it is unimportant, less the spark of life than something nondescript that is forever at the mercy of forces beyond its control. If dust does turn out to be what is left over after the world has come to an end, it will be as a residue rather than a result, as a trace of the past or a testament to the inertness of the present rather than the foundation of a future. More a qui parle

This essay examines the work of the American postwar poet Charles Olson as a site of convergence between the imperatives of postmodernism and pastoral poetry — discursive fi elds whose relation is generally constructed as one of mutual hostility or indifference. The postmodern diffi culty, as described by Fredric Jameson, of constructing a viable relationship between individual experience and the conceptual totality of globalized capitalism, has tested the viability of naively referential pastoral as a mode by which the human relationship to nature can be represented. Within the poetic context of his hometown, the 'tansy city' of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Olson's poetics suggest possibilities by which an 'avant-pastoral' might extend Jameson's notion of 'cognitive mapping' beyond the totality of capitalism to the ecological totality that is the horizon of all human and non-human life, thereby creating a usable past for contemporary practitioners of an avant-garde ecopoetics. Pastoral is never only the poetry of the natural world: it is profoundly ideological, embedding within itself a nostalgic stance of yearning for a past as vivid as it is imaginary. In the pastoral vision, human beings inhabit a gracious 'middle landscape' 1 between nature and civilization, taking the best of both while being spared their respective deprivations and depredations. The practices of postmodern poets, on the other hand, are oriented toward a present in fl ux, derived from what Andrea Huyssen calls the 'technological imagination' of the modernist avant-garde, 'best grasped in artistic practices such as collage, assemblage, montage, and photomontage' (Huyssen, 1986: 9 [NIR]). Postmodernism leans toward the cultural fragmentation characteristic of an urbanized, late capitalist modernity, a fragmentation postmodernist voices tend to celebrate as the unwriting of oppressive, hegemonic narratives, and therefore

Ever since Socrates banished poetry in Book X of Plato's Republic with a flippant "if. .. poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, " Western poets have largely been on the defensive, mounting countless defenses of their vocation across the centuries (with Percy Shelley's defiant "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" being perhaps the most notorious). However, plenty of other poets have in turn questioned why they should ever want to enter Plato's Republic in the first place which, after all, enthusiastically endorses censorship, openly denigrates democracy as being but one step from anarchy, and defended slavery and eugenics. As such, there has also arisen a long and storied history of the poet as intentional outsider, one in self-imposed exile from the repressions of the Republic. Such has been the position of contemporary American poets; such was anciently called by St. Augustine "the Church Invisible." One such modern poet is Elizabeth Willis, who has engaged with the Church Invisible long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the rest of us to out of necessity.

Ever since the arrival of colonialism gained momentum in the country, Somali literature has been approached narrowly from the tutelage of the pastoral culture. Colonial as well as early Somali writers have taken the comfort of disdaining the study of anthological themes related to the non-nomadic cultures and literatures. That restricted notion of one culture, as purported by colonial writers and later politically enshrined by the state and a section of Somali scholars, has obscured the wealth of the various non-nomadic cultures in this Horn of Africa nation. Therefore, contrary to the notion of a homogenous Somali nation of the same nomadic culture, this essay aims to produce a non-nomadic version of Somali literature as practised by a section among the agrarian communities in Somalia; those known as Bantu or Jareer. Because the Bantu is an ethnically oppressed community, all what is related to their culture and literature in particular has been deemed valueless and, as a consequence, an institution unworthy studying. In particular, the essay argues that despite the degradation by the Somali state and neglect by Somalia scholarship often obsessed with the apocryphal ideology of a self-same Somalia, the agrarian wordsmith is bestowed with rich cultural and literary wisdom which makes him view his environment with sharp consciousness.

The poet Pentti Saarikoski (1937-1983) was one of the most significant Finnish writers of the 20th century. He was also a prolific translator, who received many prestigious awards for his literary production. Throughout his life Saarikoski showed evidence of a certain psychopathology and mental complications for which he was twice hospitalized. The paper argues that Saarikoski possessed a large number of autistic traits and elevated symptomatology of ADHD. The traits of these conditions are often found in persons with high creative achievement. The works of the psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald provide the theoretical background, on which the biographic evidence from Saarikoski's childhood and adult life is analyzed. The identity diffusion under which the poet suffered can be shown as beneficial to this level of creativity. Saarikoski was an autistic writer, who visualized his poetry which eventually provided him with artistic identity. In addition to autistic traits and high intelligence, Saarikoski also sought novelty and sensation, which can be attributed to his ADHD traits.

