THE NEW PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POETRY AND POETICS ALEX P REMINGER AND T. V. F. BROGAN CO-EDITORS
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THE NEW PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POETRY AND POETICS ALEX P REMINGER AND T. V. F. BROGAN CO-EDITORS
FRANK]. WARNKE, t O. B. HARDISON, JR.,t AND EARL M INER ASSOCIATE EDITORS
PRINCE TON, NEW JERSEY P R I N C E T ON U N I V E R S I TY P R E S S 1993
Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved
Preparation of this volume was made possible in part by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency dedicated to furthering the values of humane scholarship and culture in America, and by grants from other major foundations and private donors who wish to remain anonymous. Without their support this book would not have been possible. Publication has been aided by a grant from the Lacy Lockert Fund of Princeton University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data T he New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank]. Warnke, O. B. Hardison, Jr. , and Earl Miner, associate editors p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references ISBN: 0-691-03271-8 (hardback edition) ISBN: 0-691-02123-6 (paperback edition) 1. Poetry-Dictionaries. 2. Poetics-Dictionaries. 3. Poetry-History and Criticism. I. Preminger, Alex. II. Brogan, T. V. F. (Terry V. F.) PN1021 P75 .
808.1 '03-dc20
92-41887
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Composed in ITC New Baskerville and custom fonts Designed and produced by Leximetrics, Inc., South Bend, Indiana Printed in the United States of America 7 9 10 8
for
Jacqueline Vaught Brogan Augusta Preminger and for
R. M. E. De Rycke
PREFACE 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 comprehen sive 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 third edition follows upon the first edition of 1965, supplemented in 1974, which was well received and which has been consulted, over the years, by countless readers both in America and abroad: indeed, one Burmese scholar wrote us to say "there are relatively few books in our library, and the Princeton Encyclopedia is one of the most heavily used of all. We have few good accounts of English poetry available to us here; indeed, we have few reliable accounts of Burmese poetry either. We send our students to the Encyclopedia for both." In late 1984, when the Editors agreed to undertake a third edition, it was obvious to all that what would be required would be almost entirely a new text. The period since 1965 has been a time of extraordinarily vigorous, almost dizzying change in literary studies: both the amount and the variety of work has increased geometrically over that prior to 1965, with the result that issues of interpretation, history, gender, culture, and theory now dominate the critical scene which were largely unknown in 1965. The same can be said for developments in the poetries of Mrica, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America: recent political changes in these areas of the world have been swift, extensive, and complex, resulting in burgeoning national literatures. All told, the last 25 years have witnessed enor mous changes in both the practice of criticism in the West and also the writing of poetry around the world.
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PREFACE We have sought to produce a work which retains what was most valuable from the last edition, adds extensive coverage of all new poetries and critical theories, provides more extensive bibliographies on every topic for further reading, im proves on cross-referencing, and is written in clear prose, yet keeps within the bounds of a single volume. Virtually no former entry has been reprinted without significant changes, and over 90% of the original entries have been extensively revised. Most major entries have been rewritten altogether. We have added 162 entirely new entries. Still, we have not diluted the editorial standards for scope, treatment, accuracy, and clarity of discourse which readers have come to expect from this book. The design of the book, its organizational principles and format, will be familiar to readers of the previous editions. This edition differs from its predecessors in five respects. First, some of the accounts given in the original edition were the best of their kind available both then and, with moderate revision, now. In these cases, we thought it essential to build the new texts upon what our expert reviewers told us was irreplaceable in the previous editions. We have not sought new treatments simply because they are new. We have not, however, left former treatments unchanged; on the contrary, we have in many cases reduced and combined the treatments given in the original entries so as to make room for discussion of new perspectives on those topics. One of the significant reasons for undertaking a new Encyclopedia is not merely so that we can address new topics or approaches but also so that we can survey new work on old topics. We are now able to give much more sophisticated accounts of some traditional subjects (e.g. prosody) than were previously possible. Second, we have increased dramatically our coverage of emergent and non Western poetries. It was the present work which first provided American readers with extended surveys of the world's poetries, and we have sought to build upon that foundation. Our foremost concern has been to produce more extensive, more accurate, and more sophisticated accounts of the development of poetry in each language. We now provide coverage of every significant poetic tradition in the world, coverage which has increased, all told, by fully a third over that in the last edition. We have made major expansions of our treatment of African, Middle Eastern, Central American, South American, Caribbean, Pacific, and Asian poet ries. Certain traditions have been given greatly increased space. The numerous languages and poetries of the Indian subcontinent are surveyed in an entry on "Indian Poetry" which tripled in size and is flanked by new entries on "Indian Poetics" and "Indian Prosody." African poetry written in both vernacular and foreign languages is now covered in seven entries. Our treatment of the several
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PREFACE indigenous languages of the Americas has been expanded. This effort reflects not an intention to give disproportionate space to one group of traditions over another but rather the dramatic increase in our knowledge of non-Western poetries relative to Western ones over the past 25 years. We have sought to bring a wider perspective into many other kinds of entries as well. In many entries on poetics and theory, e.g. the entry on "Poetics" itself, we have worked to differentiate the discussions of Oriental and Occidental poetics. We have added a comparative dimension to a wide range of entries which treat topics that might be assumed to be chiefly Western, e.g. "Epic," "Narrative Poetry," "Lyric" (now a global survey),"Love Poetry," "Rhyme," "Meter," and"Allegory," and even to smaller entries, e.g. "Rhyme-prose" (which discusses not only Latin but Chinese, Persian, and Arabic) and "Poetic Contests." We have added major new entries on Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese poetics. Third, we now cover all those movements in recent criticism and literary theory that bear on poetry. We provide entirely new accounts of"Criticism," "Theory," "Poetics," "Romantic and Postromantic Poetics," "Twentieth-century Poetics" (five newly written sections),"Modernism and Postmodernism," "Structuralism," "Semiotics," "Marxist Criticism," "Psychological Criticism," "Feminist Poetics," "Reader-response Criticism," "Cultural Criticism," "Historicism," "Deconstruc tion," "Ethics and Criticism," "Pluralism," and "Representation." We expanded the entry on "Poetry, Theories of." Several of these new entries are among the longest in the volume. Throughout, we have sought to provide a balanced treat ment of critical issues and noncritical ones: many entries are subdivided so as to treat both theory and history, for example. Still, we must reiterate that this is primarily an encyclopedia of poetry, not an encyclopedia of criticism. We treat those aspects of critical theory that bear on poetry to any significant degree; hence the discussions always return to poetry. When the first edition was compiled, in the early 1960s, the axes of criticism in America were largely aligned with the study of lyric poetry, and New Criticism overwhelmingly dominated pedagogy in American universities. In the intervening 25 years, the axes of criticism have in part shifted away from poetry to the study of criticism itself, and poetry itself is now much less read in America than prose narrative. Yet poetic traditions are flourishing elsewhere in the world, and readers everywhere still want information about the forms and techniques of poetry. Many readers will come to the present work for a clear explanation of hermeneutics or deconstruction, of course, but many others will come for an informative overview of Chinese poetry, and some will come simply wanting an accurate definition of
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PREFACE
zeugma. We hope to meet all these needs. In addition, where it has seemed appropriate, we have allowed our coverage to extend a little way past poetry into prose narrative and drama. Theory of narrative is addressed in long entries on "Narrative Poetry" and"Epic," theory of drama, similarly, in"Dramatic Poetry," "Tragedy," and"Comedy." Conversely, some other entries that might be thought merely to concern narrative, e.g."Fiction" and"Plot," have been conceived more broadly, as is proper. In the selection of new topics, we have exercised care. Rigorous screening has reduced a much longer list of current critical topics and terms to 162 new entries. We do not provide coverage of critical terms which are minor or narrow or which have had a very short half-life: these can be found in any of the numerous dictionaries and literary handbooks that have appeared in recent years. Fourth, the Editors have taken a more active role in the building of bibliog raphies. On virtually every topic, we now provide more extended yet still rigorous finding-lists for further reading. As before, bibliographies are confined to secon dary works only; primary texts are normally cited in the text of the entries. Bibliographic items appear in chronological order, all works by one author being listed together; editions cited are the best or most recent ones that are authorita tive, not the first, and reprints are ignored. Periodical abbreviations conform to the acronyms in the MLA International Bibliography or other standard sources such as L'Annie philologique. Fifth, cross-referencing both within entries and by independent blind entries a practice not fully exploited in previous editions, which were not prepared on computer-has been greatly expanded. Experience with the first two editions showed that the value of cross-references is difficult to overestimate. We have added nearly five hundred new blind entries and literally thousands of cross-refer ences in the text and at the ends of entries. In blind entries, cross-references are often listed in order of significance rather than alphabetically. The author or authors of each entry are listed by acronym at the ends of their respective contributions. The sequence of initials at the end of an entry does not, therefore, necessarily reflect decreasing order of responsibility for authorship. The relations between old authors and new (i.e. between original texts and revisions) and the proportions of work among multiple authors have been varied and complex; in some cases the author whose initials appear last was the principal author. It has proven impossible to represent all these relations succinctly, and since this entire volume has been very much a collaborative effort, it has seemed to the editors reasonable simply to list authors by initials in chronological se-
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PREFACE quence. Note, too, that sections of longer entries are commonly separately authored, so that one acronym at the end of an entry does not necessarily indicate that it had a sole author. We have tried to give credit to each person who made a significant contribution to an article. The names and affiliations of authors corre sponding to their acronyms will be found in the list of Contributors, in a format which we believe to be improved over that used in previous editions. By policy, every manuscript submitted was read by the Editors and refereed by at least one independent expert, often several, then revised by its author in light of these reviews before being accepted for publication. Some comment should be made about the circumstances in which this volume appears. The original editorial team which began work in 1984 comprised five editors, who divided responsibilities as follows: Professor Preminger handled the national poetry entries; Professor Brogan handled poetics, prosody, rhetoric, and genre; Professor Miner handled Asian poetries; Professor Warnke handled trans lations; and Professor Hardison handled criticism. But in 1988, Professor Warnke was killed in an accident in Antwerp, and in 1990, Professor Hardison died unexpectedly in Washington, D.C. Finally, Professor Preminger, the major force behind this book since its inception, was forced to withdraw prematurely in 1988 on account of declining health and unsuccessful surgery. Editorial work sub sequent to these events fell to the remaining full Editor. For these and, even more directly, other reasons having to do with the state of the professoriate and the conditions of knowledge just now, this has been a difficult time to attempt a work such as the present one. A reference work must always distance itself from its time while it works to embrace that time. It has not been our aim simply to cover recent trends: an eye for fashion is not one of the requisites of reference works. Our purpose has been to record, assimilate, and appraise new perspectives, not to embody any one of them. In certain respects the shape of the Encyclopedia has adapted itself to the changed critical climate which it seeks to embody and describe, while in other respects-and in the long view these are surely the more important-it has sought to place new critical perspectives within the larger philosophical contexts so far developed for discourse in poetics, giving due attention to ways in which the new views may have altered the boundaries of those contexts. In certain respects-on issues of gender, for example-critical work over the past 25 years has altered the nature of our thinking about literature permanently. But some other theories have quickly come and gone, and yet others are still too new to judge very well. We do not bring forth a new edition of this work in the belief that the new modes of
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PREFACE thinking of the past two decades have put an end to those of the preceding two millennia; quite the contrary. We have brought forth a new edition because it is now imperative that we take stock, as fully and accurately as is possible within present limitations, of those new modes, and in so doing set them alongside older modes toward the increased understanding of both. In any event, the standards for discourse have not changed. We support a critical discourse which is pluralist and civil, wherein the same criteria for evi dence, persuasion, argument, and proof apply to all who wish to engage critics and readers of poetry. We continue to believe in the necessity of admitting all differing voices as the sole means for ensuring the continuance of that discourse. We reiterate the reality and importance of facts as the indispensable correlates to values. We continue to believe that it is possible to give an account of work on a given topic that is a fair representation of greatly differing perspectives on that topic. We have aimed to present accounts that are not mere summaries of opinions, for in fact some entries in this volume provide more sophisticated theoretical accounts than are presently available anywhere else in print. We see our purpose as one not of putting facts in boxes but of making connections hitherto unmade, of bringing new perspectives to a wider audience, and of bringing all perspectives into constructive conjunction so as to increase the amount and the quality of discourse about poetry.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Among our contributors were three scholars whose assistance extended far beyond work on their own entries. They are Professors Edward R. Weismiller, Jr., Fabian Gudas, and the late W. B. Fleischman. Each made the fruits of his knowledge available to us over a considerable period of time, on an astonishingly wide range of topics, and at some expense to the furthering of his own work. We gratefully acknowledge their sustained generosity and their expert counsel. Others of our contributors also deserve thanks for generousity with sugges tions, information, referrals, and solutions: Roger Allen, Samuel G. Armistead, Beth Bjorklund, Kang-I Sun Chang, Edward Greenstein, James W. Halporn, Diana Der Hovanessian, Daniel Hoffman, Ivar Ivask, Laurence Lerner, Kathleen N. Marsh, Wallace Martin, Julie Meisami, David Lee Rubin, and Tibor Wlassics. In addition, a large number of other scholars not contributing to the volume nonetheless supported our work, assisting us in their roles of advisers, reviewers, and experts. Among many we must especially thank the following: Helen C. Agiiera, National Endowment for the Humanities; W. Sidney Allen, Cambridge University; James J. Alstrum, Illinois State University; Theodore M. Anderson, Stanford University; The Reverend Harry Aveling, Monash University, Australia; Fr. Nicholas Ayo, University of Notre Dame; Herbert Blau, University of Wisconsin; James Blodgett, Indiana University; Malcolm Bowie, Queen Mary College, University of London; Marianne Burkhard, University of Illinois; William Calin, University of Florida; Matei Calinescu, Indiana University; Dino Cervigni, University of North Carolina; Frederick J. Crosson, University of Notre Dame; Michael Curschmann, Princeton University; Isagani R. Cruz, De La Salle Univer sity, The Phillipines; Peter Dronke, University of Cambridge; Hans Eichner, University of Toronto; Roberta Frank, University of Toronto; Stephen Fredman, University of Notre Dame; Ralph Freedman, Princeton University; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University; Albert Gerard, University of Liege; Hans Goedicke, Johns Hopkins University; Nili Gold, Columbia University; Mark L. Greenberg, Drexel University; Jean Hagstrum, Northwestern University; Joseph Harris, Har vard University; William Katra, University of Wisconsin at La Crosse; Robert Kellogg, University of Virginia; Anthony Kerrigan, late of the University of Notre Dame; Bernard Knox, University of Michigan; Egbert Krispyn, University of
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Georgia; James R. Lawler, University of Chicago; Herbert Lehnert, University of California at Irvine; George Levine, Rutgers University; Barbara K. Lewalski, Harvard University; Herbert Lindenberger, Stanford University; James]. Y. Liu, late of Stanford University; Richard M. Ludwig, Princeton University; George McMurray, Colorado State University; John Matthias, University of Notre Dame; Roland Mortier, Universite Libre de Bruxelles; Kenneth E. Nilsen, St. Francis Xavier University; Linda M. Paterson, University of Warwick; Annabel Patterson, Duke University; Derek Pearsall, University of York; Henri Peyre, Yale University; Christopher Prendergast, King's College, Cambridge University; Tilottana Rajan, University of Western Ontario; W. Edson Richmond, Indiana University; Francesca Rochberg-Halton, University of Notre Dame; Margaret Scanlan, Indiana Univer sity; Egon Schwarz, Washington University; Eckehard Simon, Harvard University; G. S. Smith, Oxford University; Hans Tischler, Indiana University; Lewis Turco, State University of New York at Oswego; Karl D. Uitti, Princeton University; Helen Vendler, Harvard University; John Welle, University of Notre Dame; Rene Wellek, Yale University; Ian]. Winter, University of Wisconsin; Anthony C. Yu, University of Chicago; and Theodore Ziolkowski, Princeton University. We must also thank our editors at Princeton University Press, Loren Hoekzema and Robert Brown, whose patience with this project was extraordinary, as well as our superb editorial assistants, Rose Meisner, Veidre Thomas, and Brenda Bean, whose acumen and dilligence enhanced every entry. Finally, we thank the following authors, publishers, and agents for granting us permission to use brief selections from the copyrighted publications listed below. Great care has been taken to trace all the owners of copyrighted material used in this book. Any inadvertent omissions pointed out to us will be gladly acknowledged in future editions. Harry Aveling for four lines of his translation of "Nina-bobok" [Lullaby] and seven lines of" Kita adalah pemilik syah republik ini" [The Republic is Ours], two contemporary Indonesian poems, and for four lines of his translations of "Kam pung Rakit" [Floating Village] and six lines from "Ini Juga Duniaku" [This Part of My World], two contemporary Malaysian poems. Charles Bernstein for five lines of "Sentences My Father Used" from Control
ling Interests, reprinted by permission of Charles Bernstein and ROOF Books. Robert Bly for two lines of"Snowfall in the Mternoon" and two lines of"Waking from Sleep" from Silence in the Snowy Fields, copyright 1962; and four lines of" Six Winter Privacy Poems" from Sleepers Joining Hands, all reprinted by permission of Robert Bly. The University of California Press for five lines of "The Box" from Collected
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-75, copyright 1983; for two lines of Mounah Khouri and Hamid Algar's translation of"Two Voices" from An A nthology of Modern Arabic
Poetry, copyright 1974; and for three lines of medieval poetry translated by J.
T.
Monroe from Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology, copyright 1974, all re printed by permission of The Regents of the University of California. Cambridge University Press for three lines from Arabic Poetry and three lines from The Poems of al-Mutanabbi, both translated by A. J. Arberry. Carcanet Press Ltd. for five lines from"Portrait of a Lady" and eight lines of "The Red Wheel Barrow" from Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1909-
1939, vol. 1, copyright 1938; and for six lines of" Oread" and five lines of" Storm" from Collected Poems, 1912-44, copyright 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Copper Canyon Press for an excerpt from "A Muse of Water" in Mermaids in
the Basement, copyright 1984 by Carolyn Kizer. The Ecco Press for an excerpt from " Meditation at Lagunitas," from Praise, copyright 1974, 1979 by Robert Hass. Faber and Faber, Ltd., for two lines of "For the Time Being" and two lines of "Lullaby" from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden; for an excerpt from"September 1, 1939" from The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939; for two lines of The Waste Land from Collected Poems 1909-1962 and five lines of "Little Gidding" from The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950, both by T. S. Eliot; for five lines of Canto II and six lines of Canto V II from The Cantos ofEzra Pound, copyright 1934 by Ezra Pound; for eight lines of "The Seafarer," two lines of "Homage to Sextus Propertius," four lines of"Translations and Adaptations from Heine," and three lines of "The River-Merchant's Wife" from Personae, copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound, reprinted by permission of the publishers. Farrar, Straus & Giroux for an excerpt from # 14 of The Dream Songs by John Berryman, copyright] 959, 1969 by John Berryman; for excerpts from"The Fish" and " In the Waiting Room" from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, copyright ]940, 1971, renewal copyright 1968 by Elizabeth Bishop, copy right 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel; for an excerpt from " Memories of West Street and Lepke" from Life Studies by Robert Lowell, copyright 1956, 1959 by Robert Lowell, renewal copyright 1987 by Harriet Lowell; for an excerpt from "The Schooner Flight" from The Star-Apple Kingdom by Derek Walcott, copyright 1977, 1978, 1979 by Derek Walcott. Granada and HarperCollins Publishers for four lines of "Weltende" by Jacob van Hoddes from Modern German Poetry, translated by Christopher Middleton; and for eight lines of" Buffalo Bill 's" from Tulips and Chimneys by e e cummings, edited
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS by George James Firmage, copyright 1923, 1925, renewal copyright 195 1, 1953 by e e cummings, copyright 1973, 1976 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, copyright 1973, 1976 by George James Firmage. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for five lines of"Little Gidding" from Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 197 1 by Esme Valerie Eliot; for two lines of The Waste Land from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, copyright 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot; for five lines from "Praise in Summer" from The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, copyright 1947 and renewed 1975 by Richard Wilbur. Harper & Row, Publishers, for an excerpt from "Howl" from Collected Poems
1947-80, copyright 1955 by Allen Ginsberg. Henry Holt and Company for two lines from "Nothing Gold Can Stay," eight lines from "Come In," three lines from "Why Wait for Science?" and two lines from "The Gift Outright," from The Poems of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, copyright 1923, 1947, 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston; copyright 194 2, 195 1 by Robert Frost; copyright 1970, 1975 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Indiana University Press for two lines from Martial: Selected Epigrams, translated by Rolfe Humphries. Jonathan Cape, Ltd., for two lines from "Nothing Gold Can Stay," eight lines from "Come In," three lines from "Why Wait for Science?" and two lines from "The Gift Outright," from The Poems ofRobert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, copyright 1923, 1947, 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston; copyright 1942, 195 1 by Robert Frost; copyright 1970, 1975 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Alfred A. Knopf for six lines of "Description Without Place," two lines of "Bantam in Pine Woods," and two lines of "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself' from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Liverwright Publishing Corporation, for five lines of "Voyages" and two lines of"Cape Hatteras" from The Poems ofHart Crane, edited by Marc Simon, copyright 1986 by Marc Simon; for an excerpt from" Buffalo Bill's" from Tulips and Chimneys by e e cummings, edited by George James Firmage, copyright 19 23, 1925, and renewed 195 1, 1953 by e e cummings, copyright 1973, 1976 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, copyright 1973, 1976 by George James Firmage. Macmillan Publishing Company for two lines of"A Coat," two lines of "Leda and the Swan," and two lines of"The Gyres" from The Collected Poems of W B. Yeats, copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1956 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Georgie Yeats, -
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Michael Bulter Yeats, and Anne Yeats. New Directions Publishing Corporation for five lines of Canto II and six lines of Canto VII from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright 1934 by Ezra Pound; for eight lines of "The Seafarer," two lines of "Homage to Sextus Propertius," four lines of"Translations and Adaptations from Heine," and three lines of"The River Merchant's Wife" from Personae, copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound; for six lines of "Oread" and five lines of" Storm" from Collected Poems, 1912-44, copyright 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle; for five lines of"The Five-Day Rain" from Collected
Earlier Poems 1940-60, copyright 1958 by Denise Levertov Goodman; for an excerpt from "The Well" from Poems 1960-67, copyright 1960 by Denise Levertov Good man; for five lines from "Portrait of a Lady" and eight lines of "The Red Wheel Barrow" from Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1909-1939, vol. 1, copy right 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. State University of New York Press for four lines of"Lagu Biasa" [An Ordinary Song] and four lines of "Aku" [Me] from The Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil
Anwar, edited and translated by Burton Raffel, copyright 1970; for six lines of "Koyan Yang Malang" [Koyan the Unfortunate] , by W. S. Rendra, from An
Anthology of Modern Indonesian Poetry, translated by Burton Raffel, copyright 1968. The University of North Carolina Press for two excerpts from The Poems of
Phillis Wheatley, copyright 1989. Ohio University Press for Epigram no. 68 from Collected Poems and Epigrams of
J. v. Cunningham, copyright 1971. Oxford University Press for four lines of The First Clerihews by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, copyright 198 2 by Mrs. Nicolas Bentley. Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, for four excerpts from Modern Malay
Verse, 1946-61, edited by Oliver Rice and Abdullah Majid. Penguin Books Ltd., for three lines of "Howl" from Allen Ginsburg: Collected
Poems 1947-1980, copyright 1956 by Allen Ginsberg. Random House, Inc., for two lines of "For the Time Being" and two lines of "Lullaby" from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, and an excerpt from"September 1, 1939" from The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939, both edited by Edward Mendelson, copyright 1976, 1977 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden. The Royal Irish Academy, for four lines from Early Irish Metrics by Gerard Murphy, copyright 196 1 by The Royal Irish Academy. Stanford University Press, for five lines from japanese Court Poetry by Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, copyright 196 1 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Stanford Junior University. Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., for fourteen lines of "Black Art" from Black
Magic: Collected Poetry 1961-67, copyright 1990 by Amiri Baraka. Taylor & Francis, Ltd., for six lines of "Walker Skating" by Brian Morris from
Word & Image, vol. 2, copyright 1986. Three Continents Press for "Lazarus 1962," by Khalil Hawi, translated by A. Haydar and M. Beard in Naked in Exile, copyright 1984; and Bayadir al-ju [The Thrashing Floor of Hunger], by Khalil Hawi, copyright K. Hawi, Beirut, 1965. Zephyr Press for an excerpt from"The Muse" from The Complete Poems of Anna
Akhmatova, translated by Judity Hemschemeyer, copyright 1989.
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CONTENTS Abecedarius Absence. See DECONSTRUCTION Abstract. See CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT Abstract Poem Acatalectic. See CATALEXIS Accent Accentual Verse Accentual-syllabic Verse. See METER Accessus ad auctores. See MEDIEVAL POETICS Accord. See NEAR RHYME Acephalous Acmeism Acrostic Adnominatio. See PUN Adonic Adynaton Aeolic Aesthetic Distance Aestheticism Affective Criticism. See CRITICISM; POETICS; READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM Affective Fallacy Affective Stylistics. See STYLISTICS Mflatus. See INSPIRATION African Poetry Mrikaans Poetry. See SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY Afro-american Poetry Agrarians. See FUGITIVES Ai fhreisligi Aicill Air Akkadian Poetry. See ASSYRO-BABYLONIAN poETRY Alba Albanian Poetry Alcaic Alcmanic Verse Alexandrianism Alexandrine All<eostropha Allegory Alliteration Alliterative Verse. See GERMAN PROSODY, Old Germanic; ENGLISH PROSODY; METER Alliterative Verse in Modern Languages Allusion Alternation of Rhymes. See MASCULINE AND FEMININE Ambiguity American Indian Poetry American Poetics. See ROMANTIC AND POSTRO MANTIC POETICS; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POET ICS, American and British American Poetry
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American Prosody. See ENGLISH PROSODY American Structuralism. See STRUCTURALISM Amerind. See AMERICAN INDIAN POETRY Amharic Poetry. See ETHIOPIAN POETRY Amoebean Verses. See PASTORAL Amphibrach Amphimacer. See CRETIC Amplification Anaclasis Anacoluthon Anacreontic Anacrusis Anadiplosis Anagogic Interpretation. See INTERPRETATION, FOURFOLD METHOD OF Anagram Analogy. See SYMBOL Analysis Anapest Anaphora Anapodoton. See ANACOLUTHON Anastrophe. See HYPF.RBATON Anceps Ancients and Moderns, Battle of. See QUERELLE DES ANCIENS ET DES MODERNES Anglo-saxon Prosody. See ENGLISH PROSODY, Old
English Animal Epic. See BEAST EPIC Antanaclasis. See POLYPTOTON Anthimeria Anthology Anthropology and Poetry Anticlimax Antimasque. See MASQUE Antimetabole Antispast Antistrophe Antithesis Antithetical Criticism. See INFLUENCE Antode. See PARABASIS Antonomasia Anxiety. See INFLUENCE Aphaeresis Aphorism. See EPIGRAM Apocope Apollonian-dionysian Aporia. See DECONSTRUCTION; INFLUENCE Aposiopesis Apostrophe Arabic Poetics Arabic Poetry Arabic Prosody Araucanian Poetry. See AMERICAN INDIAN POETRY,
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South American -
CONTENTS Archaism Archetypal Criticism. See ARCHETYPE; CRITICISM; MYTH CRITICISM; PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM Archetype Archilochian Areopagus Argentinian Poetry. See SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY Argument Aristophaneus. See AEOLIC Aristotelian Influence. See CHICAGO SCHOOL; CLASSICAL POETICS; CATHARSIS; FICTION, PO ETRY AS; PLOT; POETICS Armenian Poetry Arsis and Thesis Art For Art's Sake. See AESTHETICISM; POETRY, THEORIES OF Arte mayor Arte menor Artificial Intelligence. See COMPUTER POETRY Aruz. See PERSIAN POETRY; ARABIC PROSODY; TURKISH POETRY Arzamas Asclepiad Assamese Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Association. See IMAGINATION; ONOMATOPOEIA; SOUND Assonance Assyro-babylonian Poetry Asynarteton Asyndeton Attitude. See TONE Aubade. See ALBA Audience. See PERFORMANCE; READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM; RHETORIC AND POETRY Audition coloree. See SYNAESTHESIA Auditory Imagination. See SOUND Aureate Diction Australian Poetry Austrian Poetry Authority. See INFLUENCE; INTERTEXTUALITY; HISTORICISM; TEXTUALITY Auto sacramental Autonomy, Poetic Autotelic Auxesis Awdl Bacchius Badi'. See ARABIC POETRY Balada Balete. See DANSA Ballad Ballad Meter Ballade Ballata. See FROTTOLA AND BARZELLETTA; LAUDA; RITORNELLO Bard Bardic Verse. See CELTIC PROSODY Baroque Baroque Poetics Barzelletta. See FROTTOLA AND BARZELLETTA
Basque Poetry Bathos Battle of the Ancients and Moderns. See QUERELLE DES ANCIENS ET DES MODERNES Bayt. See ARABIC POETRY Beast Epic Beast Fable. See FABLE; BEAST EPIC Beat Poets Beginning Rhyme. See ALLITERATION; ANAPHORA; RHYME Belgian Poetry Belief and Poetry Bengali Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Bergerette. See VIRELAI Bestiary Bhakti Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Biblical Poetry. See HEBREW POETRY; HEBREW PROSODY AND POETICS; HYMN; PSALM Biedermeier Binary and Ternary Biographical Criticism. See CRITICISM Black Mountain School. See PROJECTIVE VERSE Black Poetry. See AFRO-AMERICAN POETRY; AFRICAN POETRY Blank Verse Blason Blues Bob and Wheel Book. See INTERTEXTUALITY Bouts-rimes Brachycatalectic. See CATALEXIS Brachylogia. See ASYNDETON Brazilian Poetry Breton Poetry Breve. See QUANTITY; SCANSION Brevis brevians. See IAMBIC SHORTENING Brevis in longo. See ANCEPS Bridge Brigade. See PLEIADE Broadside Ballad, Street Ballad Broken Rhyme Bucolic Bucolic Diaeresis. See DIAERESIS; HEXAMETER Bulgarian Poetry Burden Burlesque Burmese Poetry Burns Stanza Byelorussian Poetry Bylina Byzantine Poetry Caccia Cacophony Cadence Caesura Calligramme Canadian Poetry Cancion Cancioneiros. See CANTIGA Canon Canso, Chanso, Chanson
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CONTENTS Cantar Cantejondo Canticum and Diverbium Cantiga Canto Canzone Capitolo Caribbean Poetry. See PUERTO RICAN POETRY; WEST INDIAN POETRY Carmen Carmina Figurata. See PATTERN POETRY Carol Carpe diem Catachresis Catalan Poetry Catalexis Catalog, Catalog Verse Catch. See CACCIA Catharsis Cauda, Coda Caudate Sonnet Cavalier Poets, Cavalier Lyrists Celtic Prosody Celtic Revival. See IRISH POETRY Cento Chain Rhyme Changga. See KOREAN POETRY Chanso, Chanson. See CANSO Chanson de toile. See FRENCH POETRY Chansons de geste Chant Chant Royal Chante-fable Character (Theophrastan) . See ETHOS Charm Chastushka Chiasmus Chicago School Chicano (Mexican American) Poetry Chilean Poetry. See SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY Chinese Poetics Chinese Poetry Chinese Prosody. See CHINESE POETRY Ch6ka. See JAPANESE POETRY Choliambus Choral Lyric. See GREEK POETRY; MELIC POETRY Choree. See TROCHAIC Choriamb Choriambic Dimeter. See CHORIAMB Chorus Christabel Meter Chronicle Play. See HISTORY PLAY Chu. See CHINESE POETRY Ci. See CHINESE POETRY Cinquain. See QUINTAIN Classical Influence. See CLASSICISM Classical Meters in Modern Languages Classical Poetics Classical Prosody Classicism Clausula. See PROSE RHYTHM Clerihew
Climax Cloak and Sword. See COMEDIA DE CAPA Y ESPADA Close Rhyme Closet Drama Closure Cobia Cockney School Code. See STRUCTURALISM; DECONSTRUCTION Collections, Poetic Colombian Poetry. See SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY Colon Colonialism. See CULTURAL CRITICISM Comedia de capa y espada Comedy Comedy of Humors Commedia dell'arte. See COMEDY; FARCE Common Meter, Common Measure. See BALLAD METER; HYMN Common Rhythm. See RUNNING RHYTHM Commonplaces. See THEME; TOPOS Companion Poems Competence. See LINGUISTICS AND POETICS Complaint Complexity. See SIMPLICITY AND COMPLEXITY Composition. See VERSIFICATION; ORAL-FORMULAIC THEORY; POET; RHETORIC AND POETRY Compound Epithets. See EPITHET; LEXIS Compound Rhyme. See RHYME; TRIPLE RHYME Computer Poetry Concatenation Conceit Conceptismo. See CULTERANISMO Concrete and Abstract Concrete Poetry Concrete Universal Confessional Poetry. See AMERICAN POETRY Connecticut Wits. See AMERICAN POETRY Connotation and Denotation Consolation. See LAMENT Consonance Constructivism Conte devot Contests, Poetic. See POETIC CONTESTS Contextualism Contraction. See ELISION; METRICAL TREATMENT OF SYLLABLES; SUBSTITUTION Contrastive Stress. See ACCENT Contre-rejet. See REJET Conundrum. See RIDDLE Convention Conversation Poem Copla Coq-a-l'ane Cornish Poetry Corona Coronach Correlative Verse Correspondence. See EQUIVALENCE; RESPONSION Correspondence Rules. See GENERATIVE METRICS; METER Counterpoint
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CONTENTS Counterpoint Rhythm Country-house Poem. See EKPHRASIS Coupe Couplet Courtly Love Courtly Makers Crasis. See SYNALOEPHA; ELISION Creationism Cretic Crisis. See PLOT Criticism Criticism and Ethics. See ETHICS AND CRITICISM Croatian Poetry. See YUGOSLAV POETRY Cross Rhyme Crown of Sonnets. See CORONA Cuaderna via Cuban Poetry. See SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY Cubism Cubo-futurism. See FUTURISM Cueca chilena Culteranismo Cultism. See CULTERANISMO Cultural Criticism Curslls. See PROSE RHYTHM Curtal Sonnet Cycle. See LYRIC SEQUENCE; SONNET SEQUENCE; COLLECTIONS, POETIC Cycle Plays. See LITURGICAL DRAMA; MIRACLE PLAYS Cynghanedd Cywydd Czech Poetry Czech Prosody. See SLAVIC PROSODY Dactyl Dactylo-epitrite Dada Daina. See LITHUANIAN POETRY; LATVIAN POETRY Dalmatian Poetry. See YUGOSLAV POETRY Danish Poetry Dansa Dead Metaphor Debat, Debate. See POETIC CONTESTS Decadence Decasyllabe. See DECASYLLABLE Decasyllable Decima Decir Deconstruction Decorum Deep Image. See AMERICAN POETRY Definition. See POEM; POETICS; THEORY Deletion. Syntactic: see ELLIPSIS; SYNTAX, POETIC. Metrical: see ELISION; METRICAL TREATMENT OF SYLLABLES Delivery. See PERFORMANCE Denotation. See CONNOTATION AND DENOTATION Denouement. See PLOT Descort Descriptive Poetry Determinacy. See INDETERMINACY; MEANING, po ETIC
Device. See RUSSIAN FORMALISM Devotional Poetry. See RELIGION AND POETRY Diachrony. See STRUCTURALISM Diaeresis Dialect Poetry Dialogic. See DIALOGUE; POLYPHONIC PROSE Dialogue Dibrach. See PYRRHIC Dichronous. See QUANTITY Diction. See ARCHAISM; AUREATE DICTION; CON CRETE AND ABSTRACT; CONNOTATION AND DE NOTATION; EPITHET; KENNING; LEXIS Didactic Poetry Difference. See DECONSTRUCTION; I MITATION; INTERTEXTUALITY Dimeter Diminishing Metaphor. See METAPHOR Dinggedicht Dionysian. See APOLLONIAN-DIONYSIAN Dipodism, Dipodic Verse Dipody. See DIPODISM; FOOT Dirge Discourse. See POETICS; RUSSIAN FORMALISM; STRUCTURALISM; MEANING, POETIC; POETRY; LINGUISTICS AND POETICS; TWENTIETH-CEN TURY POETICS; ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETICS; INTERPRETATION; PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY Disinterestedness Dispositio. See RHETORIC AND POETRY Dissemination. See DECONSTRUCTON; INTERTEXTUALITY; INFLUENCE Dissociation of Sensibility Dissonance Distich Distinctive-feature Analysis Dit Dithyramb Ditty Diverbium. See CANTICUM AND DIVERBIUM Diwan. See ARABIC POETRY Dizain Dochmiac Doggerel Doina. See ROMANIAN POETRY Dolce stil nuovo Dol' nik Double Dactyl Double Meter. See BINARY AND TERNARY Double Rhyme. See MASCULINE AND FEMININE; RHYME Doublets. See ELISION; METER Dozens Dramatic Irony. See IRONY Dramatic Monologue. See MONOLOGUE Dramatic Poetry Dr;ipa Dream Vision Dr6ttkv:rtt Dumy. See UKRAINIAN POETRY Duple Meters. See BINARY AND TERNARY Duration
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CONTENTS Dutch Poetry Dyfalu Echo Verse Eclogue Ecphrasis. See EKPHRASIS Ecriture. See SOUND; TEXTUALITY Ecuadorian Poetry. See SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY Eddic Poetry. See OLD NORSE POETRY Ego-futurism. See FUTURISM Egyptian Poetry Eisteddfod Ekphrasis Elegiac Distich Elegiac Stanza Elegiamb. See ARCHILOCHIAN; DACTYLO-EPITRITE Elegy Elision Ellipsis Elocutio. See RHETORIC AND POETRY Emblem Emotion Empathy and Sympathy Enargeia Encomium End Rhyme. See RHYME Endecasillabo. See HENDECASYLLABLE; ITALIAN PROSODY Endecha Endings. See LINE; MASCULINE AND FEMININE End-stopped English Poetics. See RENAISSANCE POETICS; BA ROQUE POETICS; NEOCLASSICAL POETICS; RO MANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETI CS; TWEN TIETH-CENTURY POETICS English Poetry English Prosody Englyn Enhoplius Ensalada Ensenhamen Envelope Envoi, Envoy Epanalepsis Epic Epic Caesura. See CAESURA Epic Simile. See SIMILE Epicedium Epideictic Poetry Epigram Epinikion Epiphora. See ANAPHORA Epiploke Epirrhema. See PARABASIS Episteme. See TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETICS Epistle, Verse. See VERSE EPISTLE Epistrophe. See ANAPHORA Epitaph Epithalamium Epithet Epitrite
Epizeuxis. See PLOCE Epode Epyllion Equivalence Equivocal Rhyme. See MOSAIC RHYME; GRAMMATICAL RHYME Erotic Poetry. See LOVE POETRY Esemplastic. See IMAGINATION Eskimo Poetry. See INUIT POETRY Esperanto Poetry Espinela Estampida, Estampie Estonian Poetry Estribillo Ethics and Criticism Ethiopian Poetry Ethnopoetics Ethos Etymology. See LEXIS Eulogy. See ELEGY Euphony Evaluation Exegesis. See EXPLICATION Exernplum Exoticism Explication Explication de texte. See EXPLICATION; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETICS, FRENCH AND G ERMAN Expression Expressionism Expressiveness. See SOUND Eye Rhyme Fable Fabliau Falling Action. See PLOT Falling Rhythm. See RISING AND FALLING RHYTHM Fancy Farce Fatras Feeling. See EMOTION Feigning. See FICTION, POETRY AS Felibrige Feminine Ending, Rhyme. See MASCULINE AND n:MININE Feminist Criticism. See FEMINIST POETICS Feminist Poetics Fescennine Verses Fiction, Poetry as Figuration Figure, Scheme, Trope Figures, Metrical. See METRICAL TREATMENT OF SYLLABLES Figures, Rhetorical. See FIGURE, SCHEME, TROPE; FIGURATION; RHETORIC AND POETRY Fili Fine Arts and Poetry. See MUSIC AND POETRY; SCULPTURE AND POETRY; VISUAL ARTS AND PO ETRY Finida Finnish Poetry Flarnenca. See SEGUIDILLA
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CONTENTS Flemish Poetry. See BELGIAN POETRY, In Dutch; DUTCH POETRY Fleshly School of Poetry Flyting Folia Folk Poetry. See ORAL POETRY Foot Form Formalism. See AUTONOMY; CONTEXTUALISM; CRITICISM; MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM; NEW CRITICISM; NEW FORMALISM; RUSSIAN FORMALISM; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETICS Formula Fornyroislag Found Poem Four Ages of Poetry Fourteener Fragment. See INTERTEXTUALITY Frankfurt School. See MARXIST CRITICISM; TWEN TIETH-CENTURY POETICS, F RENCH AND G ER MAN Free Meters. See WELSH POETRY Free Verse Freie Rhythmen Freie Verse French Poetics. See FRENCH POETRY; FRENCH PROSODY; MEDIEVAL POETICS; SECOND RHETO RIQUE; PLEIADE; RENAISSANCE POETICS; BA ROQUE POETICS; CLASSICISM; NEOCLASSICAL POETICS; ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC PO ETICS; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETICS French Poetry French Prosody Frenzy. See POETIC MADNESS; INSPIRATION Freudian Criticism. See PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM Frisian Poetry Frons. See CANZONE; CAUDA Frottola and Barzelletta Fu. See CHINESE POETRY Fugitives Full Rhyme. See RHYME Furor Poeticus. See POETIC MADNESS Futurism Fyrtiotalisterna Gaelic Poetry. See SCOTTISH GAELIC POETRY Gai saber Gaita gallega Galician or Gallegan Poetry Galliamb (us) Gaucho Poetry Gay and Lesbian Poetry. See LOVE POETRY Gayatri. See INDIAN PROSODY Ge'ez Poetry. See ETHIOPIAN POETRY Gender. See FEMINIST POETICS; LOVE POETRY Genealogy. See INFLUENCE Generative Metrics Generic Rhyme Geneva School Genius Genre
Georgian Poetry Georgianism Georgic German Poetics. See MEDIEVAL POETICS; RENAIS SANCE POETI CS; BAROQUE POETICS; NEOCLAS SICAL POETICS; ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETICS; TWENTIETH- CENTURY POETICS German Poetry German Prosody Gesellschaftslied Ghazal Glosa Glyconic Gnomic Poetry Goliardic Verse Gongorism. See CULTERANISMO Grammar and Poetry. See SYNTAX, POETIC Grammatical Rhyme Grammatology. See DECONSTRUCTION Grammetrics Grand Style. See STYLE Graveyard Poetry Greek Anthology. See ANTHOLOGY Greek Poetics. See CLASSICAL POETICS; ALEXANDRIANISM; BYZANTINE POETRY Greek Poetry Greek Prosody. See CLASSICAL PROSODY Guatemalan Poetry. See SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY Gujarati Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Guslar Gypsy Poetry Haikai. See RENGA; HAIKU; JAPANESE POETRY Haiku Haitian Poetry Half Rhyme. See CONSONANCE; NEAR RHYME Hamartia. See TRAGEDY Harga. See KHARJA Harlem Renaissance Hausa Poetry Headless Line. See ACEPHALOUS Hebraism Hebrew Poetics. See HEBREW PROSODY AND POETICS; HEBRAISM Hebrew Poetry Hebrew Prosody and Poetics Hegemony. See CULTURAL CRITICISM; MARXIST CRITICISM Hellenism. See CLASSICISM Hellenistic Poetics. See CLASSICAL POETICS; ALEXANDRIANISM Hellenistic Poetry. See GREEK POETRY Hemiepes Hemistich Hen benillion Hendecasyllable Hendiadys' Hephthemimeral . See HEXAMETER; CAESURA Heptameter Heptasyllable Heresy of Paraphrase. See PARAPHRASE, HERESY OF
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CONTENTS Hermann's Bridge. See BRIDGE Hermaphrodite Rhyme. See MASCULINE AND FEMININE Hermeneutic Circle. See HERMENEUTICS; THEORY Hermeneutics Hermeticism Heroic Couplet Heroic Play Heroic Poetry. See AFRICAN POETRY; EPIC; HEROIC VERSE Heroic Quatrain. See ELEGIAC STANZA Heroic Verse, Heroic Meter Heterometric Hexameter Hexastich. See SEXAIN Hiatus Hindi Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Hipponactean. See GLYCONIC Hispano-arabic Poetry Historicism History and Poetry History Play Hittite Poetry Hiirspiel. See SOUND POETRY Hokku. See HAIKU; JAPANESE POETRY Homeric Simile. See SIMILE Homodyne and Heterodyne Homoeomeral. See ISOMETRIC Homoeoteleuton Homonymic Rhyme. See IDENTICAL RHYME; RICH RHYME Horatian Ode. See ODE Household Poets. See AMERICAN POETRY Hovering Accent Hrynhent Hudibrastic Verse Huitain Humanism, New. See NEO-HUMANISM Humors. See COMEDY OF HUMORS Hungarian Poetry Hymn Hypallage Hyperbaton Hyperbole Hypercatalectic. See CATALEXIS Hypermetric Hypogram. See ANAGRAM Hypometric Hyporchema Hypotaxis. See PARATAXIS AND HYPOTAXIS Hysteron proteron Iamb. See IAMBIC Iambe Iambelegus. See ARCHILOCHIAN; DACTYLo-EPITRITE Iambic Iambic Shortening Iambographers. See IAMBIC Icelandic Poetry Icon. See ICONICITY; ICONOLOGY; ONOMATO POEIA; REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; SEMI OTICS, POETIC; SOUND -
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Iconicity lconology Ictus Identical Rhyme Ideogram Ideology. See CULTURAL CRITICISM; MARXIST CRITICISM; POLITICS AND POETRY Idyll, idyl Image Imagery Imagination Imagism Imitation Impair. See VERS IMPAIR Impressionism Impressionistic Criticism. See CRITICISM In medias res In Memoriam Stanza Inca Poetry. See AMERICAN INDIAN POETRY, South
American Incantation Incremental Repetition Indeterminacy Index. See REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; SEMIOTICS, POETIC Indian Poetics Indian Poetry Indian Prosody Indo-european Prosody I ndonesian Poetry Influence I nitial Rhyme. See ALLITERATION Initiating Action. See PLOT Inscape and Instress Inscription. See EPITAPH Inspiration Instress. See INS CAPE AND INSTRESS Intensity Intention Intentional Fallacy. See INTENTION Interlocking Rhyme. See CHAIN RHYME Interlude Intermedia. See CUBISM; PERFORMANCE; VISUAL ARTS AND POETRY; SOUND POETRY Internal Rhyme Interpretation Interpretation, Fourfold Method of Intertextuality Intonation. See PITCH; ACCENT; DURATION Intuition Inuit Poetry Invective Inventio. See RHETORIC AND POETRY Invention Inverse Rhyme. See REVERSE RHYME Inversion. See HYPERBATON Ionic Iranian Poetry. See PERSIAN POETRY Irish Literary Renaissance. See IRISH POETRY Irish Poetry Irish Prosody. See CELTIC PROSODY Irony
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CONTENTS Isochronism, Isochrony Isocolon and Parison Isometric Italian Poetics. See MEDIEVAL POETICS; RENAIS SANCE POETICS; BAROQUE POETICS; NEOCLAS SICAL POETICS; ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETICS; TWENTIETH- CENTURY POETICS Italian Poetry Italian Prosody Ithyphallic J akobsonian Poetics. See RUSSIAN FORMALISM; SE MIOTICS, POETIC; STRUCTURALISM; EQUIVA LENCE; POETIC FUNCTION Japanese Poetics Japanese Poetry Jarcha. See SPANISH POETRY Javanese Poetry Jazz Poetry. See MUSIC AND POETRY Je ne sa is quoi Jingle Joc partit. See PARTIMEN Jongleur Judeo-spanish Poetry Judezmo Poetry. See JUDEO-SPANISH POETRY Jugendstil Jungian or Archetypal Criticism. See ARCHETYPE; MYTH CRITICISM; PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM Kabbalah. See HEBRAISM Kannada Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Kasa. See KOREAN POETRY Kashmiri Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Kenning Kharja. See HISPANO-ARABIC POETRY; SPANISH POETRY Kind. See GENRE Knittelvers Knowledge, Poetry As. See CRITICISM; DECON STRUCTION; FICTION, POETRY AS; MEANING, PO ETIC; POETRY, THEORIES OF; REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; SCIENCE AND POETRY; SEMANTICS AND POETRY; SEMIOTICS, POETIC Korean Poetry Kviouhattr. See FORNYRTHISLAG Ladino Poetry. See JUDEO-SPANISH POETRY Lai Laisse Lake School Lament Lampoon. See INVECTIVE Landscape Poem. See DESCRIPTIVE POETRY; VIS UAL ARTS AND POETRY Language Poetry Langue. See DECONSTRUCTION; SEMIOTICS, PO ETIC; SOUND; TEXTUALITY Lapidary Verse. See EPITAPH; EPIGRAM; SCULP TURE AND POETRY Latin American Poetry. See AMERICAN INDIAN PO ETRY, Central American, South American; BRA ZILIAN POETRY; SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY
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Latin Poetics. See CLASSICAL POETICS; CLASSICISM; MEDIEVAL POETICS Latin Poetry Latin Prosody. See CLASSICAL PROSODY Latvian Poetry Lauda Laureate. See POET LAUREATE Lecture. See DECONSTRUCTION; SOUND; TEXTUALITY Leich Length. See DURATION Leonine Rhyme, Verse Lesbian Poetry. See LOVE POETRY Letrilla Letter, Verse. See VERSE EPISTLE Lettrisme Lexis Lied. See SONG Light Verse Limerick Line Line Endings. See LINE; MASCULINE AND FEMININE Linguistics and Poetics Lira Literariness. See LINGUISTICS AND POETICS; POET ICS; RUSSIAN FORMALISM Literary History. See CRITICISM; HISTORICISM; INFLUENCE; THEORY; TRADITION Lithuanian Poetry Litotes Liturgical Drama Lj60ahattr Locus Amoenus. See DESCRIPTIVE POETRY; EK PHRASIS; TOPOS Logaoedic Logocentrism. See DECONSTRUCTION; INFLUENCE; INTERTEXTUALITY; TEXTUALITY Logopoeia. See MELOPOEIA, PHANOPOEIA, LOGOPOEIA Logos. See DECONSTRUCTION; ETHOS; PATHOS Long. See DURATION; QUANTITY Long Meter, Long Measure. See BALLAD METER; HYMN Long Poem. See EPIC; MODERNIST LONG POEM; NARRATIVE POETRY Love Poetry Lii-shih. See CHINESE POETRY Lusophone African Poetry. See AFRICAN POETRY,
In French Lyric Lyric Caesura. See CAESURA Lyric Sequence Macaronic Verse Macedonian Poetry. See YUGOSLAV POETRY Macron. See QUANTITY; SCANSION Madness and Poetry. See POETIC MADNESS Madrigal Magyar Poetry. See HUNGARIAN POETRY Maithili Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Makars. See SCOTTISH CHAUCERIANS; SCOTTISH POETRY
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CONTENTS Mock Epic, Mock Heroic Mode. See GENRE Modern Long Poem Modern Poetic Sequence. See LYRIC SEQUENCE Modern Poetics. See ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETICS; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POET ICS; POETICS Modernism and Postmodernism Modernismo Modulation. See METER Molossus Mongolian Poetry Monk's Tale Stanza Monody Monologue Monometer Monorhyme Monostich Monosyllabic Foot. See FOOT Mora. See DURATION; QUANTITY Morality and Criticism. See CRITICISM; ETHICS AND CRITICISM; EVALUATION; PLURALISM Morality Play Mosaic Rhyme Moscow-Tartu School. See STRUCTURALISM Mote Motif. See THEME; THEMATICS Movement, The. See ENGLISH POETRY Mozarabic Lyrics. See SPANISH POETRY Multiple Rhyme. See RHYME; TRIPLE RHYME Muse Music and Poetry Music of Poetry. See EUPHONY; MELOPOEIA, PHANOPOEIA, LOGOPOEIA; SOUND; SOUND EF FECTS IN POETRY Muwashshah. See HISPANO-ARABIC POETRY Mystery Play. See LITURGICAL DRAMA Myth Myth Criticism Mythopoeia. See MYTH Mythos. See PLOT Myurus. See HEXAMETER
Mal mariee Mahihattr. See FORNYRTHISLAG Malay Poetry Malayalam Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Mannerism Maori Poetry. See NEW ZEALAND POETRY Marathi Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Marinism Marxist Criticsm Masculine and Feminine Mask. See PERSONA Masnavi Masque Mastersingers. See MEISTERSINGER Meaning, Poetic Measure Medieval Poetics Medieval Poetry Medieval Prosody. See MEDIEVAL POETRY Medieval Romance Meditative Poetry. See METAPHYSICAL POETRY; RELIGION AND POETRY Meiosis Meistersinger Meiurus, Myurus. See H EXAMETER Melic Poetry Melopoeia, Phanopoeia, Logopoeia Melos. See EUPHONY; MELOPOEIA, PHANOPOEIA, LOGOPOEIA; MUSIC AND POETRY; SOUND; SOUND EFFECTS IN POETRY Memoria. See RHETORIC AND POETRY Mesostich. See ACROSTIC Metacriticism Metalepsis or Transumption Metaphor Metaphysical Poetry Meter Metonymy Metric Figures. See METRICAL TREATMENT OF SYLLABLES Metrical Rest. See PAUSE Metrical Romance. See MEDIEVAL ROMANCE Metrical Treatment of Syllables Metrical Variation. See METER Metrici and Rhythmici Metron Mexican American Poetry. See CHICANO POETRY Mexican Poetry. See SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY Midrash. See HEBRAISM; I NTERPRETATION, FOURFOLD METHOD OF Mime Mimesis. See REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; CLASSICAL POETICS; IMITATION; SOUND Minimalism Minnelied. See MINNESANG Minnesang Minnesingers. See MINNESANG Minor Epic. See EPYLLION Minstrel Miracle Play. See LITURGICAL DRAMA Miscellany. See ANTHOLOGY Misreading. See INFLUENCE
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Nagauta. See JAPANESE POETRY Naive-sentimental Narrative Poetry Narratology. See NARRATIVE POETRY; PLOT Narrator. See PERSONA Naturalism Nature Navaho Poetry. See AMERICAN INDIAN POETRY Near Rhyme Negative Capability Negritude. See AFRICAN POETRY, In French; soMALI POETRY Neoclassical Poetics Neoclassicism. See CLASSICISM Neogongorism Neo-humanism Neologism. See LEXIS Neoplatonism. See PLATONISM AND POETRY Neoterics
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CONTENTS New Criticism New Formalism New Historicism. See HISTORICISM; HISTORY AND POETRY New Humanism. See NEO-HUMANISM New Norse New York Poets. See AMERICAN POETRY New Zealand Poetry Nibelumgenstrophe Nicaraguan Poetry. See SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY Nil Volentibus Arduum No Nonsense Verse Norse Prosody. See GERMAN PROSODY, Old Germanic; OLD NORSE POETRY Norske Selskab, Det Norwegian Poetry Novas (rimadas) Number(s) Numerology Nursery Rhymes Objective Correlative Objectivism Objectivity. See S UBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY; POETICS Oblique Rhyme. See NEAR RHYME Obscurity Occasional Verse Occitan Poetry Octave Octonarius Octosflabo. See OCTO SYLLABLE Octosyllable Ode Odl Off Rhyme. See NEAR RHYME Old Germanic Prosody. See GERMAN PROSODY, Old
Germanic Old Norse Poetry Omar Khayyam Quatrain Onegin Stanza Onomatopoeia Ontology of Poetry. See POETRY; PROSODY; SOUND Open Couplet. See COUPLET; HEROIC COUPLET Open Form. See AMERICAN POETRY; FREE VERSE Opojaz. See RUSSIAN FORMALISM; STRUCTURALISM Opsis. See VISUAL POETRY; VISUAL ARTS AND POETRY Opus Geminatum. See PROSIMETRUM Oral Interpretation. See PERFORMANCE Oral Poetry Oral-formulaic Theory Organicism Orientalism. See CULTURAL CRITICIS � ; EXOTI CISM; PRIMITIVISM Origin. See DECONSTRUCTION; INFLUENCE; IN TERTEXTUALlTY; TEXTUALITY Originality Oriya Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY
Ornament Ottava Rima Oulipo Outride. See HYPERMETRIC; SPRUNG RHYTHM Oxymoron Paean Paeon Painting and Poetry. See VISUAL ARTS AND POETRY Palimbacchius. See BACCHIUS Palindrome Palinode Panegyric Panjabi Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Pantun Parabasis Paradox Paralipsis Parallelism Paraphrase, Heresy of Pararhyme. See NEAR RHYME Parataxis and Hypotaxis Parison. See ISOCOLON Parnassians Parody Paroemiac Parole. See DECONSTRUCTION; SEMIOTICS, POETIC; SOUND Paronomasia. See PUN Partimen Passion Play Pastiche. See BURLESQUE Pastoral Pastoral Drama. See PASTORAL Pastoral Elegy. See ELEGY; PASTORAL Pastoral Romance. See PASTORAL Pastourelle Paternity. See FEMINIST POETICS; INFLUENCE; INTERTEXTUALITY Pathetic Fallacy Pathos Patriarchy. See FEMINIST POETICS; INTERTEXTUALiTY Pattern Poetry Pause Payada Pedes. See CAN ZONE; CAUDA Pentameter Penthemimer Perfect Rhyme. See RHYME Performance Period Peripeteia. See PLOT Periphrasis Persian Poetry Persian Prosody. See PERSIAN POETRY Persona Personification Peruvian Poetry. See SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY Petrarchism Phalaecean Phallocentrism. See FEMINIST POETICS; IN-
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CONTENTS TERTEXTUALITY; DECONSTRUCTION Phanopoeia. See MELOpOEIA, pHANOpOEIA, LOGOpOEIA Phenomenology. See GENEVA SCHOOL Pherecratean. See GLYCONIC Philippine Poetry Philosophy and Poetry Phoneme. See PROSODY; SOUND Phonestheme, Phonaestheme Phonetic Symbolism. See ICONICITY; ONOMATOPOEIA; pHONESTHEME; SOUND Phonostylistics. See EUPHONY; SOUND; STYLISTICS Pie quebrado Pindaric Ode. See ODE Pitch Piyyut. See HEBREW POETRY Planh Platonism and Poetry Pleiade Ploce Plot Pluralism Plurisignation. See AMBIGUITY; SEMANTICS AND POETRY Poem. See POETRY; VERSE AND PROSE Poema. See EPIC Poesis, poiesis. See POETICS; POET; CLASSICAL POETICS Poet Poet Laureate Poete maudit Poetic Autonomy. See AUTONOMY, POETIC Poetic Closure. See CLOSURE Poetic Collections. See COLLECTIONS, POETIC Poetic Contests Poetic Diction. See ARCHAISM; AUREATE DICTION; CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT; CONNOTATION AND DENOTATION; EPITHET; KENNING; LEXIS Poetic Drama. See DRAMATIC POETRY Poetic Form. See SOUND; VERSE AND PROSE; FORM Poetic Function Poetic License Poetic Madness Poetic Principle. See POETIC FUNCTION; EQUIVA LENCE Poetics Poetics and Rhetoric. See POETICS; RHETORIC AND POETICS Poetry Poetry, Theories of (Western) Poetry and Fine Arts. See DESC RIPTIVE POETRY; EKPHRASIS; ENARGEIA; MUSIC AND POETRY; SCULPTURE AND POETRY; VISUAL ARTS AND PO ETRY Poetry and History. See HISTORY AND POETRY �oetry and Music. See MUSIC AND POETRY; SONG )oetry and Philosophy. See PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY 'oetry and Prose. See PROSE POEM; VERSE AND PROSE 'oetry and Religion. See RELIGION AND POETRY 'oetry and Science. See SCIENCE AND POETRY
Poetry and Semantics. See SEMANTICS AND PO ETRY; SEMIOTICS, POETIC Poetry and Society. See CULTURAL CRITICISM; SO CIETY AND POETRY Poetry and the Other Arts. See MUSIC AND PO ETRY; SCULPTURE AND POETRY; VISUAL ARTS AND POETRY Poetry as Truth. See CRITICISM; DECONSTRUC TION; FICTION, POETRY AS; MEANING, POETIC; POETRY, THEORIES OF; REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; SCIENCE AND POETRY; SEMANTICS AND POETRY; SEMIOTICS, POETIC Poetry Reading. See PERFORMANCE Poetry Therapy. See PSYCOLOGY AND POETRY Point of View. See PLOT Polish Poetry Polish Prosody. See SLAVIC PROSODY Political Verse Politics and Hermeneutics. See HERMENEUTICS Politics and Poetry Polynesian Poetry Polyphonic Prose Polyptoton Polyrhythmic. See HETEROMETRIC Polysyllabic Rhyme. See RHYME; TRIPLE RHYME Polysyndeton Porson's Law. See BRIDGE Portuguese Poetry Postcolonialism. See CULTURAL CRITICISM Postmodernism. See MODERNISM AND pOSTMODERNISM Postromanticism. See ROMANTIC AND pOSTRO MANTIC POETICS Poststructuralism. See CRITICISM; DECONSTRUC TION; INTERTEXTUALITY; POETICS; POETRY, THEORIES OF, Recent Developments; TEXTUAL ITY; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETICS Poulter's Measure Practical Criticism. See ANALYSIS; CRITICISM; EVALUATION Pragmatics. See STYLISTICS Prague School. See STRUCTURALISM Praise Poetry. See AFRICAN POETRY; EPIDEICTIC POETRY; SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY Prakrit Poetry. See INDIAN POETRY Praxis. See VERSIFICATION Preciosite Precursor. See INFLUENCE Pregunta Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Preromanticism Presence. See DECONSTRUCTION Priamel Priapea Primitivism Priority. See INF'LUENCE Proceleusmatic Prodelision. See APHAERESIS Proest. See ODL Projective Verse Pronunciation. See PERFORMANCE Propositional Statements. See MEANING, POETIC;
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CONTENTS PSEUDO-STATEMENT Prose and Poetry. See PROSE POEM; VERSE AND PROSE Prose Poem Prose Rhythm Prosimetrum Prosody Prosopopoeia Proven.;:al Poetry. See OCCITAN POETRY Proverb Pryddest Psalm Psalters, Metrical. See HYMN; PSALM Pseudo-statement Psychic Distance. See AESTHETIC DISTANCE Psychological C riticism Puerto Rican Poetry Pun Punctuation Pure Poetry Puy. See RHYME ROYAL Pyrrhic Pythiambic Qa�ida Qinah. See HEBREW POETRY Quantitative Verse. See CLASSICAL METERS IN MODERN LANGUAGES; CLASSICAL PROSODY; DU RATION; METER; QUANTITY Quantity Quatorzain Quatrain Querelle des anciens et des modernes Question, Epic. See EPIC Quintain, Quintet, Cinquain Quintilla Ragusan Poetry. See YUGOSLAV POETRY Rasa. See INDIAN POETICS Razos. See VIDAS AND RAZOS Reader-response Criticism Realism Recantation. See PALINODE Reception Theory. See READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM Recession of Accent. See ACCENT Reciprocus Versus. See PALINDROME Recit. See PLOT Recognition. See PLOT Recusatio Rederijkers Redondilla Reference. See DECONSTRUCTION; IMITATION; IN TERTEXTUALITY; MEANING, POETIC; POETRY, THEORIES OF; PSEUDO-STATEMENT; REPRESEN TATION AND MIMESIS; SEMANTICS AND POETRY; SEMIOTICS, POETIC; TEXTUALITY Refrain Refran Refrein Regulated Verse. See CHINESE POETRY Reizianum. See TELESILLEUM; AEOLIC
Rejet Relative Stress Principle Religion and Poetry Remate Renaissance Poetics Renaissance Poetry Renga Rentrement. See RONDEAU Repetend. See REPETITION Repetition Representation and Mimesis Resolution Responsion Rest. See PAUSE Retroensa, Retroncha. See ROTROUENGE Reverdie Reversal. See PLOT Reverse Rhyme Rezeptionsasthetik. See READER-RESPONSE CRITI CISM Rhapsode Rhetoric and Poetics. See POETICS; RHETORIC AND POETRY Rhetoric and PoetrY ' Rhetorical Accent. See ACCENT Rhetorical Criticism. See CRITICISM; DECON STRUCTION; INFLUENCE; TWENTIETH- CENTURY POETICS, American and British Rhetoriqueurs, grands rhetoriqueurs Rhopalic Verse Rhupynt. See AWDL Rhyme Rhyme-breaking. See BROKEN RHYME Rhyme Counterpoint Rhyme-prose Rhyme Royal Rhyme Scheme Rhymers' Club Rhythm Rhythmical Pause. See PAUSE Rhythmical Prose. See PROSE RHYTHM Rhythmici. See METRICI AND RHYTHMIC I Rich Rhyme Riddle Riding Rhyme. See COUPLET Rime. See RHYME Rime riche. See RICH RHYME; IDENTICAL RHYME; RHYME Rimur Ring Composition Rising and Falling Rhythm Rispetto Ritornello Rocking Rhythm. See RUNNING RHYTHM Rococo Romance Romance, Medieval or Metrical. See MEDIEVAL ROMANCE Romance Prosody. See FRENCH PROSODY; ITALIAN PROSODY; SPANISH PROSODY Romance-six. See TAIL RHYME Romanian Poetry
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CONTENTS Romansh Po e try. See S WI S S POETRY Romamic and Poslromantic Poetics Romantic Irony. See IRONY Romanticism ROinail.y Poetry. See
Sepharclic Poelcy. See J UDEO-SPANISH POETRY Seplena.-ius Sep tet Sequence, Lyric. See LYRIC SEQUENCE Se que nce, SOllnet. See S O N N ET SEQUENCE Se rbian , Serbo-uoatian Poetry. See YUGOSI.AY po-
GYpSY POETRY
Rondeau Rondeau redouble.
See
RONDEAU
ETRY
ROhd e!
ROlrouenge Rourlde! Roving Over. See
SPRUNG
RHYTHM;
BROKEN
RHyME
RU ba i, Kuba iyat Sta{lza. See OMAR
KHAYYAM QUA-
TRAIN; PERSIAN POETRY
Rules Ruma ni an Poetry. See Rune Running Rhythm Run-on Line.
See
Short
ROMANTIC
AND
POSTRO
ICS
Saga. See
EPIC;
Meter, Short Measure. See
BALLAD METER;
HYMN
MANTle POETICS; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POET
Russian Poetry Russian Prosody. See
POETRY
Shier. See AIorhiksson, in an attempt to appro priate this genre for spiritual uses, commissioned rimur on Ruth, Judith, Esther, Tobias, and Jesus Sirach for his Visnab6k (Book of Poems) of 1 61 2. This remarkable book is not only the first volume of poetry (apart from hymns) printed in Iceland, but also by its very existence a comment on the strength of I. p. Whereas in countries such as Denmark and Germany clerical writings shaped the lang., in Iceland the Church had to rise to the level of the vernacular. Earlier translations of Lu theran hymns into I. had failed miserably in this respect. Bishop Guobrandur, recognizing the problem, enlisted the service of the best poets he knew for this volume. Many of the poems in it are anonymous, but according to the preface the chief poet was the Reverend Einar Sigurosson ( 15381626), among whose poems is a tender lullaby on the birth ofJesus, "Kv;eoi afstallinum Kristi" (Poem on Christ's Cradle) in the popular dance meter, vikivaki. His son, the Reverend Olafur Einarsson ( 1 573-1659), was also a notable poet who contrib uted a gloomy complaint on the times to Visnab6k.
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ICELANDIC POETRY In a rare instance of poetic genius passing from father to son through three generations, O lafur's son Stefan O lafsson (ca. 1 619-88) became one of the leading poets of the 1 7th c. He wrote, as did his father, complaints on laborers and 1. sloth, as well as love lyrics and poems about the pleasures of tobacco and drink and horses. A poet who wrote little in this light, worldly vein was the Reverend Hallgrimur Petursson ( 1 61474) , indubitably the major poet of the 17th c., if not of all time in Iceland. A humble man who did not, like Stefan O lafsson, mock the common peo ple, he was not shy about attacking the ruling classes. At one point in his masterful 50-poem cycle, Passiustilmar (Passion Hymns ) , after com menting on Pilate's error in consenting to Jesus's death, Hallgrimur adds: "God grant that those in power over us avoid such monstrous offenses" (Hymn 28) . An excellent shorter hymn, "Urn dauoans ovissan tima" (On the Uncertain Hour of Death) is still sung at funerals, a good example of the role that poetry of a high order has played in 1. life. Hallgrimur also wrote three rimur cycles and other secular poems, such as "Aldarhattur" (Way of the World) , contrasting the degenerate present with the glorious period of the 1. common wealth. Two figures stand out in 1 8th-c. 1. p. Jon Por hiksson ( 1 744- 1819) wrote some popular short poems, including one on a dead mouse in church ("Urn dauoa mus i kirkju" ) , and long translations of Pope's Essay on Man, Milton's Paradise Lost, and K1opstock's Messias, the latter two in Jornyraislag (q.v. ) . Eggert Olafsson ( 1 726-68) was a child of the Enlightenment who, having studied natural history in Copenhagen and made a survey of Ice land, preached the beauty and usefulness of 1 . nature in poems such as " islandss<ela" (Iceland's Riches) and the long Bunaaarbtilkur (Farming Poem) . This positive attitude toward 1 . nature became, along with a yearning for independence, an impor tant feature of 1. romanticism, whose major poet wasJonas Hallgrimsson ( 1 807-45) . Apart from his lyrical descriptions of nature, as in "i sland" which begins "Iceland, frost-white mother, land of blessings and prosperity"-he is remembered for his poems on the pain of lost love and for his mastery of many poetic forms, including (for the first time in Iceland) the sonnet and terza rima. The other great romantic poet was Bjarni Thorarensen ( 1 786-1 841 ) , who portrayed nature in similes and personifications and tended to glo rify winter rather than summer, especially in his poem "Veturinn" (Winter) . He also raised a tradi tional 1. genre, the memorial poem, to a new height. Quite different from these Copenhagen educated men was the poor folk poet and wood carver Hjalmar Jonsson ( 1 796-1875 ) , known as Bolu-Hjalmar. His large body of verse includes personal invective, rimur, bitter complaints about poverty, and poems about death.
One of the greatest poets of the later 19th c. was Matthias Jochumsson ( 1 835-1920 ) , a free-think ing parson and newspaper editor who wrote excel lent lyrics, hymns, and memorial poems and also made masterful translations of four of Shake speare's tragedies. From the abundance of good modern poets, three representatives will be mentioned here. Ei nar Benediktsson ( 1 864-1940) was a powerful figure who, as a kind oflatter-day Eggert Olafsson, sought to improve Iceland by forming interna tional corporations to mine gold and harness water power. He used lang. as he used wealth, to gain power over things, and his nature poems, like " U ts<er" (Ocean) , are rich with the imagery of opposing elements in nature and his view of the pantheistic force uniting all things. Steinn Steinar ( 1908-58) came to Reykj avik as a poor youth in the late 1 920s, and in his first collection ( 1934) produced poems of social pro test, sympathizing with hungry workers who "don't understand / their own relationship / to their enemies." This same poem, "Veruleiki" (Reality) , in free verse, goes beyond skepticism of the social order, however, to speak of the illusory nature of existence itself. This note of doubt, alienation, and nihilism became predominant in Steinn's finely pruned, paradoxical poems, the longest and most highly regarded of which is "Timinn og vatnio" (Time and the Water) , an enigmatic and symbolic meditation probably meant to be sensed rather than comprehended. Hannes Petursson (b. 1 931 ) has produced sen sitive and meticulously crafted lyrics on a variety of subjects including 1. folklore, European places (the prison camp at Dachau, the Strasbourg ca thedral) , and CI. figures like Odysseus. Hannes writes with a calm and firm voice on such themes as the emptiness of lang. and man's separation from nature. In "Storborg" (Big City ) , he de scribes himself as sitting like a prisoner in a laby rinth of asphalt and stone from which he escapes, by the grace of a bird or trees or a fountain, "into another context, a bigger and more complex whole, a labyrinth where no one knows what lives deep inside." BIBLIOGRAPHY: P. Mitchell and K. Ober, Bibl. oj Mod. I. Lit. in Tr. ( 1 975)-lists trs. of works since the Reformation period. PRIMARY WORKS: Bishop Guabrand 's VisnabOk 1 612, ed. S. Nordal ( 1937)-facsimile with valu able intro. in Eng.; Hymns oj the Passion by Hall grimur Pitursson, tr. A. C. Gook ( 1 966) ; islenzkt lj6lJasaJn, ed. K. Karlsson, 6 v. ( 1974-78)-most comprehensive anthol . ; The Postwar Poetry oj Ice land, ed. and tr. S. Magnusson ( 1 982) . SECONDARY WORKS:]' Porkelsson, Om digtningen pa Island i det 15. og 1 6. arhundrede ( 1 888) ; ]. C. Poestion, Isliindische Dichter der Neuzeit ( 1897) begins with the Reformation; R. Beck, Hist. oj I. Poets 1800-1 940 ( 1 950) ; S. Einarsson, A Hist. oj I. Lit. ( 1 957) ; ]. Hjalmarsson, islenzk nutimalj6lJlist
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ICON ( 1971 ) ; T. M. Andersson, "The I. Sagas," Heroic Epic and Saga, ed. F. ]. Oinas ( 1 978) . R.CO. ICON. See ICONICITY; ICONOLOGY; ONOMATO POEIA; REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; SEMIOTICS, POETIC; SOUND. ICONICIlY. A natural resemblance or analogy of form between a word (the signifier) and the object it refers to (the signified) . In the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, every sign mediates be tween its referent and a meaning; the relation between signifier, signified, and meaning is in effect triangular. Three types or modes of repre sentation are recognized, hence three possible relationships may obtain between the sign and its object. If the relation is cognitive (thought) but arbitrary, the sign is a symbol; thought is carried on in terms of signs, hence meaning itself is a sign relation. If the sign is in physical proximity to its object, then the sign is an index: smoke is an index of fire. If there is resemblance between sign and object, the sign is an icon: mimicry by a profes sional mime is iconic. Icons, like indices, are not genuine or full-bodied signs for Peirce but are inferior, though they may be common or even prolific; icons "can represent nothing but Forms and Feelings" ( CP 4.544) . Peirce's concept of i. is important because it refutes the traditional critical denigration of mi metic sound effects in poetry such as onomato poeia (q.v.) by showing that the mimetic function is a key component of the representational system itself. Mimetic effects in poetry may now be seen not as quaint aberrations or mere "poetical" de vices but, rather, natural extensions of a process always at work in lang. There are other processes, certainly, but L is one, and more one than allowed by Plato in Cratylus. Considerable linguistic re search in the 20th c. has confirmed that i. operates at every level of lang. structure (phonology, mor phology, syntax) and in virtually every known lang. worldwide. Beyond speech itself, L also functions in visual representations of lang., e.g. sign lang. (particularly evident) , and in several writing sys tems and writing-based picture-signs (hiero glyphs, ideograms, phonograms, the rebus) . And verbal i. can be correlated with visual forms of i. operant in painting and poetic imagery. In poetry, prosodic i. can be found operating at every level of the stratification of the text, from a wide range of mimetic sound effects (see SOUND ) to expressive rhythms and "representative meter" (see METER ) , to iconic syntax; and in the visual mode of the poem, from mimetic subgenres such as pattern poetry and concrete poetry to mimetic strategies of deployment in free verse (see VISUAL POETRY ) . See now REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; ICONOLOGY; IDEOGRAM; ONOMATOPOEIA; SEMIOT ICS, POETIC. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. C. Hartshorne
and P. Weiss, 8 v. ( 1 93 1-58) ; D. L. Bolinger, Forms of Eng. ( 1965 ) ; R. W. Wescott, "Linguistic Icon ism," Lang 47 ( 1 9 7 1 ) ; S. Ullmann, "Natural and Conventional Signs," and T. Todorov, "Lit. and Semiotics," The Tell-Tale Sign, ed. T. A. Sebeok ( 1975 ) ; w. K. Wimsatt, Jr., "In Search of Verbal Mimesis," Day of the Leopards ( 1976)-eight types of verbal L; T. A. Sebeok, "I.," MLN 91 ( 1 976) ; Y Malkiel, "From Phonosymbolism to Morphosym bolism," Fourth LACUS Forum ( 1978) , supp. by D. B.Justice, "I. and Assoc.," RPh 33 ( 1 980) ; R. Cure ton, "e e cummings: A Case Study of Iconic Syn tax," Lang&S 14 ( 1981 ) ;]. N. Deely, "Antecedents to Peirce's Notion of Iconic Signs," Semiotics 1 980, ed. M. Herzfeld and M . D. Lenhart ( 1982) ; M . Nanny, "Iconic Dimensions in Poetry," On Poetry and Poetics, ed. R. Waswo ( 1985) ;]. Haiman, Natu ral Syntax: 1. and Erosion (1985 ) , ed., I. in Syntax ( 1985 ) ; W. Bernhart, "The Iconic Quality of Po etic Rhythm," W&1 2 ( 1986) ; w. Noth, Handbook of Semiotics ( 1 990) . T.v.F.B. ICONOLOGY is the study of "icons" (images, pic tures, or likenesses) . It is thus, as E. H. Gombrich argues, a "science" of images, which not only "in vestigates the function of images in allegory and symbolism" (see ALLEGORY; SYMBOL ) but also ex plores what we might call "the linguistics of the visual image," the fundamental codes and conven tions that make iconic representation and commu nication possible. I. thus has links with philosophy, esp. the field of semiotics (see SEMIOTICS, POETIC ) or the general science of signs, as well as with psychology, particularly the analysis of visual per ception (Arnheim) and the imaginary (see IMAGE; IMAGERY; IMAGINATION ) . More modestly, i. may be described as a "rhetoric of images" in a double sense: first, as a study of "what to say about im ages"-e.g. the trad. of "art writing" that goes back to Philostratus's Imagines (ca. 220 A.D. ) and is centrally concerned with the description and interp. of a work of visual art; second, as a study of "what images say"-i.e. the ways in which images speak for themselves by persuading, telling sto ries, or describing states of affairs. I. also denotes a long trad. of theoretical and historical reflection on the concept of imagery, a trad. which in its narrow sense probably begins with such Ren. handbooks of symbolic imagery as Cesare Ripa's lconologia ( 1592) and culminates in Erwin Panofsky's influential Studies in 1. ( 1939 ) . In a broader sense, the critical study of the icon extends to theological and philosophical concepts such as the biblical concept of the imago dei, the notion that man is created "in the image and likeness" of God. The Platonic concept of the eikon crops up in the notion of eikasia (cf. Eng. "icastic" ) , the perception of images, appearances, and reflec tions ( Republic 50ge) , in the theory of art, where it is linked with mimesis (Republic 598e-599a; see IMITATION ) , and in basic models of being and knowing. F. E. Peters notes that, for Plato, "the
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ICONOLOGY visible universe is the eikon ofthe intelligible one." The concept of the icon may best be understood as oscillating between a very general sense (the notion of "likeness" or "similitude") and a fairly specific reference to visual representations by means of likeness (e.g. paintings, statues, photo graphs) . C. S. Peirce's semiotic theories and mod ern linguistic research provide the foundation for the modern understanding of iconicity (q.v. ) : in Peirce's theory, iconic signs would include such things as algebraic equations, diagrams, phonetic mimicry, and sugar substitutes. The notion of the icon enters poetics in both its general and specific senses. Theories of metaphor, figurative lang., and allegory, all of which involve the analysis of verbal analogies, similitudes, and comparisons, invoke the general sense of the icon as a relationship of likeness. The New Critical idea of the poem as a "verbal icon" (see Wimsatt) whose formal struc ture incarnates its propositional content is the formalist version of poetic iconicity. The more specific sense of the poetic icon conceives it as a poetic "image," not in the sense of similitude but as a verbal representation of a concrete (usually visual) object. Vivid descriptions of places, objects (see EKPHRASIS ) , and persons, while not them selves "iconic" in the general sense, are seen as eliciting mental images in the reader, evoking a kind of secondary visual representation. Some times the notion of an "iconic" poetic image may be reserved for highly charged symbolic objects (Keats's urn, Coleridge's albatross) , but it may equally well be applied to more common materi als. Experimental genres such as concrete, pat tern, and visual poetry (qq.v.) which array the text into the visual shape of an object are of central interest for the ways they combine the general notion of iconic likeness with the specific strate gies of visual representation. Poetics often moves between these two senses without much critical self-awareness. Aristotle's Rhetoric (3.4) uses eikon in the general sense to denote comparison or simile; Quintilian calls it a kind of comparison "which the Greeks call eikon and which expresses the appearance ofthings and persons" (Institutio oratoria 5 . 1 l .24) ; Henry Peacham defines "icon" as a "forme of speech which painteth out the image of a person or thing by comparing forme with forme, quality with qual ity, one likeness with another" ( Garden of Elo quence, 1 577) . As the Ren. interest in the naming and classifying of stylistic and rhetorical devices waned, the term "icon" almost disappeared from poetics. The all-purpose term "image" (q.v.) took its place in poetic theory until the modern revival of semiotics reopened the question of "iconicity" as a general problem. Most early modern studies of literary or poetic i., e.g. Tuve, are compilations of specific symbolic motifs (see also Aptekar; Frye; Landow; Ziolk owski) . These studies, which generally attempt to reconstruct the meanings associated with particu-
lar visual images, might better be called "iconog raphies", reserving the term "i." for studies which raise more general questions about the conditions under which poetic images acquire meaning, and of the nature of literary similitude, resemblance, and iconicity (see Panofsky, Bialostocki, and Mitchell for discussion of the distinction between iconography and i . ) . Most comparative studies of the "sister arts" of poetry and painting, regulated by the Horatian maxim ut pictura poesis (q.v. ) , are poetic "iconographies" that try to clarify the mean ing of poems by reference to the pictorial scenes or works of art they describe. 1. in its more general sense would raise questions about the status of iconic representation in the specific text, its genre, and its cultural context, as in Ernest Gilman's exemplary study, which not only provides a great deal of information about the iconographic re sources of Eng. poetry in the 1 7th c., but situates this data in the context of the religious and politi cal struggles over the relative value of visual and verbal representation. 1 . , then, is not just the interdisciplinary study of imagery in a variety of media, but a historical and theoretical inquiry into the nature of imagery, with special emphasis on the difference (as well as the similarity) between iconic and verbal representa tion. Images and words, despite their easy confla tion in phrases like "poetic imagery" or "verbal icon," carry with them a history of radical differ entiation, articulated in oppositions such as na ture and convention (qq.v. ) , space and time, the eye and the ear. These oppositions are frequently associated with distinctions of class, race, gender, and political or professional identity (see Mitchell 1 986) . What Leonardo da Vinci (or his 1 9th-c. editors) called the paragoneor contest of poet and painter, verbal and visual artist, often becomes a figure for competing if not antithetical modes of being and knowing, most fundamentally the gap between self and other. 1. thus comes to lit. and poetry with a sense of its own impropriety, as a discipline grounded in nonverbal forms of representation. It is the intru sion of the visual and pictorial into the realm of voice, hearing, and lang., the entrance of simili tude into the (linguistic) territory of "difference," the colonization of writing by painting (or vice versa) . The subject matter of i. is both the desire for and resistance to the merging of lang. and imagery. The political psychology and anthropol ogy of iconic representation-the analysis of such phenomena as idolatry, iconoclasm, iconophobia, fetishism, scopophilia, voyeurism, and icono philia-is as important to the discipline ofi. as the meaning of any particular image. See also EM BLEM; FIGURATION; REPRESENTATION AND MIME SIS; SOUND; VISUAL ARTS AND POETRY. C. S. Peirce, "The Icon, Index, and Symbol," Collected Papers, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, 8 v. ( 1931-58), v. 2; C. Morris, "Aesthetics and the Theory of Signs," Jour. of Unified Science 8 ( 1 939) ;
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ICTUS E. Panofsky, Studies in J. ( 1 939) , "Iconography and I.," Meaning in the VisualArts ( 1955) ;J . C. Ransom, "Wanted: An Ontological Critic" ( 1 941 ) ; rpt. in Ransom) ; E. H. Gombrich, "Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought," ]WCI 1 1 ( 1948 ) , Art and Illusion, 2d ed. ( 1 961 ) ; R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception ( 1 954) ; w. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon ( 1 954) ; Frye; J. Hag strum, The Sister Arts ( 1 958) , William Blake: Poet and Painter ( 1964 ) ; J . Bialostocki, "Iconography and I.," Encyclopedia of World Art ( 1 963) ; H. Weisin ger, "Icon and Image: What the Literary Historian Can Learn from the Warburg School," BNYPL 67 ( 1 963) ; R. Tuve, Allegorical Imagery ( 1966 ) ; F. E. Peters, Gr. Philosophical Terms ( 1967 ) ; J. V. Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography ( 1 9 69 ) ; G. Hermeren, Representa tion and Meaning in the Visual Arts ( 1969 ) ; J. Ap tekar, Icons ofJustice ( 1969 ) ; U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics ( 1 976) ; T. Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Im ages ( 1 977) ; W.J. T. Mitchell, Blake's Composite Art ( 1 978) , I. ( 1 986), "I. and Ideology," W&D 1 1-1 2 ( 1 988) ; Ikonographie un Ikonologie, ed. E. Kaem merling ( 1979 ) ; B. Bucher, Icon and Conquest ( 1 98 1 ) ; Image and Code, ed. W. Steiner ( 1 98 1 ) ; G. C. Argan, "Ideology and I.," The Lang. of Images, ed. w. J . T. Mitchell ( 1982) ; G. Landow, Images of Crisis: Literary J., 1 750 to the Present ( 1 982) ; K. Moxey, "Panofsky's Concept of 'I.,'" NLH 1 7 ( 1986 ) ; E. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the Eng. Reformation ( 1986 ) . WJ.T.M. ICTUS (Lat. "beat") . Long disputed as a term, the concept of i. goes by a variety of other less satisfac tory names, esp. "metrical accent," "prosodic ac cent," "metrical stress," etc. As it is currently con ceived, meter (q.v.) is a pattern of prominent and nonprominent, or marked and unmarked, posi tions which together form a distinct pattern, the line (q.v. ) . "I." is the most neutral term for each marked or prominent position. As an element of the abstract pattern which is meter, i. is marked in each verse-system by the phonological feature that is phonemic for its lang.-accent (q.v.) in stress-based langs., pitch (q.v.) in tone langs., length or duration (q.v.) in quantitative langs. In the Eng. iambic pentameter, for example, the five even syllables are ictic, meaning that in the most neutral or normative realization of this meter these syllables will be stressed. Some variations from this pattern were, according to the tradi tional account, allowed for, esp. reversing the stressing on the first and second syllables. It was disputed whether this should be accounted for at the level of realization, i.e. in the actual line (in which case a stress falls under nonictus and a slack under ictus) or at the level of meter, by positing the permissibility of "substitution" (a trochaic foot could be substituted for an iambic one, with stress now agreeably falling under ictus) . The former option seems very undesirable, but the difficulty with the latter option lies in explaining why only
some substitutions seem to be allowed and why their frequencies in the five feet of the line are very differential. Neither option, however, infringes the funda mental distinction between meter, as an abstract pattern applicable to all lines, and rhythm, the actualization in each specific line. In the Cl. Gr. hexameter (q .v. ) , the first five of the six feet may be dactyls or spondees; the sixth must be a spon dee. The number of syllables is thus variable, but the first position in each foot is ictic. On this analysis, it would seem that i. corresponds to the concept of arsis (in modern usage) and thesis in ancient usage, namely a subdivision of the foot (q.v.) into two elements (regardless of how many syllables occupy each element) of which only one is prominent (see ARSIS AND THESIS ) . In antiquity the terms "arsis" and "thesis" were used to de scribe the movement of the foot or the hand in keeping time with the rhythm of a verse; Roman writers like Horace and Quintilian, however, used them in the sense of a raising or lowering of the voice and so reversed their senses from Gr. usage, a confusion brought into the modern world by Bentley in the 1 8th c. and others. Nevertheless, "i." denotes the marked or prominent position in the foot. It is important to remember that at the level of meter, all ictuses are equal, whereas in the rhythm of the actual line, stresses often vary considerably in their weights, some primary, some secondary, some even weaker. It was the signal accomplish ment of modern metrics to articulate the relation between the latter and the former as the relative stress principle (q.v. ) : it does not matter how strong, in absolute terms, a stress under i. is so long as it is stronger-even if by a hair-than the syllable under nonictus. In the account given by structural metrists, stresses under nonictus can undergo de motion and weak stresses under i. promotion; effec tually, this means that linguistic stresses are al tered or adjusted in weight under the influence of the metrical grid. In Cl. prosody, the term has been used in the 20th c. by scholars who held that the quantitative meter of Lat. poetry was in fact made audible not by length but by a stress accent. Beare, however, thinks that such an assumption "may be due merely to our craving to impose on quantitative verse a rhythm which we can recognize." Discus sion of the controversy may be found in Allen. See now ARSIS AND THESIS; CLASSICAL PROSODY; HO MODYNE AND HETERODYNE. C. E. Bennett, "What Was I. in Lat. Prosody?" AJP 19 ( 1 898 ) , with crit. by G. L. Hendrickson in 20 ( 1899 ) : 198-210, and discussion, 41 2-34; E. H. Sturtevant, "The I. ofCI. Verse," AJP 44 ( 1 9 2 3 ) ; E. Kapp, "Bentley and the Mod. Doctrine of I. in Cl. Verse," Mnemosyne9 ( 1 941 ) ; Beare, esp. chs. 5, 1 4; P. W. Harsh, "I. and Accent," Lustrum 3 ( 1 958 ) ; P. Habermann and W. Mohr, "Hebung und Senkung," Reallexikon 1 .623-28; A. Labhardt, "Le
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IDEOGRAM Probleme de l'i.," Euphrosyne 2 ( 1959 ) ; O. Seel and E. Pohlmann, "Quantitiit und Wortakzent im horazischen Sapphiker," Philolo!JUs 103 ( 1959 ) ; H. Drexler, "Quantitiit und Wortakzent," Maia 12 ( 1960 ) ; L. P. Wilkinson, Golden Lat. Artistry ( 1 963) ; w. S. Allen, Accent and Rhythm ( 1 973) , esp. 276 ff.; E. Pulgram, Lat.-Romance Phonology: Proso dies and Metrics (1975 ) ; Morier; Brogan; S. E. Trav erse, "I. Metricus," DAI 41 ( 1 98 1 ) : 4697. T.V.F.B. IDENTICAL RHYME, sometimes "tautological r." Increase in the "richness" or sonority ofr. over the traditional form of end r., which repeats only the medial vowel and final consonants of the rhyming syllables, has usually been effected by repeating identically the initial consonant sound as well. This exact reiteration of syllable sound produces what has traditionally been called (in Eng.) "rich r." or (in Fr.) rime riche, as for example down/ down (op posite of up; duck feathers ) . But the category "rich r." actually embraces several distinct forms of homonyms (words spelled or sounded identi cally but with differing meanings) : for discussion and exemplification of these, see RICH RHYME. ]. V. Cunningham entangles such a couple in a witty epigram: "God is love. Then by conversion / Love is God, and sex conversion." Beyond these forms, however, is the further class of words identical in sound (and perhaps spelling) and grammatical class and meaning. These are claimed by some theorists as examples of "i. r." (Ger. ruhrende Reim, though that term has not been applied consis tently) . In Eng., both rich and i. rs. are more common than is usually supposed-Chaucer uses them-but in other langs. they have been more freely accepted and more extensively cultivated at times, esp. in OF and MHG. It is disputed whether i. r. is r. at all: strictly speaking, end r. requires phonic similarity (but not identity) amidst semantic difference. But the tax onomy of rich rhyming leads inexorably to i. r. and raises, thereby, the more interesting and funda mental question of whether or not a word can rhyme with itself. Abernathy argues in the nega tive, pointing out that identical word repetitions at line-end appear in some verseforms where r. is excluded, such as the blank verse of Browning's TheRing and The Book (Bk. 7 ) , or Poe's "To Helen," or even Milton. And it may be pointed out that prosodic i. r. is in fact rhetorical antistrophe (q .v. ) . Scherr distinguishes rich from i . r. i n Rus. poetry as "homonymic" vs. "repetend" r. (206) . Scott takes the view that the phenomena here called i. r. constitute "terminal repetition" (237-39) , which raises the issue of how r. is to be distinguished from repetition (q .v. ) . On the other hand, Lotman argues that no word repeated in verse is ever re peated with total identity, i.e. in precisely the same sense, by virtue of its appearance in a new seman tic context: on these grounds one could say that identity of meaning is ruled out, so that i. r. is ultimately not separable from all the other cate-
gories of rich r. For Lotman, in i. r. semantic information is increased even if phonic is de creased, resulting in increased "richness" in the r. The status of i. r. bears on issues such as the formal specification of the sestina or villanelle (qq.v. ) , wherein words are repeated identically: are these rs. or, rather, repetitions? Wimsatt held the for mer, but Abernathy holds that the sestina "should be regarded as a special form of anti rhymed verse." This would accord with the traditional view that a refrain (q.v.) word is not a r., and does not preclude Lotman's argument. E. Freymond, " U ber den reichen Reim bei alt franzosichen Dichtern bis zum Anfang des XIV Jh.," ZRP 6 ( 1 882) ; A. Tobler, Le Vers fran�ais ( 1 885) , 1 67-76; ] . MOll mann, Der homonyme Reim im Franziisischen ( 1896); C. von Kraus, "Der riihrende Reim im Mittelhochdeutschen," ZDA 56 ( 1 918) ; ]. Fucilla, "Parole identiche in the Sonnet and Other Verse Forms," PMLA 50 ( 1 935); A. Oras, "Intensified Rhyme Links in the Faerie Queene," JEGP 54 ( 1 955) ; P. Rickard, "Semantic Implications of OF I. R.," NM 6 ( 1 965) ; R. Aber nathy, "Rs., Non-Rs. , and Antir.," To Honor Roman Jakobson, v. 1 ( 1 967) ; ]. Lotman, Structure of the Artistic Text (tr. 1977) ; Scott; Scherr; A. H. Olsen, Between Earnest and Game ( 1 990)-homonymic rs. in Gower. T.V.F.B. IDEOGRAM. In lang., a pictogram, a character in an alphabet which functions as an image for that to which it refers. In poetry, a field or matrix of juxtaposed words and images. The i. is the crux of Ezra Pound's "ideogrammic method," a new form of poetic structure which he hoped would allow Modernist poets to escape the traps of both late Victorian vagueness, metaphor, and sentimental ity, on the one hand, and the loss of immediacy created by the syntax of discursive, representa tional speech, on the other. Pound's search for new poetic techniques led him, successively, into imagism and vorticism (qq.v. ) , but it was his discovery of the work of the Am. Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (d. 1908) which provided the catalyst. Pound read Fenollosa's lec ture notes (written ca. 1904) on the nature of Chinese pictograms in 1914, published trs. of Chi nese poems based on Fenollosa's work as Cathay in 1 9 1 5 , and edited the notes into an essay which he published in 1919. Fenollosa's essay, The Chi nese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, may be fairly called the first and perhaps the most important Ars poetica of the 20th c. In Chinese, said Fenollosa, the characters of the alphabet are, in greater or lesser degree, images or visual representations of the things they signity. Thus the i. for "East" is a synthesis of the is. for "sun" and "tree"-the sun in the trees. Here ab stract concepts arise not out of abstract symbols but out of concrete particulars and the immediacy of experience. In the Western langs., by contrast, graphemes denote sounds which refer to objects
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IDEOLOGY purely by arbitrary convention. Fenollosa only con trasted Chinese and Western modes of thought; it remained for Pound to see how the pictogram could be formulated as a principle and developed into a poetic method. The essence of the ideogrammic method isjux taposition of separate objects or events so as to evoke a new matrix or constellation of meaning. The syntax is paratactic or asyndetic. But juxtapo sition does not imply fragmentation or the mere "heaping together" of unrelated items. Rather, the poet still exercises selection and combination; separate items are juxtaposed so as to be re-inte grated by the reader exactly as objects and events are integrated in ordinary perception of the exter nal world: the reader's mind will organize the elements into a coherent pattern. The ideogram mic method thereby imitates perception itself, and in this respect, it is a mimetic strategy (see REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS ) ; is. are motivated signs. Further, emphasis shifts away from static description: now symbols are used to represent not objects but relations, motion, energy, and action. Now lang. has an immediacy of presentational form lacking in the discursive-descriptive-ration alist nature of Western writing. Pound in fact misunderstood part of Fenollosa, but it was a terrifically fertile misprision. And Fenollosa himself was in error about Chinese: only 10% of its characters are pictographic; the vast majority are phonetic. Nevertheless, reading Fenollosa gave Pound the idea for a wholly new poetics, arguably a method which became more influential, in its several forms, than any other in the 20th c. Gefin claims that the principle of juxtaposition underlies much subsequent Am. po etry in the 20th c., incl. the Williams trad., Objec tivism, free verse (qq.v. ) , "open form," Olson's "composition by field" (see PROJECTIVE VERSE) , and Duncan's "collages." Pound seems to have intended The Cantos as a modern epic, though one organized not via narrative but via the ideogram mic method.-D. Perkins, Hist. of Mod. Poetry, 2 v. ( 1976, 1 987) ; L. Gefin, I. : Hist. of a Poetic Method ( 1 98 2 ) . T.v.F.B. IDEOLOGY. See CULTURAL CRITICISM; MARXIST CRITICISM; POLITICS AND POETRY. IDYLL, idyl (Gr. eidyllion [diminutive of eidos, "form"] , "short separate poem"; in Gr. a pastoral poem or i. is eidyillion Boukolikon) . One of the several synonyms used by the Gr. grammarians for the poems of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, which at other times are called bucolic (q.v. ) , ec logue (q.v. ) , and pastoral (q.v. ) . Theocritus' ten pastoral poems, no doubt because of their supe riority, became the prototype of the i. In the 1 6th and 1 7th cs., esp. in France, there was frequent insistence that pastorals in dialogue be called ec logues, those in narrative, is. In Ger., Idylle is the ordinary term for pastoral. Two biblical books-
Ruth and The Song of Songs-are sometimes called is., which may be taken to illustrate the latitude of the term. Note that Tennyson's Is. of the King 1 859) is hardly pastoral. Perhaps Tennyson thought the use of the term was appropriate: each i . contains an incident in the matter of Arthur and his Knights which is separate (or framed) but at the same time is connected with the central theme; the contents treat the Christian virtues in an ideal manner and in a remote setting. But there is very little in Browning's Dramatic Is. ( 1 879-80) , which mainly explore psychological crises, to place them in the pastoral trad. The adjectival form, idyllic, is more regularly and conventionally applied to works or scenes which present picturesque rural scenery and a life of innocence and tranquillity, but this has little specific relation to any poetic genre. See BUCOLIC; ECLOGUE; GEORGIC; PAS TORAL.-M. H. Shackford, "A Definition of the Pastoral I.," PMLA 19 ( 1 904); P. van Tieghem, "Les Is. de Gessner et Ie reve pastoral," Le Prero mantisme, v. 2 ( 1 930) ; P. Merker, Deutsche Idyllendi chtung ( 1934 ) ; E. Merker, "ldylle," Reallexikon 1 .742-49; J. Tismar, Gestorte Idyllen ( 1973) ; T. Lange, I. und exotische Sehnsucht ( 19 76 ) ; R. Boschenstein-Schiifer, Idylle, 2d ed. ( 1 977) ; K. Bernhard, Idylle ( 1977) ; V. Nemoianu, Micro Har mony: Growth and Uses of the Idyllic Model in Lit. ( 1977) . T.V.F.B.;J.E.C. IMAGE. "I." and "imagery" (q.v.) are among the most widely used and poorly understood terms i n poetic theory, occurring in s o many different con texts that it may well be impossible to provide any rational, systematic account of their usage. A po etic i. is, variously, a metaphor, simile, or figure of speech (qq.v. ) ; a concrete verbal reference; a re current motif; a psychological event in the reader's mind; the vehicle or second term of a metaphor; a symbol (q.v.) or symbolic pattern; or the global impression of a poem as a unified structure (q .v. ) . The term's meaning and use has also changed radically at various points in the history of Western poetics. It plays only a minor role in traditional rhetorical theory, where related notions such as "figure" and "t;ope" are the dominant terms. Frazer argues that the term first becomes impor tant to Eng. crit. in the 1 7th c., perhaps under the influence of empiricist models of the mind. Hob bes and Locke use the term as a key element in their accounts of sensation, perception, memory, imagination, and lang., developing a "picture-the ory" of consciousness as a system of receiving, storing, and retrieving mental images. The term continues to play an important role in neoclassical poetics (q.v. ) , usually in accounts of description. Addison, in the Spectator papers on the "Pleasures of Imagination" (nos. 41 1-2 1 , 1 7 1 2 ) , argues that images are what allow the poet to "get the better of nature": "the reader finds a scene drawn in stronger colors and painted more to the life in his
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IMAGE imagination by the help of words than by an actual survey of the scene which they describe." In romantic and postromantic poetics (q.v. ) , the i. persists in a sublimated and refined fonn, and is often defined in opposition to "mental pictures" (Burke) or to the "merely descriptive" or "painted," ornamental images of 1 8th-c. poetry. Coleridge's distinctions between symbol and alle gory ("living educts" versus a mere "picture lang." ) and imagination and fancy (qq.v.; creative versus remembered images) consistently appeal to a difference between a "higher," inward, intel lectual i. and a lower, outward, sensuous i. The notion of the poetic "symbol," along with the po etic process as an "expressive" rather than "mi metic" endeavor, helps to articulate the notion of the romantic i. as something more refined, subtle, and active than its neoclassical predecessor. Mod ernist poetics often combines (while claiming to transcend) the neoclassical and romantic concepts of the L, urging poets to make their lang. concrete and sensuous while articulating a theory of poetic structure that regards the entire poem as a kind of matrix or crystallized form of energy, as if the poem were an abstract i. Thus Pound: "The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is a . . . VORTEX, from which ideas are constantly rushing" (Pound 8 1 , 92). It is not surprising, then, that "i." has been a key term in modern crit. An enonnous bibliography of studies investigating "the imagery of X in Y" could be compiled, most of them employing some uncritical amalgam of the various usages men tioned above. Furbank has argued that the term is so vague and contradictory that it ought to be dropped altogether or else restricted to "its natu ral sense . . . as meaning a likeness, a picture, or a simulacrum." The revival of rhetorical terminol ogy by structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruc tion (qq.v. ) is in large part accomplishing a quiet retirement of traditional types of L studies from literary scholarship. As the i. loses its function as a kind of universal solvent for poetic forms and elements, however, it may be taking on new inter est as an object of critical investigation in its own right (see ICONOLOGY) . Included in such an inves tigation would be some account of the historical shifts in the role of the concept of the i. in poetics; an analysis of the way it relies on philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic paradigms; and a cri tique of the values embedded in the application of a term like "imagery" to the specific problems of writing and reading. A critique of the concept of the poetic i. would probably begin by noting that it tends to blur a distinction that underlies a large tract of poetics, namely, the difference between literal and figura tive lang. An i. is, on the one hand, "the only available word to cover every kind of simile [and] metaphor" (Spurgeon) ; on the other hand, it is simply "what the words actually name" (Kenner) , the literal referents oflang., concrete objects. The
i. is, in other words, a term which designates both metaphor and description, both a purely linguistic relation between words and a referential relation to a nonlinguistic reality, both a rhetorical device and a psychological event. This confusion is most evident in theories of metaphor which follow I. A. Richards' influential distinction between "tenor" and "vehicle" (q.v. ) . Is Shakespeare's metaphor 'Juliet is the sun" to be understood as an "i." because "sun" is a concrete noun that evokes a sensuous picture in the reader's mind? Or is the whole expression an i. because it insists on a "like ness" between two unlike things? Is an i., in short, a kind of bearer of sensuous immediacy and pres ence, or a relationship formed by the conjunction oftwo different words and their associated vocabu laries? Is it a mode of apprehension or a rhetorical device? Whatever we may understand as the mean ing of the term "i." in any particular context, it seems clear that the general function of the term has been to make this sort of distinction difficult if not impossible. What could be at stake in perpetuating a confu sion between metaphor and description, or be tween figurative and literal lang.? One possibility is that the figurative- vs. literal-lang. distinction is itself untenable, and the ambiguous use of the term "i." is simply a symptom of this fact. "I.," understood in its narrow and literal sense as a picture or statue, is a metaphor for metaphor itself (a sign by similitude or resemblance) and for mimetic representation or iconicity (q.v. ) . Since literary representation does not represent by like ness the way pictorial images do, literary represen tation is itself only and always metaphorical, whether or not it employs particular figures. (Goodman argues, for instance, that representa tion, properly speaking, only occurs in dense, analogical systems like pictures, and that a verbal description, no matter how detailed, never amounts to a depiction.) We might also note that the literal-figurative distinction itself appeals to an implicit distinction between "letters" (writing) and "figures" (images; pictures; designs or bodies in space) . The concept of "poetic imagery" i s thus a kind of oxymoron, installing an alien medium (paint ing, sculpture, visual art) at the heart of verbal expression. The motives for this incorporation of the visual arts are usually clear enough: the whole panoply of values that go with painting-pres ence, immediacy, vividness-are appropriated for poetry. But there are equally powerful motives for keeping the incorporation of the visual under con trol, for seeing the visual arts as a dangerous rival as well as a helpful ally. Lessing, in Laocoon ( 1 766) , thought that the emulation of the visual arts by lit. would lead to static, lifeless description, while Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1 757) argued that visual imaging was a vastly overrated aspect ofliterary response, incompatible with the opacity
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IMAGE he associated with true literary sublimity. The recurrent figure of the blind poet, whose blindness is a crucial condition of his insight and freedom from merely "external" visual images, reminds us that the boundaries between images and texts, figures and letters, the visual and the verbal are not so easily breached in Western poetics. Another place where the contradictory tenden cies of poetic imagery may be glimpsed is in the area of reader response. Here the i. plays the role of a supplement to the poetic text (Derrida 309 ) . I t opens a n empty space t o be filled by the activity of the reader's imagination. Ideally, it completes the text in the reader's mind, in the world it projects, in the "spaces" between its words, bring ing the "vision" of the poem sensuously, perceptu ally alive; but it may equally well open a threaten ing space of indeterminacy (q.v. ) . Thus the voice and sound-phonetic "images" such as rhyme, rhy thm, onomatopoeia, and tone (qq.v. )-are the first place to look for perfect iconicity in poetry. But what of the imperfect, secondary icons-the "mental pictures" that voice and sound produce, the imaginary spaces-theater, dream-vision, movie, map, or diagram-that arise out of the reading experience? Poetics discloses a certain ambivalence toward these phenomena. While visualization, for instance, is universally acknow ledged as an aspect of reader response, there is still considerable resistance to treating it as a le gitimate object of literary study. The supposed "privacy" and "inaccessibility" of mental images seems to preclude empirical investigation, and the supposed randomness of visual associations with verbal cues seems to rule out any systematic ac count. But mental imagery has taken on a whole new life in the work of post-behavioral cognitive psychology. Literary critics who want to talk about poetic imagery in the sense of readers' visual re sponse would do well to consult the work of phi losophers and psychologists such as Fodor, Good man, Block, and Kosslyn, who have conducted experimental studies of visualization and mental imaging. Wittgenstein's critique of the "picture theory" of meaning (Philosophical Investigations, 1 957) also ought to be required reading for those who think of images as private. If mental images are an essential part of the reading experience, why should it be any more difficult to describe or interpret them than the images offered in Freud's The Interpretation oj Dreams? At the same time, it might behoove psycholo gists experimenting in the field of mental imaging to attend to poets and critics who have dealt with this question. It seems obvious, for instance, that mental imaging cannot be a subject of laboratory investigation alone, but must be understood in the context ofcultural history. Some cultures and ages have encouraged reader visualization far more extensively than others: "quick poetic eyes" and the "test of the pencil," for example, were the slogans of 1 8th-c. poetics, which urged the reader
to match his or her experience with conventional, public models from painting and sculpture. We might ask ourselves why Shakespeare seems to have been singled out as the principal object of traditional i. studies in Eng. crit. One answer may be that the study of imagery is part of the trans formation of each Shakespearean play from a prompt-book for the theater into a printed text for private reading. The first such study, Walter Whiter's A Specimen oj a Commentary on Shakespeare ( 1 794) , was pub. in the same era that saw Shake speare move from the playhouse to the study, and heard Charles Lamb's famous argument that "the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for per formance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever" ("On the Tragedies of Shakespeare" [ 1 8 1 1 ) ; see CLOSET DRAMA ) . For Lamb, the inadequate visual and aural presence of mere actors on stage was to be replaced with "the sublime images, the poetry alone . . . which is present to our minds in the reading." Whatever its merits, Lamb's argument makes it clear that the issue of mental imaging is not solely a matter for experimental investigation but entails deeply disputed cultural values-the rivalry of visual and aural media (including the "breach" or "hinge" between written and spoken lang. explored by Derrida ) ; the contest between art understood as a public, performative mode and its role as a pri vate, subjective refuge; the notion of authorial intention (q.v.) as a mental representation ("vi sion" (q.v.) or "design") that stands before or be hind the poem. The very idea of the mental i. seems inextrica bly connected with the notion of reading as the entry into a private space (the Lockean metaphor of the mind as a camera obscura or "dark room" into which ideas are admitted through sensory aper tures reinforces, with a kind of meta-image, this picture of mental solitude in an interior space filled with representations) . It is not surprising, then, that the concept of the poetic i. in all its ambivalence holds part of the central ground of poetics, serving as both the mechanism of refer ence to and deferral of an external, imitated or projected reality; as the projection of authorial intention (but also of unauthorized "unconscious" meaning) ; as the linguistic ligature that composes figures of speech and thought and decomposes them into a general condition of lang. and con sciousness; as the realm ofpolysemic freedom and dangerous uncertainty in reader response. Future crit. of the poetic i. must, at minimum, take account of the historical and conceptual variability of the concept and resist the temptation to dissolve poetic expression into the universal solvent of "the i." See also DESCRIPTIVE POETRY; ENARGEIA; FIGU RATION; IMAGINATION; IMITATION; REPRESENTA TION AND MIMESIS; UT PICTURA POESIS; VISUAL ARTS AND POETRY. H. W. Wells, Poetic Imagery ( 1 924) ; S. J. Brown, The World oj Imagery ( 1 927) ; O. Barfield, Poetic
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IMAGERY Diction (1928 ) ; J. Dewey, "The Common Sub stance of All the Arts," Art as Experience ( 1 934) ; C. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us ( 1 935) ; I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhet. ( 1 936) ; C. Brooks, "Metaphor and the Trad.," Mod. Poetry and the Trad. ( 1 939) ; L. H. Hornstein, "Analysis of Imagery: A Critique of Literary Method," PMLA 57 ( 1942 ) ; C. D. Lewis, The Poetic I. (1947) ; R. B. Heilman, This Great Stage: I. and Structure in King Lear ( 1948 ) ; R. H. Fogle, The Imagery ofKeats and Shelley ( 1 949) ; w. Clemen, The Deuel. of Shakespeare 's Imagery ( 1 95 1 ) ; Abrams; Wellek and Warren, ch. 15; F. Kermode, The Ro mantic !. ( 1 957) ; Frye; H. Kenner, The Art of Poetry ( 1959 ) ; R. Frazer, 'The Origin of the Term I.," ELH 27 ( 1960) ; M. Hardt, Das Bild in der Dichtung ( 1 966) ; P. N. Furbank, Reflections on the Word "I. " ( 1970 ) ; E. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir ( 1970 ) ; J. Derrida, Of Grammatology ( 1 974) ; N. Goodman, Langs. of Art ( 1 976) ; T. Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Is. ( 1977) ; The Lang. of Is., spec. iss. of CritI 6 ( 1980 ) ; S. Kosslyn, I. and Mind ( 1 980) ; N . Block, Imagery ( 1 98 1 ) ; M . A. Caws, The Eye in the Text ( 1 98 1 ) ; I. and Code, ed. W. Steiner ( 1981 ) ; W. Steiner, The Colors ofRhet. ( 1 982) ; Articulate Is. , ed. R. Wendorf ( 1 983) ; P. de Man, "Intentional Structure of the Romantic I.," The Rhet. of Roman ticism ( 1 984) ; Image / Imago / Imagination, spec. iss. of NLH 1 5 ( 1 984) ; w. J. T. Mitchell, "Wittgen stein's Imagery and What It Tells Us," NLH 19 ( 1 988) ; W. J. T. Mitchell, "Tableau and Taboo," and E. Esrock, "Visual Imaging and Reader Re sponse," CEA Critic 5 1 ( 1988 ) . w.J. T.M. IMAGERY. I. 1 6TH TO 1 9TH CENTURIES II. 20TH CENTURY A. Mental Imagery B. Figures of Speech C. Cluster Criticism D. Symbol and Myth III. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IV. APPLICATION Both the root meanings and broad implications of this term are akin to the word "imitate," and hence refer to a likeness, reproduction, reflection, copy, resemblance, or similitude. Its cognate terms, "icon" and "idol," often refer to objects of devotion and worship, manifesting the profound historical and cultural issues involved in i. The history of the term dates from at least the Old Testament, wherein are found the statement that humankind was made in God's image and the injunction against making graven images. The Ju daic trad. took its stand firmly against the Many in favor of the One, Appearance in favor of Reality. Material representations of the Divine were seen as interfering with rather than enhancing human ity's realization of God. Such dualisms are difficult to sustain, however, and later the Catholic Church perforce sanc-
tioned the general use of images as an aid to worship. But the pendulum subsequently swung back with the Islamic rejection of the Trinity in the 7th c. A.D., the iconoclasm of the Catholic Church itself in the 8th and 9th c. A.D. , and the Protestant rejection of images in the 16th and 1 7th c. It is during the Ren. and the Reformation that the history of lit. crit. in Eng. may be said to begin, and-although d. critics such as Horace, Longin us, and Quintilian spoke of i. and its uses-here too begins the special consideration of i. in literary theory and practice (Frazer, Furbank, Legouis [in Miner] , and Mitchell [ 1 986] ) . I . 1 6TH TO 1 9 TH CENTURIES. The term i . itself, however, was not in general use during the Ren., where the emphasis fell on "figures" (q.v.)-of thought, oflang., and of speech-concepts largely derived from the Cl. rhet. of Greece and Rome. The underlying philosophy of this rhet. was that meaning is primary and manner of expression secondary. Thus the use of figures-e.g. meta phor, simile, allegory (qq.v. ) -was viewed as orna mental and decorative, enlivening and enhancing a pre-existing meaning, and a premium was placed upon artificiality (artfulness) and technical virtu osity. A primary example is Sir Philip Sidney'S "De fence ofPoesie" ( 1 595) . In characterizing a poem as a "speaking picture," a concept derived from Horace, and in claiming that the poet "nothing affirms, therefore never lieth," Sidney meant that the poet deals with what ought to be (the ideal) rather than with what is (the real)-a Platonized adaptation of Aristotle's distinction between po etry (the probable) and history (the actual) (Poet ics, ch. 9 ) . For Sidney the power of images lay in their ability to move us toward virtue and away from vice by means of their strong emotional ap peal. But with the growth of skepticism and empiri cism in the late 1 7th and early 1 8th cs. there was a reaction against rhet. in favor of plainness and truth in lang. (Frazer) . This left a vacuum which was filled by "image." The epistemology of Hobbes and the associationist psychology of Locke led to a new way of looking at poetry in which the image was seen as the connecting link between experience (object) and knowledge (subject) . An image was defined as the reproduction in the mind ofa sensation produced in perception. Thus, if a person's eye perceives a certain color, he or she will register an image of that color in the mind-"image," because the subjective sensation experienced will be ostensibly a copy or replica of the objective phenomenon of color. But of course the mind may also produce im ages when not receiving direct perceptions, as in the attempt to remember something once per ceived but no longer present, or in reflection upon remembered experience, or in the combinations wrought out of perception by the imagination (q.v. ) , or in the hallucinations of dreams and fever.
