Richard Lewis and Augustan American Poetry

PMLA ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-101
Author(s):  
J. A. Leo Lemay

Most Augustan poetry in America remains unattributed and unstudied. However, a critical study of the poems by Richard Lewis (1700?-34) reveals that he was not only the best Augustan American poet but also the first and most successful American nature poet before Bryant. His “To Mr. Samuel Hastings,” a progress piece on shipbuilding, is the earliest poem on an American industry. “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis,” a Thomsonian nature poem, and “Food for Clitics,” which anticipates Freneau, both contain the best elements of Lewis' poetry: a philosophy of scientific deism, praise of nature and the Creator, extended descriptions and catalogues of flowers, wildlife, and rivers presented in fine images which show his exact powers of observation, and the themes of the superiority of American nature, the wilderness as Eden, and the lost innocence of America. Pope refers to Lewis' “A Journey” in the Dunciad. His occasional verses, such as the one in honor of Lord Baltimore which shows Lewis' sense of history and patriotism, and his poems on Governor B. L. Calvert also reveal his merit. His reflection of contemporary poets and philosophers, his anticipation of significant American themes, and the excellence of his poetry all suggest that Lewis was an important poet.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
David Caplan

“American poetry’s two characteristics” explains the two characteristics which mark American poetry. On the one hand, several of its major figures promoted American poetry as essentially different from any other nation’s. Although the reasons they offer vary, they typically claim that American experience demands a different kind of expression. Such poets advocate for novelty, for a break with what is perceived to be outmoded and foreign. On the other hand, American poetry might be more rightly called profoundly transnational. American poetry often welcomes techniques, styles, and traditions originating from outside it. The two characteristics do not exist separately from each other. Rather, they work in a productive dialectic, inspiring both individual accomplishment and the broader field. Examples include Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes.


1976 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 87-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Griffin

The object of this paper is a reconsideration of the relationship in the Augustan poets between experience and convention, between individual life and inherited forms of expression. The problem, which haunts the Sonnets of Shakespeare and the poems of the Romantics no less than Horace and Propertius, has notoriously been answered in very different ways at different times. Scholars like Zielinski and Wili, for example, created romantic stories about Lydia and Cinara, and worked out Horace's feelings for them, the chronology of the affairs, and the way it all ended. In revulsion from these excesses, some influential modern writers go to an opposite extreme; they distinguish on the one hand ‘Greek’ or ‘Hellenistic’ elements, which are ‘unreal’ or ‘imaginary’, from ‘Roman’ ones which are ‘real’. Thus, to give a few examples at once, Professor G. Williams, in his important book, writes that ‘Horace's erotic poems are set in a world totally removed from the Augustan State’, while Professor Nisbet and Miss Hubbard, in their indispensable Commentary, say ‘The “love interest” of Horace's Odes is almost entirely Hellenistic’, and, of Odes I. 5, ‘Pyrrha herself is the wayward beauty of fiction, totally unlike the compliant scorta of Horace's own temporary affairs’. The argument here will be that this view is over-schematic and makes a distinction false, in this form, to the poets and to their society. It will, I think, prove possible to argue the point without falling into sentimentality or self-indulgence. The aim is not to reconstruct the vie passionelle of the poet, but to discover the setting and the tone in which he means his poems to be read.


PMLA ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs
Keyword(s):  

Among the jewel-like enigmas that are Mallarmé‘s sonnets, one that deserves, that even seems to demand, extensive commentary is the one which for convenience I call the “ptyx” sonnet, that little untitled masterpiece whose first verse runs: “Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx.” In and of itself this sonnet immediately suggests numerous problems. One's inclination to study it is increased by the fact that more material for study is available here than in the case of most of Mallarmé‘s poems; not only do we have an early version of the sonnet, but also, in the poet's correspondence, there are several at times cryptic references to it. All this calls for commentary.


1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Jonathan Raban

The post-Pound, post-Carlos Williams movement in American verse, represented by such poets as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn, has for the most part been received with a deadly critical hush, particularly in England. Apart from the timely special issue of Ian Hamilton's Review in 1964 on Black Mountain Poetry, together with some discreet championing by Eric Mottram and Donald Davie, attention to the New Verse has been largely confined to the off-campus underground scene. The Black Mountaineers are generally thought to be the exclusive province of the Fulcrum Press, Calder and Boyars, the International Times and a tiny circulating broadsheet published from Cambridge called The English Intelligencer. But this critical neglect is, I think, a symptom of a genuine distress in literature departments of universities about the nature of contemporary verse. On the one hand, we have acquired a sophisticated terminology for discussing most of the verbal objects we have learned to call poems: this terminology entails certain assumptions about the working of language itself–that, for instance, the semantic value of an utterance is housed entirely in the words that compose that utterance, that language is a collection of multiply-suggestive symbols, that the operation of language is rational, logical and continuous. On the other hand, we have been recently confronted with a body of verse which either defies, or comes off very badly from, our conventional terminology. Its most striking features have been a metrical, syntactical and logical discontinuity; an insistence that language works, not symbologically, but phenomenologically, as a happening in time and space; that the silence in which a poem occurs has as great a semantic value as the words which are imposed on that silence. Given this battery of opposed assumptions, it is hardly surprising that the case of the New American Poetry offers the unengaging spectacle of criticism and poetics confronting one another with at best a dubious silence, at worst, bared teeth.


