“Under the subtle wreath”: Louise Bogan, Felicia Hemans, and Petrarchan Poetics1

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nanora Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Women Poets ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind

Abstract Louise Bogan joked that in a former life she had been “Felicia Hemans.” A lush Romantic and an austere Modernist, Hemans and Bogan appear polar opposites, yet these learned women poets shared a laureate poetics of Love and Fame. Hemans alludes directly to Petrarch’s laureate triumph in “The Magic Glass”; in poetry and prose she portrays the difficult laureateships of Sappho and Tasso. Both Hemans and Bogan seemed laureates to their contemporaries and successors, yet both found laurels an ambiguous donnée, Bogan a “burden” among flowers, Hemans a fiery crown for the likes of “the Bride of the Greek Isle.” Petrarch gained his laurels in a formal triumph at Rome, a scene mandating abjuration and entailing defeat. His I trionfi enacted triumph and its reversals in a sequence mounting from Love to Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. Bogan’s laurels were similarly fugual, a “subtle wreath” combining “the line of feeling” of “sentimental” women’s poetry with “the line of thought” in masculine Metaphysical Modernism. The poems of Bogan and Hemans that most vex critics – Bogan’s life-denying “Henceforth, from the Mind,” Hemans’s fame-abjuring “Corinne at the Capitol” – read differently as Petrarchan triumphs, that is, as abjurations signaling fresh triumphs to come.

scholarly journals NEW MYTHS, NEW SCRIPTS: REVISIONIST MYTHOPOESIS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN’S POETRY

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Deirdre Byrne
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Women ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
American Women ◽  
South African Women ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

Considerable theoretical and critical work has been done on the way British and American women poets re-vision (Rich 1976) male-centred myth. Some South African women poets have also used similar strategies. My article identifies a gap in the academy’s reading of a significant, but somewhat neglected, body of poetry and begins to address this lack of scholarship. I argue that South African women poets use their art to re-vision some of the central constructs of patriarchal mythology, including the association of women with the body and the irrational, and men with the mind and logic. These poems function on two levels: They demonstrate that the constructs they subvert are artificial; and they create new and empowering narratives for women in order to contribute to the reimagining of gender relations.

“LADY'S GREEK” (WITH THE ACCENTS): A METRICAL TRANSLATION OF EURIPIDES BY A. MARY F. ROBINSON

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 591-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Women's Colleges ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
New Women ◽  
The Future ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
To Come ◽  
Women Of Letters

How to map women's poetry at the end of the nineteenth century was a question already posed by Vita Sackville-West in 1929, in her essay, “The Women Poets of the 'Seventies.” She speculated that the 1870s “perhaps might prove the genesis of the literary woman's emancipation,” as a time of transition when “women with a taste for literature” could follow the lead of Victorian poetesses like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while also leading women's poetry forward into the future (111). According to Sackville-West, “Mrs. Browning” seemed an exemplary woman of letters to this generation, because “she had been taught Greek; her father had been a man of culture; and she had married a poet” (112). With the formation of women's colleges and the entry of women into higher education, however, another generation of literary women was emerging. What distinguished these new women of letters was a desire for classical education independent of fathers and husbands, demonstrating an independence of mind anxiously parodied byPunchmagazine: The woman of the future! she'll be deeply read, that's certain,With all the education gained at Newnham or at Girton;Or if she turns to classic tomes, a literary roamer,She'll give you bits of Horace or sonorous lines from Homer.Oh pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerningTo overload a woman's brains and cram our girls with learning,You'll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing,To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing. As quoted by Sackville-West in her essay (114), this parody is an equivocal tribute to the generation of women just before her own. Although (in her estimation) the women poets of the seventies produced “nothing of any remarkable value,” nevertheless she admired their intellectual ambition: “a general sense of women scribbling, scribbling” was the “most encouraging sign of all” that the woman of the future was about to come into being, as an idea to be fulfilled by the New Woman of thefin de siècle(131).