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IMAGERY More specifically, in literary usage i. refers to im ages produced in the mind by lang., whose words may refer either to experiences which could pro duce physical perceptions were the reader actu ally to have those experiences, or to the sense-im pressions themselves. Thus, according to Frazer, the descriptive po etry of the 1 8th c. was new in that it focused more on the landscape itself than on that which it was supposed to represent. Creative power was as sumed to reside in the "imagination," a storehouse of images in the empty mind. There was a shift, then, from the Ren. conception of the image as exemplum to the 18th-c. conception of the image as a basis for associative ruminating. By the time of the romantic poets, however, the concept of "image" shifted once again. Given ro mantic transcendentalism, the world appearing as the garment of God, the abstract and general were seen as residing in the concrete and particular, and thus Spirit was felt to be immanent in Matter. Attempting to resolve the old dualism, they re garded Nature (q.v.) as Divine and nature poetry as a way to body forth the sacred. I., therefore, was elevated to the level of symbol (q.v. ) , to become thereby one of the central issues of modern criti cism. Meanwhile, several scientific and intellectual developments were underway during the latter 1 9th c. Max Muller put forth a theory of the growth of lang. ( 1 861-64) which seemed to ac count for metaphorical imagery as an organic part oflang. rather than as an ornament or decoration. According to this theory, humanity, as it develops its conceptions of immaterial things, must per force express them in terms of material things or images because its lang. lags behind its needs. So lang. as it expands grows through metaphor (q.v.) from image to idea. The word "spirit," for exam ple, has as its root meaning "breath"; thus as the need to express an immaterial conception of soul or deity emerged, a pre-existent concrete word had to be used to stand for the new abstract mean ing. Although Muller's thesis has been questioned (Barfield in Knights and Cottle), and although there may well be differences between ordinary and poetic metaphor, the implication that meta phor is created as a strategy for expressing the inexpressible is still influential today. Sir Francis Galton reported in 1 880 on his ex periments in the psychology of perception. He discovered that people differ in their image-mak ing habits and capacities. While one person may reveal a predominating tendency to visualize his reading, memories, and ruminations, another may favor the mind's "ear," another the mind's "nose," and yet another may have no i. at all. This discov ery has also had some importance in modern crit. and poetry. II. 20TH CENTURY. In what follows we shall trace out the modern deve!. of four issues: (a) i. as a description of how part of the mind works, (b) i.
as figure, (c) cluster criticism, and (d) symbol and myth. A. Mental Imagery. Psychologists have identi fied seven kinds of mental images: visual (sight, then brightness, clarity, color, and motion ) , audi tory (hearing), olfactory (smell) , gustatory (taste) , tactile (touch, then temperature, tex ture ) , organic (awareness of heartbeat, pulse, breathing, digestion) , and kinesthetic (awareness of muscle tension and movement) . These catego ries are preliminary to the other approaches to i., for they define the very nature of the materials. Several valuable results have emerged from the application of these categories to lit. (Downey ) . In the first place, the concept ofmental i. has encour aged catholicity of taste, for once it is realized that not all poets have the same interests and capaci ties, it is easier to appreciate different kinds of poetry. Much of Browning's i., for example, is tactile, and those who habitually visualize are un just in laying the charge of obscurity at his door (Bonnell) . Or again, the frequently-voiced com plaint that Shelley's poetry is less "concrete" than Keats's suffers from a basic misconception, for Shelley's poetry contains just as much i. as Keats's, although it is of a somewhat different kind (Fo gle) . Second, the concept of mental i. provides a valuable index to the type of imagination with which a given poet is gifted. Knowing that Keats's poetry is characterized by a predominance of tac tile and organic i., for example, or Shelley's by the i. of motion is crucial to an accurate appraisal of the achievement of each poet. Third, the concept of mental i. is pedagogically useful, for a teacher or a critic may encourage better reading habits by stressing this aspect of poetry. But the disadvantages of the mental-i. approach almost outweigh its advantages. For one thing, there is an insoluble methodological problem, in that readers arejust as different from one another in their i.-producing capacities as poets, and there fore the attempt to describe the imagination of a poet is inextricably bound up with the imagination of the critic who analyzes it. Second, this approach tends to overemphasize mental i. at the expense of meaning, feeling, and sentiment (Betts) . And third, in focusing upon the sensory qualities of images themselves, it diverts attention from the function of these images in the poetic context. B. Fignres of Speech. It is evident that each of the key issues in the study ofi. overlaps with the others and broadens out to encompass many areas of human knowledge and culture. For practical pur poses, however, we may treat the second issue the nature and function of i. in metaphor-as if it were a separable topic. The figures of speech in common currency to day have been reduced to seven: synecdoche, me tonymy, simile, metaphor, personification, alle gory, and-a different but related device-symbol (qq.v. ) . Each is a device oflang. by virtue of which one thing is said (analogue) while something else
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IMAGERY is meant (subject ) , and either the analogue, the subject, or both may involve i. -although most characteristically it is the analogue. Subject and analogue (or "tenor" and "vehicle" [q.v.] as I. A. Richards termed them) may be related with re spect to physical resemblance-as when Homer compares the charge of a warrior in battle to that of a lion on a sheepfold, in which case the study of mental i. provides useful distinctions-here we mav visualize the furious movement of the attack and perhaps imagine the roaring sound of rage. But many figures relate two different things in other ways: a lady's blush, in Burns's "my love is like a red, red rose," her delicate skin, or her fragrance may find analogues in the color, texture, or odor of a rose, but her freshness and beauty are qualities suggestively evoked by the rose rather than images displayed in it. Burns's speaker is saying that his ladyis to him asJune is tothe world, in the sense of bringing rebirth and joy. The simi larity, then, is that his lady makes him feel as spring makes him feel: the ground of comparison is an emotion, and the i. functions in relation to that purpose rather than to a physical object. Furthermore, the two things related may each be images (as in the Burns example) , or feelings or concepts; or the subject may be an image and the analogue a feeling or concept; or the subject may be a feeling or concept and the analogue an image. Some critics have asserted that the funda mental subject or tenor of a figure is in reality the relationship itself and that therefore the analogy or vehicle includes the two things related. Thus, although the term i. is commonly used to refer to all figures of speech, as well as to literal images, further distinctions are obviously neces sary. The kinds of things related and the nature and function of their relationship, as we have seen, provide grounds upon which these distinctions may be made. It was once common to claim that proper practice precluded mixing one's ana logues in any one figure Oennings) , but more recent critics have argued that no such nile is universally valid, esp. in poetry (Brooks) : it all depends on whether the mixture of analogues is consistent with the context and what their effect upon the reader is. Shakespeare is notoriously full of mixed metaphors, as in Hamlet's famous reflec tion on whether he should "take arms against a sea of troubles." Here we must either imagine some sort of demented warrior slashing at the sea with his sword, or we must imagine two separate meta phors-"feeling overwhelmed by troubles as by the inundation of the sea, and doing something about them as when a warrior arms himself and marches out to meet the enemy"--conflated. With such mixtures, when the figures flash by in rapid sequence, it is counterproductive to try tostop and picture each in our minds; the point is that they seem fitting and effective in context. Or again, it was once considered good form to teach students to visualize figures, but not only are
most metaphors constructed on bases other than on mental i. but also much mental i. is other than visual. In fact, persistent visualizing will break down the relationship between subject and ana logue in many figures entirely-as in the Burns simile, for example: if we consider the rose fur ther, we could imagine that there may be a worm buried within it, that it has thorns, and that its life is all too brief (qualities which have certainly been exploited in many other poems) , we will have pretty much destroyed the image and the poem. On the other hand, much attention was once focused on that kind of figure in which the differ ence between subject and analogue seems unusu ally great, the "metaphysical image" (Wells, Ru goff, Tuve, Miller)-a term and concept which go back to Dr. Johnson's essay on Donne, though Holmes has argued that such disparate figures were anticipated by the Elizabethan dramatists (see CONCEIT; METAPHYSICAL POETRY; and the discussion of the Donne image concluding TENOR AND VEHICLE ) . Thus, while the reader must be ware of going too far with an image lest it break down into irrelevance, poets are licensed to chal lenge the reader with an image which at first appears far-fetched but which on closer inspection reveals its profounder core of significance. Fourth, much was once made of the function of the "central" or "unifying" image in a poem, ac cording to which the poet develops a sustained analogy which then serves as the structural frame of the poem. Ericson, for example, distinguishes among different sorts of i. patterns in a poem; in Herbert he finds that images may be extended, end-on-end, mixed, and so on, concluding that the extended image seems to be the most effective. But here again we can only conclude, as with mixed metaphors, visualized figures, and meta physical images, that the central or unifYing im age is merely one possibility among many, and as such it has no special normative value but depends largely upon meaning and function in a particular context. When such distinctions regarding the meaning and function of i. were adapted as the basis for theories about the nature of poetic lang., or the quality of the artistic imagination, i. became one of the key terms of the New Criticism (q.v. ) , which developed what it viewed as a radically "func tional" theory of i., based on the assumptions that figures are the differentiae of poetic lang. and that poetic lang. is the differentia of the poetic art. This assumption was opposed to what the New Critics took to be the "decorative fallacy" of traditional rhet. and the "heresy" of modern positivist seman tics, which claimed that logical statement is the only indicator of truth and all other forms of state ment are untrue. C. Clus ter Cri ticism. The study of figurative i., therefore, anticipates and overlaps the sub sequently developed study of symbolic i. In the latter approach the essential question is how pa t-
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IMAGERY terns of i.-whether literal, figurative, or both-in a work reveal facts about the author or the poem, on the basic assumption that repetitions and recur rences (usually of images but on occasion of word patterns in general) are in themselves significant. Hence the method involved the simple applica tion (and sometimes distortion) of some elemen tary statistical principles. These patterns may ap pear either within the work itself or among literary works and myths in general (see ARCHETYPE) or both. Assuming that repetitions are indeed signifi cant, we must examine the nature of this signifi cance. What exactly will counting image-clusters tell the critic? There developed at least five distin guishable approaches, each a bit more complex than the preceding: ( 1 ) texts of doubtful author ship can be authenticated (Smith) ; (2) some as pects of the poet's own experiences, tastes, tem perament, and vision of life can be inferred (Spurgeon, Banks) ; 3) the causes of tone, atmos phere, and mood in a work can be analyzed and defined (Spurgeon ) ; (4) the ways in which the structure of conflict in a play is embodied can be examined (Burke 1941 ) ; and (5) symbols can be traced out, either in terms of how image patterns relate to the author or how they relate to arche types or both (Frye, Knight, Heilman) . The first two approaches relate to problems extrinsic to the work itself, although they seek internal evidence. The procedure involved count ing all the images in a work or all the works of a given poet (and here the problems of what an image is, what kind it is, and whether it is literal or figurative had to be resolved anew by each critic doing the counting) and then classifying them according to the areas of experience these images represent: Nature-Animate and Inanimate, Daily Life, Learning, Commerce, and so on. Since these categories and their proportions represent aspects of the poet's perceptions and imagination, two inferences can be made on the basis of the resul tant charts and figures: first, that the patterns are caused by the poet's personal experiences and therefore give a clue to the poet's personality and background; and second, that since they are unique-like fingerprints, no two minds have ex actly the same patterns-they offer a means of determining the authorship of doubtful works. Perhaps the second assumption is sounder than the first, although both are dubious, for fre quently images appear in a work because of liter ary and artistic conventions (q.v.) rather than be cause of the poet's personality or experience (Hornstein, Hankins) . The third and fourth approaches relate to prob lems intrinsic to the artistic organization of the work itself. Thus Kenneth Burke remarked, "One cannot long discuss imagery without sliding into symbolism. The poet's images are organized with relation to one another by reason of their symbolic kinships. We shift from the image of an object to
its symbolism as soon as we consider it, not in itself alone, but as a function in a texture of relation ships" ( 1 937) . Certain plays of Shakespeare, as Spurgeon showed, are saturated with one or an other kind of similar images or clusters (usually figurative)-the i. of light and dark in Romeo and juliet, or of animals in King Lear, or of disease in Hamlet-and it was reasoned that these recur rences, although they might not be consciously noticed by the ordinary reader or playgoer, are continually at work conditioning our responses as we follow the action of the play. Thus Kolbe, a pioneer of cluster erit. along with his predecessors Whiter and Spaulding, claimed in 1 930: "My thesis is that Shakespeare secures the unity of each of his greater plays, not only by the plot, by linkage of characters, by the sweep of Nemesis, by the use of irony, and by the appropriateness of style, but by deliberate repetition throughout the play of at least one set ofwords or ideas in harmony with the plot. It is like the effect of the dominant note in a melody." Later critics added that clusters may form dramatic discords as well as harmonies. From this argument it was but a small step to classifying images according to their relationship to the dramatic conflicts in the work. There are basically two sorts of clusters: the recurrence of the same image at intervals throughout the work, or the recurrence of different images together at intervals. If the same image recurs in different contexts, then it should serve to link those con texts in significant ways, and if different images recur together several times, then the mention of any one of them will serve to call the others to mind. Such notions of going below the surface to find associative patterns owed something, of course, to Freudian psychoanalysis as well. D. Symbol and Myth. The next and fourth step was to reason once again from inside to outside the work, but this time ostensibly for the sake of greater insight into the work. According to Burke, a poem is a dramatic revelation in disguised form of the poet's emotional tensions and conflicts, and if, therefore, some idea of these tensions and con flicts can be formed, the reader will then be alerted to their symbolic appearance in the work. Thus Burke could make "equations" among Cole ridge's image-clusters by comparing the poet's letters with the Ancient Mariner and could con clude that the albatross symbolizes Coleridge's guilt over his addiction to opium. This, he rea soned, illuminates the "motivational structure" of that particular poem. It is not difficult, on the other hand, to equate image-clusters in a particular work with larger patterns found in other works and in myths instead of merely in the poet's personal life (a dream is the "myth" of the individual, a myth is the "dream" of the race) , as does Frye, for example, and even Burke himself, for the "action" of which a poem is "symbolic" frequently resembles larger ritualistic patterns such as purgation, scapegoating, killing
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IMAGERY the king, initiation, and the like, though expressed on a personal level and in personal terms. Robert Penn Warren sees in the Ancient Mariner a symbol of the artist-archetype, embodied in the figure of the Mariner, torn between the conflicting and am biguous claims of reason (symbolized by the sun) and the imagination (symbolized by the moon) ; thus the crime is a crime against the imagination, and the imagination revenges itselfbut at the same time heals the Mariner; the wandering is also a blessing and a curse, for the Mariner is the poete maudit (q.v.) as well as the "prophet of universal charity" (see Olson's review of this interp. in Crane) . One may therefore find implicit images of guilt, purification, descent, and ascent running throughout a poem whose literal action may be of quite a different nature. Image clusters may form "spatial pattern" or even a "subplot" calling for special attention (Cook) . There are certain difficulties with cluster crit., however, which revolve primarily around the fact that it tends to reduce complex and individual works of lit. to simpler and more general para digms. In emphasizing primarily certain aspects of a work for inspection, in finding similarities among all literary works, and in assuming that all recurrences have a certain kind of significance, this approach has been called seriously into ques tion (Adams in Miner ) . I I I . RECENT DEVELOPMENTS. More recently the literary study of i. has become at once more ad vanced and more problematic. There are a pleth ora of studies in speculative and experimental psychology, involving phenomenology, epistemol ogy, and cognitive psychology, looking very closely at the question of what exactly mental i. is. Block, for example, analyzes the recent objec tion that, although it seems as if we can see inter nal pictures, this cannot in fact be the case, for it would mean that we have pictures in the brain and an inner eye to see them with, and no such mental operations can be found. Images are, it is claimed, verbal and conceptual. Block concludes that there are two kinds of i., one which represents percep tion in roughly the same way pictures do, the other which represents as lang. does, i.e. conceptually, that some combine pictorial and verbal elements, and that the real question is what types of repre sentation are possible. Furbank, on the other hand, after giving a very useful history of the term "image" up to the imagists (q.v. ) , reveals the ambiguities and confu sions involved in using the terms "image" and "concrete" to describe qualities of the verbal me dium. We should not confuse "abstract" with "gen eral" and "concrete" with "specific." "Concrete," for example, does not necessarily mean "sensu ous," and that which is "specific" may very well also be "abstract." The only actual physical element of poetry is found in the subvocal or silent actions of tongue and larynx as a poem is recited or read. Furbank has suggested that we drop the term i.
altogether. More inclusive is the work of Mitchell, who places the entire issue within the broad historical context of knowledge as a cultural product (see IMAGE; ICON AND ICONOLOGY ) . First, he has pro vided a chart of the "family of images" to indicate the different meanings of i.: in art history are found the graphic images (pictures, statues, de signs ) , in physics the optical images (mirrors, projections) , in philosophy and theology the per ceptual images (sense data, "species," appear ances) , in psychology and epistemology the men tal images (dreams, memories, ideas, fantasmata) , and in lit. crit. the verbal images (metaphors, descriptions, writing) . Mitchell goes on to develop an argument con cerning the nature and function of i. which is deliberately constructed to steer a middle course between the old-fashioned realism of empiricists such as John Locke and the recently fashionable nominalism of poststructuralists and deconstruc tionists such as Jacques Derrida. Both our signs and the world they signify are a product of human action and understanding, and although on the one hand our modes of knowledge and represen tation may be arbitrary and conventional, they are on the other hand the constituents ofthe forms of life-the practices and trads. within which we must make epistemological, ethical, and political choices. The question is, therefore, not simply "What is an image?" but more "How dowe transfer images into powers worthy of trust and respect?" Discourse, Mitchell concludes, does project worlds and states of affairs that can be pictured concretely and tested against other representations. Approaching the problem from a socio-politi cal-historical perspective, Weimann would remind us that, while for modern critics the meaning of a poem is secondary to its figures, for Ren. and metaphysical poets the meaning was primary. Here he agrees with Tuve that modern interps. , therefore, fail to do justice to the intentions and structures of earlier works. Metaphor, he says, is neither autonomous nor decorative; rather, it re lates man and universe, and the link or interaction between tenor and vehicle (q.v.) is the core. His tory is part of the meaning of a metaphor. Shake speare's freedom oflinguistic transference reflects the social mobility of his era-an age of transitions and contradictions. That neoclassical critics did not value Shakespeare's over-rich i. but rather preferred plot over diction reflects their own view of man in society. This valuation was reversed during the romantic age, but even the romantics did not place form over meaning. Modernist poets and critics, Weimann argues, emphasizing the autonomy (q.v. ) of a literary work and its spatial patterns, have removed lit. both from history and its audience (see MODERNISM; DECONSTRUC TION) . In seeking liberation from time and space, and from history into myth, this trad. has rejected the mimetic function of lit. in Cl. crit. (see po-
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IMAGERY ETRY, THEORIES OF, Mimetic Theories) , as well as the expressive principle of romanticism. Metaphor is now seen as an escape from reality and has become severed from its social meaning. In reply, Wei mann calls for an integration of the study of i . within a more comprehensive vision of lit. hist. Other commentators more sympathetic to the achievements of modernism have held that, far from severing form and meaning, it sees meaning as a function of form; and far from seeking an escape from history, it seeks to redeem history. No more time-bound works can be imagined than those two monuments of modernism, Joyce's Ulys ses and Eliot's The Waste Land. Finally, Yu's analysis of Chinese i. suggests ways in which the study of poetic i. can be enriched further by means of comparative studies. She sees a fundamental difference between "attitudes to ward poetic i . i n classical China" and "those com monly taken for granted in the West." Western conceptions are based on the dualism of matter and spirit and upon the twin assumptions of mime sis and fictionality: poetry embodies concretely a transcendent reality, and the poet is a creator of hitherto unapprehended relations between these two disparate realms. The Chinese assumption, by contrast, is nondualistic: there are indeed differ ent categories of existence-personal, familial, social, political, natural-but they all belong to the same earthly realm, and the poet represents reality both literally and by joining various images which have already been molded for him by his culture. Thus the Chinese poetic and critical trad. reveals the conventional correspondences used by the poets in their efforts to juxtapose images so as to suggest rather than explain meaning. One might point out, however, that these principles sound very much like those of the Western mod ernist poetic previously discussed, itself influ enced by Oriental philosophy and poetry namely, the objective correlative (q.v.) and the juxtaposition of images. Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the imagists, not to mention Whitman before them, were all striving, each in his own way, to heal the split ofWestern dualism and achieve, in Yeats's phrase, Unity of Being. Whether they did so by means of a vision of transcendence or one of im manence, there are remarkable similarities in technique among them, as well as between them and the Chinese poets and critics so illuminatingly analyzed by Yu. IV. APPLICATION. We may now ask what i. does in an actual poem. Although i. has come to be regarded as an essentially poetic device, many good poems contain little or no i. When i. is pre sent, however, it is best viewed as part of the larger integral fabric of the poem's form and as having a variety of possible functions. I. may be, in the first place, the speaker's sub ject, whether that thing is present in the situation or recollected afterwards, or simply the subject of a predication. Such subjects are, roughly speak-
ing, people, places, objects, actions, and events. In Frost's "Come In," for example, the speaker, nar rating in the past tense, represents himself as having come to a place of boundaries-a not un common situation in Frost-between the woods and field, night and day, earth and heaven. He heard a thrush's song echoing through the dark ening trees, and he felt the pull of sorrow. He decided, however, to turn away from this invitation and to gaze, rather, at the stars. The literal i. of subject here comprises the woods, the thrush music, the shades of darkness and light, and the stars. As for mental i . , we may if we choose visualize the scene and "hear" the song of the thrush. Frost does no more than sketch it all in, however: he does not create a descriptive set piece; he merely names the objects and actions. Thus, although he presents a physical action and setting, he is much more concerned with their mood and atmosphere than their physical details, and so he presents just enough i. to create that effect. Nevertheless, all of the lang. of the poem, except perhaps for the last two lines, is involved in this physicality. In the concluding quatrain, But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been. The first two lines refer to action and setting, while the last two are ratiocinative and nonphysical. It does make sense, then, despite the problems of cognitive psychology, the strictures of Furbank, and the subtleties of Mitchell, to distinguish be tween imaginal and nonimaginal statements. Fur ther, since economy is a fundamental artistic prin ciple, we often expect to find that literal i. is converted into a second subject, becoming the symbol (q.v.) of something else as a result of the speaker's reflective and deliberative activity. Mere scenery is rarely enough to justify its presence in a poem. As we proceed through Frost's poem, these expectations begin materializing around a certain sort of symbolic structure: the sun has all but set, the speaker is hesitating between open field and enclosed woods, and he is pausing be tween going inside or staying outside. The speaker is not simply out for a pleasant evening walk; some more crucial issue is at stake. Here is the penultimate stanza: Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament. Now we know something about the symbolic sig nificance of the speaker's representation of this landscape: he is resisting the temptation of de spair. Thus does the literal i. become symbolic, clustering around the poles of woods-inside-dark birdsong-sunset-lamentation versus field-outside dusk-stars-determination. The entire scene, there-
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IMAGERY fore, and the speaker's response to it, are now symbolic of his inner struggle, which is his second or "real" subject-scene and act are now "vehicle" and inner struggle is the "tenor" of the basic "metaphor" which is the poem. And though most of the lang. of the poem is literal, in the third stanza the light of the sun is personified as having "died in the west," though it still "lived for one song more / In a thrush's breast." This figure is enfolded within another and more important one: the dying light of the sun is identified with the thrush's song. The thrush is singing, in other words, of the death of the day. All of these associa tions are reinforced by the i. of extremity which permeates the poem: "edge of the woods," "Too dark," "The last of the light," "Still lived for one song more," "I meant not even if asked." Every thing seems just a bit desperate. But in the final two lines the speaker admits he realized the whole thing was a projection of his own despair: it was just a bird, and so we are led right out of the symbolic structure he has encouraged us to build-the same one he himself built. He has exorcised it. Are the "stars," then, an anti-symbolic symbol? Tension, irony, and ambiguity enough to satisfY any clever critic. We could go even further, such is the skill and richness of this little lyric. Is there not the arche type of death-and-rebirth here? ofthe descent into the underworld and consequent ascent? ofa ritual initiation in which the speaker-scapegoat tests himself against his own attraction-repulsion in re lation to death? We could conclude with Mitchell that the i. in this poem is a representation of a cultural and literary convention rather than sim ply an unmediated piece of reality, and with Wei mann that the poem's use of literal and figurative images embodies the social and historical realities of its time-1942. The literalism of the poem's i . reflects the modern suspicion of decorative fig ures and preference for implicit and symbolic i. The speaker's presentation of the experience as a matter of boundaries-hesitation-commit ment may be thought to reflect the nature of his soci ety-its initial hesitation after the Depression in entering Word War II and its subsequent dedica tion to that task. In this view, the moods of Frost's speaker are not simply conventional poetic moods; they are, rather, the effects of a particular culture and history. Thus, while we are not to regard the poem as embodying naked actuality, we are also not to ignore the fact that it springs from and refers back to an actuality, however mediated, and that the problem for the poet and the critic is to adjudicate among various representations of reality. The mod ernists did not believe that the autotelic nature of poetry either divorced it from history or revealed an "objective" truth about it. Realists such as Ker mode and Weimann have exaggerated the influ ence of Fr. symbolism on 20th-c. Eng. and Am . poetry and poetics, while nominalists such as
Kuhn, White, Rorty, and the deconstructionists (see Culler) , have exaggerated the difficulty of matching mind to world through the agency of the Word. As Furbank says, a work is a self-contained "world" aesthetically so that it can refer to the world really. The entire enterprise has always been an attempt, whether successful or not, to define the way or ways in which Mind can come to know World other than simply factually, to balance our projections against what's out there, in the knowl edge that we can never really finally say what it is. We know, on the one hand, that Mind mediates between ourselves and the World, and we seek, on the other, a validation-process for choosing among Mind's interpretations. The answer, as Frost's poem demonstrates-Stevens is another example, although without that literality-is to explore the boundary between them. I. in poetry, therefore, may be seen to have the following uses. It may, in the first place, serve as a device for externalizing and making vivid the speaker's thoughts and feelings. It would have been much less effective had Frost's speaker sim ply stated, flatly, that he was tempted by despair and was seeking a way to resist it. In the second place, and consequently, since this scene serves to call up to the speaker's consciousness-and thereby becomes, as we have seen, the vehicle of-a problem which has been troubling him, it stimulates and externalizes further his mental ac tivity. M ind and World are not simply being thought about, they are indeed confronting and interacting with one another-that is what the poem is "about," a process of thinking and feeling in relation to the environment rather than a set of "ideas" about it. Third, the poet's handling of i. serves to dispose the reader either favorably or unfavorably toward the various elements in the poetic situation. That Frost devotes four out of five stanzas on the thrush, for example, serves to indi cate the magnitude of the temptation and hence the difficulty ofturning away from it. I. may serve, in the fourth place, as a way of arousing and guiding the reader's expectations. Frost sets up the nature of the problem implicitly from the beginning via "edge," "outside," "inside," and so on. And finally, i. may serve to direct our attention, as we "slide," in Burke's term, from i. to symbol ism, to the poem's inner meanings-realizing, in this case, that the speaker is testing himself against his despair and coming out the other side. See also ARCHETYPE; FIGURATION; ICONOLOGY; IMAGE; S YMBOL. JOURNALs:Journal ofMentallmagery; The Literary Image; Word & Image. HISTORICAL CONS IDERATIONS: R. Frazer, "The Origin of the Term 'Image'," ELH27 ( 1 960 ) ; P. N. Furbank, Reflections on the Word "Image " ( 1 970 ) ; 1 7th-C. /. , ed. E . Miner ( 1 971 ) ; W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology ( 1 986) . MENTAL IMAGERY: F. Galton, "Statistics of Men tal l.," MindS ( 1 880 ) ; G. H. Betts, TheDistributions
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IMAGINATION and Functions of Mental I. ( 1 909) ; ]. K. Bonnell, "Touch Images in the Poetry of Robert Browning," PMLA 37 ( 1 92 2 ) ; E. Rickert, New Methods for the Study ofLit. ( 1 927) ;]. E. Downey, Creative Imagina tion ( 1 9 29 ) ; R. H. Fogle, The I. of Keats and Shelley ( 1 949 ) ; Wellek and Warren, ch. 1 5 ; R. A. Brower, The Fields of Light ( 1 95 1 ) ; ]. Press, The Fire and the Fountain ( 1 95 5 ) ; M. Tye, The I. Debate ( 1 992) . FIGURES O F SPEECH: M . Miiller, Lectures on the Science of Lang. 2d ser. ( 1 894) ; F. I. Carpenter, Metaphor and Simile in Minor Elizabethan Drama ( 1 895) ; G. Buck, The Metaphor ( 1 899) ; ]. G. Jen nings, An Essay on Metaphor in Poetry ( 1 9 1 5 ) ; H. W. Wells, Poetic I. ( 1 9 24 ) ; O. Barfield, Poetic Diction ( 1 928) , "The Meaning of the Word 'Literal,'" Metaphor and Symbol, ed. L. C. Knights and B. Cottle ( 1 960) ; E. Holmes, Aspects of Elizabethan I. ( 1 929) ; I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhet. ( 1 936) , Interpretation in Teaching ( 1 938 ) ; M. A. Rugoff, Donne 's I. ( 1 939) ; C. Brooks, Mod. Poetry and the Trad. ( 1 939) ; R. Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical!. ( 1 947) ; C. D. Lewis, The Poetic Image ( 1 947) ; H. Coombs, Lit. and Crit. ( 1 953) ; C. Brooke-Rose, A Grammar ofMetaphor ( 1958) ; D . C. Allen, Image and Meaning ( 1 960 ) ; M. Peckham, "Metaphor" [1 962], The Triumph of Romanticism ( 1 970) ; E. E. Ericson, "A Structural Approach to I.," Style3 ( 1 969 ) ; D. M. Miller, The Net of Hephaes tus ( 1 97 1 ) ; R. ]. Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking ( 1 988) . CLUSTER CRITICISM: W. Whiter, A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare ( 1 794) ; W. Spaulding, A Letter on Shakespeare's Authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen ( 1 876) ; S. ] . Brown, The World of I. ( 1 92 7 ) ; F. C. Kolbe, Shakespeare's Way ( 1 930) ; C. F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare 's I. and What it Tells Us ( 1 93 5 ) ; U. Ellis-Fermor, Some Recent Research in Shakespeare 's I. ( 1 937 ) ; K. Burke, Attitudes Toward Hist. ( 1 937) , The Philosophy of Lit. Form ( 1 94 1 ) ; G. W. Knight, The Burning Oracle ( 1 939) , The Chariot of Wrath ( 1 942) , The Crown of Life ( 1 96 1 ) ; M. B. Smith, Marlowe's I. and the Marlowe Canon ( 1 940 ) ; L . H . Hornstein, "Analysis of I . ," PMLA 5 7 ( 1 942 ) ; E . A . Armstrong, Shakespeare's Imagination ( 1 946) ; Brooks; R. B. Heilman, This Great Stage ( 1 948 ) ; D . A . Stauffer, Shakespeare's World ofImages ( 1 949) ; T. H. Banks, Milton 's I. ( 1 950) ; W. H. Clemen, The Devel. of Shakespeare's I. ( 1 95 1 ) ; F. Marsh, Words worth 's I. ( 1 952 ) ;]. E. Hankins, Shakespeare's De rived I. ( 1 953) ; Frye;]. W. Beach, Obsessive Images ( 1 960) ; G. W. Williams, Image and Symbol in the SacredPoetry ofRichard Crashaw ( 1 963 ) ; D . A. West, The I. and Poetry of Lucretius ( 1 969 ) ; S. A. Barlow, The I. of Euripides ( 1 97 1 ) ; R. S. Varma, I. and Thought in the Metaphysical Poets ( 1 972) ; W. E. Rogers, Image and Abstraction ( 1 972 ) ; ]. Doebler, Shakespeare 's Speaking Pictures ( 1 974) ; ]. H. Mat thews, The I. of Surrealism ( 1 977) ; v. N. Sinha, The I. and Lang. ofKeats's Odes ( 1 978 ) ; R. Berry, Shake spearean Metaphor ( 1 978 ) ; V. S. Kolve, Chaucer and the I. of Narrative ( 1 984) ; ]. Steadman, Milton's Biblical and Cl. I. ( 1 984) ;] . Dundas, The Spider and
the Bee ( 1 985) . SYMBOL AND MYTH: O. Rank, Art and Artist ( 1 932 ) ; R. P. Warren, "A Poem of Pure Imagina tion," The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( 1 946) ; Crane; P. Wheelwright, The BurningFountain ( 1 954) , Metaphor and Reality ( 1 962) ; Frye; F. Kermode, Romantic Image ( 1 957) ; H. Musurillo, Symbol and Myth in Ancient Poetry ( 1 96 1 ) ; K. Burke, Lang as Symbolic Action ( 1 966) ; 1 7th-G. I., ed. E. Miner ( 1 97 1 ) ; A. Cook, Figural Choice in Poetry and Art ( 1 985 ) . RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: T. S . Kuhn, The Struc ture of Scientific Revolutions ( 1 96 2 ) ; R. Weimann, Structure and Society in Lit. Hist. ( 1 976) ; H. White, Tropics ofDiscourse ( 1 978 ) ; R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature ( 1 979 ) ; The Lang. ofImages, ed. W. T.]. Mitchell ( 1 980) ; I., ed. N. Block ( 1 98 1 ) ; ] . D. Culler, On Deconstruction ( 1 982 ) ; P. Yu, The Reading ofI. in the Chinese Poetic Trad. ( 1 987) N .F.
IMAGINATION. I. DISTINCTIONS FROM FANCY; GENERAL SCOPE II. CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL III. RENAISSANCE AND 1 7 TH CENTURY IV. 1 8TH CENTURY AND ROMANTICISM V. LATER 1 9TH AND 20TH CENTURIES I. DISTINCTIONS FROM FANCY; GENERAL SCOPE. I. derives from Lat. imaginatio, itself a late substi tute for Gr. phantasia. During the Ren. the term "fancy" (q.v.)-connoting free play, mental crea tivity, and license-often eclipsed i., considered more as reproducing sense impressions, primarily visual images. By ca. 1 700, empirical philosophy cast suspicion on fancy; i. seemed preferably rooted in the concrete evidence of sense data. Hobbes nevertheless retains "fancy" and is per haps the last Eng. writer to use it to signify the mind's greatest inventive range. Dryden describes i. as a capacious power encompassing traditional stages of composition: invention (q .v. ) , fancy (dis tribution or design) , and elocution. Leibniz con trasts les idees reelles with les idees phantastiques ou chim biques ( Nouveaux essais) . Many, incl. Addison, use fancy and i. synonymously, but Addison calls his important Spectator series (nos. 409, 4 1 1 -2 1 ) "The Pleasures of the I." More susceptible to prosodic manipulation in actual lines of verse, the term "fancy" retains a higher place in poetic diction than in erit. (e.g. Collins' "Young Fancy thus, to me divinest name") . But in England and particularly in Germany, writ ers increasingly distinguish the terms long before Coleridge's definitions in Biographia literaria ( 1 8 1 7 ) . By 1 780, Christian Wolff,]. G. Sulzer,]. N. Tetens, and Ernst Platner make explicit distinc tions. Coleridge recognizes this by claiming him self the first "of my countrymen" to distinguish fancy from i. But several Eng. writers record dis tinctions between 1 760 and 1 800. Since 1 800, and to some degree before as well,
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IMAGINATION poets and critics have considered i. the chief crea tive faculty, a "synthetic and magical power" re sponsible for invention and originality (Cole ridge) . Writers have associated or identified i. with genius, inspiration (qq.v. ) , taste (q.v.) , vision ary power, and prophecy (see also EXPRESSION; INVENTION; IMITATION; ORIGINALITY ) . During the past three centuries, no other idea has proved more fruitful for poetics and critical theory, or for their intersection with psychology and philosophy. Before the watershed in the history of the idea during the 1 8th-19th cs., commentaries and poet ics generally accord i. an important but ambiva lent role: judgment or understanding must trim its vagaries and correct its wayward force. Ancient poets, philosophers, and psychologists consider i. a strong and diverse power, but unregu lated it produces illusion, mental instability (often melancholy) , bad art, or madness. Yet i. neverthe less becomes the chief criterion of European and Am. romanticism. Even if we speak of rom anti cisms in the plural, i. is important to each one. Not only philosophers and psychologists, but critics and poets elevate it as the prime subject of their vital work. Wordsworth's Prelude proclaims i. as its main theme; Keats' Lamia and great odes debate in symbolic terms the function and worth ofimagi native art. To a surprising extent, the transcenden tal or "critical" philosophy in Germany and Amer ica explores and elaborates the idea, spawning theories that champion the process and function of art as the final act and highest symbolic expres sion of philosophizing. II. CLASSICAL AND MED IEVAL. Aristotle advances in De anima the Cl. definition of i . : mental repro duction of sensory experience. In this elegant sim plicity, i. registers sensory impressions that are immediately present in the act of perception. With sense data absent, i. becomes a form of memory, mother of the Muses. Aristotle discusses the role ofi. in what Locke will call "the association of ideas," central to empirical psychology. Hume, Priestley, the associationists in general, Hazlitt, and to some degree Wordsworth will later view i. in terms of heightened associations of ideas (either unconscious in origin or determined by conscious choice) coexisting with feelings and pas sions, thus giving all associative operations a sub jective and affective element. I. thus forms the basis of taste, by definition grounded in the per ceiving subject, an argument Burke broaches in his Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful ( 1 757) and later at the core of Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique ofJudgment, 1 790) . But in the Poetics, where Aristotle pursues a structural or generic approach based on dramatic texts, he skirts the function of i. The audience's imaginative response projecting sympathy and identification (pity and fear) may be inferred, but Aristotle does not analyze i. as crucial to either reception or production. Plato distrusts the artist's i. and assigns it only
an essentially reproductive duty (copying a copy) . I n psychological terms, the soul passively receives an image, which reflects an idea. However, the Platonic nous (reason) carries a force similar to later conceptions of creative i. Sidney and Schelling, among others, will later interpret Plato's thought and image-laden writing to counter Plato's own condemnation of poetry and poets. For Plotinus, the i. (phantasy) is a plastic, constructive faculty which can change and alter experience, permit or realize a form of intellectual intuition or insight. Phantasy comes in two forms. The lower-linked to sense and the soul's irrational power-may har monize with the higher, which reflects ideas and the rational. Plotinus and Proclus are among sev eral who provide antecedents for Coleridge's "pri mary" and "secondary" i. As Plotinus considers nature an emanation of soul, and soul an emana tion of mind, his thought adumbrates a large system of nature and sense, idea and soul, cosmos and mind, creator and creativity, all intercon nected through imaginative power. Elements of this thought recur in the Hermetic philosophers, Jakob Boehme, Blake, Schelling, and Coleridge. Plotinus also provides broad implications for mi metic theory, and for a poetics that spills over into theodicy, where the external world is "the book of nature" or, as Goethe and others later express it (before the Rosetta Stone is deciphered) , a divine "hieroglyphic." Using this general idea, Emerson and Thoreau develop their own angles of vision, as do the Naturphilosophen in their search for connec tions between the forces and laws discovered by natural science and poetry conceived as an inven tive power creating its own related-but original nature. From the beginning, i. thus possesses roots both in empiricism based on sense experience and in transcendentalism. Its function may be seen in terms of natural and psychological phenomena, perception, acquisition of knowledge, creative pro duction of art, and even, as Spinoza says, the prophets who receive "revelations of God by the aid of i." ( Tractatus theologico-politicus, 1670 ) . These manifestations are not mutually exclusive but interact, as in the thought of Giordano Bruno, who conceives of sense, memory, emotion, cogni tion, and the divine mind all linked through i. Many writers, in fact, divide the power into levels or degrees, with adjectives denoting particular functions (e.g. re/productive, erste/zweite/dritte po tenz, primary or secondary, creative, sympathetic, perceptive) . The Prelude traces a maturation of the power through different stages. The explosion of Ger. analytical terms for i. in the 1 8th c. is stagger ing (Einbildungskraft, Phantasie, I., Fassungskraft, Perceptionsvermogen, Dichtungsvermogen or Dicht kraft-with variants, and more ) . Since antiquity, then, images produced by this power have been variously considered as materially real, or simply as appearances and pure illusion, or even as ideal ized forms. Poetry, dreams, divine inspiration
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IMAGINATION (madness and prophecy) , delusion and emotional disturbances-all involve one or more activities of i, It therefore harbors the greatest potential not only for insight and intuition (q,v. ) but for decep tion and illusion. Horace, long influential in Western poetics, barely mentions i, in his Ars poetica. This absence, coupled with Platonic distrust of i. and later neo classical emphasis on verisimilitude and decorum (qq.v. ) in imitation (what much 1 8th-c. and ro mantic theory scorns as mere "copy") , diminishes the place of i, in poetic theory for centuries after Horace. Although Philostratus declares imitation inferior to phantasy and Quintilian connects i. (visiones) with raising absent things to create emo tion in the hearer, not until the rediscovery in the 1 6th c. of the Peri hypsous ( On the Sublime) attrib uted to Longinus do European critics turn more directly to the power he describes: "moved by enthusiasm and passion you seem to see the things whereof you speak and place them before the eyes of your hearers." Boileau translates Longinus; in England Dennis and Pope spread his views. The useful, ifrough, distinction between "Aristotelian" and "Longinian" crit. stems largely from divergent emphases on i. and its corollaries for mimetic theory. III. RENAISSANCE AND 1 7TH CENTURY. Pico della Mirandola's De imaginatione sive phantasia (ed. and tr. H. Caplan, 1 9 7 1 ) collects from the C!. and Med. trads . , but stresses vision as the primary or archetypal sense, circumscribing the possibility of a larger poetics founded on i. Puttenham sum marizes Ren. notions of i, in the production of poetry and emphasizes the link between poet as creator and a divine creator (see RENAISSANCE POETICS ) . Sidney and Scaliger call the poet a "creator" (johnson calls him a "maker") implying ' that such creation imitates or follows nature rather than copies it. Hence a rigid dichotomy should not be estab lished between imitation and creative i.; it is pos sible to ally them, as Coleridge does in On Poesy or Art. As Coleridge frequently says, to distinguish is not necessarily to divide. For even with Sidney (and later Leibniz, Reynolds, Shelley, and Car lyle) , imitation is not so much a duplication of nature as an echo of divine creative power. The 1 9th-c. Platonist Joubert will claim that the poet "purifies and empties the forms of matter and shows us the universe as it is in the mind of God. . . . His portrayal is not a copy of a copy, but an impression of the archetype." Macaulay will call this the "imperial power" of poetry to imitate the "whole external and the whole internal universe." For Shaftesbury the poet is a 'Just Prometheus under Jove," and the variation on the Ovidian phrase-a god or daemon in us-becomes com mon in discussions of i. During the Sturm und Drang (q .v.) and romantic eras, the theme of Prometheus further modifies the connection between divine creative energy and
human poetry. In Blake's Christian vision these powers merge as the "divine-human i." Schelling calls genius (q.v.) "a portion of the Absolute na ture of God." Poetry for Shelley elicits "the divinity in man." Coleridge considers the secret of genius in the fine arts to make the internal external and the external internal; in religious terms, Jesus is the living, communicative intellect in God and man-suggestively phrased in Emerson's "living, leaping Logos." Ren. psychologists, among them Melancthon, Amerbach, and esp. Vives, advance increasingly sophisticated views of the mind wherein i. and the association of ideas play important roles. Sidney and Spenser consider imaginative power central to both theory and practice. Shakespeare uses i, (or fancy as its equivalent) suggestively, as in the Chorus of Henry V. In Eng. critical discussion of i . , Theseus' lines i n A Midsummer Night's Dream (5.1 ) become the most-quoted verses (Paradise Lost also figures prominently) . Although close reading re veals Theseus' distrust of "strong" i. and its "tricks," identifying i, with madmen, lovers, and poets-whose tales may never be believed-Hip polyta reinterprets all the players and the night's action as a totalized myth which "More witnesseth than fancy's images, / And grows to something of great constancy." Bacon's view ofrhet. and poetry must be spliced together from his many writings. Two trends emerge. He splits rational or scientific knowledge from poetic knowledge, which is "not tied to the laws of matter." But this bestows greater freedom on i. to join and divide the elements of nature, to appeal to psychological satisfaction rather than verisimilitude (q.v. ) , and to permit the imitation of nature frankly to differ from nature itself not only in the medium of presentation but in its appeal to moral value-and to what would later be called aesthetics and the sublime (q.v. ) . Later these premises resurface often, inc!. Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination," Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," and Reynold's Discourses (esp. 6, 7, and 1 3 ) , where i. rather than the matter-of fact becomes "the residence of truth." In The Ad vancement of Learning Bacon mentions an "imagi native or insinuative reason," a concept Addison repeats. But Bacon concludes, "I find not any sci ence that doth properly or fitly pertain to the i." Hobbes fails to see the capacious possibilities of Bacon's scheme for crit. or the arts, but his contri butions to empirical psychology open other ave nues and begin to supply the science Bacon found wanting. For Hobbes the "compounded i." forms "trains of ideas" or "mental discourse" which evolves intojudgment or sagacitas. In "compound ing" images and directing these associations to larger designs, the "contexture" of i. offers a pic ture of reality. This suggests what thinkers in the next century commonly express: i, subsumes judg ment. In 1 774 Alexander Gerard's Essay on Genius explicitly declares this.
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IMAGINATION Locke coins the phrase "association of ideas" in the £Ssay Concerning Human Understanding (4th ed., 1 700) . Originally he means idiosyncratic links between mental representations peculiar to an individual, a process Sterne explores in Tristram Shandy. But the phrase, like William James' "streams of consciousness," changes signification and soon stands for a pervasive habit of mind, both conscious and unconscious, akin to Hobbes' men tal discourse and trains of compounded ideas. Locke receives little credit for recognizing i. as a strong faculty because he criticizes poetry and shows scant sympathy for art, and he distrusts figuration in lang. But the "tabula rasa" tag over simplifies his epistemology and psychology. He states that "the mind has a power," an innate power (distinguished from innate ideas, which it never possesses) "to consider several" simple ideas "united together as one idea; and that not only as they are united in external objects, but as itself has joined them." As in Bacon, the active formation of complex ideas in "almost infinite variety" need not correspond to nature. Replying to Locke's difficult arguments about innate ideas, Leibniz in his Nouveaux essais quotes Aristotle's De anima: "There is nothing in the mind not previously in the senses-except the mind itself." Here, as Santayana later notes, Leibniz uncovers the germ of Kant's critical philosophy. In Leibniz-and in Hobbes' and Locke's ascription of an active power forming complex ideas or trains of them-i. acquires a central position in a new, flexible faculty-psychology with its accompanying facultative logic. IV. 1 8TH CENTURY AND ROMANTICISM. (See also paragraphs 11. 1 ,3,4 and III.l ,3 above.) It isJoseph Addison who brings these concepts within the ken of critical theory and poetics. "The Pleasures of the I." arise from comparing our imaginative per ception of nature with our perception of art, where art is itself an imitation of nature achieved through the artist's imaginative production which "has something in it like creation; it bestows a kind of existence . . . . It makes additions to nature." The interest rapidly becomes psychological and in volves a projective faculty, active and passive, pro ductive and reproductive. Like Pico, Addison em phasizes vision, but remarks that the pleasures of i. "are not wholly confined to such particular authors as are conversant in material objects, but are often to be met with among the polite masters of morality, crit., and other speculations ab stracted from matter, who, though they do not directly treat of the visible parts of nature, often draw from them their similitudes, metaphors, and allegories . . . . A truth in the understanding is . . . reflected by the i.; we are able to see something like colour and shape in a notion, and to discover a scheme of thoughts traced out upon matter. And here the mind . . . has two of its faculties gratified at the same time, while the fancy is busy in copying after the understanding, and transcribing ideas
out of the intellectual world into the material." The material and the intellectual or passionately moral worlds thus fuse through i . ; matter and spirit find a common faculty and may be repre sented by a single image. In part derived from Addison's crit., Mark Ak enside's popular poem The Pleasures of the I. com bines empirical and Platonic elements. I. "blends" and "divides" images; its power can "mingle," 'Join," and "converge" them-phrases which an ticipate Coleridge's "secondary" i. Collins and Joseph Warton reject satiric and didactic modes of verse; Warton proclaims that "invention and i." are "the chief faculties of a poet." Edward Young links originality and genius with i . ; Gerard, whom Kant later praises as "the sharpest observer of the na ture of genius," says, "it is i. that produces genius." Gerard, Priestley, and Duff extend associationist and empirical psychology to give a fluid model of the mind, not rigid or compartmentalized. Hazlitt concludes: "the i. is an associating principle" assur ing "continuity and comprehension of mind," a definition allied with his remark that poetry por trays the flowing and not the fixed. Emerson even tually gives a twist to this organic process by hint ing at a Neoplatonic foundation in 'The Poet": "the endless passing of one element into new forms , the incessant metamorphosis, explains the rank which the i. holds in our catalogue of mental powers. The i. is the reader of these forms." In Italy, L. A. Muratori advances a mutually beneficial combination of intellect and i. to pro duce "artificial" or "fantastic" images applied metaphorically and charged with emotion. Vico's Scienza nuova (3d ed., 1 744) mentions a recollec tive fantasia but, more importantly, examines how poetic i. creates the basis for culture through the production of myth and universal patterns that shape understanding of both nature and human nature. Largely ignored during his lifetime, Vico produced ideas that have influenced historiogra phy, anthropology, and imaginative writers since the early 1 9th c. WhileJohnson and H ume generally distrust the i., they stress its pervasive ability to supplant rea son. 1. for Hume becomes the central faculty, and for Johnson, in his morality and psychology, the central concern. Both keenly appreciate the role of the passions in strengthening imaginative activ ity and the association of ideas. They yoke the Cl. theory of passions, further developed in the Ren., to empirical psychology. Hume sees i. as a com pleting power acting on suggestiveness; he claims that the elements a writer creates "must be con nected together by some bond or tie: They must be related to each other in the i., and form a kind of unity which may bring them under one plan or view." This anticipates the romantic stress on or ganic unity. As Coleridge defines "the secondary" i., it "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-cre ate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unifY."
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IMAGINATION The associationists-among them Kames, Al ison, H. Blair, Gerard, Hazlitt (to some extent ) , and others-stress imaginative association as per vasive; it determines taste. Images and sense data receive moditying "colors" of feeling and passion, a notion Wordsworth studies and uses widely. The emphasis on feeling fused with perception or cog nition may be compared with I. A. Richards' later discussion of "emotive" versus "intellectual" belief (Practical Crit.) , or T. S. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" (q.v. ) . I n Burke's Enquiry the imaginative arts become the "affecting arts." Because they trigger the com pleting i. of reader or audience, "suggestion" and "obscurity" (q.v.) attain positive value in poetry and visual art. This helps explain the growing interest in literary forms and genres not rigidly fixed but in metamorphosis, also the fascination in Blake, Novalis, and others for aphorism, and the importance of the literary fragment in the early 19th c. The i. of the reader becomes regarded as an important critical concept, too, ranging from Dryden's and Locke's "assent" to Coleridge's "will ing suspension of disbelief." J. G. Sulzer, in his Allgemeine Theorie der Schonen Kilnste, notes, "the i. of those who hear or see the artist's work comes to his aid. If through any of the latent qualities in the work this i. takes on a vivid effect, it will thereupon complete what remains by itself." Sensing rapid expansion of the idea, Burke claims in his Enquiry, (6th ed., 1 770) that to i. "belongs whatever is called wit, fancy, invention, and the like." Hazlitt later remarks, "this power is indifferently called genius, i., feeling, taste; but the manner in which it acts upon the mind can neither be defined by abstract rules, as is the case in science, nor verified by continual unvarying experiments, as is the case in mechanical per formances." Critics analyze passages of poetry as reflecting the pervasive operation of i., one aspect of what Coleridge first calls "practical erit.," a fore runner of the New Criticism (q.v.) in the 20th c. Adam Smith bases his Theory ofMoral Sentiments ( 1 759) on the sympathetic identification that i. allows us to extend to others. AsJames Beattie says, "the philosophy of Sympathy ought always to form a part of the science of Crit." Hazlitt later states: "passion, in short, is the essence, the chief ingre dient in moral truth; and the warmth of passion is sure to kindle the light of i. on the objects around it." The application to crit. is found in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, culminating rhetorically (along with much else) in Shelley's Defence: "the great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification with the beauti ful . . . not our own. A man . . . must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put him self in the place of another and of many others . . . . The great instrument of moral good is the i.; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumfer ence of the i." Applications of what Coleridge calls
"sympathetic i." are crucial to changes in dramatic crit. Before 1800, William Richardson, Thomas Whatley, and Maurice Morgann approach Shake speare in this fashion, and Coleridge becomes the most brilliant exponent of such psychologically based crit., this too a forerunner of the psychologi cal criticism (q.v.) of the 20th c. The idea of imaginative sympathy also affects theories of poetic lang.: it should be "natural" and "spontaneous." Metaphor, personification (qq.v. ) , and figurative writing i n general are now viewed less as ornament (q.v.) and more as essential to impassioned "natural lang. " Theories of the primi tive origin oflang. (Rousseau, Herder, Duff, Mon boddo, and many recapitulations, inc!. Shelley's and Hegel's) strengthen connections between i., poetry, early deve!. of societies and their langs., and figurative speech in general (see ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETICS ) . As Hazlitt says, ex emplifying the connection between i. and the fas cination with figurative lang., a metaphor or fig ure of speech requires no proof: "it gives carte blanche to the i." In the best poetry, images are "the building, and not the scaffolding to thought." What is true not only may but must be expressed figuratively, and is a specially valid form of knowl edge. Hazlitt, neither a religious enthusiast nor transcendentalist, even says i. holds communion with the soul of nature and allows poets "to foreknow and to record the feelings of all men at all times and places." Blake's emphasis falls heavily on i. as a power ultimately communicating and sharing with the holy power of creation, a vision that culminates in an Edenic state. "All things Exist in the Human !." "Man is All !.," so also "God is Man & exists in us & we in him." "The Eternal Body of Man . . . The I . , that is, God himself," is symbolically "the Divine Body of the LordJesus." We are "Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine of Human !." Wordsworth's ideas ofi. evolve from the Preface to the 2d ed. of Lyrical Ballads ( 1 800 ) , through its 1 802 version, to a new preface and "Essay Supple mentary" in 1 8 1 5. In The Prelude, he describes the infant: . . . his mind Even as an agent of the one great mind, Creates, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds.-Such, verily is the first Poetic spirit of our human life. Cf. Coleridge's definition of "primary" i.: "the living Power and prime Agent of all human Per ception, and . . . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." Coleridge actually began the Biographia as a Pref ace to his own volume of verse, in part answering and moditying Wordsworth, but expanded it to a critical exposition and autobiography of his liter-
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IMAGINATION ary life that pivots on a reply to Wordsworth's published ideas concerning fancy and i. Coleridge considers that Wordsworth too closely links fancy and i. and explains i. too exclusively via associa tionism. In the 1 8 1 5 Preface, Wordsworth tries to ex plain how i. creates as well as associates. The power becomes for him so vast it challenges all conception, as with the apostrophe in The Prelude after crossing the Alps, or later: "I., which, in truth, / Is but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood." Wordsworth also claims: "I. having been our theme, / So also hath that intellectual Love, / For they are each in each, and cannot stand / Dividually." He uses his idea of i. to establish new grounding in poetic lang. and vindicates it in his practice (though not always in perfect conformity with his theoretical state ments ) . He chooses not to exert a systematic philo sophical concern for the idea as Coleridge does. He even considers that the word i. "has been over strained . . . to meet the demands of the faculty which is perhaps the noblest of our nature." Keats explores the idea of sympathetic i. and "negative capability" (q.v. ) , a search for truth or reality without any compulsive reaching after fact. Many of his letters and greater poems are undog matic speculations on the value, "truth," and na ture of the imaginative inner life. Shelley, regard ing reason more in its deductive and experimental mode, contrasts it sharply with i., and on this distinction builds his Defence of Poetry. The essay recapitulates developments of the previous half century. He constructs his argument through pow erful images and analogies rather than by Keats's "consequitive reasoning." Shelley'S impassioned and figurative prose actualizes its own subject. He emphasizes the unconscious power of i. over the conscious will in poetic composition. Coleridge, familiar with the philosophical de velopments in the idea since Plato and Aristotle, fuses and transforms them into the most sugges tive and fruitful critical observations of Eng. ro manticism. Though he never completes a system atic work that includes extended discussion of i., his theoretical pronouncements and practical in sights provide rich ground for surmise. He com bines British empirical psychology, Platonism and Neoplatonism (q.v. ) , scholastic and Hermetic phi losophies, and Ger. transcendentalism. The result is more than an admixture: he crystallizes and connects issues of perception and constitutive or regulative ideas, of associationism, of theories of lang. and poetic diction, and of the function of i. into a mimesis that "humanizes" nature not only by reproducing natural objects and forms (the "fixi ties and definites" manipulated by fancy) but also by imitating the living process through which they exist and through which we feel and realize them. Unlike many contemp. Ger. writers (e.g. Fichte or Schelling) , he applies the theory of i. at the level
of phrase and individual image (q.v.) in the crit. of poetry. Symbols for Coleridge are "living educts of the i., of that reconciling and mediatory power which, incorporating the reason in images of the sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-encircling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors" ( The Statesman's Manual) . This definition is virtually identical to Bishop Lowth's discussion of "mystical allegory" in De sacra poesi hebraeorum ( 1 753) . Thus, even in the symbol as defined by Coleridge, we see elements of prophecy and its earlier critical deve!. in the 1 8th c. Various romantic definitions ofsym bol, allegory, myth (qq.v. ) , and schema, whether from Kant, Schelling, Solger, Hegel, or others, all rely on i. Coleridge enlarges, reformulates, and applies the idea of i. in ways seminal for poetics. He may be regarded as the most important pro genitor of the New Critical valuation of organicism and of unity (qq.v. ) . The British deve!. of the idea thus draws from both Platonic and Neoplatonic strains as well as from the line of 1 8th-c. empiricism initiated by Hobbes and Locke. With Coleridge, and to some extent Shelley and Carlyle, Ger. transcendental philosophy further enriches the Anglophone trad . , just a s British writing o n the subject had vitalized Ger. thought in the 1 8th c. The Ger. background draws heavily on Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Addison, Shaftesbury, the "Swiss Critics" Bodmer and Breitinger, Baumgarten, Hume, and the asso ciationists (histories of associationism are written in 1 777 by Michael Hissmann and in 1 792 by J. G. E. Maass) . In the later 1 8th c., Platner, Herder, and Sulzer extend discussion into psychology, lit., culture, and myth. Sulzer declares, "mythological poems must be considered as a lang. of i . . . . they make a world for themselves." Tetens, most emi nent psychologist of the era, breaks the power of i. into different levels responsible for perception, larger associations and cognition, and ultimate poetic power. He profoundly influenced Kant, and Coleridge read him carefully. The issue in Kant is central and vexing; his presentations of i. are multiple. Taking a less than clear-cut but prominent place in the Critique of Pure Reason, i. is "an active faculty of synthesis" operating on sense experience, "a necessary ingre dient of perception itself' that mediates between senses and understanding. But "a transcendental synthesis of i." also exists, so that again, i. is both an empirical and a transcendental faculty or power. In the Critique ofJudgment i. is vital to the analytic of both beauty and the sublime. It is not simply reproductive and operating under "the laws of association," but also "productive and ex erting an activity of its own." Kant tries to reconcile empirical views of the "reproductive" i. with those derived from i. in its "pure" or "productive" mode;
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IMAGINATION this leads to a "tertium medium" joining the two, an idea Coleridge also suggests in the Biographia. In our perceptions, Kant claims, we "introduce into appearances that order and regularity which we name nature." In aesthetic theory he stresses the "free play" ofi. and how, combined with taste, it draws an analogy between beauty and morality through the medium of the symbol. Fichte proclaims "all reality is presented through the i." On the faculty of " the creative i. . . . depends whether we philosophize with or with out spirit . . . because the fundamental ideas . . . must be presented by the creative i. itself. . . . The whole operation of the human spirit proceeds from the i., but an i. that can be grasped no other way than through i." He elevates i. as the most important epistemological faculty and bases phi losophy on it. In part to resolve potential contra dictions or dualities in Kant, and to escape Fichte's more abstract epistemology, Schiller writes his A s thetische Erziehung ( 1 794-95) , where free play of i . becomes Spieltrieb (the "play drive") . With antece dents of i. as "play" or "free play" in Bacon, Kant, Wieland, and Lessing, Schiller explores i. as an aesthetic state of being that oscillates (recalling Fichte's "schweben der Einbildungskraft") be tween "form" and "sense" drives. This aesthetic i. renovates the soul and permits it to be "fully hu man," opening a line of Utopian thought. An ex tensive transcendental poetics develops with Schiller, the Schlegels, and Novalis. They all hold i. to be of supreme importance in the psychologi cal and epistemological grounding of art. Schelling constructs his System des tranzscenden talldealismus ( 1 800) on the idea ofi., which in that and other works he carries further than perhaps any other thinker. It is central to his philosophy of nature and of mind as one larger system insured by the unitying revelation of the work of art. The Kunstprodukt combines the force of nature with that of mind into something that had not pre viously existed in either. 1. creates the myths that secure all cultural and spiritual significance. Fi nally, the artist's i. generates the most comprehen sive symbols; in them knowledge realizes its high est m:mifestation. Art becomes necessary to complete philosophy; philosophy's highest goal is the philosophy of art, ultimately based on i. in God, artist, philosopher, and audience. Hegel's Aesthetik ( 1 835) utilizes i. or "Geist" (spirit) as a key element for his historical and critical views but does not much enlarge the the ory of i. Goethe emphasizes i., though in unsys tematic fashion. The hermeneutic trad. from Schleiermacher through Dilthey and down to Gadamer relies on i. as an instrument of knowl edge and interp., with Gadamer roughly retaining the older distinction between i. and discursive reason as that between Wahrheit ("truth") and Methode ("method") . See HERMENEUTICS. Romantic writers provide the idea with its most extreme formulation and make the highest claims
for i. It stands directly related to-and necessary for-perception, memory, images, ideas, knowl edge, worldviews, poetry, prophecy, and religion. Santayana proclaims Emerson the first modern philosopher to base a system on i. rather than reason. Schelling or Coleridge may have a stronger claim, though Coleridge's later thought increas ingly grasps a fuller reason, both discursive and intuitive, as subsuming imaginative power. Even a brief review of romantic manifestations of i. threat ens to expand infi nitely. Perhaps the greatest "romantic" claim is that i. resolves all contradictions and unifies the soul and being of creator and receiver, writer and reader, subject and object, and human nature and Natur geist alike. 1., says Coleridge, "reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation ofopposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative . . . ." Coleridge, Schelling, Schiller, and Shelley all say that i. or poetry calls upon the "whole" soul or individual. To characterize this activity Coleridge coins two words: in an 1802 letter "co-adunating" (from the Lat. "to join" or "to shape into one") and in the Biographia the famous "esemplastic" (with its analo gous Gr. basis) . Schelling posits a fanciful etymology reminiscent of Herder: "In-Eins-Bildung" ("making into one") for "Einbildungskraft." The traditional way of expressing this unitying action, recognized in Neoplatonic and Hermetic circles, was to say, as Wordsworth does, that i. "modifies" or throws "one coloring" over all its productions. As the resolution of contradictions or antinomies, i. could be seen as a metaphysical, psychological, and artistic prin ciple-as Kant said, a "blind power hidden in the depths of the soul" -that unifies noumenal and phenomenal, sensory and transcendental, mind and spirit, self and nature (e.g. Fichte's lch and Nicht-lch) , even freedom and necessity. The power thus resolves Cartesian dualism and all sub ject/object, ego/world, Aristotelian/Platonic or Neoplatonic divisions. It drives all dialectical pro cess and provides genuine knowledge. V. LATER 1 9TH AND 20TH CENTURIES. Such full dress syntheses left scant room for further analysis or higher claims. Arguably, i. had come to stand for many ideas, not one. The associated terms and adjectives grew confusing, and G. H. Lewes re marked: "there are few words more abused." Ruskin posits three modes of i . , and an elabo rate, schematic division of fancy and i. He stresses the intuitive grasp of art rather than its reasoning or analysis. Pater echoes Coleridge to some de gree, as Wallace Stevens will, but neither adds a new dimension to theory of i. In Germany Theo dore Lipps' studies of Einfilhlung or empathy (q.v.) are related to an imaginative grasp of living truth; in this connection Hopkins' "inscape" (q.v.) also suggests an intuition of object and the feelings it arouses. Oscar Wilde's simultaneous attacks on realism and on unrealistic romances in "The De-
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IMAGINATION cay of Lying" are playful defenses of what earlier had been called "feigning," now phrased in more provocative and paradoxical lang. than Sidney's or Shelley'S. Irving Babbitt, while unsympathetic to romanti cism, nevertheless develops a theory of ethical i. similar to 1 8th-c. discussions. Croce's aesthetics and poetics lean heavily on a productive i. (fanta sia) that acts under the influence of intuition and feeling to produce a unifying image. Though with out extensive elaboration on the theory of i. as such, anthropological and psychological studies by Frazer, Levi-Strauss, Freud, Jung, Eliade, and others have kept alive and deepened concerns voiced by Vico and Blackwell (see MYTH CRITI CISM ) . The interest here, as to some extent with Cassirer's theory of the symbol, is more with the formation and importance of the individual image or myth (qq.v.) than with all the diverse powers once attributed to i. Richards, through his schol arship and crit. of late 1 8th-c. figures and esp. through Coleridge on I., combines elements of a romantic aesthetic with modern psychology and helps create the New Criticism, indebted to Cole ridge and the concept of organic unity. R. G. Collingwood, positing i. as a mediating faculty between sense and intellect, refashions ro mantic theory and attempts to give it consistent shape. I. provides real knowledge guaranteed by the work of art, which raises perception, feelings, creation, and expression to consciousness through a concrete act. Collingwood jettisons higher claims and focuses on a comprehensive aesthetic, but the currency and effect of his views-fundamentally out of step with postmodernism-diminishes in the second half ofthe 20th c. More recently, neuro physiologists have attempted to analyze areas of the brain, while developmental psychologists have empirically studied artists' and children's creative activities to determine the functions played by brain hemispheres, biochemistry, the environ ment, habit, and association in the imaginative process, incl. poetry. Results have been mixed, with no single theory or explanation emerging. But the notion of i. as creating unity is generally opposed to the spirit of literary modernism and postmodernism. Nor is it central to pheno menological approaches. More stress falls on the power of the individual image, or images juxta posed, e.g. in imagism (q.v.) or the metaphysical revival. Claims for art to save and enlighten, or to provide special knowledge, are reduced. Detrac tors of the New Criticism simplifY and attack the concept of organic unity. However, though less massively than in romantic poetics (q.v. ) , the idea of i. continues to play a role in postmodernism. Structuralism (q.v.) offers affinities with romantic organicism and an imaginative, intellectual recon struction of reality, the creation of this "simula crum" itself an imitation and not a copy. Decon struction (q.v.) shuns any unifYing power to resolve contradictions and builds itself-or rather deploys
its various moves and strategies-in part by ex ploiting those contradictions or divisions. But while deconstruction seems a polar opposite of imagina tive unity and organic synthesis, the romantic the ory of i. itself thrives on such contradictions and polarities. In one sense i. and deconstruction are allied: in crit. or philosophy they distrust any for mal system or set of rules for either analysis or creativity; they rejoin poetry and philosophy through the medium of words and through a consideration of the nature and the history of writing in general, and figurative lang. in particu lar. See also FANCY; GENIUS; INSPIRATION; INTUI TION; INVENTION; ORIGINALITY; ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETICS; ROMANTICISM; TWENTI ETH-CENTURY POETICS; VISION. I. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism ( 1 91 9 ) ; H. C. Warren, Hist. ofAssociation Psychology ( 1921 ) ; G. Santayana, Character and opinion ( 1 921 ) ; B. Croce, Aesthetic, tr. D . Ainslie ( 1922), &says on Lit. and Lit. Crit., ed. and tr. M. E. Moss ( 1990) ; L. P. Smith, "Four Romantic Words," Words and Idioms ( 1 925) ; Richards, esp. ch. 32; M. W. Bundy, The Theory of I. in Cl. and Mod. Thought ( 1927) , '''In vention' and '!.' in the Ren.," JEGP 29 ( 1 930) , "Bacon's True Opinion of Poetry," SP 27 ( 1930 ) ; R . Wellek, Kant i n England ( 1 93 1 ) ; A . S . P. Wood house, "Collins and the Creative I.," Studies in Eng., ed. M. Wallace ( 1931 ) , "Romanticism and the Hist. of Ideas," Eng. Studies Today, ed. C. Wrenn and G. Bullough ( 1 95 1 ) ; I. A. Richards, Coleridge on I. ( 1934) ; S. H. Monk, The Sublime ( 1935 ) ; D. Bond, "'Distrust of I.' in Eng. Neoclas sicism," PQ 1 4 ( 1935 ) , "Neoclassical Psychology of the I.," ELH 4 ( 1 937) ; R. G. Collingwood, Principles ofArt ( 1 938) ; C. D. Thorpe, The Aesthetic of Hobbes ( 1 940) ; K. R. Wallace, Bacon on Communication and Rhet. ( 1 943) ; W. ]. Bate, "Sympathetic I. in 1 8th-C. Eng. Crit.," ELH 1 2 ( 1 945) , From Classic to Romantic ( 1 946) ; W.]. Bate and]. Bullitt, "Distinc tions between Fancy and I.," MLN 60 ( 1945 ) ; W. Stevens, The Necessary Angel ( 1 95 1 ) ; Crane; Abrams; E. L. Fackenheim, "Schelling's Philoso phy of the Literary Arts," PQ 4 ( 1 954 ) ; Wellek, v. 1 ; M . H. Nicolson, Science and l. ( 1956) ; R. Cohen, "Association of Ideas and Poetic U nity," PQ 36 ( 1957 ) ; Wimsatt and Brooks; E. Tuveson, The I. as a Means of Grace ( 1 960) ; E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Words worth and Schelling ( 1 960) ; W. P. Albrecht, Hazlitt and the Creative l. ( 1 961 ) , chs. 1 , 3, 5; B. Hathaway, The Age of Crit. ( 1 962) ; R. Barthes, "The Struc turalist Activity," ( 1 963) ; F. Yates, The Art of Mem ory ( 1966) ; T. McFarland, Coleridge and Pantheist Trad. ( 1 969) , Originality and l. ( 1 985) ; H. Mar chen, Die Einbildungskraft bei Kant ( 1970) ; T. To dorov, Theories of the Symbol ( 1977, tr. 1982) ; W. Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the 12th C. ( 1972)-for i . and ingenium; R. Scholes, Struc turalism in Lit. ( 1 974) , ch. 6; M. Warnock, l. ( 1976) ; E. S. Casey, Imagining: a Phenomenological Study ( 1976) ; ] . Derrida, Writing and Difference, tr.