This article explores existential principles through autoethnographic poetry and narrative reflections. The use of poetry and narrative as tools in qualitative research is explored. Poetry and narratives are shown to be valuable tools for presenting people's lived experiences of complex existential principles and processes. The use of poetry and narrative in this research is positioned within the traditions of expressive arts and postmodern research methods.

Lila Matsumoto was born in Japan in 1984 and raised in the U.S.A from 1990 onwards. Between 2007 and 2016 she lived in Scotland – Aberdeen (2007-09), Edinburgh (2009-2015), and Glasgow (2015-16) – developing her practice as a poet, editor and mixed-media collaborator during this time. Matsumoto’s work is often characterized by a lightness and openness of tone which belies a commitment to formal innovation, and a mode of deep epistemological enquiry which often seems to seek out the spaces between existing symbolic and semantic categories: in her words, to “resist fast knowing”. This interview, conducted via email during December 2017, initially focuses on Matsumoto’s first collection Urn & Drum (2018), before moving on to consider the importance of objects and captions to her work, the tension it generates between intimacy of tone and opacity of content, and the thematic significance of women and women’s labor to her writing. Also discussed are Matsumoto’s role as editor of the little magazines Scree and FRONT HORSE, her past and current collaborations with artists, sculptors and musicians, and her thoughts on geographically -specific and gender -specific definitions of her work.

Covers Williams' poetry and experimental prose from c. 1916 to the late 1950s.  See the annotated table of contents below.  You may download pdf attachments for all chapters, plus the bibliography and index.  The attachments aren't in the proper order; academia.edu's formatting won't let me reorder them--but the file titles will give you the proper way to order your downloads.  Contact me if you have problems downloading these.  I've also uploaded an annotated table of contents for this book (see above); it includes a list of poems and other Williams writings discussed in detail in each chapter.

A study of the limits of multilingual literary expression in print culture. Beginning with the insight that multilingual literature defies simple translation, Brian Lennon examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication. Looking closely at the limit of multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, In Babel’s Shadow presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.

For the technologist it is easy to remain in safe technological enclaves with a bespoke language, a community of like minds and a familiar knowledge base. However, progress requires pushing the boundaries, thinking beyond the traditional and the ordinary, and questioning accepted norms. It requires opening of minds. It may surprise the reader that poetry can offer the key to unlock the closed mind.

“This bold triangulation of six Chinese, Russian, and American poets advances lively current debates about global literature by exploring encounters that challenge the old binarisms and chart possibilities of literary singularities for a future poetics. Edmond’s shrewd account of literary crossings in post-Cold War history helps us imagine how we can experience the challenge of new literary configurations.”
—Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, author of The Literary in Theory, Structuralist Poetics, and On Deconstruction

“A Common Strangeness is unique among studies of contemporary poetics in being genuinely global in its perspective and its reach. At home in Russian and Chinese as well as American poetry and that of his native New Zealand, Jacob Edmond pinpoints the crucial relationships that exist between what are seemingly disparate poetic cultures. The Chinese poet Yang Lian, who lived in exile in Auckland, is read under the sign of Benjamin and Baudelaire. The American Language poet Lyn Hejinian’s important dialogue with the Russian avant-gardist Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is studied carefully, and Bei Dao, Dmitri Prigov, and Charles Bernstein are treated as representative figures of cross-cultural thinking in the age of globalism. Edmond’s is a provocative, exciting, and genuinely original study of the new poetics; we will all be learning from it!”
—Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University, author of Unoriginal Genius and Wittgenstein’s Ladder

“Jacob Edmond addresses what he calls ‘forms of textual strangeness’ across contemporary poems of beautiful complexity and staying power. This theoretically astute book challenges us to read with a keener eye and to recognize how much poetry can tell us about political catastrophes, national dislocations, and promises of cultural renewal.”
—Stephanie Sandler, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, author of Commemorating Pushkin and Distant Pleasures

“One of this book’s secrets: it is, above all, a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular after deconstruction. What is it possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual? As an antidote to these dichotomies, A Common Strangeness gives us triangles, operating in varied scales. Edmond’s analysis of poets from the US, Russia, and China allows him to shed new light on the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that drive the aesthetics of globalization today. Overlapping, Edmond’s philosophical and linguistic triangles become hexagons, enneagons, dodecagons. These multiplying shapes provide fertile new ground for anyone interested in comparative poetics after 1989.”
––Eric Hayot, Penn State University, author of The Hypothetical Mandarin and Chinese Dreams