HOMERIC CONCERNS: A METAPOETIC READING OF LUCRETIUS, DE RERUM NATURA 2.1–19

2013 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 780-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydnor Roy
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Great Pleasure ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Programmatic Statement ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Line Spread

Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventise terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas,sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est.suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri 5per campos instructa tua sine parte pericli.sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenereedita doctrina sapientum templa serena,despicere unde queas alios passimque videreerrare atque viam palantis quaerere vitae, 10certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate,noctes atque dies niti praestante laboread summas emergere opes rerumque potiri.o miseras hominum mentes, o pectora caeca!qualibus in tenebris vitae quantisque periclis 15degitur hoc aevi quodcumquest! nonne viderenil aliud sibi naturam latrare, nisi utquicorpore seiunctus dolor absit, mensque fruaturiucundo sensu cura semota metuque?(Lucr. 2.1–19)It is pleasant, when the winds stir up the waters on the great sea,to watch the great struggle of another from land;not because it is a great pleasure that anyone be troubled,but because it is pleasant to observe the troubles you yourself lack.It is also pleasant to watch the great contests of war 5spread out over the plains without taking any part in the danger.But nothing is more pleasing than to hold lofty yet calm templesthat are well defended by the teachings of wise men,from which you can look down and see others everywherego astray and wander while seeking the path of their life, 10competing in wits and contending over their nobility;throughout nights and days they strive with outstanding labourto come out at the peak of riches and have power over everything.O wretched minds of men, O blind hearts!In what shadows of life and in how many dangers 15is this bit of life, whatever it may be, being spent by you! Do you not seethat nature barks for nothing other than this – thatgrief be separated from the body and far away, and that the mind enjoypleasant feelings cut off from anxiety and fear? Epicurus' advice to his young friend Pythocles to ‘flee all education, raising up the top sail’ (παιδείαν δὲ πᾶσαν, μακάριε, ϕεῦγε τἀκάτιον ἀράμενος, Diog.Laert. 10.6 = Epicurus fr. 163 Us.) contains an allusion to Circe's advice to Odysseus in Odyssey 12.37–58. For much of the Greek (and Roman) world, education was based on the Homeric epics, and thus Epicurus' statement represents a complicated position towards Homer in particular and poetry in general. Epicurean philosophy rejects poetry because it is misleading about the gods and the nature of the soul, but Epicurus and his followers, most notably Philodemus and Lucretius, engage in poetic allusion and even the composition of poetry. Much work has been done on allusions to poetry in all three writers, but I hope here to bring out a heretofore unnoticed poetic allusion at the start of De rerum natura Book 2, in which Lucretius makes a programmatic statement about not only his philosophy, but also his poetry and its place in the poetic tradition.

LYRICAL STUDIES

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 521-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Jackson ◽  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
On Line ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Victorian Women Poets

THE VICTORIAN POETESS has become as important a figure in the late twentieth century as she was in the late nineteenth — perhaps because she seems now, as then, to have lapsed into the obscurity of literary history. In recent years feminist critics have been interested in reclaiming a tradition of nineteenth-century popular poetesses whose verse circulated broadly on both sides of the Atlantic. A spate of new anthologies, annotated editions, and critical collections (as well as texts now available on-line) has reintroduced supposedly lost women poets into the canon of Victorian poetry. Indeed, this recovery is often predicated on a rhetoric of loss, as if only by losing women poets we can rediscover and read them anew. Thus in recent advertisements for such anthologies, we read that Victorian Women Poets (edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds in 1995) “aims to recover the lost map of Victorian women’s poetry,” and British Women Poets of the 19th Century (edited by Margaret Higonnet in 1996) “restores the voices and reputations of these ‘lost’ artists”; likewise, the compendious Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (edited by Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock in 1996) “rediscovers rich and diverse female traditions.”

scholarly journals The social struggle against death: Human strategies for immortality

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (13-14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Galić
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Biological Part ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Social Struggle ◽  
The Social ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Human Death

Death is an infallible part of the human life, and what makes humandifferent from all other beings is fact that he knows that he isgoing to die. Knowing this, human beings are spending their wholelife knowing that the day of their end is going to come. It is clear thatdeath has its biological part, also as a huge event in the existenceof all life forms, including human, death has its philosophical pointof view, and finally, unlike some may disagree, death itself is a hugesocial phenomena as well, and as such, the social influence of deathdeserves close attention and its own part in the social science studies.This paper analyzes the presence of the death in human culture, includinginstitutions, rituals and beliefs following the discourse of lateZygmunt Bauman who left huge influence on this field of study. Sincethe earliest forms of communities, humans are trying to overcomethe death, the state of “after-life” and some form of immortality ofthe being is something that is common to all religions and beliefs everknown to mankind, which stands as a evidence that the final void ofnon-existence know to us as death is something that always presentedhorror in the mind of the humans.