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IMAGISM A. Bass ( 1 978) ;J. Engell, The Creative I. ( 1 98 1 ) , ch. 1 , 1 3; D. P. Verene, Vico 's Science of I. ( 1 98 1 ) ; de Man; E. Dod, Die Vernilnftigkeit der I. ( 1985)-on Schiller and Shelley; M. Kipperman, Beyond En chantment ( 1986)-Eng. poetry and Ger. idealism; C. G. Ryn, Will, I. and Reason ( 1 986 )-on Babbitt; R. Kearney, The Wake of I. ( 1988) ; Coleridge, Keats, and the I., ed.J. R. Barth andJ. L. Mahoney ( 1989) ; Coleridge's Them) of!. Today, ed. C. Gallant ( 1 989). J.E. IMAGISM. A school of poetry which flourished in England and America between 1 9 1 2 and 1 9 1 4 and emphasized the virtues of clarity, compression, and precision. In 1 9 1 2 , Ezra Pound wrote of the "forgotten school of images" that formed around the Bergsonian philosopherT. E. Hulme, ca. 1 908. Hulme was the founder of a Poets' Club which began meeting regularly in London in 1909, inc!. Pound by April, and which was influenced by Hulme's speculations on literary lang. Hulme wrote in his essay "Romanticism and Classicism" that the lang. of poetry is a "visual concrete one. . . . Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive lang." As the founder of the "Imagist Movement," Pound was more interested in technique and even publicity than in theory. Hilda Doolittle recalls in her memoir of Pound that Pound named i. when he suggested revisions to her poem "Hermes of the Ways" and "scrawled 'H. D. Imagiste' at the bottom of the page" before sending it to Poetry magazine in October of l912; in November Pound used the term "Imagiste" for the first time in print when he published the "Complete Poetical Works" of Hulme (five short poems) as an appendix to his Ripostes. Poems by "H. D., 'Imagiste'" were pub lished in Poetry inJanuary 1913, and in the March 1 9 1 3 issue, F. S. Flint, quoting an unnamed "Imagiste" (Pound) , listed these characteristics of the movement: ( 1 ) direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective; (2) use of abso lutely no word that did not contribute to the pres entation; (3) as regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome (see FREE VERSE ) . Flint wrote that there was a fourth principle, or a "certain 'Doctrine of the Image, ' which they had not committed to writing," perhaps referring to the complex influence of Hulmean philosophy. But in his "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" in the same issue of Poetry, Pound gave a one-sentence definition of the poetic image as "that which pre sents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" (see IDEOGRAM ) . The April issue of Poetry included the best-known and perhaps finest of the imagist poems, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." The climax of the movement came in the Spring of 1 9 14, when Pound published in England and America an anthology of verse entitled Des Imagistes, which included poems by H. D., Richard
Aldington, F. S. Flint, Amy Lowell, James Joyce, and William Carlos Williams. By this time, Lowell was assuming leadership of the movement and began publishing anthologies entitled Some Imagist Poets for the years 1 9 1 5-1 7. But Pound repudiated "Amygism," declaring that it was a dilution of the original movement which violated the second imagist principle, and aligned himself rather with vorticism (q.v. ) . By 1 9 1 7 Lowell herself felt that the movement had run its course; but her anthologies had kept it alive, and her first two volumes contained pref aces which, along with the Poetry essays, constitute the most deliberate statements of imagist theory. Though the poems themselves may appear to have a merely casual relation to Pound's definition of the image, they place their values in clarity, exactness, and concreteness of detail; in economy oflang. and brevity of treatment; and in an organic basis for selecting rhythmic patterns, which is es sential if only necessary words are to be used. H. D.'s "Storm" illustrates these values: You crash over the trees, you crack the live branch the branch is white, the green crushed, each leaf is rent like split wood. I. reacted against the verbose and abstract lang. into which much of the poetry of the 19th c. had declined. As a movement it thus parallels the romantic reaction a century earlier against the ossified poetic diction of neoclassicism. Its concen tration on the object and realistic rendering of the external world recall similar principles in Words worth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads. A still deeper 1 9th-c. influence is the Fr. trad. of symbolisme (which the word imagiste echoed) from Baude laire to Mallarme (see SYMBOLISM ) . The imagists' concern with poetic form and technique and their desire for the immediacy of effect that arises from the closest possible associa tion of word and object were in part a program for improving the craft of writing which influenced the formalist poetics of critics like Eliot, Richards, and Ransom. But the imagist movement has more complex associations: its preoccupation with tech nique and with surfaces, light, and color links it with impressionism (q.v. ) ; and Pound's concept of "presentation" recalls Henry James's insistence that the writer should "show" rather than "tel!." Recent critics have seen i. as an attempt to create a poem as a single entity which, unlike a symbolic or allegorical poem, intensifies its objective reality rather than expressing the subjective feelings of the poet. The essential point about the influence and importance of i. was made by Stephen Spender: "the aims of the imagist movement in poetry provide the archetype of a modern creative procedure." See AMERICAN POETRY. E. Pound, Ripostes ( 1 9 1 2) , Letters, ed. D. D. Paige ( 1 950) , Literary Essays ( 1 954) ; F. S. Flint,
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IMITATION "Imagisme," Poetry 1 ( 1 9 1 3 ) , "The Hist. of I.," The Egoist 2 ( 1 9 1 5 ) ; T. E. Hulme, Speculations, ed. H. Read ( 1 924) ; S. K. Coffmann, I. ( 1 95 1 ) ; w. C. Pratt, The Imagist Poem ( 1 963) ; S. Spender, The Stuggle of the Modern ( 1 963); F. Kermode, Romantic Image ( 1 963) ; H. Gross, Sound and Form in Mod. Poetry ( 1964 ) ; H. Schneidau, Ezra Pound ( 1 969) ; H . Kenner, The Pound Era ( 1971 ) ; ]. B . Harmer, Victory in Limbo: I., 1 908-1 91 7 ( 1975 ) ; D. Perkins, A Hist. of Mod. Poetry, v. 1 ( 1976 ) , ch. 1 5; H. D., End to Torment ( 1979 ) ; ]. T. Gage, In the Arresting Eye: The Rhet. ofI. ( 1 98 1 ) ; R. Taupin, The Influence of Fr. Symbolism on Mod. Am. Poetry ( 1 985) ; Ter ras-Rus.;].]. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1 908-25 ( 1990) . T.M.; S.K.C. IMITATION. I. FROM THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE II. FROM THE MODERN PERSPECTIVE I. FROM THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE. Until the 20th c., when it was restored to the critical vocabu lary by Auerbach and the members of the Chicago School (q.v. ) , "i." had been out offavor as a literary term since the 18th c. Its eclipse began with the neoclassical critical stirrings that led the way to romanticism, when "i." (Gr. mimesis; Lat. imitatio) was increasingly felt to be out of keeping with the new spirit of originality, spontaneity (qq.v. ) , and self-expression. Despite the fact that romantic po etics (q.v.) was preserved essentially intact well into the 20th c., interest in i. as a critical concept has been revived in recent years in connection with efforts to question the concept of representation in lang. and with a new interest in rhetoricity (see section II below) . The original connotation of mimesis (see REPRE SENTATION AND MIMESIS) seems to have been dra matic or quasidramatic. Whether any theory of poetry as i. was developed before Plato is uncer tain. Gorgias's notion of tragedy as a "beneficent deception" ( apate) perhaps anticipated it in part; and Democritus certainly held that the arts in general arose out of i. of nature: singing, for exam ple, from i. of the birds. The first place where we can actually grasp mimesis as a critical term is Plato's Republic, Books 3 and 1 0 , though in Book 3, the context is political and pedagogical rather than literary. Plato's concern there is with the education of his elite corps of Guards, and he judges poetry strictly by that criterion. "I." is iden tified almost exclusively with the dramatic mode, Le. with the direct impersonation of literary char acters. This involves an identification of oneself with others which is perilous for the young; it may lead them to indiscriminate i. oflow and unworthy persons. Hence poetry, but esp. the drama, must be banished from the professional education of the ideal ruler. In Book 1 0 , Plato renews his attack on a broader front. I. is now identified as the method of all poetry, and of the visual arts as well. The poet, like the painter, is incapable of doing
more than counterfeiting the external appear ance of things; Truth, the realm of Ideas, is inac cessible to him. In this second discussion (perhaps written later) , Plato's attention has shifted from the method of i. to its object, and i.-i.e. art-is condemned not merely for its moral effects but because it cannot break through the surface of Appearance to the reality it ought to reproduce, Ideas. This crushing verdict upon "i." does not result, as we might expect, in banishing the term from Plato's world of discourse; on the contrary, it per meates his thinking more and more in the later dialogues. In the Sophist (236) he hints at the possibility ofa "true i." which would reproduce the real nature and proportions of its object. Indeed Plato came to think of the whole complex relation of Becoming to Being, Particular to Idea, as a kind of L Thus the Timaeus (27 ff.) presents the uni verse itself as a work of art, an "image" of the world of Ideas made by a divine craftsman. From this it is only a step to conceiving visual art, and then poetry, as a sensuous embodiment of the ideal. The Neoplatonists (see Plotinus, Enneads 5.8; cf. Cicero, Orator 2.8-9) took this step, but Plato himself did not. The condemnation of poetry in the Republic was never explicitly revised or with drawn (it is substantially repeated in the Laws, Books 2 and 7 ) , and the developments just men tioned remain hints (highly fruitful ones for later thought) rather than a new and positive doctrine of poetic L Aristotle accepts i. (Poetics 4) as a fundamental human instinct-an intellectual instinct-of which poetry is one manifestation, along with music, painting, and sculpture. His real innovation, how ever, and the cornerstone of his new theory of poetry (see CLASSICAL POETICS) , is a redefinition of mimesis to mean not a counterfeiting of sensible reality but a presentation of "universals." By "uni versals" he means not metaphysical entities like the Platonic Ideas but simply the permanent, characteristic modes of human thought, feeling, and action (9) . It goes without saying, or at least Aristotle does not bother to say, that knowledge of such universals is not restricted to the philoso pher. The poet can represent them, and his read ers can grasp them, without benefit of metaphysi cal training. Poetic i. is of action rather than simply of men (i.e. characters) . Tragedy (and, with certain reservations, the epic-qq.v.) is an i. of a single, complete, and serious action involving the happiness of an important human being. More specifically, the i. is lodged in the plot ( mythos) of the poem; and by "plot" (q.v.) Aristotle means not merely a sequence but a structure (q.v.) of events, so firmly welded together as to form an organic whole. It follows that the poet's most important duty is to shape his plot. He cannot find it already given; whether he starts from mythical trad., his tory, or his own invention, he is a poet only so far as he is a builder (poietes, "maker") of plots. Thus
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IMITATION "i." comes very close to meaning "creation." But the poet's creation is not of some "second nature" existing only in his fancy; it is a valid representa tion of the actions of men according to the laws of probability or necessity. Aristotle's concept of i. was subtle and complex. His chief successors in C1it. were men of another stamp, more literary than philosophical in their view of poetry. So far as i. remained a key term in the Hellenistic age (actually we do not hear a great deal about it) , it seems to have been conceived as meaning the portrayal of standardized human types: the hot-headed man, the braggart soldier, the wild Thracian, etc. Aristotle's "probability" (to eikos, verisimile) , and the even more characteristic concept of "appropriateness" ( to prepon, decorum, q.v. ) , are now tailored to the measure of particular social standards and conventions more than to any permanent principles of human nature. At the same time Aristotle's insistence on action gives way to more relaxed and eclectic views: the object of i. may be character, thought, or even natural phenomena. Anything can be imitated, in accord ance with the laws of the genre (q.v.) one has chosen, and the object, whether fable, fact, or fiction (q.v. ) , is tacitly assumed to have more or less the same status as a natural object. Alongside the Aristotelian concept of i., thus denatured, another of very different provenience took on increasing importance in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. This was the relatively sim pie idea of imitating the established "classics" (the word is Roman, the concept Gr. ) , the great models of achievement in each genre. Its origin was rhe torical but it ended by spreading impartially over prose and poetry. The treatise of Dionysius of Halicarnassus On l. is lost except for fragments, but we can get some idea of the theme from the second chapter ofBook 10 of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria. From these two authors, and more par ticulariy from "Longinus" (see SUBLIME) , we can see that the doctrine had its higher side. I. of the great writers of the past need not and should not be merely a copying of devices of arrangement and style, but a passionate emulation of their spirit. Dryden (Essay oj Dramatic Poesy) puts it very well: "Those great men whom we propose to ourselves as patterns of our i., serve us as a torch, which is lifted up before us, to illumine our passage and often elevate our thoughts as high as the concep tion we have of our author's genius." Here i. is united with its apparent opposite, inspiration. Nevertheless, both in antiquity and in the Ren., i. in the sense of emulation of models meant chiefly stylistic i., and thus helped to fortify the prevalent understanding of poetry as an art of words. The Ren. inherited three major concepts of i. from antiquity: ( 1 ) the Platonic: a copying of sen suous reality; (2) the Aristotelian: a representation of the universal patterns of human behavior em bodied in action; and (3) the Hellenistic and rhe torical: i. of canonized literary models. But each
of these was further complicated by a deviation or variant interpretation: ( I ) the Platonic by the Neo platonic suggestion that the artist can create ac cording to a true Idea; (2) the Aristotelian by the vulgarization of Aristotle's "universals" into par ticular social types belonging to a particular place or time; and (3) the rhetorical by its rather adven titious association with "enthusiasm" and the Juror poetieus (e.g. Vida's An poetira 2 .422-44) . That this mixed inheritance did not lead to complete criti cal chaos was due partly to the chronological ac cident that the Poeties did not become known in Italy until well after 1500, partly to the incorrigi ble syncretism of the humanists, and partly to the plain fact that the chief literary creed and inspira tion of the It. Ren. was rhetorical. Humanism was an imitative movement in its very root and essence: the i. of Cl. , and particularly Cl. Lat., lit. was its life-blood. Thus the burning question in the 15th c., and well into the 16th, was not "What is i.?" or "Should we imitate?" but "Whom [i.e. which Cl. authors] should we imitate?" The fiercest battle was waged over prose style, i.e. whether Cicero should be the sole and all-sufficient model. A genuine theoretical interest in the concept of poetic i. as such could not arise, however, until Aristotle's Poetics had come to light again and begun to be studied (Gr. text 1508; Lat. trs. 1 498, 1536; It. tr. 1549) . Vida's Art oJPoetry ( 1527) is still innocent of this new trend. It preaches the i. of "nature" (2.455) but for no other real purpose than to inculcate the i. of the ancient poets, and above all Virgil, who followed her to the best advantage. Daniello (Poetita, 1 536) knows Aris totle's definition of tragedy as i. but hardly knows what to make of it since he draws only a faltering distinction between poetry and history. Robortelli, in his commentary on the Poetics ( 1 548) , allows the poet to invent things that transcend nature. Fra castoro ( Naugerius, sive de poeta dialogus, 1 555) pieces out Aristotle's concept of i. with the Pla tonic idea of beauty, identifying the latter with the universal. Scali gel' ( 1 56 1 ) recommends the i. of Virgil because Virgil had created a "second na ture" more beautiful than the first; and Boileau gave the problem its definitive formulation for neoclassical theory: the surest way to imitate na ture is to imitate the classics. But the real difficulty and challenge of Aristotle's idea of i. had not been grasped, much less solved. The later Ren. was as unable as the earlier to make an effective distinc tion between poetry and history on the one hand, and between poetry and rhet., on the other, be cause it could not seize and define any true "uni versal" as the object of poetic i., except in vague Platonic (Neoplatonic) terms, and so fell back into regarding poetry as essentially a special way of discoursing about "things." Although i. was implicitly accepted down through the 18th c. as the goal and method of the fine arts in general, incl. poetry and painting, it began to slip into disrepute after 1 770, being
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IMITATION increasingly felt to imply a derogation of the art ist's integrity. Edward Young sneered at "the med dling ape, 1.," and Coleridge opined that "To ad mire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality." The revival of "i. " in the 20th-c. has very little to do with either the Cl. or the neoclassical trad.; it goes straight to Aristotle, not through intermediaries, and views i. above all as a structural concept, the principle of organiza tion of poetic wholes. G.F.E. II. FROM THE MODERN PERSPt:CTIVE, i. refers to two different but related concepts: representation of external reality and copying or adaptation of artistic or literary models. Periods in which critical theory is privileged have tended to devalue the concept of i. in either sense and to stress, as its opposite, originality, influence, and intertextual ity (qq.v. ) . Some recent theorists dismiss i. be cause it seems to rely on a rhet. of "presence" (insisting on "sameness" by suppressing the "dif ference" that haunts all representations) ; others point out that both in practice and in theory i. invokes that very "difference" which it is pur ported to suppress. In Plato's articulation of two types of mimesis as artistic reproduction of the physical object, and as inward representation of the idea-one activity represents the external world by means of lang. and the visual arts. The other is a conceptual activity, at once implicated in lang. yet presumably transcending its problematic elements, though this transcendence is put into question in the Cratylus and the Theaetetus, where lang. appears to be so intimately connected with thought itself that what is known and how it is known become inex tricably entangled. Plato distinguishes poetry from philosophy in terms of their respective pos sibilities of representing the Idea, but if the act of representing can contaminate the Idea, then the claims of philosophy cannot readily be separated from the performance of poetry. Aristotle re sponds to Plato's debunking of mimesis by linking it to the concept of form (q.v. ) ; in the Poetics, mimesis is governed by the rules of its form rather than by the accuracy with which it represents the object. This shift in the concept of i. in antiquity in fact represents a broader divergence between affective and formalist theories of art that has endured to this day. Affective theories, such as Plato's, which recognize the power of the text to move the readet; tend to disregard i. (either of nature or of texts) as an adequate source of that power. Formalist theories, on the other hand, regard i. as a cognitive function made possible by the closure of form. A dramatic action with a beginning and an end, portrayed within the form of art, makes it possible for a text to yield to its reader knowledge which is both textual and human. In the formalist mimetic context, the order oflit. is also the order of nature. Once this representational link is established, mi mesis slips into an i. of trad. Thus Horace (Ar:s
poetica) asserts the propriety of i. because he does
not see nature and art as disparate orders. Cl. accomplishments become rules (q.v.) for the pro duction of lit., and the secret of good writing is learning (sapere) . This connection between learn ing and originality remains important from the Ren. through the neoclassical period. When Dry den calls Jonson "a learned Plagiary" he means thatJonson has a profound knowledge of the clas sics: "he has done his Robberies so openly" and so authoritatively that the line between plagiarism and originality becomes blurred. Dante too echoes the importance oflearning in i. ("the more closely we imitate those great poets, the more correctly we write poetry") , yet he engages at the same time in a theory of i. and a practice of invention (q.v.) by which the model (Virgil) is displaced in the Commedia and Paradise created. 1 . attempts to bridge the distance from its models, or more ag gressively to suppress that distance, and in the process it slips into invention, creating a web of intertextual relations which make the link of "copy" to source problematic. Ren. critical theory routinely grounded itself by referring tothe Cl. trad., but the i. of those models only served to highlight the cultural and aesthetic distance between Ren. writers and their originals. In this respect i. forced upon Ren. critics a con sciousness of historical change, and in turn this consciousness of their difference from the past compelled them to transform i. into an invention of beginnings (Greene) . Thus i., which aims at the recuperation and presence of the originals, opens up the question of originality and poetic identity and drifts insensibly into the concerns ofinfluence and intertextuality to which at first glance it ap pears to be opposed. The stability which accom panies the notion of i. is in this respect disrupted by the gap which i. as a practice opens, and this tension breaks into major debates in the 1 6th c. as to what i. means, who the models should be, and how the relation of nature to the classics should be defined. At issue in this dispute was also the adequacy of the ancients' representation of nature-a question that remains in the foreground through the 1 8th c. The reliance on Cl. models produced a tension between i. of nature as external reality and i. of nature as represented in those models. In drama in particular this tension translated itself into a distinction between art as the i. of nature and art as an i. in which nature is elevated "to a higher pitch." Dryden (An Essay of Dramatic Poesy) sug gests that the exact representation of nature must give way to an i. in which plot, characters, and description "are exalted above the level of com mon converse." This notion refers us back to Aris totle's statement in the Physics that art completes what nature leaves undone, or "imitates the miss ing parts" (2.8) . The neoclassical period reaf firmed Aristotle's idea that art imitates not just actual nature but nature's potential form. When
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IMITATION properly accomplished, i . is expected to reflect at once CL models and the nature which those models imitated: "Nature and Homer" become, in Pope's Essay on Grit" "the same" (see CONVENTION ) . In this way i. brings together two antithetical concepts: representation of reality, which assumes the priority of the object and demands of the work of art verisimilitude or accuracy of depiction, and formalism, which insists on the work of art "com pleting" its subject. Both concepts come to rest on a metaphysics of presence (though the notion of "completing" the model puts into question the fullness or presence of the original) , and both idealize the nature of the artistic act. I. is made possible by assuming "sameness" to be the govern ing condition oflit. and life, and "difference" to be a mere departure from this central fact (Miller) . The "sameness" of nature and model which Pope points to is affirmed in 1 8th-c. aesthetics through the painted image, which, as de Man suggests ( 1 98 3 ) , is supposed to restore the object to view and in that sense guarantee the continuity of its presence (see UT PICTURA POESIS ) . The possibility that the model might be absent is repressed. Also repressed is the possibility that lang. might constitute its own fictions rather than represent, submissively, an external reality. The tension be tween nature as external reality and as potential totality conceals a deeper schism between theories of i. and theories of metaphor (q.v. ) , and conse quently between formalist and affective theories of reading. Aristotle's view of metaphor as im proper naming ( Poetics 2 1 ) tends to put into ques tion both the mimetic order that is assumed to exist between nature and art and the totality of form. When Longinus ( On the Sublime) takes up the question of art's relation to nature, he devel ops a theory of the fragment which insures the priority of metaphor over the possibility of mime sis. Fragments rather than total forms strike fire from the reader's mind, and the power of the fragment resides not in i. of nature but in a figu ration in which the argument is concealed ( 1 5 ) . Affective theories of crit. i n this way develop a line of argument antithetical to that of mimetic theo ries of crit., yet the two approaches are implicated in one another in the course of critical trads. Sidney (An Apology for Poetry) refers to Aristotle's mimesis at once as "representing" and "counter feiting." Nature comes to be perceived as form in formalist readings, but power comes to be per ceived as the breaking of that form. It may be that the felt need for "defenses" of poetry in the Ren. was a result of this tension between incompatible critical models. Romantic writings engage in precisely this ex ploration of the limits of form and the inadequa cies of i. For the romantics the text is merely a fragment of a larger vision, but this vision has less to do with nature as subject for i. than it does with the workings of consciousness itself. Both the CL and neoclassical periods privileged reason as the
determining structure of consciousness, and this assumption made i. the proper method ofinterac tion between text and world. But in romantic writ ings concealment plays such a large role (in its various guises as the unconscious, the "life of things") that nature becomes closed to the work ings of reason, form, and i . , and imagination (q.v. ) comes to take their place; the visionary perspec tive now opposes itself to the mimetic one. At the same time, the neoclassical acceptance of i. as a practice of writing is displaced in romantic texts by a stress on originality (q.v. ) , a refusal to adopt inherited forms. At times this stress on newness is couched in the rhet. of i.-e.g. Wordsworth 's de sire to "imitate the very lang. of common men" but romantic practice stresses a different rhet., built on the inescapable figuration that attends all knowledge "of ourselves, and of the universe." When Wordsworth looks down from a slow-moving boat into a lake he cannot tell apart what is at the bottom, what is reflected from the shore, and his own image: he finds he "cannot part / the shadow from the substance" (Prelude Bk. 4) . The romantic subject is implicated in what he sees, and this implication undoes the possibility of a true, holis tic, or transcendent representation of nature. The 20th c. has witnessed both periods of for malism and antiformalism. The New Criticism (q.v.) repeated the gesture of associating form with a representation of idealized nature. In a different vein, Auerbach traces in Mimesis the history of the idea of representation in textual practice by assuming, in synecdochic fashion, the coherence between literary text and the culture it represents. But after 1 960, in part as a result of the influx of Fr. erit. into America, the possibility of i. as representation has been put into question by the notion of textuality (q.v. ) : Derrida asserts the impossibility of representation that is not always already lang., and de Man terms representation "an ambivalent process that implies the absence of what is being made present again," an absence which "cannot be assumed to be merely contin gent" (Blindness and Insight 1 2 3 ) . For deconstruc tion (q.v. ) , mimesis is groundless repetition haunted by difference. The authority of represen tation is undermined in such theories by the per ceived power of rhet. to constitute its object, that is, by the strange priority of effect over cause, thus reversing the traditional cause-and-effect relation ship and taking the act of representation itself to be constitutive of the "origin" or cause which it suppos edly mirrors. For deconstructive crit., "there are no originals; there are only copies," unavoidably re peated in their "failure to originate." This upheaval in the structure and authority of i. is pursued on another front by Harold Bloom, who reverses the possibilities of i. oftrad. by map ping out trad. as a battleground in which writers continually attempt to shake off or repress those precursors who would take away their freedom; in the process, these writers rewrite their precursors
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IMPRESSIONISM and become their cause. Whether the term i. invokes Cl. models or na ture, it rests on a metaphysics within which fulfill ment is possible. But if the "original object" of i. is itself contaminated by the act of representing if rhet. constitutes the object it purports to imi tate-then i. shifts from the "re-presenting" of an "original" to a replication or doubling in which the original is displaced, inaccessible-imagined. The rhet. of presence and fulfillment opposes itself to the rhet. of desire, and loss; and the shift in the concept of i. from the one to the other aligns mimesis with violence (Girard) . I. has become an important topic once again in critical theory pre cisely because it highlights the problematic rela tion to the "object" and the conception of history itself. It may well be, of course, that the very theoretical concerns which recognize the unstable play of i. and the problem of the original from Plato to Derrida are themselves instances of a mimetic replication by which theory constructs and realigns its models. See now F64044allusion; CRITICISM; CLASSICAL POETICS; CLASSICISM; CON VENTION; ICONICITV; INFLUENCE; INTERTEXTUAL lTV; INVENTION; ORIGINALITV; RENAISSANCE PO ETICS; REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETICS; SOUND; SPONTANE H.R.E. ITV; TEXTUALITV; TRADITION. I. Scott, Controvasies Ova I. of Cicero ( 1 9 1 0 ) ; S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory ofPoetry and Fine Art, 4th ed. ( l 9 1 1 ) , ch. 2-suggestive, but overmod ernizes; E. Nitchie, "Longinus and the Theory of Poetic I. in 17th- and 18th-C. England," SP 32 ( 1 91 5 ) ; R. D. Havens, The Influence of Milton on Eng. Poetry ( 1 922 ) ; U. Galli, "La mimesi artistica secondo Aristotele," Studi Ital. di Filol. Class. , n.s. 4 ( 1926 )-comprehensive, also covers Plato; ]. W. Draper, "Aristotelian 'Mimesis' in 1 8 th-C. Eng land," PMLA 36 ( 1926) ; ]. Tate, "I. in Plato's Re public," ClassQ22 ( 1928 ) , "Plato and I.," ClassQ 26 ( 1 932 ) ; H. Gmelin, "Das Prinzip des Imitatio in den romanischen Literaturen der Ren.," Romanis chen Forschungen 46 ( 1 932) ; H. O. White, Plagia rism and I. During the Ren. ( 1935 ) ; R. McKeon, "Lit. Crit. and the Concept of I. in Antiquity," MP 34 ( 1936)-rpt. in Crane, and "I. and Poetry," Thought, Action, and Passion ( l 954)-discrimi nates types; M. T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Lit. Crit, 1531-1555 ( 1 946) ; H. F. Brooks, "The 'I.' in Eng. Poetry, Esp. in Formal Satire, before the Age of Pope," RES 25 ( 1949 ) ; W. J. Verdenius, Mimesis ( 1949 ) ; K. Burke, "A Drama tistie View of I.," Accent l 2 ( 1952 ) ; Crane; Abrams, ch. 1-2; R. C. Lodge, Plato 's Theory of Art ( 1953 ) ; R . R . Bolgar, The Cl. Haitage and Its Beneficiaries ( 1 954) ; H. Koller, Die Mimesis in der Antike ( I 954)-ambitious but unreliable; Auerbach; Wimsatt and Brooks, ch. 10; G. F. Else, Aristotle 's Poetics: The Argument ( 1957) , "I. in the 5th C.," CP 53 ( 1 958) ; V. F. Ulivi, L'Imitazione nella poetira del Rinascimento (1959 ) ; R. A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of A llusion ( 1959 ) ; R. W. Dent, John
Webstas Borrowing ( 1 960) ; Weinberg; B. Hath away, The Age of Crit. ( 1962) ; A.]. Smith, "Theory and Practice in Ren. Poetry: Two Kinds ofl.," BJRL 47 ( 1 964) ; G. Sorban, Mimesis and Art: Studies in the Origin and Early Devel. of an Aesthetic Vocabulary
( 1 966) ; H. D. Weinbrot, "Translation and Parody: Towards the Genealogy of the Augustan I.," ELH 33 ( 1966) ; ]. Derrida, De la grammatologie ( 1 967) , "La Mythologie blanche," Marges de la philosophie ( 1 972) , La Dissemination ( 1 97 2 ) ; w. K. Wimsatt, Jr., "I. As Freedom-1 7 1 7-1798," NLH 1 ( 1970 ) ; R . Girard, L a Violence et ie saere ( 1 972) ; ]. Stead man, The Lamb and the Elephant: Ideal I. and the Context of Ren. Allegory (1974 ) ; Mimesis, ed. S. Agacinski et al. ( 1975)-esp. Derrida, "Econo mimesis"; G. Braden, The Classics and Eng. Ren. Poetry ( 1 978) ; P. de Man, Allegories of Reading ( 1 979) ; D. A. Russell, "De imitatione," Creative I. and Lat. Lit., ed. D. West and A. Woodman ( 1 979 ) ; G . W . Pigman, III, "Versions of I. in the Ren.," RenQ33 (1980 ) ; L. Manley, Convention 1 500-1 750 ( 1 980 ) ; P. Ricoeur, "Mimesis and Representation," Annals ofScholarship 2 ( 1981 ) ; T. Greene, The Light in Troy ( l 982)-essential;]. H. Miller, Fiction and Repetition ( 1 982) ; D. Quint, Origin and Originality in Ren. Lit. ( 1 983 ) ; M. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Ren. Defenses ofPoetry ( 1 983) ; De Man; B.]. Bono, Literary Transvaluation From Vagilian Epic to Shake spearean Tragicomedy ( 1984) ; ]. Weinsheimer, I. ( 1 984 ) ; N. Hertz, "A Reading of Longinus," The End of the Line ( 1 985 ) ; ]. L. Mahoney, The Whole Internal Universe: I. and the New Defense in British Crit., 1 660-1830 ( 1 985) ; F. Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in I. ( 1985 ) ; C. Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis ( 1 986) ; G. B. Conte, The Rhet. ofI., ed. and tr. C. P. Segal ( 1 986) ; S. K. Heninger,Jr. , Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker ( 1989 ) ; P. Lacoue-La barthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics ( 1 989) ; R. W. Dasenbrock, Imitating the Italians
( 1 991 ) .
G.F.E.; H.R.E.
IMPAIR. See VERS IMPAIR. IMPRESSIONISM. A term coined to identify a style of painting perfected in France during the later 1870s, most notably by Claude Monet, whose painting Impression: Soleil Levant (first shown in Paris, 1874) may have occasioned its first use. Its application to analogous phenomena in poetry soon followed, often in a manner that blurs the precise definition of critical categories. As the realization of an (unformulated) program, i. is one of several stylistic tendencies that emerged during the 1 880s from the decline of realistic writing and its reliance on the mimetic function of lit. (see REALISM ) . I. thus came to share a pen chant for subtle nuances, refined perception, and the ornamental use of "precious" images (see PRE cIosIn: ) with poetic Jugendstil (q.v. ) and the decorative arts around 1900; its preference for the openness of allusive hints over conceptually fixed meanings and its fluid suggestion of atmosphere
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IMPRESSIONISTIC CRITICISM through a quick succession of sensory impressions were made possible at the expense of a clearly delineated world of concrete objects and have also been called "neoromantic." Were it not for their aversion to strict form and intense exactitude and thus to the principles of logical control, many impressionist poems might well be attributed to a symbolist aesthetic (see SYMBOLISM ) . I. is fascinated with the spontaneous evocation of sensory and mental associations. It seeks to neutralize the mediating function of lang. (be tween the external world and the psyche) as well as its metaphorical qualities, which produced the concentrated meaning of the images in symbolist poetry, its inevitable successor. This preoccupa tion with fleeting sensations and their microscopic diversity is a response to a later 19th-c. crisis of identity and of personality of which Nietzsche had been the first analyst and the sensualist epistemol ogy of Ernst Mach the popularized expression. It held to the notion that reality is its perception and that the individual is not a homogeneous unity but a complex agglomeration of reminiscences, nerve impulses, moods, and sensations. As a result, the most subtle and versatile practice of impressionist technique-in Verlaine's collections Bonne chan son ( 1870) and Romances sans paroles ( 1 874) , and in the religious verse of his Sagesse ( 1 881 ) , in the vers libre poems of Jules Laforgue, and in Mal larme's Apres-midi d 'un faune ( 1 887, illustr. by Manet and set to music by Debussy)-shows a predilection for synaesthesia and onomatopoeia (qq.v. ) and for suggestive sound and rhythmic effects. Such attention to the subtlest nuances of lang. reveals an attitude of refined, often intro spective observation, of ironic detachment, and of melancholy ambivalence. In Verlaine's Art poetique ( 1 884) , impressionist poetry was given its most congenial justification, without any attempt, how ever, at estabishing i. as a critical term. In general, most later European poetry, such as Stefan George's Das Jahr der Seele ( 1897) and Rainer Ma ria Rilke's Neue Gedichte ( 1 907-8 ) , resists sub sumption under the essential definition of i., even though it retains some impressionist charac teristics. It is not advisable to extend the use of the label i. beyond its narrow application to a short phase of Ger. lit. hist. at the end of the 19th c. I. was neither a period style nor a school of poetry; there were only a number of marginal poets who prac ticed their craft to the limit of its potential. Of these, Detlev von Liliencron ( 1844-1909 ) , the prolific Richard Dehmel ( 1 863-1920 ) , Max Dauthendey ( 1 867-1918) with his preference for an exotic ambience, and Gustav Falke ( 1 8531 9 1 6) deserve mention. Arno Holz ( 1 863-1929) soon abandoned his naturalist beginnings and de voted much of his life to one hypertrophic book length poem, Phantasus ( 1898 ) . In this, the asso ciative accumulation of myriad impressions, constant shifts in perspective, disparate arrange-
ment of words around an imaginary "central axis," and elimination of conceptual prescience may have approached the ideal of impressionist versa tility, but it soon turned into an amorphous pano rama of trivia. L. Thon, Die Sprache des deutschen Impressionis mus ( 1 928) ; C. Bally et aI., El Impressionismo en el Lenguaje ( 1936 ) ; R. Moser, L1mpressionnisme fran(ais ( 1 95 1 ) ; B.]. Gibbs, "I. as a Literary Move ment," MLJ 36 ( 1 952) ; W. Ramsey, Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance ( 1 953) ;]. Letheve, Impres sionnistes et symbolistes devant la presse ( 1 959) ; K. Brinkmann, Impressionismus undExpressionismus in deutscher Literatur ( 1960 ) ; H. Sommerhalter, Zum Begriff des literarischen Impressionismus ( 1961 ) ; R. Hamann and]. Hermand, Impressionismus ( 1 972) . M.W. IMPRESSIONISTIC CRITICISM. See CRITICISM. IN MEDIAS RES (Lat. "into the middle of things") . The device of beginning an epic (q.v.) poem, drama, or work of fiction at some crucial point in the middle of a series of events which both initiates a subsequent chain of incidents and at the same time follows as the result of preceding ones. Thus the author may work forward and backward in time to narrate the story or action. The effect is to arouse the reader's suspense and interest quickly. The phrase is taken from Horace's Ars poetica ( 1 47-48) : "Always [the poet] hastens tothe outcome and plunges his hearer into the midst of events as though they were familiar, and what he despairs of treating effectively he abandons." The suggestion that a poet should not begin "at the beginning" derives from Aristotle's argument in the Poetics that a plot is a specific arrangement of incidents unified by probability and necessity, not sequence. Aristotle is recalling Homer: the Odyssey begins with the shipwreck of Odysseus after some ten years of wandering the Mediterranean, and the Iliad is not about the whole siege of Troy but a single episode in the last year of the war. Horace's formulation became a standard con vention and was discussed as such throughout the Middle Ages. During the Ren. i. m. r. was revived, critics distinguishing between "natural" (i.e. chronological) and "artificial" order. The effect of "artificial" order is to fold the time sequence of the narrative so that the poem opens at an espe cially dramatic moment and then, at a later mo ment, includes a "retrospective episode" that re counts the origin of the events. The events depicted in Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, begin chronologically with the rebellion of Satan, the War in Heaven, and the expulsion of the fallen angels, but the poem itself opens with the activi ties of the fallen angels in Hell (Books 1-2) after the expulsion. The plot moves forward from this point until Books 5 and 6, when Raphael tells Adam of the dire consequences of disobeying God's laws. In other words, the i. m. r. convention
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INCREMENTAL REPETITION has made it more complex-more polyvalent. By contrast, a simpler version of i. m. r. is in voked by Edmund Spenser in the "Letter to Raleigh" purporting to explain The Faerie Queene. There Spenser explains that the final meaning of all the adventures will be withheld until the last ( 1 2th) book of the poem-which, however, he never completed. The model of i. m. r. adopted by Ariosto in Orlando Furioso is a more complex vari ation on the convention: here "artificial" order justifies multiple plotting, frequent digressions, and a mosaic-like arrangement of flashbacks and continuing narratives. After the neoclassical period the formal re quirement of i. m. r. was ignored, but the prece dent it established for complex foldings of narra tive time is preserved in the device of flashback and the narrative reminiscence, as, for example, in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.-J. W. Draper, "The Narrative Technique of the Faerie Queene," PMLA 39 ( 1 924) ; C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry, 2 v. ( 1 963-7 1 ) ; F. Quadlbauer, "Zur Theo rie der Komposition in der mittelalterlichen Rhe torik und Poetik," Rhet. Revisited, ed. B. Stock ( 1 982) ; O. B. Hardison, Jr., "I. m. r. in Paradise O.B.H.; R.A.H. Lost," MiltonS 1 7 ( 1 983) .
cal ceremonies or sorcery: "With nigromaunce he wolde assaile / To make his incantacion" (Gower, Confessio amantis 3.45 ) . Also the magical spell itself: "Double, double, toil and trouble" (Shake speare, Macbeth) . Frazer discusses i. under homeo pathic magic, though several of his examples are not magic but simply petitions to gods or spirits to undertake a desired action. Similar are other an cient examples such as the Babylonian is., which are ritualistic formulae associated with the act of burning images of one's enemies (the great Mesopotamian series of is. are known as the Surpu and MaqlU, both words meaning burning) ; the verbs are usually in the optative rather than the indicative mood (may it happen rather than it will happen) , suggesting prayer rather than magic. In Hittite, at the dedication of a building a piece of copper is deposited in the foundation with the i., "As this copper is fi rm and sound, so may the house be firm and sound." Related are such voo doo practices as thrusting pins into a doll to cause pain or death, usually accompanied by an i. See also SOUND.-Sir J. Frazer, The Golden Bough ( 1 890) ; B. Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien ( 1920-25 ) ; G. Meier, Die assyrische Beschwarungs R.O.E. sammlung MaqlU ( 1 93 7 ) .
IN MEMORIAM STANZA. A stanza of four lines of iambic tetrameter, rhyming abba; so called from its use in Tennyson's In Memoriam ( 1 850) :
INCREMENTAL REPETITION. F. B. Gummere's phrase for a rhetorical device he believed to be a distinguishing feature of the Eng. and Scottish popular ballads (see BALLAD ) . In i. r. a line or stanza is repeated successively with some small but material substitution at the same crucial spot. A sequence of such repetition accounts for the en tire structure of some few ballads, among them "Edward" and "Lord Randal"; the latter uses i. r. in the form of question and answer ; "The Maid Freed from the Gallows" combines this with the "climax of relatives," another typical form. More commonly, though, i. r. spans a passage of only 3 or 4 stanzas, and it is frequently confined to the lines of a single quatrain, as in the following stanza from "Sir Hugh; or, The Jew's Daughter":
I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. Although Tennyson believed he had invented the stanza, it may be found in 17th-c. poetry, notably Ben Jonson ("If Beauty be the Mark of Praise") , and Lord Herbert of Cherbury ("Ode upon a Question Moved, whether Love Should Continue for ever"). It is true however, that Tennyson ex ploited the inherent formal capacities of the stanza more extensively and with greater mastery than did his predecessors. In particular, he utilized its suit ability for successive, mutually independent philo sophical observations, each enclosed within its stan zaic "envelope," and its possibilities for special emphasis through the rhyme of first and fourth lines. Later uses of the stanza are rare; one is Oscar Wilde's "The Sphinx," in which the stanza is printed as two lines. See ALCA IC .-Schipper 3.546; Saintsbury 2.203-6; E. P. Morton, "The Stanza of I. M .," MLN 2 1 ( 1 906), "Poems in the Stanza of I. A.PR. M.," MLN 24 ( 1909) . INCA POETRY. See AMERICAN INDIAN POETRY, South American.
INCANTATION (Lat. in can tare, to chant, bewitch, cast a spell ) . Use ofa ritualistic formula spoken or chanted to produce a magical effect or charm (q.v. ) ; more generally, a chant (q.v.) used in magi-
Then out and came the thick, thick blood, Then out and came the thin; Then out and came the bonny heart's blood, Where all the life lay in. This kind of repetition is different from the kind of additive repetition found in "This is the House that Jack Built" or "The Twelve Days of Christ mas." Gummere thought i. r. a litmus test ofa true oral ballad, but later scholars have demurred (Gerould) ; Bronson shows the influence of the music. Though i. r. is common in the Eng. and Scottish ballads, it is also found in much oral or oral-de rived poetry (see ORAL POETRY ) , from the ancient Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, to old Welsh poetry, to Portuguese folksong, to Zulu song, to songs of the
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INDETERMINACY Teleut in Siberia. not to mention other Anglo-Am. folksongs that are not ballads. I. r. is but one of a number of devices characteristic of oral poetry and song that facilitate composition and memori zation; and in audition it sometimes produces an effect of suspense or emotional intensification. In songs and ballads. it can enhance the music by reducing the density of the verbal component and by reinforcing parallels established by the re peated melody.-F. B. Gummere. The Popular Bal lad ( 1 90 7 ) . esp. 1 1 7-24; L. Pound. Poetic Origins and the Ballad ( 1 921 )-sharply critical; G. H. Ger ould. The Ballad of Trad. ( 1 93 2 ) . 1 05 ff.; K. Jack son. "I. R. in the Early Welsh Englyn." Speculum 1 6 ( 1 942) ; D . K . Wilgus. Anglo-Am. Folklore Scholarship Since 1 898 ( 1 959) ; R. D. Abrahams and G. Foss. Anglo-Am. Folksong Style ( 1968) ; W. F. H. Nico laisen. "How I. Is I. R?" Ballads and Ballad Re search. ed. P. Conroy ( 1978 ) . A.B.F.; E .D . ; T.v.F.B. INDETERMINACY. A term drawn from poststruc turalist crit. which suggests the impossibility of stabilizing a text's (or word's) meaning. In tradi tional lit. hist.. meaning is either inherent in the work or produced by context. But when context itself is drawn into the conditions of textuality. all connections one may make to "determine" mean ing are open to this originary instability of lang. See AMBIGUITY; INTERTEXTUALITY; SIMPLICITY AND COMPLEXITY; TEXTUALITY.-M . Perloff. The .. Poetics of 1. ( 1981 ) ; G. Graff. "Determinacy/I. . Critical Terms for Literary Study. ed. F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin ( 1 990) ; B. J. Martine, I. and Intelligibility ( 1 992 ) . H .R.E. INDEX. See REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; SEMI OTICS. POETIC. INDIAN POETICS. Inviting as it might be. it would be misleading to see in Vedic lit. (ca. 1 500500 B.C. ) a fully developed aesthetics. Certain terms, such as "rasa" ("taste, essence") or "alarh kara" ("making adequate. ornament") indeed oc cur in the Vedas. but they are not used there in any sense remotely suggestive of their centrality to the technically elaborate later systems. This does not mean. however, that we may not seek the origins of poetic theorizing in the Veda and its ancillary lit. Indeed. we should see in the Mlmamsa system of ritual exegetics (early first millenium A.D. ) the first clear espousal ofwhat was to become a leitmotif of I. cultural history-the notion that the Vedic text should be understood as having a self-defining reality. The Mlmamsa. then, is one of the earliest instances of literary theorizing known to us; it codified in unmistakable terms the cul tural status of an entire lit. The end. though relig ious. should not be mistaken; as with any crit., the text is elevated above mundane expression and given the status of a communication available only to the elect. In its technical apparatus too the Mzmamsa for-
mulates a vocabulary and the conceptual outline of a poetics for the first time in I. history (see Sabara's commentaries to MzmamsaSutra 1 .1 .32 and 1 .2 . 1 0 ff. [tr. G.Jha. Sabara Bha$Ya. 1 933, 1 .50. 58 ff. ] ; and Kumarila's commentary to 1 .2. 1 0 ff. [tr. G. Jha. Tantra Wirttika, 1 924, 1 .40 ff. ] ) . Here we find both the distinction between the literal and the figurative and also the notion that figura tive usages have a different kind of motivation, and must ultimately derive their authority (viz .. their interpretation, their meaning) from a specific re lation to the literal-ideas both fundamental to later I. poetics. It should be made clear that we presume here the distinction between an implicit and an explicit poetics. The Vedic hymns give evidence of an elaborate and partly self-conscious practical poet ics. Many hymns were doubtless composed by a professional class of poets ( kavi) , who frequently engaged in officially sanctioned competitions. The later hymns often have an academic cast and reflect conventions of composition that must have been evident to the cognoscenti (sahrdaya) . But despite all this inferential evidence. the begin nings of an explicit trad. of speculation on po etry-understood as a mode of expression and not simply in terms of some accident of its content. religious fervor or ritual inaccuracy-are found only in the cl. period (ca. 500 A.D. and later) . The I. epic Riimayatla (late first millennium B.C. ) . in a passage near the beginning of the poem ( Ram. 1 .2.9 ff.) . also presents us with a myth accounting for the invention of poetry (kavya) by which is meant the Ramayatla itself-often styled the "adikavya," or "first poem." The bard Valmlki identifies poetry not with the epic story. but with the form of its verse: Sloka. the ubiquitous 8-syllable foot of Sanskrit didactic lit. Two other crucial themes are suggested in this myth: by a kind of pun. the verse (Sloka) is associated with an emotion (viz., soka. "grief') . and poetry as a kind of lang. is given a grounding in nature-it is the "sweet song" of the krautlca (cuckoo) grieving for its slain mate that Valmlki transmutes into human song. The themes of the inextricability of conven tion with its natural basis, and with its proper response. are nowhere better formulated than in this simple tale, which again attributes a special character to the poet-still the "kavi," the quasi magician who first "discovers" and best under stands this semiological relation fundamental (i.e. which gives structure) to the universe. The earliest extant text that begins to tie to gether these strains into a coherent and explicit poetics is the Na!yasastra. a compendium on the atrical theory and practice attributed to the sage Bharata which was composed over several centu ries and edited in its present form about the end of the 6th c. A.D. But poetics still is ancillary to the larger purposes ofthe treatise. which seeks rather to give a comprehensive account of the stagecraft of the cl. Sanskrit drama. In the discussion of a
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INDIAN POETICS suitable theatrical audience is formulated for the first time the notion of rasa,-now properly aes thetic "relish" (literally, "taste": the gustatory im plication is etymologically correct) , a charac teristic emotional response to the drama which both serves as its proper end and integrates its elements-the story, the speeches, the actions, and even the scenery. At first, eight characteristic responses are defined: the amorous, the heroic, the comic, the pitiable, the violent, the disgusting, the fearsome, and the wondrous. Later a ninth, the peaceful, is added, and still later others, testifying to the increasing emotionalism of 1. religions. From Bharata onwards, however, love, the amo rous <srngara) , figures as the rasa par excellence. Among the elements thus integrated, the lang. of the play is given prominent treatment; and for the first time is sketched a theory of what makes lang. poetic-still seen as effective, but whose pur poses are neither religious nor didactic. Implicitly, what is being communicated is the novel emotion spoken of above, but our attention is drawn here to the equally novel techniques of that communi cation-those features of expression that define lang. as nonliteral, that direct the hearer away from the straightforward sense of the words to the many sided and always partly hidden context in which they are embedded. Bharata clearly under stood simile (upama) as the most important and perhaps the fundamental such expressive device. The use of this figure is for the early Indians coextensive with poetry, and what marks it as po etic is its persistent reference to another realm of discourse ( upamana) alongside of, but charac teristically highlighting, the presumed "subject" of discourse ( upameya) . The relation between the two layers either immediately or ultimately brings the focus of the expression back to the context of the expression, which alone provides a proper motivation for the use of such elaborate lang. in the first place. Among possible determining con texts figures most importantly the mood, the emo tional response, of the audience-esp. in the thea ter, where the audience is not just an abstraction, but a presence whose immediacy is a challenge: "moving" them is a first-level test of whether any thing is happening on the stage. In the lit. immediately following the Natya sastra, these two themes seem to be taken up independently, defining two poetic trads.: the problem of the figures and nonliteral lang. preoc cupies one ( alamkarasastra: early texts date from the 8th to 1 1 th cs. ) , whereas the question of the proper and integrating response is more and more the focus of the other ( rasasastra, or natyasastra proper: early texts date from the 10th and l ith cs. ) . Evidently a combination of historical devel opments underlay this separation. The perform ance trad. of Sanskrit theater suffered a decline with the lapse of Gupta patronage, causing San skrit belles lettres to take on a more exclusively literary aspect, which in turn awakened a need to
understand a dramatic poetry that was only read and never performed-had, in effect, become a kind of kavya. And to the extent that the integrat ing response can be separated from the actual technique of its evocation, it can serve as a general integrating principle for lit. as such. For two or three centuries after the Natyasastra, the natya lit. is rather sparse; the alarhkarasastra dominates the discussion. Well over one hundred figures are defined and examined by a series of authors, from Bhamaha and DaI;u.iin (probably 7th c. A.D., the latter being arguably the same Dal)Qin who composed the famous Dasakumara carita, or Hist. of the Ten Princes) to Rudrata and Mammata. The later writers also attempted to classify the figures into types and variations. Rudrata pursues the question most systematically, identifying four basic kinds of figurative lang., based on comparison, hyperbole, punning, and "the thing itself." The principle of the first is similitude, of the second, relations other than likeness, of the third, polysemy (relations grounded on the word alone) , and of the fourth, obliteration of the relation between species and genus. Most of what we know of the rasasastra strand of poetic theorizing during this period is gleaned from later commentaries, notably Abhinava gupta's Bharatl (see below) , and is best discussed in that connection. Several treatises, such as Dha namjaya's Dasarupaka ( lOth c . ) , survive which at tempt to abstract from the Natyasastra its core of theory, concerning on the one h and plot construc tion and characterization-suitable to the writing of plays-and on the other emotional response, which, separated from a concrete theatrical con text, inevitably wears more and more a psychologi cal guise. So too, it seems, did Sanskrit drama become an exclusively literary problem. Plays con tinued to be written but were rarely performed. The most influential period of 1. poetic theory is inaugurated by the Kasmira Anandavardhana (early 9th c. ) , author of the Dhvanyaloka (the Illumination of Suggestion) . The text is a gloss on the karikas em bedded in it, which are often attrib uted to an anonymous "Dhvanikara." Some, how ever, believe Ananda to be the author of the karikas as well. In this work, the two divergent strands of post-Bharata speculation are brought together in a grand synthesis organized around the notion of the implicit meaning, which, it is claimed, is most characteristically (for poetry) its emotional message. The linguistic and expression istic aspect of the theory is the more startling, however, for Ananda claims that this emotional message-the rasa-is communicated by a seman tic capacity of lang. other than and complemen tary to the generally recognized capacities of lit eral denotation and metonymy. This novel capacity he calls dhvani, which means literally "noise" or "sound," but by recursion (an instance of itself) "overtone," "suggestion." The notion of poetic
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INDIAN POETICS context, always crucial in distinguishing poetic lang. from other kinds of speech, is here made the very center and soul of poetry, around which the ordinary capacities of lang. hover and which they serve. This synthesis not only reconciles theories of linguistic expressionism and emotional conse quence; it also demonstrates the unity of the gen res of poem and play (kiivya and niitya) . Abhinavagupta, a Kasmira of the 1 1 th c. whose name is today synonymous with I. p., wrote com mentaries on both Dhvanyiiloka and Nii tyasiistra, called Locana and Bhiirati, respectively, in which he rethought the entire problem of poetic lang. and poetic purpose in the light of an ancient truth that had again come to dominate Hinduism af fected by the extreme devotionalism of the late medieval period: namely, that the most powerful forms of lang., and ipso facto, poetry, were the via regia to forms of experience that are not of this world. In effect, Abhinava proposed an even grander synthesis than Ananda, for now the con text of art is not so much differentiated from mundane modes of experience and signification as it is integrated wiht higher forms of religious experience, and in effect signifies them most truly. (Abhinavagupta is also the great theologian of Kasmira Saivism, and author of the Tantriiloka) . Abhinava accomplishes this grand design in good 1 . fashion by reformulating the poetic trad. itself, most notably, the emotional and affective aspects of the theory focusing on rasa. Abhinava carries the inquiry, as might be expected, into truly psychological realms, concerning himself with questions of how and by whom the rasa is experienced, and what are its cognitive criteria. The notion of rasa is here given its classic formu lation, for indeed rasa is reconceived as an experi ence (and not simply functionally, as a goal, or as a content of meaning) , one that most closely re sembles the liberating cognition ( mok$a) itself. Abhinava, commenting on the famous rasasiitra of Bharata, traces the history of speculation on rasa in the intervening period and shows how the no tion evolved from that of a purely functional (quasi-realistic) effect (Lollata) , to that of an arti fice achieved by imitation ( Sankuka) , to that of an affect or emotion not really caused at all, but simply evoked (Abhinava's teacher Tauta ) . The crucial aspect of Abhinava's own theory is attrib uted to BhaHa Nayaka, who first suggested that the status of rasa as an emotion had to be qualified in order to account for the peculiar power of drama to communicate. Emotions in the literal sense (termed bhiiva) are private and particular to individuals and circumstances. In that sense, what the actor and the author and the audience expe rience is irremediably different, and no commu nity of experience is implied. But the drama, the poem, now seen as a technique-thus updating Anandavardhana's dhvani-by its very contrafac tual status generalizes the conditions of emotion and consequently generalizes or abstracts emotion
itself-makes it into something essentially shared. This is Abhinava's rasa, emotion turned inside out-determining its conditions (the fictive play) rather than being determined by them (the real world)-and thus free of its conditions. Abhinava interprets this inversion as the experience of the possibility of experience itself, an experience that both cancels the boundaries separating men and kindles in them a desire for the essentially similar experience of liberation, seen as the Advaita in version of cognitive point of view: the precondition of being is understood as more real than the par ticular manifestations of being. Though Abhinava's rasa theory has become ca nonical, it has not exhausted the 1. speculative spirit. Indeed, the emphasis on rasa as a kind of metaphysical bliss is neatly complemented by a renewed realism in other authors, who interpret rasa much more concretely as the bliss of love. In the Bengali Vai�Dava writers ofthe 1 6th c., notably Rupagosvamin, author of the Ujjvalanllamarfi, this is turned into a theology of loving God (bhakti rasa) ; in others, deriving from the encyclopaedist Bhoja ( 1 1th-c. king ofDhara, author of the longest 1. poetic work, the ,Smgiiraprakiisa), srngiira itself, ordinary human amorousness, is elevated to the theoretical prominence it has always enjoyed in practice. It is safe to say that the notion of rasa, however conceived, is the decisive achievement of 1. p., and even today must be understood in order to appre ciate not only the lit. but all the other art forms of the subcontinent-from Carnatic music to the films of Satyajit Ray-and this despite the intro duction and sometime cultivation, in the 20th c., ofWestern literary modes. It is even more influen tial in the surviving folk idioms of India, and has been canonized in the aesthetic of the popular cinema, even when it thinks of itself as "realistic." Formal theories of aesthetics during the late me dieval and modern periods, whether applying to Sanskrit or the vernacular langs., show little ten dency to deviate from the concepts or terminology established by Abhinava or Bharata. (In the mod ern universities, of course, a quasi-Western aes thetics is cultivated.) The notion of rasa has many parallels in Western poetics, most notably among the "synaesthesists" (ef. C. K. Ogden, 1. A. Richards, and J. Wood, TheFoundations ofAesthetics [ 1 925 ] ; more recently, Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form [ 1953] ; also the theory of "detachment" espoused by Jose Ortega y Gasset) . S . K. De, Hist. of Sanskrit Poetics, 2d ed., 2 v. ( 1 960) , Sanskrit Poetics as a Study of Aesthetic ( 1 963 ) ; V. Raghavan, Bhoja 's Snigiiraprakiisa ( 1963 ) ; K. C. Pandey, Abhinavagupta (1963 ) ; D. H. H. Ingalls, Gen. Intro., A n A nthol. ofSanskrit Court Poetry (1965 ) ; E. Gerow, A Glossary of I. Figures of Speech ( 1971 ) , I. Poetics ( 1 977) ; K. Krishna moorthy, Anandavardhana's DhvanyaIoka (1974); E. C. Dimock, Jr. , et al., The Lit. of India: An Intro. (1974); S. Dhayagude, Western and 1. P.: A Com-
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INDIAN POETRY parative Study (1981); Theater of Memory, ed. B. S. Miller (1 984); 11. K. Chari, Sanskrit Crit. (1990). E.G . INDIAN POETRY. I . OVERVIEW II . ANCIENT PERIOD ( CA. 1 200 B.C. A.D. 1 200) A. Vedic Poetry B . Sanskrit Epic Poetry C. Classical Sanskrit Poetry D. Prakrit Poetry E . Classical and Epic Tamil Poetry III. MIDDLE PERIOD ( CA. A.D. 600 AND 1 5 00 TO 1 800) A. Bhakti Poetry B. Islamic Poetry IV. MODERN PERIOD ( SINCE CA. 1 800) A. Colonialism and Modernization B . Modern Poetic Genres I . OVERVIEW. The term " I . p ." commonly refers to the immense and diverse body of usually metri cal, often religious, and highly imagistic lit . pro duced on the I. subcontinent between about 1 200 B.C. and the present. This region, which now con sists mainly of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, is as large and varied as Western Europe . I . p . does not belong to a single, cohesive trad. but rather constitutes a constellation of numerous interact ing trads. in about 20 major langs . and several hundred dialects, most of which are used widely in South Asia today. The langs. of the I. subcontinent have preserved their poetic trads. in oral as well as written forms, using several different scripts both native and for eign . The langs . belong to four families: the Indo Aryan (a branch of Indo-European, inc! . Sanskrit, Hindi-Urdu, and Bengali ) , the Dravidian (the fourth largest lang . family in the world, containing 25 langs ., particularly Tamil, which dates from the second century B.C. ) , the Austro-Asiatic (which includes many I. tribal langs . ) , and the Sino-Ti betan (inc! . Burmese) . The first two of these have dominated I . culture from the beginning . The oldest poetic trad . belongs to Sanskrit, which first achieved canonical status before 1 000 B.C. and continued to flourish until the 1 8th c ., while the youngest of the major lits . belongs to Urdu, which emerged only in the 1 6th c. This article covers the poetic trads. and cultural contexts in all the major Indo-Aryan and Dravidian langs., the primary sub jects being Vedic, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Bengali, Hindi, Indian-English, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu poetry, with occasional examples from Gujarati, Malayalam, Panjabi, and Telugu . For more information on poetry in the last-mentioned set oflangs ., and in langs . we have not discussed particularly Assamese, Kashmiri, Oriya, and Sindhi-the reader should consult the specialized works on these trads. listed in the bib! . (e .g . Gonda [ 1973-] ; Zelliot; Heifetz and Narayana Rao;
Sarma; Kachru). For the greater part ofthe present millennium, the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian mother tongues (which are vernaculars as distinct from literary or cl . Sanskrit) have been associated with specific regions of the subcontinent along surprisingly fixed lines. In addition, particular "foreign" langs ., esp. Persian (between the 1 3th and 1 9th cs .) and Eng. (since the late 1 8th c . ) , have peri odically come into widespread use, thus greatly complicating the issues of linguistic, regional, na tional, and cultural identity, as well as of literary style, artistic quality, and poetic trad . In addition to this regional linguistic complexity, itself inten sified by the universal prestige enjoyed by Sanskrit in the cl . period and Persian in the middle, there is the greater complexity resulting from the fact that, over the past 1 500 years, different langs. have exploded into exemplary creativity and affected the entire I . culture without really becoming na tionally spoken langs.; examples of this are Tamil in the middle period and Bengali in the modern period. The concept of "poetry" in the different I . trads . is reflected in the various native systems of poetic genres. For about 2500 years, I . theorists and lite rati have often used the word kiivya for poetry to distinguish it from other kinds of verbal composi tion. In its earliest and narrowest meaning (ca. 500 B.C. ) , the term kiivya was used to characterize the poetry of the Rii miiya1}a, which is epic in scope, narrative in structure, and lyrical in effect . In this sense, kiivya (as distinguished from the mantras or formulaic hymns of the Vedas) signified poetry in the sloka meter (see INDIAN PROSODY ) , with rela tively unadorned diction and simplified syntax; the term therefore could also be used to describe the poetic qualities of the other major epic of the period, the Mahiibhiirata. In its somewhat wider and slightly later meaning in the late d. period, kiivya signifies composition in verse, intended to create the experience of rasa or a particular set of poetic emotions in the audience (see INDIAN po ETICS ) . In this sense kiivya is of two basic kinds which will be further discussed below: ( 1 ) mahiikiivya, great or major poetry, and (2) laghukiivya, short or minor poetry. In its widest sense, popular around A.D. 7001 200, kiivya signifies the full range of imaginative composition, both in verse (padya) and prose (gadya) and mixtures of verse and prose ( misra) . It now also includes dramatic or other texts meant for performance, which were composed in verse or prose or both and were often multilingual (in cl . Sanskrit drama, different characters speak dif ferent langs . or dialects, depending on their social and regional origins) . Kiivya further includes prose narrative, both "fictional" (kathii) and "non fictional" ( iikhyiiyikii) , such as short stories, novel las and novels, moral tales, fables, biographies, and "true stories." The widest meaning of kiivya in the latter part ofthe ancient period thus coincides
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INDIAN POETRY with the meaning of lit. itself (called vaTJmaya or sahitya) , although the term still does not cover the "total order of words" in the various langs. (San skrit, the Prakrits, and the several Jain langs. called the Apabhrarp.sas) to which it is systemati cally applied. Because this conception of kavya is so inclusive, I. theorists refine it by distinguishing between d!$ya kavya, poetry that has to be seen in performance to be properly understood ("drama" ) , and sravya kavya, poetry that needs only to be heard to be fully grasped ("epic," "lyric," "prose" ) . I n the ancient period, kavya was part of several distinct "Hindu" systems of genres, two of which are worth mentioning here. The first of these systems distinguishes between sruti and smrti. The genre of sruti (hearing, that which is heard) con sists of texts that record "original revelation," while the much larger and more varied genre of smrti (recollection, that which is remembered) contains the "received trad." that has grown up around the sruti. Although much of the sruti (the Vedic texts) and the smrti (authoritative discourse on religious, philosophical, mythological, social, and political matters, such as the Manusmrti and the Dharmasastras) is composed in verse, it is con sidered sacred and canonical and falls outside the sphere of kavya. By the end of the ancient period, however, some texts admitted into the category of smrti (such as the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad gila within it) qualify as kavya. As a consequence, what kavya is in any of its narrow and wider senses also depends on the other types of discourse to which it is related and from which it is distin guished. The second major system of genres distin guishes between itihasa, puraTJa, and kavya. An itihasa is a received or traditional history, such as the Mahabharata, a record and explanation of past, present, and predicted future events on an epic scale. A puraTJa, on the other hand, is an "old text," a more popular or sectarian account of affairs in the world, and is focused on a temple or religious community. In contrast, a kavya is distinguished by its aesthetic qualities and purposes, its creation of poetic emotions and pleasurable fictions. If itihasa and puraTJa are modes of discourse "about" the world, then kavya remains suspended in a realm of imaginative effect and memorable enter tainment, and stands only in a potential relation to the world of everyday experience. Itihasa and puraTJa thus shift towards smrti and sruti to consti tute a broad continuum of culturally and ideologi cally authoritative or "true" discourse, while kavya as vaTJmaya or sahitya (lit.) stands apart as fictive discourse (Tripp) . These and other such concepts are discussed in greater detail in recent crit. on I. p. (Dimock et aI., 1974; Ingalls) . Here, we shall use a mixture of I. and Western theories of poetry to describe some of the most important poetic trads. of the subcon tinent over three millennia, and esp. to show how
I. kavya in its various senses changes, often irre versibly, and profoundly alters the ancient notion of kavya itself. In our discussion of the ancient period, we shall concentrate on three different types of Sanskrit (verse) composition: (a) sruti or mantra (the Vedas) ; (b) itihasa (the Mahabharata) ; and (c) kavya (from the epic RamayaTJa to cl. mahakavya and laghukavya and their successors ) . 1 1 . THE ANCIENT PERIOD (ca. 1 2 00 B.C.-A.D. 1 200 ) . Ifwe set aside the large lits. in the Buddhist lang. Pali and the Apabhrarp.sas (the "fallen speech" varieties used by authors of theJain relig ion towards the end of the ancient period), 1. p. between about 1200 B.C. and A.D. 1 200 was written chiefly in various forms of Sanskrit, the oldest of which (Vedic) reflects the patterns of a spoken lang. The 40 or more Prakrits that appeared later in this period probably evolved from the emerging common speech varieties of the subcontinent, and were closely related to Sanskrit in linguistic as well as literary terms. A. Vedic Poetry. The Vedas, probably composed in the second half of the second millennium B.C. and redacted around 1000 B.C., contain the oldest surviving 1. p. There are four Vedic collections (samhitas) . The earliest (and best known in the West) is the l!gveda or the Veda of the Stanzas. The l!gveda contains 1028 poems averaging ten verses in length, addressed to a wide variety of gods and treating a large assortment of themes. Among the gods it invokes in hymns, prayers, and supplications are Agni, Indra, VarUl)a, and Rudra, and among its recurrent themes are creation, birth, death, sacrifice, soma, earth, sky, water, dawn, night, women, and the horse of sacrifice. The verse is cryptic and the symbolism often ob scure, but many ofthe l!gvedic poems are imagistic and disjointed, and even brilliantly surreal. The poems include natural descriptions, dramatized human and divine interactions, and condensed narratives and myths of various kinds, as well as riddles, epigrams, and spells. Although the con text of these poems is ritual and the facts of per formance are now complicated by the passage of time, many of them are poetically superb-strik ingly fresh in imagery, dense in structure, memo rable in sound and phrasing (O'Flaherty) . The second collection, the Yajurveda or the Veda of the Formulas, contains sacred formulas in verse which priests recite at the Vedic sacrifice. The third, the Samavedaor the Veda ofthe Chants, is mainly an anthol. of material found in the l!gveda. The fourth, the Atharvaveda or the Veda of the atharvan (a special kind of priest) , brings together many sorts of prayers, incantations, spells, magic formulas, and songs. The Vedic verse collections are supplemented by three main kinds of later canonical discourse. The BrahmaTJas are commentaries on the ritual aspects of the Vedas, while the A raTJyakas are "books studied in the forests" (where early Hindu renouncers, sages, and seers seem frequently to have congregated ) ;
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INDIAN POETRY both are written in expository and narrative prose. The third type of discourse consists of the Upani �ads, collections of "esoteric equations," which are also largely in prose, although some of the later UPani�ads, produced around 500 B.C., contain some of the earliest didactic poetry, a very signifi cant genre in the I. trad. The four Vedas, esp. the I!gveda, and the 13 principal UPani�ads have exercised an enormous influence on Hindu and I. culture, at least among the dominant castes and classes. The primary lit erary influences of Vedic poetry, however, have been quite specific, among which three are par ticularly important. First, the anonymous Vedic poets, esp. of the I!gveda, "invented" a substantial amount of the I. poetic imagery that has under gone endless variation and amplification in the various I. langs. over the succeeding 3000 years e.g. sun, fire, rivers, horses, cows, frogs, monsoon rain, flowers. Second, the Vedic poets established a simple formal and structural principle for non narrative verse that dominated much I .-lang. po etry until the last quarter of the 19th c . : each verse must express one complete poetic thought. Third, Vedic poetic practice established the caesura that divides a line of premodern I . verse into two equal or unequal portions. Vedic meters provided the basis for the numerous simple and intricate me ters that subsequently came to dominate Sanskrit and I.-lang. poetry (Keith; Lienhard; Dimock et al. 1 974) . B. Sanskrit Epic Poetry. Between about 700 B.C. and A.D. 500, Sanskrit poets drew on a long trad. of bardic narrative, martial stories, and heroic tales, as well as popular accounts of specific his torical events, to create the two major epics, the Ramaya1Ja and the Mahabharata. Although both these composite poems are traditionally attrib uted to specific I. authors, the latter, especially, clearly has been composed and edited collectively over a long period of time. The Ramaya1Ja, attrib uted to Yalmiki-who may well have composed its central portion-was probably completed earlier, between about 600 and 300 B.C.; the Mahabharata, attributed to Vyasa ("the compiler") , is usually placed between about 500 B.C. and A.D. 500. The term "epic" can be applied only loosely to these works, however, for they have little in common with the conventions and structures of the Western epic trad. as defined by Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton. I. readers and theorists most often place the Ramaya1Jain the genre of kavya (poetry, imagi native fiction) and the Mahabharata in the genre of itihasa (history, received trad . ) . ( 1 ) The Mahabharata is the longest poem in the world, running to about 100,000 verses in its canonical versions, nearly seven times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. It is divided into 18 major books (parvans) and concurrently into 100 minor books, each type of book being further divided into chapters ( adhyayas) . The en tire text with minor exceptions is in verse and
employs a variety of meters, with the Sloka pre dominating. The bulk of the poem, which would take nearly 25 days and nights to recite continu ously at the rate of one verse per minute, is cast as a single dialogue between two characters, VaisaJTl payana and Janmejaya. VaisaJTlpayana, the princi pal "reteller" of the story, is a student of Kr�t:la Dvaipayana or Vyasa, traditionally identified as the original author or compiler of the Mahabha rata. His listener and interlocutor, King Janme jaya, is a sixth-generation descendant of the prin cipal characters of the Mahabharata; it is on the occasion of a great snake sacrifice at his court that Janamejaya wishes to hear once again who his famous ancestors were and what they did. Both outside and within this main frame of dialogue are embedded hundreds of complete, interlinked, separate, and overlapping narratives. Each of the embedded or lesser stories has its own particular teller (and sometimes its own interlocu tors or listeners) , so that somewhere between 300 and 400 "characters" serve as the work's "narrators within narratives." Many of the narratives nested inside the VaisaJTlpayanajanmejaya dialogue are also structured as dialogues; a specific character or narrator tells a particular story or part of the main story to one or more listeners inside the fiction, so that narrator and audience, action and observation, story and dialogue become insepara ble from each other and from the substance of the Mahabharata throughout. The Mahabharata has at least three interrelated primary narrative lines or plots (van Buitenen, v. I ) . The basic narrative framework involves over 50 major characters and spans half a dozen succes sive generations in an attempt to record and ex plain every aspect of the conflict between two branches of the Bharata clan. The two branches are the Pat:ldavas (the sons of Pat:ldu) and the Kauravas (the descendents of Kuru) , involved in a protracted struggle for power over the kingdom of Hastinapur (north of modern Delhi ) . The epic also includes a massive recounting of the long genealogy of the clan of the Bharatas, mythologi cal and cosmological accounts of all the significant events in the story, discussions of the ethics of the principal characters and their actions, and a gen eral recapitulation (in poetic, narrative, and quasi dramatic terms) of the entire known ancient I . world in its political, religious, philosophical, mythological, and cultural aspects. The poets of the Mahabharata boldly claim: "What is found in the world is found in this book; what is not found here is not found in the world." Within its vast, epic perimeter, the Mahabharata is also dialogic at the deepest level of meaning; every event, situation, and character anticipates a response and gives rise to multiple viewpoints, esp. in ethical terms, so that nothing crucial to the narrative remains un ambiguous or uncontested. Epic, heroic, and tragic in its scale and impact, the Mahabharata, traditionally classified as an iti-
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INDIAN POETRY hasa (a received history) , also refers to itself as a kavya, a great poem shaped by poetic insight into
the nature of the human (I., Hindu) world, But the style of the work is often plain and even rough, and not always beautiful in comparison with later Sanskrit kavya, esp. cl. mahakavya. The Mahabha rata is also ultimately anagogic in meaning (in the Dantean sense) , which complicates the generic status of the poem as well as the issue of how the text is to be interpreted. In this sense, the poem is understood as a discourse on dharma (right con duct, ethics, duty) and the many ambiguities in the story serve to outline the ethical dilemmas that define d. Hindu civilization. The generic confusion of the Mahabharata has no easy solution, esp. because it contains within itself the Bhagavad-ftita, often regarded inde pendently as one of the great poems of world lit. The Bhagavad-ftita, by now translated into all ma jor langs., is a dialogue in 18 chapters ( adhyayas) that takes place on the battlefield of Kuruk�etra between Lord Kr�I)a and Arjuna, in which the ethical dilemmas posed by civil war are debated. Together with the Mahabharata as a whole, which is sometimes treated as "a fifth Veda," the Bha gavad-ftita has exercised an influence on sub sequent life and culture on the subcontinent that cannot be explained in terms merely of the ge neric conventions of itihasa, kavya, or sastra (van Buitenen; Zaehner; Miller 1986) . (2) The Ramaya1Ja, in contrast, is a relatively homogeneous text about one-fourth the length of the Mahabharata. Traditionally called a kavya, the poem also describes itself as an itihasa, a history of the Raghuval11sa, the clan of Raghu to which King Rama belongs. In fact, I. readers most often think of the Ramaya1Ja as the adikavya or the first poem in the I. literary trad., and of its traditional author, the sage Valmiki, as the adikavi or first poet. Valmiki is said to have invented the sloka meter, valued as the most poetic of the ancient meters, and the Ramaya1Ja is the oldest and great est poem composed in it. But because of its relig ious importance, and its concern with the themes of Hindu ethics, government, and family, the Ramaya1Ja is also regarded as a devotional, discur sive, and normative text. Like the Mahabharata, then, the Ramaya1Ja is a poem rich enough to belong simultaneously to several major genres, and to be sacred and poetic in several different senses. Unlike the Mahabharata, the Ramaya1Ja basi cally tells one continuous story in a fairly straight forward manner. The story concerns the succes sion to the throne of the ancient republic of Kosala (now in northeastern Uttar Pradesh) , and its pro tagonist is Rama, the eldest in the line of succes sion. Although it contains many smaller stories embedded within the story of Rama and his wife Sita, these narratives function as episodes within the main action rather than as digressions or elaborations of the kind found in the larger work.
The central story line is complicated by the ethical issues and emotional dilemmas facing the main characters of the story: Queen Kaikeyi's ambi tiousness and duplicity, her hold over Rama's ag ing father King Dasaratha, Rama's brother Lak�maI)a's decision to accompany Rama and Sita into exile, Sita's abduction by RavaI)a, Sita's faith fulness to Rama while imprisoned in LaI)ka, and so on (Goldman et al. ) . The Ramaya1Ja i s also very different in effect from the Mahabharata because its main story is narrated in a single omniscient voice, which we associate with the implied presence of Yalmiki. The whole is organized into seven books (ka1JQas) and divided into many short chapters (sargas) , each of which tells one portion of the story pro gressively with sharpness, darity, and concision. While the Ramaya1Ja does not have the dialogue structure of the Mahabharata, in the various San skrit forms in which it has come down to us it is fascinatingly self-reflexive. After a 1 4-year exile, Rama returns to Ayodhya as its rightful king. Sita's likely violation by RavaI)a leads him to send her away to a hermitage in the forest which belongs to Valmiki. There Sita gives birth to twin sons, Lava and Kusa, who learn and perfect the art of bardic recitation and singing. Valmiki then teaches them-the sons of Rama-the Ramaya1Ja he has composed, and it is they who turn up at Rama's court and sing the whole tale to the very men who are its heroes and characters. The Ramaya1Ja thus contains its poet, performers, listeners, charac ters, and events in a closed poetic narrative of great power which is remarkably close to what W. B. Yeats called the "hermetic egg" of the poem that cannot break out of its shell. C. Classical Sanskrit Poetry. Although the Mahabharata and the Ramaya1Ja probably contin ued to be edited and revised until around A . D . 500, by ca. A.D. 200 new kinds of Sanskrit poetry had begun to be composed. The new poetry, charac terized chiefly by its forms, themes, and style, is usually called "classical" (as distinct from epic ) . Western scholars frequently identify kavya i n its d. phase as a style rather than as a genre (Keith; Seely et al.; Lienhard) . This new style involved a conscious effort to create a verbal texture pleasing to both the ear and the mind. Heavily figural lang. (involving alat{lkara, rhetorical embellishments or figures) , strictly grammatical constructions, heavy use of nominal compounds ( samasa) instead of inflections, a display of learning in the arts and sciences, and a wide variety of complicated meters and verseforms all contributed to an overt show of poetic and rhetorical prowess. The cl. kavya style was usually applied to subject matter provided by the earlier epics, to the creation of the specific poetic emotions (rasas) , and esp. to the descrip tion of romantic love. In a large measure, these features gave cl. Sanskrit poetry its "impersonal" quality, analogous to the quality T. S. Eliot valor ized in his theory of poetry. Among the masters of
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INDIAN POETRY the d. kavya style were Asvagho�a (2d c.) , Kalidasa (5th c.) , Bharavi (6th c.) , BhaHi, Bal).a, Kuma radasa, Magha, Dal).Q in, Bhartrhari (all 7th c.) , and Bhavabhuti (8th c . ) , as well as such later poets as Bilhal).a, Srihar�a, and Jayadeva (all 1 2th c . ) . These poets and their lesser counterparts contri b uted to the formation and consolidation of the d. kavya style in the mahakavya and laghukavya genres. ( 1 ) Mahakavya (poetry in major forms) in cludes works that are several hundred (or even thousand) lines long, sometimes in a variety of meters. A mahakavya is also referred to as a sar gabandha poem because it is usually produced by binding together several or many sargas (cantos or chapters) . The mahakavyas by Kalidasa, Bharavi, Magha, and Srihar�a are frequently regarded as model poems of their kind in Sanskrit poetry. The earliest surviving examples of the cl. style and the genre, however, are two mahakavyas by the Bud dhist poetAsvagho�a (2d c.) , the Buddhacarita and the Saundarananda. The Buddhacarita, the com plete version of which is known only through Ti betan and Chinese translations, describes in the extant Sanskrit portion the birth, childhood, and youth of Prince Gautama, leading up to the mo ment of his enlightenment as the Buddha. The Saundarananda tells the story of how the Buddha converted his half-brother Nanda from the latter's deep love for his wife Sundari and their worldly life together to a life of Buddhist monasticism. Both works contain numerous descriptions of natural and urban scenes, royal spectacles, amo rous episodes, and theological and philosophical aphorisms-all of which were to become primary characteristics of kavya over the next one thou sand years. The mahakavya, however, achieved its mature form only with Kalidasa. According to I. lore, Ka lidasa (5th c.) was originally an illiterate woodcut ter but nevertheless found his genius as a poet and dramatist at the court of Candragupta Vik ramaditya at Ujjain ( now in Madhya Pradesh) . Kalidasa's plays include the Sakuntalam, probably the best known ancient I. work in the West other than the 8gveda and the Bhagavad-ffita. His long poem Meghadilta and his two mahakavya!r-Kuma rasambhava and Raghuva1,!sa-represent cl. San skrit poetry at its most refined. Kalidasa's Meghadilta (The Cloud Messenger) , though technically not a mahakavya, is an elabo rate conceit of the envoi (q.v.) type. Here a ya�a (a nature deity or demi-god) asks a cloud to carry a message to his beloved. The poem describes the cloud's journey in detail, mixing descriptions of scenic beauty with evocations of the emotions of separation and then union (Nathan) . His Kuma rasa1[!bhava (The Birth of Kumara, the War God) , a proper mahakavya, describes the courtship and marriage of Lord Siva and the daughter of the Himalayas, the goddess Parvati. The god of love, Kamadeva, attempts to facilitate the union by dis tracting S iva's attention while he is performing
austerities; S iva, angry, destroys Kamadeva by opening his third eye; Parvati, however, succeeds where Kamadeva failed by serving her lord faith fully; S iva and Parvati marry, and on their wedding night conceive Kumara. Kalidasa's Raghuva1,!sa (The Dynasty of Raghu) , his second mahakavya, recounts the legends of the north-I. kings of the solar dynasty and retells the story ofRama and Sita. Some of the other exemplary mahakavyas in the Hindu trad., composed later, are based on mate rial from the Mahabharata. In Bharavi's Kiratar junzya (Arjuna and the Mountain Man, 6th c.) Arjuna fights a wild man who turns out to be Lord Siva himself. Magha's Sisupalavadha (The Slaying of King S isupala, 7th c.) draws on a different story from the same epic in which Sisupala insults Kr�l).a (an avatara or incarnation of Lord Vi�l).u) , and Knl).a then beheads him in combat. Srihar�a's Nai�adhacarita (The Life ofNala, King ofNi�adha; 1 2th c . ) is based on the Nala and Damayanti tale, perhaps the most famous of the stories embedded within the Mahabharata (Keith; van Buitenen, v. 1 ) . Two other significant mahakavyas in the trad. from the same period are Bhani's Bhattikavya and Kumaradasa's ftinakzhara1,!a, the latter based on the episode of Sita's abduction in the Ramaya1,!a. (2) Laghukavya, a category of diverse poetry in minor forms, includes riddles, proverbs, and aphorisms; descriptive poems and seasonal verse; confessional poems; epigrams; erotic and love po ems; devotional and religious lyrics; hymns and prayers to the natural elements; philosophical re flections and wisdom poems; verses on childhood, youth, and old age; didactic poems; imagistic ob servations; and even short dramatic monologues. In any of these kinds of poetry, a given piece may be in a particular metrical form or mixture of meters, often with an intricate prosodic pattern, and the category as a whole contains examples of virtually every well-known and obscure prosodic and formal variation possible in the lang. Other than brevity, the primary qualities of these poems are concreteness of imagery; exactness of descrip tion; powerful visual, aural, and emotional sugges tion; refinement of expression and sensibility; and memorability. In most cases, a short poem of this kind evokes a very specifi c rasa, a poetic emotion or mood, presenting it in its purest and most con centrated form. The most highly valued laghukavya verses in Sanskrit, and by extension in the Prakrit langs., are called subha�ita or "well-fed, well-turned." Much of the short lyric and didactic poetry from the ancient period of I. p., and esp. in cl. Sanskrit, is preserved in kosas (anthologies). A popular form of the kosa-style anthol. in the d. Sanskrit period was the sataka, a "century" of verses. In the 7th c., four important satakas of well-turned San skrit poems were compiled. One is the "Amaru collection" from Kashmir-attributed to a legen dary author-editor, King Amaru-which served as a source for later anthols. such as Vidyakara's
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INDIAN POETRY Subha$itaratnakosa (An Anthol. of the Jewels of Well-Turned Verses; 1 2th c . ) . The other three are attributed to the poet Bhartrhari, who organized them thematically: the first of his satakas contains love poems; the second, epigrams of worldly wis dom; and the third, poems of dispassion or renun ciation. Throughout the ancient period, such kos as drew on two kinds of material: short poems that were explicitly written as laghukavya, and complete verses or series of verses extracted from longer works, esp. mahakavyas, which could stand on their own ( Ingalls; Miller 1 967 ) . Some Sanskrit poetry written at the end of the ancient period or early in the middle period falls outside the categories of mahakavya and laghu- kavya. Two 1 1 th-c. works esp. modify the genres of I. p . in important ways.Jayadeva's Gltagovinda, for instance, is structured in cantos like a mahakavya, but its lang. is much more lyrical than its cl. antecedents. It intersperses short religious-erotic songs between the longer movements, and its over all theme is closer to the concerns of the short religious or devotional poems written in Sanskrit through much of the cl. period. It takes up the theme ofKr�l).a and Radha's love and turns Radha into an object of religious devotion within the Vaisnava poetic trad. Jayadeva's variation on the subject has proved both memorable and ex tremely influential in I. p., music, dance, and painting (Miller 1 977) . Bilhal).a's CaurapaiicaSika (Fifty Poems of a Thief of Love) , on the other hand, brings together a series of short poems on a single theme, a remembered clandestine affair between a poet and a princess (Miller 197 1 ) . The great cycle (or series of cycles) of Sanskrit poetry from about 1 200 B.C. to A .D. 1 200 thus comes to a close remarkably different from its beginning in Vedic hymns. D. Prakrit Poetry. Cl. Sanskrit, as we noted above, was probably based on a variety of common speech early in the ancient period, but soon ac quired the characteristics of an elite, sophisti cated literary lang. and served as the "official" lang. of court and state for a very long time. The common langs. of the people of the I. subconti nent during much of the first millennium A . D . , and probably a little earlier, were the Prakrit langs., which appear in written form in central India around the 2d c. Over 40 Prakrit langs. are recorded; they are classified linguistically as Mid dle Indo-Aryan langs. The Prakrit langs. were put to several kinds of literary uses. In multilingual Sanskrit plays of the cl. period, for instance, the common characters and most of the women (even the queens) speak in Prakrit, while the kings and courtiers (and an occasional female mendicant) speak in the more refined Sanskrit. At the same time, many of the love lyrics of the ancient period, esp. those de scribing the feelings of women, are composed in Prakrit. The Prakrits, simpler in imagery, style, and emotion, seem to have been the langs. of
choice for early !. song. The most important Prakrit for lit. hist. is Ma harashtri, which was used in central India in the 1 st millennium A.D. King Hala (ca. 3d c.) used Maharashtri to compose his Sattasal or the Gatha Saptasadi. It is an anthol. of about 700 short lyrics, broadly similar in content and convention to the cl. Sanskrit laghukavya kosas of the kind described above. The Prakrit gatha, together with the San skrit kosa, serves as the model for the collection of verses and short poems that dominates the middle period of ! . p. in the Indo-Aryan vernaculars. Even in the modern period. , a 20th-c. Marathi poet like P. S. Rege uses Hala's gatha as a model for a collection of short, lyrical (often erotic and per sonal) poems. E. Classical and Epic Tamil Poetry. The oldest non-Sanskrit lit. on the I. subcontinent belongs to Tamil, one of the four literary langs. of the Dravidian family found in the southern peninsular region. Early d. Tamil lit. is called cankam lit., since it is believed to have been produced by three successive cannkams or academies of poets. It is represented by eight anthols., ten long poems, and a grammar called the Tolkappiyam (Old Composi tion) . Nothing of the first cankam of writers has survived; the Tolkappiyam is ascribed to the second cankam; and the anthols. and long poems are all said to be the work of the third carikam and prob ably belong to the first three centuries of this era. Together the eight anthols. and ten long poems constitute a body of2,381 poems ranging in length from 4 to about 800 lines; about 1 00 of these poems are anonymous, but the rest are the work of 473 poets known by name or by epithet (Ramanujan 1986; Hart 1 979) . In the Tolkappiyam, a work that is crucial for the understanding of cl. Tamil poetry, and in the an thols. themselves, this body of verse is divided into two main tirJais or genres whose features are com pletely independent of Sanskrit poetics: akam (in terior) poetry and puram (exterior) poetry. Akam poems are highly structured love poems, while puram poems are heroic poems on war, death, social and historical circumstances, the charac teristics of kings, and the condition of the poets. In the anthols. both types of poems carry colo phons added by later commentators. The colo phon to an akam poem identifies its speaker with a phrase like "What she said to her girlfriend" or "What his mother said to the neighbors," while the colophon to a puram poem usually identifies its speaker, the poet, and his patron (a chieftain or king) . The poems thus function like dramatic monologues in very specific situations in the inte rior and exterior worlds of ancient Tamil culture. The basic conventions of the two genres derive from a taxonomy of Tamil landscapes and the cultures associated with them. Using these con ventions, the akam genre portrays an interior land scape of love, while the puram genre portrays an exterior landscape of war. Although the two gen-
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INDIAN POETRY res are distinct, they parallel each other so that love and war become part of the same universe and metaphors for one another. The taxonomy created by the ancient Tamil poets and their commentators is comprehensive and focuses on concrete particulars. The year is divided into six seasons and the day into six parts. The Tamil country is divided into five poetic land scapes (hill, seashore, forest and pasture, country side, and wasteland ) ; each landscape is then named after the flower or vegetation charac teristic of it ( kuriiici, neytal, mullai, marutam, and palai respectively) and characterized by what it contains. Thus each landscape becomes a reper toire of images for the poets, and anything in it, whether a bird or drum, tribal name or dance, can then evoke a specific feeling. A favorite device for such evocation is u!!urai (metonymy) , in which the description of one thing evokes that of another associated with it in a particular landscape. The natural scene implicitly evokes the human scene; thus the image of bees making honey out of the kuriiici flower becomes a metonymic representa tion of the lovers' union. In the akam genre, each of the five landscapes is matched metaphorically with the five phases of love, the times of day, and the season most appro priate to those phases: kuriiici (a white flower; hillside) is the landscape of union, at night in the cool season; mullai (jasmine; forest, pasture) is the landscape of patient waiting and domesticity, late in the evening and in the rainy season; marutam (queen's-flower; countryside, agricultural low land) is the landscape oflovers' unfaithfulness and "sulking scenes," in the morning in all seasons; neytal (blue lily; seashore) is the landscape of anxiety in love and separation, at nightfall in all seasons; and palai (desert tree; wasteland) is the landscape of elopement, hardship, separation from lover or parents, at midday and in summer. A similar but looser encoding of exterior situations occurs in the puram genre, where the landscapes are more inhospitable, often devastated by strife, battle, and destruction. The akam poetry of d. Tamil is found in five of the eight anthols.: the Kuruntokai, the Narrir;ai, the Akananuru, the A inkurunuru, and the Kalit tokai. The poems of the puram genre are collected in three anthols.: the Purananuru, the PatiLrup pattu, and the Paripatal. Taken together, these eight anthols. and the ten long poems give us a very detailed, highly structured, and intricately encoded picture of the cl. Tamil world, in which not only is the poet's lang. Tamil, but the land scapes, personae, moods, and situations are them selves a code of signifiers for Tamil culture. For five or six generations at the beginning of the first millennium A.D. the cankam poets spoke this com mon lang. with a passion, maturity, originality, and delicacy which may well be unique in the ancient 1. world (Ramanujan 1986) . Between ca. A . D . 300 and 900, this cmikam lit.
gave way to ancient Tamil epic poetry. The two main works in this trad. are the twin (interlinked) epics, the Cilappatikaram by I!anko Nika! and the Mar;imekalai by Catanar, which draw on d. Tamil poetics as well as on Sanskrit models. Mika! , s Cilappatikaram, composed in three books, tells a story not about kings but about Kovalan, a young Pukar merchant unjustly executed for a crime he did not commit, and his wife, the virtuous Kal)l)aki, who acquires power through her unfail ing faithfulness and becomes a goddess of chastity (DanieIou 1965) . Catanar's Mar;imekhalai (the last part of which is missing) continues the story of the Cilappa tikaram; the heroine Mal)imekalai, a dancer and courtesan like her mother Matavi, (Kovalan's mis tress) , is torn between romantic love and spiritual longings. While the Cilappatikaram gives us a de tailed picture of Tamil culture-its varied relig ions, towns, people (a mixture of Tamils, Arabs, and Greeks) , performing arts, and daily life-us ing Tamil cankam poetics as well as Sanskrit poet ics and folklore without any particular religious commitment, the Mar;imekhalai is clearly a work influenced by Buddhism (Danielou 1 989 ) . After about the 6th c . A.D., Tamil poetry and lit. swerved increasingly towards the phenomenon called bhakti, intense personal devotion to a par ticular god, usually either Vi�l)u or S iva, the two principal gods of ancient and subsequent Hindu ism. The earliest Tamil bhakti poets were the 1 2 Nayanar saints, devotees o f S iva, whose earliest representative was the woman poet Karaikkal Am maiyar. The most important Nayanars were Appar and Campantar (7th c . ) , and Cuntarar (8th c . ) . Among the major works of S aiva bhakti i n Tamil is the collection of hymns called the Tiruvacakam by Mal)ikkavacakar (9th c.) , for whom Siva was lover, lord, master, and guru. The S aiva bhaktas were followed by the Tamil Vai�l)ava saint-poets, called the Alvars. Among the poets who worshiped Vi�l)u, one of the earliest was again a woman, Al)ta! (8th c. ) . The greatest of the Alvar poets was also one of the last, Nammalvar (9th c. ) , who expresses poign antly the pain and ecstasy of loving God (Ramanu jan 198 1 ) . As this discussion suggests, in what we have called the ancient period, 1. p. evolved along sev eral distinct lines (within Sanskrit and outside it) , passed through a number of well-defined phases (in Sanskrit , from Vedic to epic to classical; in Tamil, from cankam to epic to devotional, etc.) , and came to constitute a very large and multiform body of verbal composition. This body of poetry steadily became an immense reservoir of com monplaces for subsequent 1. poets to draw upon. In the middle and modern periods it also became the canon against which poets and audiences could react, as they began to create new identities in lang., style, poetic theme, genre, religious ori entation, and social and political ideology. As the ancient period drew to a close, 1. poets started
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INDIAN POETRY extending the domain of poetry or kavya in ways that the d. theorists and practitioners of verse could not have envisioned. III. THE MIDDLE PERIOD (ca. A.D. 600-1 5 00 TO 1 800) . The middle period of I. p. begins at differ ent times in the different langs. and regions of the subcontinent. In Tamil poetry, it begins around A.D. 600, well before the ancient period of Sanskrit lit. comes to an end, whereas in the case of langs. like Urdu it begins only after 1 500. Broadly speak ing, however, the middle period comes to a close around 1 800 for most of the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian mother tongues, even though clearly modern poetry, prose fiction, and drama do not appear in many of them until after about 1 860. Although the absence of definite and uniform historical closure makes generalizations ex tremely difficult, it is nevertheless possible to say that during the middle period as a whole, esp. between about 1000 and 1 500, Sanskrit and the Prakrits cease to be the primary medium ofliter ary composition and give way gradually to the regional mother tongues. Sanskrit has continued to be used for scholarly and ritual purposes down to the present, but the last great original poets in it, such as Jayadeva, belong to the 1 2th c. This large-scale linguistic and literary shift, which seems similar to the shift from Lat. to the vernaculars in Europe near the end ofthe Middle Ages, goes hand i n hand in India with a selective but concerted devaluation of the ancient past, and particularly with the rise of a new chauvinism focused on the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian vernacu lars and their native regions. The shift also accom panies very significant changes in the political complexion of the subcontinent (the Muslims ar rive to stay after about 1 200 and dominate much of India until the beginning of the 18th c. ) . But most importantly, the shift is part of a profound evolution in religious and literary theory and prac tice (Ramanujan 1 981 ) . The first mother tongue to develop the new kind of poetry was a Dravidian lang., Tamil. Among the Indo-Aryan iangs., Bengali in eastern India and Marathi near the western coast were the first to be written down (ca. 1000 A.D. ) . Between the 1 0th and 1 4th cs., poetry appeared for the first time on a significant scale in several other linguistic me dia: in Assamese, Oriya, Hindi, Rajasthani, Gu jarati, and Kashmiri, among the Indo-Aryan langs. ; and in Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam, among the Dravidian iangs. Between the 14th and 1 6th cs., poetry also appeared in Panjabi and Urdu, and by this time Arabic, Turkish, and Persian had also entered I. discourse as a result of Muslim political success on the subcontinent. By about 1 600, all the native langs. mentioned had developed strong and continuous trads. of both oral and written poetry. Many of the particular genres of the middle pe riod were associated with particular langs. , social groups (esp. caste communities) , and religious sects. Thus, from ca. 600-1 600, more than a dozen
new major !its. and trads. of poetry appeared on the I. subcontinent. gradually displacing Sanskrit, Prakrit, and d. Tamil poetry and changing radi cally the constitution of the world of I. poetic discourse (Dimock et al. 1 974) . What poetry is in the middle period is itself an enormous problem, since the change of me dium-from three or four main ancient langs. to about 15 new regional mother tongues-involves a transformation of the very notion of poetry and its various functions. Here the problems of his tori cal continuity and difference will be addressed by limiting the discussion to the two main areas of I. p. in the middle period: the bhakti movement and Islamic poetry. A. Bhakti Poetry. The most prominent literary, religious, and social movement of the middle pe riod is bhakti ("devotion") , which began in the far south (in the Tamil-speaking area) after the 6th c. and spread with surprising success all over the subcontinent by the 1 6th c. Despite the linguistic fragmentation ofIndia in this period, bhaktipoetry in a dozen major langs. shares a considerable number of features, while of course revealing many regional variations and peculiarities (Zel liot) . Several thousand poets, variously called bhaktas and sants, are associated with the bhakti movement all over South Asia, but each of the major iangs. and dialects has its own particularly valued fig ures. Among the most significant saint-poets asso ciated with the various kinds of bhakti lit. are: the Nayanar devotees of Siva, the S rivai�lJava Alvars, devotees ofVi�lJu in Tamil (Peterson; Cutler) ; the Virasaiva poets, esp. BasavalJlJa, Dasimayya, Al lama Prabhu, and Mahadeviyakka, as well as the later dasas, like Purandharadasa and Kanakadasa, in Kannada (Ramanujan 1973 ) ; JftaneSvar, Nam dev, Eknath, Tukaram, and Ramdas in Marathi (Kolatkar; Tulpule l : Narasirpha Mehta and Mira bai in Gujarati, of whom the latter also belongs to the Hindi-Rajasthani trad. (Munshi; Hawley and Jurgensmeyer) ; Kabir, Siirdas, Raidas, and Tulsidas in Hindi (Vaudeville; Hess; Bryant; Hawley ) ; Nanak in Panjabi (Hawley and Jur gensmeyer) ; Vidyapati in Maithili and Candidas, Caitanya, and Ramparsad �n Bengali (Archer; Di mock and Levertov) ; and Sankardev in Assamese andJagannath Das in Oriya. Over and above these individual poets, there are several sects or schools of bhakti poetry, each with its own tribe of saints and poets, such as the Vallabhacarya sect in the Braj Bhasa dialect of Hindi, the Dattatreya sect in Marathi, the S aiva poets in Telugu, and the Vai�lJava poets in Malayalam. Bhakti, frequently described as theism, centers on devotional poetry in which the poet expresses his or her intensely personal devotion to a particu lar god (or, occasionally, goddess) or seeks to be one with a god or an undifferentiated godhead. The many hundred bhaktas and sants (devotees, saint-poets) in the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian
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INDIAN POETRY trads. of the middle period fall roughly into three categories: ( 1 ) those who worship ViglU, one of his ten avataras (incarnations ) , or one of the numer ous local I. gods absorbed into Vaiglava mythology over the centuries; (2) those who worship Siva, who has no avataras but may be set in different regional and transregional contexts (both ViglU and S iva are sagurJa ["with qualities"] ) ; and (3) those who remain in quest of a god or godhead "without qualities" (nirgurJa) . The sagurJa poets in the various bhakti trads. usually oppose the nirgurJa poets ideologically and politically; the former often tend to be conserva tive while the latter tend to be radical and satiric. Among the sagurJa poets themselves, the Vai�I;lavas and the S aivas often oppose each other; and among the Vai�I;lavas, in turn, the worshipers of Rama and the worshipers of Kr�I;la (the two most popular avataras ofVi�I;lU in this period) frequently mock and criticize each other. The goal of theistic devo tion in the middle period is the same as the goal of ritualistic brahmanism (or even Buddhism) in the ancient period, but the means-ecstatic devo tion-of attaining mukti ("liberation" from mun dane existence) are now substantially different. As this suggests, a great deal remains in common across the great historical, ideological, and linguis tic divide between Sanskrit and the later vernacu lars. Consequently, many of the bhakti poets at tempt to "vedicize" themselves and to take ancient Sanskrit texts, such as the Bhagavad-gzta and the Bhagavata PurarJa, as palimpsests to be over-writ ten in the new langs. Nevertheless, during its primary devel. over six or seven centuries, bhakti poetry and its large ac companying lit. (mainly the lives of the poets written in verse and prose and commentaries on the poems) substantially modified, reshaped, and even rejected the brahmanism and Hinduism of the ancient period. Many of the bhaktas and san ts of the middle period were low-caste or "untouch able" men and women, although some of the im portant poets, such as Tulsldas in Hindi, Ba hiI;labal in Marathi, and BasavaI;lI;la in Kannada, were brahmarJas, administrators, statesmen, or scholars by birth and by profession. The tradi tional lives of the devotees of the middle period, mostly written late in the period, are full of mi raculous deeds and transformations achieved against the greatest odds. These figures thus be come larger-than-life "saints" because of their powerful devotion to their chosen gods and the reciprocal grace (krjJa) those gods confer upon them, a combination that constitutes a major al ternative to the ritual nature of "salvation" in an cient Hinduism. The typical poet of the ancient period is a royal sage in a forest, a worldly courtier, a learned priest, or a renouncing )'Ofii, while the typical bhakta or sant in the middle period fre quently puts on the persona of an outcast, a rebel, a rustic, or a reformer-sometimes illiterate but practically always divinely inspired.