Author(s):  
James Williams

Edward Lear wrote a well-known autobiographical poem that begins “How pleasant to know Mr Lear!” But how well do we really know him? On the one hand he is, in John Ashbery’s words, “one of the most popular poets who ever lived”; on the other hand he has often been overlooked or marginalized by scholars and in literary histories. This book, the first full length critical study of the poet since the 1980s, sets out to re-introduce Lear and to accord him his proper place: as a major Victorian figure of continuing appeal and relevance, and especially as a poet of beauty, comedy, and profound ingenuity. It approaches Lear’s work thematically, tracing some of its most fundamental subjects and situations. Grounded in attentive close readings, it connects Lear’s nonsense poetry with his various other creative endeavours: as a zoological illustrator and landscape painter, a travel writer, and a prolific diarist and correspondent.


1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-496
Author(s):  
Douglas N. Walton

In a critical study of some recent action theory Professor James Tomberlin [7] makes some insightful and suggestive remarks concerning the by now well known problem of "Smith and the airplane" formulated by Keith Lehrer and Richard Taylor [3]. While these remarks do significantly advance our knowledge of the nature of the problem, I would like to try to show why the strategy they indicate does not lead to a solution that represents any improvement on the one developed in [1], [8] and [2].The problem of Smith and the airplane is posed by the following apparent inconsistency. Suppose it is now shortly before 3:30 and Smith is at a country airport. The 3:30 plane is the only possible means whereby Smith can arrive at the city at 4:00. There is nothing to prevent Smith from leaving on the 3:30 plane, but he in fact does not do so: Then each of the following statements are true.


The doublet and triplet separations in the spectra of elements are, as has long been known, roughly proportional to the squares of their atomic weights, at least whenelements of the same group of the periodic table are compared. In the formulæ which give the series lines these separations arise by certain terms being deducted from the denominator of the typical sequences. For instance, in the alkalies if the p -sequence be written N/D m 2 , where D m = m +μ+α/ m the p -sequence for the second principal series has denominator D—Δ, and we get converging doublets; whereas the constant separations for the S and D series are formed by taking S 1 (∞) = D 1 (∞) = N/D 1 2 and S 2 (∞) = D 2 (∞)= N/(D 1 —Δ) 2 . It is clear that the values of Δ for the various elements will also be roughly proportional to the squares of the atomic weights. For this reason it is convenient to refer to them as the atomic weight terms. We shall denote them by Δ in the case of doublets and Δ 1 and Δ 2 in the case of triplets, using v as before to denote the separations. Two questions naturally arise. On the one hand what is the real relation between them and the atomic weights, and on the other what relation have they to the constitution of the spectra themselves ? The present communication is an attempt to throw some light on both these problems.


2006 ◽  
pp. 69-92
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych

Ukrainian religious studies has recently entered the world scientific community. Acquaintance with Western science, which has proven to be heterogeneous, often based on different methodological approaches and methodological means, has coincided with difficult internal transformations that have undergone all humanitarian knowledge in Ukraine after worldviews and political changes in society. In pursuit of its identity, domestic religious studies went, on the one hand, by contrasting itself with theology, and on the other, by distinguishing itself from scientific atheism. At first, the emergence of religious studies from the bosom of ideologized social science was more relevant. In the form of a critical study of religion, Soviet-era religious studies were included in scientific atheism. Therefore, religious studies came not as knowledge of religion, but as its critique.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Wafa Yousef Alkahtib

The aim of this study is to address the nostalgic elements found in the Writings of the Arab American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye is an American Palestinian poet whose works are mainly concerned with revealing her father’s homesickness and detailing his lomging for his homeland and childhood memories. The study makes an attempt to prove that the overwhelming nostalgia bonds the person with his lost homeland, and prevents him from forgetting his past; therefore’ these feelings stand as a barrier between him and his new world. Displacement and homesickness are the main elements that increased the nostalgia of the immigrants for their homelands. To emphasize this, the current paper analysed some of Nye's poems which handle the sever nostalgia that Nye's father started suffering since the early beginning of his arrival to San Antonio, Texas in the United States of America. Besides, the study argues that the nostalgic feeling for the homeland has been transmitted from father to son/ daughter, although the later doesn't have any memories in his/ her ex- homeland. Thus, Nye herself started feeling the nostalgia for a past she has never lived and to a homeland she has never seen.


Author(s):  
R. K. Nayak

The structure and function of the corpus luteum has been studied intensively, yet many of the factors and events in formation, maintenance, function and regression of this endocrine gland remain unclear. Christensen and Gillim reviewed the literature dealing with steroid-secreting cells including lutein cells. They clearly documented the role of smooth endoplasmic reticulum in steroid biosynthesis. The fine structure of the corpus luteum has been described in a variety of animals including rat, mouse, hamster, guinea pig, rabbit, pig, cow, sheep, deer, dog, racoon, mink, badger, lemur, armadillo and man. Recently, Enders reviewed in detail the results obtained on the cytology of corpus luteum granulosa lutein cells of early pregnancy.Novoa has recently attempted to correlate some reproductive phenomena in Camelidae with those of other domestic animals. Since the literature is essentially devoid of information on electron microscopy of the camel corpus luteum and since fresh camel corpus luteum specimens were obtained in excellent condition, a critical study was undertaken to provide definitive information on the structure and function of the corpus luteum during early stages of pregnancy and after parturition in the one-humped camel, Camelus dromedarius.


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