Women’s Poetry in the Magazines

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Batt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Poetic Expression ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Poetic Community ◽  
Female Poets ◽  
Poetic Culture ◽  
Shed Light

Nearly every monthly magazine published in the eighteenth century had a poetry section, a regular slot given over in each issue to poetic expression of all kinds, written by a broad range of writers, both male and female, provincial and metropolitan, amateur and established. This chapter assesses the place that women poets, both familiar and unfamiliar, occupied in the rich poetic culture that made magazines possible. Jennifer Batt’s case studies are drawn from national periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), London Magazine (1732–85) and British Magazine (1746–51), as well as from regional magazines. Collectively, these examples shed light on the possibilities that periodicals made available to female poets (of giving them a voice, a readership, a public profile and place within a poetic community). At the same, Batt demonstrates that women could be exploited by the medium and its editorial practices (publishing without author consent, for instance, or intrusive framing of poems) in ways that have overdetermined women poets’ critical reception.

Anthology Publication and the Woman Poet

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-70
Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First Time

Chapter 1 investigates the moment at mid-century when American women’s poetry was, for the first time, being collected and marketed to a wide audience. By looking closely at the structures and visual components of the anthologies of the late 1840s, this chapter shows just how vexed the placement of the “American woman poet” into literary culture was. While women poets had been deployed in the service of a narrative about American literary culture earlier, it was with the creation of these anthologies that a whole host of conventions got embraced by writers and editors alike. By highlighting the diversity of approaches and poems contained within these anthologies, this chapter returns to the ways in which women’s poetry resisted being flattened into one kind of poem and women poets into one image.

Word knowledge, learning and acquisition in a second language: Proposed replications of Elgort (2011) and Qiao and Forster (2017)

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Irina Elgort
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
L2 Word Learning ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
To Come ◽  
Prime Lexicality Effect ◽  
The Mind ◽  
L2 Vocabulary

AbstractWhat does it mean to learn a word? How can we tell when a sequence of letters or sounds becomes a word in the mind of the learner? While many second language (L2) vocabulary teaching and learning studies continue to use traditional vocabulary tests to measure learning (such as multiple choice, translation, gap-fill), these measures tend to come short when researchers want to address theoretical questions about the nature of L2 word knowledge. In the present paper, I argue for conceptualising word learning as lexicalisation, which necessitates the use of alternative approaches to measuring learning. I then propose approximate and conceptual replications of two theoretically motivated L2 word learning studies, Elgort (2011) and Qiao and Forster (2017), that used the Prime Lexicality Effect as a measure of lexicalisation of deliberately learned L2 words.

scholarly journals A discipline for the avoidance of unnecessary assumptions

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Scalar Case ◽  
Mean Square ◽  
William Of Ockham ◽  
Know How ◽  
Mathematical Formulas ◽  
The Subject ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Available Information ◽  
Do So

Although unnecessary assumptions are something we all try to avoid, advice on how to do so is much harder to come by than admonition. The most widely quoted dictum on the subject, often referred to by writers on philosophy as “Ockham's razor” and attributed generally to William of Ockham, states “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”. (Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.) As pointed out in reference [I], however, the authenticity of this attribution is questionable.The same reference mentions Newton's essentially similar statement in his Principia Mathematica of 1726. Hume [3] is credited by Tribus [2c] with pointing out in 1740 that the problem of statistical inference is to find an assignment of probabilities that “uses the available information and leaves the mind unbiased with respect to what is not known.” The difficulty is that often our data are incomplete and we do not know how to create an intelligible interpretation without filling in some gaps. Assumptions, like sin, are much more easily condemned than avoided.In the author's opinion, important results have been achieved in recent years toward solving the problem of how best to utilize data that might heretofore have been regarded as inadequate. The approach taken and the relevance of this work to certain actuarial problems will now be discussed.Bias and PrejudiceOne type of unnecessary assumption lies in the supposition that a given estimator is unbiased when in fact it has a bias. We need not discuss this aspect of our subject at length here since what we might consider the scalar case of the general problem is well covered in textbooks and papers on sampling theory. Suffice it to say that an estimator is said to be biased if its expected value differs by an incalculable degree from the quantity being estimated. Such differences can arise either through faulty procedures of data collection or through use of biased mathematical formulas. It should be realized that biased formulas and procedures are not necessarily improper when their variance, when added to the bias, is sufficiently small as to yield a mean square error lower than the variance of an alternative, unbiased estimator.

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