In general, many of the bhakti poets of the middle period oppose the caste system, Vedic and later Hindu ritual, the notions of pollution and untouchability, and brahmanical learning and alllhority. They also seriously question the ancient hierarchy of genres, attacking the legitimacy of Vedic sruti or revelation, the hegemonic status of the brahmanical sastras as cultural codes, and the pedantry involved in a refined (esp. cl. Sanskrit kavya) style. Against the authority of the received trad. or canon they pose the authority of their own immediate experience ( anubhava) , their visions, their intense personal devotion ( bhakti) , and god's privileging grace (krpa) . Despite a few superficial similarities, the I. bhakti poets use poetic strategies and function in cultural situations that differ im mensely from those of the European and Anglo Am. trads. of religious poetry. Jiianeiivar, for in stance, has little in common with his contemporary Dante. The bhakta or the sant often claims that true poetry must be spontaneous, urgent, personal, "divinely inspired," and composed in the simpler and more genuine vernacular rather than a re mote and artificial lang. of refinement like San skrit. Bhakti poets and poems therefore tend to be more immediate, colloquial, autobiographical, confessional, and dramatic than many of their cl. counterparts. But since these qualities became conventionalized early in the bhakti movement, the bulk of bhakti poetry seems fairly routine and insipid rather than inspired. Though bhakti stands out as a "counterculture" in the great flow of 1. p., it becomes, in turn, the norm against which sub sequent poetic movements define themselves. Thus, by the end of the 1 8th c., many of the mother t ongues (such as Hindi and Marathi) de velop bodies of"academic" verse written by learned poets (ParJ¢it kavis) modeled explicitly on Sanskrit poetry and poetics, which constitute countercur rents to the stream of bhakti writing. Though a large portion of the lexicon, gram mar, and prosody of the Indo-Aryan vernaculars is derived in some way from Sanskrit, and Sanskrit metrical verseforms often serve as the basic mod els for the new poetry, bhakti poetry swerves away from Sanskrit kavya on a significant scale in more narrowly literary terms. For instance, as already indicated, if a significant portion of epic and d. Sanskrit poetry is impersonal and attempts to cre ate the experience of a particular rasa in its audi ence, then much of bhakti poetry aims at being personal in tone and serves as immediate self-ex pression for its authors. Even when the bhaktas and sant.I claim to create a rasa, they call it the bhakti rasa or "the poetic emotion of devotion," which falls outside the conventional list of poetic emo tions proper to Sanskrit kavya. Such reorientations acquire meaning and power on ideological grounds as well as within the context of form and genre. Although the ancient and middle periods are intricately interconnected, their respective poetic
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INDIAN POETRY forms and genres differ significantly. Many poets and poetic trads. within and outside bhakti are so strongly associated with particular vernacular verseforms that those forms acquire the status of genres, as did the sonnet in early modern Europe. For instance, the mangalakabya, which lies outside the bhakti movement, belongs uniquely to Bengali, the vacana to the Virasaiva poets in Kannada, the ramainHo the Hindi poet Kabir ( 1 5th c. ) , and the ovi and the abhaiiga to the Marathi poets from JitaneSvar (late 1 3th c.) to Ramdas (late 1 7th c. ) . Some genre names cut across several langs., re gions, and trads., e.g. the pada ("verses, poem, song") , the padavau (a "string" of songs, very dif ferent in structure from a modern Western poetic sequence) , and the gatha (an anthol. or collection of poems, modeled on Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit antecedents) . Besides these new and often pre cisely differentiated forms (a Hindi pada, a Kan nada vacana, and a Marathi abhanga cannot be confused with each other ) , in the middle period the mother tongues also develop their own "oral epics" and varieties of "folk song," incl. martial sagas, romances, tragic love stories, ballad-like forms, work songs, etc., all ofwhich affect the more canonical genres of poetry. Moreover, a very high proportion of the poetic forms of the middle pe riod is designed for performance or is integrated with some of the performative arts-music, dance, folk or popular theater, dance-drama. As far as bhakti poetry itself is concerned, the various religious strands in the movement bring together lyric (short) forms and epic (long) forms, and further bring these forms together with perform ance of various types. One common feature of lyrical bhakti poetry is a refrain-like pattern that becomes prominent in singing-the opening verse of a poem, often called a teka, is repeated after each subsequent verse. The last verse usually identifies its author explic itly in its signature line (called bhar;ita) or, in cases like the Kannada vacanas, by a unique image, metaphor, or epithet that is clearly the "signature" of that particular poet. This important feature complements the rhetorical mode of many bhakti poems cast as dramatic monologues, in which the poet identified speaks in a particular voice, or through a particular persona, to a god or to an immediate audience of listeners. This form of direct address makes a bhakti lyric different from the imagistic or descriptive lyric of the subha�ita kind in cl. Sanskrit laghukavya, and differentiates its rhetoric significantly from the kind of speaker listener drama we find in d. Tamil cankam poetry in the akam genre. Some bhakti poems are long, and they are fre quently intertextual with long poems in the an cient period of I. p. For example, the earliest long poem in Tamil bhakti, the Tirumurukaarruppalai, which is about the god Murugan, has six sections and draws on earlier cankam images and ancient Sanskrit mythology. Tulsidas's Ramacaritamanas in
Avadhi (a major literary dialect of Hindi; 1 6th c.) is several thousand verses long and retells the story of the Rlimayar;a, but with all the characters now absorbed into a bhakti worldview. Rama thus be comes Tulsidas's chosen personal god. The poem is clearly epic in scope, tone, and structure, and its conventions derive from those in Yalmiki's San skrit adikavya, but its effect as a whole is very different: the omniscient voice of the narrator, for instance, is now interrupted by the poet-devotee's voice, expressing his devotion to the divine char acters. Kampan's Ramayar;a in Tamil ( l 2th c.) does something even more complex by accommo dating the Sanskrit classic to a Dravidian lang. and its independent d. trad.: his retelling of Rama's story is shaped as much by the "interior" and "exterior" landscapes of akam and puram poetry as by the poetic conventions and emotional tones of Tamil Vai�l.lava bhakti (Hart and Heifetz) . All such changes connect I. p. of the middle period to the poetry and the poetics of the ancient period, but place many commonplace elements in entirely new combinations. Many of the features of bhakti poetry already mentioned come together in a major poem like the Marathi Jiiancivaii, one of the earliest and greatest works in the lang. of central and western India, and attributed toJitaneSvar ( 1 3th c. ) , who is said to have achieved muktibefore he turned 20. The Jiiancivarz is intertextual with the Bhagavad gita; it quotes each verse of the Sanskrit classic in the original lang., and then places several stanzas in Marathi before and after each quotation, thus building a new poem around and inside an old one (Tulpule) . The poetry of the bhakti movement coexists in the middle period of I . lit. hist. with a variety of other lits. Although bhaktidoes constitute a "coun terculture" within Hindu society at this time, still it does not effectively replace older, continuing, or contemp. lits. Thus in Bengali, for instance, bhakti poetry inhabits a larger discursive world which also includes the genre of mangalakabya ("poetry of an auspicious happening") , consisting of narra tives about and eulogies to local Hindu gods and goddesses, and the Bengali mahakavya, based on Sanskrit models (Sen) . Similarly, in a Dravidian lang. like Malayalam, poetry written in the Vai� I.lava trad. coexists with other types of poetic com position, such as the major genre of pattu (song ) , which combines linguistic and literary elements from Tamil, Sanskrit, and folk sources into a unique and complex trad. of its own after the 1 5th c. Moreover, bhakti lit. coexists with a substantial range of new court poetry, learned or academic poetry, and popular "oral epics" (Roghair; Heifetz and Narayana Rao; Blackburn et al. ) . In general, it also stands apart from such works and genres as the Hir-Ranjha tale in Panjabi, Chand Bardai's Prithviraj raso in Hindi, Malik MuhammadJayasi's Padmavat in Avadhi, the Buddhist carya- padas in Bengali, and the lavar;i and the powatja in Marathi.
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INDIAN POETRY Among the many such contexts of bhakti poetry in the middle period is the body of writing which we shall broadly call Islamic poetry. B. Islarnic Poetry. Islam first entered the South Asian region in the 8th c. with the conquest of Sind, and the first Islamic empire (the Delhi Sul tanate) emerged early in the 1 3th c. Between the 1 3th and 18th cs., the courts of Muslim rulers, esp. in northern India, attracted refugee and immi grant men of letters from Persia and Central Asia (inc!. Sufi poets) and also patronized local and regional writers who wrote in Arabic, Turkish, Persian (an Iranian relative of Sanskrit) , and Urdu (a highly Islamicized version of Hindi) , with the last two langs. becoming predominant. The pres ence of Islam on the subcontinent permanently influenced many of the Indo-Aryan langs. Modern Hindi, Marathi, and Bengali, for example, derive substantial portions of their lexicons from Arabic and Persian roots (Rypka; Sadiq) . Among the Muslim writers who played impor tant roles in the regional lits. of the subcontinent are: Lalla ( 1 4th c . ) in Kashmiri; Shah 'Abdul-Latif ( 1 7th-18th cs.) in Sindhi; Waris Shah ( 1 8th c . ) in Panjabi; Daulat Qazi and Alaol ( 1 7th c . ) in Ben gali; and Malik Mu\:lammad Jayasi, Rahim, Man jhan (all 1 6th c. ) , and 'Us man ( I 7th c . ) in the Avadhi and Braj Bhasha dialects of Hindi. Sufi ideas and poetics, esp. the doctrine of monothe ism, clearly influenced the nirgurJa sant poets of north India, esp. Kabir and the various poets in the Sikh guru trad. (particularly Guru Nanak, 1 6th c. ) , whose poems in a mixture of Panjabi, Hindi, Urdu, and other langs. are included in the canonical text of the Sikh religion, the A digranth or Guru Granth Sahib. The trad. of Persian writing in India, which is different from the trads. of Muslim writing in U rdu and in other I. mother tongues, goes back to the I I th c . ; its first major poet was Amir Khusrau ( 1 3th- 1 4th cs. ) , who composed poetry in Persian, Urdu, and early Hindi ( Hindui or Hindavi) . The most important poet in this trad. was 'Abdul Qadir Bedil ( 1 7th c . ) , who wrote 16 volumes of poetry. The I .-Persian trad. introduced the rna;;navl, qa {ida, and ghazal (qq.v.) genres into I. lit.; the ghazal in particular became very popular by the end of the middle period. In the 19th and 20th cs., the ghazal has spread, principally from U rdu models, to langs. like Panjabi and Marathi. The poetic trads. of U rdu have their beginnings in Persian as well as in the various I. langs. of the subcontinent. Urdu poetry first appeared in cen tral India at the courts of Bijapur and Golconda in the 1 6th c. In the early 18th c., Aurangabad in the Deccan became a notable center; from there, Urdu poetry spread to the courts at Delhi and Lucknow in the north, where it acquired an unusual pre eminence at the end of the middle period. Two of the characteristic institutions of Urdu poetry emerged during this period: the practice of nov ice-poets choosing an ustad or master from whom
they learned the craft of poetry, and the practice of poets gathering in a private or semiprivate setting to read or recite their poems (meetings called rnusha'irahs) . The genres of poetry that appeared in U rdu during the middle period were the qa{ida (pane gyrics in praise of high or holy personages) ; the IJaju (personal and other satires; epigrams on con temporaries ) ; the shahr-ashiib (poems lamenting the decline or destruction of a city and its culture ) ; the rnarSiyah (an elegy for the martyred family and kinsmen of Husayn [Mu\:lammad's grandson] ) ; the rna;;navl (the preferred genre for long narra tive and descriptive poems) ; and the ghazal (a short, metrical, rhymed lyric on a variety of themes, esp. erotic love, Sufi love, and metaphys ics ) . All these forms and genres in Urdu are re lated to specific antecedents in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish lit., and though they are not all pri marily "religious" in function they are never far from the central tenets of various branches of the Muslim faith. The masters of the qa�'ida are Sauda and Insha' ( 1 8th c . ) , and Zauq and Ghalib ( 1 9th c. ) ; of the rnarSiyah, Mir Anis and Mirza Dabir ( 19th c . ) ; of the rna;;navl, a very widely practiced genre, Mir, Mir Hasan, Daya Shankar Nasim, and Mirza Shauq ( 1 8th-19th cs. ) ; and of the ghaza� Mir Taqi Mir ( l 8th c . ) and Mirza Ghalib ( l 9th c . ) . As these dates clearly show, the greatest phase of U rdu poetry in the middle period was the 1 8th through early 1 9th cs., overlapping with the be ginning of the modern period (Ali; Ahmad; Russel and Islam; Russell) . Between ca. 1 400 and 1 800, bhakti poetry and Islamic poetry in India influenced each other ex tensively. The nirgurJa sant poets in the Hindu and Sikh trads., for example, were affected deeply by such elements in the Muslim faith as monotheism, the rejection of all forms of idol-worship, and be liefin an egalitarian society; and the Muslim relig ious poets, esp. the ecstatic poets in the Sufi trad., were in turn affected by bhakti performative prac tices, esp. communal singing in places of worship. Although we have described the middle period of I. p. mainly in terms of two of its components, the nature of bhakti and Islamic poetry, their inter relations, and their divergence from the older I. past should have indicated the kinds of change that took place on the subcontinent between about 600 and 1800. The shift from Sanskrit, the Prakrits, and c1. Tamil (as well as Pali and the Jain ApabhraJTlsas) to the major Indo-Aryan and Dravidian mother tongues for literary purposes, the creation and dissemination of new genres and new principles of poetic composition, and the introduction of new beliefs, values, and worldviews added numerous features to I. p. that did not previously exist on the subcontinent. In fact, the middle period not only brought fresh resources into the common stock of I. p., but also became a part of the "traditional" I. world against which the writers of the modern period reacted. In this com-
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INDIAN POETRY posite "trad .," bhakti poetry (but not Islamic po etry or the poetry of the folk and oral trads.) also came to be referred to as kavya, thus extending the field of canonical poetry well beyond that of San skrit kavya. IV. THE MODERN PERIOD ( SINCE CA. 1 800) . In the conventional view of India's lit. hist., the divi sion between the "traditional" and the "modern" is marked by the establishment of the British colonial empire on the I. subcontinent. Two pre cise dates are significant: 1 757, when the East India Company effectively gained control of Ben gal following the Battle of Plassey; and 1 8 1 8 , when the British acquisition of I. territories was practi cally completed. In the course of the 60 years between these two dates, deeply traditional I. so ciety began to "modernize," affecting not only the "manners and customs" of the natives but also their langs. and-often unknowingly-their lits. A. Colonialism and Modernization. Western-style education first became available on a significant scale to Indians late in the 18th c. with the estab lishment of a number of influential missionary schools and colleges; after Macaulay's famous "Minute on Education" ( 1 83 4) , Eng.-Iang. educa tion became quite commonplace in the cities and towns and among the I . middle and upper classes. In the later 1 9th c., Indians all over the country began encountering European and Anglo-Am. lit erary works and reading Eng. translations of Gr. and Roman lit. and the modern European, Eng., and Am. classics. Many I. poets of the 19th c . then began consciously to imitate their Western prede cessors and contemporaries, thereby creating one major kind of modern I. p. in the I. mother tongues. Thus Bengali writers started a Bengali trad. of modern epic in verse,just as Marathi poets began composing sonnets, odes, and pastoral ele gies, and Hindi poets started writing romantic lyrics. These "imitative innovations" significantly changed the formal, thematic, and generic com plexion of the lits. of the subcontinent. The West ernization of India under British rule also went one step further: it created the kind of poet who wanted to write poetry of the Anglo-Am. kind directly in the Eng. lang. However, contrary to the common claim, the modernity of modern I. writing does not consist entirely in its Westernization, and I. writers did not become modern merely by imitating the qualities invented originally by European or Western writ ers. In many of the modern Indo-Aryan langs. the 1 8th and 1 9th cs. were largely periods of very complex and innovative interaction among the various local, national, and international trads. In Hindi and Marathi, for instance, the transitional decades between the middle and the modern pe riods (roughly 1 775-1875) were dominated by many parJltit-kavis ("learned" or "academic" po ets ) . These brahmalJa writers worked with Sanskrit and Persian as their cl. langs. , and in the 1 9th c . also with Eng. as one o f their official langs., but
used their own vernaculars and local dialects as the actual media of literary composition. Their often voluminous poetry comes in several inter linked genres that cross the boundaries usually erected between derivative and original writing: ( 1 ) close translations of Sanskrit poems, plays, and narratives into modern I. mother tongues; (2) loose adaptations, retellings, or imitations of San skrit, Persian, and Arabic literary works; ( 3 ) "new" works in the modern mother tongues that basi cally rework old materials from the cl. langs. and from the older lit. in the mother tongues; and (4) genuinely original poems in their own langs. which explicitly adopt the norms and values of Sanskrit (and sometimes Persian-Arabic) poetics. Thus the paIJtJ.it-kavis, as the men who prepared the way for modern poetry without actually prac ticing it, produced works like Hindi and Marathi translations of Kalidasa, adaptations of tales from the Arabic Thousand and One Nights, modern ver sions of old Hindi and Marathi poems and tales, and original poems modeled closely on Sanskrit erotic poetry (Dharwadker 1 989, v. 2 ) . This mixed body of writing provided the ground in which Eng. and broadly European influences, both modern and cl., took root. The Western in fluences first became noticeable in the mid 19th c. when the paIJtJ.it-kavis gave way to the first two generations of writers educated in schools where Eng. was the medium of instruction and the valor ized lang. The work of the new Westernized poets of these two generations falls into two main cate gories: ( 1 ) I.-lang. translations of Eng., Am . , and some European poetry, such as the works of Shake speare, Milton, the romantics, Thomas Hood, Wil liam Cowper, Tennyson, and Longfellow; and (2) original poems in the I. langs. that involved con scious imitation of Eng. poetic genres from the Ren. onwards, in verseforms that used Sanskrit prosodic principles and meters but had rhyme schemes, stanzaic structures, and thematic ele ments drawn clearly from Western models and sources. In the long run, this layer of material interacted in complicated ways with the somewhat earlier work done by the paIJtJ.it-kavis, producing mixed prosodic, formal, and generic practices that have become commonplace in the I. langs. of the 20th c. (McGreggor 1974; Schomer) . The pivotal shiftfrom the middle to the modern period, accomplished in a surprisingly short time considering the number of langs. and cultures involved, thus brought together several lines of translation, adaptation, imitation, and original writing, as well as two very different types of poets and writers: native scholars trained in the "purely I." way (mainly in non-Western langs., inc!. Persian and Arabic), and "Westernized" natives with bilin gual training (mainly in Eng. and their native I . vernaculars) . The historical transformation was further shaped by the print media, which intro duced a factor of common access, esp. after ca. 1800, that was missing earlier. The transforma-
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INDIAN POETRY tion, however, was not uniform . In terms of time, the effects of modernization varied a great deal: distinctly modern 1 . p. appeared first in Eng. ( 1820s) and Bengali ( 1 840s) , and then in langs. like Marathi, Tamil, Panjabi, Gujarati, and Malay alam ( 1860s-90s), followed by langs. like Hindi, Urdu, and Oriya ( 1900s-20s ) (Dimock et a!. 1974; Srinivasa Iyengar; McGreggor 1974; Kopf; Schomer; Dimock 1 986; Nai k ) . The overall effect of colonization o n 1. p. was thus clearly multifaceted and far-reaching: the encounter with cultures of European origin drove 1. poets to experiment with varieties of poetry markedly different from anything the I. trads. themselves had invented so far; it went hand in hand with a renewed interest among I. poets in their own trads. of the ancient and middle periods, inc!. Islamic lit.; and it introduced yet another literary lang. into the 1. babel-Eng. These effects have continued from the early 19th c. down to the present, and the grafting of Western "influences" onto "native" sensibilities has resulted in a hybrid lit. that has broken away sharply from many of the patterns set up in I. p. over the preceding 3000 years. A dhunik kavya or urvacln kavya (modern poetry) swerves away in complicated ways from pra6n kavya (ancient or old poetry) , whether that of cl. Sanskrit or of the bhakti movement, and pushes the notion of kavya or kavita (poetry) across new frontiers. B. The Modern Poetic Genres. The shift away from the poetry and poetics of the middle period was signaled by a concerted change in poetic forms, themes, conventions, images, metrical frames, and structural principles, as well as by radical changes in the conception of who the poet ( kavi) is, what his or her functions are, and how his or her audience is constituted. Moreover, the new situation of the I. poet in the 1 9th and early 20th cs. evoked new attitudes, concerns, tones, and voices. Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and Tamil poets, for example, began experimenting with enjambed lines, imitations of Elizabethan blank verse, Eng. epic conventions, Miltonic simi les, greater romantic lyrics, and specific European and non-I. verseforms grafted onto Sanskrit-based prosody, as well as with themes of nationalism, cultural chauvinism, and social and religious change (some of the important early modern 1. poets were former Hindus who had recently con verted to Christianity ) . This complex shift led to writing which, when placed beside I . p. of the early periods, strikes a very clearly cosmopolitan, "mod ern" note. However, as already suggested above, the newness of 1 9th- and 20th-c. I. p., whether in the native langs. or in Eng., does not emerge simply out of a rejection of the I. past. Interestingly enough, the earliest modern po etry by writers of I. birth appeared in Eng. (in the 1 820s and '30s) , and not in one of the regional langs. The first I.-Eng. poet was Henry Derozio, whose sonnets and odes are virtually the earliest
documents of I. nationalism. The first modern poetry in the 1. langs. was written in Bengali (in the 1830s and '40s), and includes the work of bilingual poets like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who began as a writer in Eng. and then turned to his native Bengali by conscious decision at age 35 (Srinivasa Iyengar; Parthasarathy) . This is practi cally the earliest modern writing by non-Western writers in the world, preceding by several decades the corresponding instances in Japanese and Chi nese and in the African langs. Modern I. p. in Eng. and Bengali soon gave way to a flood of similar poetry across the entire subcontinent, with self consciously modern poetry appearing in Panjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, and in the Braj Bhasha, a dialect of Hindi, from 1 850 to 1 900, and in Khadi Boli (modern standard Hindi) , Urdu, Oriya, Dogri, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Telugu, and Kannada from 1900 to 1 930. This literary expan sion coincided with a number of historically and politically crucial events: the "I. Mutiny" of 1 857, the subsequent dismantling ofthe East India Com pany, the formal absorption of India into Queen Victoria's Empire in 1877, the formation of the I. National Congress in 1 885, and the launching of the I. freedom movement under Mahatma Gandhi's leadership at the end of World War 1. The specific poetic genres that have emerged from these developments in the colonial and post colonial decades are worth mentioning in some detail because they demonstrate the distance modern I. p. has covered since the end of the middle period. Among the more notable modern genres are: the long philosophical or speculative poem, often epic in size and scope, which attempts to formulate a new poetic worldview (e.g. Auro bindo Ghose's Savitri in Eng., G. M. Muktibodh's Andhere men in Hindi) ; the nationalist or chauvin ist epic, quite frequently cast as a retelling of an ancient Hindu myth or story, often from the Ramaya'IJa or the Mahabharata (e.g. Michael Mad husudan Dutt's Meghanad-vadh in Bengali, Jaishankar Prasad's Kamayani in Hindi) ; the long sequence of short poems, whether religious, philo sophical, satiric, or personal in theme, modeled on the Western poetic sequence as well as on premod ern I. sequences (e.g. Rabindranath Tagore's Gitan jali in Bengali, Subramania Bharati's "prose poems" in Tamil, Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri and R. Partha sarathy's Rough Passage in Eng. ) ; the short metrical lyric in modern rhymed stanza form, sometimes set to music, as well as the modernized lyric based on premodern 1. and foreign verseforms (e.g. Tagore's songs in Bengali, Mahadevi Varma's in Hindi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz's ghazals and nazms in Urdu, B. S. Mardhekar's and Vinda Karandikar's abhangas in Marathi, numerous haikus in Kan nada, Buddhadev Bose's sonnets and Bishnu De's imitations of folksongs in Bengali) ; and the "free verse" poem, varying in length from a few lines to several hundred and ranging in theme from auto biographical and confessional to mythological, po-
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INDIAN POETRY litical, and historical (e.g. the later love poems of P. S. Rege in Marathi; the political poems of Dhoomil, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, and Raghuvir Sahay in Hindi; the landscape poems of Keki N . Daruwalla and the surreal poems of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in Eng.; the poetry of bilingual poets like A. K. Ramanujan in Eng. and Kannada and Arun Kolatkar in Eng. and Marathi; protest poetry, Dalit poetry, and contemp. feminist and women's poetry in a number of langs. ) . Among these, the genre of free verse poetry is esp. crucial to the changes in I. p. in all the major langs. in the late-colonial and the postcolonial periods. Modern I. poets "invented" free verse in the I . langs. in the second and third quarters of the 20th c., following the examples of the Anglo-Am. imagists and high modernists. But the freedom of free verse has meant different things in different langs.-for instance, in Bengali, freedom from the overwhelming presence of Tagore's modernity; in Urdu, freedom from the domination of the ghazal form in lyric poetry; in Hindi, freedom from the cloying lyricism of the early 20th-c. adars avad and chayavad poets; in Marathi, freedom from the sen timental songs of the early moderns; in Kannada and Malayalam, freedom from the rhetorical pub lic poetry of the national freedom movement. Since the 1960s, a very high proportion of the poetry written in the various langs.-incl. Telugu, Oriya, Dogri, Sindhi, Panjabi, and Gujarati, be sides those mentioned in the examples above has appeared in free verse. Much of this poetry reveals the influence of international poetic move ments that originated in Europe or the West in the 19th and 20th cs. , incl. symbolism, modernism, futurism, expressionism, dada, Beat poetry, and even concrete poetry (qq.v.) and Zen writing. Among the important Western poets of the past 200 years that I. poets working primarily in free verse (and Western forms) allude to are: Whitman, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery, Apolli naire, Cesare Pavese, Vasko Popa, hans magnus enzensberger, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Aime Cesaire, Allen Ginsberg, and the Soviet so cialist poets. As with other trads. in the world, the domination of free verse in modern I. p. since the 1940s has generally involved a major shift in poetic sensibility, from the "musical phrase" to the "col loquial phrase" as the basis of composition. It is also noteworthy that early in the modern period (ca. 1 775- 1850 ) , the colonial reconstitu tion of India led to the creation of specific genres of discourse which involved both colonizers and their colonial subjects in mutual tension, and al tered the immediate and the future generic shapes and literary environments of I. lit. One of the striking facts about the colonial modern ization in the I. case (as also in many Mrican cases) is that a very large amount of modern I. p. is social rather than personal or confessional. For the mod ern I. kavi or poet, who is a very different person from the bhakti poet or the ancient I. poet de-
scribed above, social poetry is so important be cause it exercizes his or her citizenship in the modern world. As a loosely integrated body of writing appearing in all the I . literary langs., mod ern I. social p. branches out into several genres, two of which are of particular significance. The first is antinationalistic or "satiric poetry," ridicul ing specific aspects of I. society, history, culture, and lit., past and present. The second is national istic or "heroic poetry," attempting to counter the satirists by praising things Indian, concentrating on the achievements of ancient I. culture and lit. as well as on future possibilities. Satiric discourse has generated a large body of poetry in the 1 9th and 20th cs. criticizing particular I. beliefs, cus toms, and institutions such as caste, brahmanical ritual, female infanticide, widow-immolation, child-marriage, and untouchability. In contrast, the conventions of heroic discourse have enabled I. poets to retell stories from the Sanskrit and mother-tongue classics, to create new nationalistic epics, and to write about freedom from colonial rule (Dharwadker 1 989, v. 2 ) . Broadly speaking, i n the last 1 50 years I . p . has undergone cyclical interchanges between these two modes of writing. Between ca. 1 825 and 1900, I. poets largely practiced a mixture of satiric and heroic discourse; thus Derozio in Eng., K. K. Damle in Marathi, Bharatendu Harishchandra in Hindi, and Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali, for instance, attacked certain features of l . society for being backward, exploitative, and inhuman, and at the same time also patriotically praised I . cul ture and values. From ca. 1 900 to 1 940, I. poets practiced the heroic mode, in keeping with the massive nationalist movement, esp. under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. In this phase, poets like Maithili Sharan Gupta and Mahadevi Verma in Hindi, Subramaniam Bharatl in Tamil, Tagore in Bengali, U ma ShankarJoshi in Gujarati, G. Shankara Kurup in Malayalam, Bendre and Putappa in Kannada, and Muhammad Iqbal in Urdu turned explicitly to nationalistic and cultur ally chauvinistic themes, praising and revalorizing the content of native I. trad. and helping to trans form India into "Mother India," Bengal into "Our Golden Bengal," and so on (Daedalus; Schomer; Dimock et al. 1974 ) . By about 1940, however, disillusionment with the freedom movement and its politics led to a new surge of satiric and antinationalistic poetry. With Suryakant Tripathi and G. M. Muktibodh in Hindi, B. S. Mardhekar in Marathi, and the later work of Jibananada Das in Bengali, I . poets began once again to ridicule and attack the state of contemp. India and the hist. of I. cultural institutions. This satiric phase continued into the poetic preoccupa tions of the early postcolonial period (beginning with freedom from British rule in 1947) , in which I. poets quite concertedly attacked the negative features of the I. past and present. Between the 1 960s and '80s, social poetry in most of the langs.
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INDIAN POETRY has arrived at yet another mixture of the satiric and heroic modes, now based on new regional, communal, ideological, and national concerns ( Rubin;Jussawalla; Daruwalla; Dharwadker 1 990; Dimock 1 986 ) . The contemp. variations are most apparent in several specific phenomena: the long-term suc cess of the Progressive (left-wing) movement in langs. like Urdu (in present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as in India) , Hindi, Marathi, and Bengali (in both India and Bangladesh ) ; "pro test" movements like those involving the Hungry Generation poets in Bengali, the pratirodhl kavis ("oppositional poets") and akavis ("anti-poets" in Hindi, the Dalit poets in Marathi, the "naked poetry" writers in Telugu, and protest poets in Tamil and Malayalam; a strong upsurge of women poets in Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, and Kannada; and the national prominence achieved by the poets of the 1 960s and '70s in Oriya and Kannada. They are also evident in the reputations particular "modernist" poets have ac quired in the various 1. langs., e.g. Muktibodh, Dhoomil, Agyeya, Sahay, Saxena, Kedarnath Singh, and Shrikant Verma in postcolonial Hindi; Das, Bose, De, Nirendranath Chakrabarti, Sunil Gangopadhyay, and Subhas Mukhopadhyay in Bengali; Rege, Mardhekar, Karandikar, Kolatkar, Indira Sant, Mangesh Padgaonkar, Namdev Dhasal, Narayan Surve, and Dilip Chitre in Marathi; Chan drashekhar Kambar, Gopalkrishna Adiga, and K. S. Narasimhaswami in Kannada; N. Picamurti, Shanmuga Subbiah, and Gnanakoothan in Tamil; and Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, Daruwalla, AdilJussawalla, Mehrotra, Parthasarathy, Gieve Patel, Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Chitre, and Kolatkar in Eng. Although this list of poets and langs. (and most of the fore going discussion) is limited to contemp. India, corresponding claims can be made for poets in Pakistan writing in Urdu, Panjabi, Sindhi, and other langs., as well as for poets in Bangladesh working in the Bengali and Urdu trads. In the course of these fluctuations, the tensions between modernity and trad., Indianness and Westernization, have played a shaping role. Like many oftheir 1 9th-c. counterparts, 20th-c. 1. poets reject certain aspects of their own past, but at the same time make use of it, achieving a modernity in which Westernization and I ndianness stand in a constant and constantly productive conflict. As a result, modern 1. writers, critics, and common readers now refer to all the varieties of poetry surveyed in this article as kavya or kavita, although they sometimes reserve the former word for the high canonical poetry of the ancient and middle periods (or, more rigorously, for only cl. Sanskrit poetry) and the latter term for the verse of the past 200 years. In its broadest 20th-c. usage, kavya thus embraces a vast quantity of writing in about 20 major langs. produced over about 3000 years. As our survey indicates, the word is now capable of
signifYing trads. as different as those of the Valmiki RamayarJa and d. Tamil akam and puram poetry, bhakti lyrics and religious epics in the middle period, Telugu "Vedas" and Bengali "mangalak abyas," Urdu or Marathi sonnets and condensed allegories in Hindi free verse, ancient Hindu Bud dhist works, as well as contemp. Marxist poetry and protest poetry by former untouchables. See also INDIAN POETICS; INDIAN PROSODY. GENERAL: A. B. Keith, A Hist. of Sanskrit Lit. ( 1 928 ) ; H. H. Gowen, A Hist. of I. Lit. ( 1931 ) ; S. N. Dasgupta and S. K. De, A Hist. ofI. Lit. ( 1 947) ; M. Winternitz, A Hist. of I. Lit., 3d ed. ( 1 962) original Ger. , 3 v., 1908-22; A. K. Warder, I. Kavya Lit. ( 1 972) ; A Hist. of I. Lit., ed. J. Gonda, 1( 1 973)-uneven but indispensible multivolume reference in progress, all iangs., genres, and peri ods; E. C. Dimock et aI., The Lits. ofIndia ( 1 974) excellent intro.; C. Seely et aI., "South Asian Peo ples, Arts of," Encyc. Britannica (1974)-useful overview; E. Gerow, I. Poetics ( 1977) ; C. P. Masica, The Indo-Aryan Langs. ( 1989 ) ; Columbia Book of I. P, ed. B. S. Miller et al. (forthcoming)-trs. from 1 5 langs. SERIALS: Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Re search Institute [ABOR!] ( 1 9 1 9-) ; Bahuvachan ( 1 988-) ; Harvard Oriental Series ( 1883-) ; Illus trated Weekly of India ( 1 929-) ; I. Horizons [ IndH] ( 1 952-) ; I. Lit. [lndL] ( 1957-) ;Jour. ofAsian Stud ies UASt] ( 1941-) ; Jour. of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies ( 1977-) ; Jour. of South Asian Lit. USoAL] ( 1963-) ; Jour. of the Am. Oriental Society UOAS] ( 1 843-) ; Mod. Asian Studies ( 1 967-) ; Quest ( 1950-) ; South Asian Digest of Regional Writing ( 1 972-) ; Vagartha ( 1974-79) ; Chandrabhaga ( 1979) ; Indian PE.N. ( 1 934-) ; 1iYronto South Asia Review ( 1 987-) . ANCIENT PERIOD: A. A. MacDonnell, A Hist. of Sanskrit Lit. ( 1 900)-useful for Vedic lit.; E. W. Hopkins, The Great Epic ofIndia ( 1 90 1 ) ; The Rama yana and the Mahabharata, tr. R. C. Dutt ( 1 9 10) ; The Bhagavad Gita, tr. F. Edgerton ( 1944) ; S. N. Dasgupta and S. K. De, A Hist. of Sanskrit Lit., Cl. Period, 2d ed. ( 1 962)-full inventory of the lit.; The Shilappadikaram, tr. A Danielou ( 1 965) ; An Anthol. of Sanskrit Court Poetry, tr. D. H. H. I ngalls ( 1 965 )-from Vidyakara's kos a, extremely influ ential; C. V. Narashimhan, The Mahabharata ( 1 965 ) -handy abridgment; B. S. Miller, Bhartri hari ( 1 967) , Phantasies of a Love-Thief ( 1 97 1 )-on Bilhana, Love Song of the Dark Lord, Jayadeva S Gitagovinda ( 1977 ) , The Hermit and the Love Thief ( 1 978) ; A. K. Ramanujan, The Interior Landscape ( 1967)-important text, tr., commentary; The Mahabharata, tr. J. A. B. van Buitenen, 3 v. ( 1 97380)-unfinished but indispensible; W. Buck, The RamayarJa ( 1 974) -unreliable yet useful retelling; L. Sternbach, Subhas ita, Gnomic and Didactic Lit. ( 1 974) ; The Cloud-Messenger, tr. L. Nathan ( 1 974)-Kalidasa; J. Gonda, Vedic Lit. ( 1 975) ; G. L. Hart, The Poems ofAncient Tamil ( 1 975 ) , Poets of the Tamil Anthols. ( 1 979) ; R. Panikkar, The Vedic
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INDIAN PROSODY Experience ( 1 977) ; B. A. van Nooten, "The Sanskrit Epics," Heroic Epic and Saga, ed. F.J. Oinas ( 1 978) ; W. D. o 'Flaherty, The Rig Veda ( 1 98 1 ) ; S. Lien hard, A Hist. of Cl. Poetry ( 1 984)-Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit; Thl! Ramaya1,la of Vlilmiki, tr. R. Goldman et at. ( 1 9R4-)-cssent.ial, in progress; TIU' Rha gavad-GIla, tr. B. S. Miller ( 1 986 )-major new tr.; Po('!ms of Love and War, tr. A. K. Ramanujan ( 1 986)-excellent, indispensiblc; The Forest Book of the Ramayana of Kampan, tr. G. L. Hart and H. Heifetz ( 1 988) -Tamil; Ma1,limekhalai, tr. A. Danieloll ( Hl89 ) . MIDDU: PERIOD: R . D. Ranade, Mysticism i n in dia ( 1 933 ) ; S. Sen, A Hist. of Bengali Lit. ( 1 960) ; M . Mansinha, Hut. ofOriya Lit. ( 1 962) ; Love Songs of Vidyapati, ed. W. G. Archer ( 1963 ) ; In Praise of Krishna, tr. E. D . Dimock and D. Levertov ( 1 967) ; K. M . Munshi, Gujarat and its Lit. from t'arly Times to 1 852, 3d ed. ( 1967 ) ; K. M. George, A Survey of Malayalam Lit. ( 1968) ; R. Russell and K. Islam, Three Mughal Poets ( 1 968) ; J. Rypka, Hist. of Ira nian Lit. ( 1 968)-section on "Persian Lit. in In dia"; G. V. Sitapati, Hist. of Telugu Lit. (1968 ) ; L. H. Ajwani, Hist. of Sindhi Lit. ( 1 970) ; Ghazals of Ghalib, ed. A. Ahmad (1971 ) ; Ghalib, ed. R. Russell ( 1972 ) ; The Golden Trad., tr. A. Ali ( 1 973)-Urdu; A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of S iva ( 1 973)-Kan nada, excellent; C. Vaudeville, Kablr, v. 1 ( 1 974) ; K. Zvelebil, Tamil Lit. ( 1974 ) ; S. Sarma, Assamese Lit. ( 1 976) ; E. Zelliot, "The Medieval Bhakti Movement in Hist.," in Hinduism, ed. B. L. Smith ( 1 976)-essential bib!.; K. E. Bryant, Poem, to the Child-God ( 1 978) ; S. G. Tulpule, Cl. Marathi Lit. from the Beginning to 1818 ( 1979 ) ; B. B. Kachru, Kashmiri Lit. ( 1 981 ) ; Hymns for the Drowning, tr. A. K. Ramanujan ( 1981 ) ; A. Kolatkar, "Translations from Tukaram and Other Saint-Poets," JSoAL 1 7 ( 1 982) ; G. H . Roghair, The Epic of Palna¢u ( 1 982)-Telugu oral epic; The Hijak of Kabzr, tr. L. Hess and S. Singh ( 1983) ; J. S. Hawley, Sur Das ( 1 984) ; R. S. McGreggor, Hindi Lit. from its Begin nings to the 1 9th G. ( 1984 ) ; M. Sadiq, A Hist. of Urdu Lit., 2d ed. ( 1 984) ; N. Cutler, Songs of Experience ( 1 985) ; For the Lord of the Animals-Poems from the Telugu, tr. H. Heifetz and V. Narayana Rao ( 1 98 7 ) ; Songs of the Saints of India, ed. and tr. J. S. Hawley and M. Juergensmeyer ( 1988 ) ; Poems to Siva, tr. I. V. Peterson ( 1 989)-Tamil; Oral Epics in India, ed. S. H. Blackburn et a!. ( 1 989) . MODERN PERIOD: Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore ( 1 956) ; Green and Gold, ed. H. Kabir ( 1958)-Bengali; A Tagore Reader, ed. A. Chakravarty ( 1 961 ) ; Mod. Hindi Poetry, ed. V. N. Misra ( 1 965) ; An Anthol. of Marathi Poetry, 1 94565, ed. D. Chitre ( 1967 ) ; D. McCutchion, I. Writing in Eng. ( 1 969) ; Poem< by Faiz, tr. V. G. Kiernan ( 1 97 1 )-Urdu; Contemp. l. P. in Eng., ed. S. Peera dina ( 1972 ) ; K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, I. Writing in Eng., 2d ed. ( 1 97 3 ) ; New Writing in India, ed. A. Jussawalla ( 1974 ) ; R. S. McGreggor, Hindi Lit. in the 1 9th and Early 20th Cs. ( 1 974) ; I Have Seen Bengal's Face, ed. S. Ray and M. Maddern ( 1 974) ;
Ten 20th-G. I. Poets, ed. R. Parthasarathy ( 1 976) ; A Season on the Earth, tr. D. Rubin ( 1976)-Hindi; Considerations, ed. M. Mukherjee ( 1 977) ; D. Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Mod. I. Mind ( 1 979) ; Two Decades of I. P., 1 960-1 980, ed. K. N. Daruwalla ( 1 9RO) ; Contemfl. l. Eng. Vilrse, eel. C. Kulshreshtha ( 1980) ; India: An Anthol. of Con temp. Writing, ed. D. Ray and A. Singh ( 1 983 ) ; K. Schomer, Mahade,li Vi!rma and the Chhayavad Age of Mod. Hindi Poetry ( 1 983) ; R. Tagore, Selected Poems, tr. W. Radice ( 1985 ) ; E. C. Dimock, The Sound of Silent Guns ( 1 986) ; B. King, Mod. l. I� in Eng. ( 1 987) , ed., Three 1. Poets ( 1 991 ) ; M. K. Naik, Studies in I. Eng. Lit. ( 1987 ) ; The True Subject, tr. N. Lazard ( 1988)-Faiz; "India," Nimrod 3 1 ( 1 988 ) ; Contemp. I. Trad., ed. C . M . Borden ( 1 989 ) ; V. Dharwadker, "The Future of the Past," 3 v., diss., Univ. of Chicago ( 1 989) ; "Another India," Daeda lus 1 1 8 ( 1 989) ; "29 Mod. I. Poems," tr. V. Dhar wadker, TriQ 77 ( 1 990) ; Another India, ed. M. Mukherjee and N. Ezekiel ( 1 990) ; 100 Mod. I. Poems, ed. V. Dharwadker and A. K. Ramanujan (forthcoming)- 1 4 Iangs. V.D. ; B.S.M.; A.K.R.; E.A.H. INDIAN PROSODY. I. THE CLASSICAL LANGUAGES: SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND TAMIL II. THE MODERN VERNACULARS I. THE CLASSICAL LANGUAGES: SANSKRIT, PRAK RIT, AND TAMIL. I. metrics is one of the world's most complex prosodic trads. Though perhaps best treated historically, it must in an article such as this be surveyed formally. I. meters fall into three main types: (a) those that fix the quantity of each syllable ( var1,lavrtta) , (b) those that fix the total quantity of each line ( matravrtta) , and (c) those that appear to mix the two types (Sloka) . Like the metries of Gr. and Lat., I. is based on a prosodic distinction between heavy and light sylla bles. A heavy syllable contains a long vowel, or a short vowel followed by two or more consonants. A light syllable contains a short vowel followed by at most one consonant. The distinction of vowel quantity is inherent in the phonology of Sanskrit and the other I. langs. A. Fixed-syllable meters. The elegant meters of cl. Sanskrit poetry are of this type. The general formula calls for four usually identical feet (pada) , which in practice may vary from 8 to 21 or more syllables each. Mandakranta (the meter of Kili dasa's Meghadhuta) may be taken as an example. Each of its four 1 7-syllable feet realizes the follow ing pattern: G G G G L L L L L G I G L G G L G x (G guru, or heavy syllable; L laghu, or light syllable; x a syllable of variable quantity; "I" marks the yati, or caesura ) . Less common meters may vary identical first and third feet with identi cal second and fourth feet, or may have four dif ferent feet, but the principle remains the same: the quantity of each syllable is predictable and the
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INDIAN PROSODY sequence or pattern is fixed. In recitation, a chant ing intonation is usually employed, modeled on the quantitative sequence of the line. Though some common recitative patterns are noticeable, each reciter may also cultivate a personal style. The names of the meters generally scan in the meter and often suggest appropriate associations: "mandakranta," " (a lady) slowly approaching." B. Fixed-line or marie meters. Here the quantity of the total line is fixed by considering a laghu worth one "measure" ( miitrii; cf. Lat. mora) and a guru two. Free variation of syllables within the line is however restricted by several conventions, which demonstrate the influence of a regular beat-indi cating that these meters were probably sung. It is forbidden, for instance, that the beat fall on the second half of a guru syllable. If we assume one beat every four miitriis (three, five, and six are also possible) , this convention will in effect articulate the line into groups (gatta) of four matras each, which have only the shapes G G, G L L, L G L, L L G, or L L L L, each signaled by an initial beat. The iiryii, which probably originated in popular, non-Sanskritic milieux and remained the meter of choice for d. Prakrit poetry, may serve as a typical example: it is composed of two lines, the first of which must contain 30 miitrii, the second 27. The simple tetramoric pattern (above) is however complicated (and syncopated) by adding to seven of these gattas an eighth of two miitriis (for a total, in the first line, of 30), and, further, in the second line, by reducing the sixth gar].a to a single laghu (i.e. 27) . Convention also restricts the kinds of gattas that do in fact occur in given loci in the verse; for example, in the iiryii, L G L is possible only for the second and fourth gattas. The meters of the songs of the Gitagovinda ( 1 3th c . ) and those employed in middle Indic devotional poetry and in the modern north I. langs. are generally of the moric type, which is subject to extreme variation. Beginning with the Gitagovinda, end-rhyme is fre quently associated with moric meter, and later vernacular poetry is regularly rhymed. Allitera tion, though not unknown in earlier poetry, also becomes an increasingly prominent feature of moric verse. As may be surmised, the correlation of moric meter with song is in the modern period even more marked. The meters of the Dravidian langs. of the south (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam) are based on a somewhat more complicated scansion (in certain circumstances treating as light even a syl lable containing a long vowel ) , but during the long course of coexistence and mutual contact, there has been a give and take of both theory and prac tice with the Sanskritic north. The oldest Dravi dian (viz., Tamil) meters greatly resemble the moric meters of the Prakrits, employ alliteration with great effect, and are definitely rhythmical (cf. again the Gltagovinda) . On the other hand, they often feature initial rhyme, based on the first interior consonant of the line-virtually unknown
i n the north. Lines most commonly consist of four feet ( dr) comprising two or three syllables ( acai) . The earliest treatise on pros. in the Dravidian langs. is the Ceyyuiiyal chapter of the Tamil Tolkiippiyam (3d c. B.C.? ) . The classical meters prevailed up to the end of the first millennium A.D., when folk meters were popularized by devo tional poets. C. Sloka. The most common Sanskrit meter is partly fixed, partly free. Sloka (viz. , "praise" doubtless referring to a usual context of Sanskrit poetry) is both a type and a species, deriving in its special epic and later form (after 500 B.C.) from the meters found in the oldest extant Indic text, the I!gveda (ca. 1 500-1 000 B.C . ) . The d. Sloka is like type (a) in that it is composed of 4 feet, each of which must have 8 syllables; but it is like (b) in that its line appears to fall into two 4-syllable halves, the first of which is quantitatively quite free (though x L L x does not normally occur) , the second of which is obligatorily L G G x in odd feet and in even feet L G L x. A "trochaic" cadence thus alternates with an "iambic." Many variations on this pattern are however found. The older Vedic meters ( chandas) are composed generally of feet with 8, I I , or 12 syllables. Of the 8-syllable meters, some have three feet (giiyatrl) , some four ( anu �tubh) . This latter is evidently the ancestor of the d. sloka, but it lacks, along with the other Vedic meters, the contrast between even and odd feet. Its usual shape is x G x G / L G L x. The I I-syllable meters ( tri�tubh) generally have the same attack and the same cadence, but add a middle sequence of L L G ( f ) . The jagat"l adds a syllable to the tri�tubh but is otherwise like it. Like the anu�tubh, the tri�tubh and jagat! have descendants in the d. metrics-the family of I I-syllable meters called upajiiti, and I 2-syllable meters such as the popular vmhsastha and drutavilambita. The style of Sloka recitation is more or less uniform over all ofIndia, testifying to its antiquity. The Vedic meters have been deformed by the superimposition of later prosodic features, such as the obligatory sandhi (linguistic junctures) of the d. lang., and are only dimly perceivable in the (otherwise) beautiful ritual chanting of the Vedic priest, itself the likely precursor of d. I. music. The sloka is not "poetic" in the usual Western sense, however. Though it is metrical, it is func tionally the equivalent of our "prose," in that it is the mode of choice for an entire range of literate composition, from epic ( Mahiibhiirata, Riimiiyatta) and fable (Kathiisaritsiigara) to grammar ( Vakya padlya) and astronomy ( Siiryasiddhiinta) -doubt less reflecting the importance of memorization in I. religious and cultural trad. The study of prosody is very old in India, being counted as one of the six "ancillaries of the Veda" ( vediinga) . A siitra attributed to Pingala, portions of which may be as old as 600 B.C. (the rest as late as 500 A.D. ) , describes about 1 60 meters, but surprisingly not the s loka that we know. In the late
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INDIAN PROSODY cl. period (after A.D. 900 ) , an elaborate technical lit. ( chandal;sastra) grew up, based on Piitgala, wherein were defined the various meters in actual use and, with mathematical completeness, many meters merely possible. Associations with moods, time of day, and colors were sometimes also made, testifYing to an effort to integrate metrics into the larger domain of aesthetics. See also INDO-EURO PEAN PROSODY; CLASSICAL PROSODY; GREEK PO ETRY; INDIAN POETICS. E.G. II. THE MODERN VERNACULARS. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods the end stopped rhyming couplet is the preferred medium of expression for poets in the New Indo-Aryan langs. (Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya ) . As in Cl. Sanskrit, lines are usually divided by caesurae into two, three, or four feet (pada or caratz) . The most popular verseform for the vast number of devotional lyrics produced in this period is the pad, a stanza of from 4 to 8 lines (but often extended to several more ) , all having the same metric structure and frequently the same rhyme. Often the lyric begins with a shorter line which in performance serves as a refrain. Alliteration is prevalent throughout the medieval period; among the poets of Rajasthan it becomes obligatory. On the whole, Hindi poets favored moric me ters, esp. those with a tetramoric pattern. It ap pears that the poets normally had a specific rhyth mic cycle ( tala) in mind when they chose the meter. Often this was a cycle of 16 beats divided into 4 equal sections, the common time of I. music. The ma,jority of lyrics have 16 morae in the first foot of each line and from 10 to 16 in the second. The doha is a rhyming couplet commonly used for aphorisms as well as for longer narrative and didactic poetry. The first foot of each line has 1 3 morae and the second 1 1 . I n the case of Kabir and other Sant poets it is called sakhl, and in the A digranth of the Sikhs it is termed salok (from Sanskrit s loka, of which it was the vernacular equivalent) . The basic unit of the narrative poems composed in the Avadhi dialect of Hindi ( notably the Sufi romances and the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas) was a stanza offrom 5 to 8 distichs in the 1 6-moric caupaz meter followed by a doha. Hindi poets also used syllabic meters, the most common being two types of quatrains called savaiya and ghanak�ar'i. The former has lines of 22-26 syllables with a trisyllabic rhythm and a medial caesura; the ghanak�ar! line has three feet of 8 syllables and a fourth of 7 or 8. The tetrasyl labic rhythm of the latter prevailed in other ver naculars which used mainly syllabic meters. The most common meter in Eastern India (Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya) was the payar, a rhyming couplet used for both lyric and narrative poetry. Here, each line has 14 syllables divided 8 + 6 but subdivisible into a 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 structure. Another popular couplet form was the tripad!, of which each line has two feet of equal length, often with
end rhyme, followed by a third that is slightly longer, e.g. 6 + 6 + 8 or 8 + 8 + 1 0. Similar to the payarare the abhmiga and the ovI, the most popular forms used by Marathi poets. The shorter type of abhmiga is composed of rhym ing octosyllabic sections; the longer abhanga has lines of four feet (6 + 6 + 6 + 4 syllables) with the second and third rhyming. The ovl is considered a folk-meter from which the abhanga derived. Its first three feet are of equal length and have end rhyme, while the fourth is slightly shorter and rhymeless. These are the most common types of meter. The theorists describe many more, of which several are adaptations of Sanskrit meters or permutations of the basic vernacular ones, but the more recondite meters are usually confined to the work of scholas tic court poets. Poetry in Urdu stayed within the Perso-Arabic trad., using principally the ghazal and mainavi (qq.v.) forms. Medieval and modern Tamil poets retained their purely indigenous meters; those who composed in the other Dravidian langs. (Kannada, Telugu, Ma layalam) more readily assimilated the meters and vocabulary of Sanskrit. Kannada and Telugu po etry, of which the earliest examples emerged about a thousand years ago, used meters derived from Sanskrit as well as Dravidian meters that are found earlier in Tamil, adapting some of them to the Sanskrit method of scansion. Though Telugu poets were stricter in observing metrical rules, they modified the Sanskrit meters more than their Kannada counterparts and also accepted enjamb ment. Many of the meters used in Malayalam bear Sanskrit names but are freer than Sanskrit in their syllabic structure. A form of prose poetry in Kannada is found in the short vacana ("utterances") of Basaval)l)a ( 1 2th c.) and subsequent Virasaiva poets of Kar nataka. Comparable, though more regular, are the vakh of the Kashmiri female saint Lalla (or Lal Ded; early 14th c . ) : these are quatrains ofapproxi mately seven syllables and four stresses in each line with occasional rhyme. In the 19th c., familiarity with Eng. poetry encouraged Bengali poets, and later those writing in other langs., to experiment with blank verse and enjambment. Rabindranath Tagore, besides writing blank and free verse, also maintained the moric trad. but simplified the rules for measuring quantity by giving all open syllables the value of one mora and all closed syllables two. A.W.E. E. W. Hopkins, The Great Epic of India ( 1 90 1 ) , esp. ch. 4 ; E. V. Arnold, Vedic Metre ( 1 905)-still the standard authority; A. B. Keith, A Hist. of Sanskrit Lit. ( 1920 ) , esp. ch. 20, sect. 3-4; H . Weller, "Beitrage zur Metrik der Veda," Zeitschrift fur Indologie und Iranistik 12 ( 1 92 2 ) , "Metrica," Beitriige zur indischen Philologie und Altertumskunde ( 1 95 1 ) ; J. Hermann, O ber die alteste indischer Metriker und ihr Werk," IndLing 3 ( 1933) ; H. D . Velankar, "Apabhramsa Metres," Jour. of the Univ.
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INDO-EUROPEAN PROSODY of Bombay (Arts) ( 1 933) , 32-62, ( 1 936) , 41-93, "Prosodical Practices of Sanskrit Poets," Jour. of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society n.S. 24-25 ( 1 948-49) , ed., "Chandai:lkoSa," Jour. of the Univ. of Bombay (Arts) ( 1 933)-repub. as App. 2 to his Kavidarpa�a ( 1960 ) ; A. C. Chettair, Advanced Studies in Tamil Poetry ( 1 943) ; H. N. Randle, "San skrit and Gr. Metres," Jour. of Oriental Research 1 7 ( 1 947 ) ; V. Raghavan, "Sanskrit a nd Prakrit Me tres," Jour. of the Madras Univ. 23 ( 1 952-53) ; L. Renou, L'Inde Classique, v. 2 ( 1953 ) , App. 2, and "Sur la Structure du Kavya, " JAsiat 247 ( 1959 ) ; M. Sinha, The Historical Devel. of Med. Hindi Pros. ( 1 964) ; A. K. Warder, Pali Metre ( 1967 ) ; A. D. Mukherji, "Lyric Metres inJayadeva's Gitagovinda," Jour. of the Asiatic Society of Bengal ( 1967, pub. 1 969 ) ; H.Jacobi, Kleine Schriften ( 1970)-his coli. essays; P. Kiparsky, "Metrics and Morpho phonemics in the Rigveda," Contribs. to Generative Phonology, ed. M. K. Brame (1972 ) ; D. Matthews and C. Shackle, "Note on Prosody and Metre," An Anth. of Cl. Urdu Love Lyrics ( 1 972 ) ; I. Lit., ed. A. Poddar ( 1 972) ; N. Sen, Early Eastern New Indo-Ar yan VersiJ ( 1 973) ; W. S. Allen, Accent and Rhythm ( 1 973) ; G. Nagy, Comparative Studies in Gr. and Indic Metre ( 1974) ; S. Pollock, Aspects of Versifica tion in Sanskrit Lyric Poetry ( 1977) ; S. Subrahman yan, The Commonness in the Metre of the Dravidian Langs. (1977 ) ; J. F. Vigorita, "The Trochaic Gayatri," ZVS 93 ( 1 979) ; c. E. Fairbanks, "The Devel. of Hindi Oral Narrative Meter," DAI 42 ( 1 982) , 4452A; S. Lienhard, A Hist. of Cl. Poetry: Sanskrit-Pali-Prakrit, v. 3 of A Hist. of I. Lit., ed. J. Gonda ( 1 984) ; E. Gerow, 'jayadeva's Poetics and the Cl. Style," Essays in Honor ofErnest Bender, spec. E.G.; A.W.E. iss. ofJAOS 1 09 ( 1 989) . INDO-EUROPEAN PROSODY. Like the IE lang. itself (the common ancestor of most of the langs. of Europe and ofIndia, dating to ca. 4000 B.C . ) , IE pros. is lost and must be reconstructed. Since the work of Meillet in 1 923, conclusions have been based on analyses of Sanskrit and Gr. verse, with subsequent attention to Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic, using the comparative method. Recent re search on the phonological pattern of IE has, however, resulted in changes in our views of the conservatism of Sanskrit and Gr. in the IE family; the pros. proposed by Meillet may then require revision. In the meantime, his conclusions, built on those of earlier scholars, notably Wilamowitz, represent our best hypotheses about the prosodic pattern ofIE verse. IE verse is assumed to have consisted of short lays, songs of praise to gods and men, charms, and other small pieces; epic verse like the Homeric is considered a subsequent form taken from Medi terranean genres. Initial impetus for the assump tion of IE verse came from Kuhn's comparison of a number of Atharvavedic and Germanic charms ofstriking similarity. Typically these portray a situ ation, such as riders on horses one of which suffers
a broken or sprained leg, then apply an incanta tion ( itself surviving into recent use) such as "bone to bone, sinew to sinew, blood to blood, flesh to flesh." While some doubts have been expressed on typological grounds about Kuhn's postulation of an IE charm of this type, the common charac teristics are sufficiently comparable and complex to justify the assumption of historical continuity. Other grounds for assuming continuity of poetic trad. are found in diction. Thieme has examined passages in the Rigveda and other early verse for their use of poetic terminology such as derivatives of the Sanskrit root vat (its simplest sense, "blow," was extended to "inspire"; derivatives refer to "poet" [Lat. vates, Old Irish faith, Old Slavic vetija] , to the name of the Germanic god of poetry [ Wotan] , and to other Indic, Iranian, and Gr. terms concerned with poetry ) . Like other poetic terms, forms of this root bear the record of a trad. of poets maintained, much as were later poets at Ger manic, Celtic, and Indic royal courts, to remind their rulers of past glory and to preserve their own deeds of valor in memory. Phrases provide a third basis for positing IE verse. The most widely cited such phrase consists of adjective + noun, a sequence found in many Vedic and Homeric formulae. The oldest exam ple, appearing three times in the Rigveda, is aksiti s ravas, lexically equivalent to Gr. aphthiton kleos; though cited in a late form, the phrase is demon strably archaic. IE poetry as oral verse (see ORAL POETRY ) has also been assumed to contain fomlU lae such as those made up of the words for "sa cred" in Vedic and early Gr. But application of proposed formulae to prosodic reconstruction has been complicated by extension of the term (to "theme") beyond the classical definition given by Milman Parry in 1 930 (see FORMULA ) . Homeric formulae are characteristically found in the final syllables of the line, which is indeed a central prosodic characteristic ofIE verse: the line is most strongly regulated at its end. Other assumed char acteristics are constant number of syllables per line, freedom of quantity except in the cadence preceding a final syllable either long or short (i.e. an anceps ) , and a mandatory internal break or caesura around the fifth syllable of the line. Vedic lines based on the IE pattern (see INDIAN PROSODY ) consisted of 12 or fewer syllables with only slight regulation of the distribution of long and short syllables, but a generally iambic rhythm in the initial segment. Examples are the Jagat! meter of 1 2 syllables, x - x - I x v x I - v - v x, and the Tri�tubh meter of I I syllables, in two schemes, x - x - v v - I - v - x and x - v - X v v I - v - x. These have been compared with Gr. aeolic (q.v.) lines such as Sappho's of I I sylla bles, x x - v - v v I - v - x. Because the section after the caesura is the most strictly regulated, it gives basic stt;ucture to the line. The Gr. paroemiac (q.v. ) , of varying length but generally of 9 or 10 syllables with free distribution of quan-
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INDONESIAN POETRY tity before a fixed cadence ending x, has also been considered a direct descendant of IE verse. Jakobson also ascribes the Slavic line of 1 0 syllables t o inheritance from IE; Watkins suggests continuation through linguistic change into Celtic. Earlier, Sievers had proposed that an IE line of 8 syllables may be the precursor of the Vedic Gayatrz, of the pattern x x I x, and of the Germanic alliterative long line. On the other h and, Kurylowicz with other metrists rejects any continuity into the dialects and accordingly denies the possibility of reconstructing IE prosody. But even those who posit the existence of IE verse and its direct transmission into the sub groups assume that its prosodic structure was rela tively free. The dialects of the sub-groups modi fied IE metrical principles in accordance with the linguistic modifications they themselves under went, such as the introduction of stress accent in Germanic, Celtic, Italic, and other late dialects. In view of the persistence of quantity as a metrical device in the early dialects, IE prosody must have been based on it, and also on isometrical lines within a poem. See now CLASSICAL PROSODY; GER MAN PROSODY, Old Germanic; GREEK POETRY, Clas sical; INDIAN PROSODY. A. Kuhn, Indische und Germanische Segensspruche ( 1 864) ; R Westphal, Allgemeine Metrik der indoger manischen und semitischen VOlker ( 1892 ) ; Sievers; Wilamowitz; A. Meillet, Les Origines indo-europeen nes des metres grecs ( 1 923) ; P. Thieme, Die Wurzel vat ( 1954 ) ; M. Durante, Untersuchungen zur Vor gesch. Griechischen Dichtersprache ( 1 962) ; C. Wat kins, "IE Metrics and Archaic Ir. Verse," Celtica 6 ( 1 963); RJakobson, "Slavic Epic Verse: Studies in Comparative Slavic Metrics," inJakobson, v. 4; R Schmitt, Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indoger manischer Zeit ( 1 967) ; Indogermanische Dichter sprache, ed. R Schmitt ( 1968)-incl. the articles of Kuhn and Thieme cited above; ] . Kurylowicz, "The Quantitative Meter of IE," IE and Indo-Euro peans, ed. George Cardona et al. ( 1 970), Metrik und Sprachgesch. ( 1975 ) ; Parry; M. L. West, "Lydian Metre," Kadmos 1 1 ( 1 972) , "Gr. Poetry 2000-700 B.C., " ClassQ 23 (1973 ) , "IE Metre," Glotta 5 1 ( 1 973) ; W. S . Allen, Accent and Rhythm ( 1 973) ; G . Nagy, Comparative Studies i n Gr. and Indic Meter ( 1 974) ; ]. F. Vigorita, "IE Comparative Metrics," DAI 34 ( 1974 ) , 72 1 6A; B. Peabody, The Winged Word ( 1 975) , ch. l; V. N. Toporov, Die Ursprunge der indoeuropiiischen Poetik ( 1981 ) ; West. W.P.L. v
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INDONESIAN POETRY, like contemp. Malay po etry (q.v. ) , is rooted in older and folk Malay poetry. Bahasa indonesia, the I . lang., formally divided itself from the Malay lang. in 1 928; I. p. began to assume its separate course in 1 9 1 7. One of the first of the modern I. poets was Mohammad Yamin ( 1 903- 62) , an active politi cian. Strongly patriotic, romantic, and distinctly sentimental, Yamin was much influenced both by European (esp. Dutch) poetry and the work of
Rabindranath Tagore, as well as by older and folk Malay poetry. He introduced the sonnet into I. p. His contemporaries, Rustam Effendi ( 1 903-79) , Sanusi Pane ( 1 905-68) , and Sutan Takdir Alis jahbana ( 1 908-86) , were somewhat more success ful at integrating Malay, European, and oriental strands into stronger, less derivative poetry. Ef fendi in particular experimented with the devel. of new forms; he also tried to "find a new poetic manner" and to make bahasa indonesia capable of the wry, dry tone of European poetry. Pane (who also wrote in Dutch) and Alisjahbana were influ enced primarily by Malay and oriental poetry. Pane had studied at Tagore's Santiniketan Uni versity. His Puspa Mega (Cloud Flowers, 1 927) features quiet, lyrical poems of high polish but no great substance. Alisjahbana's Tebaran Mega (Scat tered Clouds, 1 936) , written in memory of his first wife, is his only major work of poetry; most of his other writing is heavily European-influenced so cial, linguistic, and philosophical crit. Pane, Alisjahbana, and Amir Hamzah ( 1 91 146) jointly founded Pujangga Baru (The New Writer) , a journal the most significant contributor to which was Hamzah, the outstanding I. poet before World War II. Scion of an aristocratic Su matran family, he was deeply religious and just as deeply steeped in the older Malay trad. His Nyanyi Sunyi (Songs of Loneliness, 1937) is largely auto biographical. Chairil Anwar (see below) ex claimed: "What a bright light he shone on the new lang.," though the mystical and complex qualities of Hamzah 's work sometimes make him difficult to understand. In 1939 Hamzah published a coli. of translations from other oriental lits., Setanggi Timur ( Incense from the East) . The break with Dutch colonialism begun by the Japanese Occupation ( 1 942-45) and formalized, on August 1 7, 1945, by the declaration of I. inde pendence helped bring into being the Angkatan 45 (Generation of '45 ) , led by the greatest of all I . writers, Chairil Anwar ( 1922- 49) . Others of the Generation of 45 incl. Asrul Sani (b. 1926) and Rivai Apin (b. 1927), both associated with Anwar in the tripartite Tiga Menguak Takdir (Three Against Fate or Three Against Takdir Alis jahbana ) , and Sitor Situmorang (b. 1924) . Led by Anwar, these and other writers broke with romanti cism; their work features blunt lang., emphatic syn tax, strong components of irony and social crit., and, in Anwar's case, a passionate lyricism and strength: She winks. She laughs And the dry grass blazes up. She speaks. Her voice is loud My blood stops running. (Lagu Biasa [An Ordinary Song] ) When my time comes I want to hear no one's cries Nor yours either Away with all who cry! (Aku [Me] , tr. Raffel)
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INFLUENCE His three collections, all posthumous, incl. Deru Campur Debu (Noise Mixed with Dust) and Kerikil Tajam dan Yang Terampas dan Yang Putus (two books in one: Sharp Gravel; Plundered and Bro ken) . Many I. writers first realized the true literary possibilities of bahasa indonesia reading Anwar's poetry. Anwar's effect has been almost as strong on the literary generations which have followed, though I. p. has expanded far beyond the boundaries of any one influence. Contemp. I. p. has become one of the world's most vital bodies oflit., inc!. among others the work of W. S. Rendra (b. 1935 ) , Ayip Rosidi (b. 1938) , Taufiq Ismail (b. 1937 ) , Goe nawan Mohamad (b. 1 942) , Subagio Sastrowar doyo (b. 1924) , Toeti Heraty (b. 1942 ) , I.'s leading woman poet, Sutardji Calzoum Bachri (b. 1 940) , and Darmonto (b. 1 942) . Rendra is the senior and most noted poet of this group: Fire has gutted the forest: Charred logs curse at the sky That runs across the world. Overhead, the moon, shining with blood, Drips orange tears from its eyes. ( Koyan Yang Malang [Koyan the Un fortunate] , tr. Raffel ) But the range and strength of contemp. I . p. a s a whole is remarkable. Sleep, child, on the earth which never sleeps Sleep on the grass, on the sand, on the bed Sleep with the butterflies, the waves of the sea and the bright lights, Which sing, slowly sing (Goenawan Mohammad, Nina-bobok [Lullaby] ) We are the people with sad eyes, at the edge of the road Waving at the crowded buses We are the tens of millions living in mis ery Beaten about by flood, volcano, curses and pestilence Who silently ask in the name of free dom But are ignored in the thousand slogans And meaningless loudspeaker voices (Taufiq Ismail, Kita adalah pemilik syah republik ini [The Republic is Ours ] , tr. Aveling) ANTHOLOGIES AND TRANSLATIONS: Poeisi Baru, ed. S. T. Alisjahbana ( 1946) ; Pujangga Baru, ed. H. B. Jassin ( 1 962) ; Anthol. of Mod. l. P., ed. B. Raffel ( 1 964) ; Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar, ed. and tr. B. Raffel ( 1970) ; Ballads and Blues: Sel. Poems ofW S. Rendra, ed. and tr. B. Raffel
and H. Aveling ( 1974) ; Contemp. I. P. ( 1 975) , Arjuna in Meditation ( 1 976) , both ed. and tr. H . Aveling. H ISTORY AND CRITICISM: H. B. Jassin, Chairil Anwar, pelopor Angkatan 45, 2d ed. ( 1945 ) , A mir Hamzah, Raja Penyair Pujangga Baru ( 1 962) , Ke susastraan Indonesia modern dalam kritik dan esei, 2 v. ( 1 962) ; W. A. Braasem, Modeme Indonesische Literatur ( 1 954) ; R. B. Slametmuliana, Poezie in Indonesia ( 1954) ; A. Teuw, Pokok dan tokoh dalam kesusteraan Indonesia baru, 3d ed., 2 v. ( 1 95 5 ) ; A. H. Johns, "Chairil Anwar: An Interp.," Bijdragen tot de taal-, land-en Voklenkunde ( 1964 ) ; B. Raffel, The Devel. of Mod. l. P. ( 1967) ; H. Aveling, A Thematic Hist. of I. P. 1 920 to 1974 ( 1974 ) . B.R. INFLUENCE. Traditionally, i. has been associated with imitation (q.v.) and most often understood as the result oflearning and technique. Horace coun sels writers to follow trad.; "Longinus" considers imitation of earlier writers as a means to sublimity; Dante urges writers to first drink of Helicon before taking up their singing instruments. I. is a benefi cent and necessary corollary of creative genius, routinely addressed and acknowledged up until the late 1 8th c. romantic poetry and poetics in stead stress originality (q.v. ) , taking the latter to be the direct opposite of the former. A trad. of "affective" crit. then arises in both the poetry and crit. of the 19th c. which proceeds to reread earlier critical texts, such as Longinus, in terms of the struggle between, on the one hand, the techniques steeped in learning and imitation and, on the other, the sublime and wholly original power of genius. Genius (q.v. ) , however, cannot be fully separated from learning, and the notion of i. de velops as a way of negotiating the distance between the two. In the 4th c., i. had referred to the stars, and later came to be associated with the exercise of power. It signals an influx or flowing in, and thereby relates the imitation of earlier writers to the power that such writers exert on the trad. This concept of "tradition" (q.v. ) , of an ideal order of lit., has had a considerable impact on the hist. of i. as traced by critics in the 20th c. North rop Frye, for example, repeats Eliot's ideal order by reading the lines of filiation (of i.) between one writer and another in terms of myth and archetype (qq.v. ) , knowledge of which makes possible an understanding of the "total form" oflit. Each work is a synecdoche (q.v. ) for the whole. The myth constitutes an origin ( archei outside of time and lang., and each creative act becomes a "fable of identity." Both Frye and Eliot perceive lit. as a totality, present in space and expressed through form. This model of i . , articulated within the frame work of traditional lit. hist., has produced many other solid scholarly works. R. D. Havens' The I. of Milton on Eng. Poetry ( 1 922) . for example, traces the 1 8th and 1 9th centuries' indebtedness to Mil ton by a meticulous inventory of repetitions and
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INFLUENCE echoes of Milton's style. Havens refers, for instance, to Wordsworth's poems about Milton as well as his conscious stylistic borrowings from Milton, incl. his lofty diction and "organ tone." Several assump tions underwrite such studies as Havens': ( 1 ) the earlier poet functions as an undisputed and stable "source," a foundation or origin itself not open to question; (2) i. is conscious and explicit, not hid den; (3) the scholarly study of i. observes the boundaries of the discipline, eschewing interac tions with other disciplines such as philosophy and psychoanalysis; and (4) literary trad. works in cu mulative fashion and holds out the promise of further riches, so that i. (such as Milton's) is both powerful and beneficent. It is W. J. Bate (1970) who for the first time emphasizes the difficulty that a rich trad. pro duces for each poet who comes after. He sees the past as a "burden," though he suggests that this burden is a recent phenomenon ("the product of the last 50 years") . Bate is explicit that the strength of the past in no way indicates the weak ness of the future, a condition which only a self-ful filling prophecy could bring about. An idealizing, humanistic strain informs The Burden of the Past, with the assertion of human freedom and human choice its paramount concern. For Bate the rich heritage of the past points the way to our own "identities," the way "to be ourselves." These conceptions of i. rest on the traditional view of lit. hist. as a stable context with determi nate cause and effect relations, recognizable sources, and a reliably straightforward chronol ogy. Literary relations, in this scheme of things, are equally straightforward and determinable. Their determinacy is built on the premises of traditional crit., but these premises were put into question by the advent oftheoretical crit. originating in France in the 1950s and '60s. "Textuality" and "intertex tuality" (qq.v.) disrupt the stability of the "work" and its meaning, deny its "origin" and "originality," and open up infinite and random connections be tween texts. The concept of the origin is problematic long before the advent of "textuality," however. Post structuralist critics note that the history of West ern metaphysics is haunted by the impossibility of establishing a system of knowledge authorized by a cause external to the system, and after poststruc turalism the study of causes and effects between texts often goes by the name of "genealogy." The name suggests a genesis which is already a meta phor within the system rather than the cause of it. Gregory Jay defines genealogy as "charting, be tween writers and texts, those often unauthorized relationships that nonetheless belong to the liter ary lineage of an essay or poem" ( 1 983) . Geneal ogy rereads the simultaneous order as a figure for textuality itself. Relations with the history of texts may shift, but genealogy does not produce an origin: it already knows that beginnings do not trace a history but constitute instead a metaphor
for such a history (Riddel) . Poststructuralist critics suggest that the absent origin punctuates a history of texts stretching from Plato to the present. Three writers within this history place particular emphasis on the proble matics of the origin. That is, in the terms outlined above, three writers are repeatedly drawn out ofa history of texts to function as a genealogical locus and exemplar for the problem: Giambattista Vico ( 1 668-1 744 ) , Friedrich Nietzsche ( 1 844-1900) , and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) . Vico's major work, Scienza Nuova ( The New Sci ence, 1 725, tr. 1 744) asks how human beings first began to think humanly, a question prefaced by an account of the difficulty Vico encountered in reaching back to inaccessible origins which he could "imagine only with great effort." The text dealing with origins enacts the problematic for which it seeks to account. Vico's response to the question he poses is that thought begins in meta phor. The first human beings begin to think hu manly when, in response to fear, they create a world out of themselves and assign to it the names of gods. This is the "imaginative metaphysics" born of ignorance and fear and needing no author ity other than its own creation. We might say that it is born out of need, and functions as defense. Vico traces a later "rational metaphysics" which emphasizes learning and which he describes as a fall from the first. Imaginative metaphysics is a metaphysics of power: it imagines the origins it needs in order to survive. Rational metaphysics recognizes the tropological nature of those origins and the groundlessness of all understanding. This double attitude is echoed by Nietzsche in " Uber Wahrheit und Liige im aussermoralischen Sinn" ("On Truth and Lying in their Ultramoral Sense" [ 1 873 ] ) , which notes two significant mo ments in thought: the creation of "truth" through metaphor ("truth is a mobile army of metaphors") and the forgetting of the fact of that creation. The first points toan epistemological impasse, since we cannot know anything in its essence, only in the relations posited by lang. The second points to a will-to-power by which an artist creates out of the "delicate material of ideas." Nietzsche denigrates the "impulse to truth" crucial to a metaphysics of presence, since it promotes a false sense of under standing and security. Understanding for Nietz sche is built on metaphor and cannot claim a privileged point of reference beyond it. There is no metalanguage or external reference point from which to view the whole. Identity is a fiction, cause and effect relations an illusion, and origin an imag ined thing; this is the frightening world without rational order, without bottom, that art reveals to us when it tears for a moment "the woof of ideas." It is the power of art to witness the abyss that underlies human thinking, and it is also the power of art to create the illusion of origin and poetic identity. Nietzsche's "forgetting" is Freud's "repression."
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INFLUENCE Though Freud is perceived as a scientist, and his initial gestures are in that direction, his theories lead him further away from the world of real causes and events and into the area of "phantasy." The case history of the WolfMan proposes "cause" as phantasy. At first Freud surmises that the Wolf Man's trauma is caused by a "primal scene" in which the child, at one and a half years of age, watches his parents copulating. Yet it is not until the child is four years old that another event triggers the memory of the primal scene and ren ders it traumatic. Freud terms this phenomenon "Nachtraglichkeit" (retroactive meaningfulness ) . In this case cause and effect s o contaminate one another that the rational chronology of events (the kind of chronology that would be employed in "normal" lit. hist.) does not apply. The later even could well be said to be the cause of the earlier one, or rather the cause of its "meaning." Freud further suggests that even the "primal scene" is a phantasy, constructed out ofthe child's experience on a farm and the stories he was read. In place of origin, then, we have imagined con struct. In the beginning is another metaphor or text. In the wake of Vico, Nietzsche, and Freud, de construction assumes the problematic nature of the origin, and in so doing it undermines the logocentric and rationalist Western metaphysics upon which presence, continuity, and the notion offulfillment are based. Following Nietzsche, Paul de Man emphasizes "the tropological structure that underlies all cognitions, inc\. knowledge of the self' ("Autobiography as De-facement") . Far from making any totalization possible, rhet. sug gests that even the ultimate self-understanding (autobiography) comes to rest on a figure. Through his discussions of irony (q.v.) and proso popoeia, de Man points to the "rigorous unreli ability" of literary lang. and to the "systematic undoing of all understanding." Irony is the recog nition that conflict cannot be reduced to logic, and prosopopoeia (the giving of a face) is the giving of a face to that which is otherwise faceless. Such a rhetorical (ironic) reading undoes the possibility of lit. "hist." or of a "genetic" study of i., since neither history nor lit. would be generative proc esses (de Man speaks of the literary text's re peated failure to originate) . Deconstruction makes impossible the reading of lit. in terms of periods, dismantles the notion of "lit. hist.," and dismisses the vision of a trad. as an aggregation of great works. Lit. hist. conceived along the lines of rhetorical figures and aporias would be a halting phenomenon, accounting "at the same time for the truth and falsehood of the knowledge lit. con veys about itself' ( 1983 ) . While the controversy over traditional lit. hist. vs. deconstruction was raging, Bloom published in 1 973 The Anxiety of I., followed by three sub sequent books ( 1975, 1975, 1 976) setting forth a theory of i. which opposed both the idealizing
views of traditional lit. hist. and the deconstructive readings of Derrida and de Man. Three more books followed ( 1976, 1982, 1982) , refining and extending these theories. Together the seven stud ies have made Bloom the major modern theorist on the subject. Bloom rejects the view of trad. as a "handing over" from precursor to later poet and argues for a reading of trad. as a series of struggles in which the later poet attempts to turn his late ness into earliness. The informing rhetorical fig ure for Bloom is metalepsis (q.v.)-the "trope-re versing-trope" which reverses cause and effect. Bloom rejects the conventional view of trad. as an inclusive order in which space is always made for the newcomers. Trad. is the force that takes poten tial originality away from a poet, always rendering the space available more limited and more exclu sive. Originality in this view is a moment of free dom which the poet must achieve by creating discontinuity and thus turning loss into the illusion of origins. Bloom's story of influence-relations is one of power, violence, and appropriation, since these will be the marks of a poet's strength. He has no compunctions about dividing poets into strong and weak: weak poets accept the "handing over" and are silenced by it; strong poets react against it and their reaction is mapped out by Bloom into specific "revisionary ratios." The later poet "swerves" from the precursor by finding where the earlier poet went wrong, establishes discontinuity with the precursor, and rewrites the parent poem in such a way that, far from appearing to be influ enced by the earlier, the later poet now appears to have created the earlier poet's work. Bloom's approach to texts is not entirely unlike intertextual conceptions. For him, texts have nei ther closure nor meaning: meaning wanders be tween texts, and the meaning of a poem lies in its reaction to another poem. This wandering of meaning is a key concept in Bloom's theory of i., and when it becomes appropriation it merits the term "misreading." Misreading is the necessary condition of all strong poetry and all strong crit., for it describes a swerving away from the precur sor's poem which in turn makes possible the strength of the belated poet. Misreading points to a practice which Bloom terms "antithetical crit." and which refuses to distinguish between poetry and crit. In the predicate that there are no right or wrong readings, only strong or weak readings, misreading opens up the space of persuasion, "the domain of the lie." Bloom attacks the humanistic and New Critical procedures which would make crit. an ancillary activity, and which, like Auer bach's "figura," would make the later reading a fulfillment of the earlier one. Strong crit. and strong poetry constitute a lie against time, grant ing the poet for a moment the illusion that he is self-begotten. Though he draws from poststructu ralist theories of intertextuality, however, Bloom insists finally on "figures of willing" against "fig ures of knowing." Epistemology tells us that all
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INITIAL RHYME origins are metaphors; Bloom's readings of Freud and Vico remind us that origins can be imagined. It is the power of great poetry to achieve the latter, and Bloom's seven books on i. are an account of the strategies by which a poet turns his belated "authority" into imaginative "priority," or the illu sion of originality. Deconstruction transforms i. into intertextuality because the poet is himself an effect of a system of lang. in which he is inscribed. Bloom denies on the one hand a self that is not the construct of a poem, but on the other hand insists on the figurative creation of a poetic self. He argues that repression and forgetting (embedded in his theory of i.) offer a much more realistic account of the relations between one text and another and of the ways in which a text finally comes to read itself than deconstruction's empha sis on epistemology. In this way he insists on the importance of psychic strategies of reaction and defense as opposed to the epistemological con cerns of deconstruction. Within a single poem, the condition of belatedness expresses itself as a series of disjunctive moments, and the "crossings" be tween these moments are defined as a repression of i., a leaping over time, and an image of voice. Voice (q.v.) is a term drawn from traditional crit., but Bloom's use of it is directed against purely rhetorical readings that focus on an impasse rather than a metaleptic leaping over that leads to self-begetting. Self-begetting can be achieved in other ways. Geoffrey Hartman links quotation with the crea tion of a poetic self. A poet has to "overhear" and work through the ghostly echoes or allusions which haunt him, and in poets like Wordsworth quotation turns into self-begetting. Intertextuality (and its implication that the poem cannot com plete itself) becomes intratextuality, with the poet finally quoting not Milton or the classics, but him self. The arguments over i. over the past quarter century continue unabated. De Man refers to Bloom's scheme of a father-son struggle as a ge netic model and hence a "rhetorical mystifica tion." But while the issues between the priority of epistemology in deconstruction and the priority of the psyche in Bloom's theories will continue to affect the way in which i. is understood, it is clear that these concerns have radically transformed the study of i., turning it away from any simplistic kind of "source-study" toward more elaborate pat terns of allusion. Far from attempting to define a text's origin or cause, i. has shifted to a concern with the prob lematic wanderings between texts and has taken on the shape of theory. It is no longer possible to distinguish, in an age of theoretical self-conscious ness, the objective literary relations between writ ers from the critical articulations that shape those relations, so that the study ofi. engages the critical history through which i. is articulated. In a 1987 collection suggestively entitled Re-membering Mil-
ton, Robin Jarvis begins with a meditation on Ha vens' study and takes us to an "i.-theory" that argues the self�divided, androgynous, effeminate nature of poetic fathers and their texts, "shored against an otherness which inscribes them in the irrecuperable ebb of meaning." In contemp. the ory the paternity of the text is an illusion, and i. and intertextuality address the complex wander ing and dismemberments and the critical "re memberings" of the orphaned text. In the realm of theory, there are no last words, only further articulations. In this respect the theories of the past 20 years have, in transforming the under standing of i., opened up space for other work to follow. See also ALLUSION; ECHO VERSE; METALEP SIS; POETRY, THEORIES OF, Recent Developments. T. S. Eliot, ''Trad. and the Individual Talent" ( 1 9 1 7 ) , rpt. in Essays; S. Freud, "Aus del' Gesch. einer infantilen Neurose" ( 1 91 8 ) , rpt. in Standard Works; R. D. Havens, The I. of Milton on Eng. Poetry ( 1 92 2 ) ; N. Frye, ''Th t; Archetypes of Lit.," KR 1 3 ( 1 95 1 ) ;]. Derrida, L'Ecriture et la difference ( 1 967) ; W. J. Bate, The Burden of the Past and the Eng. Poet ( 1 970) ; C. Guillen, "The Aesthetics of Literary I.," Lit. as System ( 1 971 ) ; H. Bloom, The Anxiety of I. ( 1 97 3 ) , A Map ofMisreading ( 1 975) , Kabbalah and Crit. ( 1 975 ) , Poetry and Repression ( 1976), Figures of Capable Imagination ( 1 976) , Wallace Stevens ( 1976 ) , Agon ( 1 982 ) , The Breaking of the Vessels ( 1 98 2 ) ; E. Said, Beginnings ( 1 975) ; The New Nietz sche, ed. D. Allison ( 1 977) ; P. de Man, "Shelley Disfigured," in Deconstruction and Crit. ( 1 979) , Blindness and Insight, 2 d ed. ( 1983 ) , "Autobiogra phy as De-facement," The Rhet. of Romanticism ( 1 984) ; ]. Riddel, "Decentering the Image," Tex tual Strategies, ed.]. Harari ( 1 979) ; F. Lentricchia, After the New Crit. ( 1 980)-critique of Bloom; S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in theA ttic ( 1 980) ; G. H. Hartman, "Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth," in Deconstruction and Crit. (above) ; J . Hollander, The Figure of Echo ( 1 981 ) ; J . Culler, On Deconstruction ( 1982) ;]. Guillory, Poetic Author ity ( 1983 ) ; G. S.Jay, T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Lit. Hist. ( 1 983 ) ; The Anxiety of Anticipation, spec. iss. of YFS 66 ( 1984) ; C. Baker, The Echoing Green ( 1984) ; P. Brooks, "Fictions of the Wolf Man," Reading for the Plot ( 1 984) ; D. Fite, Harold Bloom ( 1 985) ; ]. P. Mileur, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity ( 1985 ) ; N. Lukacher, Primal Scenes ( 1 986) ; Re-membering Milton, ed. M. Nyquist and M. Ferguson ( 1 987) ; H. R. Elam, "Harold Bloom," Mod. Literary Critics 1 955 to the Present, ed. G. Jay ( 1988 ) ; Intertextuality, Allusion, and Quota tion: An Internat. Bibl. of Crit. Studies, ed. U. ]. Hebel ( 1 989) ; L. A. Renza, "I.," Critical Terms for Literary Study, cd. F. Lentricchia and T. McLaugh lin ( 1990 ) ; 1. and 1ntertextuality in Lit. Hist., ed. ] . Clayton and E. Rothstein ( 1 99 1 ) . H.R.E. INITIAL RHYME. See ALLITERATION. INITIATING ACTION. See PLOT.
