Lyric Encounters

A new survey of twentieth-century U.S. poetry that places a special emphasis on poets who have put lyric poetry in dialogue with other forms of creative expression, including modern art, the novel, jazz, memoir, and letters. Contesting readings of twentieth-century American poetry as hermetic and narcissistic, Morris interprets the lyric as a scene of instruction and thus as a public-oriented genre. American poets from Robert Frost to Sherman Alexie bring aesthetics to bear on an exchange that asks readers to think carefully about the ethical demands of reading texts as a reflection of how we metaphorically "read" the world around us and the persons, places, and things in it. His survey focuses on poems that foreground scenes of conversation, teaching, and debate involving a strong-willed lyric speaker and another self, bent on resisting how the speaker imagines the world.

What is distinctive about Greek lyric? How should we conceptualize it in relation to literature, song, music, rhetoric, history? This discussion investigates such questions, analysing a range of influential methodologies that have shaped the recent history of the field.

Engaging with four English poems or groups of poems-the anonymous medieval Crucifixion lyrics; William Langland's Piers Plowman, John Donne's Divine Poems, and John Milton's Paradise Lost-this book examines the nature of poetic encounter with God. At the same time, the author makes original contributions to the discussion of critical dilemmas in the study of each poem or group of poems. The main linguistic focus of this book is on the nature of dialogue with God in religious poetry, an area much neglected by grammarians and often overlooked in studies of literary style. It constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between literature and theology.

Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal. The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.

Just as our society delights in citations, quotations, and allusions in myriad contexts, not least in popular song, late medieval poets and composers knew well that such references could greatly enrich their own works. In The Art of the Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut, author Yolanda Plumley explores the penchant for borrowing in chansons and lyrics from fourteenth-century France, uncovering a practice integral to the experiments in form, genre, and style that ushered in a new school of lyric. Working across disciplinary boundaries, Plumley traces creative appropriations in the burgeoning "fixed forms" of this new tradition to build a more intimate understanding of the shared experience of poetry and music in the generations leading up to, and including, Guillaume de Machaut. Exploring familiar and less studied collections of songs as well as lyrics without music, this book sheds valuable light on the poetic and musical knowledge of authors and their audiences, and on how poets and composers devised their works and engaged their readers or listeners. It presents fresh insights into when and in which milieus the classic Ars nova polyphonic chanson took root and flourished, and into the artistic networks of which Machaut formed a part. As Plumley reveals, old songs lingered alongside the new in the collective imagination well beyond what the written sources imply, reminding us of the continued importance of memory and orality in this age of increasing literacy. The first detailed study of citational practice in the French fourteenth-century song-writing tradition, The Art of Grafted Song will appeal to students and scholars of medieval French music and literature, cultural historians, and others interested in the historical and social context of music and poetry in the late Middle Ages.

'Metalepsis' is a term from classical rhetoric, but in the twentieth century, it was re-framed more broadly as a crossing of the boundaries that separate distinct narrative worlds. This modern notion of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette, has so far largely been theorized on the basis of examples from post-modern novels and films. Yet metalepsis has a much greater potential to address all sorts of transgressions between 'worlds' or 'levels', not only in post-modern but also pre-modern literature. This volume explores metalepsis in classical antiquity, considering questions such as: if metalepsis consists fundamentally in the breaking down of barriers, what sort of barriers and what sort of transgressions can the concept be fruitfully applied to? Can it be used within approaches other than narratology? Does metalepsis require recognisable levels of reality and fictionality, and if so, what role might be played by other planes, such as the past, the mythical or the divine? What form does metalepsis take in less obviously 'narrative' genres, such as lyric poetry? And how should it be understood in visual media? Reflecting on these questions sheds new light on important dynamics in ancient texts, and advances literary theory by probing how explorations of ancient metalepsis might change, refine, or extend our understanding of the concept itself.

The history of the epic-ranging from the heroic narratives of cultural origin found in Homer and Virgil to the tumultuous theological and political conflicts depicted by Dante or Milton-is nearly as old as literature itself. But the epic is also made and remade by its present, adapted to the pressures and formal necessities of its particular cultural moment. Examining modernist poetry's epic turn in the years between the two World Wars, C.D. Blanton's ambitious study charts the inversion of what Ezra Pound called "a poem including history" into a fractured and hollowed form, a "negated epic" that struggles not only to acknowledge the distant past but also to conceive its immediate present. Compelled to register the force of a larger historical totality it cannot directly represent, the negated epic reorients the function of poetic language, trading expression or signification for concrete but often buried reference, remaking the poem as an instrument of dialectical reason in the process. Epic Negation turns first to T. S. Eliot, productively pairing The Waste Land with The Criterion, the literary review it announced in 1922, to argue that Eliot's journal systematically realizes the editorial and critical method through which modernism's epochal poem sought to think its moment whole, developing a totalizing account of interwar culture. Dividing the epic's critical function from its style, The Criterion not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the crisis facing bourgeois society, formed in the image of a Marxism it opposes. World War II's approach serves to organize the second half of Blanton's study, as he traces the dislocated formal effects of a serial epic gone underground. In the tense elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms cryptically divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness, what can be said in a poem from what cannot. And, finally, with H.D.'s Trilogy-written under bombardment in a terse exchange with Freud's famous rewriting of biblical history in Moses and Monotheism--the poetic image itself lapses, consigning epic to the silent historical force of the unconscious. Uniquely conceived and deftly executed, Epic Negation transforms our understanding of modernist poetics and the concept of epic more broadly.

Examining a wide range of ekphrastic poems, David Kennedy argues that contemporary British poets writing out of both mainstream and avant-garde traditions challenge established critical models of ekphrasis with work that is more complex than representational or counter-representational responses to paintings in museums and galleries. Even when the poem appears to be straightforwardly representational, it is often selectively so, producing a 'virtual' work that doesn't exist in actuality. Poets such as Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Hughes, and Gillian Clarke, Kennedy suggests, relish the ekphrastic encounter as one in which word and image become mutually destabilizing. Similarly, other poets engage with the source artwork as a performance that participates in the ethical realm. Showing that the ethical turn in ekphrastic poetry is often powerfully gendered, Kennedy also surveys a range of ekphrastic poets from the Renaissance and nineteenth century to trace a tradition of female ekphrastic poetry that includes Pauline Stainer and Frances Presley. Kennedy concludes with a critique of ekphrastic exercises in creative writing teaching, proposing that ekphrastic writing that takes greater account of performance spectatorship may offer more fruitful models for the classroom than the narrativizing of images.