“Edmond differs from most scholars who make a point of crossing national and linguistic boundaries to speak of a new ‘world literature’ in that he deals with non-Anglophone as well as Anglophone writers and can give close readings of the former as well as the latter because he knows their languages and the histories of their literatures. The fact that he applies this knowledge to a number of representative poems makes his study unique. . . . He makes significant contributions in the areas of literary history, textual analysis, and a theory of comparative literature that ‘negates commensurability in favor of superimposition, encounter, and touch.’”
—Michael Heim, University of California, Los Angeles

“Ultimately the readings support an interpretation of Benjamin as authority for interpreting the experience of globalization, or ‘common strangeness’ as that experience appears in poetry. The close readings are . . . also very worthwhile in the context of critical discussion of world literature.”
—Edward M. Gunn, Cornell University, author of Rendering the Regional and Rewriting Chinese""

Art is based exclusively on the data gained from the online archive (even though some of the data are controversial). The performances mentioned in the archive are catalogized. The main challenges of the archive-based research in performance studies are underlined.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use the work of Robert Frost to give insights into the diverse meanings that work holds in daily lived experience. It aims to use this analysis to discuss general ways in which the content and formal properties of poetry allow unique insights into the world of work.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses the approach of literary criticism and analysis to give insights into how work can be experienced as personally liberating but also culturally stifling, a tool both for and against human self-fulfilment. After a brief discussion of the use of poetry to understand organizational life, various excerpts from Frost’s well-known and lesser known works are analyzed.
Findings – Through a series of passages in Frost’s works, the paper shows how these illuminations
of the poet’s own experiences hold insights by which scholars can understand the experience of work
more generally.
Practical implications – It is argued that an understanding of poetry is a way for scholars to expand their understanding of the world of work, both through paying attention to the contents of poems and, more generally, from considering a poetic form of expression as shot-through with theoretical and epistemic insights.
Originality/value – While some papers have incorporated poetic expressions and explanations for various organizational phenomena, this work represents an attempt to incorporate this rarely studied feature into organizational studies. To the authors’ knowledge, the mainstream organizational literature has few if any in-depth poetic analysis, and none of the work of Frost, whose focus on work is widespread and illuminating

George ‘Dadie’ Rylands (1902-1999) was a Cambridge don and a director and scholar of Shakespeare. He is well known for hosting the sumptuous dinner in King’s College that Virginia Woolf elaborated in A Room of One’s Own (1929),
but he played a yet more significant, and hitherto unrecognized, role in Woolf’s writing life. Rylands brought Woolf in touch with English Studies and mediated between two of its aspects: the patriarchal world that privileged verse and the more democratic world that esteemed verse and prose equally. Rylands’ private letters and critical study Words and Poetry (Hogarth Press, 1928) reinforced Woolf’s confidence that prose could adapt elements of verse, and by extension that her verse-adapting prose had much in common with Shakespeare’s prose-adapting verse. Further,
Rylands’ writing on words’ freedom, in Words and Poetry and his BBC talk ‘The Language of Shakespeare’ (18 March 1937), offered language that Woolf transformed for her BBC talk ‘Craftsmanship’ (29 April 1937), delivered in the
series ‘Words Fail Me’. Woolf alludes to Rylands to counter the views of the first speaker in the series. This article draws on the Monks House Papers at the University of Sussex and the King’s College Archive Centre at the University of
Cambridge.

In 1931, the Greek poet George Seferis discovered T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land in London. His translation of this long poem appeared five years later (three years after Takis Papatsonis’ translation had appeared in the periodical Ο Κύκλος/O Kyklos) and several editions followed, in 1949, 1965 and 1967, while it has since been translated again by Sarantēs Giorgos (1958, 1964) and Kleitos Kyrou (1990).  The 1970s were crucial in this itinerary because it was in 1976 when Greek poet and critic Nasos Vayenas wrote a fictional piece on published and unfinished versions of The Waste Land called ‘Patroclus Yiatras or The Greek translations of The Waste Land’ («Πάτροκλος Γιατράς ή Οι ελληνικές μεταφράσεις της Έρημης Χώρας»). This was an examination of various versions of the translated poem focused around the efforts of an imaginary figure, the poet’s alter-ego, to contribute his own translation and a turning point in the reception of Eliot’s work in Greece as in 1984 another poet, Elias Lagios,  produced his own long poem, Η Έρημη Γη (Erēmē Gē, translated as Desolate Land), which linked Eliot’s The Waste Land – and its translation by Seferis – with Vayenas’ 1976 piece.  Going even further, Lagios’ poem connected Dionysios Solomos’ poetry (from a verse from which Lagios borrowed his title) with Το Δεύτερο Αντάρτικο (The Second Rebel Movement) by Foivos Gregoriades, a four-volume book on the Greek Civil War (1945-1949) that ensued the Second World War in Greece. The ‘Notes to Erēmē Gē’ that accompany Lagios’ poem – following here too the notes at the end of Eliot’s poem – reveal a mosaic of literary and political references from Homer to modern Greek poets Kostes Palamas, C.P. Cavafy and Angelos Sikelianos and from folk and rebel songs to the man with the carnation (dedicated to the memory of Nikos Beloyiannis) from a poem by Yiannis Ritsos.