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INSPIRATION INSCAPE AND INSTRESS. Inscape is Gerard Manley Hopkins' term for the pattern of attributes in a physical object that gives it at once both its individuality and its unity. In his critical study, Peters defines inscape as "the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing, or a sensible copy or representation of its individual essence" (2) . Gardner ( 1 970) concurs: inscape denotes "those aspects of a thing, or group of things, which consti tute its individual and 'especial' unity of being, its 'individually-distinctive beauty'" which is the "very essence of its nature" (xx) . Hopkins later found confirmation of his conception of inscape in the Scotist notion of haecceitas or "thisness," namely that which uniquely differentiates each thing from all other things. Cf. ENARGEIA. Closely related to inscape, the principle of indi viduation, is ins tress, which is "that energy or stress of being which holds the 'inscape' together" and, as a projective force, "carries it whole into the mind of the receiver," being "ultimately the stress of God's Will in and through all things" (Gardner xxi) . See Letters 66, Note-books 98.- The Letters of G. M. H to Robert Bridges, ed. C. C. Abbott ( 1 935 ) ; Note-books and Papers of G. M. H. , ed. H. House ( 1 937) ; w. A. M. Peters, G. M. H : A Critical Study ( 1 948 ) ; W. H. Gardner, G. M. H : A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Trad., 2 v. ( 1 94849) , "G. M. H. and the Poetry of Inscape," Theoria 33 ( 1 969 ) ; Immortal Diamond, ed. N. Weyand ( 1949 ) ; A. Heuser, The Shaping Spirit of G. M. H ( 1 959) ; A. J. McCarthy, "Toward a Definition of Hopkins' Inscape," UDR 4 ( 1 967) ; Poems of G. M. H, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, 4th ed. ( 1970) ; P. Milward, Landscape and Inscape ( 1 975 ) ; L. Cochran, "Instress and Its Place in the Poetics of G. M. H.," HQ 6 ( 1 980) . S.H.; T.Y.F.B. INSCRIPTION. See EPITAPH. INSPIRATION (Lat. "breathing in" ) . Every poet recognizes that, during poetic composition, mate rial emerges-words, images, figures, rhythms from sources which lie beyond the pale of con sciousness. Conscious effort and craft may indeed produce such material, and certainly they will shape all material, but at least some material seems to come into the mind from that place which we know only as other. In most cultures, poets, esp. those of religious conviction, have be lieved this source, this other, to be divine, the "breath" of the god or God blown into the recipi ent poet, who becomes the vehicle of godhead. In the West, the doctrine of i. has deep roots in both Hellenic and Hebraic cultures, from which streams it fed into Christianity and so was transmit ted to the modern world, where it still holds sway: the concept of production by other-than-the-con scious-self has survived all radical alterations in attribution of its source. At least as early as Homer, i. holds a central place in Gr. poetics, both as invocation to the gods
or, more often, the Muses (see MUSE ) for the gift of memorable speech, and also as claim that when the god does take possession, the poet enters a state of transcendent ecstasy or frenzy, a "poetic madness" (q .v.) or furor poeticus. Throughout most of archaic Gr. thought, the creation of art is asso ciated with ritual, religion, and substance-induced ecstasis. In Odyssey 22.347-48, the bard Phemius acknowledges that the god has put songs into his heart. Hesiod and Pindar also invoke divine i., as does Theocritus, though with the latter perhaps the invocation has already become conventional. Plato refers to i. and to the doctrine of poetic madness often (Laws 7l9c ) , sometimes at length (Symposium 197a; Phaedrus 244-45) . In the Ion, Plato suggests, borrowing from Democritus, that just as iron filings become magnetized by the magnet, so the poet is inspired through divine power, which power is conveyed by him in turn to the professional rhapsodes (q.v.) and their audi ences. Aristotle repeats Plato's view in the Poetics (cf. Rhetoric 3.7) but seems uninterested in pursu ing it; and the Peripatetic Problemata (Bk. 30; ca. 250 B.C.) offers an alternative, organic explana tion, the four "humors." Virgil's invocation to the Muse at Aeneid 1 is well known, and Ovid also refers to i. (Ars amatoria 3.549; Fasti 6.5) . Longinus, one of the key texts of antiquity, treats i . from the reverse direction: the litmus test of great lit. is sublimity, and in all works which are sublime, the reader is transported, car ried out of herself, expired as it were into divinity. Cicero discusses i. in his On Divination ( 1 . 1 8.37) , On the Nature of the Gods (2.66: "No man was ever great without divine i." ) , On the Orator (2.46. 194) , and The Tusculan Disputations ( 1 .26) . Modern Eng. trs. of these passages use the word i., but Cicero's Lat. terms are afflatus, instinctus, and concitatio: inspiratio does not appear until the late Lat. pe riod. Afflatus in particular long survived as a syno nym for i. 1 . has, if anything, even more central a position in Hebraic poetics, as the poets and prophets of the Old Testament freely acknowledged (Joel 2:28-30, Ezekiel 2:1-1 0 ) , though for them posses sion was by no means always willed, desired, or ecstatic (Jeremiah) . When Christianity emerged triumphant over the other Roman mystery cults, it appropriated the notion of the Muses to the Christian God as the source of i., making not the breath of the god but divine grace the inseminat ing force. The Church Fathers-Jerome in particu lar-often referred to David as the perfect poet prophet, inspired by God. St. Paul's claim that "all scripture is given by i. of God" (2 Timothy 3 : 1 6) was reasserted by literalists for millennia thereafter. 1. became a central tenet of Neoplatonism, which transmitted it through the Middle Ages (see PLA TONISM AND POETRY ) . The emergence of science in the 1 7th c. and of psychology in the 1 8th, however, transferred the locus of i . from outer to inner: now the source is the subconscious mind-
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INSTRESS creative and energetic. but also appetitive and unstable. In this form. i. becomes. along with spon taneity (q.v. ) . one of the principal tenets of roman ticism (q.v. ) . and is given the fixative. for the 20th c by Freud (see PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM ) . But the two loci. outer and inner. should not be taken as mutually exclusive. for even in the religious view the mind itself is a divine creation: the issue is only whether i. is directly given or mediate and proximal. Nor. similarly. should the two dimen sions of poetic production-i. and craft. or seeing (see VATES ) and making-be taken as mutually exclusive: the only question is whether the mate rials which appear are already fully formed and finished. or require subsequent shaping. In its most extreme form. the doctrine of i. makes of the poet a passive receptacle and mere mouthpiece. This would reverse Auden's remark. elegizing Yeats. that poetry is only a mouth and makes nothing happen. for even there the saying itself is attributed to the poem; literalist i by contrast. strips even the poet of creative capacity. Composition becomes now merely automatic writ ing. as Yeats reported of his wife. or Blake reported of himself. It is Blake who says. "I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation. 12 or sometimes 20 or 30 lines at a time. without Premeditation & even against my Will." and "I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary the Authors are in Eternity." And we may recall that Socrates in the Thaetetus ( 1 49-50) claims that even the philoso pher is merely the midwife of truth. possessing no wisdom in himself. Subsequent examples incl. Bede's account of Caedmon (Ecclesiastical History 4.24 ) ; Dante. Purgatorio 1 . 1 -20; Boccaccio. Geneal ogy of the Gods 14. 1 5.39. 15.99, etc . ; ] . C. Scaliger. Poetics libri septem 1 . 2 ; Bacon. Advancement ofLearn ing. and Ben Jonson, Discoveries. The most signifi cant example in Eng. poetry is found in Milton's invocations of the Muse in Paradise Lost (e.g. 9.24 ) . Milton's Muse i s a source of enlightenment com parable to the Protestant "inner light" and equa ted with the spirit from whom Moses received the Ten Commandments. This sort of theory finds its stronges( modern statement in romantic poetics (q.v. ) : preromantic and romantic examples incl. Young's Conjectures on Original Composition ("genius" is "the god within") ; Blake's letter to Thomas Butts of April 25. 1803; Wordsworth's conclusion to "The Re cluse"; Coleridge's account of the origin of "Kubla Khan"; Poe's "Poetic Principle"; and Emerson's "The Poet." The doctrine will be found full blown [sic 1 in Shelley's Defence ofPoetry ( 1 82 1 ) and "Ode to the West Wind." But study of the notebooks and working habits of the romantic poets (incl. Shelley; cf. the preface to Prometheus Unbound) shows unequivocably that one should regard i. as more a part of the mythology of romanticism than of its praxis. for the romantics recognized the necessity of composition after-or without-i. : even Blake admitted that "without practice noth.•
.•
ing can be accomplished." To say this is to acknow ledge the importance of craft, of what Horace called "the labor of the file." i.e. the application of effort and skill in the acquisition of technique practiced. learned. remembered. repeated. Thus the concepts of i. and making may come to be seen as antinomies, which mutually entail and illumi nate each other; and in the heat of sustained and complex poetic composition. a good poet. asked to distinguish the two. might not be able to say. It is of interest to notice that. in the Iliad and Odyssey. on every occasion when Homer appeals to the Muses. the appeal is for matter of a factual nature rather than for form. That is. Homer always asks for i. concerning what to say. never how to say it. Less extreme forms of i. would probably be acceptable to many poets. particularly if the locus is left unspecified or if the nature of the infusion is seen as less systematic, less direct (the Aeolian harp. the correspondent breeze) . or simply occa sional. And if the joint effect of romanticism and Freudian psychology was ultimately to shift the locus of i. from external divinity to internal psy che. the mystery of the process of production itself was not thereby lessened. See also GENIUS; IMAGI NATION; INVENTION; POETIC MADNESS; SPONTANE ITY; WIT. W. Dilthey. Die Einbildungskraft des Dichters ( 1 88 7 ) ; Patterson. esp. 507-20; C. D . Baker. "Cer tain Religious Elements in the Eng. Doctrine of the Inspired Poet During the Ren .. .. ELH6 ( 1 939) ; E. A. Armstrong. Shakespeare's Imagination: A Study of the Psychology of Association and I. ( 1 946) ; G. Grigson. The Harp ofAeolus ( 1947) ; ]. C. Simopou . lous. "The Study of I. . . JP 45 ( 1 948) ; R. E. M. Harding. An Anatomy of I 3d ed. ( 1 948) ; G. Kleiner. Die I. des Dichters ( 1 949) ; B. Ghiselin, The Creative Process ( 1 952);]. Prevost. Baudelaire ( 1 953) ; Abrams; C. M. Bowra. I. and Poetry ( 1955 ) ; M. C. Beardsley. "On the Creation of Art." JAA C 23 ( 1 964-65) ; A. Anvi. "I. in Plato and the Heb. Prophets." CL 20 ( 1968) ; E. N. Tigerstedt. Plato's Idea of Poetical I. ( 1 969) ; B. Vauter. Biblical I. ( 1 97 2 ) ; P. Milward. Landscape and Inscape ( 1 975) ; H. Mehnert. Melancholia und l. ( 1 978) ; K. K. Ruthven. Critical Assumptions ( 1979 ) . ch. 4; C. Fehrmann, Poetic Creation (tr. 1980 ) ; P. Murray. "Poetic I. in Early Greece." JHI 101 ( 1 981 ) ; A. ]. Harding. Coleridge and the Inspired Word ( 1985 ) ; CHLC. T.V.F.B. .•
INSTRESS. See INS CAPE AND INSTRESS. INTENSITY. although chiefly a romantic stan dard of poetic excellence. has a long history. Its most famous Cl. statement is in Longinus' On the Sublime ( 1st c. A.D. ) . with its emphasis on the superiority of original genius to trad of strong emotion to restraint. Sir Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetry ( 1 595) similarly underlines the supe riority of the poet to the philosopher. "for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that
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INTENTION whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordless description: which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth." Dryden's recognition of the i. of Shake speare's imagery in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy ( 1 668) can be seen in Neander's observation that "when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too." Hobbes and Locke among other British empirical philosophers did much to chal lenge 18th-c. rationalism and to emphasize the power of sensation. Boileau's tr. of Longinus in 1 674 stirred wide interest in literary circles; but Burke's treatise On the Sublime and the Beautiful ( 1 757) was even more influential, with its charac terization of the sublime as "productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling" or as producing "astonishment." It is among the romantics that i. receives its fullest expression. Wordsworth speaks of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" ("Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, 1800 ) . Shelley con tends that it is impossible to read the most cele brated writers of his day "without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words" (A Defence ofPoetry, 1 821 ) . Hazlitt's "gusto" embodies one of the most powerful descriptions ofi. in art-"power or passion defining any object" ("On Gusto," 1 8 1 6 ) . His emphasis on poetry's need for a firm grasp of reality is reflected in Keats's idea of negative capability (q.v.)-"the excellence of every art is its i. capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth" (Letter of l 8 1 7) . Poe's attraction to i. is evidenced in his require ment that poems be short, that stories be such that they can be read in one sitting. "The value of the poem," he contends, "is in the ratio of this elevat ing excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychical necessity, transient" ( The Poetic Princi ple, 1 848) . Subsequent 19th-c. advocates of art for art's sake continued this trad., with Pater search ing for "the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purist energy," arguing that "to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy is success in life" ("Pref ace" to The Ren., 1 873) . But in general the late 19th c. saw a marked shift away from the emphasis on i. in art. Major exam ples incl. Arnold's praise for great human actions and his unhappiness with situations where "suffer ing finds no vent in action" ("Preface" to Poems, 1 853) ; the more scientific methodology of Sainte Beuve and Taine in studying connections between work and author, work and the spirit of the age; and Tolstoy's stress on the social responsibility of art. More notable still is the critical writing of T. S. Eliot, with its focus on trad., on objectivity, on intelligence in the poet, and on the idea of the "objective correlative" (q.v. ) . The increasingly sci entific and textually oriented approaches of the Am. New Critics downplayed i. in favor of irony
and structure, while poststructuralism, and esp. deconstruction (q.v. ) , questions fundamental pre sumptions of authorial presence and textual meaning, offering, instead of perceived i., delight in the play ofiang. See also SUBLIME.- T. R. Henn, Longinus and Eng. Crit. ( 1934 ) ; S. Monk, The Sub lime ( 1 935) ; W. ]. Bate, From Classic to Romantic ( 1 946) ; Abrams; W.Jackson, Immediacy: The Devel. of a Critical Concept from Addison to Coleridge ( 1973) ;]. Engel!, The Creative Imagination ( 1 981 ) ; J. L . Mahoney, The Whole Internal Universe ( 1 985) ; P. Veyne, Roman Erotic Elegy (tr. 1988) , Epilogue; T. McFarland, William Wordsworth: I. and Achieve ment ( 1992 ) . ].L.M. INTENTION. The question of the relevance and value of i. has been at the center of debate in literary theory for close to half a century, and the controversy is far from reaching a satisfactory reso lution. In Anglo-American literary theory, the de bate has found its central terms in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's well-known essay, "The Intentional Fallacy" (SR 54 [ 1 946] ; rpt. in Wim satt's The Verbal Icon [ 1 954] ) . Here Wimsatt and Beardsley characterize all crit. which takes ac count of authorial i. in the production of a work, insofar as this is known, as committing a serious "fallacy," and resolve the question in favor of New Critical formalism. Wimsatt and Beardsley do not deny the pres ence of an element of i. in the structure of a poem; rather, they deny the usefulness of any genetic analysis of the concept of i. A genetic analysis attempts to give a causal explanation of how works of art are created, and many genetic theorists claim that their accounts also provide criteria for deciding whether or not a poem is successfully realized by the poet and, in such criteria, a more valid (because more objective) methodology for the appreciation and judgment of the poem. It is in order to reject this latter claim that Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that intentionalist crit. commits a fallacy. The anti-intentionalist position denies that knowledge of a poet's i. is necessary to the proper critical appreciation andjudgment of a poem. And it extends this denial to the romantic claim for the relationship of the poet's personality to his poems. Wimsatt and Beardsley give their position further support by arguing that poems are verbal struc tures made out of public lang., which is governed by the conventions of a lang. community; what ambiguity or obscurity (qq.v.) there may be in a poem occurs not because a private lang. has crept into the poem but because the conventions of a lang. community permit it, since it adds to the aesthetic richness of the poem. Anti-intentional ists (e.g. Wimsatt and Beardsley) argue that a great deal of crit. confuses inquiries beginning with "why" (our reasons for finding a poem inter esting and successful) with inquiries beginning with "how" (the way the poem came about) . In
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INTENTION order to keep these two inquiries separate, Wim satt and Beardsley would rewrite romantic poetics (q.v. ) : I t would b e convenient i f the pass words of the intentional school, 'sincerity,' 'fidelity,' 'spontaneity,' 'au thenticity,' 'genuineness,' 'originality,' could be equated with terms such as ' integrity,' 'relevance,' 'unity' [q.v. ] , 'function,' 'maturity,' 'subtlety,' 'ade quacy,' and other more precise terms of evaluation-in short if 'expression' [q.v.] always meant aesthetic achieve ment. But this is not always so. The rejection of intentionalist crit. is part of a more comprehensive attack on romanticism launched earlier in this century by T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot. For the modernists, the romantic critics (e.g. Pater, Sainte-Beuve, and Taine) are the antagonists whose method of appreciation and judgment of poetry is genetic. The romantic writ ers and critics place great emphasis on individual experience and inner vision, which constitute for them the nature of the work an artist produces. Consequently, artists no longer have a common set of problems which critics can understand and ap praise. Given the emphasis on the peculiar quali ties of the poet's vision, sincerity, originality, spon taneity, and adequacy become the romantic criteria of crit. Anti-intentionalists reject adequacy and original ity (q.v.) as criteria of expression on the grounds that one can argue for the adequacy of a poem only when we compare the poem to the poet's original experience. But in fact we have no verifi able access to that experience. And at what stage, they ask, is the experience original and the expres sion adequate to it? As T. S. Eliot trenchantly put it, "the 'experience' in question may be the result of a fusion of feelings so numerous and ultimately so obscure in their origins, that even if there be communication of them, the poet may hardly be aware of what he is communicating; and what is there to be communicated was not in existence before the poem was completed." As for sincerity and spontaneity (qq. v.) , anti-inten tionalists argue that the first is relevant only when considering content, while the second is relevant only when considering process, but neither is ade quate. Consequently, although the romantic crite ria are usable, they are inadequate because they are neither necessary nor sufficient for crit., which needs a criterion of value. Hence the insistence by Eliot, the New Critics, and others that crit. ought to concern itself with the verbal structure of a poem. Further, anti-intentionalists argue, in the pro cess of writing, poets often abandon their original i. or include elements not central to that i. If there is a change in i. in the course of writing a poem we can no longer consider the original i. as the stan-
dard for judging. '''Intentions' of the author are always a posteriori ratiocinations, commentaries which certainly must be taken into account but also must be criticized in the light of the finished work of art" (Wellek ) . Moreover, in the case of anonymous poetry, Homer, Shakespeare, and most other poetry of the past, there is no way of deter mining the poet's i. And finally, there is the So cratic argument about the inherent unreliability of the poet's capacity to explain his i. The controversy over the role of i. is part of a larger dispute on more fundamental questions about what a work of art is and what is proper to crit. The anti-intentionalist position conceives the theoretical problems of creativity and crit. as de finitional and conceptual problems to be settled by rigorous logical scrutiny; thus Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that "it is not so much a historical statement as a definition to say that the intentional fallacy is a romantic one." Romanticism, however, is a historical phenome non which gives rise to a host of conceptual and definitional problems not resolvable by some uni tary and objective logical procedure. Moreover, intentionalists such as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., question Wimsatt and Beardsley's distinction between po etic lang. and ordinary lang. Hirsch insists that all uses oflang. "are ethically governed by the i. ofthe author." On this view, the author is the determiner of the meaning of her work, because without that we have no compelling normative principle for validating one interpretation (q.v.) and rejecting others. Without some knowledge of what an author set out to do, we cannot reasonably judge how well she did it, for otherwise a critic is liable to condemn the work merely for not being the kind of work the critic happens to approve of-i.e. the kind of work the author never set out to create in the first place. In sum, anti-intentionalists give considerable logical power and coherence to their position and its formalist and organicist criteria, and they suc ceed in showing the limitations of romantic crite ria. Yet they cannot succeed in showing that inten tionalists are entirely wrong, for there are always numerous ways by which other critics can show how art and personality, art and consciousness are indissolubly linked together, inevitably requiring the critic to take into account historical and bio graphical contexts for the proper interp. andjudg ment ofliterary works. See also SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY; THEORY. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Crit. ( 1 933) ; The Critic's Notebook, ed. R. W. Stallman ( 1 950) , ch. 8; Abrams; I. Hungerland, "The Con cept of I. in Art Crit.," JP 52 ( 1 95 5 ) ; Wellek and Warren; M. C. Beardsley, Aesthetics ( 1958 ) , The Aesthetic Point of View ( 1982 ) , ch. 1 1 ; E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interp. ( 1 967) , The Aims of Interp. ( 1 976) ; R. Maier, '''The Intentional Fallacy' and the Logic of Lit. Crit.," CE 32 ( 1 970) ; ]. Derrida, Speech and Phenomenon ( 1 973)-critique of author-
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INTERNAL RHYME ial i. in the phenomenology of Husserl; G. Hermeren, "1. and Interp. in Lit. Crit.," NLH 7 ( 1975 ) ; W. K. Wimsatt,Jr., "Genesis: An Argument Resumed," Day of the Leopards ( 1 976) ; On Literary I., ed. D. Newton-de Molina ( 1976) ;]. W. Meiland, "Interp. as a Cognitive Discipline," P&L 2 ( 1 977) ; K. K. Ruthven, Critical Assumptions ( 1 979) , ch. 9; S. Raval, "1. and Contemp. Literary Theory," JAA C 3 8 ( 1 980) ; P. D. Juhl, Interp. ( 1 980) ; ]. M. Ellis, "Wittgensteinian Thinking in Theory of Crit.," NLH 1 2 ( 1 98 1 ) ;]. Searle, Intentionality ( 1 983) ; H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words ( 1989 ) ; A. Patterson, "1.," Critical Termsfor Literary Study, ed. F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin ( 1 990) ; ]. T. Shawcross, Intentionality and the New Traditional ism ( 1 992) . S.R. INTENTIONAL FALLACY. See INTENTION. INTERLOCKING RHYME. See CHAIN RHYME. INTERLUDE, enterlude (Lat. interludum, It. inter medii, Fr. entremets) was formerly considered a light break between acts of a longer didactic play or between courses in a banquet. The term has al ways been ambiguous and generally has been used as a catchall or generic term for a great variety of secular and nonsecular, short and long, comic and serious plays. Yet many mss. and early printed editions of the plays refer to themselves specifi cally as interludes. (e.g. Ralph Roister Doister, Gam mer Gurton s Needle, and several of John Bale's plays), though later critics "correct" the term to the more commonly accepted morality (q.v.) or "moral play." The earliest reference to the i. is probably Robert Brunne's Handryng Synne ( 1 303), which in cludes "enterludes" of singing, tabor-playing, arrl pip ing as household entertainments, demonstrating the early connection between the i. and private patronized performance. The 14th�. fragment "Interludium de clerico et puella," a bawdy secular play in the fabliau trad., is the first extant i. Early references suggest that Tudor audiences and theater personnel considered the i. an indoor, private entertainment performed for a small audi ence by patronized players; it is tempting to sug gest that the i. was perhaps commissioned by a patron for his players, unlike the mystery, miracle, and morality plays, which were in the hands of the parish or city clerks, or the stage-plays, which were the province of unpatronized and later profes sional troupes. By the time of Elizabeth, i . comes to refer to short plays in general. In addition to indoor performance, small casts, select audience, and certain forms and themes characterize these plays. Frequently the i. is simi lar in structure to the "morality" or "moral play," but is concerned with social, political, pedagogi cal, and religious values in the guise of theological lessons. For example, The 1. of Youth and Hickscor ner ( 1514) are frequently called moralities be cause of their innocence-sin-redemption, battle-
of-virtue-and-vice-paradigms, but Youth concerns ideological and specifically noble interests, and Hickscorner contains political satire. Humanistic is. of the first half of the 1 6th c. are commonly written in loose four stress couplets (called "cantilevered verse" by Bernard ) , though other verseforms such as rhyme royal are often used as well. Many are debates or adaptations of Fr. farce whose purposes vary from amusement to instruction. John Redford's Wit and Science, (ca. 1 530) considers education; John Rastell's Of Gen tleness and Nobility (ca. 1 530) debates the nature of true nobility, and his Nature of the Four Elements (ca. 1 5 1 8 ) discusses contemporary natural sci ence, including the doctrine of the roundness of the earth. John Heywood, the most prolific of the i. writers, composed The Play Called the Four PP (ca. 1525 ) , a farcical presentation much influenced by Chaucer. See also MORALITY PLAY; FARCE.-D. Bevington, From "Mankind" to Marlowe ( 1962 ) , Tu dorDrama and Politics ( 1 968) ; E. K. Chambers, The Med. Stage, 2 v. ( 1 903) , The Elizabethan Stage, 4 v. ( 1923 ) ; ] . E. Bernard, The Prosody of the Tudor 1. ( 1 939) ; T. W. Craik, The Tudor I. ( 1958) ; G. Wick ham, Early Eng. Stages, 3 v. ( 1959--8 1 ) , The Med. Theatre, 3d ed. ( 1 987) ; S. R. Westfall, Patrons and Performance ( 1990) . S.R.W. INTERMEDIA. See CUBISM; PERFORMANCE; VIS UAL ARTS AND POETRY; SOUND POETRY. INTERNAL RHYME (Ger. Inreim, Binnenreim; It. rimalmezzo) is the Eng. cover-term for a variety of rhyming structures which have to do not with rhyming words solely at line end but line-inter nally. Terminology is not at all standardized across prosodies, but the typology of forms includes: ( 1 ) rhyming (a) a word at line end with a word or words in the same line or (b) in another, or (2) rhyming (a) words within a line with each other but not with the end, or (b) words within one line with those in another but without ends. Types ( l a) and (2a) occur within a single line, types ( 1 b) and (2b) usually in two consecutive lines. Type ( 1 a) , Ger. Inreim or Mittelreim, Fr. rime teonineor renforcee, most often rhymes the word at line end with the word at the caesura: this is form developed in the Middle Ages known as leonine rhyme (q.v. ) and the form which in Eng. prosody is usually meant by the phrase "i. r." Type (2a), Ger. Binnenreim, most often rhymes two words inside the same line and is sometimes in Eng. called "sectional r. " ; if the rhyming in a long-line couplet is --a a b / --a a --b, splitting into short-line verse will give tail rhyme (q.v. ) . Type ( l b ) , Ger. Kettenreim or Mittenreim, Fr. rime batetee, most often rhymes the line-end word of one line with the caesural word of the next, or vice versa; Eng. prosodists sometimes call this "caesura r." Type (2b) is rare. In Fr. rime brisee, caesura rhymes with caesura and end with end; this was already devel oped in leonine verse and is treated here as "cross
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INTERPRETATION rhyme" (q.v. ) . Both Fr. and Ger. forms developed from Med. Lat.; Meyer gives a full taxonomy of types. The Fr. terms for these elaborately inter laced sound patterns were developed mainly by the Grands Rhetoriqueurs of the late 1 5th and early 1 6th cs. See AICILL.-K. Bartsch, "Der innere Reim in der hafischen Lyrik," Germania 1 2 ( 1 867) ; Meyer; Patterson; W. Vogt, "Binnenreime in der Edda," Acta Philologica Scandinavica 1 2 ( 1 938 ) ; H . Forster, "Der Binnenreim (Reimfor mel ) ," Sprachspiegel 37 ( 1 98 1 ) ; Brogan. T.v.F.B. INTERPRETATION. The entry for HERMENEU TICS treats the history of interp., with attention to the broader meanings of this term and the philo sophical issues they entail. The medieval systems of Jewish and Christian interp. are treated in the entry following the present one, INTERPRETATION, FOURFOLD METHOD OF. The present entry con cerns the interp. of poetry written in modern langs. , which did not become a central concern of crit. until the 20th c. I. TERMINOLOGY: THEORY V S . PRACTICE II. THEORETICAL ORIENTATIONS A. Intrinsic Interp. B. Intentional Interp. C. Referential Interp. D. Structuralist and Semiotic Theories E. Reader-Response Theories III. PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND DECONSTRUCTION I. TERMINOLOGY: THEORY VS. PRACTICE. Interp. begins when we have difficulty understanding a poem. "Explanation"-achieved by obtaining ex tratextual information about an allusion, for ex ample-may solve the problem. If the relevance of an allusion (q.v.) is not apparent or a metaphor (q.v.) is hard to fathom, "explication" (q.v.)-elu cidation of the meaning through analysis (q.v.) will be necessary. In Fr. erit., explication de texte includes explanation and explication. The Ger. erkliiren, to explain, is often opposed to verstehen, to understand, the former being characteristic of the natural sciences, the latter of the human sci ences. Explizieren means to explicate, in the lim ited sense; auslegen, like interpretieren, means to explicate and to interpret. As in Ger., the Eng. term "interp." includes explanation and explica tion but goes beyond them: the purpose of analysis is to understand the meaning of the poem as a whole (see THEME; MEANING, PROBLEM OF ) . Some critics (e.g. Hirsch) hold that there is, in principle, a single correct interp. of a poem, not withstanding the fact that it may have varied kinds of significance in connection with one or another situation. Critical pluralists argue that different theories oflit. can produce different interps. of a poem, all of which are legitimate (see CHICAGO SCHOOL; Pasternack 1 9 75 ) . "Syncretists" would draw together the useful parts of other theories to produce an encompassing interp. (Hermand and
Beck ) . One school of Ger. crit. has undertaken detailed studies of the evidence and logic that critics use in interp. The results are disappointing: critics' methods often prove to be haphazard and sometimes even contrary to their own theories. Attempts to create formal procedures for interp. based on principles taken from the philosophy of science, while revealing, have not proved influen tial (Gattner; Schmidt; Kindt and Schmidt; Paster nack 1979 ) . Those who look on the multiplicity of interps. not as a defect but as a necessary result of literary study, one that cannot be explained or contained by pluralism or syncretism, are often called relativists or skeptics. But these terms are products of the very philosophical and critical trads. they would call into question. Theories of interp. often seem remote from interpretive practice, which cannot be reduced mechanistically to a set of rules or a method. But arguments about interp., beginning with reasons, lead toward theoretical conclusions, and, as in philosophy, the quest for meaning becomes one for certainty, for knowledge grounded on indubi table premises. Some interpreters avoid this prob lem by rejecting theory (Knapp and Michaels ) , and some theorists seem determined t o eschew praxis at all costs, concentrating instead on the study of literary conventions and textual struc tures. But this separation of theory and philosophy from interpretive praxis cannot be sustained, as de Man ( 1 982) points out. In identifying a phrase as a metaphor, for example, we are unavoidably in terpreting it, not merely describing it, and at the same time invoking poetics (the interp. depends on a theory of figures) . This reciprocal relation between theory and praxis encompasses all as pects of interp. If we find a poem ambiguous, we can either appeal to a theory that provides meth ods of reducing ambiguity (q.v. ) , on the assump tion that it is a fault in the poem or the interp.; or we can invoke a theory that explains why poems should be ambiguous, after which we might seek ambiguity where we had not noticed it before. The history of crit. shows that methods used in inter preting one type of poetry tend to be generalized into a theory that is then applied to other genres, in the same way that theories developed in other disciplines have been used to interpret poetry. Two conceptual schemes discussed in other en tries provide a useful means of classifying theories of interp. The first is Jakobson's communication model (see SEMIOTICS, POETIC; POETIC FUNC TION ) . On a horizontal axis, left to right, an "ad dresser" sends a "message" to an "addressee." The transmission depends on three factors named on a vertical axis over "message": the "context" (a situation and its realities ) , the "code" (in this case, lang. ) , and "contact," a means of communication (e.g., speech and hearing, or print and reading ) . This diagram corresponds t o a simpler one in the entry for POETRY, THEORIES OF: a poet produces a poem for an audience, and the poem refers, in a
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INTERPRETATION general sense, to reality. Intrinsic theories of interp. derive the meaning of a poem Oakobson's "message") from its lang., isolating it from the poet, variations of audience, and other factors. In 20th-c. poetics (q.v. ) , such theories have been termed formalist or New Criti cal (see RUSSIAN FORMALISM; NEW CRITICISM ) . Other theorists emphasize the connection be tween the poem and other terms in the communi cation model; while not necessarily rejecting poet ics, their allegiances are with rhet., linguistics, semiotics, or the social sciences. Intentional theo ries concern the relation of the poem to the con sciousness of the poet or "addresser" (see INTEN TION ) . Referential theories, which emphasize the poem's connections with reality (the "context") , include traditional literary historians, biogra phers, and social and political critics, as well as psychoanalytic and myth critics (who hold that poems embody encoded references to reality) . The codes and conventions important in interp. are emphasized in structuralist and semiotic theo ries (see STRUCTURALISM; St:MIOTICS, POETIC ) ; in research these are concerned with the history of ideas. Reader-response theories show how variations in the audience ("addressee") affect interp. (see READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM ) . This classification is heuristic; for other pur poses, it could be constellated differently. Some critics and philosophers see the communication model, based on the idea that we mentally encode and decode messages in specifiable contexts, as itself an erroneous interp. ofhow lang. works. The last section of this entry treats this view. II. THEORETICAL ORIENTATIONS. In the 1 9th c., Arnold and Taine could refer to poetry as an in terp. of life; in our century, the burden of interp. has shifted from the poets to the critics. For the emergence of significant theories ofinterp., three factors seem crucial. The 20th c. inherited a high esteem for the lyric (q.v. ) from romanticism (q.v. ) . The enigmatic texts of modernist poets, the prog eny of symbolism, imagism, and surrealism (qq.v. ) , required new interpretive methods (see OBSCURITY ) . A third factor contributing to the rise of intrinsic interp. was the growing importance of modern lits. in the universities. For an under standing of Gr. , Lat., and Heb. texts, linguistic and historical knowledge had been paramount; mod ern poetry presented entirely different problems. A. Intrinsic Interp. 19th-c. philosophy had pro vided a place for poetry in the scheme of things without indicating how it should be interpreted (see TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETICS ) . Poetry, said Kant, unites "a concept with a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely ade quate"; it is peculiarly suited to express feeling and the inner life, according to Hegel, and can do so without reliance on representation of the outer world (see EXPRESSION ) . As a mode of discourse, it is opposed to rhet.; it is not heard, but overheard (Mill ) ; when produced by genius, it seems to flow
from nature (q.v. ) , not the poet's intentions (Kant). Similar ideas can be found in Coleridge. While not in agreement about what a poem is, these thinkers nevertheless all assume that it is not a "message" that the poet transmits to readers to inform or persuade them, as in ordinary dis course. For modern Fr. and It. critics, Bergson and Croce provided philosophical grounds for a con ception of poetry as a special use of lang. Drawing on these philosophical resources, a broad range of 20th�. critics developed methods of poetic analysis that are fundamentally i ntrinsic or formalist (see CONTEXTUALISM; CONCRETE UNI VERSAL ) . The assumption that the meaning of poetry is entangled in its concrete and figural lang.-so ambiguous, paradoxical, ironic, and polysemous that it is not reducible to paraphrase (q.v.)-is most obviously applicable to modern poems. Because modern poets were influenced by a poetics that advocated impersonality and dis couraged mimetic representation, early advocates of intrinsic interp. often found in practice what they held in principle: modern poems were self sufficient entities, complex verbal structures cre ating meanings that could not be recovered from the poet's biography or historical circumstances. Mallarmc,;, Valery, Rilke, the late Holderlin, Eliot, and Wallace Stevens were poets ideally suited to intrinsic interp., as were some metaphysical poets, Culteranismo (q.v. ) , Sceve, and Dante's canzoni. In order to apply intrinsic interp. to poetry written between the 1 7th and 20th cs., it was nec essary, as Cleanth Brooks said, to read "the inter vening poems . . . as one has learned to read Donne and the moderns." Confirmation of the intrinsic theory required the discovery of complexity in poems that appeared simple (Staiger) . Originally a method for the interp. of obscure lyrics, the immanent approach now became a theory that determined how all poetry should be read: poems not displaying the features it esteemed were cor respondingly devalued. The faults of intrinsic crit., which have been more than adequately exhibited, should be bal anced against its pedagogical achievements. As Richards showed, the wildly disparate interps. produced by students often resulted from an in ability to recognize the basic conventions of po etry, quite apart from the ambiguity that could be imputed to it (Empson ) . Influential textbooks led to the improvement of exegetical skills (Brooks and Warren; Kayser) , and cogent accounts of the logic underlying intrinsic interp. (Wimsatt; Burck hardt) provided later generations of critics with a theoretical awareness that helped them pinpoint the deficiencies of the theory. B. Intentional Interp. Intrinsic interp. achieved such widespread acceptance that even politically conscious critics (Bakhtin; Sartre) did not chal lenge it; conceding the autonomy (q .v.) of poetry, they devoted their critical energies to socially rele vant prose forms. Those who opposed intrinsic
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INTERPRETATION interp. in the 1950s, despite their differences, agreed on one thing: poems are not self-contained entities cut off from their authors, readers, and reality. Though distinctive in some structural or textual respects, in other respects they do not differ in kind from other forms of verbal commu nication. To separate the poet from the poem, intrinsic interp. had argued that the speaker should always be construed as a dramatized persona (q.v. ) , a poetic voice (q.v. ) , never to be identified with the flesh-and-blood author. Apart from the difficul ties that this position presents with respect to poems that are obviously personal, it glosses over important theoretical issues. Unlike organisms (see ORGANICISM ) , poems have meaning because someone intends them to mean something. To interpret them, it is helpful to consider the poet's intentions (see INTENTION) insofar as they are manifest or latent in his or her other writings and inferable from biographical study. From this premise, intentional theorists diverge along several lines. Philosophers have distin guished nine meanings of "intention," three of which are important here. Some critics use the word in its everyday sense but add to it a concept from phenomenology: meaning as such is inten tional (Hirsch; Juhl) . A poem therefore means what the poet intended it to mean, in general and in every particular, though we are unlikely ever to know exactly what that meaning was. In a more fully phenomenological sense, intentionality is not just a matter of conceptual meaning; it is that property of consciousness whereby objects are constituted in all their experiential dimensions. Interp. from this point of view is a matter of assimi lating all of a poet's writings in order to replicate his or her mode of experiencing the world-sen sory and emotional as well as intellectual and voli tional. In intrinsic crit., image (q.v. ) and idea are the parts that constitute the unity (q.v. ) of the poem; for "critics of consciousness," the poet's mind is the unity to be interpreted, and images taken from various poems become parts used to reconstitute that whole (see GENEVA SCHOOL) . C. Referential Interp. When the relationship between the poet and the poem is the focus of interp., intention and meaning may become nearly synonymous. But the latter terms are often opposed to each other in ordinary usage. Like other mortals, poets may intend to conceal facts (representing as a general situation some incident that has a specific biographical basis) and may unintentionally convey meanings that they do not try to communicate. Referential or mimetic theo ries emphasize the importance of concrete cir cumstances in determining what a poem means. They recover from history and biography the facts or situations to which poems directly or indirectly refer. In a similar manner, we interpret what friends say in light of what we know of them; and to understand other cultures, we must know what -
they assume about the world as well as what they "intend" to say about it. To interpret a poem from the past, we must understand not just its words but its pastness; its distance from us becomes part of its meaning. To these traditional methods of interp. the 20th c. has added others based on the assumption that references to reality in lit. can themselves be en coded. Todorov refers to these as symbolic or "finalist" theories; they are exemplified in the entries for ARCHETYPE, MYTH, and PSYCHOLOGI CAL CRITICISM. He includes Marxist interps. in this category, but their interpretive decoding usu ally connects poetry to the facts of history rather than to an individual or transhistorical psyche (see MARXIST CRITICISM) . Jameson bridges the gap between psyche and history by positing a "political unconsciousness" that contains an imaginary rep lication of one's socioeconomic circumstances. The success of referential theories is insepara ble from their weakness (see HISTORICISM ) . The wholeness of meaning they reconstruct is that of a life, an epoch of history, or a racial unconscious; poems are merely parts useful in creating these wholes. That a poem is a product of its time is undeniably true; but it is easier to posit connec tions between the two than to confirm or refute them. Rather than providing a factual basis for interpretive inference, historiography produces different histories, which are themselves interps.; the same is true of biography and psychology. Some recent literary critics have tried to resolve this dilemma by treating all the events and writing of a period as a "social text." From this point of view, history is not the cause or source oflit.; acts and texts are both embodiments of cultural pow ers and practices (Greenblatt; Pechter) . Alterna tively, one may find conceptual configurations emerging in poetry before they are registered else where in culture (Fineman ) . D. Structuralist and Semiotic Theories. In the traditional opposition of intrinsic to extrinsic in terp. and of language-bound meanings to facts independent of linguistic embodiment, what is lacking is attention to the mediating terms through which these antitheses interact: the con ventions and codes that bind poet, poem, lang., and reality together in shared systems of significa tion. An emphasis on the distinctive codes of poetry is characteristic of Rus. Formalism and struc turalism (qq.v. ) . Shklovskij conceived them as purely formal structures: "The purpose of the new form is not to express new content, but to change an old form which has lost its aesthetic quality." Jakobson isolated the "poetic function" (q.v.) in phonetic, syntactic, and grammatical features (see EQUIVALENCE) . Like the formalists, some struc turalists and poststructuralists have argued that the purpose of literary study should not be to produce still more interps. but "to advance one's understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse" (Culler) .
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INTERPRETATION Semioticians argue that social and cultural codes are as important as linguistic and literary conventions in the interp. of poetry. Challenging traditional methods of extracting a theme from a poem, J. Mukarovsky held that all of its features, including sound, are endowed with meaning, and that poetry refers not to reality as such, but to the "total context of so-called social phenomena, for example, philosophy, politics, religion, econom ics, and so on." The Prague School (q.v.) struc turalists found in poems a dialectical tension be tween the poet and others of his era; between inherited and innovative forms; between lit. and society. Interp. thus becomes an inclusive prC!ject that moves back and forth between text and cul ture, correlating the semiotic configurations of the text with the cultural contexts in which they take on one or another significance. In its final phase, this school began to explore the ways in which interp. depends upon the assumptions, habits, and expectations of readers in different historical periods (see Galan) . E. Reader-response Theories. Phenomenological critics, structuralists, and semioticians all hold that a poem exists as an object ofinterp. only when it is read; in this sense they recognize the impor tance ofthe reader. But they are usually interested in finding what remains constant in varied in stances of interp. rather than in determining why these vary. Riffaterre, for example, criticized Jakobson and Levi-Strauss for disregarding the reader when identifYing patterns in poetry, but he did not go on to argue that readers could legiti mately find different meanings in poems. His se miotic approach assumes that there is only one valid interp. of a poem, that it involves not "mean ing" (reference to reality) but "significance" (se mantic coherence within the poem ) , and that all deviations from clear meaning are generated by a commonplace or cliche that serves as the poem's matrix. "All of the reader's possible reactions to the text" constitute for him the audience; this inclusiveness insulates his theory from individual and historical differences. Reader-response (q.v.) critics explore the ways in which interp. depends upon the audience. Their answers to the following questions are cru cial: (a) Who is the reader? For structuralists and semioticians, the reader is anyone who has ac quired "competence" in understanding literary codes and conventions. From an empirical point of view, however, the reader is a particular person who may produce a unique interp., or simply disregard the exegetical labors undertaken by in terpreters to el�oy the poem (see TASTE ) . Other critics posit an ideal reader or the kind of reader implied by the text as the appropriate interpreter of its content. (b) To what extent does the poem exercise control over the interp.? The pheno menologist's assertion that a text exists only as it is perceived and understood can correct a naive belief that the meaning lies "in" the words, inde-
pendent of interp., but it can also lead to the conclusion that meaning is in the reader, inde pendent of any corrigible experience of words. Interps. that cannot plausibly be related to the words of a poem may serve as evidence for this conclusion, but it has had little effect on the prac tices of interpretive communities, which produce tacit (and evolving) criteria governing how read ings will be justified. (c) What is "interp."? As Ricoeur and Ray point out, critics at one extreme hold that it is an act, the process of experiencing a text, which may cancel as many meanings as it creates (Fish) ; at the other extreme is the tradi tional view that the purpose of interp. is to recon stitute a stable meaning after the experience of reading. Jauss tries to accommodate these differences in his inclusive model of reader response. In his view response comprises three phases: understanding (the act of reading ) , interp. (reflective constitu tion of meaning) , and application (relating the interp. to other knowledge and experience) . He distinguishes the Wirkung or effect of a poem, which the structure of the text lays out for the reader, from its Rezeption or reception, the actuali zation of its meaning conditioned by the reader's social and personal existence. Despite their differ ences, readers from a particular period have much in common. The history of literary recep tion shows that poems survive because they re main open to varied interps. governed by needs and expectations that could not have been imag ined when they were written. Other critics would add that interp. can thus be seen as a product of "interpretive communities," institutional prac tices, and social structures that will determine whether or not an innovative reading is acceptable (Fish; Kermode) . III. PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND DECON STRUCTION. The shift from intrinsic interp. to theories based on the communication model cor responded to a shift in interest from lyric poetry to narrative modes in literary study. Consideration of how literary codes, reality, and readers determine the meaning of texts seemed to provide a sound basis for interp. of lit. within a general theory of communication (e.g.Jakobson's ) ; while disagree ments about interp. persisted, it was at least pos sible to point out their sources within the frame work of the model. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the model itself was called into ques tion-either because it failed to account for spe cific features of literary lang. or because of its philosophical presuppositions. If poets intend to convey clear messages, they are remarkably unsuccessful in doing so; the vari ety of interps. elicited by their works suggests that they have other aims. Bloom holds that their in tention is to attain literary immortality and that their poems are misinterpretations of earlier po ems, created to clear a space for their own mean ings in the trad. (see INFLUENCE ) . In a similar
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INTERPRETATION manner, the "strong" reader or critic proposes a new interp. of a poem to assert priority over other readers and, indeed, over the poem itself. The assumption that literary lang. is a deviation from ordinary lang., one in which conventions (the use of figures and sound effects) add ambi guity and pleasure to messages that could be trans mitted without them, is likewise questionable. In trinsic critics held that poetry unites meaning (codes) and being (reference ) ; de Man argued that allegory reveals the gap between the two, and that rhet. cannot be contained within the tidy codes oflinguistics and semiotics (see TWENTIETH CENTURY POETICS, sect. II) . Despite their differ ences, intrinsic and subsequent critics agree that poets explore the relationship between lang. and reference, rather than assuming it to be unprob lematic. The communication model presupposes that, on the basis of reliable knowledge about inten tions, history, literary conventions, and lang., we can elucidate the less evident meanings contained in poems. But that purportedly reliable knowl edge is itseifan interp., based on philosophical and linguistic assumptions that are far from certain (see HERMENEUTICS, sect. IV) . Interp. is always caught in the hermeneutic circle: rather than using facts to determine meaning, we cannot help but let our anticipations of meaning determine what "facts" (themselves prior interps. ) we will select to support it (see Fish 1980 ) . Linguists, philosophers, and critics who employ the communication model treat speech as the typical instance of lang. use. In a particular con text, at a certain moment, someone says something for a specifiable purpose. When this model is applied to written poetry, interp. becomes a mat ter of recovering information we lack about the poet, the audience, and a unique moment of in scription. Writing is seen as an impoverished ver sion of speech, since it has been torn from a presence that made it meaningful. It is possible, however, to construe writing as a distinct method of creating meaning, in which case interp. be comes a very different activity. As Ricoeur says, writing severs lang. from the writer and "opens it to an indefinite range of po tential readers in an indeterminate time." An in terp. that would confine the meaning of a poem to the historical moment of its creation is at odds with the poet's intentions, and denial that poems written in earlier centuries have meaning in our world is at odds with our desires. If, in the case of writing, the "context" and "addressee" of the com munication model continually change, interp. can not be invariant. The different interps. of a poem we inherit from the past may themselves become part of its meaning for us Gauss) . For deconstruction (q.v. ) , the instability of meaning apparent in the case of writing results not just from the text's survival in changing circum stances but from the character of lang. itself. Phi-
losophers have argued that problems of interp. result from literary uses of lang. (e.g. metaphor and polysemy) that could be eliminated in a sys tematic literalism. Deconstructive critics reply that philosophers also make use of these "supple mentary" aspects of lang. in building systems that themselves contain paradoxes and contradictions. Literary lang. and the interpretive difficulties it poses can be seen as characteristic of lang. in general. As a self-reflexive unfolding of the figural and rhetorical constituents of meaning, poetry explores and exemplifies the impossibility of at taining a univocal interp. of words and the world. From this point of view, the critic's task is to discover the patterns underlying alternative read ings of a poem and the points at which they inter sect to create an impasse or dilemma. By discovering a diversity of interpretive possi bilities in the lang. of poetry, deconstruction con fers on the poetic text a richness denied it in intentionalist, referential, structuralist, and reader response theories. Miller suggests that the impos sibility of univocal interp. is implied in poems that he interprets-a paradoxical conclusion that can only be as correct as his interp. Many critics admit or assert that there is no single correct interp. of a poem; yet when themselves engaged in interp., they very often urge the superiority of theirs; and almost always cannot help but imply that the poem has one range of meanings rather than another, referring to its formal features to substan tiate their arguments. Thus theory and praxis, while interdependent, remain dialectically at odds with each other in the critical acts of reading and writing. See also CRITICISM; POETRY, THEORIES OF; THEORY; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETICS, American and British. 1 . A. Richards, Practical Crit. ( 1929 ) ; Brooks; Empson; W. K. Wimsatt,Jr., The Verbal /con ( 1 954) ; E. Staiger, Die Kunst der Interp. ( 1 95 5 ) ; Wellek and Warren; M. C. Beardsley, Aesthetics ( 1958) ; A. Child, Interp.: A General Theory ( 1965 ) ; S. Sontag , . Against Interp. ( 1 966) ; Immanente Asthetik-As thetische &jlexion, ed. W. Iser ( 1966) ;Jakobson; E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interp. ( 1 967) , The Aims of Interp. ( 1 976) ; symposium on Hirsch 1967 in Genre 1 ,3 ( 1968) , with his reply in 2 , 1 ; S. Fish, Surprised by Sin (1972 ) , Is There a Text in This Class ? ( 1980) ; H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence ( 1 973) ; H. Gattner, Logik der Interp. (1973) ; ]. Hermand and E. T. Beck, Interpretive Synthesis ( 1 975 ) ; G. Pasternack, Theoriebildung in der Literaturwiss. ( 1 975) , Interp. ( 1979) ; L. Pollmann, "Lyrikinterp. heute," Sprachen der Lyrik, ed. E. Kohler ( 1 975) ; S. ]. Schmidt, Literaturwiss. als argumentierende Wiss. ( 1 975) ; W. Kindt and S. ]. Schmidt, Interpre tationsanalysen (1976 ) ; ]. A. Coulter, The Literary Microcosm ( 1 976)-Neoplatonic theories of in terp.;]. Mukarovsky, "Art as Semiotic Fact," Semi otics of Art, ed. 1. R. Titunik et al. ( 1 976) ; P. Ri coeur, Interp. Theory ( 1976) ; ]. W. Meiland, "Interp. as a Cognitive Discipline," P&L 2 ( 1 977) ;
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INTERPRETATION, FOURFOLD METHOD OF W. Kayser, Das Sprachliche Kunstwerk, 1 8th ed. ( 1 978 ) ; M. Riffaterre, Semiotics ofPoetry ( 1 9 78 ) ; T. Todorov, Symbolism and Interp. ( 1978 ) ; F. Ker mode, The Genesis of Secrecy ( 1979) , The Classic ( 1 983) ; H. Bloom et aI., Deconstruction and Crit. ( 1 979) ; P. de Man, Allegories of Reading ( 1 979) , Intro. to Jauss (below) ; S. Greenblatt, Ren. Self Fashioning ( 1980 ) ; P. D. Juhl, Interp. ( 1980) ; Text und Applikation, ed. M. Fuhrmann et al. ( 1 98 1 ) ;]. Culler, "Beyond Interp.," The Pursuit of Signs ( 1981 ) ; F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious ( 1981 ) ; Fowler; H. R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception ( 1982 ) , Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics ( 1 98 2 ) ; S. Knapp and W. B. Michaels, "Against Theory," CritI8 ( 1 982) ; de Man; K. Muel ler-Vollmer, "Zur Problematik des Interpretation sbegriffs," Erkennen und Deuten, ed. M. Woodman see et al. ( 1 983) , and "Understanding and Interp.," Lit. Crit. and Philosophy, ed. J. P. Strelka ( 1 983) ; W E. Rogers, The Three Genres and the Interp. of Lyric ( 1 983) ; S. Schmidt, "Selected Bibl. on Interp. ( 1970-1982 ) ," Poetics 12 ( 1 98 3 ) ; F. Galan, Historic Structures ( 1 984) ; W Ray, Literary Meaning ( 1984 ) ; ] . H. Miller, The Linguistic Moment ( 1985) ;]. Fine man, Shakespeare's Perjured E,)e ( 1 98 6 ) ; E. Schauber and E. Spolsky, The Bounds of Interp.: Linguistic Theory and Literary Text ( 1 98 6 ) ; E. Pechter, "The New Historicism and Its Discon tents," PMLA 1 02 ( 1987) ; A. Barnes, On Interp. : A Critical Analysis ( 1988) ; .J. M. Ellis, Against Decon struction ( 1 989); P. B. Armstrong, Conflicting Read ings: Variety and Validity in Interp. ( 1990 ) ; S. Mail loux, "Interp.," Critical Termsfor Literary Study, ed. F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin ( 1 990) ; U. Eco, WM. The Limits of Interp. ( 1 990) . INTERPRETATION, FOU RFOLD METHOD OF. This phrase, or any of a number of variations on it, refers to the classical system of biblical interp. dominant in the Middle Ages and Ren., and derived from Patristic theorizing on and sys tematizing of biblical hermeneutics (see HERM E NEUTICS ) . The common fourfold system-the lit eral (historical) level, the allegorical (typological or figural) level, the tropological (moral) level, and the anagogical (eschatological) level-was not widely developed among Christian exegetes until the 1 2th c.; a similar yet different fourfold hermeneutic was first articulated among Jews in the late 1 3th c. One of the best known examples, in the letter to Can Grande that is prefixed to the Paradiso and was once attributed to Dante, illus trates the fourfold method with respect to the Israelite exodus from Egypt: on the literal level, the Hebrews celebrated Passover and left Egypt; allegorically, members of the Church are re deemed through Jesus; tropologically, Christians are transformed from sinfulness to grace; anagogi cally, the soul passes from material bondage to eternal existence. At no time was the formula slavishly applied, nor does it suit all or even most biblical verses, and not all theories of biblical -
interp. in either the Patristic or later periods were classified in a fourfold way. A more fundamental bipartite division contrasts literal and spiritual (or fuller ["plenior"] ) mean ing, both of which were themselves subdivided variously. The basic argument in the NT for the genuineness ofJesus' claim to divinity was based on the notion of a deeper meaning in the OT to be discovered in the fullness of time. Interp. of a highly regarded text was also allegorized to pre serve its currency. Classical Judaism posited an oral trad. that interpreted written scripture through the hermeneutic of midrash to derive contemp. law and express current values. Simi larly, Hellenistic scholars in Alexandria developed a systematic exegesis of Homer in order to keep the CI. epics up to date. Alexandria, carrying on this pagan and Rabbinic trad., esp. in Philo (d. ca. 54 A.D. ) , produced a lively school of biblical exe gesis which was Christianized largely by Origen of Alexandria (d. 254) . This school came to empha size the spiritual or allegorical sense, while the interpretive school of Antioch tended to stress philologically determined meaning. Allegory (q.v.) within the NT is usually typological or fig ural, in which the actions and events of the OT are seen to foreshadow true events in the NT and in the future, a kind of "horizontal" allegory. Alle gory on the Bible, by contrast, is more frequently "vertical," in which one, two, three, or four levels are found. However, a strict distinction between the two types of allegory is not always possible. Here we can only briefly trace the devel. of biblical exegesis. CI. Rabbinic interp. employed a network of hermeneutic techniques-midrash for discovering divine revelation in scripture. Le gal midrash, for practical reasons, had to arrive at a single authoritative interp., but homiletical mid rash could proliferate alternate meanings. The Jewish sect at the Dead Sea (2d c. B.c.-1st c. A.D. ) and the later Rabbis explained prophetic and other biblical texts according to a contemp. eso teric meaning as well as a historical one. Such esoteric interp. harks back to Joseph's interpret ing of his dream and Daniel's deciphering of the writing on the wall in the Bible. Allegorical interp. was applied early amongJews and then Christians to the Song of Songs, ostensibly personal love poetry but also interpreted as expressions of devo tion between God and Israel or God and the Church. Indeed, Paul and the early Church Fathers un derstood the NT to represent a fulfillment of the figures and "types" of the OT. A "type" is a charac ter, institution, or concept that is taken symboli cally. Types of the OT, in this view, prefigure the "antitypes" of the NT that realize or replace them. For example, the paschal lamb offering of Exodus 1 2 , of which no bone was to be broken, prefigures the divine sacrifice of Jesus on the cross; and the tabernacle of God in the Sinai wilderness "be comes" the incarnation of God in Jesus. Jewish
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INTERTEXTUALIlY midrash may generally be distinguished from Christian typological interp. by the former's exe getical dependence on the actual (Heb.) lang. of its scriptural base. Origen had a threefold system-somatic, psy chic, and pneumatic-based on Hebraic and Gr. psychology. Augustine in his De doctrina christiana provided the canonical justification to the high Middle Ages for the use of allegorical methods, even though his own system usually refers to the way Jesus Himself taught rather than to current biblical exegesis. He did distinguish, however, the spiritual from the literal sense, and he provided an aesthetic of allegory in which the beauty of figurative and obscure biblical lang. is praised. Gregory the Great (d. 604 ) , esp. in his Homilies on Ezechial and Moralia (a moralized commentary on Job) , proposed a threefold method which become more influential than Augustine's in med. biblical allegorizing. Various medieval schools of exegesis flourished and carried on the trad.: the Ir. Monastic School, the Benedictines, the School of Laon, the Vic torine School, the school of Scholastic exegesis, and, above all, from the 1 2th c. on, a "scientific" school, culminating in Nicholas of Lyra of the 1 4th c., who unified all the exegetical trads. for sub sequent Christianity. Among Jews, the 1 2th c. Franco-German school of Rashi (Rabbi Solomon Itzhaki) distinguished contextual ("peshat") from rabbinic exegetical ("derash") meaning. Sp. Jew ish exegetes developed allegory to bring scripture into congruence with rational or philosophical truth; in the 1 3th c., they adopted mystical doc trines as well. Accordingly, in 1 29 1 , Bahya ben Asher employed a fourfold system ofinterp. which soon became known as "pardes" (Heb. for "or chard")-an acronym for "peshat" (contextual, philological level) , "remez" ( rational or philo sophical level) , "derash" (rabbinic, midrashic) , and "sod" (mystical, kabbalistic ) . I n modern literary theory, the medieval and Ren. use of the so-called fourfold system of interp. in lit. has been much debated. Is there a "four fold" meaning to the Romance of the Rose, or in Chaucer or Chretien de Troyes, and so on? Some have thought so. That biblical symbolism and exe gesis had influence on medieval and Ren. works is beyond doubt, but the degree and extent of that influence is difficult to establish. Typological and allegorical levels of meaning have been plausibly attributed to such explicitly Christian poets as M ilton, Herbert, and Blake. In the 20th c., ty pological models of crit. have been proposed in particular by Protestant biblicists and by Northrop Frye. See also ALLEGORY; FIGURATION; HEBRAISM; HERMENEUTICS; INTERPRETATION; MEDIEVAL PO ETICS. F. W. Farrar, Hist. ofInterp. ( 1 886) ;J. Tate, "Plato and Allegorical Interp.," ClassQ23-24 ( 1929-30) , "On the Hist. of Allegorism," ClassQ28 ( 1934) ; B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2d
ed. ( 1 952) ; G. W. H. Lampe and K.J. Woollcombe, nssays on Typology ( 1957 ) ; E. Auerbach, "Figura," Scenes from the Drama of European Lit. ( 1959 ) ; H. de Lubac, Exegese midievale, 4 v. ( 1 959-64) ; Critical Approaches to Med. Lit., ed. D. Bethurum ( 1 960) ; D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer ( 1 962) ; H . Hailperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars ( 1 963) ; Cambridge Hist. of the Bible, ed. P. R. Ack royd et aI., 3 v. ( 1963-69)-esp. 2.155-279; R. Tuve, Allegorical Imagery ( 1 966) ; H. R. Jauss, Ent stehung und Strukturwandel der allegorischen Dich tung (1968 ) ; D. C. Allen, Mysteriously Meant ( 1970) ; Anagogic Qualities of Lit., ed. J. Strelka, spec. iss. of YCC 4 ( 1 97 1 ) ;J. Pepin, Dante et la trad. de l 'ailligorie ( 1 97 1 ) ; M. W. Bloomfield, "Allegory as Interp.," NLH 3 ( 1 971-72) ; S. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the Am. Self ( 1 975) ; Literary Uses of Typology, ed. E. Miner ( 1 977) ; G. Marshall, The Tempering of Allegory ( 1 982) ; M. Saperstein, Decod ing the Rabbis ( 1 982) ; F. Talmage, "Apples of Gold," Jewish Spirituality from the Bible through the Middle Ages, ed. A. Green ( 1 986) ; A Guide to Con temp. Hermeneutics, ed. D. K. McKim ( 1 986) ; Mikra, ed. M. J. Mulder ( 1 988) ; J. Saly, Dante's Paradiso: An Interp. of the Anagogical Meaning ( 1 989) ; CHLC, 85 ff.; U. Eco, "Two Models of Interp.," The Limits of Interp. ( 1 990) . M.W.B.; E.L.G. INTERTEXTUALITY refers to those conditions of textuality (q.v.) which affect and describe the re lations between texts, and in most respects is syn onymous with textuality. It originates in the crisis of representation and the absent origin that would guarantee meaning, centrality, and reference. Without an ultimate referent that would make possible the self-presence and meaning of a text, texts are by definition fragments in open and end less relations with all other texts. In traditional models of influence (q .v. ) , a text comes to rest on a prior text which functions as a stable source which is retrieved and made present by a study of allusion (q.v. ) , quotation, and refer ence. Relations between texts are thus straightfor ward and determinate. Their determinacy is the result of five premises of traditional crit.: ( 1 ) that lang. has the capacity to create stable meaning; (2) that such meaning exists within the confines of form; (3) that the artist is in control of meaning; (4) that a work has closure (q.v. ) , its tensions, ambiguities, and ironies coming to a point of reso lution; and (5) that crit. is an ancillary activity, separate from lit. These premises tend toward totality (either in the mode of "the work itself' [see AUTONOMY; NEW CRITICISM ] or Frye's mode of the "total form of lit." [see MYTH CRITICISM ] ) , and the concepts of stable meaning and the artist's control of it are basic to the humanistic trad. of learning, which affirms and emphasizes the no tions of human self and human will. In the late 1 950s and '60s, however, as a result ofthe influx of Fr. crit. into America, the premises
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INTERTEXTUALI1Y upon which the study of lit. had been carried out changed dramatically, and the conceptual ap proach to literary relations underwent an equally radical transformation. With structuralism (q.v.) and poststructuralism (see DECONSTRUCTION ) , the concept of "influence" was discarded in favor of the concept of "i." Seven major premises now come into play: ( l ) Lang. is not a transparent medium of thought or a tool in the service of communication; it is arbitrary and dense, and its very excessiveness leads to an infinite number of interps. ( 2 ) Texts are fragments, without closure or resolution. No text is self-sufficient; each text is fraught with explicit or invisible quotation marks that dispel the illusion of its autonomy and refer it endlessly to other texts-like the entries in this Encyclopedia, referring parenthetically to other ref erences, except that there is no way to contain all possible references in any encyclopedic "whole." (3) Given the above, no writer can ever be in control of the meaning of the text. I. does away with the concept of "author" in its conventional meaning (authority, property, intention) , sup planting it with the concepts of "author-function" (Foucault) or "subject" (Lacan) . (4) Meaning is supplanted by the notion of "signification" (a sign is composed of signifier and signified, but in post structuralist thinking the signified is lost, leaving the signifier in search of a referent it can never find ) . Poststructuralism thus discards the human istic version of human beings as creators of mean ing, and proposes them instead as creatures (ef fects) of lang. (5) Crit. is no longer an ancillary activity, but is now considered part of the poem, creative of its meaning or signification. In formal ism and humanism, the task of crit. is "explica tion" (q.v. ) , which distinguishes the reading sub ject from the literary object and defines lit. as a discipline and a mode of knowledge. I. stands in direct opposition to explication, with its explicit distinction between primary and secondary texts, and instead opens up literary, critical, and indeed many other texts to illimitable relations. (6) Dis ciplinary boundaries are erased: such fields as philosophy and psychoanalysis are all considered discursive practices and ultimately inseparable from lit. ( 7 ) Finally, poststructuralist crit. defies the rules of reason and identity and suggests in stead the idea of contradiction. "Contradiction," says Adorno, "indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived." Adorno's "contradiction" is very close to Derrida's " differance." I. is marked by two key features: the absence of an origin and the function of randomness. Tradi tional ("Iogocentric") critics consider lit. as a privi leged mode of communication, expressive of hu man nature in its highest form. For these critics a transcendent referent (the "transcendental signi fied") organizes all lang. and experience, making possible a "self' which expresses itself in terms of "voice" (q.v. ) . Poststructuralist crit. "steals" that
ultimate referent. In the place of a privileged origin it finds a trace of something prior, which is lang. (writing) itself. Derrida speaks of the ab sence of a center or origin which would "arrest and ground the play of substitutions" because the sign which replaces the center "supplements" it and thus underscores its lack. Diffiranceis the name for this unnamable absence of origin and for the "chain of differing and deferring substitutions" which it unleashes. In this respect textuality is precisely synonymous with i., in that it signals the impossibility of boundaries or borderlines that would adequately frame a "work" and its "mean ing," and points instead to writing's "dissemina tion." Under these conditions, there could be no metalanguage, no privileged point that would make reference and knowledge possible, that would not "always already" be implicated in the tropological relations it would seek to describe. This submis sion to the legislature of lang. transforms the na ture of intertextual relations and thereby the rela tions between crit. and lit. In the absence of an origin that would guarantee presence, meaning, and voice, there can be no originals-only copies. And without a univocal and transcendental refer ent, all texts refer to one another-translate one another-in infinite and utterly random ways. Representation and reference, the mainstays of traditional humanism, underwrite a patriarchal "Iogocentric" order (Derrida terms it "phallogo centric") in which a work or a referent functions as a stabilizing ("seminal") source and provides the authority of meaning. Explicit in i. is the dismantling ("dissemination") of paternity. Barthes claims that "there is no father-author"; Derrida argues that "writing is an orphan." I. underwrites a critique of logocentrism and of patriarchy, sub stituting for patriarchal self-presence the feminiz ing "otherness" of intertextual "lapses." These lapses which signal lost and irrecuper able meaning have altered the very shape of the "book." Notable as an effect of i. is the number of quotation marks deployed across texts, indicating "other" or alien contexts in which the words in question might be understood. The book, as a concept and as an entity, has undergone a similar transformation. While it still appears to us as words between two covers, the traditional rules by which prefaces functioned as openings, introduc tions introduced, and afterwords or epilogues closed are often missing. A preface may be termed a "pre-text" or "prefatory material"; a conclusion may well be a "postscript" or an "afterword" (or both, in sequence) ; "interchapters" or "intersti ces" point to the fragile relations between parts; and footnotes will sometimes constitute a parallel text, as in Derrida's "Living On . Borderlines," where the essay is entitled "Living On" and the long footnote threading its way through the essay is entitled "Borderlines." The latter does not func tion in submission to or as a subtitle to the former, so even the punctuation between them for routine
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INTONATION reference becomes problematic. All of these strategies point to the impossibility of a text's wholeness or self-presence, and to the changed relations i. has wrought between reading and writ ing. See now ALLUSION; DECONSTRUCTION; OR GANICISM; STRUCTURALISM, Moscow-Tartu School; TEXTUALITY. J. Derrida, De la grammatologie ( 1 967, tr. 1976) with essential preface by G. Spivak, "Signature, Event, Context," Marges de la philosophie ( 1 972) , La Dissemination ( 1 972) , Glas ( 1 974, 198 1 , tr. 1 986) , "Living On . Borderlines," Deconstruction and Crit. , ed. H. Bloom ( 1 979) ; J. Kristeva, Semeiotike ( 1 969) , La Revolution du langage poetique ( 1 974, tr. 1984) ; Poetique 27 ( 1 976)-spec. iss. on i . ; M. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry ( 1978) , Text Production (tr. 1 983 ) , Fictional Truth ( 1990 ) ; Tex tual Strategies, ed. J. Harari ( 1979)-excellent in tro., bib!.; J. Culler, "Presupposition and I.," The Pursuit of Signs ( 1 98 1 ) , On Deconstruction ( 1 98 2 ) ; Untying the Text, ed. R . Young ( 1 981 ) ; The Question of Textuality, ed. W. Spanos and P. Bove ( 1 98 2 ) ; Displacement, ed. M. Krupnick ( 1 983 ) ; The Anxiety of Anticipation, spec. iss. of YFS 66 ( 1 984) ; G. Atkins and M. Johnson, Writing and Reading Differ ently ( 1 985) ; G.Jay and D. Miller, After Strange Texts ( 1 985) ; Intertextualitiit: Formen, Funktionen, anglis tische Fallstudien, ed. U . Broich et a!. ( 1985 ) ; A. McHoul and D . Wills, "The Late (r) Barthes: Con stituting Fragmenting Subjects," Boundary 2 1 4, 1-2 ( 1 985-86) ; C. Chase, Decomposing Figures ( 1 986) ; M. Nyquist, "Textual Overlapping and Dalilah's Harlot-Lap," Literary Theory / Renais sance Texts, ed. P. Parker and D. Quint ( 1 986)-on textual "lapses"; S. Weber, Demarcating the Disci plines, ed., ( 1 986) , Institution and Interp. ( 1 987) ; R. Dasenbrock, "Accounting for the Changing Certainties of Interpretive Communities," MLN 101 ( 1 986) ; Poems in Their Place: The I. and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. N. Fraistat ( 1 986) ; C. Nor ris, Derrida ( 1 987) ; R. Goodkin, "Proust and Home(r) : An Avuncular Intertext," MLN 104 ( 1 989) ; Autour de Racine: Studies in I., spec. iss. of YFS 76 ( 1989 ) ; I. and Con temp. Am. Fiction, ed. P. O'Donnell and R. Davis ( 1 989)-esp T. Morgan, "The Space of I."; I., Allusion, and Quotation: An Internat. Bibl. of Crit. Studies, ed. U. J. Hebel ( 1 989) ; G. Jay, "Paul de Man: Being in Question," A merica the Scrivener ( 1 990) ; I.: Theories and Prac tices, ed. M . Worton and J. Still ( 1 990) ; Influence and I. in Lit. Hist., ed. J. Clayton and E. Rothstein H.R.E. ( 1 99 1 ) ; I., ed. H. F. Plett ( 1 99 1 ) . INTONATION. See PITCH; ACCENT; DURATION. INTUITION. I. IN AESTHETICS AND POETICS II. IN POETRY I. IN AESTHETICS AND POETICS. The term "i." owes its importance in 20th-c. poetics to Benedetto Croce's use ofit in his Aesthetic as Science
of Expression and General Linguistic ( 1 902, tr. D. Ainslie, 2d ed., 1922) , where he identifies it with expression (q .v. ) . Rejecting as naive the popular view of i. as a completely subjective phase of the cognitive process, Croce lays down the warning: "it is impossible to distinguish i. from expression in this cognitive process. The one appears with the other at the same instant, because they are not two, but one." Also: "to intuit is to express; and nothing else (nothing more but nothing less) than to express" (Ainslie 8-1 1 ) . In 1915, Croce acknow ledged that his own dissatisfaction with his 1902 account of i. had led to its "conversion" into the "further concept of pure or lyrical i." Under the influence of Giovanni Gentile (Philosophy ofArt, tr. G. Gullace, 1972) as well as Vico and Hegel, Croce had delivered his Heidelberg lecture in 1908 on "Pure I. and the Lyrical Character of Art," where the term's meaning deepens to include the "suc cessful union of a poetic image with an emotion." By the time he is done, Croce has given an aesthetic theory of i. which is a theory of expres sion and of imagination (q.v.) as well. By identiry ing it with expression and imagination, Croce was able to give his use of i. a measure of variety and novelty it probably could not have sustained on its own. Croce nearly makes us forget that, before Kant took it up with fresh insight, the concept had already had a long history in Med. Lat. as intuitus, and an even longer history in its original Gr. form, nous. It was C. S. Peirce who pointed out that the Lat. term intuitus-which Kant puts in parentheses after the Ger. equivalent, An scha uung--first oc curs as a technical term in St. Anselm's Monolo gium ( 1 1 th c.; tr. S. N. Deane 1903). Anselm, Peirce explains, had tried to draw a clear distinc tion between seeing things through a glass darkly, (per speculum) and knowing them "face to face," calling the former speculation and the latter intui tion. In a famous passage of the Monologium, An selm says: "to the supreme Spirit, expressing [ di cere] and beholding through conception [ cogitando intueri] , as it were, are the same,just as the expres sion of our human mind is nothing but the i. ofthe thinker." Some students of Pound's Cantos, com menting on the so-called St. Anselm canto ( 1 0 5 ) , have suggested that the entire Monologium may be read as an adumbration of what Eliot called the "objective correlative" (q.v. ) . I n the Proslogium, St. Anselm would later at tempt to show that, in the concept of God intuited through Christian faith, enough is contained to "prove" discursively that anything so conceived must not only be thinkable but also exist. Pressing his argument (against the fool who has said in his heart "there is no God" ) , Anselm compares hu man i. of God with a painter's i. of a painting he has actually painted, as contrasted with his i. of the same before he has painted it. This so-called onto logical "proof' of God's existence, later advanced by Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, prompted many later critics to attack Anselm. And foremost
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INTUITION among them has been Immanuel Kant. I. lies at the heart of Kant's entire intellectual paradigm. In his first critique, the Critique of Pure Reason ( 1 78 1 ) , Kant is at pains to distinguish two kinds of i.: first, a receptive kind, which enables the understanding ( Verstand) to take in phenomenal sensations in the a priori forms of space and time, and as related to one another causally; and second, a non receptive kind, which Kant does not hesitate to characterize as a "productive imagination." It provides the understanding with a contents of supersensory things-in-themselves, not knowable through sensory experience. A proper name for it, says Kant, is "intellectual i." The chief supersen sory ideas it provides are soul, world, and God. However grand their suggestiveness, those ideas have no empirical validity: they belong entirely to intellectual i . ; the understanding cannot "prove" to itself whether they exist or not. In Kant's second critique, the Critique ofPractical Reason ( 1 788) , the entire context of his argument derives from one of the three supersensory ideas provided by intellectual i., namely the soul or human psyche. As the subjectivity of reason, the soul is made "aware" of itself not in the process of trying to know itself, but in that of being or willing itself. Kant's critique shows that, for the practical reason, the will can in no sense be a phenomenon related by laws of necessity to other phenomena; on the contrary, it is a noumenon or thing-in-itself, unaffected by anything external to it, and there fore completely free, answering only to itself for how it responds to the a priori "categorical impera tive" by which its ends are determined intuitively. But i. rises to a still higher level in Kant's third essay, the Critique ofJudgment ( 1 790; ed. K. Vorlan der 1 923, tr. J. C. Meredith, 1 9 1 1 , 1 928) . At the outset, Kant speaks of a "great gulf' yawning be tween the two previous critiques, "between the realm of the natural concept, as the sensible, and the realm of the concept of freedom, as the su persensible." What is needed, he says, is "a third mediating principle," an a priori intuitive synthesis of the opposed perspectives of nature (which mind comprehends only through its phenomenal impressions on the understanding) and freedom (where mind is at home with itself in its inner, noumenal reality) . A table at the beginning of the third critique shows it is "art and beauty in gen eral" that must "bridge the gap" between the two. Only art or aesthetic experience, Kant explains, can provide the needed a priori intuitive synthesis, precisely because it is neither natural nor free in itself, and yet participates, at least apparently, in both. In nature, our mind seeks knowledge; in freedom, it wills or desires; in art, it neither seeks knowledge nor wills, but rather finds itself viewing things intuitively-Wordsworth in his Excursion (4. 1 295) will call it a "passionate i."-so as to link the realms of nature and freedom together in what amounts to a great metaphor or intuitive synthesis. Despite his Humean skepticism, Kant allows him-
self to speak of the "divine mind" as author of that "highest synthesis ofthe critical philosophy." Hav ing identified it as "that reason which creates the content at the same time with its forms," Kant adds that it here appears at last as "intellectual percep tion or intuitive understanding." It was Hegel who remarked that, in rising through his three critiques to the concept of intel lectual i. or intuitive understanding as the govern ing principle of the experience of purposiveness and beauty in nature and art, Kant merits the kind of praise Aristotle accorded Anaxagoras in Gr. antiquity. When Anaxagoras first said that nous (understanding in general or reason) rules the world, "he appeared," says Aristotle, "like a sober man among drunkards." Awed, like Kant, by the spectacle of the night sky with its "undisturbed circling of countless worlds," Anaxagoras had con cluded that it could only be the result of a mind or nous, a divine intuitive reason which sorts out the original constituents of things in order to join like to like in a well-ordered whole (kosmos) . Still, as Aristotle notes, Anaxagoras wavers between as signing his nous completely to man's thinking soul (like Kant in his first critique) and proclaiming its total objectivity as the "soul-stuff' of the sensory world of nature. In Plato and, even more, in Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists, the nous of Anaxagoras retains its original significance as the divine mind that gives order to all things. It comes finally to be conceived as a pure act of "thinking thinking about thinking" ( noesis noeseos noesis) . The human soul or psyche, like everything else that is, "imitates" or "partici pates" in that pure act in the measure of its natural potencies. The psyche receives intuitively-quite as Kant will later explain it-the principles of its theoretical, practical, and productive kinds of ra tional activity. Through rational making, men and women build the cities or states in which they are able, individually and collectively, to behave ra tionally. And it is only when their making and behaving have acquired habitual excellence that human beings can have the experience of sharing, however briefly, in the divine existence ofthinking thinking about thinking, which is the height of sophia or wisdom. The good habit or virtue of making well is techne or art; of behaving well, it is phronesis or prudence; of explaining well, it is episteme, or excellence in discursive reasoning. Nous or intuitive reason is what ultimately activates all three; but when the three become one at the pole, like the meridians on the globe, it is sophia, the highest intuitive reason joined with the high est discursive reason, that absorbs the other two (the highest good and the highest beauty) in its highest truth. Through St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas, the form of rational i. that activates prac tical reason will get a special name: synderesis. But it will be left to Dante to do the same for the productive reason, or fine art. Dante will dare to
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INTUITION say that his whole Commedia, in which he sought to "write like God," was for him a metaphoric, intuitive vision, completed to perfection in his "creative imagination" ( alta fantasia) before he applied himself to the task of writing it down. Love, he says, helped him to turn his vision into poetry by dictating words in his heart (see INSPI RATION ) . Fortunately, he had native talent-inge nium or genius (q.v. )-and had acquired the tra ditional poetic skills ( ars) through long practice ( usus) , to be able to do somejustice to love's divine dictation; otherwise, as he says, his trying to write like God might have looked rather like the efforts of a goose to fly like an eagle. For a rounded view of the importance of i. as an aesthetic concept that does full justice to its long history, one must turn to Hegel (Aesthetics, tr. T. M. Knox 1975 ) . Hegel makes use of i. to distinguish the three great kinds of art that have charac terized the civilizations of ancient Greece, the Near and Far East, and European Christendom. The three are the Classical, with its ideal recipro cal adequacy of content and form; the Symbolic, which falls short of that ideal, presenting a recip rocal inadequacy of constituents, the results of which are sometimes ugly but sometimes tremu lously sublime (q.v.) in Kant's sense of the term; and the Romantic, which transcends the classical reciprocal adequacy-as Shakespeare does in his characterizations of Falstaff and Hamlet, and Dante does at the close of his Paradiso, where, after telling us that his creative imagination tinally ex perienced a vast intuitive power-shortage ( all'alta fantasia qui manco possa) , he permits us to share with him, intuitively, the dizzying heights of art in the process of transcending itself as art. The same insight permits Hegel to treat com prehensively the great epic, lyric, and dramatic genres or voices of poetry, and to predict that poets of the future in the Western world are apt to find the lyric voice more vital than the other two voices of poetry. As a living experience, epic poetry be longs to the beginnings of a people's national history,just as dramatic poetry does to the decades of its full maturity. Lyric poetry has no special time in a people's history, and therefore its voice is never silent. From that Hegelian vantage point, it is possible to explain why theorists of art since Kant who have counted on i. to tell them what is actually living for them in aesthetic experience have tended to emphasize the ideal of the lyric in poetry and of musical subjectivity among all the arts. That has been so from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche down through Henri Bergson ( The Cn?a tive Mind, tr. 1 946) and Jacques Maritain ( Creative I. in Art and Poetry, 1953 ) . Rene Wellek has seen in it a tendency to abolish the "whole concept of art as one of the distinct activities of man" by collapsing the rich legacy of traditional artistic distinctions into a crude "unity of experience" that makes all things subjectively and intuitively one. Still, Hegel's best insights permit us to say on
Croce's behalf that, when he faithfully scrutinized his personal aesthetic experience, he found in deed that its depths resounded, for him at least, with a voice of singularly lyrical intuitive inspira tion. A.P.; H.P. II. IN POETRY. Theories of poetry as a form of i . are even today somewhat alien t o our ways of thinking. G. N. G. Orsini observes that Am. liter ary critics are profoundly distrustful of their intui tive capacities and, one might add, of the intuitive power of poetry itself. Am. histories of aesthetics do contain clear descriptions oftheories of poetry as i., but their clarity depends on their remoteness from that which they are describing. Even when most objective, they seem to suggest that such theories are simply untenable. Of course, the theories may in truth be untenable. But because they have emerged in cultures with much richer conditions of poetry and art than our own, we should reject them only with extreme caution. In its most fully developed form, the theory of poetry as essentially intuitive is based on the belief that lines like the following are exemplary: "the dry sound of bees / Stretching across a lucid space" (Hart Crane, "Praise for an Urn") and "As a calm darkens among water lights" (Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning") . To be sure, any line of verse, according to this theory, is poetic only if it is intuitive. But the two lines just quoted seem to exhibit what is meant by poetic i. with unusual clarity and vividness. Even these lines, it is true, do not force the reader to respond to them intuitively. The lines may be taken to be imitative of certain natural events or as illustrations of visual illusions or even as instances of rhetorical catachresis (q.v. ) . But i f the reader takes these lines i n a s they really are-or so the theory goes-then the reader will experience them as poetic intuitions, as immedi ate fusion of feeling and image. The reader is pulled into a new place and time and becomes one with its desperate beauty. If the reader mediates within this intuitive moment, it will enfold his whole world; Crane's world will become the reader's world, and he will see everything afresh, colored by a pain and lucidity as never before. In experiences such as this, life, lang., the world, and the word are irrefrangibly one. The experience one has of the poetry and one's knowledge of the experience are identical. The poetry creates the experience-as a fusion of world as experienced and of the person as experiencing-and gives knowledge of the experience as an identity of world and person in a single, seamless act of i. This theory does not equate poetry with c reative acts such as the primal creative act of God, for it views poetic i. not as a creation out of nothing but as the creation of a poetic maker and the world, of lang. and being, out of a material which is its prior condition. But this condition is utterly formless; it is only a hum and buzz, a pure flux of sensation. In effect, then, poetic i. discovers only what it creates: it knows that which it itself makes. More-
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INUIT POETRY over, in this theory, poetry as we ordinarily think of it is only the highest form of that creative experience in which each of us becomes a human being, both sentient and verbal, living in a world. Poetic i. differs from sensation because it is neither passive nor psychological; it is a oneness of person and world expressed in lang. In the other arts its lang. may be song or shape or gesture. It is knowledge, but of an immediate kind, and thus is prior to conceptual,judgmental, discursive knowl edge. There is no claim in poetic i. that its world is either real or unreal or that that world and the experiencing person are distinct; because it is not a self-conscious experience, it does not even con tain the claim that it is itself poetic i. Although it is possible to extract concepts and abstract ideas from a poem, in the poem experienced as a poem, these ideas are fused within the i. Vico, who may be credited as the originator of this conception of poetry, argued that Homer con ceived of Achilles not as a courageous individual or as an example of courage or as courage itself, but as an utter fusion of all of these. In poetic i., in other words, individuality and universality are identical (cf. CONCRETE UNIVERSAL) . Poetic i., moreover, is radically distinct from perception, which is the basis of empirical knowledge. If one perceives "the blue spot here and now," one ob serves it as part of a spatial and temporal and chromatic framework, a structure already com posed by conceptual thought. It is, of course, possible to perceive rather than intuit poems, to consider their space and time as part of some large, conventional structure within which we live our days. But to do so is to miss the poems as poems. Space and time are abstractions by means of which we think and perceive the world. But poetic i. creates the world and with it our living sense of space and time. The crudeness or fineness of our very ideas of space and time is thus deriv able from the quality of our poetic, intuitive expe rience. Finally, in its purest form, the concept of poetry as i. is at odds with the idea of poetry as self-expression. In a poetic i., self and world, sub ject and object, are immediately identical. This is the way the world begins. This is the way the self begins. On its basis alone we construct our distinc tions, self and world, space and time, real and unreal, truth and error, even beauty and ugliness. M.E.B. After Croce, theories of i. in the 20th c. have been pursued from directions he might never have anticipated, but with results which in some cases at least he would have found congenial. Expressionist theories of poetry, which are the last inheritors of romanticism (q.v.) and of which po etic i. is one, have had surprising strength through much of the 20th c. In Italy, the publication of Gentile's Philosophy of Art in 1 932 effectively put an end to the currency of Crocean expressionism, but in Switzerland and France, the rise of the Geneva School (q.v.) of critics during the same
decade produced a strong form of intuitivist crit. This, however, is based now on Bergson, existen tialism, and (esp.) phenomenology. Here too the operating assumption is that a reader will, through inseeing or i., come into a rapport with the imaginative space of the text, and through it that of the poet, the authenticity of which is taken as guaranteed. On the basis of this guarantee one can then say that the ordinary category bounda ries between subjective and objective are indeed dissolved, and along with them the usual concerns of critics with the gaps or spaces between the world and the world as embodied in words. In such i., one is literally seeing through words into the very life of things. Eng. translations of Geneva School phenomenological crit. brought its meth ods into currency in America in the 1 960s. The subsequent assaults on referentiality and determi nate meaning that were associated with decon struction (q.v. ) , however, sought to dissolve all possibility of intuitive readerly rapport with the text, much less with the poet, as convenient but vain delusions built upon a fictive metaphysics. But in denying the possibility of stable meaning, deconstruction reduced its own position to merely one voice among all the rest, and not one on which any productive or even viable cultural practice could be built. Much more productive were developments in reader-response criticism (q.v. ) , which sought to reestablish links between individual readers and texts, at least, and perhaps even to restore links among readers themselves, and so guarantee intui tive authenticity, via the concept of readerly and social convention (q.v. ) . Nevertheless, intuitivist theories of poetry, like phenomenological philoso phy, provides the most radical alternative to tradi tional 'Nestern dualist metaphysics. Most of the great Western poets have indicated implicitly or explicitly their belief in the power of i. to bypass the circuits offeeble human rationality and fickle human perception, going straight to the source. "If a sparrow come before my window," said Keats, "I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." Whether such entering-in upon the con scious lives of other selves, other beings not hu man, and even events beyond all selfhood be dream or truth is a question that seems, finally, less important than the evident fact that it pro ceeds from a human capacity certain beyond cavil, and one which poetry above all arts, for some reason, makes central. See also GENEVA SCHOOL; IMAGINATION; INVENTION; SUBJECTIVITY AND OB JECTIVITY; VISION.-G. N. G. Orsini, Benedetto Orsini ( 1 961 ) ; M. E. Brown, Neo-Idealistic Aesthetics: Croce, Gentile, Collingwood ( 1 966) ; M. R. Westcott, T.V.F.B. Psychology of 1. ( 1 968 ) . INUIT POETRY. 1. TRADITIONAL SONG AND POETRY II. MODERN SONG AND POETRY
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INUIT POETRY The Inuit (pI. form; sing. Inuk) , commonly called Eskimos (a name the Inuit consider offen sive ) , live along some five thousand miles of Arctic coastline, so comments about any one aspect of their culture are generalizations, but unlike Namerindians, the Inuit have a strong linguistic connection throughout the circumpolar world. The I. lang. belongs to the Eskalutian family, which has two branches: I., spoken in Greenland, Canada, and Alaska, and Yupik, spoken in Alaska and Siberia. Until relatively recently, I. p. be longed to oral trad. and was usually sung or chanted, often to the accompaniment of drum, choral background, or dance. Its agglutinative nature makes translation of I. p. particularly re warding, for although a single word may require 1 00 characters to spell, it will contain a fully de veloped image. I. TRADITIONAL SONG AND POETRY. Traditional Inuit believed in the literal power of the word (hence everyone was a singer and to some extent a poet) and thought it as imperative to work on lang. as on skins or ivory. As hunter-gatherers, they had to sing and compose in order to control the universe-to catch a seal, break a fever, or cut the weather. I. p. was very special, possessing super natural powers, but it was also very commonplace, a part of everyday life. Knud Rasmussen, the Greenlandic poet and scholar who collected literary material from across the circumpolar world, identified four cate gories of I. p.: charms, mood songs, hunting songs, and songs of derision. These four categories are not mutually exclusive, however, for they were occasionally integrated in traditional myths and legends as well as sung on their own. A. Mood Songs are songs of reflection which do not involve a central story or action, but like imagist poems try to give a visual impression which involves the perception of relationships. These short poems have a strong literal meaning; they may describe a bird perched on a rock or a man waking in the morning, but tied into the simple description ofthe moment is a subtext concerned with the poet's emotional response to the bird or his perception of his place in the universe. B. Charms and Incantations, often fragmented, incomprehensible, or in supernatural lang., are similar to nonsense verse, sound poetry, or even concrete poetry (qq.v. ) , where form dominates meaning, but they have added depth in that they have magical powers. A charm can be capable of drying blood in a wound, attracting a fish to the hook, or killing an enemy. These poems were thought by some to be so powerful that it was dangerous to give them to strangers, so words were sometimes changed before charms were offered to collectors. Simply reciting the words of a chant was often enough to put a person into a shamanistic trance. The use of obscure or archaic diction fre quently makes the chants incomprehensible even to native speakers.
C. Hunting Songs can be reflective but are more likely to be narrative, in keeping with the subject. Rasmussen notes the difficulty of separating hunt ing songs from mood songs because so many touch on thejoys and disappointments of the hunt; they also often use the lang. of incantation. Frequently the circumstances described in the poems are familiar to the audience, and mnemonic phrases are included to fill out the song. D. Derisive Songs. Sometimes referred to as nith songs, drum songs, song duels, or satirical songs, these are the most interesting to readers outside the culture, perhaps because a common denomi nator is an ironic element of criticism. These monologues or dialogues are like medieval flytings (q.v. ) : verbal assault is part of the game. The poet can aim the derision at himself, at another, at a group of people, or at a type of behavior. The song may only be part of an attack, or it may be a response to an attack by another singer; it may be a cheerful, loving correction or it may be a vicious assault on a reputation. The song duel, in which two singers exchange reproaches, has a judicial function in that each is allowed to voice com plaints against the other in public, each is given an opportunity to respond, and the loser either acknowledges his fault or leaves the community. The song duel varies greatly from one area to another, occasionally involving boxing or head butting, and is usually also considered entertain ment. II. MODERN SONG AND POETRY. As long as the Inuit were nomadic, they had no real need for a written lang., but in the 18th c. they came in contact with European explorers, and Christian missionaries soon followed. Although writing did not develop indigenously, it was accepted quickly. Orthographies as diverse as Cyrillic, syllabic, hi eroglyphic, and Roman were used across the Arc tic coast as printing presses and schools were es tablished. Today, highly individualistic forms of I. p. such as throat music-in which the distinctive sounds are produced through gutteral, nasal, and breath ing techniques-are extant, but song dueling has virtually disappeared. Although the traditional forms are seldom performed or read in the I. lang. they have gained credibility outside the culture as written translations. Modern I. p. and song is not so widely admired, but is also gaining acceptance. Most I. composers and writers now draw heavily on European musical and literary structures while still retaining some elements of the ancient forms. The themes are often different and the tone inter vals are more familiar to Western ears than they would be to the ancient Eskalutians, but the lang. dictates certain rhythmic patterns peculiar only to I., so comparisons must be circumscribed. In gen eral terms, however, poetry from the written trad. can be grouped into units similar to those Ras mussen identified in the oral modes. A. Mood Poems. Still popular with both old and
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INVECTIVE young authors, though now they often refer to settlement life and modern technology, these short, vivid lyrics attempt to capture emotions related to the senses, such as the joy of seeing the sun come up, the taste of meat or a steaming mug of tea, or an awareness of the passage of time. Often these brief poems will be worked into pho tographs, drawings, or prints so that illustration and text are indivisible. B. Religious Hymns and Poems. Magic chants and incantations are no longer evident, but Christian hymns, tr. or adapted from Eng. and Danish or composed originally in I. are widely promulgated. The hymns of Rasmus Berthelsen are known throughout Greenland, while in Canada, Armand Tagoona is the best known composer of Christian songs. Occasional poems on the Incarnation or the nature of the Creator appear, but there is no significant body oflay Christian religious writings comparable in quality to that lit. which emerged from the old shamanistic beliefs. C. Contemporary Hunting Poems. Although writ ten poems about hunting are still emerging in the circumpolar world, they have taken on a romantic or spiritual importance that is quite different from those in the oral trad. While the old songs tended to be narrative and reminiscent, the new ones emerge as imaginative speculation written in many cases not by hunters but by young urban Inuit who are reluctantly tied to office jobs but regard hunting as the only fit occupation for a true Inuk. The works often urge people to return to the ways of their ancestors, or describe the need to protect the land and animals for future genera tions. The old hunting poems frequently explored man's sense of fragility and insecurity, with images of the land providing a sense of continuity and stability, but modern poets are more concerned with the survival of the land itself. D. Political Poetry. The song duels and derisive poems generally do not exist in a pure form in modern I. p., having been banned by Christian missionaries, but certain elements have survived. The question-answer sequence, or the repeated use of the interrogative, is a feature of contemp. I. political poetry, though the respondent is as likely to be a garbage can or an alien from Mars as a snowy owl or an offended husband. The deve\. of the epic is a major innovation in modern I. p . ; Frederik Nielsen's trilogy o n Qitdlaussuaq traces the 1 8th-c. I. migration from Canada to Green land; Alootook Ipellie's long poem 'The Strang ers" describes the I. occupation of the Arctic from ancient times and examines the effect of Euro pean contact; Villads Villadsen's Christian epic Nalusuunerup Taarnerani (In Heathen Darkness) describes the death of the last Norseman in Green land and the eventual conversion and baptism of Aattaaritaa the exorcist. The politically inspired poems are sometimes purely didactic but are more frequently satiric and ironic. Since the Inuit tradi tionally had no political structure, poetry has been
used as an impetus to social activism by writers many of whom are politicians. There is a large body of popular music concerned with political and social issues to be found in all the I. regions. To date, there is not a wide body of I. p. available outside the culture, but inside the culture the trad. is flourishing and continues to develop. H. Rink, Eskimoiske Eventyr og Sagn, 2 v. ( 1 86677) , tr. as Tales and Trads. of the Eskimo ( 1 875) ; w. Thalbitzer, "Old Fashioned Songs," Phonetical Study of the k-skimo Lang. ( 1904) ; H. Roberts and D. Jenness, Songs of the Copper Eskimos ( 1 925) ; K. Rasmussen, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1 921-24, 7-9 ( 1930-32); Anerca, ed. E. Carpenter ( 1 959 ) ; I Breathe a New Song, ed. R. Lewis ( 1971 ) ; Eskimo Poems From Canada and Greenland, ed. T. Lowenstein ( 1973); Kalaallit Taallaataat Nutaat INUIT Ny Gronlandsk Lyrik, ed. K. Norregaard ( 1 980) ; Paper Stays Put, ed. R. Gedalof ( 1 980) ; Poems of the I. , ed. J. R. Colombo ( 1 98 1 ) ; C . Ber thelsen, Gronlandsk Litteratur ( 1 983); Alaska Na tive Writers, Storytellers and Orators, spec iss. of Alaska Quart. Rev. ( 1 986) ; Northern Voices, ed. P. Petrone ( 1988 ) . history and criticism: S . Frederiksen, "Henrik Lund, A National Poet of Greenland," PAPS 96,6 ( 1 952) , "Stylistic Forms in Greenland Eskimo Lit.," Meddelser om Gronland 1 36,7 ( 1 954) ; E. Car penter, "Eskimo Poetry: Word Magic," Explorations 4 ( 1 955) ; H. Lynge, "The Art and Poetry of Green land," Greenland Past and Present, ed. K. Hertling et a\. ( 1 97 1 ) ; R. Wiebe, "Songs of the Canadian Eskimo," CanL 52 ( 1 972); R. McGrath, Canadian I. Lit. ( 1984 ) ; R. Pedersen, "Greenlandic Written Lit.," Handbook of North Am. Indians, V , ed. D. Damas ( 1 984) ; C. Berthelsen, "Greenlandic Lit.: Its Trads., Changes, and Trends," Arctic Anthro. 23 ( 1986) . R.McG. INVECTIVE. A personal attack or satire, often scurrilous, a lampoon, fonnerly written mainly in verse. I. is to be differentiated from satire (q.v.) on the grounds that it is personal, motivated by mal ice, and unjust; thus John Dennis remarks that satire "can never exist where the censures are not just. In that case the Versiryer, instead of a Satirist, is a Lampooner, and infamous Libeller." I. is as old as poetry, and as widespread; in the West it appears (if not in the Homeric Margites) at least as early as Archilochus, who wrote an i. against Lycambes; other notable Gr. examples include those by Hip ponax against Bupalus, by Anacreon against Artemon, and others by Xenophanes, Timon of Phlius, Sotades (see SOTADEAN ) , Menippus, and (less virulently) Callimachus. Indeed, iambic me ter itself (see IAMBIC) is in its earliest, Ionian form so called specifically because of its association with i., which has the specific characteristics both of a speaker giving vent to personal hatred and of common speech for its vehicle, to which iambic meter was thought by the ancients to conform. In Lat., i. is written, though in a wider variety of
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INVENTIO meters, chiefly by Catullus (see SCAZON ) , Ovid ( Ibis) , Martial, and Varro. In the Middle Ages, Petrarch's i. against doctors, I. contra medicum, is notable; in the Ren., the scope of personal i. is expanded considerably by the invention of print ing, which provided broadsides, bills, and ballads particularly well suited for rapid and wide disper sal of political i. and satire. Eng. i. of this sort abounds particularly in the Restoration and 1 8th c.; indeed, the Eng. word "lampoon" (from the Fr. slang term lamper, "to guzzle, swill down") dates only from mid 1 7th c. Rochester's History of In sipids, a Lampoon ( 1 680) is but one of many of his, and others'. Dryden, a master of i., nevertheless deplores it in his "Discourse concerning the Origi nal and Progress of Satire" ( 1 693) as both illegal and dangerous. Mter 1 750, however, verse i . , like other verse genres such as narrative poetry (q.v. ) , rapidly gave ground t o prose as the medium of choice, except in the (remarkably durable) trad. of the epigram, inc!. scurrilous and vindictive epi grams, which have been produced in the 20th c. most notably by J. V. Cunningham. See also DOZ ENS; EPIGRAM; FLYTING; SATIRE; TOAST. J. Addison, Spectator, no. 23; An Anthol. of I. and Abuse, and More I., both ed. H. Kingsmill (1929, 1930) ; C. Reichley, "Lampoon: Archilochus to By ron," DAI32 ( 1 97 1 ) , 2703A;J. C. Manning, Blue I. ( 1 973) ; The Book ofInsults, Ancient & Modern, ed. N. McPhee ( 1978 ) ; G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans ( 1979) , chs. 1 2-13; Tygers ofWrath: Poems ofHate, Anger, and I., ed. X.J. Kennedy ( 1 98 1 ) ; A. Richlin, The Garden of Priapus ( 1 983) ; The Devil's Book of Verse, ed. R. Conniff ( 1 983) ; The Blasted Pine: An Anthol. , ed. F. R. Scott and A.J. M. Smith ( 1 965)-Canadian; R. M. Rosen, Old Comedy and the Iambographic Trad. ( 1 988) ; H. Rawson, Wicked Words ( 1 989) ; G. J. van Gelder, The Bad and the Ugly: Attitudes towards I. Poetry (Hija') in Cl. Arabic Lit. ( 1 989) ; K. Swenson, Performing Definitions ( 1 99 1 ) ; L. Watson, Arae: Curse Poetry in Antiquity ( 1 99 1 ) . T.V.F.B. INVENTIO. See INVENTION; RHETORIC A N D PO ETRY. INVENTION (Gr. heuresis, Lat. inventio) . Ancient theories of rhet. commonly identified five steps in construction of an oratory or composition of a literary work: inventio (i. or discovery, "the devis ing of matter") , dispositio (arrangement) , elocutio (expression or style) , pronuntiatio (delivery) , and memoria (memory) . Inventio, the most complex and important of the five steps, refers to the nature and source of what is said rather than to how it is said: it concerns the preliminary tasks of collect ing, exploring, discovering, or creating materials for use. Important discussions are to be found in Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bks. 1-2; the anonymous Rheto rica ad Herennium 1 .2.3; and Cicero, De inventione 1 .7.9 (cf. Cicero, De oratore 1 .3 1 . 1 42, 2 . 1 9.79; Quintilian 3.3. 1 ) .
