scholarly journals Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians: Amy Lowell's Haunting Modernism

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-589
Author(s):  
Hannah Roche
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Robert Lowell ◽  
Ted Hughes ◽  
Male Dominated

By the end of the twentieth century, Amy Lowell's poetry had been all but erased from modernism, with her name resurfacing only in relation to her dealings with Ezra Pound, her distant kinship with Robert Lowell, or her correspondence with D. H. Lawrence. The tale of how Pound rejected Lowell's Imagism, rebranding his movement as Vorticism and spurning the ‘Amygism’ of Lowell's Some Imagist Poets anthologies (1915–1917), has become something of a modernist myth. Recent critics have begun the project of re-evaluating and ultimately reinstating Lowell, but the extent of her contribution to modernist poetry and poetics – and her influence on other, more popular, twentieth-century writers – has not yet been acknowledged. This essay encourages readers to see the apparitional Lowell, both in the male-dominated world of modernism and in celebrated works by writers that followed. By drawing attention to the weighty impact of Lowell's poetry on Lawrence – and, later, on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – I provide compelling reasons not only to revisit Lowell but also to reassess those texts that are haunted by her presence.

Just Letters: Corresponding Poets

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Haughton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Philip Larkin ◽  
Ted Hughes ◽  
Art Form

This chapter explores poets’ letters as ‘an art form’ in the post-Romantic period, exploring the bearing of poets’ letters on their poems (and vice versa). It reflects on the key role played by epistolary dialogue in the creation and circulation of poetry in the modern period, documenting the ways poets first launched poems in letters to friends, and used letters to sketch out their ideas about poetry and poetics. It comment on the practice of a number of nineteenth-century poets who used letters to launch ideas about their poetry (including Keats, the Brownings, Hopkins and Emily Dickinson), before moving on to consider the equally crucial role of correspondence in the work of twentieth-century poets (including Bishop, Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Larkin). In offering a survey of this broad epistolary territory, it also outlines an idea of an epistolary poetics.

Collaboration

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-191
Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Ted Hughes ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter examines a particular instance of canonical late-twentieth-century poetry that shows close collaboration with the visual arts. It takes as a case study the work of Ted Hughes, who is often considered central to the development of the English poetic canon, in his collaboration with the American artist and publisher Leonard Baskin in producing the 1973 book, Cave Birds. The trade volume initially contained over ten of Baskin’s pen-and-ink images (which had inspired Hughes to pen his poems). Why, then, are Baskin’s artworks no longer published alongside Hughes’s poems? This chapter puts drawing and text back into dialogue, offering a sustained intra-artistic reading of an image-poem pair as it resonates with the vision of Michelangelo, Michael Ayrton, Giacometti, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. Artwork and literary text interact before our viewing-reading eyes, performing an eloquent expression of the complexity of aesthetic co-constitution, across media and history.

Editing Twentieth-Century Letters: The Road to Words in Air

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Travisano
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
Robert Lowell ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
The Road

This chapter offers a personal account of how its author came to edit Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). In doing so it reflects on how previous editions of correspondence were edited, including The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941 (1950), and the extent to which letter writing offers readers powerful examples of literary style while at the same time providing deep glimpses into personal and literary history. The chapter also considers how the practice of editing and publishing the letters of poets has changed since 1950.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

scholarly journals Ezra Pound's Poetry between Victorianism and Modernism: A Historical-Biographical Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 826-832
Author(s):  
Kizhan Salar Abdulqadr ◽  
Roz Jamal Omer ◽  
Ranjdar Hama Sharif
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Academic Discussion ◽  
Biographical Analysis

This paper examines the short poems of Ezra Pound, a group of works that have long been the subject of academic discussion in the field of literary analysis. Although Ezra Pound is typically considered a Modernist poet, some clear elements of Victorianism can be discerned within his revolutionary forms of poetry. The paper will offer a historical and biographical background to Pound's work before moving on to an analysis and discussion of the poet's short poems. While previous studies of Ezra Pound's poetry have adopted various critical approaches, we believe that this is the first study that compares the influence of Modernism and Victorianism on the work of this important figure in English verse of the early twentieth century.

scholarly journals Moving out of the Attic: Susan Glaspell and the American She-Tragedy

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Zaid Ibrahim Ismael ◽  
Jinan Waheed Jassim
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Vicious Circle ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Susan Glaspell

Midwestern American dramatist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was one of the early voices in the American theater who explored gender issues and woman’s rights at the beginning of the twentieth century. She portrays women in distress, trying to find an outlet from the vicious circle of loneliness and abuse in which they live. Despite the fact that her characters resist oppression and degradation and try to defy the patriarchal authority that restrains them, they are often overwhelmed by this powerful male-dominated system. As a result, they grow defensive and resort to violence and murder in order to avenge themselves from the society that dehumanizes them. They ultimately fall prey to their tragic fate, not necessarily death, but psychological disintegration and incarceration. Glaspell’s tragic heroines are outsiders, living in a world that thwarts their dreams to have a free life beyond the prescribed roles and social demands of house management, domesticity, and social propriety. This study applies the feminist theory of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, introduced in their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, to two of Glaspell’s major plays, namely Trifles and The Verge. It also aims at tracing the elements of the Restoration ‘she-tragedy’ in these plays to prove to what extent Glaspell is a master of this form of writing.

Conversation with Sylvia in Colour

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-581
Author(s):  
Jane Reece
Keyword(s):  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Ted Hughes ◽  
The Many ◽  
Poetry Collection

This paper takes the form of two imaginary meetings with the resurrected figure of the writer Sylvia Plath, in 1967 and 2007, informed by the work of Lieblich (1997) and Speedy (2005; 2007b). It is loosely based on recollections by Al Alvarez (1974:20–53; 2005:29–33), one of the last people to see Plath alive before her death on 13 February 1967, and from Plath's journals (1983). I have drawn from Plath's autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, the many speculations on Plath's last days that provided material for Wintering (Moses, 2003), and from Birthday Letters (1999) — Ted Hughes' poetry collection concerning his marriage to Sylvia Plath.

The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

2015 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-360
Author(s):  
Diederik Oostdijk
Keyword(s):  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Ted Hughes
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