Lagios, Vayenas notes, rewrites Eliot’s poem from the perspective of a leftist Greek poet ‘reproducing the transcendental quest of The Waste Land with the coordinates of a politicized neohellenic vision’ and parodying both The Waste Land and its translation by Seferis, phrases from which he transfers whole into his own poem.  Already, the combination of Solomos’ verse, the poet who composed the Greek National anthem, with the work of Gregoriades, shows the poet’s intention to connect the fight for the creation of the modern Greek state and the subsequent creation of a national identity, supported by the narrative of the 1821 Greek revolution, with the fight for the creation of the modern Greek nation in the post-war years and the narratives that dominated then. As Aristos Doxiadis and Manos Matsaganis note, ‘after the 1946-1949 Civil War, the mantle of nationalism was monopolised by the victorious Right [...] portraying the defeated communists as enemies of the nation’ while ‘the nationalist rhetoric (‘Fatherland-Religion-Family’) reached an apogee with the Colonels’ coup d’état of 1967, and came crashing down together with the military regime in 1974’.  This article explores how Lagios’ Erēmē Gē  used the form and language of Eliot’s poem and of Seferis’ translation of it to construct a version of history telling through a medium that combined the workings of historical memory and the art of fictionality.

The comparative study of the literatures of Ireland and Scotland has emerged as a distinct and buoyant field in recent years. This collection of new essays offers the first sustained comparison of modern Irish and Scottish poetry, featuring close readings of texts within broad historical and political contextualization. Playing on influences, crossovers, connections, disconnections and differences, the 'affinities' and 'opposites' traced in this book cross both Irish and Scottish poetry in many directions. Contributors include major scholars of the new 'archipelagic' approach, as well as leading Irish and Scottish poets providing important insights into current creative practice. Poets discussed include W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, Seamus Heaney, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, Don Paterson and Kathleen Jamie. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of poetry from these islands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

We present a novel approach for generating poetry automatically for the morphologically rich Finnish language by using a genetic algorithm. The approach improves the state of the art of the previous Finnish poem generators by introducing a higher degree of freedom in terms of structural creativity. Our approach is evaluated and described within the paradigm of computational creativity, where the fitness functions of the genetic algorithm are assimilated with the notion of aesthetics. The output is considered to be a poem 81.5% of the time by human evaluators.

L otxeTTexto ... ; a partiT de mis re.spuestas, crecieron nuevas preguntas, averiguaciones, conjeturas, probabilidades hasta que alfin tenía un país propio, una tierm propia, un mundo entero, discreto, pudiente, como un jardín secreto, cuya existencia nadie sospechaba. Oh, cuan afortunados somos, nosotros los hombres del sabe~; siempre que sepamos cómo guardar silencio el tiempo necesario' De todos modos, hay una cosa, sobre todo que es necesaria para practicar la lectum, conw un arte, algo que se ha desaprendido profundamente hoy en día y va a ser por esto que va a pasar algún tiempo antes de que mis escritos sean "legibles" algo para lo que casi hay que ser una vaca, y en todo caso no un "hombre moderno": ruminación. Friedrich Nietzsche 1 ¿Qué es un texto? ¿Cómo funciona? ¿Qué nos dice? ¿Para qué nos sirve? Para empezar, vemos que se trata de un constructo funcional, de una máquina2, que implica una forma y que toma cierto espacio. Para que existan espacios ocupados, necesariamente tiene que haber espacios 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings oJNietzsche, Transl., Ed. & Comm. by Walter Kaufmann, The Modern Library, New York, 1992, p. 453 & p. 459. (La traducción es mía. El destacado es suyo.) 2 Estas reflexiones y conceptos como texto como 'máquina', territorialización/desterritorialización, y texto 'nómade', están basados fundamentalmente en la lectura de A thousand plateaus; Capitalism & Schizophrenia, por Giles Deleuze y Félix Guattari (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, USA, pp. 3-26, 310-424). 80 RE\' 1ST.\ CHILE:\.\ DE LITFK\TLJR\, N" 50, 1 CJ97