The first three of these rhetorical divisions have also been widely employed in poetics to distin guish not only the tasks and faculties involved in writing poems but also the elements of poems themselves. Here "i." most often refers to finding, or otherwise producing, the subject matter or "content" of poems. But the concept has also been used to indicate the production of poetic form or structure (e.g. Aristotle's Poetics, ch. 1 4 ) , or of poetic lang. or style (Du Bellay's Deffense et illustra tion de la langue fran�oyse 1 .8 [ 1 549] ; the passages on Homer's "expression" in the Preface to Pope's Iliad [ 1 71 5 ] ) , or of poetry in general (Boccaccio's Genealogia deorum gentilium 1 4.7 [ca. 1 365 ] ) , or specific poetic kinds (Scaliger's Poetices libri septem 1 . 1 [ 1561 ] ) , or a particular whole work of art (A. Gerard's Essay on Genius 1.3 [ 1 774] ) . The special meanings given to the term within this general usage have been numerous. Some times i. is contrasted with "imitation" (q.v.) of prior models, thus signifYing originality (q.v. ) and independence in the production of subject matter (Horace, Ars poetica 1 1 9-20; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1 0.2.12;Johnson, Rambler no. 1 2 1 [ 1 75 1 ] ; E. Young, Conjectures on Original Composition [ 1 759] ) . Sometimes it is contrasted with 'Judg ment," and thus refers to the native power of producing poetic substance as opposed to the control of that power by reason, convention, or skill (Pope, Essay on Crit. 1 . 1 14 [ l 7 1 1 ] , Preface to the Iliad) . Sometimes it refers to the production of things "fanciful" or incredible (Johnson, Ram blerno. 4 [ 1 750] ) ; sometimes it means the produc tion of "fiction" (q.v.) as opposed to historical truth; sometimes it indicates the artful combina tion of historical truth and imaginative falsehood. Basic differences in the conception of poetic i . are in large part functions o f more general differ ences in poetics regarding what is necessary or desirable in poetic subject matter, and why. In most mimetic theories in Western poetics (see POETRY, THEORIES OF ) , poetic i. is conceived pri marilyas a matter of the proper imitation (q.v. ) of nature (in one or another of the several senses of that term) , since the desired effects of poetry, it was argued, are possible only through images or likenesses of real or natural things (Plutarch, Mor alia 17-1 8; Aquinas, In libros posteriorum analyti corum expositio 1 , Lectio 1 ; Ronsard, Abrege de l'art poetique fran�ois [ 1 565] ; Dryden, Parallel betwixt Poetry and Painting [ 1 695] ; Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare [ 1 765 ] ) . "Imitation of nature," how ever, has been a very inclusive concept, and in some theories in this trad., poetic i . legitimately embraces the powers of "imagining" things and hence of producing visionary, supernatural, and "marvelous" subjects (see IMAGINATION ) . On the other hand, there have been a number of theories (incl. those of some of the Stoics and Neoplatonists, and of preromantics and romantics like Shaftesbury, Akenside, Herder, and Cole ridge) in which poetic i. is conceived as the pro-
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IRISH POETRY duction of subject matter which transcends "ordi nary" human images or ideas of nature and the natural, often on the grounds that the poet is one who rivals or reflects a higher, "creative" being. Sir Philip Sidney's statement is characteristic: "only the poet [of all human artists) . . . lifted up with the vigor of his own i., doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature" (Apologie for Poetrie [ 1 583; 1 595 ] ) . I n some theories in this trad. (Shelley, Emerson) , the emphasis is on the poet's special inspired or intuitive "vision" of ultimate reality (see INSPIRA TION; INTUITION; VISION) , and poetry is justified by its provision of a superior kind of cognition to that available via ordinary human discourse. In others (A. W. Schlegel, Wordsworth ) , the empha sis is on the poet's power of supremely great or original thought and feeling (see ORIGINALITY) ; here poetry is defended not as primarily depictive or imagistic but rather as a superior mode of "expression" (q.v. ) . Some later theories stress the need for a coalescence of two or more transcen dent powers (Croce, Maritain, Wimsatt, Vivas, Wheelwright) . The most significant recent deve!. in the history of the concept has been a general shift of emphasis, beginning in the 1 8th c . , away from the principle that the poet produces subject matter (and form and style) by deliberate acts of learned technique, inc!. the imitation of prior works and of nature, to the converse principle that poetry is generated in the poet's mind-whether consciously, via intuition, or by any other organic process-by God or nature . It has traditionally been said that, while the original meaning of "i." involved primarily the idea of "finding" subject matter (even by imitating or borrowing from other writers ) , the term later came to suggest, through association with the concept of imagination, not so much finding as "creating." This observation has considerable va lidity, but it ought not obscure the fact that there never was a time in the history of Western crit. when poetic i. was not conceived by someone in terms of the poet's creative or imaginative ability to transform given or discovered materials, for better or worse. It was romanticism which fixed in the modern mind the valorization of creativity and purely original i. over the wider concept of antiq uity. "Outside of God," Victor Hugo remarked, "Shakespeare invented most." See now RHETORIC AND POETRY, sect. II. C. S. Baldwin, Ancient Rhet. and Poetic ( 1 924 ) , Med. Rhet. and Poetic ( 1928 ) ; M. W. Bundy, '' 'I.' and ' Imagination' in the Ren.," jEGP 29 ( 1930) ; W. G. Crane, Wit and Rhet. in the Ren. ( 1937) ; F. Solmsen, "The Aristotelian Trad. in Ancient Rhet.," AJP 62 ( 1941 ) ; Sr. M. Joseph, Shakespeare 's Use of the Arts of Lang. ( 1 947) ; R. McKeon, "Imitation and Po etry," Thought, Action, and Passion ( 1 953) ; W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhet. in England, 1500-1 700 ( 1 956 ) ; W. J. Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of
Dialogue ( 1 958) ; Weinberg; G. A. Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece ( 1963); C. Vasoli, La dialet tica e la retorica dell 'Umanesimo: 'lnvenzione' e 'me todo' nella cultura del XV e XVi secolo ( 1 968) ; Laus berg; L. Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Arts of Discourse ( 1974 ) ; Murphy; L. D. Martin, "Literary I.," Crit1 6 ( 1980) ; P. Bagni , "L'Inventio nell'ars poetica latino-medievale," Rhet. Revalued, ed. B. Vickers ( 1982 ) ; S. Crowley, The Methodical R.M . ; T.V.F.B. Memory ( 1990) . INVERSE RHYME. See REVERSE RHYME. INVERSION. See HYPERBATON. IONIC. The metrical unit - - , and meters composed in such metra or derived from it. In Gr. poetry, pure I. meters found wide use in monody (esp. Anacreon), choral lyric, and the choruses of Gr. tragedy (particularly Euripides) and comedy. For other varieties of I. rhythms, see GALLIAMBUS and ANACREONTIC. Aeolic (q.v.) and I. meters are closely related and were often confused with one another by the ancient grammarians. Pure Is. are found in Horace, Odes 3 . 1 2 (probably an imitation of Alcaeus, fro 1 08 [Lobel-Page) ) , but mixtures of Is. and other meters are found in Plautus. The pure I. is sometimes called the "lesser I." or I. a minore. The so-called "greater I." or I. a maiore ( ) is a later Hellenistic deve!. , found particu larly in the Sotadean (q.v. ) , which also had its Lat. imitators; an example is provided by Varro, Satirae Menippeae 489. Accentual imitations oflesser Is. in Eng. poetry inc!. Browning's "In the midnight, in the silence of the sleep-time" and John Frederick Nims' "The Young Ionia" ( Knowledge of the Evening [ 1 960 ] ) . Some modern metrists have entertained the idea that the sequence xxi I in the first four syllables of the Eng. iambic pentameter is a kind of analogous I. foot-Wimsatt calls it a "crescendo foot"-but this is a confusion ofrhythm with meter (see Brogan) .-Hardie; Wilamowitz, pt. 2, ch. 9; Crusius; Dale; Koster, ch. 9; Dale, ch. 8; Halporn et a!.; West. J.W.H.; T.V.F.B. v
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IRANIAN POETRY. See PERSIAN POETRY. IRISH LITERARY RENAISSANC E. See IRISH po ETRY. IRISH POETRY. I. POETRY IN GAELIC: 6TH-1 9TH CENTURIES II. POETRY IN ENGLISH: YEATS AND THE CELTIC REVIVAL III. IRISH POETRY AFrER YEATS I. POETRY IN GAELIC: 6TH-1 9 TH CENTURIES. From its origins to the present, the form and content of Ir. p . have been enmeshed with the evolution of Ir. hist. and society. Poetry in Gaelic belongs to one of the oldest vernacular lits. in
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IRISH POETRY Europe, extending from the 6th c. A.D. to the present. In the pre-Christian oral culture, Ir. poets (jilidh, sing. fili [q.v. ] ) had for long constituted a privileged professional class; they were not only repositories of traditional knowledge but also seers and prophets with magical powers. With the displacement of their druidic religion by Christi anity in the 5th c., the filidh apparently ceded their magical functions but maintained their identity as scholars and poets. It was the Lat. learning that accompanied Christianity that enabled Gaelic verse to be written down. The poetry of the filidh consisted typically of genealogies, histories, and praise for noble patrons. As Christianity was estab lished in Ireland, the filidh coexisted, perhaps even intermingled with, the monastic clerics who constituted another class of learned men. The early Ir. church was organized, unusually, on a monastic structure, and such monasteries as Glen dalough and Clonmacnoise were centers of learn ing akin to modern colleges: it was this system that gave Ireland its Golden Age in the 7th and 8th cs. Ireland became known as the island of saints and scholars, as missionary Ir. monks founded monas teries all over Europe. One official duty of clerics in the Ir. monasteries was to copy sacred texts, but they also compiled the pre-Christian lit. of Ire land-the ancient myths and epic tales which re count the exploits of the heroes Cuchulainn and Finn. They were also responsible for a body oflyric poetry, some of it as formulaic as the poetry of the filidh, but some charged with a fresh and numi nous sense of the natural world. The economy, precision, and delicacy of early Jr. nature poetry at its best can be seen in such de lightful poems as "The Scribe in the Woods," the poem from the Fenian Cycle that begins scel lem duib, and "The Blackbird of Belfast Lough." Sea mus Heaney gives this tr. of the latter poem: "The small bird / let a chirp / from its beak: / I heard / woodnotes, whin- / gold, sudden. / The Lagan / blackbird ! " The style of poetry from the 6th to the 1 2th c . , virtually all of it anonymous, is for the most part an intricate formalism. Complex rhym ing syllabic meters gradually incorporated and displaced the technique of the earliest Ir. verse, which was cadenced and unrhymed and origi nated in the same IE system as did Sanskrit and Gr. verse (see CELTIC PROSODY; INDO-EUROPEAN PROSODY; and see Watkins) . It was long thought that the rhyming, syllabic meters of Ir. verse were formed under the influence oflate Lat. verse, but more recent scholarship argues just the oppo site-that the versification of early Ir. p. influ enced Med. Lat. verse. Certainly Lat. verse in me dieval Ireland would seem to reveal the impress of Celtic models in its technique; the most famous collection of poems in this style by the Ir. Latinists is Hisperica Famina (7th c.) . This hisperic or rhyming style was subsequently employed in the OE rhyming poem. Bardic or Classical Ir. p. is usually dated from
1 200-1600. With the Norman invasion in the 1 2th c. and the decline of the the monastic system, poetry became the hereditary vocation of the pro fessional poets, inheritors of the filidh trad., who trained for many years in an academy and were employed by noble families, Gaelic or Norman. Before this period the distinction between fili and bard derived from the more elevated function of the fili as druidic prophet and seer as well as poet; the bardwas merely a poet or versifier who special ized in eulogy and satire. During the bardic pe riod, however, this distinction disappears, and the term bard paradoxically is rarely used as the title for poet. What seems to have happened is that the once separate functions of fili and bard have merged as the fili shed his sacred attributes and assumed some of the functions of the bard. The poets of the bardic period would have been known as filidh; their social function and their poetry is devoid of the romanticism attached to the word "bard" in the 1 9th c. (see BARD ) . Some authorities would date this period earlier, from the 8th c., to coincide with the devel. of dan direach ("strict verse" ) , the generic name for the new syllabic meters which were to be the hallmark ofIr. p. until the 1 7th c. Much ofthe verse of the bardic period is encomiastic, consisting of formal eulogies and elegies composed in the strictest of meters, court poetry written for noble patrons. Religious verse of the period is also written in this strict style. But if virtuosity and artifice, learned lang. and ornateness were prized in all the verse of this period, there was a considerable amount of poetry in which less elaborate forms were employed. To begin with, there is a body of love poetry in the European convention of courtly love (q.v. ) , im ported into Ireland by the Normans. Pierce Fer riter (d. 1 653} and Gerald Fitzgerald (d. 1 398} are among the better known authors of these danta gradha (love poems) . There is also a category of poems on the lore of places (dinnseanchas) , lyric and narrative verse that elaborates on the tales about Finn and Oisin, and finally, an amount of more personal poetry. If it is the somewhat less formal and more personal poetry which appeals to the modern reader, there is still a high degree of craft and technical virtuosity in such poems as Giolla Brighde MacNamee's prayer for a son ( 1 3th c.) or Gofraidh Fionn 6 Dalaigh's poem on a child born in prison ( 1 4th c . ) , or Muireadach 6 Dalaigh 's "On the Death of his Wife," which be gins "I parted from my life last night, / A woman's body sunk in clay: / The tender bosom that I loved / Wrapped in a sheet they took away" ( 1 3th c.; tr. Frank O ' Connor). With the military defeat of the Ir. Chieftains at Kinsale in 1 60 1 , the Cromwellian settlements of 1 652-54, and the defeat of James II in 1 690, the old Ir. social and cultural organization which sup ported the privileged status and function of the poet was broken. Thus much of the poetry of the 1 7th and 1 8th cs. is overtly political, a poetry of
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IRISH POETRY defiance, of mourning for the old order and con tempt for the new. The collapse of the old order was experienced in a very personal way by the poets o�the 1 7th c. Daibhf 6 Bruadair ( 1 625-98) , Aogan 0 Rathaille ( 1 675-1 729) , and others inher ited a residual social endorsement of the aristo cratic and scholarly role of the poet which in their own lifetime was suddenly withdrawn. Both went from positions of privilege and status to impover ishment and misery; 6 Bruadair ended up as an agricultural laborer. The form and content of post-bardic poetry reflected the massive social and political upheaval of the 1 7th c. It is still ornate and intricate, but composed in accentual rather than syllabic verse; it employs assonance but not rhyme, uses more colloquial lang., and is dramatic in utterance. The political context obviously provided the prevailing themes oflament for Ireland's defeat and hope for its political redemption, but it probably also gen erated the new form of the aisling. 6 Rathaille is credited with inventing this political dream-vision in which a beautiful young woman, the personifi cation of Ireland, appears to the poet, complains of her captivity and (sometimes) prophesies salva tion. Perh aps the most famous of these aisling , poems is 0 Rathaille's "Gile na Gile" (Brightness of Brightness) . With the 18th c. and the penal laws, Gaelic culture became the culture of an impoverished and oppressed peasantry. Poets were reduced to employment as hedge-school masters, minstrels, or agricultural laborers. Poetry moved closer to the people and the oral trad., and frequently em ployed song meter ( amhnin). In the figures of the blind poet/musicians Turlough O 'Carolan ( 1 670-1 738) and Anthony Raftery ( 1 784-1 835) may be seen the merging ofliterary style with folk music and ballad. Two masterpieces produced in the 1 8th c. are Brian Merriman's bawdy and comic The Midnight Court and Eibhlin Dubh O ' Connell's tragic "Lament for Art O 'Leary." The Midnight Court has affinities both with Ir. folk poetry and the European medieval poetic genre of the Court of Love; in it a court of Ir. women indict, humor ously yet savagely, the various sexual failures of Ir. men. The occasion for the second poem was the murder of Art O' Leary, a casualty of the penal laws. The "Lament" is a poem of passionate grief written by the dead man's wife; it is in the keening trad., but made memorable by its sustained and moving eloquence. There is also a large body of anonymous folk poetry written in the 1 7th and 1 8th cs. which is written mainly in accentual meters and is techni cally quite sophisticated. "Roisin Dubh," "Kilcash" and "Fair Donncha" are three of the better-known examples. II. POETRY IN ENGLISH: YEATS AND THE CELTIC REVIVAL. The decline of poetry in Gaelic is obvi ously a result of the historical and social circum stances also responsible for the decline of the lang.
in the 1 8th and 19th cs. By the 1 9th c . , Eng. was rapidly becoming the vernacular lang. of Ireland, a process accelerated by the famine of the 1840s and the massive emigration that followed. While verse continued to be written in Gaelic in the 1 9th c., it is by and large undistinguished. The idea of Celticism was a product of Eng. romanticism, a way of explaining the difference in temperament and character of the Ir., Scots, and Welsh from the Eng. This idea supposed the spirit of these "Celts," but esp. the Ir., to be in its essentially wild and imaginative nature utterly different from (and more interesting than) that of the stolid "Anglo Saxons." The attempt to recover the native trad. in Ireland was fueled by this assumption of cul tural difference-and superiority-to England. In the first half of the 1 9th c . , Moore, Mangan, and Ferguson attempted in various ways to absorb and reconstitute the Gaelic trad. Although Moore's enonnously popular melodies sentimentalized their originals, and his lyrics were facile if charm ing, he did transmit some sense of what Ir. culture had been and might be again. Mangan's "transla tions" (he knew little Ir. ) of old Ir. poems such as "R6isfn Dubh" (Dark Rosaleen) and "O' Hussey's Ode to the Maguire" somehow captured if also transformed their passionate qualities and thereby become the classic Eng. versions. Ferguson's trans lations from Ir. heroic and mythic material were a recovery of much that had been inaccessible but that was later to become an important part of Ir. cultural and political nationalism. In the latter part ofthe 19th c., Anglo-Ir. writers, scholars, and antiquarians continued this attempt to recapture the Ir. Gaelic past and to write a distinctively Ir. lit. in the Eng. lang. William Alling ham ( 1 824-89) and William Larminie ( 1 8501 900) are both significant contributors to this ef fort, but Douglas Hyde ( 1 860-1 949) and George Sigerson ( 1 839-1925) were more influential through their translations from the Ir. William Butler Yeats ( 1 865-1 939) was born into the Anglo-Ir. class, the Protestant landowning class that was rapidly losing its power and privilege in the late 19th c. Yeats subscribed to the efforts of the Celtic Revival; his sense of his own Irishness derived, initially, from his 19th-c. predecessors and contemporaries engaged in the enterprise of the Revival. Yeats's poetry before 1900, in such volumes as The Wind Among the Reeds ( 1 899) , is Ir. in its use of mythology and folklore in narrative and ballad forms, although Yeats had no first-hand knowledge of Gaelic. To a great extent, this cul tural and political nationalism in Yeats and his contemporaries can be seen as a reaction to the scientific and industrial ethos of the late Victorian world. But even in this first phase of his work, Yeats's poetry cannot be dismissed as mere belated romanticism based on the notion of the supe riority of things "Celtic." It is a poetry remarkable not only for its music and imagery but also for its self-conscious awareness that the quest for tran-
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IRISH POETRY scendence is unduly limiting: see, for example, "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland." After 1900, in part because of Yeats's involve ment in founding and running the Ir. national theater (the Abbey), the lang. of his verse became a great deal more energetic and colloquial. Most remarkably in the love poems of the volumes In the Seven Woods ( 1 904) and The Green Helmet ( 1 9 1 0 ) , the stylized if beautiful rhet. of the earliest phase of Yeats's verse has been transformed into passionate and dramatic utterance: "Heart cries, 'No, / I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain. / Time can but make her beauty over again'" ("The Folly of Being Comforted") . With the vol ume REsponsibilities ( 1 9 1 4 ) , there is yet another change as Yeats began to write a poetry of engage ment with the social and political life of his coun try, emerging as the chronicler of modern Ireland who spoke, in his poetry, for and about Ireland with great authority. The poems of Michael Ro bartes ( 1 9 2 1 ) and The Tower ( 1 928) are haunted by the nightmare of contemporary history in Ireland and Europe. It was this phase of Yeats's work, with its apocalyptic view of history, that had most in common with the work of such modernists as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound: "Things fal l apart; the cen tre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" ("The Second Coming" ) . In the last decade or so of Yeats's life, esp. in Last Poems ( 1 936-39) , the dominant note is a tragic affirma tion oflife defiantly expressed in the teeth of time and the worst that life can offer: "All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again are gay" ("Lapis Lazul i" ) . Yeat's verseforms are the traditional ones of Eng. poetry and not the revolutionary new forms associated with Pound and Eliot: his preference is for various quatrain, sestet, and octave stanzas in iambic and trochaic measures, and he employs rhyme extensively. Associated with Yeats and the Revival is a group of poets writing in the earlier part of the 20th c . : George Russell, also known a s AE ( 1 867-1935 ) , Oliver St. John Gogarty ( 1 878-1 957 ) , Padraic Co lum ( 1 881-1972 ) , and James Stephens ( 1 8821 950) . The great folk dramatist John Millington Synge ( 1 87 1 - 1 909) is also affiliated with this group. The term "Ir. Literary Renaissance" (q.v.) may be employed to include the Celtic Revival and the later poetry of Yeats (which makes him not only Ireland's greatest poet, but the greatest poet of the modern world) ; it also includes the prose fiction of James Joyce ( 1 884-194 1 ) , surely the greatest of the modernist prose writers, and the drama of Sean O 'Casey ( 1 880-1964) . III. IRISH POETRY AFTER YEATS. The vitality of Ir. p. after Yeats is remarkable. Poetry in Eng. may be divided, for simplicity's sake, into two catego ries. The first shares the broad theme of explora tion of cultural identity: it reflects the individual's experience of the social life of the Ir. people in the 20th c . , esp. as they emerge from a traditionally
rural way of life to confront modern urban expe rience. This poetry is written by a very different class from the one to which Yeats belonged, and is based on a very different social experience from his. The major figures are Austin Clarke ( 1 8961 974) , Patrick Kavanagh ( 1 904-67 ) , Thomas Kin sella (b. 1 928), John Montague (b. 1 928 ) , and Seamus Heaney (b. 1 939) . (Of contemporary Ir. poets only Richard Murphy hails from Yeats's An glo-Ir. background.) This poetry by and large shares a certain sense of history, place, lang., and religion. Indeed, the theme of Ir. history as an urgent personal issue, felt in the blood, super sedes the present conflict in Ulster, and takes as its domain all of Ir. history, including the archae ological past. There is little sense of the aestheti cizing of history or the creation of heroic myth that one finds in Yeats. Much of this poetry is shaped to various degrees by an awareness of Ir. lang. and lit.; except for Kavanagh, all the major figures have effected a substantial repossession of poetry in Ir. through tr. into verse in Eng. which captures more authentically the spirit of the original than did the trs. of the Revival writers. Contemporary poets have also incorporated, in various ways, this linguistic awareness into their verse in Eng. The sense of place in their poetry is frequently atavistic in its recovery of an Irishness which has been hidden from the present. The common attitude toward religion resists the oppressive aspects of the Catholic Church as a social institution in Ire land, yet the poetry is frequently imprinted with a vision of nature as sacramental, of poetry as prayer, of the artist as a sacerdotal figure. The second category of poetry after Yeats vigor ously disputes the agenda set by the first, stressing modernity rather than Irishness. There are two main groups, as well as numerous individuals: The European-Ir. poets-Samuel Beckett (b. 1 906) , Thomas MacGreevy ( 1 893-1 967 ) , Brian Coffey (b. 1 905) , Dennis Devlin ( 1 908-59)-constitute one group, and a number of the Ulster poets, pre-eminently Derek Mahon (b. 1941 ) , who look to Louis MacNeice ( 1 907-63) as exemplar, consti tute the other. Both groups are possessed of a cosmopolitan sensibility, modern feelings of loss and alienation, a view ofhist. informed by modern European and world hist. (rather than Ir. hist. ) , and a conviction that the European langs. and the classics are more significant than Ir. lang. and lit. They distrust the idea of an Ir. poet, as opposed to a poet who happens to be Ir. The technique of Ir. p. in Eng. after Yeats, as in poetry in Eng. elsewhere in the same period, has tended to reject the traditional forms within which Yeats worked. The example ofPound and Williams (and behind both, Whitman) has been particu larly liberating for Ir. poets in their struggle to emerge from Yeats's colossal shadow. But this is not the whole story. There is also, and esp. among poets from Ulster, a disposition toward a more traditional sense ofform , akin to the notion of the
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IRONY well-made poem fostered by The Movement in Britain. There is an occasional reversion to older forms, as in Seamus Heaney's sonnet sequences; and at least one Ir. poet, Austin Clarke, has sought to import into Eng. the complicated and ornate technique of poetry in Gaelic, an undertaking which he described thus to Robert Frost: "I load myself with chains and try to get out of them." Conventional forms in Ir. may also be used uncon ventionally in contemporary poetry in Eng., as in the parodic appropriation of immram (voyage poem) and the aislingin the work of Paul Muldoon (b. 1951 ) . One index t o the vitality and accessibility of recent poetry in Gaelic is the fact that it is being translated by contemporary Ir. poets who write in Eng. In the earlier generation of poets writing in Gaelic, the names to reckon with are Sean 6 Riordain ( 1 9 1 7-77 ) , considered by some to be the finest poet writing in Ir. since the 1 8th c., Mairtin 6 Direain (b. 1 9 1 0 ) , and Maire Mhac an tSaoi (b. 1922 ) . The present generation includes a host of writers, from whom may be singled out Michael Hartnett (b. 1 94 1 ) , who also writes in Eng., Mi chael Davitt (b. 1 950) , and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (b. 1 952) . What characterizes this most recent resurgence of poetry in Gaelic is not only individ ual talent, but the fact that writing in Gaelic no longer precludes an acceptance of the modern world, nor does it require the employment of the strict poetic forms of the past. If contemporary poets writing in Eng. or Gaelic do not enjoy quite the same privilege as the filidh, they do, like their ancient counterparts, tend to stand as a group in intimate relation to the na tional life of their country. By and large, they are known, respected, and listened to when they speak or write on history, society, or politics, as well as on more personal subjects. Aosdana, the state-sup ported association of writers, is obviously based in part on the conviction that the dignity and prestige enjoyed by the poets of ancient Ireland ought in some measure to be accorded to the poets of contemporary Ireland. See also AI FHREISLIGI; AICILL. BI BLIOGRAPHIES: R. I. Best, A Bib!. ofIr. Philology and of Printed Ir. Lit. ( 1 9 1 3) ; K. G. W. Cross and R. T. A. Dunlop, A Bibl. of Yeats Crit. 1 887-1 965 ( 1 971 ) ; R. Bromwich, Med. Celtic Lit.: A Select Bibl. ( 1 974) ; M. Lapidge and R. Sharpe, A Bib!. of Celtic-Lat. Lit., 400-1200 ( 1 985 ) ; K. P. S. Jochum, W B. Yeats: A Classified Bib!. of Crit. ( 1 990) . ANTHOLOGIES I N ENGLISH AND TRANSLATIONS FROM GAELIC: The Love Songs ofConnacht, and The Religious Songs of Connacht, ed. and tr. D. Hyde ( 1 893; 1906) ; Bards of the Gael and Gall, ed. and tr. G. Sigerson ( 1 897) ; Sel. from Ancient Ir. P , ed. and tr. K. Meyer ( 1 9 1 1 ) ; An A nthol. of Ir. Verse, ed. P. Colum ( 1 922 ) ; Love's Bitter-Sweet, ed. and tr. R. Flower ( 1 925 ) ; K. A.Jackson, Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry, ( 1 935 ) , A Celtic Miscellany ( 1 951 ) ; 1 000 Yean ofIr. P , ed. K. Hoagland ( 1 947) ; Ir. Poets
of the 1 9th C., ed. G. Taylor ( 1 95 1 ) ; Early Ir. Lyrics, ed. and tr. G. Murphy ( 1 956) ; Kings, Lords and Commons, ed. and tr. F. O'Connor ( 1 959 ) ; Love Poems of the Ir. , ed. and tr. S. Lucy ( 1 967) ; The Penguin Book of Ir. Verse, ed. B. Kennelly ( 1 970) ; The Book of Ir. Verse, ed. ]. Montague ( 1 974 ) ; An Duanaire 1 600-1 900, ed. and tr. T. Kinsella and S. O'Tuama ( 1 981 ) ; Early lr. Verse, ed. and tr. R. Lehmann ( 1 982) ; Poets of Munster, ed. S. Dunne ( 1 985) ; The Bright Wave, ed. D. Bolger ( 1 986) ; The New Oxford Book of lr. Verse, ed. T. Kinsella ( 1 986) ; Contemp. Ir. P, ed. A. Bradley ( 1 988 ) . HISTORY AND CRITICISM: E . O 'Reilly, A Chrono logical Account of Nearly Four Hundred Irish Writen ( 1 820, rpt. 1 970) ; E. A. Boyd, Treland's Literary Ren. ( 1 9 1 6 ) ; D . Corkery, The Hidden Ireland ( 1 924) ; A. De Blacam, Gaelic Lit. Surveyed ( 1 929 ) ; R. Flower, The Ir. Trad. ( 1 947) ; M. Dillon, Early lr. Lit. ( 1 948) ; E . Knott, Ir. Syllabic Poetry 1 200-1 600 ( 1 957); C. Watkins, "IE Metrics and Archaic Ir. Verse," Celtica 6 ( 1 963 ) ; Early Ir. P, ed. ]. Carney ( 1 965) ; C. Donahue, "Med. Celtic Lit." in Fisher; P. L. Henry, The Early Eng. and Celtic Lyric ( 1 966) ; P. Power, A Lit. Hist. of Ireland ( 1 969) ; O. Bergin, Ir. Bardic Poetry ( 1 970) ; H. Bloom, Yeats ( 1 970) ; ]. E. Stoll, The Great Deluge: A Yeats Bibl. ( 1 971 ) ; T. Brown, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster ( 1 975) ; Two Dec ades of lr. Writing, ed. D. Dunn ( 1 975) ; R. Fin neran, Anglo-lr. Lit: A Review of Research ( 1 976) ; D . Perkins, Hist. of Mod. Poetry, 2 v. ( 1 976, 1987) ; S. O'Neill, "Gaelic Lit.," Dict. oflr. Lit., ed. R. Hogan et al. ( 1 979) ; G. ]. Watson, lr. Identity and the Literary Revival ( 1 979) ; R. Welch, Ir. P from Moore to Yeats ( 1 980) ; The Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry, ed. S. MacReammoin ( 1 98 1 ) ; A. N. J effares, Anglo-Ir. Lit. ( 1 982) ; S. Deane, Celtic Revivals ( 1 985) , A Short Hist. oflr. Lit. ( 1 986) ; D . Johnston, Ir. P AfterJoyce ( 1 986 ) ; P. L. Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the lr. Ren., 2d ed. ( 1 987) ; R. Garratt, Mod. Ir. P ( 1 986) ; E. Longley, Poetry in the Wars ( 1 986) ; D. Donoghue, We Irish ( 1 988) ; R. F. Garratt, Mod. lr. P ( 1 989 ) . A.BR. IRISH PROSODY. See CELTIC PROSODY. IRONY (Gr. eironeia, Lat. dissimulatio, esp. through understatement) . A. Classical l. In Gr. comedy the eiron was the underdog, weak but clever, who regularly tri umphed over the stupid and boastful alazon. In Theophrast's Characters, the ironist appears as a deceitful hypocrite pursuing his own advantage. The cl. image of i. as a lofty, urbane mode of dissimulation, practiced in conversation and pub lic speech and without one's own advantage in mind, finds its origin in the Platonic Socrates (hence the term "Socratic i . " ) . In front of his conversational partners who claim to know, Socra tes professes not to know, but through insistent questioning proves them also not to know, thereby finding a common basis for their quest for knowl edge. Hence Socrates dissimulates not for his own
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IRONY advantage but for the sake of truth. Aristotle ( Rhet., Bk. 3) presents i. as "a mockery of oneself': "the jests of the ironical man are at his own ex pense; the buffoon excites laughter at others" ( 1 4 1 9b7) . In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle con ceives of i . as "the contrary to boastful exaggera tion; it is a self-deprecating concealment of one's own powers and possessions; it shows better taste to deprecate than to exaggerate one's virtues" ( 1 108. 1 9-23) . In the same work Aristotle dis cusses eironeia and alazoneia, understatement and boastfulness, as deviations from truth, holding that i. is a noble form because it deviates not for the sake of one's own advantage but from a dislike for bombast and a desire to spare others the feel ing of inferiority. The prototype of this genuine i . i s Socrates ( 1 1 27b22-26) . Cl. rhetoricians distinguished several varieties of i. In i. proper, the speaker is conscious of double meaning and the victim unconscious; in sarcasm both parties understand the double meaning. Other forms incl. meiosis and litotes (under statement ) ; hyperbole (overstatement) ; antiphrasis (contrast) ; asteism and charientism (forms of the joke ) ; chleuasm (mockery) ; mycterism (the sneer) ; and mimesis (imitation [q.v. ] , esp. for the sake of ridicule) . Cicero termed i. "that form of dissimu lation which the Greeks named eironeia" (Aca demica posteriora 2.5. 1 5 ) and also considered Soc rates the prototype of this witty and refined art of conversation (De officiis 1 .30. 1 08 ) . Quintilian as signed i. its position among the tropes and figures discussed in Books 8 and 9 of his Institutio oratoria. For Quintilian the common feature in all rhetori cal forms of i. is that the intention of the speaker is different from what he says, that we understand the contrary of what he says (9.2.44) . In late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Ren., and neoclassicism, the cl. delineation of i. was varied and enriched by including other rhetorical forms and elaborating a more complex system offigures, but the basic meaning remained the same. The Fr. Encyclopedie of 1 765 summarizes the various nu ances of i. found in numerous critical handbooks of the time by defining i. as "a figure of speech by which one indicates the opposite of what one says" (8.905 ) . To this one should add that, according to cl. opinion, in order to distinguish i. from mere lying, the entire tenor of speaking, inc!. intonation, emphasis, and gesture, is supposed to reveal the intended meaning. One should also recollect that authors (Boccaccio, Cervantes, Shakespeare) whom today we consider ironic in their literary creations were not viewed so in their time; this term re mained confined to the field of rhet. until late in the 1 8th c. B. Romantic I. The most significant change in meaning took place in 1 797, when Schlegel ob served in his Fragments: "there are ancient and modern poems which breathe throughout, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of i." Schlegel's most constant description of i. in
its literary and poetic forms is that of a consistent alternation of affirmation and negation, of exuber ant emergence from oneself and self-critical re treat into oneself, of enthusiasm and skepticism. In Ger. romantic poetry (Tieck, Jean Paul, Hoff mann, Heine ) , i. became a conscious form of literary creation, although its prototype was seen, as is now fully recognized, in older European authors such as Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Shake speare. Particular points of ironic contrast, of crea tion and annihilation, were the relationships of illusion and reality, subjective and objective, self and world, the inauthenticity and authenticity of the self, the relative and the absolute. A new dimension was introduced when these relation ships were viewed not only in terms of artistic playfulness (Schlegel) but also in terms of melan choly and sadness as the mal du siecie (Fr. roman ticism) , the transitoriness of life (Keats) , or the perishing of the divine in this world (Solger). See ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETICS. C. Tragic I. was introduced by Connop Thirlwall in 1833, who based it on a distinction among three basic types of i.: verbal, dialectic, and practical. Verbal i. establishes, as in cl. rhet., a contrast between what is said and meant; dialectic i. relates to works of lit. and thought in which i. permeates the entire structure. Practical i., however, is the most comprehensive form, present throughout life in individuals as well as in the history of states and institutions, and constitutes the basis for tragic i. The contrast of the individual and his hopes, wishes, and actions, on the one hand, and the workings of the dark and unyielding power offate, on the other, is the proper sphere of tragic i. The tragic poet is the creator of a small world in which he reigns with absolute power over the fate of those imaginary persons to whom he gives life and breath according to his own plan. D. Cosmic I. I. took on a new and more compre hensive dimension with Hegel, who strongly op posed romantic i. because of its "annihilating" tendency, seeing in it nothing but poetic caprice. Yet in The History ofPhilosophy, Hegel sensed in the "crowding of world historical affairs," in the tram pling down of the "happiness of peoples, wisdom of states, and virtue of individuals," in short, in his comprehensive view of history, an ironic contrast between the absolute and the relative, the general and the individual, which he expressed by the phrase, "general i. of the world." Later we find this phrase in Heine and Kierkegaard. In Kierkegaard, however, i. becomes an absolute and irreconcil able opposition between the subj ective and objec tive. Heine uses terms such as "God's i." and "i. of the world" to express the disappearance of reason able order in the world. The ultimate extension of Hegel's concept was made by Nietzsche, who asked what would happen if all our ultimate con victions would become "more and more incred ible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, lie-if God himself
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ISOCHRONISM should prove to be our most enduring lie." E. In Verbal I. (see paragraph 2 above) , one meaning is stated and a different, usually antitheti cal, meaning is intended. In understatement the expressed meaning is mild and the intended meaning often intense, e.g. Mercutio's comment on his death-wound, "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve." Overstatement, esp. common in Am. folk humor, effects the reverse. The i. of a statement often depends on context. If one looks out of his window at a rain storm and remarks to a friend, "Wonderful day, isn't it?" the contradiction be tween the facts and the implied description of them establishes the i. When Hamlet rejects the idea of suicide with the remark, 'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all," his remark is ironic because conscience is a sacramental word associ ated with moral goodness, whereas coward is a pejorative. The same kind of i. is illustrated in Comus' seduction speech, where a true principle (natural fertility) is used to prove an untrue doc trine (libertinism ) . Thus, i. can arise from explicit or implicit contradiction, as when Marvell begins his proposition to his coy mistress with the remark that time is short, but ends with the observation that love can make time pass more quickly. F. Dramatic I. is a plot device according to which (a) the spectators know more than the protago nist; (b) the character reacts in a way contrary to that which is appropriate or wise; (c) characters or situations are compared or contrasted for ironic effects, such as parody; or (d) there is a marked contrast between what the character understands about his acts and what the play demonstrates about them. Foreshadowing is often ironic: Ham let's speech on the fall of the sparrow has one meaning in its immediate context and a somewhat different one in Hamlet's own "fall" at the end of the scene. Tragedy is esp. rich in all forms of dramatic i . The necessity for a sudden reversal or catastrophe in the fortunes of the hero (Aristotle's peripeteia) means that the fourth form of i. (form d) is almost inevitable. Oedipus Rex piles i. on i. Form (a) is present because of the fact that the audience becomes increasingly conscious as the play progresses that Oedipus is rushing blindly to his doom. Form (b) is present in Oedipus' insis tence on pursuing his investigation to its bitter climax (the fact that his basic motivation is a desire for justice and public welfare is a further i.-his fal l is in part caused by his nobility ) . Form (c) is illustrated in the parallel between blind Tiresias (who can "see" morally) and the figure of Oedipus when he, too, has gained "vision" after blinding himself. Form (d) is, of course, present in the contrast between what Oedipus hopes to accomplish and what he finally does accomplish. G. Poetic I. An important new step in the crit. hist. of i. can be noticed with the literary theory elaborated by the New Criticism (q.v. ) , esp. in the work of I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert
Penn Warren, equating i. with poetry as such. For Brooks in particular, i. is considered the "principle of structure" in literary works, a reconciling power fusing the ambiguity, paradox, multiplicity, and variety of meaning in a work into the unity, whole ness, and identity which constitutes its modes of being. On this basis, but by way of reversal, Paul de Man conceives of i. in terms of a discrepancy between sign and meaning, an absence of coher ence or gap among the parts of a work, and an inability to escape from a situation that has be come unbearable. In this sense i. practically coin cides with the notion of deconstruction (q.v. ) . In all its forms of expression, cl. and modern, i. func tions as an agent of qualification and refinement. But during the modern period esp., beginning with romanticism, i. has become inseparable from literary and poetic expression itself. S. Kierkegaard, The Concept oj I. ( 1 84I ) , tr. L. M. Capel ( 1 965 ) ;] . A. K. Thomson, I. , an Historical Intra. ( 1 926 ) ; G. G. Sedgwick, OJ I., Esp. in the Drama ( 1 935 ) ; C. Brooks, Mod. Poetry and the Trad. ( 1 939 ) , The Well Wrought Urn ( 1 947) , "I. as a Principle of Structure" ( 1 949) , in Literary Opinion in America, ed. M. W. Zabel ( 1 951 ) ; D. Worcester, The Art oJSatire ( 1 940) ; A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock: A Study ojI. in Drama ( 1 948) ; R. P. Warren, "Pure and Impure Poetry," Critiques and Essays in Crit., ed. R. W. Stallman ( 1 949 ) ; R. B. Sharpe, I. in the Drama ( 1 959) ; N. D. Knox, The Word I. and its Context, 1500-1 755 ( 1 961 ) ; V. Jankelevitch, L'Ironie ( 1 964) ; E . M. Good, I. in the Old Testament ( 1 965 ) ; A. E. Dyson, The Crazy Fabric: Essays in I. ( 1 965 ) ; N. D. Knox, "I.," DHI; B. Allemann, Ironie und Dichtung, 2d ed. ( 1 969 ) ; B. O. States, I. and Drama: A Poetics ( 1 97 1 ) ; E. Behler, Klassische Iron ie, Romantische Ironie, Tragische Ironie ( 1 972) , I. and the Discourse oj Modernity ( 1 990 ) ; W. C. Booth, A Rhet. oJI., 2d ed. ( 1 974) ; D. H. Green, I. in the Med. Romance ( 1 979) ; D. Simpson, I. and Authority in Romantic Poetry ( 1 979) ; A. K. Mellor, Eng. Romantic I. ( 1 980); Morier; D. C. Muecke, I. and the Ironic, 2d ed. ( 1982 ) ; U . Japp, Theorie der Ironie ( 1983) ; L. R. Furst, Fictions oj Romantic I. ( 1 984 ) ; E. Birney, Essays on Chaucerian I., ed. B. Rowland ( 1 985 ) ; D . ] . Enright, The Alluring Prob lem: An Essay on I. ( 1 987 ) ; M. Yaari, Ironie paradox ale et ironie poetique ( 1 988 ) ; C. D. Lang, I./Humor: Crit. Paradigms ( 1 988) ; R. ] . Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking ( 1 988) ; F. Garber, Self, Text, and Romantic I. ( 1 988 ) , ed., Romantic I. ( 1 989 ) ; S. Gaunt, Trou badours and I. ( 1 989) ; L. Bishop, Romantic I. in Fr. Lit. ( 1 990 ) ; D. Knox, Ironia ( 1990) ;]. A. Dane, The Critical Mythology oJI. ( 1 99 1 ) . w.V.O'C.; E.H.B. ISOCHRONISM or ISOCHRONY refers to the rhythmic organization of speech into equal in tervals of time. Most modern discussions derive from Kenneth Pike's distinction between "stress timed" and "syllable-timed" langs. Proponents of i. claim that in stress-timed langs. (incl. Eng. ) , i. operates in such a way that the distance between
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ISOCOLON stressed syllables is held constant in speech re gardless (within limits) of the number of syllables between them; unstressed syllables between stresses are either lengthened or shortened in timing in order to keep the intervals isochronous. (Notice that i. is operative in music: musical bars are all equal in duration regardless of how many notes actually fill each one, and by convention the first note in every bar bears a stress.) Opponents of i. note that objective evidence is slim: Bolinger showed that interstress intervals in continuous speech can vary as much as 6: 1 . How ever, within certain more localized contexts, i . does seem t o occur. And it may not b e necessary that the intervals be objectively equal, so long as they are perceived to be equal. Acoustic measure ments have failed to confirm perfect i. in speech production, but there is evidence that listeners do impose rhythmic structure on sequences of inter stress intervals. In the "syllable-timed" langs. , by contrast, such as Fr., it is the syllables than are evenly spaced. Here i. comes closer to having both objective and subjective reality. Some temporal prosodists, who hold that timing rather than stressing is the basis of meter, have applied the concept of i. to the scansion of Eng. poetry. This approach has not worked well on accentual-syllabic verse, but most types of accen tual verse (q.v. ) , by contrast, probably show some degree of i., because they are not far removed from song. A good example is ballad meter (q.v. ) : since ballad texts were originally almost always set to music, the i. probably derives from the residue of the musical structure. However, some metrists in sist that i. can only be a feature of performance (q.v. ) , never of meter. C. Patmore, "Eng. Metrical Critics," North Brit. Rev. 27 ( 1 857 ) ; P. Verrier, Essai sur les principes de la metrique anglaise, 3 v. ( 1 909-1 0) -esp. v. 3;]. W. Hendren, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. , and M. C. Beardsley, "A Word for Rhythm and a Word for Meter," PMLA 76 ( 1 961 ) ; Y Shen and G. G. Peterson, I. in Eng. ( 1 962) ; D . Bolinger, Forms ofEng. ( 1 965) , 1 64-7 1 , Intonation and Its Parts ( 1 986) , ch. 5; ]. E . Duck worth, "An Inquiry into the Validity of the Iso chronic Hypothesis," DAI26 ( 1 966) , 5424A; E. M . Kafalenos, "Possibilities o f I.: A Study o f Rhythm in Mod. Poetry," DAI 35 ( 1 974) , 2273A; C. L. Coleman, "A Study of Acoustical and Perceptual Attributes of 1. in Spoken Eng.," DAI 35 ( 1 975 ) , 4724A; M . Sumera, "The Concept of I . : Some Problems ofAnalysis," SIL 25 ( 1 975) ;J. S. Hedges, "Towards a Case for Isochronous Verse," 1 975 Mid-Am. Linguistics Conference Papers, ed. F. Ingle mann ( 1 976) ; I. Lehiste, "I. Reconsidered," Jour. of Phonetics 5 ( 1 97 7 ) . T.V.F.B.; I.L.
mar or form . I. denotes members that are identi cal in number of syllables, or in scansion. Two members could show p. without i.: the number and types of words would match identically, but the words themselves would not match in number of syllables. Conversely, two members could be isosyllabic and evenidentical rhythmically without having exact correspondence of members. But normally p. implies i. as well. Sometimes an obvi ous word is elided in the second member: "The ox hath known his owner, and the ass his master's crib." I. is particularly of interest because Aristotle mentions it in the Rhetoric as the figure which produces symmetry and balance in speech, and thus creates rhythmical prose or even measures in verse; cf. Quintilian 9.3.76. In rhythmical prose it is important for establishing the various forms of the cursus (q.v. ) . Vickers gives examples ofp.: "As Caesar lov'd me, I weep for him; as he was fortu nate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but as he was ambitious, I slew him" (Julius Caesar 3 . 1 .24) ; and of i.: "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd? / Was ever woman in this humour won?" (Richard 3 1 . 2.227) . The p. by Nathaniel in Love's Labour's Lost (5.1 .2) is famous.-Norden; A. Quinn, Figures of Speech ( 1 982) , 77-79; B. Vickers, In Defence of Rhet. ( 1 988) , Cl. Rhet. in Eng. Poetry, 2d ed. ( 1 989 ) . T.V.F.B.
ISOCOLON (Gr. "equal length") and PARISON. P. (Gr. "almost equal") is the figure which de scribes syntactic members (phrases, clauses, sen tences; or lines of verse) showing parallelism (q.v.) of structure. In short, they are identical in gram-
I. DUECENTO: THE 1 2 005. The Middle Ages, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the 1 300s, were long regarded as merely an epoch of barba rism. Modern historiography, however, has redis covered the period from Charlemagne to the
ISOMETRIC, isometrical; in Cl. prosody, "ho moeomeral ." Stichic verse is by definition i . : every line is of the same length and meter. Most stanzaic poems are i.: the metrical structure of the first stanza is repeated identically in subsequent ones. A few-e.g. tail rhyme and the Sapphic (qq.v.) are not. In nonstanzaic poetry (consisting of only one stanza not repeated, e.g. the sonnet [q.v. l l , by contrast, a significant number are heterometric (q.v.)-some lines are shorter than others. It is not known whether most forms in Western poetry are i. See now HETEROMETRIC; STANZA. T.V.F.B. ITALIAN POETICS. See MEDIEVAL POETICS; REN AISSANCE POETICS ; BAROQUE POETICS; NEOCLASSI CAL POETICS; ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC PO ETICS; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETICS. ITALIAN POETRY. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII.
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DUECENTO: THE 1 200S TRECENTO: THE 1 3 00S QUATTROCENTO: THE 1 400S CINQUECENTO: THE 1 500S SEICENTO: THE 1 600s SETTECENTO: THE 1 7 00S OTTOCENTO: THE 1 800s NOVECENTO: THE 1 900S
ITALIAN POETRY birth of the Romance vernacular lits. as a time of fervent incubation, a preparation for the cultural rebirth of the 1 3th and 1 4th cs. During this period the autonomous existence of the neo-Lat. langs. became evident. The first documents of It. lang. and lit., from the doubtful "Veronese Riddle" (9th c.) and the "Laurentian Verse" (ca. 1 150) to St. Francis 's "Hymn," Jacopone's poems, and the Si cilian and Tuscan love lyrics, should be examined in the light of three conditioning facts: ( 1 ) the political conformation of the It. peninsula-the constant tension between temporal and ecclesias tical power and its result, the Guelph-Ghibelline wars; (2) the influence of Fr. and Occitan literary models-the Fr. lang. precedes It. by a century or more; the delay usually being attributed to a tena cious survival of Lat., though it also owes to the absence of a central power, hence a slower evolu tion offeudal structures in the peninsula; and (3) the widespread religious revival beginning around the year 1 000 and its vast influence throughout the 1 300s. Directly related to the latter is the monastic order founded by Francis of Assisi ( 1 182-1 226) , who is also the first It. poet worthy of note. His "Cantico delle creature" (Song of the Creation) , a thanksgiving hymn by and for the creature to the Creator, reflects a spirit of humility and simple faith as well as a new-found wonder at the beauty of the creation and an implicit refusal to see earthly life as a mere valley of tears. The primitive diction should not mislead the reader: Francis is a conscious creator of poetry. This can be seen in the careful structure of the hymn, in the purpose ful ambivalence of word choice, and in the cele brated adjectival series which define each "mem ber" of the grace-giving choir. The genre of the lauda (q.v.; the "Canticle" is also known as "Laus creaturarum" ) , enriched by the example of Med. Lat. liturgical lit., was en dowed with high poetry by Jacopone da Todi ( 1 236?-1 306 ) , an attorney spiritually reborn after the tragic death of his wife . Jacopone vigorously opposed the power plays of Pope Boniface VIII (Dante's arch-enemy) , and was excommunicated and imprisoned by him; a number of the approxi mately 100 extant laude by Jacoponi are against the simony of the Church (e.g. "0 Papa Boni fazio" ) . Jacopone's best poetry is inspired by his feeling of singularity and isolation in his mystical passion. "There's wisdom and rank methinks no higher / than the madness of love for the fair Messiah," Jacopone sings in "Senno me pare"; holy insanity pervades his poems. The primitive dic tion is, in part, poetic artifice. In "0 iubelo del core" (0 HeartfeltJoy ) , a rough-hewn ars poetica, the poet seems to give his program: "the tongue in your mouth stutters, / it knows not what it says." His masterpiece, the "Donna del Paradiso" (La ment of Mary) , is a short dramatization of Christ's passion seen through the eyes of the Mother. Here Jacopone reaches lyric heights never before at-
tained in It. p. The Madonna's cry to her Son, the "Lovely Lily," ("0 figlio figlio figlio / figlio amoroso giglio") is supreme religious poetry, equalled only in Dante's Paradiso. Jacopone had no direct following. Among Dante's indirect predecessors was the late 1 3th-c. flowering of religious verse in Northern Italy on the theme of the Beyond: the excessive realism of Giacomino da Verona's "Infernal Babylon" and "Heavenly Jerusalem" (620 stammering verses ) , and the ex-vota-like "Threefold Book" b y Bonvesin de la Riva ( 1 240-1 3 1 3 ) . The actual forerunners of Dante's lyric poetry were the poets of the "Sicilian School" (q.v. ) , the first matrix of It. literary trad. Centered at the Palermo court of Frederick II ( 1 1 94-1250 ) , the group devolved from the Occi tan troubadour (q.v.) trad. It superimposed the rituals of feudal bondage and court protocol onto a concept of love, its only topic, in which the perfect submission by the Platonic lover corre sponded to the heavenly perfection of the lady. The school, of vast cultural importance but want ing in invention, produced no great poetry. Among its members were Giacomino Pugliese, Rinaldo d'Aquino, and Pier delle Vigne. The reputed "in ventor" of the sonnet (q.v. ) , the notary Jacopo da Lentino (mid 1 2 00s) , is mentioned by Dante as the foremost poet of the "Magna Curia"; he was a faithful adapter of the trouveres ' schemata of fin
amor. The Emperor Frederick, himself a poet, had vainly attempted to unity his Ger. and It. domains against violent ecclesiastical opposition. During his reign arose the Ghibelline (Imperial) and Guelph (Papal) factions, antagonists for over a century in It. politics. Mter the battle of Benevento ( 1 266) the practice of poetry survived but was transplanted to the North. Its first note worthy h eir, Guittone d 'Arezzo ( 1 225-93) , a Guelph exiled from his homeland, renewed and enriched the Siculo-Occitan trad. by extending its topics to ethical and social concerns. Guittone's hermeticism is an exasperation of the trobar clus (q.v.) of Fr. minstrelsy; his poems sound cold and artistically stifling. Although poets such as Chiaro Davanzati and the abstruse Monte Andrea shared his taste for technical complexity, Guittone had no direct disciple. His songbook is a bridge, or rather a hurdle to be overcome between the Sicilians and the first great flowering of It. lyric, the school of Dante's Sweet New Style, the Dolce stil nuovo (q.v. ) . The very existence o f such a "school," posited only by a vague reference in Purgatory, is unsure. Certain, however, is a common conception of Love as "dictator" (inspirer and despot) . The Bolognese judge Guido Guinizzelli (ca. 1 240-76), praised by Dante as the father of the style dolce ("sweet," not bitterly harsh, as in Guittone) and nuovo ("origi nal" ) , left a celebrated summary of the new amo rous ars poetica in his canzone: true nobility is not of lineage but of virtue; love is a positive force:
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ITALIAN POETRY through the lady, admired from afar, the lover of "noble heart" attains spiritual perfection. Guido's Songbook (about 20 extant texts) shows a youthful vitality and a springtime acerbity, also present in Dante's Vita nuova. Among the numerous adepts of the Sweet New Style we can but mention Lapo Gianni, Gianni Alfani, Dino Frescobaldi, Bonagi unta Orbicciani; an anonymous Compiuta Don zella ( "Accomplished Maiden"; her three sonnets show poetic skill and sincere passion) ; and the prolific Cino da Pistoia (d. 1 336) , usually charac terized as a hyphen between Dante and Petrarch. The maturity of the school is represented by Guido Cavalcanti (d. 1 300), Dante's "primo amico." Leg end depicts him as a haughty loner, an image probably inspired by his poems (52 extant) , his an poetica, and theory of love. Cavalcanti 's interest in the mechanics of feelings, esp. the anguish oflove, gives him a "morbid and mournful" air; he seems to be an observer of his own soul. In his concept of love the image ofa "real" woman stimulates the lover to create an idea of beauty which pervades his soul and, in turn, prods him to strive vainly toward the "original." Cavalcanti's masterpiece, "Ballatetta" (ca. 1 300) , was written in exile. Parallel to stilnovo a school ofjocose (or "bour geois") poetry developed. The "Contrasto" by a Cielo d'Alcamo ( l 250?) is a highly artistic, lively "script" of amorous bickering, ending in bed, be tween a cynical minstrel and a clever country lass. The Sicilian court poets' recurrent topics (praise, submission) and artful linguistic koine are the ironic subtext to this still enjoyable little master piece. Parody of stilnovo results in shrill outbursts in Cecco Angiolieri ( 1260-1 3 1 3 ) , the skilled Sienese sonneteer (about 1 00 extant poems) whose themes incl. wild quarrels with his lady (Becchina-who is no lady) , tavern brawls, the sorry state of his purse, and the stinginess of his parents, who are reluctant to die. Cecco is no "It. Villon," as h e has been called. His texts are meant for recital in the inn or brothel; the punchlines are ideally completed by guffaws from the guzzlers. A gentler realism inspires the sonnets of Folgore, poet of San Gimignano (early 14th c . ) , reflecting the chivalric ceremonies of polite society. The frank pursuit of pleasure here is tempered by a code of behavior based on good taste. Folgore 's tenuous poetry harks back, as stilnovo does, to the courtly poets of Provence. II. TRECENTO: THE 1 3 005. In retrospect, the first hundred years of It. lit. appear as preparation for Dante's poetry. This perception, philologically speaking, is quite correct. Aesthetically, however, a veritable chasm separates Duecento poetry from The Divine Comedy. For valid parallels one must turn to the fine arts and Giotto, or to philosophy and Thomas Aquinas. Little is known of Dante Alighieri's life. Born in 1 265 in Florence into a Guelph-leaning family of lesser nobility, he studied rhet. with Brunetto Lat ini. His attendance at Bologna University is doubt-
ful; service in the wars of the Commune in 1 289 is attested. Lasting influences upon his youth in cluded his friendship with Guido Cavalcanti, his discovery of his own talent for poetry, and, esp., his love for a Bice Portinari, wife of the banker Bardi ("Beatrice" for the poet who remained devoted to her in her life and after her death . ) Their lop sided love story is told in his youthful novel, the Vita nuova, but in his magnum opus, written to honor this young woman who died at 25, Beatrice is present from beginning to end. No mention is ever made of wife Gemma and their three or four offspring (two, Jacopo and Pietro, become exegetes of their father's work) . After 1 295 docu ments attest Alighieri's participation in the civic life of his city; in 1 300 he became one of six "priori" (cabinet members) in a Florence torn between two Guelph parties: Blacks, subservient to Rome, and Whites, anti-imperial but resistant to Papal hegemony. Alighieri sided with the latter. In 1 30 1 he was sent by his party, then in power, as ambassador to Pope Boniface VIII, who promptly detained him while the Blacks, with French and Papal help, seized power in Florence. Dante, sen tenced in absentia to be burned at the stake, never again set eyes on his city. In exile over 20 years, he hoped at first to deserve recall on the strength of his learning: he produced works on linguistics (De vulgari eloquentia, a fragment in Lat. ) , exegesis ( Convivio, unfinished) , and political science (De monarchia) . Scholars date the composition of The Divine Comedy from 1 307 to the year of Dante's death in Ravenna, 1 32 l . The Vita n uova ( 1 292-93) i s a collection of poems connected by prose passages relating a tenuous love story from the meeting between Dante and Bice, both aged nine, to her death in 1 290 and beyond. It is a story made up of abstract emotions, the most daring "real" event being Bea trice's one-time reciprocation of Dante's greeting. Vita nuova is neither autobiography nor total fic tion: it is rather a typology of youthful love, per vaded by a quasi-religious, mystical solemnity and by an oneiric vagueness of detail. Poems not fit for inclusion in the "Vita," and those written after 1 293, make up Dante's Canzoniere (or Rime [Song book] ) . Here, besides the early and later experi ments with styles and fOnTIs, we find the canzoni of Dante's maturity and exile; closest to the inspira tion of the Comedy is the poem ''Tre donne" (Three Women) . The 1 5 ,000 verses of the Comedy (for Dante, "comedy" as opposed to tragedy meant a story beginning badly but e nding well; "divine" was added by posterity) took 15 years to compose. Grosso modo, he wrote an average of one strophe a day: 33 syllables (three hendecasyllables ) ; hence the impression, predominant among his good readers for over six centuries, of an extraordinary density, a continually unfolding and renewed inner richness. The poet claimed at different times dif ferent purposes for his enterprise: in addition to
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ITALIAN POETRY the glorification of Beatrice and the exile's wish to show his worth, Dante seems to claim, in a letter (EPistle XIII) of doubtful attribution, the messi anic mission "to lead the living out of a state of misery into a state of bliss." The purpose the poet did accomplish was poetic: to create with words a world which in its miraculous credibility vies with God's own creation. The reader must keep con stantly in mind that the Comedy is a fiction, not a world, tlie work of a poet and master storyteller, not of the Holy Spirit. This lapalissian truth sets a limit to symbolic interp ., even though the medie val practice of allegory (q.v.) is ever-present in the text. Consider, however, what distinguishes Dante's from earlier transcendental journeys. His unread able predecessors are all allegory; we read Dante after seven centuries for what we find beyond his didactic purposes. Allegory is a premise of the narratio, flexible and often ambiguous: it is part of the plurivalence genetic to all enduring poetry. Beatrice and Virgil are, respectively, "theology" and "reason," but we believe and love them pri marily because Dante "forgot," more often than not, their roles as abstractions. The grand architecture of the poem is univer sally known. The Comedy is the fictive, visionary account of a redemptive journey through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise and God, by a pilgrim who both is and is not Dante Alighieri, guided at first by Virgil and later by Beatrice. Allegorically the trip is Everyman's progress through suffering and purgation to salvation and bliss; narratively it is an immensely, mysteriously moving story of an explo ration of an unknown universe. The first realm holds the souls of the damned, distributed into nine "circles" set up according to Aristotle's cate gories of sin (intemperance, violence, fraud with heresy, unknown to the Greek, thrown in) . The realm of purgation is segmented into the seven deadly sins of Christian dogma (with Ante Purgatory and Earthly Paradise bringing the num ber of divisions to nine) . The blessed regions com prise the nine heavens of Ptolemy's geocentric universe, from the sphere of the Moon through the planets and the Sun to the fixed stars and the Empyrean, abode of all the souls happy in the sight of God. The recurrence ofthe number 3 and its multiples, as well as other divisions in the edifice, such as the 1 00 canti, or the strophic scheme of 3 lines of 1 1 syllables each- ten a rima (q.v.)-or the canto and episode parallelisms and contrasts at corresponding "locations" in the three cantiche are the cross and delight of Dante exegesis (see NUMEROLOGY ) . Hints at the Trinity?-cer tainly. But first and foremost, these are self-im posed "difficulties," order-creating limits with which the poet circumscribes and regulates the excesses of his boundless imagination. Of the three canticles (34+33+33 canti) , Inferno is the most dramatic and suspenseful. Memorable characters and events dominate several canti: Francesca's story oflove and death, Farinata's "war
memoirs," Chancellor Pier's suicide, Ulysses' last voyage , the prison "cannibalism" of Count Hu golin of Pisa. Purgatory is the reign of elegy, sub dued sadness, and hopeful yearning: it is the can tica most "earthly" and peaceful. Feelings of brotherly affection dominate here; the middling tone fits well the characters on the mountainside. It is a mild crepuscular setting, in contrast to the purple-dark violence of Hell and the soul-search ing beams of the last domain. Paradise is the tri umph of Beatrice, who is a symbol and yet a real woman, with her individualized intonation, chore ography, and even mannerisms. Among the blessed, absolute equality is the rule: no character should emerge; but a hymnal choir clearly cannot satisfy the playwright in Dante. The sequence of Heavens is transformed into a transcendental fire works of growing intensity. Humanity is never ab sent from the rarefied mysticism signalling God's presence. And the great Saints appear in person to test, prod, warn, and guide the Pilgrim toward fulfillment. God, thanks to the magnificent intui tion of Dante's genius, is depicted here not as the bearded elder of Judaeo-Christian iconography but as a blinding point of light immeasurably far and immeasurably near. In Paradise Dante is at his most sublime; it is the soaring flight of his mature genius. In "Limbo" the pilgrim meets the six great poets of CI. antiquity, and there, in a prideful aside, he reports how he was made an equal among them. Some readers detect immodesty here. In truth, Dante's claim is rather modest. Two of the six, Ovid and Lucan, through respectable storytellers, are certainly not in the same league with Homer, Horace, and Virgil ( and Dante ) . In fact, the author of The Divine Comedy has in world lit. fewer than five equals: he is in that most select club which has so far admitted only Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Dante's robust spirituality, unshaken religious convictions, and firm belief in the continuity of social structures were rooted in the apparent sta bility of the "old" world, the thick Ages in the Middle. The curriculum vitae of Francesco Petrarca ( 1 304-74) coincides with a historical mo ment of accelerated change and crumbling cer tainties. Petrarch appears much closer to us than Dante, closer than the generation or two that actually separate these two quasi-contemporaries. The "modern" lability of Petrarch's psychic makeup is manifest in his vast correspondence, in his treatises (e.g. on "solitude," on the "remedies against Fortune" ) , and esp. in his Lat. "Confes sions" ( Secretum) , which is a microscopic analysis of that nameless something that forever anguished his soul. Born in Arezzo of a Florentine bourgeois family in exile, Petrarch was brought up in South ern France. He studied jurisprudence at Montpel lier and Bologna. On April 6, 1 327, his destiny was redirected by his meeting in Avignon, Laura, the unidentified Provenc;al girl whom he loved in life
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ITALIAN POETRY and in death (she died of the plague in 1 348) and whom he immortalized in his poetry. Petrarch is the forefather of humanism, the revival of Graeco Roman culture that dominates the next century. His work in Lat. is immense; it (mainly the epic in hexameters, Africa) procured him the Poet Laure ate (q.v.) title and crown conferred by the Senate of Rome in 1 34 1 . The uncontested arbiter ofEuro pean lit., Petrarch lived the latter half of his life mainly in Italy. Petrarch expected enduring fame from his Lat. work; immeasurably superior are his modestly ti tled (with affected scorn) Rerum vulgarium frag menta (freely rendered, "It. bits and pieces") or Canzoniere. In spite of his expressed desire to burn the collection, he kept revising and perfecting the ms. to his dying day. The 366 poems ( 3 1 7 sonnets, plus canzoni, sextets, ballads, and madrigals) re cord the earthly (not at all merely spiritual) pas sion inspired by Laura, even after her "flight to heaven." This last great representative of the trou badour trad. (afterwards there will be epigones and "Petrarchism") breaks with its "Platonic" in corporeality. Some critics have doubted the very existence of Laura, assuming her to be a compos ite of the poetic trad. And the "love story" behind the stylized abstractions is clearly an unrequited love. But the human passion of the poet, with its ebb and flow over the years, with its emotional flotsam and j etsam of briefjoys and long despair, with its cries and silences, with its phases of resig nation and of rebellion, recreates, albeit perhaps ex nihilo, the anonymous Beloved, body and soul. A curious double process takes place: Petrarch veils and stylizes his earthly model, but the living warmth of his words makes the reader mentally recreate Laura. There is no direct description of her in the Songbook, yet we never lose sight of her. There is something artful if not artificial in this process-the something that made F. De Sanctis remark that, while Dante was more poet than artist, Petrarch was more artist than poet. It is true, however, that readers have always privileged the poems written about Laura and the self-ana lytic pauses. Set aside the recantatitive opening and closing pieces as well as the few non-directly "Laura" poems, and what remains engraved in memory are the dreamy evocation of the memora ble day (no. 2 ) , the Proustian simile of the old pilgrim ( 1 6 ) , a solo e pensoso walk across the fields ( 35 ) , the tired prayer of the penitent (62 ) , a lovely shape made of transparencies (90 and the famous 1 26) , the cameretta [little room ] of the poet (234 ) , and, in the death o f Laura, the inexorable march of days and years (272 ) , the useless return of spring ( 3 1 0 ) , and the sad song of a nightingale telling us that "nothing here below delights-and lasts" ( 3 1 1 ) . A certain repetitiousness has been observed in the Canzoniere, but in fact the work was meant to be sampled by fits and starts, rather than by continued perusal. A monochrome uni formity is genuine in Petrarch's only other "vul-
gar" (i.e. It.) verse work, the later Trionfi. Heavily allegorical, unfinished and unrefined, these series of Dantesque terzine sing the "triumphs" of Love , Modesty, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. Among the minor Trecentisti poets one should mention at least the late stilnovista Fazio degli Uberti, from Pisa; the courtly poet Antonio Bec cari from Ferrara; the Florentine prolific poly graph, popularizer of vernacular lit., Antonio Pucci (d. 1 388) ; and the fine author of ballads, Franco Sacchetti (d. 1400 ) . The third component of the great Trecento triumvirate, Giovanni Boccac cio ( 1 3 1 3-75 ) , father of modern storytelling, was an uninspired but evidently inspiring versifier. Known is Chaucer's vast and undervalued debt to his Filostrato ( 1 336?; the romance of Troilus in octaves) and Teseida ( l 34 1 ? , an epic, the Palamon aud Arcite story) . Boccaccio's own "Vita nuova" ( Commedia delle ninfe, 1 34 1 ) and allegorical vision in terzine (Amorosa visione, 1 343?) influenced in turn Petrarch's Trionfi. There are some 1 00 lyric compositions also attributed to Boccaccio, count ing the "day"-divider ballads from the frame of the Decameron. The real poetry of the Decameron, how ever, is to be looked for rather in some of the stories construed more according to the composi tional norms of a poem (strophic architecture, anaphoric insistences, gigantic "rhymes," echoes and refrains) than of a short story (e.g. Zima, Federigo and his falcon, the rhythmical tale ofthe baker Cisti, or, esp., the wondrous ballad of Isa betta and her "pot of basil" ) . III. QUATTROCENTO: THE 1 400S. The sudden blossoming ofvernacular lit. in the 1 4th c. carried in it the seeds of decadence, or rather of ex hausted retrenchment during the first half of the next century. Petrarch and Boccaccio (and proto humanist Dante) were indeed the fountainhead of the cultural movement called humanism, essen tially an enthusiastic revival ofLat. lit. (as opposed and "superior" to It. lit . ) . The trend, initially a passion for Cl. learning and a rediscovery of many major texts of Lat. and Gr. antiquity, by degrees became a belief in the panacea of Cl. education, capable of "freeing" man. The main creative tenet of this new classicism was imitatio (see IMITATION) , theorized by Petrarch and basis for the later "Petrarchism" (q.v. ) . The new blooming ofLat. lit. highlights such well-known humanists as Pi co della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla, Coluccio Salutati, Giovanni Pontano, and Marsilio Ficino. Far from being slavish imitators, the humanists in fact ended by "dethroning the ancients from their ex alted position" (Guarino, in Bondanella) by reex amining under the microscope of philology the old texts and by historicizing classicism. Human ism was nothing short of a discovery of history in the modern sense of the word (see RENAISSANCE POETICS) . Poetry in It. continued to be produced, margin ally as it were, often in its "lower" species as imita tions of popular song. The Venetian patrician
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ITALIAN POETRY Leonardo Giustinian ( 1 338-1446) became a sort of bestseller on account of his talent for reproduc ing the sonorities and easy grace of the canzonette sung by gondoliers on the laguna. The same taste for the simple diction of popular genres inspired the Florentine Luigi Pulci ( 1 432-84) , but with a different result. Pu\Ci is a "humorist" in the true sense of the word: for him life was a "harmonious mixture of sweet and bitter and a thousand fla vors." His mock-heroic "epos" Morgante, a rewrit ing of the Chanson de Roland, is not merely a parody on the solemnities of the Fr. chansons de geste; it is the amusing product of a whimsical comic genius. Its rough model is enriched by characters alive on the page-in spite of their irrational capriciousness. In addition to the usual types, Pu\Ci introduced Morgante, the giant, in spirer of Rabelais, the ribald monster Margutte who dies of immoderate laughter at a gross prac tical joke, and the amusing "logician" fiend, As taroth, spokesman for Pulci's religious doubts and occult leanings. Byron read and translated part of this weird epic; it may have been among the inspi rations for Don Juan. Matteo Maria Boiardo ( 1 44 1 -94) made refer ence in a serious vein to the same material. Pulci's attitude toward the Carolingian sources had re flected popular Tuscan city-bred tastes; Boiardo brought to them the conservative provincial at mosphere of Northern courtly life. The incom plete Orlando innamorato (The Loves of Roland) injects Arthurian elements into the chivalric ma terial: all-conquering love now presides over the knights' and ladies' adventures. The poem is a whirlwind of disparate episodes, unified, if at all, by overwhelming passion and vigorous action. The idiom, of strong regional flavor, hindered wide diffusion of the original ; up to the 19th c. Orlando was read in Tuscanized remakes by Berni and others. Florence, transformed from Dante's Commune into a Signoria under the Medicis, reacquired its cultural centrality during the second half of the century. Pulci's lord protector, Lorenzo de' Medici ( 1 449-92; known as "II Magnifico" ) , was himself a poet of great versatility. Critical appraisals of the Magnifico's poetry range from enthusiastic en dorsement of his artful masquerades to viewing his output as the pastime of a statesman, the amuse ment of a dilettante. In truth, Lorenzo was simply one of the many skillful literati of his court. His principal merit, other than his all-important pa tronage, lies in his vigorous defense of literary It.: Lorenzo contributed in a decisive way to the final prevalence of the Tuscan-Florentine trad. and the decline of creative writing in Lat., almost in abey ance during the Ren. Still, it may well be that Lorenzo's most endur ing achievement was the discovery of the poetic talent of Politian (Poliziano) , pseudonym of Ag nolo Ambrogini ( 1 454-94) from Montepulciano (hence the name) . Politian became a leading hu-
manist rediscoverer and editor of ancient texts. Apart from his poetry in Lat. and Gr. , Politian wrote canzoni and other lyric poems; his master work is the unfinished Stanze ("Strophes" ) , the allegorical retelling, in ottave, of the meeting be tween Giuliano de' Medeci, a youth devoted to pleasure and adventure, and the nymph of un earthly beauty Simonetta (Vespucci) . The airy lightness of the Stanze is a poetic miracle. Every octave is a contexture of reminiscences, references, and reminders (Homer, Horace, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, and dozens of lesser classics ) , but the resulting quilt appears perfectly natural. Mo ments of noble melancholy accent the translucid text, mementos of the fragility and transience of all that is earthly. Politi an is the first poet of modern times whose subject is poetry; a poet's poet, he saw lit. as the essence of life. Composed during the last two decades of the century, the Arcadia ofJacopo Sannazaro ( 1 458?1 530) has enjoyed a plurisecular fortune, cycli cally renewed and, in a way, enduring into our own times of recurrent ecological lamentation. On the model of Boccaccio's Ameto, Arcadia is a mixture of prose tales and pastoral songs. "Antimetropoli tan" yearnings (anachronistic already at incep tion) for a nonexistant rural simplicity, together with the immemorial myth of a lost Golden Age, inspire this early environmental manifesto. It is also a stylistic miracle: there is hardly a sentence in its loose quilt that is without a source in CI. lit. IV. CINQUECENTO: THE 1 5 00s. The Rinas cimento, the It. Ren., is the age of artistic and literary splendor between the age of humanism and the advent of baroque. Its poetic practice is pervaded by the heritage of the great Trecento, esp. of Petrarch (Dante was considered, by this age of refinement, a "primitive" ) , filtered through the classicism that prevailed in the 15th c. The Rinas cimento is the age of Petrarchism (q .v. ) , an age not only of servile imitation ofthe themes and style of the Canzoniere, not only the fashionable organiza tion of one's poetic output into an ideal love story, but also an adherence to the Platonic ideal oflove (see PLATONISM AND POETRY) and to the linguistic ideal of purity, harmony, and elegance of expres sion, which later deteriorated into mere technical virtuosity. The patron saints of the European 1 500s were Petrarch and Plato; however, Aris totle's Poetics was also rediscovered and deeply, at times obsessively, studied-and in part miscon strued. The tenet of imitatio became paramount. Literary genres were rigidly codified, just as social behavior came to be governed by a code-its great documents are Castiglione's Courtier and Machia velli's Prince. At the threshold of this great age stands the historically important but poetically insignificant Cardinal Pietro Bembo ( 1 4701 547) , friend of Lorenzo and Politian. Bembo, as codifier of Petrarchism and Platonism, is the em bodiment of the Ren. His Rime (Poems) are little more than textbook examples to illustrate his
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ITALIAN POETRY theories, but his treatise on the Prose della volgar lingua (It. Prose Style, 1 525) became something of a bible for the literati of the century. This inclusive codification of literary taste and linguis tic choice had a decisive influence on the diction of authors from Ariosto to Tasso. The essence of the Rinascimento is best revealed in the epic romance Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Roland) , whose creator, one of the most likeable figures in the annals of It. lit., is Ludovico Ariosto ( 1 474- 1 53 3 ) . Ariosto's minor work illustrates the frustrations of a harried existence. His lyric poetry was inspired by his lifelong devotion to Alessandra Benucci, whom he married secretly so as not to forfeit ecclesiastical benefits. The Satire (seven capitoli on the model of the Horatian sermo) re counts his travels and reflections. The last years of his life were devoted to the definitive revision of his poem (pub. 1 532 in 46 cantz) . Orlando, 30 years in the making, pools the experience of the minor work, the warmth and immediacy of the love po etry, the detached and smiling wisdom of the Sat ire, and the character-sketching of his theatrical pieces. The external occasion for the poem was the unfinished Orlando innamorato: the Furioso completes the story, closely following Boiardo's sources in the Carolingian epic cycle and the Celtic Arthurian legends in narrative detail, but renewing the material with poetic license. This master storyteller holds hundreds of threads in hand at once and unerringly weaves them into an immense coherent tapestry. Some critics, dis turbed by the artifice of the complex plotting, posit an improbable network of allegories behind the narratio. The great movers of the threefold plot are Ariosto's passions: first, love conceived as an earthy emotion, frankly sensual; second, the forms of knightly behavior and of court ritual; third, an insatiable appetite for adventure. Vol taire noted that Ariosto is always "superior" to his material: he tells his story 'Jokingly"-taking seri ously and yet mocking his inventions. Hence the frequent authorial intrusions (comments, tongue in-cheek explanations, ironic misdirection); hence the fable-like and dreamy atmosphere around Ariosto's errant knights and ladies. Painstaking realism of detail fuses with an oneiric vagueness of context. The description of Atlante's castle and the invention of the lunar travels of Astolfo are emblematic of this attitude. The form of the Orlando furioso is nothing short of prodigious. The octaves of narrative poetry woody and lagging in Boccaccio's youthful poems, prosily stammering in Pulci's Morgante, loosely dressing Boiardo's laborious inventions-coin cides here, for the first time in It. p., with the "breathing" of author and reader. Ariosto thinks, nay, lives in his octave, in the six (the alternately "sonorized" verses) plus two (the clinching couplet) pattern of his strophe, each one a microcosm, in its perfectly controlled and yet wondrously airy archi tecture, of the entire magnificent construction.
Ariosto's Petrarchan love lyrics are undistin guished products of the age, similar to myriads of contemp. songbooks. Little talent emerges from the crowd of the Cinquecento Petrarchisti. Monsi gnor Giovanni della Casa ( 1503-56) , remembered for his Galateo (Book of Manners) , shows a nostal gia for robust emotions and monumental imagery. Casa is an expert architect of resonant verse; his skilled enjambments still provide examples of the device in prosodic treatises. Two women poets introduce a welcome variation in a field domi nated by the stylized male psychology of emotions: Vittoria Colonna ( 1 492-1547 ) , of aristocratic fam ily and patroness of artists, authored a conven tional songbook; Gaspara Stampa ( 1 523-54) , probably oflow social standing, occasionally allows life to show through her imitative verse. Even more creatively, the feverish and disordered rhythms of a passionate existence seem to influ ence her songs, which are suggestive of entries in a love diary. Intimations of the incipient baroque taste have been detected in Luigi Tansillo ( 1 510-68) . His too-easy sonorities, abuse of color, predilection for horrid landscapes, and colloquial touch seem, in deed, to point toward Marino. But more notewor thy than the lyric output of the age and its vast and forgotten epic feats (the best are Trissino's Italy Freedfrom the Goths, Alamanni's Avarchide, and Ber nardo Tasso's Amadigi) is its humorous or light verse (q .v. ) . Two cultivators of this genre had vast influence throughout the following century. Francesco Berni ( 1 498- 1 535) , Tuscan refurbisher of Boiardo's epic, is the wellhead of the bernesco poem, still jokingly cultivated in Italy-a buffoon ery or "sitcom" heavy on puns. Written in an irre sistibly funny It. modeled on Lat. (or a Lat. bas tardized by It. ) , the mock-heroic epic Baldus by Merlin Cocai (pseudonym of the rebellious Bene dictine monk Teofilo Folengo [ 1 491-1 574] ) ex tends Pulci's Morgante by recounting the farcical adventures of Baldus, a descendant of Rinaldo. The last great poetic voice of the Ren. has long been considered to be Torquato Tasso ( 1 544-95 ) , spiritual forerunner of baroque poetics (q.v. ) . Most likely inheriting a psychic disorder, h e be came distraught by the mental effort required to produce his masterwork, the epic La Gerusalemme liberata Oerusalem Delivered, 1 575) . Episodes of irrational behavior at the court of Ferrara and aimless excursions across the peninsula eventually led to Tasso's confinement for seven years in the dungeon asylum of Sant' Anna. Pirated editions of his poem, attacks from pedantic critics, and obses sive religious doubts exasperated his illness; he died in Rome. His minor work alone would be sufficient to give him a high rank among the Petrarchists and epic poets of his century. The Rime (Verses) , nearly 2000 lyrics, is a workshop in which the poet perfected techniques and experi mented with sentimental situations; these are in terspersed with lyrics of admirable invention and
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ITALIAN POETRY masterful execution, esp. his madrigals, a genre congenial to Tasso's evanescent moods. The Pe trarchan model here appears at one remove, fil tered through the Petrarchists of the early 1 500s-Bembo, Casa-as indeed Petrarch will be read through Tasso by the next generation of lyricists, Marino and his school. The chivalric poem Rinaldo ( 1 2 canti of oUave) betrays the ado lescent's hand as well as features that will later govern the inspiration of his epic. Already here the war chronicle of the sources is constantly squeezed out by the courtly love. Tasso first favored the idyll, and his pastoral play Aminta is rightly spoken of in the same breath with his lyric output: its theatrical pretext gives way to the emotional situations and flights of pathos experimented with in the Rime. Whether La Gerusalemme liberata is the first full poetic manifestation of the incipient baroque age (some critics hold that the very terms "baroque" and "Marinism" [qq.v.] are misnomers for "Tas sism" and "Tassomania" ) , or, inversely, the last bloom of the "sane" Rinascimento is an academic question, and interestingly, it parallels the great 1 7th-c. controversy (which engaged Galilei) on the relative worth of the two great narrative poems ofthe preceding age, Ariosto's and Tasso's. Tasso's epic, its pretext the last phase of the 1 099 Cru sade, has a cast made up on the one hand oflifeless historical characters and, on the other, of fictive personae of the poet himself, each endowed with throbbing life. To Ariosto's objectivity, detach ment, and irony, Tasso opposes his subjectivity, participation, and sentimentality. All the great passionate characters of the oft-abandoned plot are facets of Tasso's psychic makeup, exhibiting the excesses and morbidity that landed their crea tor in Sant' Anna. The Gerusalemme is in this sense that unicum: a truly autobiographical epos. Long traverses through Aristotle's poetics and the the ory of the epic preceded and accompanied the feverish composition, but the rules reaffirmed were soon discarded by Tasso's prepotent senti mental inspiration. The Crusade cedes place to the multiple, strangely disturbed love stories of the variously and wrongly assorted couples. The whole is immersed in an overheated atmosphere of gratuitous heroism, white and black magic, cliffhangers cum heavenly intervention, duels to the death, and battle scenes of vast confusion. In the Orlando jurioso the goodnatured "colloquial" voice of Ludovico the Amiable constantly tended to over-dub the narrator, while in the Gerusalemme Torquato's falsetto breaks through, fitfully as it were, to lend his creations a hundred diverse into nations of emotional disorder. Tasso's ottava, ordered into obsessive parallel isms and chiastic contrasts, offers an ineffable musicality and a psychomimetic finesse never be fore heard. It is masterfully torn by the high drama of enjambments-much more so than Ariosto's peaceful, at times lumbering gait would allow. And yet Boileau's objection to the clinquant
du Tasse, as well as the sometimes violent antipathy for the Gerusalemme shown by excellent readers, points at a fact recent Tasso erit. has placed into light: the poem is addressed to a new audience of a new age and sensibility, that of the Counter-Ref ormation, an age of earthshaking upheavals. This critical view allows us to reevaluate Tasso's rework ing of Gerusalemme conquistata (Jerusalem Recov ered ) , a text of vaster and more solemn architec ture, characterized by a baroque heaviness of pace and expression and universallyjudged until quite recently a complete failure. The characteristics of Gerusalemme eonquistata are in evidence in Tasso's late poem Ii mondo ereato, a ponderous account of the Creation similar in flavor to an overripe fruit. V. SEICENTO: THE 1 6005. The 1 7th c . , a Golden Age in Gongora's and Cervantes' Spain, in Ra cine's and La Fontaine's France, and in the Eng land of the metaphysical poets (q.v. ) , was long considered to have been an age of decadence in Italy, a "century without poetry." Its dominant Tassesque aesthetics certainly revealed the ex haustion of a long-mined vein, an exasperation of the drive for outward perfection yearned for by the Ren. The age frittered away its heritage in an obsessive search for originality and "marvels." For eign (Sp.) and Papal domination in the peninsula, the newborn religious dogmatism imposed by the Counter-Reformation, the general lowering of ethical standards owing perhaps to the riches from the New World, and the universal instability of ideas in this age of scientific revolution have all been pointed to as causes for the alleged poetic aridity of the age. In truth, an equation of the beautiful with the difficult has prevailed in all silver ages of culture (Hellenistic Greece, later Imperial Rome, our own 20th c . ) . The baroque age in Italy adopted the ars poetiea ofthe late Ren., developing Tasso's theories and example toward a concept of poetry as a nonrational activity, and it endorsed a view of literary production and appre ciation based on taste (q.v. ) and feeling. Giambattista Marino ( 1 569-1 625 ) , a Neapoli tan, became the high priest of the new school of writing usually called Marinism (q.v.; also Seicen tismo, conceptism [see CULTERANISMO 1 , and manierismo [see MANNERISM ] ) . He was the theo rizer and the most prolific practitioner of the poetics of meraviglia (of astonishment-at all costs ) , a style in search of the arduous and the complex. A genre loved by Marino and the Marin isti was poetry on art (e.g. his collection Galleria) , a species of poetry feeding on itself (his Lira [Lyr ics] ) and pillaging all preexistent lit.-as does Marino's masterpiece the Adone (Adonis ) , in al most every one of its 40,000 verses. The poem is truly a miracle of words growing fungus-like on words and never managing to cover the void under them. The enthusiasm for the poem among Ma rino's contemporaries was followed by three cen turies of almost total critical rejection, though Adone is being reevaluated.
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ITALIAN POETRY Among Marino's contemporaries, two poets sought independence from the master: Gabriello Chiabrera ( 1 552- 1 638) , whose Anaereontic songs are another "reading" of Tasso, and Alessandro Tassoni ( 1 565- 1 635) , remembered for his mock heroic Secchia rapita (The Ravished Pail, 1 622 ) , The most notable recovery of recent erit. i s the poetry of the philosopher Tommaso Campanella ( 1 568-1639 ) , whose work closely parallels the metaphysical songs of Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw. This Calabrese monk suffered a mon strous fate, 30 years in prison (several years in the flooded underground dungeon of St. Elmo with hands and feet chained) for heresy and rebellion. Campanella's speculative output was immense, notwithstanding, and involved all branches of the scibile. His poems, owing to their forbidding com plexity of concepts and diction, were judged by their rare readers almost devoid of interest. But today these canzoni, esp. the beautiful "Hymn to the Sun," composed in the depth of St. Elmo, strike us as the "missing link" in It. baroque poetry. In his translucent verses the chained poet attains the lyrical height for which Marino always strove but rarely reached. VI. SETTECENTO: THE 1 7 005. The latter half of the 1 600s produced a general decadence in po etry. The anti-baroque backlash came as a call to "return to nature," to observe the limits of good taste and common sense, and to renew imitatio and the cult of the classics. The adepts of this neoclas sical revival congregated in the Academy ofArcadia (a loose association of literati, self-defined "shep herds" ) , founded in 1 690 by Queen Christine of Sweden, then in exile in Rome. Arcadia promoted pastoral poetry, sobriety of lang., and faithfulness to trad., discarding the whole Marinist century to hark back to Sannazaro's Cinquecento. However, this school too in turn became the matrix of me diocre versifiers of derivative bucolic idylls. An intermittently genuine poetic voice is heard in the tenuous lyrics of the great libretto dramatist Me tastasio (pseudonym of Pietro Trapassi; 1 6981 782) , poet-in-residence for most of his life at the Hapsburg court in Vienna. His many melodramas (e.g. Didone abbandonata, Olimpiade, Demoofonte, and Demetrio) are deservedly famous. In his Can zonette (Songs) , Metastasio introduced a facile sen timentalism and an evanescent lyricism which he, unlike his predecessors, couched in down-to-earth lang. Descartes' rationalism influenced practically all intellectual trends in 1 8th-c. Italy. The influence of the Fr. encyclopedists, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot, on the one hand, and of the Ossian craze, with the nocturnal/sepulchral fashion it brought with it, on the other, became paramount. The first civic poet ofItaly, the Lombard Giuseppe Parini ( 1 729-99) , represents the sober awakening of the age leading to the earthquake of the Fr. Revolution. A seriousness of ethical purpose and a sense of mission in his social crit. distinguish this -
Catholic priest, editor, and schoolteacher. His early lyrics show the Arcadism prevalent at the time; his later odes from "Alia Musa" to "Messag gio" are the meditations of a political moderate. Parini is remembered, however, for his long and unfinished poem of bitter social comment, Il giorno, depicting one day in the life of a "giovin signore," a young man about town. The satire, ferociously allusive and resentful, and seldom at tenuated by the smile of superior comprehension, seems at times shot through by a secret nostalgia for the world offashion and elegance. Parini is the first in the history of It. p. to have obtained from the "short" hendecasyllable effects vying with those of the flexible Cl. hexameter. The essence of pure poetry-as opposed to the practically ambitious engage verse of Parini-is represented by the domineering figure of the pre romantic playwright Vittorio Alfieri ( 1 749- 1 803) , scion of an old aristocratic family from Italy's Piedmont region. After a stint, customary for his class, at the military academy, and the grand tour, the rich nobleman settled in the capital of Savoy to act out, as it were, Parini's recipe for the useless existence of the high-society youth of his day. Alfieri dated his conversion from 1 775, with the sudden realization that the aimless, incessant agi tation of his soul could be channelled into artistic creation. The first fruit of his illumination, the tragedy Cleopatra, was followed by a feverishly fer tile decade of dramatic production ( 1 776-86) : 1 8 more tragedies, dramatic verse in dialogue form. The Alfierian hero, a pure revolutionary, acts out the abstract libertarian rebellion of the poet's soul, scornful of any pragmatic effort at real social progress. Alfieri 's stay in Tuscany afforded him time to refine, to "Tuscanize," his Piedmontese, Frenchified linguistic and cultural background. In Paris in 1 789, he was at first wildly enthusiastic about then bitterly disappointed in the Fr. Revo lution. In 1 792 he escaped the Terror to spend his last years in Florence writing six comedies, his violent anti-French persiflage Il misogallo (The Francophobe) , and his celebrated Vita (Mem oirs) , with its relentlessly, almost breathlessly drawn portrait of the poet-hero. Alfieri represents the Sturm und Drang (q.v.) of It. p. His collection of lyrics ( Rime) amounts to a spiritual autobiography of a soul tormented by dreams of immensity. The idealized and idolized figure of the poet, alone, in haughty solitude, looms large. The Petrarchan subtext of these po ems signifies a return to the source; it is the mani festation of a genuine "elective affinity" rather than the obligatory imitation of an earlier century. However, the greatest lyric poetry of this "lion of Asti" is to be found in his tragedies, texts of a lyrical essentiality, of an elliptic diction, a bare bones structure, and an unrelenting pace. By criti cal consensus, Alfieri's most acclaimed tragic pieces, Saul ( 1 882) and Mirra (Myrrha, 1 887) , are staged poems on the sublime.