Analyzing Stevens's 1952 The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain I trace the laborious journey the persona of the poem undertakes-an external as well as an internal adventure-transforming thus the world nature and complex system of interwoven external and internal images and circular movements-may offer the persona a sense of self and home in space and time among the fragments of the broken universe. A central preoccupation of Stevens's poetry consists in questioning what connects the image about the world created by the self with reality and what road the creative imagination travels in order to make sense of a universe that lacks a central ordering idea. The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain attempts to answer these questions taking its reader on a journey of self-discovery, even if the answers Stevens formulates are always conditional and undermined, deconstructed by the subtle irony of his works. The title already foreshadows the fundamental themes of this 1952 short poem: the abstract, the created poem takes the place of a concrete, un-created mountain, a movement from the objective to the subjective, toward a new interpretation of reality. Considering the symbolic potential of the word mountain, we may already state that the poem will present a view of the world different from the everyday, ordinary one. It will be a view from above, from the top of a mountain-in all cultures mountains being holy places where one gets closer to and may connect with God, with the transcendental. Stevens also title-as he often does.

The contrast between the two farmers  in Robert Frost's Mending Wall has been much discussed -- but the contrast between their farms has barely been noted.  In “Mending Wall,” he uses the symbolism of the apple tree and the pine to underscore the qualities of the two men. He also uses it to mimic and challenge a foundational text — the dialogue between the serpent and Eve in the Garden of Eden:

This essay tells the story of Stevens’ first two books and especially looks at the poet’s relationship with his editors.  The essay begins by filling in some of the early history of Harmonium, including well known letters, lesser known letters, and unknown letters, mining archives of unpublished material from the Huntington, the Ransom Center, and the University of Chicago Library.  It argues that a key component to understanding the structure of Harmonium is a rejection card Stevens received from Harriet Monroe.

After that, it offers new evidence and a new take on Stevens’ hiatus from writing poetry immediately after the first publication of Harmonium¸ why a book with so few sales was republished, and why Ronald Lane Latimer, of the Alcestis Press, became interested in Stevens.  It then goes on to tell the little understood tale of how Knopf came to publish Ideas of Order.  It also makes a case for a group of poems that were written especially for the Knopf edition, a trio of poems that have never, I believe, been read together.  The essay ends with a very new reading of “Postcards from the Volcano” which I happen to think is much better than anything that has been offered before.

There is a wealth of unpublished material here, as well as the new telling of the story of the books.  Further, the essay deals with the intersection between the economics of the book trade and Stevens, who has long been assumed to be uninterested in such details.

Ciaran Carson has established a reputation as one of Ireland's most important poetic voices. However, Carson is also an accomplished musician whose work reflects the liminal borderland that has always existed between Irish music and Irish literature. Music is a prominent theme throughout Carson's work with songs and musical allusions frequently a feature of his poems. While music has influenced Carson's work thematically, it has played a formative role in one of the most distinctive features of his poetry until recently - that is his use of the long line. This paper argues that it is even possible in some of his poems to find comparable metres with those found in forms of traditional Irish music. Carson's use of the long line is part of his attempt to recreate what he has called the urgency of traditional Irish music in his work through an audience-aware poetic that attempts to recreate the immediacy of the live sessions Carson has partaken of as a musician. For Carson, the crucial moments of communication and understanding are those shared between the performer and the audience, an audience that can sometimes include fellow performers. However, this conviction is reflected in understandings of musical events one finds in ethnomusicology, an audience-orientated approach increasingly shared by literary theorists.

The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945–2010 brings together sixteen essays that explore the full diversity of British poetry since the Second World War, a period of signifi cant achievement in which varied styles and approaches have fl ourished. As a comprehensive critical, literary-historical and scholarly guide, this Companion offers not only new readings of a wide range of poets but a detailed account of the contexts in which their verse was written and received. Focusing on famous and neglected names alike, from Dylan Thomas to John Agard, leading scholars provide readers with insight into the ongoing importance and profundity of postwar poetry. In view of its influence on contemporary British Poetry, a chapter on Northern Irish Poetry is included.