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ITALIAN POETRY VII. OTTOCENTO: THE 1 800s. The Arcadian trend had sown the seeds of a rebirth of taste for CI. ideals of beauty. In Italy these preromantic stirrings coincide with a short period of neoclassi cal predominance in art (Canova) and lit. concur rent with the Napoleonic age. The two move ments, Arcadism of the late 1 700s and neoclassicism of the early 1 800s, shared an atten tion to form, an aesthetics based on the renewed concept of the sublime (q.v. ) , a taste for the genu ine and primordial, and a purism in the medium of art. Ippolito Pindemonte ( 1 735-1828 ) , remem bered for his Poesie campestri ( Rustic Verses ) , and Vincenzo Monti ( 1 745-1 828) were the most co herent adepts of the new trend. Monti's inborn flexibility and susceptibility to influences favored his art as a translator (his 1 8 1 0 Iliad is a master piece) as well as the eclectically occasional nature of his poetic output-the centerpiece of it being his anti-republican Basvilliana ( 1 791 ) . The poetic genius of the imperial intermezzo was Ugo Foscolo ( 1 778-1 827) . His poetry fuses the classicist's love for perfection of form with the heritage of Parini and Alfieri and with European romanticism. Born of a Gr. mother on the Ionic island of Zante, Foscolo's classicism was, so to speak, a congenital trait in his psychic makeup. His tempestuous age provided the background for a truly romantic curriculum of wars and turbulent loves. In 1 802 he published the "Vita nuova" ofIt. romanticism, the Ortis (The Last Letters ofJacopo Ortis) , an epistolary novel of love and suicide inspired by Goethe's Werther. Foscolo's shorter poems are exemplary of the short-lived It. Sturm und Drang. His 1 2 sonnets (among them the mas terpieces "Alia Musa," "A Zacinto," "Alia sera," and "In morte del fratello Giovanni") and his two major odes ( 1 800-03) are perfect expressions of the CI. ideal implanted in a romantic soul. His principal claim to posthumous glory should have been the poemetto, or three-part hymn, "Le Grazie" (The Graces) , a vast corpus of fragments com posed over the course of20 years. The immaterial lightness of diction and verse can only increase our regret at the structural sketchiness of the magnifi cent torso. Though 20th-c. exegesis, with its bias for the fragmentary, has rediscovered this great mass of poetic wreckage, attempts at a coherent reconstruction have not been wholly convincing. The entire experience of the poet's "life in art" is the true theme of the poem. Foscolo remains best known for his Dei sepolcri (Tombs, 1806) , written in 295 blank verses. The theme, occasioned by the Napoleonic decree pro hibiting burial within urban limits, is left behind, replaced by a poetic meditation on life and death, on the immemorial rites of burial, on fame surviv ing the tomb, and on the great men of the past and their sepulchers. The evocation of the nocturnal cemetery, the "triumph" in the Petrarchan sense of posthumous glory over death, the celebration of memory as a cenotaph to greatness, the motif
of tears and consolation-all are close to the cen tral topics of romanticism (q.v. ) . In his Sepolcri, Foscolo emerges most cleary as the "father of It. romanticism. " The new mode of conceiving the human condi tion given by romanticism, with its components of Enlightenment rationalism and Restoration histo ricism, with its taste for the unsophisticated and primordial, and with its repertory of lugubrious themes, came of age in Italy in the 1 820s. It. romantics, who first gathered around the Floren tine periodical Conciliatore ( 1 81 8-19) , distin guished themselves from their fellows in Germany and England by their concern with the social and ethical role of lit. The Risorgimento (It. national "Resurgence," a movement which would result in 1 870 in the birth of a unified modern Italy) was an important factor, mainly through the educative influence of such protagonists as the patriot Gi useppe Mazzini, the publicist Vincenzo Gioberti, and the literary historian Francesco De Sanctis. The great models, Schiller, Byron, Chateaubri and, and Scott, had only limited direct influence on literary works. The most conventional It. ro mantic poet, Giovanni Berchet ( 1 783-1 85 1 ) , left a thin collection of songs and ballads which is a veritable index of the items dear to European romanticism. Berchet's theoretical Semi-Serious Letter had a lasting impact on the reception of romantic ideology. A more interesting figure is Niccolo Tommaseo ( 1 802-74) , the blind lexicog rapher and Dante scholar and author of lyric po etry of "cosmic nostalgia" and a prophetic tone. The bitterness of a bleak existence inspired the Tuscan Giuseppe Giusti ( 1 809-50 ) , who wrote poetry marked by sarcasm and despair. His mimic talent is at its best when fixing on the page a gesture or attitude: his cerebral diction has lost its popularity. Alessandro Manzoni ( 1 785-1873) is best known for his great novel The Betrothed; his verses are marginal products, but his tive "Hymns" ( 1 8 1 2-22 ) , of deep religious inspiration, his com memorative poems, and the choral passages from his plays Carmagnola ( 1 820) and Adelchi ( 1 822) show the great novelist's precise diction as well as the characteristic undercurrent of I promessi sposi: compassion for the humble, the disinherited, and the marginal. The realistic penchant of the romantic move ment in Italy, its bias for the popular and immedi ate, favored the flowering of dialect poetry (q.v. ) . The traits of dialectal speech included a down-to earth tone, a direct documenting of life, and a built-in smile owing to the use of dialectal vari ation as a vehicle of low humor. The two greatest It. dialect poets lived in the heyday ofthe romantic querelle; both show the taste for the "slice-of-life," for a ready plebeian wit, and for the antiliterary spirit congenital to the realistic facet of romanti cism. Carlo Porta ( 1 775-182 1 ) derived some of his inspiration from the decidedly nonpoetic con tacts through his clerk's window in the Milan tax
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ITALIAN POETRY offices. He is one of those humble "chroniclers without pretense who end by preserving for pos terity the portrait of a whole epoch" ( Momig liano) . His masterworks are versified novelle: the "disasters" of a semi-derelict (the "Giovannin Bongee" stories ) , the "lamentations" of a poor street fiddler (bow-legged "Marchionn" ) , and the tale of a streetwalker ("Ninetta del Verzee" ) . Porta's laughter never becomes a sneer; behind his smile one often senses the sadness of the wise. The encounter with Porta freed Giuseppe Gioachino Belli ( 1 79 1 - 1 863) from his failed at tempts at It. verse and opened up the dialect of the Roman plebs as inspiration. A minor cleric, Belli left behind about 2000 sonnets (pub. in the 1 880s) inspired by a violent anticlericalism, irrev erent and often obscene. He too is a poet of met ropolitan low-class life-vagrants and beggars, monks and spies, flunkeys and whores-with an infusion of prelates. His immense rogues' gallery, with its lightning-fast character sketches, infernal settings, and cynicism of expression, has been compared to Dante's characterizations in the In ferno. Belli's tone is more virulent than Porta's, but like Porta's, his art of portraiture, imitation of colloquial speech, and mastery of detail all point to future literary developments-to the narrative art of the naturalist school, to great Verga, and to
verismo. The greatest poet of modern Italy, Giacomo Leopardi ( 1 798-1837) was born to an impover ished aristocratic family in Recanati. The poet's professed revulsion for his backward hometown and his disciplined upbringing (esp. the conserva tism of his father) have been made much of in critical attempts to trace the roots of his cosmic pessimism. Recanati, however, acted as the almost exclusive locus of the poet's inspiration; there he wrote most of his poetry, and there, placed at the child-prodigy's disposal, was his father Count Monaldo's extensive library. Young Giacomo spent his adolescence in obsessive studies, amassing an astonishing amount of writing: verses, plays, and learned (though all compilative) essays and trea tises, almost blinding himself in the process. Though merely the products of a pedantic youth, the early works have been shown to contain the germ of Leopardi's later and most persistent leit motif. the attraction to illusions and delusions, the heroic striving toward an abstract glory marking one's passage on earth (for Leopardi, man's only existenc e ) . These motifs are recurrent in the im mense notebook collection, the Zibaldone ( 1 8 1 532) . The clash of nature and reason, dominant theme of the Enlightenment, was at first given by young Leopardi a Rousseauian solution (benign nature vs. the ills brought on by human reason) , but the contrary prevails in his later work: hostile nature, a "stepmother" for mankind, undermines all human endeavors. The romantic elements in fluencing Leopardi's system underwent a charac teristic transformation: the denial of the poet's
social role ( and the belief in pure poetry, antici pating the "decadent" poetics to come) , a materi alistic worldview, a refusal of almost all nonlyric content, and a bias for the "pathetic" based on "immediacy" of feeling. The concepts of "infinity" and "remembrance" are the cornerstones of Leopardi 's best verse and are strongly present in his poetry until 1 82 1 , when the poet "escaped" from Recanati. "Rimembranze" ( Recollections) and "Appressamento della morte" (Nearness of Death ) , written at age 1 8 ; experi ments with fashionably lugubrious topics; a num ber of engage compositions; and poetic medita tions-show Leopardi's search for his poetic voice. He discovers it in the idyll "Vita solitaria" (Life of Solitude) and esp. "Sera del di di festa" (Sunday Night) . The tension is maintained through the whole (short) poem in the admirable "Alia luna" (To the Moon ) ; however, "Infinito" ( Infinite) , a poem of a mere 1 5 lines written before the poet's flight from his family, is universally recognized as his masterwork-it is, with Dante's 'Tanto gen tile," the most renowned It. lyric. Its contents are of a lightness and evanescence which elude para phrase. Its last line, with its sign of cupio dissolvi (the "sweetness of shipwreck" ) , ties Leopardi to such key texts of modern poetry as Rimbaud's "Bateau ivre" and Mallarme's "Brise marine." The years 1 822-28, a period of uneasy inde pendence interrupted by desperate returns to Re canati, mark an intermission in Leopardi's poetry. He fitfully produced the Operette morali ( Little Moral Exercises, 1 824) , pensive and ironic dia logues on ontological questions, in this pause, a gathering of strength before his second creative period (ca. 1 828-1830 ) , an economically forced return to Recanati for 16 months of ennui. The cosmic meditation of "Canto notturno" (Nocturn of a Nomadic Shepherd in Asia) is "one of the supreme modern songs of existential anguish" (Perella, in Bondanella ) . "A Silvia" (written in Pisa, "perhaps the most poignant elegy in the It. lang.") "Ricordanze" (Memories) , and "Sabato ' del villaggio" (Saturday in the Village) are the most characteristically Leopardian texts in his col lection of Canti ( 1 831 ) , with their tone of thought ful melancholy and disconsolate contemplation of the nullity of all things under the empty heavens. The elegy "Quiete dopo la tempesta" (The Calm Mter the Storm) looks for happiness in death. The great idylls are Leopardi's true operette mor ali, meditations couched in immortal verse, liber ated from the bitterness and animosity often pre vailing in his prose dialogues. Leopardi lived to see his Canti published in a definitive edition in 1 836. Their themes have a common denominator: the loss of dreams-of youth, of happiness, of heroic existence-a loss restated with calm de spair in the cruel light of cold and godless reality. The meter is a kind of early free verse: discarding the strophic models of the past, Leopardi relied on a loose rhythm, now expanded freely, now sud-
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ITALIAN POETRY denly restrained. While the incisive "A se stesso" (To Himself) is a pitiless spiritual self-portrait. the poet facing his bleak universe and murmuring his final renunciation, the late elegies "Amore e morte" (Love and Death) and "Tram onto della luna" (Moon Setting) , as well as his last poem, "La ginestra" (The Desert Flower) , seem to be not only the conclusion of an experience but also a hint at another incipient search for new directions. The reaction to the excesses of romanticism, such as the lachrymose sentimentalism of the Prati-Aleardi school, took place in Italy under a double flag, realism and classicism. The call for a return to the sanity of everyday life as the master theme of literary mimesis was spread by a largely Lombardian group of poets known as "Scapigli ati," ("the 'unkempt' ones")-a movement paral lel to the Fr. boheme. The salient figures of the movement, the Boito brothers, Camillo and Arrigo (the latter is also remembered for his librettos) , Emilio Praga, and Carlo Dossi professed a n ars poetica based on the "slice of life . " For the most part they produced "little proses in verse," unwit tingly turning upside down Baudelaire's ambition of petites poemes en prose. The classicists' reaction, on the other hand, to the romantic mania for originality had at first a rather ineffectual leader in Giacomo Zanella ( 1 820-88) , who revived the minor neoclassical trad. of Monti and Pindemonte, a trend largely exhausted by mid century. The heritage of classi cism in Alfieri and Foscolo, and even in the young "civic" Leopardi, was pressed into the service of anti-romanticism by Giosue Carducci ( 1 8351 907) , a poet of vast authority who was the uncon tested focal point ofIt. Jin de siecle poetry. Carducci attempted to confer dignity and discipline on a field that, by his maturity, had lost or refused both. Carducci, chair of It. at Bologna, was "the last great literatus" Italy had. His professed ideal of a "sane, virile, strongwilled" lit. has lost most of its appeal in modern times; his reclaiming for the poet the immemorial function of vates has an archaic flavor. Carducci himself, after a youthful phase of loud and heathen Jacobinism, became something like a mouthpiece for the powers that were and for prevailing public opinion. His lyric production in traditional form appeared in the collections Levia gravia (Light and Heavy, 1 8617 1 ) , Giambied epodi (Iambs and Epodes, 1 867-69 ) , and Rime nuove (New Verses, 1861-87 ) . Carducci believed in the possibility of transplanting Graeco Lat. metrics into It. versification; while probably overrated as a prosodic experiment, it makes an interesting curiosum out of his most discussed vol ume, Odi barbare (Barbaric Odes, 1 877-89 ) . It is likely that Carducci will survive his current eclipse by virtue of a few nonprogrammatic compositions, usually deeply autobiographical, such as his Pianto antico (Old Grief) , about a personal loss. VIII. NOVECENTO: THE 1 9 00S. The last hundred years exemplity Viktor Shklovsky's observation on
"schools." Apparently antithetical trends may long coexist until one of them by manifesto rises to predominance-only to cede its shortlived he gemony to its successor, which usually claims di rect opposition to it but, in fact, dialectically pre supposes and continues it. Thus currents as diverse as positivism and decadence, the "Voce" and the "Ronda" groups, the "Twilight" poets and the futurists, hermeticism and neorealism, not only coexist but in retrospect appear to be inter dependent elements of the same whole. Two monumental figures, D 'Annunzio and Pascoli, preface and condition contemp. poetry; neither strictly belongs to a "school," but each recapitu lates and anticipates several. Carducci today appears firmly rooted in the century of Leopardi and Manzoni, while the po etry of Giovanni Pascoli ( 1 855-191 2 ) , his succes sor at Bologna, stretches far into our own. It fore shadows trends as distant from and seemingly alien to it as the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and the postmodern verse of the 1980s. Pascoli is the first It. poet to "wring the neck" of eloquence. Some of his best-known pieces from Poemetti ( 1 897-) and Canti di Castelvecchio ( 1 903-) most surely have been swept away by the tears shed over them (e.g. "Cavallina stoma" [The Dappled-Gray Ponyl , memorized by generations of schoolchildren) . But his thin first collection, Myricae ( 1 89 1 ) , re mains the cornerstone of modern It. p. The title "Tamarisks" hints at the "lowly shrubs" of the Fourth Eclogue, but this "last descendant of Vir gil" is not merely a poet of simple rustic scenes, as his themes seem to suggest. His quaint syntax and vocabulary, invasive onomatopoeia, dialect and Lat. words, and exotic and technical terms, for example, signal the complexity underlying his de ceptively simple landscapes. Pascoli's interest never fixes on the positive spectacle of human labor in the fields; his rural tableaux radiate a mysterious feeling, an almost religious stupor. G. A. Borgese recommended an impressionistic read ing of Pascoli, with eyes "half-shut," and called Myricae the most heterogeneous book of It. p . However, a pattern in Pascoli's constructions may be discerned: a rural view is sketched out by broad brush strokes, then filtered and "un-defined" through some optical disturbance: haze, mist, fog ( tremulo is a favorite adjective) . A minimal sign of life appears, slowed at once almost to a standstill (lento, "slow," appears frequently in Pascoli's con cordance ) . The cadence remains "the beating of his own heart" (Garofalo, in Bondanella) though with the constant sinking feeling of skipped beats. At last a tiny acoustic element is added to the landscape-the chirping of a bird, the rustle of leaves, a snatch of faraway singing. That is all, but the whole remains miraculously suspenseful, suggestive not of something "else" but of itself. Even the most allegorical-seeming texts of Pascoli, e.g. his best poemetti, "II vischio" ( Mistletoe) and "Digitale purpurea" (Foxglove) ,
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ITALIAN POETRY suggest, rather than a meaning, an abstract hor ror, a visionary experience of Evil. The tragedy of Pascoli's life, the unsolved murder of his father in 1 867, fixed his poetic age at 1 2: there is a sense of bewildered wonder in front of an uncompre hended world, the urge to escape, the need for refuge-a need he soon identified with poetry. In the poet's psyche, the unknown assassin assumes the features of mankind, driven on by the eternal enigma of evil. In an 1 89 7 essay, "II fanciullino" (The Child) , Pascoli shaped this very concept into an ars poetica. Leopardi was the last It. poet to have, in a poetic sense, a geocentric view of man's habitat. Pascoli's universe, by contrast, is heliocen tric, or rather centerless: a cold immensity in which the poet sees himself as a "tiny wanderer / lost on a star among the stars." If Pascoli's "life in art" had few events, Gabriele D 'Annunzio ( 1 863-1 938) construed his life as a work of art. A cross between Nietzsche's "super man" and Huysman's Des Esseintes (ii rebours, 1884) , this last vates of It. lit. devoted only his talent to his work, reserving, like Oscar Wilde, his genius for his life. In appraisals the latter crowds out the former with the memorabilia of this mas ter self-promoter: his heroics as a flying ace, his well-publicized loves, his public switch from ex treme right to extreme left, his bankrupt flight to France. "More a rhetorician than poet" ( Sa pegno) , a "dilettante di sensazioni" (Croce) , D 'Annunzio titled his mature collection Laudi ( 1 903-4) . Composed of three parts, Maia, Electra, and Alcyone, it is a laus vitae, a celebration of life, in which he seems intoxicated by his own exulta tion: his poetry is the "inventory of his delights" ( Momigliano) . His extraordinary imitative skill fills his writing with disparate echoes: some from the Fr. and Eng. Parnassians and Preraphaelites, some deliberate impersonations of stilnovoand OF masters. This mimetic bent reflects D 'Annunzio's principal characteristic, the musicality of his verse. As Debussy "paints" with music, so his friend uses words as musical notes. But D'Annunzio's music at its best is not imitative but abstract vaguely allusive, suggestively obsessive, as in the airy curlicues of Alcyone, "texts without a topic ." The best ofD'Annunzio is often his most extreme: poems in which the thematic pretext is at its baroque flimsiest and the text an orgy of polyph ony, as in "Undulna" (the nymph "regulating" the ideal line the sea "writes" on the shore ) , or texts in which the poet's decadent attraction to the morbid is released. D 'Annunzio's art had no per ceptible devel. , no "early" or "late" period: his is a verse of a curious immobility. In a 1 9 1 0 article ("Poets on the Wane," in De Bernardi) Borgese defined as crepuscolari a group ofyoung poets whose cult of quotidian themes and slipshod expression seemed to signal the end of a great lyric trad. The term took root without its negative connotation and today denotes a tone shared by most verse published in the decade -
preceding World War I. Not a formal school, "Wan ing Poetry" was as much a derivation from as a reaction to Pascoli's mystic rusticism and D'An nunzio's pompous alexandrinism. Given its popu larity, it is probably not so much a product of its age as a producer of the contemp. fashion of skepticism and sadness. Poems written with a pencil (M. Moretti ) , Harmonies in Gray and Silence (Go voni ) , Useless Booklet (Corazzini) , Conversations the very titles of these slim volumes announce deliberate colorlessness and monotony, everyday emotions about banal objects: sleepy old gardens, hospital wards, convent walls, creaky weatherva nes, bells tolling, yellowed photographs, dried flowers, nuns, invalids, beggars. These poets de light in diminutives and limited horizons: views are cut out by a small window or filtered by a dusty pane, often with some distorting defect. The most versatile member of the group was Corrado Go voni ( 1 884-1965 ) , who later became a futurist. Dying at 20, a consumptive, Sergio Corazzini ( 1 886-1907) declined the title of poet for that of a "weeping child" who "knows nothing but how to die." His free verse ebbs and flows with his desolate sobbing, and imminent death confers a vicarious authenticity on his sadness. Two poets of the first rank are customarily included here: AIdo Palaz zeschi exceeds all labeling and warrants treatment apart; Guido Gozzano ( 1 883- 1 9 1 6 ) survived tu berculosis long enough to see the success of his Colloqui ( 1 91 1 ) . Not since the secentisti did a verb less list have the evocative power of Gozzano's catalogues of "good old things in atrocious taste." Gozzano's mild irony blends with his mild yearn ing: he mocks what he loves and loves only what he mocks. His great trick is faking with sincerity. Gozzano's only mode is the idyll, a slightly addled idyll with its melodramatic element gone bad; the smell, voluptuously inhaled, is often that ofk.itsch. Historically, "Crepuscularism" and futurism (q.v. ) rise from the same impulse, the need to escape D'Annunzio's dominance and Pascoli's classicism. Futurism springs not from the "percep tion of a chaotic universe" (a formula applicable to most movements of the past thousand years) but from the adolescent rebelliousness which sustains all cyclical recurrences of Sturm und Dran/S hence the interest in it by the New Vangard ofthe 1960s. It burst on the scene with the 1909 mani festo of F. T. Marinetti ( 1 887-1944 ) , a first-rate polemicist and a fourth-rate poet. Marinetti trum peted activism at all costs, adventure and aggres sion, speed and the triumph of the Machine, de struction of the past, war as the "hygiene" of history, and scorn for women and sentiment. The very scope of its ludicrous claims killed the school; after its disintegration ( 1 9 15 ) , however, futurism was adopted by National Socialism, Marinetti be coming a sort of Poet Laureate of the regime . Still, Marinetti's poetics had a vast and, on the whole, salutary influence. His main thesis, simultaneity of impression and expression (hence fusion of
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ITALIAN POETRY object and image) , influenced Apollinaire's calli grammes, dada, cubism (qq.v. ) , and Majakovskij . In Italy, futurism's best adherents soon developed in different directions, turning against its ontologi cal claims (Lucini, Ardengo Soffici) or deriving from its libertarian impulse a ludic concept of poetry (Govoni, Palazzeschi ) . Gian Pietro Lucini ( 1 867-1 9 1 4 ) , between his early Parnassian sonnets and his late anti-futurist stance, published his theory of free verse in Ma rinetti's review ("Poesia," 1 908) and then his Re volverate (Gunshots, 1 909 ) . His Antidannunziana ( 1 9 1 4 ) satirizes D'Annunzio's superman poses. Resistance to time attests to the greatness of Aldo Palazzeschi ( 1 885-1974) , a much appreciated novelist. The production of his "poetic" decade ( 1 905-15) differs from the humorless declama tion of mainline futurists. Its wit and charm is seen in his celebrated phonomimetic "Fontana malata" (Ailing Fountain) . His "L'incendiario" (The Ar sonist) records the urge to break with trad.-with out the obsessive need for activism or linguistic anarchy. The title of his "poetics," "E lasciatemi divertire! " (Well, I want to have fun ! ) describes well the zany wit of his poems. But Palazzeschi's endurance is assured by his great myths, created out of airy nothings ("Ara Mara Amara," "Oro Doro Odoro Dodoro," "Rio Bo") , and by his poems commemorating the grotesque in everyday life (Contini ) . A flourishing literary culture i n the years pre ceding World War I gave rise to a number of periodicals, many of them Florentine. The most influential, La voce ( 1 908-1 3 ) , was directed by the grand "impresario of culture," Giuseppe Prez zolini, who gathered together a heterogeneous group of collaborators. La voce became associated with nearly all the trends in vogue during its run. It offered a first forum to the best known autochthonous poetic movement in 20th-c. Italy, later called "Hermeticism" (q.v. ) . The forefather of this novel trobar clus, Dino Campana ( 1 8851932 ) , came to notice after the "school" had gained notoriety with Ungaretti and Montale . Campana i s often compared to Rimbaud and Trakl for his aimless wanderings over the world, inter rupted only by his stays in mental asylums (he was permanently committed in 1 9 1 8 ) , and for his po etics of total faith in the magic of the Word. The Canti orfici ( 1 9 14) refer to Orpheus: here poetry is a descent into Hell and a religion for initiates. The poems, marvels of fragmented verbal obses sion (or drugged hallucinations ) , show for all that echoes of Carducci and D 'Annunzio. In them syn tax is not (futuristically) eliminated; it is replaced by cadences (see "L'invetriata" and the irrational "logic" of Campana's oneiric chimeras: "La Chi mera" is perhaps his best known poem ) . Two other influential poets who matured i n the La voce context produced poetry in a vein related to Campana's. The existential adventure of Cle mente Rebora ( 1 885-1 957) , not less erratic than
Campana's, took place all within, as a lifelong struggle with his own soul and a periodically de spairing search for superior truth. Not given to theorizing, Rebora's only inspiration is his need to find the all-encompassing Word. His aptly titled Frammenti lirici ( 1 91 3 ) and Canti anonimi ( 1 922) record in their daring analogies, in Rebora's char acteristic "imagine tesa" (taut imagery) , a "sort of transcendental autobiography" of powerful origi nality (Contini) . Camillo Sbarbaro ( 1 888-1 967) sang the " monotonous recurrence of indifferent life," withdrawing from the bustle into his private drama. Resine (Amberdrops, 19 1 1 ) and Pianissimo ( 1 914) sound at first curiously old-fashioned-as if in the midst of a dodecaphonic revolution a humble songwriter kept on modulating his simple lieder on his flute-but Montale shows in his com plex tunes the impact this withdrawn predecessor had. The review La ronda ( 1 9 19-23) welcomed the voices of reaction to the cult of originality in pre war poetry. Its founder, Vincenzo Cardarelli ( 1 887-1959 ) , advocated a return to the classics (esp. Leopardi and Manzoni ) , i.e. to syntax, logic, and immediate comprehension. The progress of Hermetic poetry, supported by parallel trends abroad among the Fr. and also in Eliot and Pound, proved irresistible. Its principal exponents are less typical of its program than its lesser adepts (S. Quasimodo, A. Gatto, M. Luzi, L. Sinisgalli, V. Sereni) . All share the quasi-mystical concept of "poetry as life," as a magic formula capable of revealing, under the semblances ofthis phenome nal world, "universal reality" ( Manacorda) . Giuseppe Ungaretti ( 1 888-1970) will be long appreciated for his prosodic innovation, based on the lesson of Rimbaud's Illuminations and Mal larmes "Un Coup de des." Fragmenting the vers fibre of his futurist beginnings, he paralleled the jocose cough of Palazzeschi's "Ailing Fountain" and Majakovskij 's "staircase" poems in his trade mark one-word verse ( imitated even today by would-be poets) . It acts as a "macroscope" for the word, harshly isolating it (Ungaretti eliminated punctuation) and transforming poetic diction into a series of fragments lit up by intermittent flood lights. In spite of disclaimers, Ungaretti is heir both to futurism and to Waning Poetry, but while these trends merely raised or lowered their vol ume, Ungaretti is a master of tonal modulation. His first book of verse, Allegria ( 1 9 1 6; repub. 1 923 with a preface by Mussolini) remains the overture to a new phase of It. p. The title of his collected poems, Vita d 'un uomo (A Man's Life ) , points to his dominant theme, the sublimation of his expe riences, though these, esp. in the verse of the 1930s and '40s, at times remain untranslated into poetry. When the blurbs have yellowed and the promo tion died down, Eugenio Montale ( 1 896-1 981 ) may well be perceived as the true heir to Pascoli. His poetry is Pascolian in its resignedly hopeless
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ITALIAN POETRY scrutiny of the "ontological mystery," its vague desire for an escape route from the "male di vivere" (both "pain oflife" and "evil ofliving" ) , for a "broken seam I in the net that constrains us." Pascolian too is Montale's characteristic of trans forming emotion into landscape. Pascolian is, in his epoch-making Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefishbones, 1 925) , Montale 's metaphysical and baroque myth making, soberly desolate as it is. Much has been made of the political texts by antifascist Montale (from Occasioni, 1 939, to Satura, 1 971 ) , endlessly deciphered by immense and often too-Hermetic exegesis. Variously related to Hermeticism are four poets whose assessment is still pending: U mberto Saba ( 1 883- 1 957) , Cesare Pavese ( 1 908-50) , Sandro Penna ( 1 906-77), and Pier Paolo Pasolini ( 1 92275) . Saba was in a sense pre-hermetic; his Can zoniere ( Songbook) "reads as a 1 9th-c. work" (De benedetti ) . Its Petrarchan ambition signals the "only major contemp. poet wholly free from ex perimentalism." His simplicity and trite diction prompted critics to see in him an authentically popular poet. It slowed recognition and led Saba to publish a Chronicle ( 1 948) effectually advertis ing his own songbook. His bias for the humble shows no trace of Gozzano's worldly irony; instead, we find warm participation, an almost childlike amor vitae. A typical motif is animal life related to human behavior. Pavese offered a model of anti Hermetic poetry in his realistic and matter-of-fact poesie-racconto (story-poems) , but the project failed both in this role and as a matrix of poetry, despite Pavese's great (but mostly extraliterary) popularity with the young. His Lavorare stanca (Work Makes You Tired, 1936; ineptly tr. as Hard Labor) is a curiosity. Interest is still inspired by this often politically and culturally "misappropriated" writer, a suicide at 42. The populist search for the "primitive" drew another blank with Penna. "Hermetic" in a special sense ("coding" for this gay poet was a must) , Penna's only topic is love, dolce pena, "cross and delight," "strange joy" (the last two are titles of collections) . This "vigorous outsider" was also an ermetico in his refusal of easy legacies, in his iron clad rule ' of conciseness, and in his stenographic imagery. Penna sings of joy and pain with a Ma tisse-like luminosity of vision. His best poems, always centered on his beloved ragazzi, are prodi gies of a balanced moment suspended in timeless ness. Everything is burned off in the white heat of the poet's dogged hammering at the "right word." Penna, the self-defined "penny-a-dozen [sexl fiend" has, incongruously, an almost virginal chastity of poetic voice. Pasolini, the filmmaker, whose 1 957 Le ceneri di Gramsci (Gramsci's Ashes) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important col lections of poetry published in the postwar period, had a different and more tragic purity of voice. Paroxysms of paradox interrupt his song. The popular brand of Marxism he professed never
overcame his bourgeois values. Pasolini took idi osyncrasy for ideology: the pangs of libido appear in some of his purposely controversial and perhaps less enduring pieces as the stirrings of History. Around the critic Luciano Anceschi and his influential periodical ll Verri sprang into being the self-styled Gruppo 63 (so called from its founding meeting at Palermo in 1963 ) . Three poets associ ated with it are likely to mark the last decades of this century with their names: Antonio Porta ( 1 935-89) , Andrea Zanzotto (b. 1 92 1 ) , and Edoardo Sanguineti (b. 1 930) . In their verse the linguistic revolution begun by Pascoli comes full circle; his weakening of the tie between signifier and signified reaches the final stage of divorce. The movement has been compared in its sound and fury to futurism; however, the poetry initially born out of and later in some cases opposed to Gruppo 63 is distinguished by a theoretical rigor unknown to Marinetti et Cie. Porta was first brought to critical notice by the collective volume I novissimi ( 1 961 ) . His poems reveal a strongly individual voice and have an eerie capacity to suggest, behind a deliberately gray diction, vast threatening conspiracies by unknown objects and persons. Porta has since gone beyond his novissimi origins and alliances. Some critics distinguish his poetry as the first real novelty after Hermeticism. Zanzotto 'Joined" the group after the fact, as it were. His early collections, Dietro il paesaggio (Be hind the Landscape, 195 1 ) , Elegia ( 1 954) , Vocativo ( 1 95 7 ) , and IX Ecloghe ( 1 962) , are characterized by traditional form ( Zanzotto even wrote Petrar chan sonnets, the only 20th-c. poet to do so outside of parody ) . Zanzotto's arcane Arcadia suggests spectral visitations, seances of literary ghost-evok ing. Lang. acts here as a trance-inducing drug. New revolutionary techniques appear with La belta (Beauty, 1968) and subsequent collections of ever increasing textual complexity. An original member of the Palermo group, San guineti had anticipated in his Laborintus ( 1 956) its ideological and technical characteristics. A shocked Pavese refused to consider seriously San guineti's early samples, and Zanzotto later called them the "record of a nervous breakdown." Sense in Laborintus is replaced by obsessive para nom asia. Segments read as if they were a medieval treatise on alchemy, a textbook on sociology, yes terday's newspaper, and Freud's Traumdeutung, all put through a shredder and reassembled at ran dom. But Sanguineti's collected poems, Segnalibro (Bookmark, 1 982) , and esp. his Novissimum Testa mentum ( 1 986 ) , rank him with the best of con temp. European poets. Among the poets active in the last two decades, Franco Fortini and Paolo Volponi, engagewriters of the older generation, deserve more than a sum mary listing, as well as Luciano Erba, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Giovanni Raboni, Dario Bellezza, and Fabio Doplicher. Curiously, while the dialects of the peninsula had seemed doomed by 20th-c.
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ITALIAN PROSODY mass education and media diffusion, poetry in dialect shows no sign of decadence. Among its practioners, heirs to Meli, Porta, and Belli, one must mention the first-rate poets Virgilio Giotti and Giacomo Noventa. See also FROTTOLA AND BARZELLETTA; ITALIAN PROSODY; LAUDA; RITOR NELLO; ROMANTIC AND POSTROMANTIC POETICS; TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETICS, Italian. GENERAL HISTORIES: F. De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana ( 1 870), tr.J. Redfern, Hist. ofIt. Lit. ( 1 968 ) ; A. Momigliano, Storia della letteratura italian a ( 1936) ; F. Flora, Storia della letteratura italiana, 4 v. ( 1 940-4 1 ) ; N. Sapegno, Compendio di storia della letteratura italian a, 3 v. ( 1 954 ) ; J. H . Whitfield, A Short Hist. ofIt. Lit. ( 1 960) ; Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. E. Cecchi and N. Sapegno, v. 8-9 ( 1 969) ; I classici italiana nella storia della critica, ed. W. Binni, 3 v. ( 1 971-77) ; B. Croce, La letteratura italian a per saggi, ed. M. Sansone, 4 v. ( 1 972) , Essays on Lit. and Lit. Crit., ed. and tr. M . E. Moss ( 1 990) ; Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, ed. V. Branca ( 1 973 ) ; Wilkins; Orien
tamenti culturali: La Letteratura italiana: I maggiori, I-II; I minori, I-IV; Le correnti, I-II; I contemporanei, I-VI ( 1 975-) ; Dictionary of It. Lit., ed. P. and J . C. Bondanella ( 1 979 ) ; Letteratura italiana, prajilo sto rico, ed. I. De Bernardi et aI., 3 v. ( 1 980 ) ; M. Puppo, Manuale critico bibliografico per 10 studio della letteratura italiana ( 1 985 ) . SPECIALIZED HISTORIES AND STUDIES: E . Un derhill, jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic ( 1 9 1 9 ) ; E. Garin, It Rinascimento italiano ( 1 941 ) ; F. Flora, La poesia ermetica ( 1947 ) ; C. Calcaterra, It Barocco in Arcadia ( 1 950 ) ; A. Momigliano, Saggio sull'Or lando Furioso ( 1 952 ) ; M. Fubini, Ritratto dell'Al fieri ( 1 967) , "Arcadia e Illuminismo," Dal Muratori al Baretti ( 1 975 ) , Ugo Foscolo ( 1 978 ) ; Marino e marinisti: opere scelte, ed. G. Getto, 2 v. ( 1 954) ; A. Bobbio, Parini ( 1954) ; A. Galletti, If Novecento ( 1 954 ) ; Lirici del Settecento, ed. B. Maier ( 1 960 ) ; A. Viscardi, Storia della letteratura italiana dalle origini al Rinascimento ( 1 960) ; Poeti del Duecento, ed. G. Contini ( 1 960 ) ; E. H . Wilkins, The Life of Petrarch ( 1 961 ) ;J. H . Whitfield, Leopardi 's Canti (tr. 1962 ) , Giacomo Leopardi ( 1 964 ) ; G . Santangelo, If seeen tismo ( 1 962 ) ; M . Bishop, Petrarch and His World ( 1 963) ; J. V. Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous: Giambattista Marino ( 1 963) ; G. Petronio, If Roman ticismo ( 1 963) ; A. Del Monte, Le origini ( 1 964) ; B. Maier, If Neoclassicismo ( 1 964 ) ; G. Singh, Leopardi and the Theory ofPoetry ( 1 964) ; Complete Poems and Sel. Letters of Michelangelo, tr. C. Gilbert ( 1 965 ) ; T. G. Bergin, Dante ( 1 965 ) , Petrarch ( 1 970) ; C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso . . . and His Contrib. to Eng. Lit. ( 1 965 ) , Ludovico Ariosto: A Preface to the Or lando Furioso ( 1 974) ; G. Pozzi, La poesia italiana del Novecento ( 1 965 ) ; Am. Critical Essays on the Divine Comedy, ed. R. Clements ( 1 967) ; Dante's Lyric Poetry, ed. K. Foster and P. Boyde ( 1 967 ) ; G. Getto, L'interpretazione del Tasso ( 1 967) , Carducci e Pascoli ( 1977) ; P. Nardi, La Scapigliatura ( 1 968 ) ; G. Manacorda, Storia della letteratura italiana con-
temporanea ( 1 968) ; G. Contini, Letteratura dell'Italia unita, 1861-1 968 ( 1 968 ) ; W. Binni, Saggi alfieriani ( 1 969) ; P. Dronke, The Med. Lyric ( 1 969 ) ; Tasso s Jerusalem Delivered, tr. ]. Tusiani ( 1 970) ; Enciclopedia dantesca, ed. U. Bosco, 5 v. ( 1 9 70-78 ) ; A . Vallone, Dante ( 1 971 ) ; L. Anceschi, Le poetiche del Novecento in Italia ( 1 973 ) ; M. Marti, Storia della stil nuovo ( 1 973) ; G. Debenedetti, Poesia italiana del Novecento ( 1 974) ; R. Griffin, Ludovico Ariosto ( 1 974) ; Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, tr. B. Reynolds ( 1 975-77) ; F. Petrarch Six Centuries Later: A Sympo sium, ed. A. Scaglione ( 1 975) ; A. Seroni, If deca dentismo ( 1 975 ) ; Petrarch 's Lyric Poems, tr. R. Durling ( 1 976) ; U. Bosco, Petrarca ( 1 977 ) ; If Nove cento, ed. G. Grana, 1 0 v. ( 1 980) ; The New It. P. : 1 945 to the Present, e d . and tr. L. R. Smith ( 1 98 1 ) '
bilingual anthol.
T.W.
ITALIAN PROSODY. I. METER II. RHYME III. POETIC FORMS At its beginnings in the 1 3th c., It. poetry (q.v.) imitated many of the themes and forms of the earlier trads. of Occitan and Fr. poetry (qq.v. ) . Med. Lat. rhythmical verse also exerted a strong formal influence on many of the nascent vernacu lar lyrical modes in Italy. In addition to his pre eminence as Italy's leading poet, Dante Alighieri ( 1 265-1 321 ) was the first among many well known theoreticians of prosody. In the Vita nuova (ch. 25) , Dante expresses his views on the history of poetic composition in the European vernaculars and argues that, on the model of their Gr. and Lat. predecessors, It. poets should be granted the use of rhetorical figures. He also evidences his recog nition not only of the seriousness of lit., but also of his own role as a creative artist and of his place in the literary trad. Dante's literary career essentially retraces the trajectory of lyric poetry in 1 3th-c. Italy, from the Sicilian School (q.v.) through the Dolce stil nuovo (q.v. ) , and thus his remarks on and practice of versification are of particular importance for the It. poetic trad. In his unfinished treatise, De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular, ca. 1 302-5 ) , Dante situates poetic praxis within a more theoretical discussion of the nature of poetic lang., esp. the search among the various It. dia lects for a sufficiently noble literary lang., one that would be, in his terms, "illustrious, cardinal, courtly, and curial" ( 1 . 1 7. 1 ) . Such a lang. would be the proper medium for refined lyric poetry in the "high" or "tragic" style on one of the three noble themes: prowess in arms, love, and virtue (2.2.7) . From the "questionoflang.," Dante passes to an extended discussion of metrical forms (2.3.1-3 ) , particularly the construction of the can zone (q. v. ) : the grammatical structure ofthe verse period, the qualities of individual words, varying line lengths, the AAB structure of the canzone
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ITALIAN PROSODY stanza, and the particular nature of rhyme words and rhyming devices. While intending to treat this last point in the (unwritten) fourth book of the treatise, Dante discusses the ordering of the can zone through placement of rhymes and discour ages certain practices: excessive use of the same rhyme, equivocal rhymes, and rhymes on harsh sounds. Not extant-ifthey were ever written-are sections on the ballata and sonnet (q.v. ) , both of which belong to the "middle" style. Nevertheless, Dante's codification of It. prosody served as a touchstone for centuries of both praxis and and crit. I. METER. It. metrics is based both on number of syllables and on the position of the primary accent in the line; the latter is the more important factor for determining meter. Syllables are counted only up to the last accent; if any follow it, they are ignored. Hence the hendecasyllable (q.v.; It. ende casillabo) , the most excellent of meters according to Dante and the one most appropriate for sub jects in the high style, is not necessarily deter mined by the presence of 1 1 syllables, as its name implies, but rather by the placement of the pri mary accent on the 1 0th syllable and secondary stresses on either the 4th or 6th. While a "normal" hendecasyllable ( endecasillabo piano; see VERSO PI ANa ) adheres to the I I-syllable model, it may have as few as 10 syllables ( endecasillabo tronco; see VERSO TRONCO ) or as many as 12 or 1 3 syllables ( endecasillabo sdrucciolo or bisdrucciolo; see VERSO SDRUCCIOLO ) . Vowels in hiatus (q.v.) must often be elided (see ELISION ) for a verse to scan, via either synalepha or synaeresis (qq.v. ) . At other times, such vowels must be pronounced sepa rately, via dialefe (across a word boundary) or diaeresis (q.v.; within a word ) . After the hendecasyllable, the 7-syllable line ( settenario) is the most popular It. meter, with the principal stress always on the 6th syllable, as in "II Cinque Maggio" by Alessandro Manzoni ( 1 7851 873) . Dante notes that verses with an odd num ber of syllables (3, 5, 7, 1 1 ) are generally to be preferred, and thus we find verses in all periods of It. lit. with 5 syllables ( quinario: major stress on the 4th ) , as, for example in "La pioggia nel pineto" by Gabriele D'Annunzio ( 1 863-1938) . Although in early It. poetry the trisillabo (major accent on the 2nd syllable) is generally found only as a rhyming component (internal rhyme: rimalmezzo) of a longer verse, it sometimes appears as a separate verse. The trisillabo, however, does occur with some frequency in modern poets, as in D 'Annun zio's "La pioggia nel pineto" ( 1 4-1 5) , where h e combines a quinariowith a trisillabo. Dante holds the 9-syllable line ( novenario: major accent on the 8th syllable) in contempt for giving "the impression of being three lines of three syllables" (D. v.E. 2.5.6; tr. Haller) , but it has been used by Chiabrera ( 1 5521 638), Redi ( 1 626-1 698 ) , Carducci ( 1 835-1907), Pascoli ( 1 855-1 9 1 2 ) , and D'Annunzio. Dante considers lines with an even number of
syllables decidedly less noble (2.5.7 ) , perhaps be cause the regularity of the stress pattern led to a monotonous cadence. There are, nevertheless, nu merous examples of octosyllabic verse ( ottonario, accent on the 7th syllable ) , esp. in poems ofpopu lar inspiration; similarly, we have examples of 6syllable verses ( senario, accent on the 5th syllable) and 4-syllable verses ( quadrisillabo, accent on 3rd) . Many early narrative poems were written in stan zas composed of 1 4-syllable lines, alessandrini, which imitate OF verses; these are essentially dou ble septenaries ( doPPi settenari, accents on the 6th and 1 3th syllables) with a caesura (q.v.) after the first settenario. They were also called versi martel liani, after Pier Jacopo Martelli ( 1 661-1 727) , who composed tragedies in this meter based on the model of CorneiIle and Racine, and were used subsequently by Goldoni ( 1 707-93) and Giacosa ( 1 847-1906) in their comedies and by Carducci in his Rime nuove. Decasyllables ( decasillabi, accent on 9th syllable) also were first modeled on OF meters; these enjoyed a certain popularity in the 19th c. with Manzoni, Berchet ( 1 783-185 1 ) , Gi usti ( 1 809-50) , and Pascoli. Both in the Ren. and in the 1 9th c. we find examples of the imitation ofCI. meters (see CLAS SICAL METERS IN MODERN LANGUAGES ) . The first conscious attempts were made by Leon Battista Alberti ( 1 404-72) and Leonardo Dati, who com posed It. hexameters for the poetry contest-the certame coronario--of 1 44 1 . Ariosto ( 1 474-1533) tried his hand at reproducing the Lat. iambic trimeter in hendecasyllables. In the 1 6th and 1 7th cs., Claudio Tolomei ( 1 492-1555) and Chiabrera attempted to resolve the conflict between the Lat. quantitative and the It. accentual systems. Car ducci also experimented with "barbarian" poetry ( metrica barbara)-for such it would have ap peared and sounded to the ancients-based on accentual imitations of CI. meters, e.g. Virgilian hexameters and Catullian elegiac distichs. In his Odi barbare, Carducci is esp. indebted to Horace. II. RHYME. Rhymes in It. are exact. Rhyme sounds are identical from the major stress to the end of the word: amore/ dolore; compi/ senti; can tano/piantano. Eye rhymes (q.v.; rime all'occhio) , which are apparently but not actually identical, are infrequent (palmi/salmi/ almi; Dante, In! 3 1 .65-69) . Examples of composite rhymes ( rime composte; see MOSAIC RHYME ) may be found in early poetry ( chiome/oh me; In! 28:1 21-23) and esp. in the poetry of Guittone d'Arezzo (ca. 1 22593) and his followers. Other unusual sorts of rhyme found among the early lyrics include ( 1 ) equivocal rhyme (q.v.; traductio) , where the word is the same but has a different meaning; (2) de rivative rhyme ( replicatio; see GRAMMATICAL RHYME ) , where the rhyme words have the same root; (3) and rich rhyme (q.v.; rima cara, ricca) , where an uncommon word form is used. In the early lyrics there is a phenomenon known as "Sicilian rhyme" ( rima siciliana) , which refers
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ITALIAN PROSODY to words which in the dialect of the Sicilian poets would have rhymed because of the identity of the vowels e and i, and 0 and u. Thus diri ( dire) and taciri ( tacere) , as well as tuttu ( tutto) and muttu ( motto) , rhyme in Sicilian, but not in It. When the Sicilian lyrics were copied into manuscripts by late 1 3th-c. Tuscan scribes, these forms were "Tus canized," i.e. regularized orthographically, and thus emerged matches of the sort ride/vede (Sicil ian ridi/ vidi) and ascoso/incluso (Sicilian as cusu/ inclusu) , which are "Sicilian rhyme." Generally speaking, most medieval It. poetry is rhymed, although we do find occasional examples of assonance or consonance, as for example in the Laudes creaturarum of St. Francis of Assisi ( 1 1 821 226) , and some examples of versi sciolti (q.v. ) , poems with unrhymed lines, the first example of which is the anonymous 1 3th-c. poem, "II mare amoroso." This It. variety of blank verse (q.v.) was reintroduced in the Ren., first by Trissino ( 1 4781 550) in his epic, L1talia liberata dai Goti. III. POETIC FORMS. For Dante, the canzone rep resents the height of artistic perfection. It devel oped in Italy under the direct influence of the Occitan canso (q.v. ) , the OF chanson, and the Ger. Minnesang (q.v. ) . Canzoni generally have several strophes composed mainly of endecasillabi and set tenari, all of which follow the same structure (a one-stanza canzone is called a cobbola) . The mix of l I s and 7s is distinctive. Canzoni composed en tirely of shorter meters are called by the diminu tive canzonette; these were esp. privileged in the 1 7th and 18th cs. by Chiabrera, Frugoni ( 1 6921 768 ) , Parini ( 1 729-99 ) , and Metastasio ( 1 6981 782) . The essential division of the canzone strophe is bipartite, the first part being termed the fronteand the second the sirma. The fronte usually divides into two (sometimes three) equal parts called "feet" (piedi) ; the sirma sometimes divides into two equal parts called volte or giri. The passage from fronte to sirma, which marks the change from one musical pattern to another, is generally known as the diesis. Some canzoni conclude with a com miato (see ENVOI ) , a short stanza generally having the same pattern as the sirma (or a part of it) , in which the poet sometimes addresses his composi tion and instructs it where it should go, with whom it should speak, what it should say, and so on. These rules were followed rigidly until the 1 7th c., when the rise of the canzone libera signaled the abandonment of prosodic uniformity among str phes. Poets were thus presented with two possibili ties: following the older, traditional forms or the newer, freer models. While some poets adhered in part to the earlier modes (Alfieri [ 1 749-1803 ] , Monti [ 1 754-1828] , Foscolo [ 1 778-1 827) , Man zoni, Carducci ) , most followed the newer forms, perhaps best exemplified by Leopardi ( 1 7981 837) in his Canti. Other important forms include the ballata (see FROTTOLA AND BARZELLETTA ) , which arose in the =
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mid 1 3th c . as a song to accompany a dance and has essentially the same form as the canzone, except that the ballata begins with a refrain, the ritornello (q .v.) or ripresa, which in performance was repeated after each stanza, and the last rhyme(s) of which recur(s) at the end of each stanza. The ballata was very popular in the Middle Ages and Ren. and found illustrious practitioners in Dante, Petrarch ( 1 304-74) , Lorenzo de' Medici ( 1 449-92) , Poliziano ( 1 454-94) , and Bembo ( 1 470-1547 ) . It was revived briefly in the late 1 9th c. by Carducci, Pascoli, and D 'Annunzio. The lauda (q.v.) adopted the metrical form of the secular ballata under the guidance of its first great practitioner, Jacopone da Todi ( 1 236-1 306 ) , but its very popular use for religious subjects did not extend past the 1 5th c. In imitation of the Occitan troubadour Amaut Daniel (fl. 1 1 89) , Dante intr duced the sestina (q.v. ) ; later practitioners in clude Petrarch, Michelangelo, Carducci, D 'An nunzio, and U ngaretti ( 1 888-1970 ) . The 1 4th c. saw the advent of other lyrical modes, esp. the madrigal (q.v.) and caccia (q.v. ) . In the 1 6th and 1 7th cs., the madrigal became the preferred form to be set to music, e.g. by Palestrina (ca. 1 525-94) and Monteverdi ( 1 567- 1 643 ) ; the caccia disap pears after the 1 6th c. The sonnet, arguably the single most important creation of It. prosody, was apparently invented in the second quarter of the 1 3th c. by Giacomo da Lentini, a notary at the court of Frederick II in Sicily. Although perhaps formed by the reduction of two strambotti (q.v. ) , it more likely developed in imitation of the strophe of the canzone. In early It. lit., the rhyme schemes of the quatrains and tercets are more flexible than later. It was also used as the vehicle for verse epistles in the tenzone (q .v. ) . Under the influence ofPetrarch, perhaps its most important practitioner, and Petrarchism (q .v. ) , the sonnet sequence (q.v.) spread throughout Europe. It. poets who have cultivated the sonnet include Michelangelo ( 1 475-1564) , Tasso ( 1 5441 595 ) , Alfieri, Foscolo, Carducci, and D'Annun zio, although its popularity has steadily dimin ished since the 1 7th c . In narrative poetry, ottava rima (q.v. ) , used first by Boccaccio ( 1 31 3-75) for his verse narratives ( Teseida; Filostrato; Ninfale fiesolano) , became the staple for both the epic and the popular cantare, which had for its subject matter Cl. and medieval myths and legends, as well as contemp. political events and humorous tales. Following Boccaccio's lead, the great epic poets of the Ren. used ottava rima for their chivalric poems (Boiardo [ 1 44194] , Orlando innamorato; Ariosto, Orlando furioso; and Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata) , as did other poets such as Pulci ( 1 432-84, Morgante) , Poliziano ( Stanze per la giostra) , Marino ( 1 569-1 625, Adone) and Tassoni ( 1 565-1 635, La secchia rap ita) . Allegory, didactic poetry, and the dream vision (qq.v.) generally followed the great model of Dante's Divine Comedy, with its intricate concate-
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ITHYPHALLIC nation (q.v.) of hendecasyllables in a pattern known as terza rima (q.v.) . I t was used by Boccaccio in the Amorosa Visione, by Petrarch in the Trionfi, and by Fazio degli Uberti (ca. 1 307-70) in the Dittamondo. In later centuries terza rima, often in the form of the capitolo (q.v. ) , was incorporated by poets for a variety of compositions: satires (Ariosto, Berni, Alfieri, Leopardi ) , historical (Ma chiavelli ) , eclogues (Lorenzo de' Medici ) , amo rous elegies (Ariosto, Foscolo, Carducci) , and po litical allegories (Monti ) . T h e rules of I t . prosody were essentially fixed for subsequent poets in the first two centuries of It. lit., thanks to the great example of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and to the work of early compilers of metrical treatises such as Francesco da Barberino (Documenti d 'amore [ 1 306-1 3] ) , An tonio da Tempo (Summa artis rithimici vulgaris dictaminis [ 1 332] ed. R. Andrews [ 1977] ) , and ' Gidino da Sommacampagna ( Trattato dei ritmi vol gari [ 1 3 8 1 -84] , ed. G. B. C. Giuliari [ 1 870] ) . To be sure, metrical innovation has always taken place, particularly in the 20th c. with literary movements such as futurism and hermeticism (qq.v. ) . Nevertheless, while prosodic forms are no longer followed strictly, poets still imitate, albeit unconsciously, the cadences of traditional verse. P. E. Guarnerio, Manuale di versificazione itali ana ( 1 893) ; F. Flamini, Notizia storica dei versi e metri italiani ( 1 9 1 9 ) ; R. Murari, Ritmica e metrica razionale ital. ( 1 927 ) ; V. Pernicone, "Storia e svol gimento della metrica," Problemi ed orientamenti critici di lingua e di letteratura italiana, ed. A. Momigliano, v. 2 ( 1 948 ) ; La metrica, ed. R. Cre mante and M. Pazzaglia ( 1 972) ; A. B. Giamatti,
"It.," in Wimsatt; D' A. S. Avalle, Sintassi e prosodia nella lirica italiana delle origini ( 1 973) ; F. Caliri, Ritmica e metrica: le origini: nozioni ed esempi ( 1 973) ; Spongano; M. Fubini, Metrica e poesia, 3d ed. ( 1 975 ) ; Lit. Crit. ofDante Alighieri, ed. and tr. R. S. Haller ( 1 977 ) ; L. Castelnuovo, La metrica italian a ( 1 979) ; Dante Alighieri, Opere minori, ed. P. V. Mengaldo ( 1 979 ) ; M. Shapiro, Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina ( 1 98 1 ) ; Brogan-bib!. to 1 98 1 , supp. in Verseform ( 1 988 ) ; Elwert, Italienis C.K. ch�
ITHYPHALLIC (Gr. "erect phallus" ) . An iambo trochaic colon of the form - X , which can be regarded as the remainder of a catalectic iambic trimeter after the caesura after the second anceps. According to the scholia to the ancient metrist Hephaestion, the i. received its name from its use in the procession of the phallos at the festival of Dionysus (cf. Aristophanes, Acharni ans) . It is often used as a colon or a closing element (clausula) in the iambic songs in Gr. drama (see DACTYLO- EPITRITE ) ; in Aristophanes' Wasps ( 248-72) it is used with a colon consisting of an iambic dimeter. It is also used in the epodes (q.v.) of Archilochus and the epodic forms Horace de rived from him. An i. of the form - x - x - - is often used by Plautus with cretics ( - ) , and sometimes it is used as a clausula in a short cretic system (Pseudolus 921 ) or together with iambic quaternarii ( Curculio 1 03-04) .-W. M. Lindsay, Early Lat. Verse ( 1 922 ) ; Maas; Dale; C. Questa, Introduzione alia metrica di Piauto ( 1 967) ; Halporn J.W.H. et a!.; Snell; West.
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v
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J JAKOBSONIAN POETICS. See RUSSIAN FORMAL ISM; SEMIOTICS, POETIC; STRUCTURALISM; EQUIVALENCE; POETIC FUNCTION. JAPANESE POETICS. I. CLASSICAL (TO A.D. 1 868) II. MODERN ( AFTER 1 868 ) I. CLASSICAL (TO 1 868) . The most important features of J. p. derive from its definition out of lyricism augmented by a certain kind of history. There is a parallel with, and some differences from, Chinese poetics (q.v. ) . In fact, all of the world's poetic systems but one appear to have been defined out of lyric as the privileged genre. The exception is the Western, which used drama to produce mimesis (see IMITATIO N ) , but even this was later supplemented by the affectivism of Horace (see CLASSICAL POETICS) . Varying ideas of lit. produce varying discourses. Ki no Tsurayuki begins his preface to the Kokinshii ( l Oth c . ) : The poetry of Japan takes the human heart as seed and flourishes in the countless leaves of words. Because hu man beings possess interests of so many kinds, it is in poetry that they give expression to the meditations of their hearts in terms of the sights ap pearing before their eyes and the sounds coming to their ears. Hearing the warbler sing among the blossoms and the frog that lives in the waters-is there any living thing not given to song? It is poetry which, without exer tion, moves heaven and earth, stirs the feelings of gods and spirits invisible to the eye, softens the relations between men and women, calms the hearts of fierce warriors. Here is affectivism (all are moved) , expressivism (all sing) , and realism: all is possible because the world is real. This poetic accounts for poet, reader, world, and expression. Lit. (at least bun or fumi) also included mythical history from the age of divinities to the sovereigns who succeeded them on earth. Much in the twoJ. histories, the Kojiki ( A.D. 7 1 2 ) and Nihon Shoki (720 ) , is fabulous, much dynastic selfjustifica tion. Significantly, prose yields to lyric verse when a divinity or sovereign is deeply moved. These are lyricized narrative histories. History also strengthened the realist presump tions. Fact and fiction are not extremes; either may
be used to literary ends without Western anxiety. J. affectivism differs from Chinese and from the Horatian in being nondidactic: J. poetry is very rarely moralistic. Tsurayuki's chief terms are heart or conception ( kokoro) , words or subjects ( kotoba) , technique or style (sama) , and total form (sugata) . These terms or equivalents last through cl. J. p. Some terms were borrowed from China: e.g. elegance (fiiryii; Ch. feng-liu ) , with a native equivalent, courtly beauty ( miyabi) . Elegance was esteemed variously, so that fiiryii is a word with a long, complex history. To be possessed of a right heart or conception was designated by kokoro aru and by the Sinified ushin. An ideal of mystery and depth (yiigen) was distin guished in terms of conception (kokoro yiigen) , expression ( kotoba yiigen) , and total effect ( sugata yiigen) . But yiigen later signified beauty. Sabi is disputed by J. critics but seems to mean desola tion, deterioration, silence, esp. later in the d . period. Naturally there was some prescriptive crit.: one should avoid hypometric (ji tarazu) lines, poetic ills ( kahei) of various kinds, and repetition ( rin 'e, rinne) esp. in linked poetry (see RENGA) . Other slogans, e.g. "Old lang., new conceptions" (kotoba furuku, kokoro atarashz) , found some who dis agreed with one part or the other. Rudely put, early poetry tends to be more factual. Fictionaliz ing accompanied esteem of elegance, yielding to beauty in linked poetry and no (q.v. ) . In later linked poetry ( haikai; see HAIKU ) , beauty was poised with desolation ( sabi) , elevation with hu mor, etc. The dominant waka used purely J. dic tion, eschewing Sinified: as if, in Eng., we used "amorous," "bishop," and "rigor" in prose but in verse "loving," "overseer," and "hardness." Earlier linked poetry ( renga) continued the choice; later ( haikai) did not. Numerous distinctions existed, but formally poet and audience were interchangeable: poetry was not entertainment but transmission of what was found moving and might elicit reply-compe tition in a poetry match ( utaawase; see POETIC CONTESTS) , or another poet's added stanza ( tsukeku) in linked poetry. Waka moves from com munication to composition on topics, often in com petition. Linked poetry moves from joint compo sition of sequences to that of individual stanzas ( hokku ) . Poetry remains, however, an art open to all, since a poet is not one specially inspired but rather one moved. Poetic training also differs from its Western equivalent. Writing practice ( tenarai) commonly
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JAPANESE POETICS involved calligraphy less than setting down old, or composing new, poems expressive of one's con cerns (see "Writing Practice" in The Tale of Genji) . Poetry was learned from example, not precept. Numerous collections of exemplary poems ( shuka, shuku) were made. Tutelage by a poetic authority normally involved marking composi tions as good or bad; reflection was left to the composer. Crit. involved general treatises, but less often than in the West, because one wrote for potential equals and always for people of taste. Certain critical emphases recur, inc!. increasing attention to the dicta of esteemed poets. Classification in volved forms, topics ( dai) , and other distinctions. As suggested, some crucial terms ( kokoro, kotoba, sugata) remained stable in meaning; others (y� gen, fiiryu, sabi) changed, and most were initially metaphorical. In poetry matches (incl. renga awase) , judgments and reasons were commonly supplied, as were commentary, anecdotes (e.g. utagatari) , and tales of poems (e.g. uta monogatari) . Comparisons were frequent, as in matches and emulations. Alternative styles were distinguished in varying numbers, e.g. the lofty style ( taketakaki yo) , the style possessing heart ( ushintei) , etc. Rulebooks ( shikimoku) emerged for linked poetry setting forth elaborate canons designed to control the rapid composition in alter nation by several poets. Historical assumptions emerge very early; as a sense, the historical exists from the beginning of poetic collections. The sense of generations or ages begins with Tsurayuki. His torical and cultural relativism comes with prose (see "Fireflies" in The Tale ofGenji) . The historical devel. of ]. p. involves the enlargement, but not the displacement, of the affective-expressive system, first by literary prose narrative, and then by E.M. drama. (For bib!., see below) . II. MODERN (AFTER 1 868) . With the Meiji Res toration and the coming of the West,]. p. began to show a number of new developments. The history of modern ]. p. can be recounted in terms of Western-inspired literary movements that succes sively came to dominate the ]. poetic scene. As romanticism, symbolism, naturalism (qq.v. ) , and other Western literary movements were intro duced, poets tried to adopt the imported ideas in a manner appropriate to their lang. and culture as well as to their individual creative needs. They were, as before, inclined toward lyricism and for mal brevity, yet they knew that in order for their poetry to become part of a world culture they would have to be informed of, and respond to, new poetic movements emerging in other parts of the world, esp. Western Europe. Meanwhile, scholars searched for ways to reinterpret traditional ideas in the light of imported poetics and incorporate them into some general conceptual scheme that would encompass both Eastern and Western aes thetics. Romantic ideas of poetry reminiscent of Words-
worth, Byron, and Heine, which came into vogue in Japan around the turn of the 20th c., were soon overshadowed by other Western theories such as symbolism and naturalism (see JAPANESE POETRY, Modern), although all such foreign concepts were modified. ]. romanticism, for instance, extolled free love more loudly than its European counter part in order to reach those who were still in the shadow of feudal morality. ]. symbolists showed more confidence in nature than in art for a me dium through which to probe the mystery at the heart of the universe. Western naturalism was transformed into a kind of autobiographical real ism that emphasized the author's personal obser vations and feelings, not far from the type of real ism implied in Ki no Tsurayuki's preface to the Kokinshu (see JAPANESE POETRY, Classical) . In general, modern ]. poets have shown a ten dency to adore Western ideas of poetry in their youth but to return to their own literary heritage as they grow older. Some of their most interesting poetics emerge in mid-career, when they struggle to reconcile the two poetic trads. A typical case is Hagiwara Sakutar6 ( 1 886-1942 ) , who admired European symbolist poetry early in his career but later became an avid reader of waka and haikai. In the process of that transition he formulated a unique poetic that centered upon the idea of "nostalgia," a modern poet's instinctive longing for his existential homeland. A similar transition is seen in Takahashi Shinkichi ( 1 901-8 7 ) , who con sidered himself a disciple of Tristan Tzara during his youth but soon abandoned dada (q.v.) in favor of Zen Buddhism. His conception of poetry is highly individual: he tried to combine an intellec tual verseform imported from the West with an Eastern religion that defies intellect. The case is more complex with Shaku Ch6kii (real name, Orikuchi Shinobu, 1 887-1 953 ) , who started as a traditional tanka poet but proceeded to follow the worldwide trend during the 1 920s toward proletar ian lit. His second book of poetry shows a radical break from tanka convention in both theme and technique. When that phase passed, he resumed writing tanka in a more traditional manner, draw ing on materials that reflect his lifelong interest in ancient ]. mythology and folklore. His concept of poetry is characterized by his attempts to modern ize tanka through a kind of cultural primitivism. Poetics in premodern Japan had been largely unsystematic. With the newly acquired knowledge ofEuropean philosophy, modernJ. scholars began to reinterpret traditional ideas from a new angle and to try to make them part of a coherent scheme. Mori O gai ( 1 862-1922 ) , for example, proposed to elucidate the implications of yojo (overtones) against the background of Eduard von Hartmann's aesthetics. Watsuji Tetsur6 ( 1 8891960) analyzed mono no aware, a cl. literary ideal implying sad awareness of life's ephemerality, by using a philological method learned from Euro pean scholars like Gilbert Murray. Perhaps the
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JAPANESE POETRY most ambitious of all such attempts was made by O nishi Yoshinori ( 1 888-1959 ) , who reinterpreted yfigen and sabi from the viewpoint of Ger. phe nomenology. It does not seem, however, that more recent theorists feel as much urge to internation alize ]. p., probably because they have become more confident of their own trad. Or else they are already so much a part of the international poetic community that they feel no need to insist on their national identity. ANTHOLOGIES AND TRANSLATIONS: Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei [Great Compendium ofCI.]. Lit.] , ed. I. Takagi, 102 v. ( 1 957-68) ; Nihon Kagaku Taikei [Great Compendium of]. Poetic Treatises ] , ed. N. Sasaki, 1 0 v. ( 1956-63 ) , and Bekkan [Sup plement] , ed. N. Kylisojin, 4 v. ( 1 959-80 ) ; Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshfi, ed. K. Akiyama et aI. , 51 v. ( l 970-76)-full collection of J. lit.; Kindai Bun gaku HYMon Taikei [Great Compendium of Mod. Lit. Crit . ] , ed. S. Yoshida et aI., 1 0 v. ( 1 9 7 1-77 ) . HISTORY AND CRITICISM: S. Hisamatsu, Nihon Bungaku Hyoronshi [Hist. of .J. Lit. Crit.l , 5 v. ( 1 936-50) ; A. Yasuda, Nihon no Geijutsuron U. Treatises o n t h e Arts] ( 1 957) ; M . Ueda, Literary and Art Theories in Japan ( 1 967) , Mod. ]. Poets and the Nature of Lit. ( 1 983) ; T. Matsui, Kindai Hairon shi [Hist. of Haiku Crit. in the Mod. Period] ( 1 973 ) ; S. Yoshida, Kindai Bungei Hyoronshi [Hist. of Lit. Crit. in the Mod. Period] , 2 v. ( 1 9 75 ) ; D. Keene, World Within Walls ( 1 976-)-] . lit. 1 6001 868, part of a continuing hist.; H. Shino, Kindai Tanka Ronsoshi [Hist. of Tanka Controversies in the Mod. Period] , 2d ed., 2 v. ( 1 98 1 ) ; ] . Konishi, A Hist. of]. Lit., 5 v. ( 1 984-) ; Principles of CI. ]. Lit., ed. E. Miner ( 1 985) ; Miner et aI., esp. parts lA, 4, 6A, I , J , and K. M.U.
JAPANESE POETRY. I. CLASSICAL ( TO 1 868) A. Genres and Characteristics B. History II. MODERN ( AFTER 1 868 ) I. CLASSICAL ( TO 1 86 8 ) . This account treats poetry written in.J. by those racially]. on the main archipelago. That is, it excludes Ainu and Ryuk yuan poetry and]. composition in Chinese. This is the usual implicit, limited definition. The prosody of]. p. comes to consist of lines constituted by 5+7 or 7+5 morae in alternation, a mora being a for mally or conceptually conceived syllable. Some modern haiku poets conceived of their poems as single lines and, like Chinese poetry, .J. has been written or printed without typographical breaks for lines, except for modern editions reproducing ch6ka (see below) . The following terms are as sumed: ( l ) waka (yamatouta) : ] . p., particularly (a) choka ("long poem" ) , alternating S and 7-syllable lines with a last 7- added; and
(b) tanka (q.v.; "short poem " ) , of 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 syllables respectively (also used as envoys [ hanka] for choka) : kami no ku ("upper-lines part" ) , the 5, 7, 5 of tanka, and shimo no ku ("lower-lines part" ) , the 7, 7 of tanka. (2) renga (q.v.; "linked poetry") , particularly (a) renga, using pure]. diction ofwaka; typically composed by three or four poets alternating stanzas of the upper and lower parts of tanka to a total of 1 00 (50 each ) , but 100-stanza units could be multiplied to 1000- or 10 ,000stanza lengths; and (b) haikai ( [ no, q. v.] renga; modern designation, renku) , introducing Sini tied words oflower decorum and of the same typical alternate composition and length, although the 36-stanza form (kasen) was most favored by Bash6. A. Genres and Characteristics. Song has always been an activity of both individual and communal importance in Japan. The divinities and sover eigns in the two ]. mythical histories ( Kojiki, ca. 712; Nihon Shoki, 720) deliver their strongest feel ings in verse. These pieces were not sung in the modern sense but were delivered in heightened voice, often as spells ( kotoage) . The court enjoyed various kinds of songs. Kagura were associated with Shinto and dance. Saibara, originally folksongs, were taken up by the court and modified by ga gaku, stately music imported from China (lost there but preserved in Japan) . [mayo ("present styles") incl. many kinds of song compiled around 1 1 69. Kinds proliferate and names with them, e.g. nagauta and meriyasu, music in kabuki; the former is instrumentally accompanied and is fundamen tal to the stage; the latter is unaccompanied and was only briefly in vogue . Both kinds were also performed in pleasure quarters, where minute discrimi nations existed for songs. The verse por tions of no are cantillated in a manner approach ing singing. Comic, parodic, and satiric verse flourished ca. 1 650 ff. The two major kinds were kyoka ( mad waka) and senryfi. The latter developed out of haikai and eventually took on the 5, 7, 5-syllabic form of opening stanzas in linked poetry. Numer ous other kinds came and went as vogues. The main line of ]. p., waka (including esp. ,hoka and tanka) originated with the court but was open to all. Its earliest examples appear in Kojiki. It used pure ]., i.e. excluded the Sinified diction increasingly used in prose. Early prosody consisted of inconsistent alternation of shorter with longer lines which gradually became settled as 5s and 7s, with hypersyllabic but not hyposyllabic lines per mitted. The verse sections of no and some other writing are in units of7s and 5s; some songs are in 8s and 6s. ]. lit. seldom demonstrates the strong opposi tions of its Western counterparts. Significantly,
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JAPANESE POETRY fact and fiction do not conflict, both being drawn on equally by poets. There is, however, a growing tendency for waka to be fictionalized. Poems might be composed to go with paintings on screens. As poetic contests (q.v.; utaawase) became a chief venue for formal poetry, it became necessary for matching poems to be on the same topic ( dai) . Poets perspiring in August might write on "Snow in a Mountain Village," or old male poets of a young woman's love yearning. Topics were also necessary for sequences, commonly of 100 poems ( hyakushuuta) , for presentation. Informal poetry addressed to friends or lovers, or formal poetry on actual occasions, remained factual. The opening stanzas oflinked poetry (see below) were required to deal with the actual setting, the rest to be fictional; but both requirements could be violated. In brief, fact is often embellished, and fiction often based on fact, with factual elements often domi nant in modern poetry. Brevity is a central feature. Poetic units not long to begin with grow shorter. The longest extant choka of consequence is also the only one describ ing a battle, a poem by Kakinomoto Hitomaro (d. 708- 1 5 ) , only 1 49 lines long. By the late 1 7th c. it was common to compose opening stanzas ( hokku) for haikai that were meant to stand alone, hence formally the same as modern haiku (q.v. ) . No complete explanation exists for this attachment to brevity. One factor involves the closely knit nature of composing groups. The more intimately poets know each other, the less necessity and good man ners require lengthiness, a fact the converse of which is the weak opposition between poet and reader. A person who is one now will be the other another time. These roles are codified inJ. linked poetry, where poets compose in alternating roles as poets and audience according to complex can ons. In effect, they make an integrated collection as poets-audience on the spot. Collections (q.v.) are another conspicuous fea ture of J. p. The most prestigious, although not always the greatest, were the 2 1 royally commis sioned nijuichidaishu, beginning with the Kokinshu (905-15) and ending with the Shinzokukokinshu ( 1 439) . Their typical 20-scroll form divides into halves: the first begins with the seasons ( 1 -2 spring, 3 summer, 4-5 autumn, 6 winter) and the second with love ( 1 1-15 or so) . Other scrolls in volve travel ( tabi no uta) , congratulations (ga no uta) , and complaints (jukkai) . More and more comes to be made of a miscellaneous category in which no single topic predominates ( kusagusa no uta, zoka) , thereby allowing poets to introduce fact or avoid topics they thought timeworn. Seasonal poems open with spring's beginning and close with winter's end. Love poems present a stylized version of courtly love (q.v. ) ; the man's view domi nates early on, the woman's more thereafter. Love ( kol) means loving or yearning for someone else, not being loved, although happy consummation ( au koi) is treated. Love is, then, particularly agi-
tated, and in the collections undergoes many fluc tuations. Travel scrolls progress through the geog raphy of central Japan, if not farther, and the trip never returns to the capital. There is considerable codification of topics, a tendency fully realized in the rule books ( shikimoku) for linked poetry: haze represents spring; the moon is an autumn moon unless qualified; drizzle ( shigure) belongs to both autumn and winter, although first drizzle ( hat sushigure) belongs to winter. As progressions became more skilled, associa tions were devised to integrate them more closely. Group associations, such as runs of anonymous poems and older (recent) poems, come first. Sub tler associations involve conception ( kokoro) or diction (kotoba) . Conceptually, a poem on making a pillow in travel (a frequent topos) might precede one on a dream of home. The poem de rigueur for a man to send a woman after a love meeting might precede one where the woman wonders if her lover will come again the next evening. Frost im agery in one poem connects with withered plants in the next, or dew in one with leaves changed in color in the next (dew and frost were considered agents of change) . The common association of winds with peaks could lead to a poem on wind following one on mountains. By the time of the eighth collection, Shinkokinshu (ordered 1 20 1 ) , another principle functions. Not merely selecting the best poems, compilers used lesser to set off greater to give a pleasing variety and to honor the J. aesthetic canon of asymmetry. Somewhat later, two poems might be juxtaposed with no apparent association until one realized that together they constituted an allusive variation ( honkadori) on an older poem. Modern sequential composition ( ren saku) offers similar forms of integration. As these procedures imply, progressions and associations usually derive not from individual po ets but from compilers, who were themselves dis tinguished poets. A poet with a dozen poems in a collection would find them scattered, situated ac cording to stated or inferrable topics, progression, or association. The result is a force countervailing brevity: hence the Shinkokinshu can be read as a complex, varied poem of upwards of 10,000 lines. A renga 1 0,000-stanza unit ( manku) would involve 25,000 lines. The poet Ihara Saikaku ( 1642-93) produced extraordinary numbers of haikaistanzas in a single day and night, his prodigy being 23,500 (nearly a thousand per hour, more than 15 per minute) . Nobody has read this; Saikaku ex hausted his scribes. Such bravado aside, the col lective principle holds remarkable strength in Ja pan, surely the only country whose first writing system, man 'yogana, was named after the collec tion employing it, the Man 'yoshu-although in fact it was first used in the Kojiki and was probably adapted from a Korean model. InJapan verse has been unusually hospitable to prose and vice versa. Still, they are distinguished since the introduction of writing in J.: a distinct
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JAPANESE POETRY kind of man 'yogana was used for verse in the Kojiki, whose narrative in prose is interspersed with lyr ics, Again, a people's rites show what they devote to the divine, and inJapan almost 30 Shinto pieces are prosimetric' Some lines are in verse, some in prose, a distinction immediately evident and ulti mately baffling. Why is a line of 5 or 7, or even 4 or 8, syllables verse, whereas one of3 or 9 is prose? The royal collections provide two kinds of infor mation. The second is the poet's name (or "Poet Unknown" ) . The first is its subject (or "Subject Unknown," not quite a title ) . The subject may be: ( 1 ) a flower or bird; (2) topics, e.g. "Love by the seaside"; (3) topics and occasions such as '''A distant spring view' for The Poetry Match in Six Hundred Rounds"; or (4) headnotes. Headnotes may show that one poem is a message or state ment, the next poem a reply. Extended headnotes give a narrative setting to an exchange. In fact, with slight alteration the headnoted exchange could become an episode in the "tales of poems" genre, e.g. The Tales oj Ise. Essentially collections of brief stories about poems, these tales show again the urge to collect, to make larger integers from smaller. Given J. poetics, readers wish to know the poet in the poem; and at court, poetry was a form of social communication. In The Tale oj Genji, the characters exchange about 800 poems, nearly 4000 lines, alluding to yet other poems in Chinese as well as J. and to songs. Throughout cl. J. lit., verse and prose are com patible, even if distinct and even if changing in nature over time. Poetry is the idealized member: an early term exists for J. p. (yamatouta) , but not for prose. The term j lang." (yamatokotoba) im plied idealizing ofJ. (as opposed to Chinese) lang. and poetry, with J. taken as the purer and truer. Chinese poetry must be written in Chinese char acters; J. can be written in the cursive syllabary ( himgana) , the standard medium of literacy for women, hence called "woman's hand," vs. the man's for Chinese. Although in practice both sexes wrote in both hands, J. p. goes back to the divinities headed by the sun goddess. Idealizing gradually led to codifications (those for moons, haze, and travel were mentioned above) , inc!. poetic placenames. One visited places for poetic associations, not actual sights. In visiting Sayo no Nakayama on a clear day, one thought of the night, storms, clouds, and moon associated with the place. The Bay of Sleeves, Sode no U ra, was a godsend to poets indulging in the one excess in J. p .-superabundant tears. When renga master Sogi ( 1 421-1502) wrote ofa place in Kyushu love lier than a famous one near the capital, he rejects what he sees: what has not been celebrated in verse is, he says, no worthier of attention than poems by someone whose status is unattested by family trad. or study with a famous master. The precedented and the customary have very strong appeal to people in traditional societies. In both Japan and China, socially esteemed art is '
.
precedented art, which is why innovation is often cast as appeal to a pristine past. Circumvention and innovation were, however, possible by experi ment, and the eccentric in one generation might set precedent in another, or old Chinese prece dents innovate on J. practice. All else failing, the few great innovators and exception-makers could intervene. Change in cl. and modern poetry alike also reflects engagement with, or revulsion from, valued foreign lits. (Chinese for cl., Western for modern) . The two major subjects of J. p. are nature and love. Nature has been treated in terms of the progression of seasonal phenomena, and progres sively ordered so in collections. Love has been conceived of chiefly as longing, and at court in volved taste more than physical beauty: lovers met in the dark. The erotic was expressed by images of wetness and women's tangled hair and symbol ized by spring, dream , and color. These associa tions have endured. Male homosexual love be came a frequent poetic topic, although not female until very recently. But a trad. of the passionate woman has endured from early times to Yosano Akiko ( 1 878-1942 ) . Nature tends to give assur ance and love to agitate, particularly in linked poetry. B. History. Period Genre Oral to 1 3th c , Waka ( choka, tanka) Linked poetry ( renga, 1 3th-19th cs. haikai) J. lit. hist. is periodized, although as elsewhere the logic and terminology are inconsistent. Only two basic divisions distinguish what follows, with the second also divided in two. The dividing prin ciple is the poetry which flourishes most, although genres of all kinds have continued to be practiced. 1 . Waka Period. The last date assignable a Man 'yoshu poem is A.D. 759; its first poem is as signed to Yuryaku (regnal dates unclear; he sent an embassy to China in 478 ) . The Kojiki (ca. 7 1 2 ) may have some songs from the 3rd c, By the end of the 13th c', compilation rights for a royal col lection are vested in descendants of Fujiwara Teika ( 1 1 62-1241 ) . The final four royal collections were compiled by royal order on request of the military aristocracy: power was dispersing as the nation fell into chaotic wars. Even beyond the waka period proper, waka was associated with the divinities, with the monarchs who continued their line, and with all Japanese. Yamatouta is J. p. in a special sense: it is the sole literary art never on probation and from the outset the possession of all, including the illiterates. The Man 'yoshu selects from previous collections now otherwise lost. It includes poems from all levels of society, even a few attributed to animals. Its greatest achievement, reflecting a time over a century prior to 759, lies in the work of Kakino moto Hitomaro (d. 708-1 5 ) , a middling courtier,
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JAPANESE POETRY a kind of poet laureate, and one of the great ] . poets. His occasional poems o n royal affairs are public in the highest sense; his personal poems render the individual universal. Dynastic causes mingle with humane observation in his poems on the bloody Jinshin War (67 1 ) , on the death of its hero Prince Takechi, and on the poet's visit to the ruined capital of the defeated rival. His poems on parting from, or mourning, wives are unforgetta ble. His masterpiece recounts seeing a dead man on a rocky shore after he himself has barely sur vived a typhoon. The world in which we die is divine-one of many kind ironies, as in the second envoy: From open sea the waves Break upon a rugged coast Become your bedding For the pillow you have made, And so, my lord, your rest is here. "Become your bedding" renders a pillow-word ( makurakotoba) , an evocative fixed epithet of which Hitomaro is the unquestioned master. His choka show a skill in complex, alternating parallelism derived from Chinese practice. Oth erwise he seems to ignore anything foreign. That is truer still of melodious Yamabe Akahito (fl. 724-37) , who features greenery, hills, streams whatever is "pure"-an unsullied world ignoring the suffering Hitomaro knew defined the good ness of life. Yamano(u)e Okura (d. 785) visited China. Not surprisingly, Buddhism and even Confucianism enter choka like his " Dialogue on Poverty." Emo tional generalization, homely imagery, and broken syntax make his styles unmistakable. That syntax shows tellingly in the envoy to a poem mourning a son: He is still too young And cannot know the road to take. I will pay your fee. Courier to the realms below Bear him there upon your back! ( homo Yakamochi (d. 785) and his family are most fully represented in the collection. Perhaps the last compiler, Yakamochi sought out interest ing poems from the remote and humble. His own show mastery of both poetic inheritance and new thought. He lacks the differing intensities of the other three, but his fluency and range exceed theirs. The first of the early royal collections, the Kokinshii (905- 1 5 ) , has poems credited to Man 'yoshii poets, anonymous subsequent poets, and the more recent Six Poetic Sages dominated by Ariwara Narihira (825-80) and Ono no Koma chi (fl. ca. 833-5 7 ) , both legendary lovers. Nari hira's conceptions seem to find words inadequate. Komachi's words defined her conceptions, as her famous use of pivot-words (kakekotoba) reveals in the double or triple meanings she infuses. The
single most famous tanka is his: There is no moon! Nor is this spring the spring that was In those days bygone! I myself being the sole one Remaining the thing it was . . . . A paradoxical poem reflecting Buddhist tran sience, it was known so well by later poets that its words were thought too familiar to be used for allusion. The compilers, particularly Ki no Tsyrayuki (882-945? ) , defined the Kokinshii ethos. His gen eration gave Japan its first poetic, its first poetic diary, its art. Accommodating Chinese wit to ] . sensibility, he also accommodated poetry t o paint ing, vastly enlarging its fictional scope while retain ing fact. Precisely because technique ( sama) was his standard, he most prized the human heart ( kokoro) as conceiver, and purity of lang. (kotoba) as means. His greatness towers over any single achievement, and the collection he led still affects assumptions concerning poetry's relations to the rest of life. The next six collections imitated, then inno vated on, the Kokinshii. Izumi Shikibu (b. 976?) was the occasion, and probably the author, of an important poetic diary. Her position in poetry was unrivaled in her time, when women created the greatest]. lit. Intense, subjective, various, and dif ficult, her poetry is still not adequately compre hended. After her, most ofthe best poets are men who extended poetic understanding, leading to the eighth royal collection, the Shinkokisnhii, with the profoundest poetry of these centuries. Poetic arbiter of the age, Fujiwara Shunzei ( 1 1 1 4-1204) imparted depth by adapting Bud dhist meditation to poetry. Priest Saigyo ( 1 1 1 890) , beloved in Japan, and the sensitive, intense Princess Shokushi (d. 1 20 1 ) are excelled in the age only by Fujiwara Teika, Shunzei's brilliant, difficult son. Poetic fiction now required learning and intellectual effort to define feeling. Many chapters have been written on two of Teika's po ems: Looking out afar, What need is there for cherry flowers Or colored autumn leaves? Along the cove the humble huts Yielding to the autumn dusk. The brief spring night, Its floating bridge of dreams Breaks all apart, And from the peak there takes its leave A cloudbank into open sky. Teika's heirs disputed his legacies. One line offered subtle variations on the familiar, the two others new conceptions. Novelty lay in subjective manipulation through patterning, synaesthesia, and metamorphosis in seasonal poems often con-
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JAPANESE POETRY sisting entirely of images, in love poems without images, and in miscellaneous poems fusing the alternatives. These are represented in the 1 4th ( Gyokuyoshu, 1 31 3 ) and esp. the 1 7th (Fiigashu, 1 349) of the 21 collections. The outstanding poets incl. the ambitious KYOgoku Tamekane (Tame kanu, 1 254-1332) and three royal figures: Fushimi ( 1 265-1 3 1 7 ) , Eifuku Mon'in ( 1 271-1342 ) , and Hanazono ( 1 297-1348 ) . Waka and royalty were still associated, even after the age of renga had begun. 2. Linked Poetry. As politics turned toward chaos in the 1 3th c., linked poetry ( renga, 1 3th1 6th cs. ) achieved greatness. Linked poetry em ployed as stanzas alternations of the kami no ku (upper-lines part) and shimo no ku (lower-lines part)-the 5-7-5 and the 7-7 syllable lines mak ing up a tanka. Two or more poets usually took part in alternating composition according to elaborate rules and canons. Renga proper used elevated diction not unlike that of waka, and a 1 00-stanza length was most common. The nobleman Nija Yoshimoto ( 1 320-88) accorded renga premier status with a semi-royal collection, the Tsukuba Shu ( 1 357) . A renga boom had begun (even illiterates were composing it) which lasted through the 1 6th c . The renga masters knew waka thoroughly; Shinkei ( 1 406-75) composed brilliantly in both kinds. Frequently difficult, Shinkei resembles in renga Teika in waka. But the peak of renga came with Sagi, who made the whole sequence rather than stanzas the aim of poetry. Caught up in wars, he fled the capital and taught renga, receiving teaching in classics that raised him from unknown origins to an unrivaled height as lecturer and renga master. Inevitably he also collected renga. His solo of a hundred stanzas ( 1 499) is thought the great est renga sequence, but solo composition over four months is abnormal for renga, so that two trios with the noble Shahaku ( 1 443-1 527) and Sacha ( 1 448-1532 ) , son of a smith-are always praised. Sacha's performance in The Hundred Stanzas at Minase sometimes lags, but perfection was sub sequently achieved in The Hundred Stanzas at
Yunoyama. As long as renga was composed at court, women participated. They did less when warcamps and temples were the sites. The last impressive renga master, Satomura Jaha ( 1 524-1 602 ) , made renga into a house art taught to the military aristocracy. Ossification had begun. The art of renga can be suggested by three stanzas from the Minase sequence. Shahaku (76) and SOCha (77) demonstrate renga connectedness. Master SOgi (78) shows how to vary, imparting beauty to desolation: ( 76) Shrubs never cultivated by the owner stand thick by the wattled door ( 77 ) in that vicinity the overgrown field by the hedgerow covers the neglected hoe
In that vicinity the overgrown field by the hedgerow covers the neglected hoe (78) the traveler returns dim in haze brought by twilight in light rain.
Haikai ( haikai renga, 1 6th-19th cs.) brought a lower decorum, beginning in play with diction extended by the Sinified, the humble, and the otherwise unwakalike. Conceptions were also lower. The problem was to make this mixture fundamental to human experience. It is too easy to treat Matsunaga Teitoku ( 1 572-1653) and Nishiyama Sain ( 1 605-80) as frivolous predeces sors of grand Matsuo Basha ( 1 644-94) , most loved ofJ. poets. Actually, Teitoku effected the transition from renga to haikai, and Sain's Danrin school had survival value in its spirited practicality. Basha's seriousness with the low and lighthearted made haikai the most difficult poetic art in cl.Japan. No wonder his oeuvre is small or that he turned to an easier style when late success required frequent composition. No wonder the glory of his school ended with him. Japan's foremost poet-painter, Yosa (Taniguchi) Buson ( 1 7 16-83) , led the Haikai Revival. Basha sometimes nods, Buson seemingly never. Yet the common judgment seems correct: Basha risked more of self and art, achieving a human profundity not achieved by Buson's greater accuracy and beauty. Also, by Buson's time Basha's sequential art yielded to brilliant stanzas (cf. Shinkei) and often to separate hokku very like haiku. Kobayashi Issa ( 1 763-1827) made a virtue of this defect by interspersing stanzas in the prose of many poetic diaries. They are moving, if not the equal of Basha's Narrow Road Through the Provinces. Two quotations must suffice to show the precari ous meaningfulness of haikai. In Poetry Is What I Sell ( 1 682) , Basha is joined for a duo by the irre pressible Enomoto (Takarai) Kikaku ( 1 6611 707) , who composes the different-seeming stan zas 34 and 35. Basha's conclusion (36) joins Kikaku's last in violating the rule of nonrecollec tion in linked poetry: they echo their first two stanzas (capitals designate ]. treated as Chinese) : (34) Horses may neigh at dawn like cocks announcing freshly fallen snow (35) poetry is what I sell flowers not my debts concern me so I drink all the time Poetry is what we sell flowers not our debts concern us so we drink all the time (36) as sun sets on THE SPRINGTIME LAKE AND PLEASURE HAS BROUGHT HOME OUR POEM. A quite different, religious mood governs a pas sage in At the Tub ofAshes, a foursome . From Mukai Kyorai ( 1 65 1 -1 704) (31 ) to Okada Yasui ( 1 658-
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JAPANESE POETRY 1 743) (32) to Basho (33 ) , the rise in tone is remarkable; so is the skillful shift by Nozawa Boncho (d. 1 7 1 4) (34): ( 3 1 ) The strolling peddler loudly calls his wares in shortened names as he passes by (32) no more than cover from a shower is human life in ceaseless flux No more than cover from a shower is this world in ceaseless flux (33) sleeping at noon the body of the blue heron poised in nobility Sleeping at noon the body of the blue heron poised in nobility (34) trickle trickle go the waters where rushes sway in utter peace. Basho's heron, head under wing, asleep on one leg, is a figure of human enlightenment. A pain terly counterpart by Buson is secular, not notice ably figurative of the human, but exact in its sequence of images: The evening breeze blows waters to the blue heron whose legs are rippled. All these quotations exemplify the opening sen tence of Tsurayuki's preface to the Kokinshii: "The poetry ofJapan takes the human heart as seed and flourishes in the countless leaves of words." E.M. II. MODERN ( AFTER 1868). Poetry since the Meiji Restoration has been dominated by three major forms: ( 1 ) tanka, with the same pattern as in the cl. period, but no longer used as envoys; (2) haiku, normally inc!. a season word, originating in but distinct from hokku (first stanza of haikaz) ; and (3) kindaishi ("modern poetry" ) , par ticularly (a) shintaishi ( new-style poetry, typi cally consisting of 7+5 or 5+ 7 syllable lines and written in cl. ].) and (b) jiyiishi (free-style poetry, evolved from shintaishi but without a fixed syllable scheme and usually written in modern ] . ) .
Renga and haikai became virtually extinct in the late 1 9th c., surviving only among a small number of literati. Senryfi has come to be viewed more as epigram or playful commentary than as poetry. Like the rest of modern]. culture, poetry since 1 868 has developed under the influence and stimulation of the West. It has had to respond not only to Western literary currents but to internal political and social changes caused by rapid mod-
ernization. To early modern poets, traditional verseforms seemed so outmoded that several po ets, incl. Masaoka Shiki ( 1 867-1902 ) , went so far as to predict their total disappearance in the near future. Shintaishi emerged in response to the new need. Yet poets working in tanka and haiku did not give up; they endeavored to modernize those forms, and eventually succeeded in doing so. Modernization of ]. p. involved a number of innovations aimed at overcoming what early mod ern poets saw as the main weaknesses of cl. verse, such as brevity of form, lack of social awareness, and inability to embody sustained reasoning. One early Meiji scholar, after reading European poetry, observed: "Their poetry is closer to our prose fiction than to our poetry." The task of modern] . poets, then, was t o bring poetry closer t o prose, to a type of lit. flexible enough to reflect the ever-in creasing complexity of modern civilization. Those who opted for kindaishi had little problem over coming the deficiencies, but those who persisted in writing in premodern forms had a stiff chal lenge on their hands. One scheme adopted by a number of modern tanka and haiku poets has been a method known as rensaku (sequential composition ) , in which the poet strings together two or more poems written on a common topic. The method is reminiscent of renga and haikai, except that it uses thematic rather than tonal qualities to attain structural unity and is composed by a single poet. Individual tanka or haiku grouped together would become like stanzas of a Western poem, showing progres sion of thought or feeling from one to the next within the group. A complex topic that cannot be done justice in a short form receives more ade quate treatment by use of the rensaku technique. Even a topic that demands sustained thinking can be dealt with. Other schemes devised to help overcome the brevity of traditional forms exploit visual qualities of the lang. Kawahigashi Hekigodo ( 1 873- 1 937 ) , for example, once tried what he called ruby haiku-haiku that has furigana (J. phonetic sym bols, called "ruby" in typography) alongside Chi nese ideograms. The poet would use unconven tional furigana, so that added meaning would emerge from the surprising juxtaposition of ]. syllabary and Chinese characters. Ishikawa Takuboku ( 1 886-1 9 1 2) had many of his later tanka printed in three lines, sometimes utilizing indentation for poetic effect: My wife today behaves like a woman unleashed. I gaze at a dahlia. The new typographical format shocked contemp. readers, because a tanka, though consisting offive syllabic units and often translated as a five-line poem, had always been printed in a single or run-on line in]. Similarly, ]. readers had known of haiku as a one-line poem, but Takayanagi
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JAPANESE POETRY Shigenobu ( 1 923-83) began writing haiku like Western visual poetry: blooming flaming ash's swirling circle lone island's roses Both poets observed the 3 1 - and 1 7-syllable rules, but not the line conventions of the genres. In another attempt to modernize traditional forms, some radical poets advocated "free-style tanka" and "free-style haiku." The basis of their argument is the same as in Western free verse (q.v. ) : the form of each poem should be deter mined by its unique subject matter, not by prede termined prosody. In effect, their work was short free verse, yet they insisted it was tanka or haiku on the basis of nonformal elements. For instance, Ogiwara Seisensui ( 1 884-1976 ) , leader of the freestyle haiku movement, argued that even though his poems did not follow the 5+ 7+5 syllable pattern they should be considered haiku because their subject matter was confined to nature and their structure concentric rather than linear. Such arguments did not convince many fellow poets, however, who believed that any poem that refused conventional prosody was free verse. Although free-style haiku gained wider support than its counterpart in tanka, both declined in popularity with time and all but disappeared in the second half of the 20th c. In his last years, Seisensui himself began calling his poems free verse. Incorporating social awareness into tanka and haiku proved an easier challenge. Already in the 19th c. Shiki had shown a strong dislike for the confinements of cl. aesthetics and advocated en largements of theme, tone, and imagery. Later poets, esp. those who came under the influence of Western naturalism, positively sought to draw on plebeian life. This trend reached a peak with pro letarian tanka and haiku in the 1920s and '30s. The following 3 1 -syllable poem by O kuma Nobuyuki ( 1 893-1977) on the subject of J. Labor Day is typical: Amidst the dust Rising from the earth, A red flagThe sight in my memory Forever unblottable. Efforts to link poetry to social issues went to the other ideological extreme during World War II, when many poets wrote tanka with ultranational istic overtones. After the war, leftwing poetry be came popular again, but this time poets were more careful not to let their political beliefs impinge on the artistic autonomy of their work. Also, the social upheaval of the postwar period wrought changes on readers' sensibilities, so that they no longer
expected contemp. tanka and haiku to have aware,
sabi, or other such traditional tones. Using the 31or 1 7-syllable forms, today's poets can treat most political, social, or intellectual issues without ap pearing experimental or avant-garde. All such problems that plagued tanka and haiku poets were largely unknown to those who chose to write kindaishi, for their verseform had all the flexibility of the Western poetry it was modeled on. Their major challenge lay in finding a way to naturalize the alien form, which had centuries of cultural trad. behind it. Esp. troublesome was the problem of lang.: Western poetry fully exploited the various musical qualities of lang., whereas modern J., mingling native and Sinified words, seemed a lang. woefully lacking in music. Devoid of accent, meter was nonexistent in].; alliteration and rhyme were not effective poetic devices be cause they abounded in ordinary usage. The only usable scheme was the syllable pattern, so early poets wrote shintaishi in 5+7 or 7+5 syllable lines; yet repetition of such lines brought monotony in long poems. Hagiwara Sakutar6 ( 1 886-1942 ) , who tried harder t o solve the problem than most other poets, believed that the only solution would be to mix 5+7, 6+4, 8+5 and other syllable patterns in a single poem, which would be the same as writing a poem in prose. "In ].," he concluded, "the more prosaic the lang. is, the closer it ap proaches to verse." Later kindaishi poets tried to exploit the visual features of the lang. and thereby compensate for the lack of musical quality in their work. They skillfully combined letters from the three differ ent scripts available in their lang.: angular and seemingly artless katakana, cursive and graceful hiragana, and ideogrammic and dignified kanji. They would make use offurigana in the same way Hekigod6 did in ruby haiku. Going beyond visual effects, they arranged words, images, and ideas in such a way as to create an "emotive rhythm," a rhythm which is more sensory than phonetic. To cite a short example, a jiyushi entitled "Horse" by Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (b. 1900) consists ofjust one line: "It has a naval port in its intestines." This prose sentence creates no noticeable musical rhy thm. Its emotional impact, however, arising almost entirely from the interplay of images and associa tions, is similar to that of a surrealist painting. And, in general,jiyushi has become more imagistic than traditional Western poetry. Another way in which kindaishi attempted to compensate for lack of inherent musical quality was by bringing in vocal and instrumental music in performance. Recordings by several early poets show that in reading kindaishi they sang out with a certain melody, somewhat in the manner in which tanka poets recite before an audience. I t was as if these poets did not feel kindaishi would sound poetic enough when recited with the intonation of ordinary speech. Later, some famous kindaishi were transformed into songs by professional com-
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JAPANESE POETRY posers, who wrote special melodies for them. "Moon over the Ruined Castle" by Tsuchii Bansui ( 1 871-1952) and "Coconut" by Shimazaki Toson ( 1 872-1943) are two notable examples. In a sense, this practice was an extension of the d. cultural practice that had produced many instances of happy union between lit. and music. It has contin ued to the present day, and provides a good oppor tunity for the general public to come into contact with kindaishi. Despite different problems confronting tanka, haiku, and kindaishi, the history of modern J. p. shows that in each of its phases there was a cen tripetal force bringing together a large number of poets regardless of the verseform in which they specialized. The earliest phase, extending to the first few years of the 20th c., was one of romanti cism (q.v. ) , during which time many poets worked under the influence of European romantic writ ers. The promoter of the movement, Kitamura Tokoku ( 1 868-94) , wrote two long shintaishi in spired by Byron's The Prisoner of Chillon and Man fred, but the full potential of the new form was not revealed until Shimazaki Toson published a col lection of short lyrics called Young Herbs in 1 897. Toson's two predominant themes were romantic love and the anxiety of youth, and he expressed them in a delicate, exquisitely beautiful lang. that was to become a model. The theme of romantic love also found eloquent expression in the tanka ofYosano Akiko ( 1 878-1942 ) , whose Tangled Hair ( 1 90 1 ) shocked contemp. readers by its bold af firmation offemale sexuality. For haiku, Shiki pub lished an essay called "Buson the Haiku Poet" ( 1 89 7 ) , giving lavish praise to Buson's poetry for its bright, fanciful, sometimes startling beauty. Romanticism was succeeded by ]. symbolism (q.v. ) , most notably in kindaishi, after The Sound of the Tide was pub. in 1905 by Ueda Bin ( 1 8741 9 1 6) . This book of translations introducing the works of many Fr. symbolists made a great impact on the ]. poetic scene, inspiring a new movement led by Susukida Kylikin ( 1 877-1945) and Kanbara Ariake ( 1 876-1 952 ) . One reason why such diffi cult European poetry appealed to ]. poets lay in its emphasis on the idea of "correspondence" (cf. Baudelaire) , which was common in d. ]. verse . The symbolist movement reached a peak with Kitahara Hakushu ( 1885-1942 ) , who, with his decadently modern sensibility and colorfully rich vocabulary, created in]. a type of poetry reminis cent of European fin-de-siecle lit. Haiku poets were the least attracted to roman ticism or symbolism during these years, mainly because their leader Shiki advocated in his later years the principle of shasei (sketch from life) . This principle was advanced further by his two leading disciples, Takahama Kyoshi ( 1 874-1959) and Hekigodo, esp. as naturalistic realism became a dominant force in]. fiction shortly after the turn of the century. Some major tanka poets, such as Ito Sachio ( 1 864- 1 9 1 3 ) and Nagatsuka Takashi -
( 1 879-1 9 1 5 ) , came under the spell, too, and wrote 3 1-syllable poems that purported to copy life ob jectively. Others, like Maeda YUgure ( 1 883-195 1 ) and Takuboku, focused on copying plebeian life in their tanka, thereby paving the way for proletar ian poetry. Principles of modern European real ism also attracted some kindaishi poets, notably Kawaji Ryuko ( 1 888- 1959 ) , who published a col lection of naturalistic poems entitled Flowers on the Roadside in 1 9 1 0. ]. p. entered a new stage of maturity when its writers became more fully awakened to their mod ern identity. Western neo-humanism (q.v.) had begun to permeate the depths of]. consciousness in the early years of the 20th c., and poets gradu ally came to seek out their inner selves, trying to give them poetic expression. Of several major poets who did this, Takamura Kotaro ( 1 883-1956) was the most intensely ethical. In his first book of kindaishi, The Journey ( 1 9 1 4 ) , he powerfully as serted the potential of humanity and pleaded for elevating it to its highest level by rigorous disci plining of the self. A similar longing for exalted life pervades the tanka collected in Red Light ( 1 91 3) by Saito Mokichi ( 1 882-1953) , but life as conceived by him seems more primordial and biological, presuming a powerful force flowing in the depths of all living things. In sharp contrast, the self as seen by Hagiwara Sakutaro is lonely, ailing, and anxiety-ridden. His first book of kin daishi was called Howling at the Moon ( 1 9 1 7) , the title suggesting spiritually starved modernists for ever longing for unreachable ideals. The celebra tion of the self did not touch haiku until later, possibly because the form traditionally focused on depicting external nature rather than expressing the inner self. The publication of Katsushika in 1 930, a collection of haiku by Mizuhara ShuOshi ( 1 892-198 1 ) , belatedly announced the arrival of the age of individualism in that verseform. The 1920s and '30s saw a number of new West ern ideas flowing into Japan and inducing poets to respond in varying ways. The most pervasive of such ideas was Marxism; however, except for the jiyiishi of Nakano Shigeharu ( 1 902-79 ) , few po ems written by Marxist sympathizers have stood the test of time. More productive was interaction between other European movements and young kindaishi poets, such as between dada (q.v.) and Takahashi Shinkichi ( 1 90 1-87 ) ; between surreal ism (q.v.) and NishiwakiJunzaburo ( 1 894-198 2 ) ; between imagism ( q .v. ) and Murano Shiro ( 1 90 1 75) ; and between modernism and Kitazono Katsue ( 1 902-78) , Anzai Fuyue ( 1 898-1965 ) , and others. The only major poet largely free of Western influ ence during this period was Miyazawa Kenj i ( 1 896-1933) , who turned t o Buddhism and agrarianism for inspiration. Although imported ideas had less impact on poets writing in tradi tional forms, they still spurred the emergence of such short-lived movements as "proletarian tanka" and "modernist haiku."
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]ARCHA After the barren years of the War, ]. p. made a fresh start and, with the nation's rapid economic recovery, in time attained a new height of prosper ity. Poets who established themselves in the post war years can be classified in two categories. One was a school that stressed the social significance of poetry. Its founders were Ayukawa Nobuo ( 1 92086) , Tamura Ryilichi (b. 1 923) , and other jiyushi poets who in 1 947 started a poetry magazine called The Waste Land with the aim of " discovering a ray of light in the dark empirical awareness and hopeless realization that we live in a waste land." They were joined by leftwing poets like Kaneko Mitsuharu ( 1 895-1975 ) , Sekine Hiroshi (b. 1 920 ) , and others, who tried to discover in the energy of the masses a hope for reclaiming the "waste land." Their poetry, unlike that of prewar proletarian poets, appealed to a wide audience because it was artistically more satisfying. Tanka by Kondo Yoshimi (b. 1 9 1 3) and haiku by Kaneko Tota (b. 1 9 1 9 ) , among many others, also showed awareness of contemp. social issues to an unprece dented degree, freely treating such topics as atomic bombing, the Tokyo Trial, and the U .s.:Ja pan Mutual Security Treaty. The other school of postwar poets emphasized the importance of more universal issues. It was sometimes called the "art school" because of its high regard for the artistic perfection of the poem. Among its earliest promoters were Naka mura Shin'ichiro (b. 1 9 1 8 ) , Kato Shilichi (b. 1 9 1 9 ) , and other kindaishi poets, who in 1 948 initiated the "matinee poetique" movement to introduce modern Fr. poetics to ]. p. Although Nakamura and Kato soon stopped writing poetry, and the movement itself was short-lived, poetry concerned with basic human nature gained sup port when younger poets with no direct war expe rience began writing in the 1 950s and '60s. Most prominent among these are Tanikawa Shuntaro (b. 1 93 1 ) and O oka Makoto (b. 1 931 ) , who write meditative lyrics of serene intellect and restrained diction. Tanikawa is the first poet who has success fully transplanted the sonnet (q.v.) form into]. p . He and his associates have also been active a s literary a nd social critics; their activities extend far beyond the conventional role of the poet. What is known as "the poetry boom" arrived in the late 1 960s. Perhaps the general anti-estab lishment attitude of the younger generation dur ing that decade stirred interest in poetry, a me dium that otherwise seemed to be becoming obsolete. Another factor may have been the ready availability of washing machines and other house hold appliances which freed women from many daily chores and gave them time to read and write. For whatever reason, numerous books of poetry by both old masters and new experimenters ap peared. As the nation's affluence continues, "little magazines" publishing poetry have proliferated, as have books of poetry that are privately publish ed. Poetry no longer enjoys the kind of high social
prestige it once did, but it continues to fulfill its social and personal functions in Japan. See JAPA NESE POETICS. M.U. BIBLIOGRAPHIES: The P.E.N. Club News ( 1 9587 1 ) ; Japan P.E.N. Club.]. Lit. in European Langs. ( 1 961 ) ; Kokubungaku Kenkyu Bunken Mokuroku [Bibliographical Materials for the Study of]. Lit.] ( 1 971-76 ) ; ] . T. Rimer and R. E . Morrell, Guide to ]. P. ( 1 975 ) ; j. Lit. Today ( 1 976-) ; Internat. House of]. Library, Mod. ]. Lit. in Tr. ( 1 979 ) ; Kokubun gaku Nenkan U. Lit. Annual] ( 1 977-) ; JASt-an nual bibl. ANTHOLOGIES AND TRANSLATIONS: Nishiyama Soin, Soin Toppyaku Koi no Haikai ( 1 67 1 )-]. p. on heterosexual and male homosexual love; Yosano Akiko, Midaregami ( 1 904)-daring love poetry; The Man 'yoshu, 1000 Poems ( 1 940) ; R. H. Blyth, Senryu, ]. Satirical Verses ( 1 950) , Edo Satirical Verse Anthots. ( 1 9 6 1 ) ; ] . Konishi, Haiku: Hassei Yori Gen dai Made [Haiku: From Its Origins to the Present] ( 1 952 ) ; T. Ninomiya and D . ]. Enright, The P. of Living]. ( 1 957) ; Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei [The Great Compendium of CI. ] . Lit. ] , ed. I. Takagi et aI., 1 0 1 v. ( 1 95 7-68 ) ; K. Yamamoto, Nihon Shii kashu [Anthol. of]. P. ] ( 1 959) ; Nihon no Shiika U. P. ] , ed. S. Ito et aI ., 3 1 v. ( 1 967-70 ) ; H . C. M cCul lough, Tales of Ise ( 1 968) , Kokin Wakashu ( 1 985 ) , Brocade by Night ( 1 985 ) ; Nihon Koten Bu ngaku Zen shu [A Full Collection of]. Lit. ] , 5 1 v. ( 1970-76) ; H . Kijima, The P. of Postwar]. ( 1975 ) ; M . Ueda, Mod. ] Haiku ( 1 976);]. Kirkup, Mod.]. P. ( 1 978 ) ; E . Miner, ] Linked P. ( 1 979) ; E . Miner and H . Odagiri, The Monkey 5 Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of the Basho School ( 1 98 1 ) ; H. Sato and B. Watson, From the Country of Eight Islands ( 1 98 1 ) ; The Ten Thousand Leaves, tr. I . Levy, v. I , Man 'yoshu, 1-5 ( 1 98 1 ) ; Shimpen Kokka Taikan [Newly Edited Great Canon of]. P. ] , 3 v. in 6 ( 1 983-85 ) ; Kyoka Taikan [The Great Canon of Mad Waka] , 3 v. ( 1 983-85 ) ; L. R. Rodd, Kokinshuu ( 1 984 ) ; Waiting
for the Wind: 36 Poets ofjapan 's Late Medieval Age ( 1 989 ) , Traditional]. P., tr. and ed. S. D. Carter ( 1 991 ) . HISTORY AND CRITICISM: Kindai Tankashi [A Hist. of Mod. Tanka] , ed. U. Kubota et aI., 3 v. ( 1 958) ; ]. Konishi, "Association and Progression," HjAS 21 ( 1 958) , Sogi ( 1 97 1 ) , A Hist. of]. Lit., 5 v. ( 1 984-) , with]. version, Nihon Bungeishi ( 1 985-) ; R. H. Brower and E. Miner, ]. Court P. ( 1 961 ) , Fujiwara Teika's Superior Poems of Our Time ( 1 967 ) ; K . Yamamoto, Gendai Haiku [Mod. Haiku] ( 1 964) ; Koza Nihon Gendaishi Shi [Lectures on the Hist. of Mod.]. P. ] , ed. S. Murano et a!., 4 v. ( 1 973) ; D. Keene, World Within Walls ( 1 976 ) , Dawn to the West, 2 v. ( 1 984) ; M. Ueda, Mod. ]. Poets and the Nature of Lit. ( 1 983) ; "Himerareta Bungaku," ed. S. Yamada, spec. iss. of Koku Bungaku Kaishaku to Kansho (l983)-on erotic writing am art; Miner et a!., esp. parts I , 6A, F, J, K, 7H, 8K. E.M.; M.U.
JARCHA. See SPANISH POETRY.
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JAVANESE POETRY JAVANESE POETRY. I. II. III. IV.
A.D. 7 3 2--928 A.D. 9 2 9-1 5 2 7 CA. A.D. 1 5 00-162 5 CA. A.D. 1 5 7 8-1 940
]. p. was in the beginning closely linked to relig ion and politics. In the Hindu:J. period, poets were members of the Brahman caste or Buddhist clergy, working either as priests and teachers in the service of the monarch or in monasteries pa tronized by the court. I. A.D 7 32-928 : the dynasty of MeQan� in South Central Java. Period I is dominated by Sivaite and Buddhist rulers, presumably of mixed Indian and ]. blood. Kakawin lit. originates in this period. A kakawin is a sizable epic poem in Old]. composed in the metrical rules of the Indian mahakiivya and mostly dealing with topics borrowed from Indian mythology. The oldest dated poetry in Old ]. id iom and in Indian meters is preserved in a stone inscription of29 stanzas dated A.D 856. The oldest and largest complete poem is the RiimiiyarJa-kak awin, comprising 2783 stanzas in 81 different me ters and also believed to date from the 9th c. The author must have known by heart Bhani's kiivya RiivarJa-vadha, which treats the same theme but is meant as a textbook of grammar and alar{lkiira. ]. art in this period adheres strictly to Indian rules. This also applies to kakawin prosody. In principle the kakawin stanza is built up of four lines of similar length and showing the same pat tern of long and short syllables. Thus the metric formula of the popular Old ]. meter siirdiila vikri!jita, for example, is as follows:
Although in J. phonology vowel-length is not pho nemic, the aesthetic effect of kakawin poetry must have been very distinctive, the text being sung, each meter to its own melody. Poetry in Java was from its inception something to be sung before an audience, not read in private. I I . A.D. 929-1527: the dynasties of KeQiri, Sing hasari, and Majapahit in East Java. In period II a strong tendency toward 'javanization" occurred in the plastic arts and in lit. Around A.D. 1 000, the great Indian epics together with some Pural)a's and other religious texts were translated into Old ]. prose, and an efflorescence of kakawin lit. fol lowed. Kakawins were composed for royal mar riages, victories in war, and funeral rites. The authors most often used existing Indian themes but transformed them intoJ. stories, changing the plots radically to fit the needs of the moment and to suit the tastes of their highly placed patrons. The Niigarakrtiigama by Prapanca, a panegyric in praise of King Hayam Wuruk which contains a description of Majapahit in its heyday, is an excep tion, however. Old]. must have become a dead lang., used only for literary purposes, by the end of the 1 3th c. if
not earlier. It is not surprising therefore that the Majapahit era ( 1 294-1 527) witnessed the emer gence ofa new poetic trad ., the kidunglit. A kidung is a sizable epic poem in Middle ]., composed in indigenous meters and treating indigenous themes. Most frequently the kidungs contain a ruwat story or deal with local historical trad. or a variant of the Panji theme. Ruwat stories relate how a person or group was once freed of a curse or safeguarded against evil. They are sung or per formed on the wayang (shadow theater) stage as part of a conjuration ceremony. Panji stories relate how a prince of Koripan, who is an incarnation of Vishl)u, is united after many vicissitudes with his niece, a princess of Daha ( KeQiri) who, being an incarnation of Sri, was predestined to become his bride. Kidungs ("songs" ) are, just as kakawins, sung to an audience, though on different occasions, and are composed in tengahan or macapat meters. A stanza consists of a fixed number of lines (differ ent for each meter) of mutually different but otherwise fixed length, each ending in a certain vowel. Thus the structure of the tengahan meter wukir can be summarized in the following for mula: 10-u, 6-e, 8-i, 7-u, 8-u, 8-e, 8-u, 8-a, 8-a; which means that a stanza consists of 9 lines, the first of which has 10 syllables with u in the final one, etc. Mter the downfall of the Majapahit em pire in 1 527, the poetic trads. in Old and Middle J. were perpetuated on the island of Bali. III. CA. A.D. 1 500-1625: the petty kingdoms on the North Coast ( Pasisir) . Important cultural changes occurred in Java's third period. In the prosperous cities along the North coast, a new Islamic elite had sprung up, speaking an early form of Modern]. and interested in the Arab and Indo-Persian stories that came to Java with the Qur'anic trad. The wayang remained popular, serving to perpetuate the Indian epic trad. Out of the kidung trad. , new forms of poetry evolved, using the Modern ]. idiom, treating new topics, and exhibiting an outspoken preference for maca pat meters which, though technically obedient to the same rules of prosody as the older tengahan meters, were used in such a way that each meter with its specific melody was supposed to suggest the particular atmosphere prevailing in the canto. Included in this Modern]. p. are]. stories on topics borrowed from the international Islamic trad. , original didactic poems o n tenets ofIslamic faith, often concerning questions of orthodox or hetero dox mysticism (the suluk lit. ) , adaptations of older stories from the pre-Islamic period, wanderer sto ries, and compilations called serat kanrJ¢a in which the cycles of tales forming the repertoire of the shadow theater were brought together. IV. CA. A.D. 1 5 78-1 945: the dynasty of Mataram in South Central Java. In period IV, poetry once again became "court poetry." The new genres generated during the Pasisir period were refined. In addition, a new genre became important: the
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JONGLEUR chronicle ( babad) . A modern type of Panji story was developed. A renewed interest in the d. heri tage led to the creation of Modern]. versions of the most important kakawins. New epic poems, some of them hundreds of pages long, were cre ated, along with many shorter didactic-moralistic poems. The court poets played an important role, and even members of the royal house took an active part in poetry writing. After Indonesian Independence in 1945, tradi tional J. p. ends. Western genres written in modern idiom and dealing with modern topics, such as the novel, the short story, free verse, and modern forms of the drama, all of which have developed since 1900, now hold the field. H ISTORY AND CRITICISM: E. M. Uhlenbeck, A
Crit. Survey of Studies on the Langs. of Java and Madura ( 1 964) ; C. Holt, Art in Indonesia, Continui ties and Change ( 1 967) ; T. Pigeaud, Lit. of Java: Mss. in the Library of the Univ. ofLeiden, 4 v. ( 1 96780) ; P. ]. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan: A Survey of Old J J .R. J. Lit. ( 1974) . JAZZ POETRY. See MUSIC AND POETRY. JE NE SAIS QUOI ("I know not what") . A term of aesthetic response in 1 7th- and early 1 8th-c. France closely related to charm, taste (q.v. ) , and (to some extent) the sublime (q.v. ) . As the phrase implies, j. n. s. q. indicates the failure of lang., rational discourse, or any critical system to capture the totality of aesthetic perception. In contrast to the (neo) classical conventions of objectivity in art, the j. n. s. q. asserts an ineffable residuum of personal response-personal, certainly, but not idiosyncratic, since it supposes a community of readers with good taste and shared standards. The j . n. s. q. is posited beyond formal and generic rules as a certain quality, a particular combination of formal aspects, or a relationship between form and content which can only be sensed, not defined or articulated. The very evasiveness inherent in the term led to abuse, affectation, and ridicule (Moliere, Les Femmes savantes 3.3) . The Lat. nescio quid (Augustine ) , It. non so che (Dante, Ariosto, Tasso) , and Sp. no se que (Juan de la Cruz, Gracian) were generally disparate, and applied to Neoplatonic love or metaphysics. The concept entered France in this context (Corneille, Rodogune 1 .4; Pascal, Pensees 1 62) but developed as a critical term (Ogier, Apol. Balzac, 1 628; Mairet, Preface a Silvanire, 1 63 1 ) . It received great est examination in the fifth conversation of Abbe Bouhour's Entretiens d 'Ariste et d 'Eugene ( 1 67 1 ) . Rapin compared i t t o poetic rhythm (Riflexions, 1 674) and Marivaux equated it with voice ( Cab. du phil. , 1 734) . The Fr. term entered Eng. (Blount, 1 6 7 1 ) and appears in Congreve (Double Dealer, 1 694) and Shaftesbury ( Characteristicks, 1 7 1 1 ) . Cf. Pope's "grace beyond the reach of art." Montes quieu (Essai sur Ie gout) and Feij60 (El no se qui) also analyzed it in the 1 8th c., but since then the
j. n. s. q. has not been a vital concept in lit. crit. Jankelevitch has explored the concept in his phe nomenological investigations. See BAROQUE POET I cs .-E . B. O. Borgerhoff, Freedom ofFr. Classicism ( 1 950) ; E. Haase, "Zur Bedeutung von 'J. n. s. q . ' i m 1 7 . J h . , " ZFSL 67 ( 1 956) ; Saisselin; E. Kohler, Esprit und Arkadische Freiheit ( 1 972 ) ; F. Schalk, "Nochmals zum 'j . n. s. q.,''' RF 86 ( 1 974) ; V. Jankelevitch, Le j. n. s. q. et Ie presque-rien ( 1 980) ; L . Marin, "Le Sublime dans les annees 1 670: Un ]. n. s. q.?" Actes de Baton Rouge ( 1 986) . A.G.W. JINGLE (ME gyngle) . Any verse which pleases the car by its catchy rhythm and by pronounced sound repetition (q.v. ) , e.g. rhyme or alliteration (qq.v. ) , often a t the expense of sense. Eeny meeny miny mo and Hickory dickory dock are js. Because they are easily memorized and repeated, js. are often as e nduring as the loftiest poetry, though in a differ ent register. Mark Twain in "Punch, Brothers, Punch" ( Tom Sawyer Abroad) humorously describes his "catching" and passing on a contagious news paper j. Modern advertising js.-usually one phrase or sentence, heavily formulaic if not close rhymed (q.v. ) , and set to a single melodic phrase-use the same devices of repetition for the same mnemonic end. Since the 1 6th c., the term has also been applied depreciatively to any poetry which makes pronounced use of sound effects. Addison (Spectator no. 297) criticizes Milton for often affecting "a kind of]. in his Words" in Para dise Lost, but Milton himself in the note on "The Verse" prefixed to PL had referred to rhyme scorn fully as the ')ingling sound of like endings." This catches, in its sense of "mingled metallic sounds" (e.g. bells, coins ) , very precisely the structural conditions of rhyme and the tinny effect of exces sive alliteration. - Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes, L.P.; T.V.F.B. ed. 1. and P. Opie ( 1 95 1 ) . JOC PARTIT. See PARTIMEN. JONGLEUR (Fr. jongleur, Occitan and Catalan joglar, Sp. juglar, Port. jogral, It. giullare) . A medie val minstrel (q.v.) in France, Spain, or Italy. Al though the word dates only from the 8th c., js. seem to have existed in France from the 5th c. to the 1 5th. In the earlier period the name was applied indiscriminately to acrobats, actors, and entertainers in general, as well as to musicians and reciters of verse. From the 1 0th c, on, however, the term is confined to musicians and reciters of verse, evidencing the importance of the distinction be tween the composer and the performer of verse. Cf. the OE scop, the ON skald, and the Celtic bard (qq.v. ) . The Occitan joglar performed lyrics composed by a troubadour (q.v.) whom he served as a singing messenger, perhaps accompanying himself with an instrument or alternating song with instrumen tal performance. The troubadour might name the j. in the tornada (q .v. ) , with instructions to take the
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JUDEO-SPANISH POETRY song to an addressee who could be expected to reward him for it. Thus a given song was usually entrusted to one j . , but the troubadour might commission severaljs. with different songs during his career, occasionally revising a given song for a second performer. During the 1 2th and 1 3th c. the frequency of such mentions ofjs. declined steadily, suggesting that oral diffusion was being gradually replaced by written transmission. The OF j. performed not only the lyrics of the trouveres (q. v. ) , but also chansons de geste (q.v. ) , medieval romances (q.v. ) , saints' lives, and other narratives. The chansons de geste were originally performed to a simple melody, and according to the oral-formulaic theory (q.v.) were composed in performance by a technique similar to that of the 20th-c. illiterate Yugoslavian guslar (q .v.; see Lord, Duggan); but other scholars maintain that the js. read the chansons de geste from a book even in the earliest times, as they certainly did later on, and as they must have normally read romances and hagiographic texts.-E. Faral, Les Js. en France au moyen iige ( 1 91 0) ;Jeanroy; R. Morgan, "OFJogleor and Kindred Terms," RPh 7 ( 1954) ; R. Menendez Pidal, Poesia juglaresca y origines de las literaturas romanicas ( 1957) ; Lord; J. Duggan, The Song oj Roland ( 1 973) ; w. A. Quinn and A. S. Hall, ] : A Modified Theory oJ Oral Improvisation ( 1 982) ; W. D . Paden, "The Role of the Joglar," Chretien d e Troyes and the Troubadours, ed. P. S. Noble and L. M . Paterson ( 1 984) . W.D .P. JUDEO-SPANISH POETRY is that poetry sung, recited, or written in the Judeo-Sp. (Judezmo, Ladino) dialect, in the various post-diasporic sanc tuaries ofthe SephardicJews-North Mrica (Mo rocco, Algeria) and the Eastern Mediterranean (the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, Israel)-after their exile from Spain in 1 492. By contrast, in Western European centers such as Amsterdam, Bayonne, and Leghorn, there were Jewish authors who did not write in the Judeo-Sp. dialect but continued to form part of the Hispanic (Sp. or Port.) literary trads. (see HEBREW POETRY; SPANISH POETRY ) . Judewp. p. can be organized into the following generic categories: complas (popular religious or didactic songs) , cantigas (q.v., lyric songs) , roman sas (traditional ballads ) , endevinas (riddles ) , and refranes (q.v., proverbs) . Complas can be consid ered essentially written lit.; the other genres are oral. Following World War II, a special sub-genre of Sephardic poetry, written in Judeo-Sp. and in Fr. , commemorated the tragic events of the Holo caust. Complas (Sp. coplas, q.v. ) are strophic poems usually of paraliturgical content, by both known and anonymous authors, and are the most charac teristic Sephardic genre. Typically they are sung and often are acrostic (q.v.) poems presenting the letters of the Hebrew alphabet or of the author's name. Since they are essentially part of a written trad. , they are generally sung by men, unlike the
romansas, which are usually performed by women. Among the most traditional complas are those for the festivity of Purim, composed in the 1 8th and 1 9th cs., that relate the biblical story of Esther or evoke the joys of the holiday in strophes of varying lengths, with short or long verses in zejelesque rhyme ( aaab) , often incl. a refrain. Other complas celebrate the festivities of Hanukkah, Passover, Pentecost, the Sabbath, the Rejoicing of the To rah, and Arbor Day. There are also dirgelike com plas ( Quinot) that commemorate the destruction of the Temple (70 A.D.) and other tragic events in ancient Jewish history. Other complas of a moraliz ing, admonitory bent ( complas de castiguerio) preach the glories of God and warn against the illusory nature of worldly attractions. Complas del Jelek ("destiny") present the life and customs of late 19th- and early 20th-c. Sephardic Jewry from a satirical or humorous perspective. In complas de Tebaria are celebrated the praises of the city of Tiberias, of venerable sages who lived there, and of miracles concerning its Jewish population. M . Attias has published another group of poems, Complas de 'Aliya ("Songs of Return to Zion") , which give voice to the Jews' longing for redemp tion and return to Jerusalem in all its glory. Those complas by Abraham Toledo, devoted to the life of Joseph and first published in 1 732-part of a subgenre designated as complas hagiograJicas constitute for I. M . Hassan perhaps the single greatest poem inJudeo-Sp. In reworking the bib lical account ofJoseph's life (Genesis 37, 39-45) , Toledo used numerous elements from folklore, rabbinical commentaries, and traditional life, pre sented with lyrical verve, lexical versatility, and rhetorical strength. In comparison with such gen res as ballads and proverbs, which have strong Hispanic connections, the study of complas has, until recently, been gravely neglected. Cantigas are traditional lyric songs, frequently of Hispanic origin in form and content, but, in the Eastern trad., with significant Gr. and Turkish lexical, structural, and thematic influences. Al though love in all its vicissitudes is the predomi nant theme, there are also lyric songs devoted to various functions in the traditional life cycle: can tigas de boda (wedding songs ) , de parida (birth songs) , and endechas (dirges) . Many Sephardic lyric songs, esp. in the Eastern communities, are of relatively recent origin (late 19th and early 20th c.) and often consist of quatrains in couplets with assonance; some are modeled on Gr. originals and others even imported on phonograph records from Spain or Sp. America. But other lyric songs attest to a venerable Sephardic trad. going back to medieval Hispanic origins. The parallelistic rhymes of some Eastern poems and of many Mo roccan wedding songs-similar to that of the primitive Sp. and Port. lyric-confirm the medie val character of the Judeo-Sp. cantiga trad. Romansas (Sp. romances, q.v.) are traditional bal lads in assonating octosyllabic verse. In content
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JUGENDSTIL they are essentially similar-in some cases, geneti cally related-to narrative poetry current in other European communities. No other Sephardic genre is so closely linked to its medieval Hispanic origins, and none has received as much scholarly attention. Judeo-Sp. ballads can be documented from as early as 1 525 through verses used as tune indicators in Heb. hymnals. Several 1 8th-c. mss. are known, and numerous Eastern ballads were collected and printed in popular Heb.-Ietter chap books in the late 1 9th and early 20th c. There are Sephardic ballads derived from medieval Sp. and Fr. epics; others concern events in Sp. and Port. hist. or tell stories from the Bible, CI. antiquity, or medieval romances; still others concern a variety of topoi (prisoners and captives, the husband's return, faithful or tragic love, the unfortunate wife, the adulteress, amorous adventures, tricks and deceptions ) . Some ballads function as wed ding songs, others as dirges, still others as lulla bies. Though a majority ofSephardic ballads have med. or 1 6th-c. Sp. counterparts, others can be shown to derive from modern Gr. narrative poetry; some were undoubtedly created in the exile com munities by the Sephardim themselves. P. Benichou's studies of oral trad. as a creative artis tic process are essential to ballad crit. Endevinas (riddles) are often rhymed and, like proverbs, should count as a part of Sephardic traditional poetry. Of all genres, the riddle (q.v.) has been the most gravely neglected by scholar ship. Little fieldwork has been done to collect riddles, and the known Eastern repertoire is still radically limited. Nothing is presently known of the Moroccan Sephardic riddle trad. As far as origins are concerned, a preliminary assessment indicates that EasternJudeo-Sp. riddles are about evenly divided between texts of medieval Hispanic origin and adaptations from Turkish and Gr. How ever, in many cases it is impossible to point to a specific origin. Refranes (proverbs) have been abundantly col lected in Heb.-Ietter chapbooks since the late 1 9th c. by the Sephardim themselves and also by West ern scholars. Some Sephardic proverbs agree ex actly with their Sp. counterparts, while others have obviously been taken over from Gr., Turkish, or biblical Heb. sources. M. Attias, "Sheloshah shire Tsiyon," Shevet va 'Am 4 ( 1 959) , Cancionero ( 1 972 ) ; P. Benichou, Creacion poetica ( 1 968) ; M. Alvar, Endechas ( 1 969) , Cantos de boda ( 1 97 1 ) ; S. G. Armistead and ]. H. Silverman, Folk Lit. ( 1 97 1-86 ) , "EI antiguo ro mancero," NRFH 30 ( 1 981 ) , En tomo al romancero ( 1 982 ) , "Adivinanzas," Philologica M. Alvar ( 1983) ; E. Romero, "Complas de Tu-Bishbat," Poesia: Re union de Malaga, ed. M . Alvar ( 1 976) , "Las coplas sefardfes," Jomadas, ed. A. Viudas Camarasa ( 1 98 1 ) ; L. Carracedo and E. Romero, "Poesfa ad monitiva," Sefarad 37 ( 1 9 77) , "Refranes," Sefarad 4 1 ( 1 981 ) ; S. G. Armistead et aI., El romancero en el Archivo Menendez Pidal ( 1 9 78 ) ; I . Hassan and E.
Romero, "Quinot paraliturgicos," Estudios Se fardies 1 ( 1 978) ; P. Dfaz-Mas, "Romances de en dechar," Jomadas, ed. A. Viudas Camarasa ( 1 981 ) ; I . Hassan, "Vision panoramica," HispaniaJudaica, ed. ]. M. Sola-Sole ( 1 982) ; And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust, tr. I. J. Levy ( 1 989 ) .
S.G.A. ; ] .H.S.
JUDEZMO POETRY. SeeJUDEO-SPANISH POETRY. JUGENDSTIL. A term originally applied to the "new style" in the decorative arts and crafts that flourished around 1 900, and soon broadened to include other phenomena effected by the same spirit of refinement and rejuvenation. At first used synonymously with "Art Nouveau," J. more specifi cally refers to the Ger. and Austrian characteristics of a European stylistic reorientation ( Modem or
Yachting Style, stile modemista, Nieuwe Kunst, Mou vement Beige, etc. ) that sought to free the applied arts from imitative eclecticism and historicism. The Munich journal Die Jugend, established in 1 896 by Georg Hirth to popularize the cult of beauty and vitalism among the "youthful" middle class at the end of the economic recession ( 1 87396), gave the "new style" its name; periodicals like Pan ( 1 895) , Ver Sacrum (the publication of the Vienna Secession, 1 898) , and Die Insel ( 1 899) ad dressed a readership of connoisseurs. The satirical weekly Simplicissimus ( 1896-1944) subsequently became famous for its cartoons and for its almost carnevalesque irreverence toward political solem nities. The most widely influential propagator of J. in Germany was the Belgian designer and archi tect Henry van de Velde, the director of the Wei mar Kunstgewerbeschule (School ofArts and Crafts) from 1 902 to 1 9 1 2 . The aims and techniques by which the visual arts and lit. of the time constructed a delicately and vibrantly beautiful reality were the same, but it was only after the rediscovery offin-de-siiiCle cul ture in the early 1960s that it became popular to speak of]. lit. Similar characteristics were discov ered among virtually all writers who came into prominence at the turn of the century: a coexis tence of creative exuberance and morbid preoccu pation with sterility, decay, and death; a wavering between ecstatic profusion resulting from a naive trust in the spontaneity of lang. and debilitating skepticism about all media of communication; the linguistic release of desires for powerful action disguising an alienation from most social pur poses; the search for vital coherences between all people and things in dreamlike fantasies as op posed to the experience of rigid isolation; the longing for emotional elevation as an antidote to functional abstraction; visionary intuition, often erotically stimulated and producing orgiastic sen sations of the infinite and of a fusion with excited masses, as an answer to the narcissistic retreat into artificial paradises. During its most intense phase ( 1 895-1905) , ]. tried to rediscover the hidden
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unity ofall things before critical consciousness had fragmented and technological materialism had destroyed it. Though most easily identifiable by its use of highly stylized ornament, J . neither followed a coherent program nor dominated the art of its time, which speaks against using the noun as a period term. It shows affinities to other concur rent styles (impressionism, symbolism, revivals of mannerism) as well as a multitude of contradic tory impulses that defy definition. In its simplest form it is a playful combination of decorative
details; in its most ambitious purpose it is an attempt to overcome life's contradictions by aes thetic means.-J : der Weg ins zwanzigste Jahrhun dert, ed. H. Seling ( 1 959) ; D. Jost, Literarischer J. ( 1 969 ) ; J , ed . J. Hermand ( 1 97 1 ) ; E. Hajek, Lit. J : Vergleichende Studien zur Dichtung und Malerei um 1 900 ( 1 97 1 ) ; Theone des lit. J, ed. J. Mathes ( 1 984) . M.W. JUNGIAN OR ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM. See ARCHETYPE; MYTH CRITICISM; PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM.
K KABBALAH. See HEBRAISM. KANNADA POETRY. See INDIAN POETRY. KASA. See KOREAN POETRY. KASHMIR! POETRY. See INDIAN POETRY. KENNING (pI. kenningar) . A multi-noun substitu tion for a single noun, e.g. "din of spears" for battle. Although found in many poetries, the k. is best known from Old Germanic verse. Ks. are common in West Germanic poetry, and scholars have recognized a k. in the expression of "corpse sea," i.e. "blood," on the Eggjum runic inscription from Western Norway, ca. 700 A.D. ON Eddic poetry also makes use of ks., but their greatest importance was in skaldic poetry. In medieval Icelandic rhet., the verb kenna ( via) , "make known (by) ," was used to explain these expressions: "din" (the "base word" in mod ern analysis) is "made known" as battle by "of spears" (the "determinant"). The determinant may be in the genitive case, as here, or may attach to the base word to form a compound ("spear-din") ; the base word takes the morphological and syntactic form of the concept the k. replaces. Inskaldic poetry the determinant could in turn be replaced by an other determinant; if "flame of battle" means "sword," then "flame of the din of spears" makes an acceptable k. Snorri Sturluson, the 1 3th-c. poet and man of letters and the first to attempt a rheto ric of ks., called this example tvikennt ("twice2determined") in the commentary to H6ttatal in his Edda. If another determinant were added, to make a four-part k., he would call it rekit, "driven." Snorri cautioned against "driven" ks. with more than six parts. The relationship between the base word and determinant (s) could be essentially metonymic, as in "Baldr's father" for Odin, or metaphoric, as i n t h e examples above. T h e ks. o f West Germanic
poetry, frequently used in connection with vari ation, tend toward the first category, those of skaldic poetry toward the second. Many skaldic ks. rely on Norse mythology or heroic legend for the links between the parts; thus poetry is the "theft of Odin" because he stole it from the giants. In skaldic poetry the number of concepts for which ks. may substitute is limited to about one hundred, among which warrior, woman, weapons, and battle are well represented. Since the base words tend to be fairly stereotyped (ks. for "woman" often have the name ofa goddess as base word, for example ) , the system is relatively closed, but ks. make up nearly all the nouns in skaldic poetry, and the verbs are not important. Having imposed on them selves this closed system, the skalds exploited it brilliantly. In skaldic poetry the sum of the ks. is, to be sure, greater than their parts, but the best skalds made every word count. See also OLD NORSE POETRY. As the following ks. for "sea" from Beowu lfshow, ks. enabled poets to express various aspects of an underlying noun: ganotes bmo "gannet's bath": a shoreward salt-water area where the sea-fowl fishes, sports, and bathes; jloda begang" expanse of the floods or currents": emphasizes the vast extent of the oceans, esp. between the lands of the Geats and the Danes; lagustrmt "path of the sea": the sea on which men sail their ships from one port to another; windgeard "enclosure or home of the winds" : the sea, its storms, a watery expanse marked off from and enclosed by land, to be com pared with middan-geard "middle enclosure," the land surrounded by the sea. See also LEXIS.-R . Meissner, Die Kenningar der Skalden ( 1 921 ) ; H. van der Merwe Scholtz, The K. in Anglo-Saxon and ON Poetry ( 1 92 7 ) ; Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, ed. F. Jons son ( 1 931 ) ; C. Brady, "The Synonyms for 'Sea' in
Beowulf," Studies in Honor of A. M. Sturtevant ( 1 952) ; H. Lie, "Natur" og "unatur" i skaldekunsten ( 1 957) ; R. Frank, ON Court Poetry ( 1 978 ) ; E. Ma rold, Kenningkunst ( 1 983) ; M. Clunies Ross, Sk6ld-
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KOREAN POETRY skaparmal ( 1 986) .
J.L.
KHARJA. See HISPANO-ARABIC POETRY; SPANISH POETRY. KIND. See GENRE. KNITTELVERS (also Knittteivers, Knitppelvers, KlippelveTs) . Since the 18th c . the term "K." (or�gi
. nally a Ger. designation for Lat. verse III leonme hexameters) has been used to describe two types of 4-stressed rhymed couplets in Ger. and Scandi navian poetry. "Free K." (freier K.) consists of lines varying in number of syllables ( �sua�ly 6-1 5 per line ) ; "strict K." ( strenger K. ) , prImarIly a 1 6th c. phenomenon sometimes called "Hans-Sac hs . Vers," consists exclusively of 8-syllable masculIne and 9-syllable feminine lines in couplets. K. can be traced back to Otfrid, who, using Lat. verse as a model, introduced couplets into Ger. verse in the 9th c. Free K. predominates in the Shrovetide plays (Fastnaehtsspiele) of Hans Ros�npliit and . Hans Folz in the 1 5th c.; stnct K. prevaIls from the late 1 5th to the late 1 6th c. (e.g. Sebastian Brant, Hans Sachs, Johann Fischart) . Led by Martin Opitz, 1 7th-c. poets rejected both forms and used "K." as a derogatory term to refer to the unwieldly rhythms and crude subject matter-�sually hu morous or satirical, often earthy and pithy, some times even obscene-of these 1 6th-c. couplets. In the 1 8th c., free K. was revived by J. C. Gottsched and used later by Goethe (Hanswursts Hoehzeit, Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern, and parts of Urfaust, Faust, and the West-ostlicher Di wan) , Schiller ( Wallensteins Lager) , and other po ets (Herder, Biirger, Lenz) , e.g.: Hab nun, ach, die Philosophei, Medizin undJuristerei, Und leider auch die Theologie Durchaus studiert mit heiBer Miih. Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor, Und bin so klug, als wie zuvor. (Goethe, Urfaust)
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Kortum 's variant of K. was later imitated by Wil helm Busch, Julius Bierbaum, and, most success fully, by Frank Wedekind (Santa Simpl�citas; Politis ehe Lieder) , but it has not been used slllce. In the 20th c., Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Mell, Peter Weiss, and Peter Hacks have used K. in dramatic works, and poets such as Bertolt Brecht, Karl Kraus, Peter Huchel, Wolf Biermann, and Christoph Meckel have writ ten short poems in this verseform. K. was used by Kurt Tucholsky for a number of cabaret texts and a long political-satirical poem (Die verkehrte Welt In Knittteiversen dargestellt von Kaspar Hauser, 1 922) . Today K. continues to be used as a medium �or political and social satire and parod�, and to depICt middle- and lower-class people III burlesque, mock-heroic, and tragicomic situations. These couplets are often used in children's vers� and �re spoken at Carneval festivities (Fasching) I� Malllz and elsewhere in local dialects as well as III stan dard Ger. O. Flohr, Geseh. des K. vom 1 7.Jahrhundert bis zur Jugend Goethes ( 1 893 ) ; E. Feise, Der K. des jungen Goethe ( 1 909) ; A. Heusler, Deutsche Versgeseh. ( 1 925-29) , v. 3 ; W. Kayser, Gesch. des deutse�en Verses ( 1 960) ; H.:J. Schliitter, "Der Rhythmus 1m strengen K. des 16. Jahrhunderts," Euphorion 60 ( 1 966) ; H. Heinen, Die rhythmiseh-metrisehe Gestal tung des K. bei Hans Folz ( 1 966) ; D. Chisholm, Goethe's K. ( 1975 ) . D.H.C. KNOWLEDGE, POETRY AS. See CRITICISM; DE CONSTRUCTION; FICTION, POETRY AS; MEANING, POETIC; POETRY, THEORIES OF; REPRESENTATION AND MIMESIS; SCIENCE AND POETRY; SEMANTICS AND POETRY; SEMIOTICS, POETIC. KOREAN POETRY.
In general, the metrical form of 1 9th-c. K. (as in Eichendorff, Heine, Morike, Hebbel, Storm, Keller, and Fontane) and turn-of-the-century K. (Liliencron, Dehmel, Holz, Schnitzler) is quite similar to that written in the late 1 8th c. In the 1 780s, however, Goethe's contemporary Karl AI: nold Kortum developed a new form of K. (Dw Jobsiade, 1 784, 1799) consisting of quatrains i� which a masculine couplet is followed by a femi nine couplet. Many lines are extremely long ( 1 5 or more syllables ) , with the result that syllables bear ing word-stress often occur in metrically un stressed positions: So kann man nur hier das Ratsel l6sen
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beschreib 'ne Krankheit gewesen (Die Jobsiade)
I. II. III. IV . V.
S ILLA DYNASTY ( 5 7 B.C.-A.D. 9 3 5 ) KORYO DYNASTY (A.D. 9 1 8- 1 3 9 2 ) CHOSON DYNASTY ( 1 3 9 2- 1 9 1 0 ) JAPANESE OCCUPATION ( 1 9 1 0- 1 945 ) AFTER THE LIBERATION ( 1 945-)
Although the K. lang. belongs to a ling. �amily totally different from Ch., cl. Ch. was the pnmary written lang. of Korea until the invention .of the K. alphabet in the mid 1 5th c. After that pomt, most learned men wrote both in Ch. and K., but more often in Ch. Earlier, an ingenious system was de vised by the Silla people to transcribe the current spoken lang. using Ch. graphs; used from the 6th c. on, it was through this means that the extant Old K. poems, or hyangga, were preserved. This article, however, considers only K. poetry written in the vernacular. There are four major native poetic forms in traditional Korea: hyangga, ("native song," 6th-
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KOREAN POETRY 10th c . ) ; pyolgok or changga ("long song," 1 1 th1 4th c.) ; sijo ("current tune," 15th c. on) ; and kasa ("song words," 1 5th-19th c.) . Another poetic form that flourished briefly is the akchang ("eulogy," 1 5th c . ) , the most representative of which is the Songs of Flying Dragons ( 1 445-47) , a cycle com piled in praise of the founding of the Choson dynasty. I. SI LLA DYNASTY (57 B.C.-A.D. 935 ) . Hyangga were written in 4-, 8-, and 1 0-line forms; the 1 0-line form comprising two quatrains and a concluding couplet was the most popular. The poets were either Buddhist monks or hwarang, knights trained in civil and military virtue in preparation for national service. Seventeen of the 25 extant hyangga are Buddhist in inspiration and content. Most hyangga gain their resonance through verbal felicity and symbolism. The "Ode to Knight Kip 'a" (8th c.) by Master Ch'ungdam, for example, be gins with a symbolic equation between the moon that pursues the white clouds and the speaker seeking the depths of his friend's mind, and con cludes with a correspondence between the knight and the pine that "scorns frost, ignores snow." Like the pine tree, the knight represents the principle of growth and order, an emblem of continuity of society and culture. "Requiem" (8th c.) by Master Wolmyong uses the ancient trope comparing hu man generations with the scattering ofleaves. The eleven devotional poems by Great Master Kyunyo (923-73) recall Western religious poetry in their imagery and symbolism. (As passion's flame scorches and destroys the fabric of human nature, so the ignorant mind suffers the blight of afflic tion.) Only the Buddha's sweet rain of truth can cause the withered soul to yield the grass of spiri tual regeneration, bringing forth the golden fruit of knowledge. This harmonious state of the mind is expressed by the single metaphor of "a moonlit autumn field," the full moon of enlightenment. I I . KORYO DYNASTY ( A.D. 9 1 8- 1 392 ) . The inter play of Buddhist and native beliefs continued to inspire popular culture. Koryo lyrics, the pyolgok or changga, a blend of folk and art songs rooted in the indigenous culture, were composed and sung to music. Their refrains combine verbal and mu sical rhythms with nonsense syllables and ono matopoeic representation of the sound of the drum to create tension, suspense, and an incanta tory quality. The refrain establishes the tone that carries the melody and spirit ofthe poem or unites a poem comprised of discrete parts. The theme of most of these anonymous poems is love, the joys and torments of which are expressed in frank and powerful language-the sadness of parting, revul sion at betrayal, renewed desire, grief at abandon ment. The nameless poets were at war with time, love's chief enemy. In "Ode on the Seasons," a woman likens the stages of her love to the four seasons; in "Spring Overflows the Pavilion," a woman laments a blighted spring in her heart; and in "Winter Night" she compares the agony of de-
sertion to a stormy night that scatters sleet and snow. But the poets say they can make the river stand still, they are content to be dissolved by fire, and they are able to transform the icy bamboo hut into a love grotto. III. CHOSON DYNASTY ( 1 392-1 9 1 0 ) . The sijo, the most popular, elastic, and mnemonic of K. poetic forms, is a 3-line poem (in tr. usually a 6-line stanza is used) . The sijo meter is formed by an ordered sequence of metric segments comprising syllables within a set range (2-7, commonly 3-4) . Each line consists of four syllable groups, with a minor pause occurring at the end of the second group and a major at the end of the fourth. An emphatic syntactic division, usually introduced in the third line in the form of a countertheme, paradox, resolution, judgment, command, or ex clamation, indicates a shift to subjectivity. The interplay of sound, rhythm, and meaning is the soul of the sijo, the basis of its organic structure. Writers of the sijo in the first half of the Choson dynasty were mainly the lettered class and kisaeng, women entertainers, while in the second half, be ginning from the 1 8th c., they were commoners. Sijo are still written, an oral art for the lettered and unlettered alike. Any subject is permissible, but favored ones include praise of virtue, complaints of desertion, fear of death, the beauty of friend ship, and the simplicity of rural life. A long form, called sas'61 sijo, evolved in the latter part of the dynasty. Written mainly by commoners, it is marked especially by onomatopoeia (q.v. ) , a ten dency to catalogue, striking imagery, and a bold twist at the end. It is frank and humorous, often satirical and running to burlesque, and explores the resources of the vernacular. Is it a cuckoo that cries? Is it the willow that is blue? Row away, row away! Several roofs in a far fishing village Swim in the mist, magnificent. Chigukch'ong chigukch'ong osawa! Boy, fetch an old net! Fishes are climbing against the stream. This is the fourth poem in the spring cycle from The Angler's Calendar ( 1 65 1 ) by Yun Sondo ( 1 5871 67 1 ) . Yun adds two envois to the form charac teristic of the fisherman's songs: a set of verbs connected with boating, and three 3-syllable ono matopoeic expressions simulating the movements and sounds of rowing. The poem opens with two lines that question the reliability of the senses of hearing and sight. Next, we see something in the distance, barely visible in the mist, but confirming the reality of the uncertain vision. The last two lines are brief and forceful, bespeaking a practical and more immediate connection with nature. In an ordered progression, then, the poem presents nature's mystery, beauty, and bounty in terms of illusory loveliness, real visual beauty, and life-sus taining reality, food from the stream. The poem
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KVIDU HATfR not only suggests the felt transcendence of the vision, but reveals a consciousness of the tran sience of earthly joy and beauty. Yun Sondo achieves clarity and richness of vision with the simplest vocabulary and utmost economy. The kasa that emerged as a new form toward the middle of the 15th c. can be compared to the Ch. rhymeprose (q.v. ) , the fu. It is characterized by a lack of stanzaic division, varying lengths, a tendency toward description and exposition, at times lyricism, and by verbal, syntactical parallel ism. Its norm is a group of two 4-syllable words, or alternating groups of 3 and 4 syllables, forming a line often employing syntactic and semantic paral lelism.
in.seang. un yu. han.han. dae si.ram.do ku.ji.op.ta Life has an end: Sorrow is endless. Earlier examples dealt with topics such as the loyalty to the king, celebration of the virtues of retired life (Chong Ch'ol, 1536-93; Pak Inno, 1 561-1643 ) , and the sorrows of unrequited love (Ho Nansorhon, 1 563-89) . The subject matter of the 1 8th-c. anonym ous kasa by women was the daily life of the middle and lower classes. The themes of later examples of definite authorship include records of officials to Tokyo and Peking, praise of institutions, the farmer's works and days, and the sorrow of banishment. From the 1 9th c., the kasa became didactic, patriotic, or nostalgic. The "Song of Seoul" ( 1 844) , which details the institutions and glories of the Choson dynasty, was popular among women. IV. JAPANESE OCCUPATION ( 19 1 0-45 ) . The "new poetry" movement dates back to the publication of "From the Sea to Children" ( 1 908) by Ch'oe Namson ( 1 890-195 7 ) . Written in free verse, the poem's inventions include the use o£ 1 06 punctua tion marks, hitherto not used in cl. poetry, stanzaic forms of unequal length, topics of the sea and children also previously little used, and onomato poeia in the first and seventh lines of each stanza. The first collection of translations from Western poetry was Dance ofAnguish ( 1 92 1 ) by Kim O k, the principal transmitter of Fr. symbolist poetry. Two major poets in the 1 920s were Han Yongun ( 1 8791944) and Kim Sowol ( 1 902-34 ) . With The Silence of Love ( 1 926) , comprising 88 Buddhist poems, Han became interpreter of the plight of the colo nized peoples by creating a poetics of absence. Kim Sowol, the nature and folk poet, effectively used simplicity, directness, and terse ph rasing. Unfulfilled love, or unquenchable longing, per meates his work. Perhaps the most influential modern poet before 1945 was Chong Chiyong (b.
1903 ) , a student of William Blake and Walt Whit man. Chong rendered details with imagistic preci sion, as in his White Deer Lake ( 194 1 ) , symbolically representing the progress of the spirit to lucidity, the fusion of man and nature. Yi Yuksa ( 1 904-44) and Yun Tongju ( 1 9 1 7-45 ) . major resistance po ets, perished in Japanese prisons. V. AFTER THE LIBERATION ( 1 945-) . Major poets writing after the liberation of 1945 include So Chongju (b. 1 9 1 5 ) and Pak Tujin (b. 1 9 1 6) . So is credited with exploring hidden resources of the lang. from sensual ecstasy to spiritual quest, from haunting lyricism to colloquial earthiness. Capa ble of a wide range of moods, Pak uses sonorific intricacies and incantatory rhythms, revealing a strong historical and cultural consciousness. Some poets younger than So and Pak were determined to bear witness to the events of their age; some sought to further assimilate traditional K. values; others drew variously on Western traditions to enrich their work. Hwang Tonggyu (b. 1937) has drawn his material not only from personal experi ence but from the common predicament of his people. In his fifth collection, Snow Falls in the South ( 1 974) , Hwang studies modern K. history to determine the root of the K. tragedy, esp. its divi sion and attendant instability, in images of barbed wire besieging his consciousness and snowflakes falling from the sky. In their search for order, for what Frost called "a momentary stay against con fusion," modern poets affirm their situations by bold articulation of their human condition. Like their predecessors, they do not j ettison cognitive claims or social functions for poetry but give that sense of purpose and coherence that only poetry can provide. Thus they have delved into the tradi tion to redeem the past and to affirm the new world they have created. ANTHOLOGIES: Kranich am Meer: Koreanische Gedichte ( 1 959) , Poems Jrom Korea: A Hist. Anthol. ( 1 974) , The Silence oj Love: 20th C. K. P. ( 1 980 ) , Anthol. oj K. Lit.: From Early Times to the i 9th C. ( 1 981 ) , Pine River and Lone Peak ( 1 991 ) , all ed. P. H . Lee; Contemp. K. P., ed. Ko Won ( 1970 ) ; R. Rutt, The Bamboo Grove: An intro. to Sijo ( 1 971 ) . HISTORY AND CRITICISM: P. H . Lee, Songs of Flying Dragons: A Crit. Reading ( 1 975 ) , Celebration
oj Continuity: Themes in Classic East Asian Poetry ( 1 979 ) ; D . R. McCann, "The Structure of the K. Sijo," HJAS 36 ( 1 976 ) ; Chong Pyonguk, Hanguk kojon sigaron [Studies in Classic K. P. ] ( 1977) ; M . Sym , The Making oJMod. K. P. ( 1 982 ) ; Cho Tongil, Hanguk munhak t 'ongsa [Gen. Hist. ofK. Lit. ] , 5 v. ( 1 982-88) . P.H.L. KYlDUHATTR. See FORNYRTHISLAG.
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L LADINO POETRY. See JUDEO-SPANISH POETRY. LAI (OF; Eng. lay; Ger. leich) . A short narrative or lyric poem, perhaps based on Celtic material but primarily Fr., most often secular and usually set to music. ( 1 ) In OF the oldest narrative lais, almost always written in octosyllables (q.v. ) , are the contes or short romantic tales originated by Marie de France in the late 1 2th c. Most of them have Breton themes, chiefly love but also the supernatu ral. Marie's dozen lais take as their central interest true love, even if adulterous, in the face of mar riages of convenience and abusive husbands. Later the term l. become synonymous with conte. (2) The oldest lyric laisare by Gautier de Dargies, who flourished in the first third of the 1 3th c. The lyric l. is addressed to an earthly lady or to the Virgin, but it differs from other poems of this theme by varying the rhymes and syllable counts in its stan zas, without refrain. One of the most interesting, by Ernoul le Vieux, has no love theme; it is the L. de l'ancien et du nouveau testament. The OF I. may be related to the Occitan descort (q.v.; "discord") . In the 1 4th c., Machaut standardized the form; half this century's 57 extant lais are by him. ( 3 ) The term "Breton lay" was applied i n 1 4th-c. Eng land to poems set in Brittany, written in a spirit similar to that of Marie's, or, often, applied the term to themselves. About a dozen Breton lays are extant in Eng., among them Sir Orfeo, Sir Launfal, Emare, and Chaucer's Franklin s Tale. Since the 1 6th c. "lay" has been used for song; in the early 1 9th c. the term was sometimes used for a short historical ballad, e.g. Scott's Lay of the Last Min strel. See LEICH.-F. Wolf, Vber die Lais, Sequenzen, und Leiche ( 1 841 ) -still sound; Lais et descortsfr. du XIlle siecle, ed. A. Jeanroy et al. ( 1 901 ) ; H. Spanke, "Sequenz und L.," Studi medievali 1 1 ( 1 938 ) ; G. Reaney, "Concerning the Origins of the Med. L.," M&L 39 ( 1958) ;]. Maillard, Evolution et esthetique du I. lyrique ( 1961 ) ; H. Baader, Die Lais ( 1 966) ; M . ] . Donovan, The Breton L . : A Guide to Varieties ( 1 969) ; K. W. Le Mee, A Metrical Study ofFive Lais of Marie de France ( 1 978) ; R. Hanning and ] . Fer rante, The Lais of Marie de France, 2d ed. ( 1 982) ; G. S. Burgess, The Lais of Marie de France ( 1 987) . V.T.H.; T.V.F.B. LAISSE. The OF epics or chansons degeste (q.v.) are divided into sections or group of lines of no speci fied length called Is.; in the Chanson de Roland they range from 5 to 35 lines. Technically Is. are not strophic because there is no responsion (q.v.) of form from one I. to the next; the length of each
depends upon how much emphasis the poet wishes to give its subject. Each I. links together its lines with terminal assonance or-in later po ems-rhyme (qq.v. ) ; the distinction between mas culine and feminine (q .v.) is observed. Sometimes the content of a I. is repeated item for item in one or two following Is., though with differing asso nance or rhyme; such repetitions are called is. similaires. The modern analogue is the verse para graph (q.v. ) , though this is unrhymed.-] . Rychner, La Chanson de geste ( 1 955 ) , ch. 4 ; A . Monteverdi, " L a L. epique," in La Technique lit tifraire des chansons de geste ( 1 959 ) ; B. Schurfranz, "Strophic Structure versus Alternate Divisions in the Prise d 'Orange," RPh 33 ( 1 979) ; R. M.Johnston, "The Function of L. Divisions in the Poema de mio Cid," Jour. ofHispanic Philol. 8 ( 1 984) ; E. A. Heine mann, "Measuring Vnits of Poetic Discourse," Ro mance Epic, ed. H.-E. Keller ( 1 987) . V.T.H.; T.V.F.B. LAKE SCHOOL, L. Poets, Lakers. A derogatory term applied to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. In the first number of the Edinburgh Rev. (Oct. 1 802, 63-83) , the hostile critic Francis Jef frey referred to these three as a "sect" of poets which in 1 807 he coupled with "the Lakes of Cumberland." A December 1 809 review calls them "The Bards of the Lake"; other terms ap plied included "Naturals" and "Simple Poets." The expressions "Lake Poets" and "Lakers" first appear in 1 8 1 4; the term "L. S." does not actually appear until 1 8 1 7. The terms themselves and other close variants were obviously in conversa tional use ca. 1 8 1 3 and are common in print there after. Hence, despite the common assumption, Jeffrey himself did not coin the phrase "L. S.," and in fact other references to the idea of a "new school" appear as early as 1 797 (in a review by Canning in the AntiJacobin parodying Southey) . At first the jibes are aimed against the new poets' political principles, but after the pub. of the 2d ed. of Lyrical Ballads in 1 802, with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's names now on the title page, the focus shifts to the radical innovations in poetics simplicity (q.v.) in diction, novelty in meter, and, in content, the effort to naturalize the supernatu ral and make transcendent the natural. The asso ciation via geography in the terms was a metonym meant to imply vulgar rusticity. It is certainly true that nature figures large in Wordsworth's poetry, though descriptive verse (q.v. ) strictly defined was hardly his sole aim, and his claims in the "Preface" concerning diction were quickly punctured. And
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LANGUAGE POETRY the differences in philosophies, temperaments, and production among the three poets far out weigh their similarities. Cf. COCKNEY SCHOOL.-P. A. Cook, "Chronology of the 'L. S.' Argument: Some Revisions." RES 28 ( 1 977 ) . T.v.F.B. LAMENT (Ger. Klagelied, Totenklage, Trost) . In its largest sense, I. is an expression of grief at misfor tune, esp. at the loss of someone or something, and occurs throughout poetry in most genres. There are Is. in Sumerian poetry (e.g. over the fall of Sumer and Ur) and in Gilgamesh, Homer (e.g. Iliad 22.477-5 14) , and the Heb. Bible (e.g. Lam . ; Isa. 47; Ps. 44; Job 3 ) . Ls. are a common feature of Gr. tragedy in the form of a monody (q.v.) or kommos (Alexiou ) . In Gr. choral lyric poetry (see MELIC POETRY) , Simonides developed the threnos or dirge (q.v. ) , followed by Pindar, of whose book of dirges only fragments remain (Smyth) . Theocri tus introduced I. into pastoral (q.v.) poetry (Idyll 1 ) , foil . by Bion ("L. for Adonis" ) and Virgil (Ec logue 5 ) . Pseudo-Moschus' "L. for Bion" is the precursor of numerous Is. or elegies (see ELEGY) for poets, incl. Virgil's I. for Gallus (Eclogue 10) , Ovid's for Tibullus (Amores 3.9 ) , Garnier's for Ronsard, Spenser's for Sidney, Carew's and Wal ton's for Donne, Milton's Lycidas for Edward King, Shelley's "Adonais" for Keats, Arnold's "Thyrsis" for Clough, and Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." Standard topics in Is. incl. a summons to and list of mourners, praise of the deceased, depiction of the death, contrast between the past and the pre sent, the ubi sunt topos, and complaints about the cruelty of fortune, the purposelessness of life ("What boots it?" ) , and the finality of death (Menander Rhetor; Hardison; Alexiou; Race) . In pastoral Is., nature is often depicted as mourning. Poetic Is. or elegies over deceased individuals, most often including various topics of consolation or "comforting" (Wilson) , are legion in virtually all langs. A sampling includes: Hebrew: David's I . for Saul and Jonathan a t 2 Sam. 1 . 1 9-27; Greek: Iliad 24.748-59, Hecabe's I . for Hector; Latin: Catullus 1 0 1 for his brother; Propertius 3 . 1 8 for Marcellus; and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetna nova 368-430, for Richard the Lionhearted; French: Ronsard's E-pitaphes; English: Deor's L. (OE) ; Jon son's "On My First Son"; Donne's Epicedes and Obsequies; Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom 'd"; and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"; Italian: Foscolo's "In morte del Fratello Giovanni" and Carducci's "Piano Antico"; German: Schiller's "Nanie"; Spanish: Manrique's "Coplas por la muerte de su padre" and Garcia Lorca's "Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias." See now COMPLAINT; DIRGE; ENDECHA; ELEGY; EPICEDIUM; EPITAPH; MONODY; PLANH. H. W. Smyth, Gr. Melit Poets ( 1900) ; Wilson 's Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H . Mair ( 1 909) ; R. Kassel,
Untersuchungen zur griechischen und romischen Kon-
solationslit. ( 1 958) ; R. Lattimore, Themes in Gr. and Lat. Epitaphs ( 1 962 ) ; O. B. Hardison, TheEndunng Momument ( 1 962 ) ; N. K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations ( 1 962 ) ; v. B. Richmond, Ls. for the Dead in Medieval Narrative ( 1 966) ; G. Davis, "Ad sidera notus: Strategies of L. and Consolation in Fortunatus' Degelesuintha," Agon l ( 1967) ; H.-T. Johann, Trauer und Trost ( 1 968) ; J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts ( 1 969 ) ; P. von Moos, Consolatio: Studien zur mittellateinischen Trostlitera tur, 2 v. ( 1 9 7 1 -72 ) ; M . H. Means, The Consolatio Genre in ME Lit. ( 1972 ) ; M. Alexiou, The Ritual L. in Gr. Trad. ( 1 974) ; Menander Rhetor, ed. and tr. D. A. Russell and N . G. Wilson ( 1 981 ) ; Terras; W. H. Race, Cl. Genres and Eng. Poetry ( 1 988) . WH.R. LAMPOON. See INVECTIVE. LANDSCAPE POEM. See DESCRIPTIVE POETRY; VISUAL ARTS AND POETRY. LANGUAGE POETRY emerged in the mid 1970s as both a reaction to and an outgrowth of the "New Am. Poetry" as embodied by Black Mountain, New York School, and Beat (q.v.) aesthetics. Within the pages of little magazines like Tottel's, This, Hills, and the Tuumba chapbook series, poets such as Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, Bob Perelman, and Robert Grenier developed modes of writing that implicitly criticized the bardic, personalist im pulses of the 1960s and explicitly focused atten tion on the material of lang. itself. This practice was supplemented by essays in poetics, pub. in journals like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Open Space, Pa per Air, and Poetics Jour., or presented in "talk" series conducted at lofts and art spaces. The gen eral thmst of this critical discourse has been to interrogate the expressive basis of much postwar Am. poetry, esp. the earlier generation's use of depth psychology, its interest in primitivism (q.v.) and mysticism, and its emphasis on the poetic line (q.v.) as a score for the voice (q.v. ) . While I. p. has derived much from the process-oriented poetry of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and John Ashbery, it has been skeptical about the claims of presence and participation (see PROJECTIVE VERSE) that underlie such practice. The response of I. p. to expressivism has taken several forms, most notably a deliberate flattening of tonal register and extensive use of non-sequitur. Experimentation in new forms of prose, collabora tion, proceduralism, and collage have diminished the role of the lyric subject in favor of a relatively neutral voice (or multiple voices ) . L. poets have endorsed Victor Shklovsky's notion of ostranenie or "making strange," by which the instrumental func tion of lang. is diminished and the objective char acter of words foregrounded. The poetry of Rus. Futurism and Am. objectivism (qq.v. ) has been influential. Far from representing a return to an impersonal formalism, I. p. regards its defamiliariz-
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lANGUE ing strategies as a critique of the social basis of meaning, i.e. the degree to which signs are contex tualized by use. In order to defamiliarize poetic lang., I. p. has had recourse to a variety of formal techniques, two in particular. The first involves the condensation and displacement of linguistic elements, whether at the submorphemic level (as in the poetry of David Melnick, P. Inman, or Steve McCaffery) or at the level of phrases and clauses (Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Barrett Wat ten) . Bernstein, for example, condenses what ap pear to be larger syntactic units into brief, frag mentary phrases: Casts across otherwise unavailable fields. Makes plain. Ruffied. Is trying to alleviate his false: invalidate. Yet all is "to live out," by shut belief, the various, simply succeeds which. Although the title of this poem, "Sentences My Father Used," implies some autobiographical con tent, there is little evidence of person. The use of sentence fragments, false apposition, and enjamb ment displaces any unified narrative, creating a constantly changing semantic environment. A second prominent feature of I. p. has been extensive work in prose. In the most influential essay, "The New Sentence," Ron Silliman calls for the organization of texts on the level of sentences and paragraphs. The "new" sentence refers less to deformations of normal sentences as to alternate ways of combining them within larger structures. Lyn Hejinian's My Life, for example, consists of 37 paragraphs of 37 sentences, each one of which leads to the next by the substitution or replace ment of materials from the previous one or by mutiple forms of association. The issues raised by such writing are not simply aesthetic but involve the social implications of literary reception. By blurring the boundaries be tween poetry and prose, everyday and literary lang., theory and practice, I. p. has attempted to establish a new relationship with the reader, one based less on the recuperation of a generically or stylistically encoded work and more on the reader's participation in a relatively open text. By thwarting traditional reading and interpretive habits, the poet encourages the reader to regard lang. not simply as a vehicle for preexistant mean ings but as a system with its own rules and opera tions. However, since that system exists in service to ideological interests of the dominant culture, any deformation forces attention onto the mate rial basis of meaning production within that cul ture. If such a goal seems utopian, it has a prece dent in earlier avant-garde movements from symbolism (q.v.) to futurism and surrealism (qq.v. ) . Rather than seeking a lang. beyond rationality by purifying the words of the tribe or by discovering new langs. of irrationality, I. p. has made its hori zon the material form rationality takes. See also
SOUND POETRY; AMERICAN POETRY. ANTHOLOGIES: The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. B. Andrews and C. Bernstein ( 1 984) ; Writing / Talks, ed. B. Perelman ( 1985 ) ; In the Am. Tree, ed. R. Silliman ( 1986 ) ; "Lang. "Poetries: An AnthoL, ed. D. Messerli ( 1 987) . CRrrICISM: B. Watten, Total Syntax ( 1985 ) ; M. Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect ( 1985 ) , ch. 10; S. McCaffery, North ofIntention: Crit. Writings 1 9 731 986 ( 1 986) ; C. Bernstein, Content's Dream: Essays 1 975-1 984 ( 1 986) ; L. Bartlett, "What is 'L. P.'?" CritI 12 ( 1 986) ; R. Silliman, The New Sentence ( 1 987) ;].]. McGann, "Contemp. Poetry, Alternate Routes," CritI l3 ( 1 987); A. Ross, "The New Sen tence and the Commodity Form: Recent Am . Writ ing," Marxism and the Interp. of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg ( 1988 ) ; G. Hartley, Tex tual Politics and the L. Poets ( 1 989) . M.D. LANGUE. See DECONSTRUCTION; SEMIOTICS, PO ETIC; SOUND; TEXTUALITY. LAPIDARY VERSE. See SCULPTURE AND POETRY.
EPITAPH;
EPIGRAM;
LATIN AMERICAN POETRY. See AMERICAN IN DIAN POETRY, Central American, South American; BRAZILIAN POETRY; SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY. LATIN POETICS. See CLASSICAL POETICS; CLAS SICISM; MEDIEVAL POETICS. LATIN POETRY. I. CLASSICAL A. Origins B. Preclassical C. Late Republican
D. Augustan E. Post-Augustan II. MEDIEVAL III. RENAISSANCE AND POST-RENAISSANCE I. CLASSICAL. Lat. p. is commonly censured as derivative. The Lat. poets wrote in meters origi nated by the Greeks, employed a more or less assimilated Gr. mythology as a poetic vehicle, and confined their efforts, for the most part, to genres already well established when Rome was little more than a barbarous village. Yet despite this real dependence, there remains nothing less Gr. than the masterpieces ofLat. p., whose imitation ofthe Gr. was never slavish, and whose trad. was a double one. On one side stood the centuries of developed Gr. lit., a lit. of infinite variety and vast achieve ment, supplying Lat. poets with models and sanc tions, and the more valuable for being foreign without being alien. On the other stood the devel oping corpus of Lat. lit., steadily informing the cultural context within which a given Roman poet lived and wrote. Between these two trads. the tension was lively and fruitful for Republican po etry esp.; if earlier Lat. poetry can be generally
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LATIN POETRY divided between a "Romanizing" school on the one hand and a "Hellenizing" school on the other, for later poets the problem was one of preserving the double loyalty they felt without doing damage to either trad. This double loyalty was not main tained by the simple mechanical act of domesti cating Gr. meters and forms or adapting them to a specifically Roman sensibility, but by the far more delicate operation of blending the strengths and virtues ofboth sensibilities in a common form. This marriage of two trads. was the achievement of Virgil more than any other Lat. writer; and for Virgil's followers his example loomed so large that their problem was less whether they should be Greeks or Romans than whether they should be Virgilians or something else. Further governing the finished Lat. poem were two states of mind almost completely alien to Cl. Gr. poetry. The first was the Lat. poet's conscious ness of his trad. and his place in it. Like the Roman historian, the Lat. poet was intensely aware of and intensely loyal to his trad.; at times his humility before his tradition's authority approaches servil ity. It is this intense loyalty that most nearly ex plains the small range and variety of Lat. p. when measured against Gr. or Eng. poetry. Trad. for the Lat. poet early acquired an enormous authority, extending to subject, conventions, form, and even rhetorical modes; it was something to be ex ploited, but the exploitation was an exercise in humility and craft, a constant refinement of a more or less dominant mode. Rarely does the Lat. poet rebel against his trad., though he may reject one of its modes for another. In poetry as in char acter the virtue ofpietas (dutiful loyalty) is central, and continuity is therefore one of the dominant features of Lat. p.: in all essential respects the poetics of Virgil and the poetics of Claudian four cs. later are the same. For the same reason that Lat. p. exhibits a restricted range, it also exhibits much less flagrant sensationalism and striving af ter originality; yet it would be a mistake to suppose that Lat. poets were indifferent innovators or that their style is somehow impersonal. Nowhere is sensationalism of rhet. and situation more preva lent than in Lat. p., esp. in post-Virgilian verse; but it needs to be observed that formal rhetorical innovation is almost always marginal, an elabo rate, sometimes frigid, refinement of the domi nant rhet. of the lang. Almost never is there revo lution at the core or rej ection of the cardinal principles of traditional poetics. Combined with consciousness of the trad. , the second dominant characteristic of Lat. p. was the passion for utility in lit., for its application to some patriotic or instructive end-a passion never really absent, even in the hyperesthetic pieces where the poet emphasizes its existence by his determined avoid ance of it. But it is not difficult to see how the poetry that emerged from the juggling of these elements was completely different from any Gr. poetry ever written.
A. Origins. Traces of wholly indigenous Lat. lit. are almost nonexistent. There were rude farces in the Saturnian (q.v.) stress meter before the irrup tion of Gr. culture into Latium, but we possess no fragments. This meter, however, was employed in the first Lat. poem of which we have even the barest knowledge-a tr. of the Odyssey written about the mid 3d c. B.C. by Livius Andronicus, a Gr. ex-slave. He handled the jigging, heavily ac cented movement of his verse with little distinc tion, but he had the incalculable advantage of being first; his work was used as a school text for more than two centuries. His younger contempo rary Gnaeus Naevius represents a further stage in the transition. His versified chronicle of the First Punic War was done in the same meter, but he seems to have owed much to Homer, while he also wrote tragedies and comedies on Attic models wherein he employed quantitative Gr. meters based on quantity rather than stress. But the tow ering figure of the early years is Quintus Ennius (239-1 69 B .C . ) , in the wreck ofwhose work we may discern the roots of most subsequent Lat. p. He wrote tragedies, comedies, didactic poems and epigrams, all largely derived from the Greeks, but his most important work was the Annals, an epic chronicle recording the history of Rome from the arrival of Aeneas down to Ennius' own times. The fragments of this work-which established the dactylic hexameter as the medium of Lat. epic-still serve to illustrate the peculiar nature of Lat. p. Based openly on the Homeric poems, and in some sense a continuation of them, the work also seems to have been influenced by Hel lenistic poetic histories, and it fused these two sources, separated by cs. in time and outlook, into something distinctly Roman by its dedicated patri otic and didactic bias. Ennius' somewhat older contemporary, Titus Maccius Plautus (250- 1 84 B.C.) set a number of plays of the Gr. New Comedy into Lat., but his debt to the rough native dramatic tradition is probably quite great, as the rather tired comedy of manners of the late Hellenic and Hellenistic ages suffers a sea-change, becoming excellent bawdy farce. The 21 Plautine comedies which survive are rude, colloquial, and frankly aimed at the pit, but they are funny and vital as well. B. Preclassical. The 2d c. B.C. saw Rome's first literary-philosophical coterie, a gathering of phil hellenes around the younger Scipio Mricanus for the purpose of serious study and adaptation of Gr. culture. Two great poets of the c. were friends and clients of Scipio. The first was Terence (Publius Terentius Afer, at work 1 66-59) , whose six verse comedies show a definite reaction from the "ex cesses" of his predecessors, such as Plautus, back to the pure Menandrean ideal of the Gr. New Comedy. The purity and beauty of Terence's Lat. is a definite landmark; but more important are the implications of his subtlety. In stressing form, ex pression, and relationships at the expense of
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LATIN POETRY strength, character, and humor itself, he clearly turned away from the general public to address the educated c\asses-a situation that had not occurred in Greece until the beginning of the Hellenistic Age. I t was a necessary step toward grafting a sophisticated Gr. trad. onto a crude but vital Roman one. Henceforth, with few excep tions, Lat. p. was composed by learned poets for a more or less learned audience. The other great name was Gaius Lucilius ( 1 80?-102 B.C. ) , consid ered the father of satire (q.v. ) , the only genre to which the Romans laid fair claim-though the satirical attitude has a long history in Greece, and Lucilius was well acquainted with its examples in mock-epic, comedy, and diatribe. His work, 30 books of miscellanies, or saturae, ranged over the experiences of educated Romans in a world that was becoming increasingly Romanized and politi cized, and his strong personal statements and ver satile colloquial style established the mode of Ro man satire. We possess numerous fragments of his works-he fixed on the hexameter for verse form-but none, unfortunately, of any length. C. Late Republican. The 1st c. B.C. witnessed the rise of rhet. and the fall of the Roman Republic, both of them events of prime importance for po etry. The first important poem of which we possess any considerable remnants was the tr. by the orator Cicero ( 1 06-43) of the Phaenomena of Aratus of Soli, an Alexandrian didactic work on astronomy and meteorology that combined "science," devout Stoicism, and literary art. Cicero was no great poet, but his contributions to poetic lang. and metrical polish should not be minimized. A far greater poet, who used Cicero's developments but argued passionately for Epicureanism, was Lu cretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, at work 65- 55) . In six hexameter books he composed his remarkable poem De rerum natura ("On Nature " ) , a memora ble exposition of his love of nature and its essential creativity and his passionate belief in Epicurean natural philosophy as it bears upon primary hu man anxieties, superstition, and the fear of death. But the De rerum natura is not completely iso lated. Lucretius' protest against the disturbances of politics and imminent civil war and his accep tance of the poetic challenges ofdidactic hexame ter ally him with the interests of the revolutionary "New Poets . 1 70 (see NEOTERICS ) . These rejected Roman politics and social issues and adopted the standards and forms of Alexandrian erit. and per formance, preferring the brief, highly-wrought genres-epyllion, lyric, epigram, elegiac (qq.v. ) t o full-scale epic a nd didactic with their tradi tional themes. Our sole survivor from this learned group is Gaius Valerius Catullus (84?-54?) , whose range was remarkably wide. He wrote epyllia in the Hellenistic fashion which brilliantly manifest variety and beauty of texture, care for responsion (q.v.) and juxtaposition, and dismay at contempo rary pressures, as witnessed in The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, a marvelous exhibition of unity
in layered diversity. In his intenser, shorter pieces, however, he turned from Gr. practice-though not from Gr. theory-employing (like Lucilius) the full range of colloquial Lat. in experimental Gr. lyric meters to greet friends, damn enemies, and celebrate or abuse his mistress Lesbia (a name invented to evoke Sappho) . These, and esp. the last group, are not the simple effusions that ro mantic erit. has dotingly supposed: Catullus in love is a learned poet still, and to say that he conveys the immediacy of passion more directly than any other Lat. poet is not to deny the learned intricacy of even his shortest poems. D. Augustan. The Hellenizing New Poets never succeeded in making-if they ever intended-a full break with the didactic-patriotic trad., and their achievements significantly affected the su perb and subtle poetry of the next age. This is best shown in the work of Rome 's greatest poet, Virgil ( Publius Vergilius Maro, 70-19 B.C. ) . His first major work was the Eclogues or Bucolics (qq.v. ) , a collection of ten pastoral (q.v.) poems which ob serve the New Poets' architectonic structure, in tense attention to the word, and approved Helle nistic sources-in this case, Alexarrlrian Theocritus. But the difference is significant: Virgil's shep herds are not Gr., but It., and his pastorals treat overtly and covertly the way war, love, and literary politics threaten the serenity of the bucolic world. The same tendency is heightened in the Georgics, a poem starting from the didactic farming-poem of the Gr. Hesiod, the Works and Days, but trans forming its agricultural poetics into a representa tion of human beings (particularly Romans) at the painful task ofwringing a living from Nature, now gratified, now defeated, but ultimately heroic in their dedication. This troubled dedication becomes the central focus of Virgil's magnum opus, the Aeneid. Ostensi bly returning to Homeric epic, Virgil builds upon, not imitates, Homer, and his whole poem func tions, in form and subject alike, to marry the hitherto divided trads. of Gr. and Roman sensibil ity. The achievement of the Aeneid's is the willful creation of a culture, fusing apparently disparate and warring trads. into the full mythos of Lat. culture, and this synthesis is perfectly mirrored and supported in the almost miraculous union of form and subject. Poetry and history meet in the Aeneid and in the New Rome which is its subject, and the formulation is so perfect that it almost came to be final as well. Virgil, that is, almost usurps the entire trad., for his example ( and the prestige of his success) was so great that it practi cally compelled subsequent poetry into its path and rendered it impossible by its exhaustion of the ground. The poem is strongly but realistically pa triotic. It shows the New Rome of Augustus Caesar to be the product of ineluctable fate, but (in line with the New Poets) it deplores the losses to cities and people, both guilty and innocent, that impe rial success entails. Aeneas, who embodies the
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LATIN POETRY painful dedication of the hero, finally emerges as a tragic and flawed character, and Virgil ends the epic by picturing him as a ruthless killer rather than a creative statesman. Inasmuch as Aeneas represents in mythical terms the achievements of Augustus, there can be no question about Virgil's attitude toward imperial propaganda. He and all the other Augustan poets did not scruple to dis tance themselves pointedly from the negative ten dencies of Augustus' despotism. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 B.C . ) is another example of restrained commitment. His earliest works-the llpodes-polished iambic poems based on the Gr. Archilochus-and the Satires-much more skillful, polished, and kindly developments of Lucilius' genre-define his mixed view of revolutionary Rome in their survey of human foibles. But in his transfer of the forms ofSappho and Alcaeus into Lat. , Odes, Books I-III, Horace became both a great poet and the lyric voice of Augustan tensions. These lyrics (written ca. 30-23 and dedicated to Augustus' loyal aide Maecenas) treat, in various Gr. meters, in a felicity of lang. equaled only by Virgil, and in exquisitely formal precision, love and wine lightly, life and death deeply, reflecting the continuing dialogue in Rome between engagement and disengage ment, Stoicism and Epicureanism. Horace's later works consist of a fourth book of Odes, where this dialogue is overshadowed by the tensions of approaching old age; an important collection of ethically oriented epistles; the fa mous Ars poetica, a highly problematic versifica tion of literary doctrines attributed to the 3d-c. Gr., Neoptolemus, which formulated for all time the basic Roman literary tenet: the successful poet must mix the useful ( utile) with the pleasing ( dulce) -see CLASSICAL POETICS; and, lastly, a Ro man centennial ode. The mixture of, or tension between, the useful and the pleasing exhibits a different and entertain ing blend in another genre. Though Gr. elegiac poetry is various in theme, Roman elegy, which derived from Catullus, Alexandrian elegy, and Gr. and Roman New Comedy, was largely restricted to one theme-love-not in the light Horatian sense, but as the most important thing in the world. The spare-dictioned, deceptively simple elegies of Al bius Tibullus (54?-19 B.C. ) treat, with flowing structure, only of his mistress (Delia or Nemesis, significantly Gr. names) , his farm, peace, and oc casionally the praise of his patron, Augustus's dis enchanted lieutenant Messalla. Sextus Propertius (ca. 50-after 1 6 ) , the most violent and original of Augustan poets in his structure, lang., and im agery, also shows little willingness to compromise his amatory world for politics. From the intense, introspective poems on his mistress Cynthia which comprise his earliest collection, he moves to the odd sort of Roman poetry found in his fourth and last book, where, adapting an interest of Gr. Cal limachus, he mixes patriotism and amatory
themes. It is a mix where love often overshadows heroism or subverts it, where Roman trads. yield to a modern elegiac irony. Propertius prepares the way for Ovid, with his much more obvious irreverence for Roman con ventions and his almost total engagement with the values he perceives in love. Publius Ovidius Naso (43 B . C .-A .D . 1 7? ) utilized every bit of his formida ble rhetorical training in his poetry, seeking, even at his wittiest, to elicit the underlying reality by an intense exploration of the conventional poses of the amatory elegist. Thus, in his love elegies, the Amores and Heroides (verse letters cleverly imag ined as written by famous women of Gr. mythology to their absent, usually faithless lovers ) , and even in his double-edged satirical treatments of didac ticism and love-practice ( The Art of Love and The Remedy of Love) , he develops the unheard-of con cept of equality between the partners in a love affair. But erotic poetry (q.v.) won him no favor with Augustus. When Ovid's greatest work, the Metamorphoses, potentially a patriotic epic in its size and use of heroic meter, the hexameter, turned out to be an interweaving (on the thread of "form-changing") of250-odd stories and epyllia, which, in typical elegiac manner, exalted the indi vidual and personal feelings at the expense of temporal and divine authority, Augustus had had enough. Ovid, already compromised by the sup posed lasciviousness of The Art ofLove, committed some accidental political indiscretion and was summarily banished to Tomi on the Black Sea-an event which brought to a premature end his Fasti, an irreverent elegiac poem on the Roman calen dar. His last collections, the Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae ex Ponto ( Letters from the Black Sea), return to the elegiac lament, protesting his bitter life among Latin-less barbarians but at the same time showing his independence, in spite of his suffering, as poet and man of feeling. E. Post-Augustan. The last considerable age of Cl. Lat. p. shows only too clearly the cramping effects of authoritarianism and the changes made in the social life of poetry by despotism. Rhet., already a danger to poetry, now often became an end rather than a means. The literary past, both Gr. and Roman, assumed enormous prestige and became an inhibiting power-esp. the example of Virgil, whose great success with epic tended to demote other genres by comparison. Characteristically, Silver Lat. p. exhibits a spec tacle of uprooted rhet. that flourishes for its own sake or supports grandiose mythological (Gr.) structures lacking almost any social or political relevance to the times. Socially, it is the age when gifted poets beg for patronage, rich aristocrats dabble in poetry, and both types perform their works in public recitations. Many of the subjects focus on horror, perverse crimes, cosmic disorder, and the apparent triumph of evil, but they have a convenient distance as myths or long-past Roman history. In satire, however, Silver Lat. verse en-
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LATIN POETRY gages itself with contemporary immorality with great vigor and power, and its colloquial or unor thodox style combines with rhetorical techniques in an especially successful way. Much of this poetry may be dismissed as little more than pious imitation of Virgil, as in the Virgilian pastorals of Calpurnius Siculus (under Nero) or the wretched Virgilian epic on the career of Scipio Africanus, the 1 7-book Punica of Silius Italicus (late 1st c . ) . Usually, however, Ovid has also exerted his influence, and the blend of Virgil, Ovid, and exuberant rhet. focused on a demonic theme appeals to the tastes of many a subsequent age, notably that of Elizabethan England and our own. The court of Nero (54-68) stimulated many poets, notably Seneca, Persius, and Lucan. Seneca, perhaps while he was tutor, then advisor to young Nero ( 49-63) , perhaps after he prudently retired from the court, produced a series of tragedies on violent, irrational crimes from Gr. myth, which feature malevolent deities, ruthless and unpun ished villains, and helpless victims-situations that negate the Stoic order and implicitly call for a new assertion of Stoic values. Aules Persius Flac cus (34-62) wrote satires saturated with Stoic con viction and a passionate appeal to the Roman conscience in a uniquely crabbed style . And Lucan (39-65) , Seneca's nephew, at first a favorite then a hated rival of the artistically pretentious Nero, reacted so violently to the despotic emperor that he turned his magnificent epic, the Civil War (ostensibly about the conflict between Julius Cae sar and the Senate in 49-6 B.C. ) , into a platform for shrill editorial rhet. against the political system that spawned and protected Nero. He too appeals to Stoicism and the heroic resistance to the tyr anny that has enslaved Romans. After another Civil War in 68-69, another impe rial family came to power for nearly 30 years, and in its last member, the unstable and cruel Domi tian, it promoted the fortunes of Statius and Mar tial, both men of nonRoman and unaristocratic backgrounds, and both in desperate need of pa tronage. Statius (ca. A.D.40-95 ) , son of a school master, wrote much occasional verse, published in a collection called the Silvae, while devoting his main efforts over 12 years to his epic the Thebaid (on the senseless tragedy of the Seven Against Thebes ) . In the end, he did not feel that Rome had adequately rewarded his poetic efforts and retired to Naples todie. Martial (ca. 40-1 02) came to Rome from Spain, with high hopes of capitaliz ing on the Sp. friends of Nero, but he found himself struggling under the new dynasty, with some success though he likes to portray himself as a needy client, until the murder of Domitian in 96 put the poet in trouble with the angry men who came to power. He too was obliged to retire to his native Sp. town. But his epigrams are a fine, genial legacy of the period, sentimental or witty, often naughtily so, about life in the most brilliant and corrupt city of antiquity.
In the next "liberated" generation appears Ju venal (at work 1 00-30) , who starts from the theme ofviolent Roman reaction against the tyrant Domi tian but develops his own themes, Roman and general, as time passes. His tight and memorably phrased indictments of human pretense and weak ness are Rome's greatest, wittiest, and angriest satires, an able use of the rhetorical techniques that had overwhelmed others' efforts. For the next three cs., Virgil, Ovid, and rhet. variously influenced Lat. p., and capable writers of Lat. verse came from all parts of the Empire to Rome or wherever the emperor made his residence. In the 3d and 4th cs., the poets began to divide over conservative Roman religion and the new Christi anity. Contemporaries, Claudian from Mrica was a staunch pagan, while Prudentius from Spain wrote only on Christian topics as Alaric ap proached, to bring CI. Lat. p. to an end, bereft of a home, and to turn Rome into a symbolic topic for medieval poets. See also GREEK POETRY, Classical. BIBLIOGRAPHY: L'Annee philologique 1 - ( 1 92 7-) ;
The Cl. World Bibl. of Roman Drama and Poetry ( 1 978 ) ; Gr. and Roman Authors: A Checklist of Crit., ed. T. Gwinup and F. Dickinson, 2d ed. ( 1 982) covers 7 0 authors. GENERAL: W. Y. Sellar, Roman Poets of the Augus tan Age, 2 v. ( 1 897 ) ; H. E. Butler, Post-Augustan Poetry ( 1 909 ) ; T. Frank, Life and Lit. in the Roman Republic ( 1930) ; ]. F. D'Alton, Roman Lit. Theory and Crit. ( 1 931 ) ; H.]. Rose, A Handbook ofLat. Lit. , 2d ed. ( 1 949) ; ]. W. Duff, A Lit. Hist. of Rome, ed. A. M . Duff, 3d ed., 2 v. ( 1953, 1 964 ) ; G. Williams, Trad. and Originality in Roman Poetry ( 1 968) ,
Change and Decline: Roman Lit. in the Early Empire ( 1 978) ; CHCL, v. 2 ; Nouvelle Histoire de la litterature latine, ed. R. Herzog and P. L. Schmidt ( 1 990). SPECIALIZED STUDIES: P. Nixon, Martial and the Mod. Epigram ( 1 927 ) ; M . M . Crump, The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid ( 193 1 ) ; A. L. Wheeler, Ca tullus and the Trads. of Ancient Poetry ( 1 934) ; H. F. Fraenkel, Ovid: A Poet Between Two Worlds ( 1 945 ) ; L . P. Wilkinson, Horace and His Lyric Poetry ( 1 945 ) , Ovid Recalled ( 1 955) , Golden Lat. Artistry ( 1 963) ; G. E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy ( 1 95 2 ) ; G. Highet, Juvenal the Satirist ( 1954) ; F. O . Copley, Exclusus Amator: A Study in Lat. Love Poetry ( 1 956 ) ; E . Frankel, Horace ( 1 95 7 ) ; K. Quinn, The Catullan Revolution ( 1 959) ; S. Commager, The Odes of Horace ( 1 962 ) ; v. Poschl, The Art of Vergil, tr. G. Seligson ( 1 962 ) ; C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry, 3 v. ( 1 963-82) ; B. Otis, Virgil; A Study in Civilized Poetry ( 1 963) , Ovid as Epic Poet ( 1 970) ; N . Rudd, The Satires ofHorace ( 1 966) ; E. Segal, Roman Laughter ( 1 968 ) ; W. S. Anderson, The Art of the Aeneid ( 1969 ) , Essays on Roman Satire ( 1 982 ) ; G. Luck, The Lat. Love Elegy ( 1 969) ; D. O. Ross, Jr. , Style and Trad. in Catullus ( 1 969) , Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry: Gallus, Elegy and Rome ( 1 975) ; D. West, The/magery and Poetry ofLucretius ( 1 969 ) ; M . C. ]. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid ( 1 965 ) ,
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LATIN POETRY Virgil's PastoralArt ( 1 970), Virgil's Poem of the Earth ( 1 979) , Essays on Lat. Lyric, Elegy, and Epic ( 1 9S2) , Artifices of Eternity ( 1 9S6) ; E. H. Guggenheimer, Rhyme Effects and Rhyming Figures ( 1 972) ; D . Vessey, Statius and theThebaid ( 1 973); Seneca, ed. C. D. Costa ( 1 974) ; ] . Wright, Dancing in Chains: the Stylistic Unity of the Comoedia Palliata ( 1 974 ) ; G. K. Galinsky, Ovid 's Metamorphoses: A n Intro. to the Basic Aspects ( 1 975) ; F. M . Ahl, Lucan. An Intra. ( 1 976) , Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Cl. Poets ( 1 9S5) ; M . Coffey, Roman Satire ( 1 976) ; F. Cairns, Tibullus: A Hellenistic Poet at Rome ( 1 979 ) ; R. O. A. M . Lyne, The Lat. Love Poets ( 1 9S0) ; R. Jenkyns, Three Cl. Poets: Sappho, Catullus, Juvenal ( 1 9S2 ) ; M. Morford, Persius ( 1 9S4 ) ; R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome ( 1 9S5 ) ; H .-P. Stahl, Propertius: "Love " and "War": Individual and State under Augustus ( 1 9S5 ) ; F. Verducci, Ovid's Toyshop of the Heart: Epistulae Heroidum (1 9S5 ) ; R. Kilpatrick, The Poetry of Friendship: Horace, Epistles I ( 19S6 ) ; S. Goldberg, Understanding Terence ( 1 9S6); P. Veyne, Roman Erotic Elegy (tr. 19S5) ;]. K. Newman, Roman Catul WA.; D.S.P.; WS.A. Ius ( 1 990) . II. MEDIEVAL. Early evidence of Christian Lat. poetry is sparse and random. If Commodian, who offers doctrine and exhortation in an accentual approximation of the Cl. hexameter, was indeed a 3d-c. African, he is an isolated phenomenon. In dicative of things to come are two short narratives, onJonah and on the destruction of Sod om, written in skillful hexameters (ca. 300) , and the beautiful Phoenix attributed to Lactantius (ca. 3 1 0 ) , wholly pagan in detail but to the early Middle Ages plainly a celebration of the Resurrection. A coherent Christian Lat. trad. emerges in the 4th c . , deliberately conceived as an alternative to the pagan classics on which all learned Christians had been reared, but in effect an extension of the c1. trad. The cento of Proba (mid 4th c.) is a mere pastiche of tags from Virgil. What is innovative in Juvencus' hexameter rendering of the Gospels (ca. 330) and the freer version in Sedulius' Carmen paschale (ca. 430) is their ingenuity in adapting Virgilian style to Christian purposes; and Paulinus of Nola (353-431 ) expresses his resolve to repudi ate pagan models and write a new kind of poetry in verse richly evocative of Virgil, Ovid, and Hor ace. Prudentius (34S-405 ) , master of many c1. styles and genres, was a brilliant original whose complex attitude toward both Christian and pa gan culture we are only beginning to fathom. His Psychomachia, a short epic on the conflict of virtue and vice in the human soul, greatly influenced medieval iconography, and his elaborate hymns were incorporated in simplified form into the Church liturgy. The Christian Lat. poets were to coexist with, and even displace, the great pagans in the school curriculum of the early Middle Ages, but they had few imitators. More significant for Med. Lat. po etry was the hymnody which appeared as Lat.
replaced Gr. as the lang. of the liturgy. The cum bersome, dogmatic verse of H ilary of Poitiers ( 3 1 0-66) can hardly have had a liturgical func tion, and the rhythmical prose of the great Te Deum, despite its early and abiding popularity, was not imitated; Med. Lat. hymnody begins with Am brose (340-9 7 ) , who provided his Milanese con gregation with meditations appropriate to the li turgical hours and calendar couched in 4-line strophes of iambic dimeter (see HYMN ) . Psycho logically profound, and written in beautiful and surprisingly d. Lat. , the Ambrosian hymns were widely imitated and came to form the nucleus of the medieval hymnaries; their form, 4-stress lines in quatrains, has been preserved with only minor variations down to the present day, as may be seen in the Metrical Index of any hymnal. The upheavals ofthe later 5th c. left their mark on the Christian Lat. trad. The bookish verse of Sidonius Apollinaris (d. 4S0) reflects its survival in an attenuated form in Gaul; the "epic" trad. of Prudentius and Sedulius enjoys a late flowering in the De laudibus Dei of Dracontius (ca. 450-500 ) ; and the verse i n Boethius' Consolation ofPhilosophy (ca. 524) , a prosimetrum (q.v.) including a range of meters imitated from Horace and Seneca, is a last manifestation of inherited familiarity with Cl. culture. The verse epistles and occasional poems of Fortunatus (535-604) , charming and often bril liantly innovative, show a marked loss of syntactic and metrical fluency, though his passion-hymns Vexilla regis and Pange, lingua are among the great est of Christian hymns. The Cl. trad. is still alive in the poems of Eugenius of Toledo (fl. ca. 650) and resurfaces with the Carolingian court poets, but new developments were also taking place. Rhyme and accentual meters begin to appear, most notably in Ir. hymnody, evidently influenced by native Celtic verseforms and the rules of rhyth mical prose formulated by the Lat. grammarians, culminating in the Altus prasator of Columbanus (d. 597 ) . Correct Lat. verse in quantitative meters continued to be taught in schools and written by the learned past the 16th c., but accentually meas ured Lat. verse is the rule after the 4th c . , paving the way for the accentually based prosodies of the vernaculars (Beare) . The riddles of Aldhelm (d. 709 ) , which inaugurated a popular genre, imitate the African Lat. poet Symphosius, and the metri cal life of Cuthbert by Bede (673-736) is couched in a fluent hexameter shaped by 4th-c. Christian models, but the high points ofSth-c. It. Lat. poetry are a rhythmical poem in praise of the city of Milan (ca. 73S) and the accentual verse experi ments of Paulinus ofAquileia (d. S02 ) . Paulinus' somber lament on the death of Eric ofFriuli (799) is an early and influential example of the planctus (see LAMENT ) , which became a popular form and may reflect the influence of vernacular trad. The poets who came to the court of Charle magne brought their culture with them; much of the poetry of Paul the Deacon (d. S02) was written
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LATIN POETRY before he left Italy, and Theodulf (d. 8 2 1 ) and Alcuin (d. 804) were products of thriving schools in Spain and England. But Charles and his court inspired new poetry. Panegyric epistles by Alcuin and Theodulf, and the Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa (ca. 800) attributed to Einhard, celebrate Charles as the champion of political and cultural renewal, and Aachen as a new Rome. The poetry of the court includes charming occasional poems by Paul the Deacon and Theodulf's satire on the courts of law, but its finest product is the Christian Lat. pastoral, best illustrated by Alcuin's nightin gale poems, his 0 mea cella, and a "Conflict of Winter and Spring," probably his, which is both a pastoral and perhaps the first example of the debate-poem or Streitgedicht, a form imitated in Sedulius Scotus' "Contest of the Lily and the Rose" (ca. 850) and the "Eclogue" of the pseudonymous "Theodulus" (9th-10th c . ) , and widely popular in later centuries, e.g. "The Owl and the Nightin gale" in ME (see POETIC CONTESTS ) . The later 9th and 1 0th c. produced further new departures. The hexameter narrative of an anony mous "Poeta Saxo" (ca. 890) celebrates the deeds of Charlemagne as an example for the Emperor Arnulf, and Abbo of St. Germain combines war poetry with moral reflections on the state of France in a poem on the Norman siege of Paris (ca. 897) . The remarkable Waltharius, commonly attributed to Ekkehard of St. Gall (900-73) but possibly earlier, balances the impulsive and bom bastic heroism of Attila against the less heroic but more sophisticated behavior of Walter of Aqui taine and his companions, providing a perspective at once sympathetic and detached on the trad. of Germanic heroism and heroic poetry that it evokes. Vernacular culture is probably reflected also in the Ecbasis captivi (ca. 950 ) , a rambling beast-fable in leonine (q.v.) hexameters appar ently written for the edification of young monks; in the mid I l th-c. Ruodlieb, the adventures of a wandering knight, based partly on an oriental tale, provide an early foretaste of chivalric romance (see MEDIEVAL ROMANCE ) . This period was also a time of innovation in religious music, its most significant form being the sequence, sung at Mass between the Epistle and the Gospel, in which the emotional and dramatic scope of religious lyric is greatly expanded. The origins of the sequence are much debated, though the impulse it reflects is present in emotionally expressive poems like the Versus de Lazaro of Paulinus or the 0 mi custos of Gottschalk (ca. 825 ) . A shaping influence (formerly thought to be the originator of the sequence) was Notker of St. Gall (d. 9 1 2 ) , whose Liber hymnorum expresses a range of spiritual feeling, often in striking dramatic monologues and set forth in rhythmically parallel phrases designed for antiphonal singing. His work anticipates the religious poetry of Peter Damian and Peter Abelard and the great achievements of Franciscan hymnody.
The devel. of the secular lyric is even harder to trace, but as early as the mid 1 0th c. the lang. of the Song of Songs was being used to celebrate an idealized beloved in a way which clearly antici pates the courtly lyric of the 1 2th c. (see COURTLY LOVE ) . The mid- l l th-c. "Cambridge Songs" ms. includes the sophisticated 0 admirabile veneris idolum, addressed to a beautiful boy; Levis exsurgit Zephirus, which dwells on the interplay of emotion and natural setting in the manner of high medie val lyric; and the magnificent lam dulcis amica venito, here a passionate lovesong but found else where in a form adapted to religious use. The 1 2th c. saw a great flowering of secular love-lyric , rang ing from imitations of popular song to elaborate essays in love-psychology and courtoisie by poets such as Walter of Chatillon (b. 1 1 35) and Peter of Blois (ca. 1 1 35-1 2 1 2 ) . Many of the best of these are gathered in collections such as the early 1 3th c. Carmina Burana, which also includes drinking songs, narrative love-visions like Phyllis and Flora and Si linguis angelicis (which anticipate the Ro mance of the Rose) , and satire in the trad. of "Goliardic" verse (q.v. ) , in which poets such as Hugh Primas (fl. ca. 1 150) and the anonymous "Archpoet" of Cologne (fl. 1 1 60s) make their own misfortunes and dissipations, real or imagined, an occasion for discussing the ills of the world. Religious poetry, too, appears in new forms in this period. The sequence form, now evolved into accentual verse with a regular rhyme scheme, provided a model for the powerful series of planc tus in which Abelard ( 1 079-1 1 42 ) dramatizes the sufferings of such Old Testament figures as Sam son, Dinah, and the daughter of Jepthah. In the sequences of Adam of St. Victor (d. 1 1 77-92) , subtle allegorical and theological arguments ap pear in forms as intricate as any lyric poetry of the period, and the sonorous rhyming hexameters of the De contemptu mundi of Bernard of Morlas (ca. 1 1 40) give a new force to religious satire. Side by side with these new departures is a steadily evolving trad. of "learned" Lat. poetry based on Cl. models. Already in the late 1 1 th c., Marbod of Rennes ( 1 035-1 1 2 3 ) , Hildebert of Le Mans ( 1 056-1 1 3 3 ) , and Baudri of Bourgueil ( 1 046-1 130) had produced a new, urbane poetry, Ovidian in form and manner and devoted to such topics as friendship and the cultivation of relations with noble patrons. The renewal of Cl. studies in the 12th-c. cathedral schools led to more ambi tious exercises. Bernardus Silvestris' Cosmographia (ca. 1 1 47) and the De planctu naturae (ca. 1 1 70) of Alan of Lille, philosophical allegories in the trad. of Boethius and Martianus Capella, exhibit a new assurance vis-a-vis the great authors of an tiquity. Alan's Anticlaudianus ( 1 182-83 ) , on the creation of the perfect man, announces itself as a new kind of epic, and the Alexandreis of Walter of Chatillon ( 1 1 82 ) , Joseph of Exeter's !lias ( 1 18890), and John of Hanville's virtually all-encom passing Juvenalian satire Architrenius ( 1 1 84) re-
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LATIN POETRY flect similar ambition, while Geoffrey of Vinsauf provided a latter-day equivalent to Horace's Ars poetica in his Poetria nova ( 1 2 1 6 ) . Later critics such as John of Garland (d. 1258) and Hugh of Trim berg (fl. ca. 1280) could claim these writers as modern auctores worthy of the respect and study accorded the ancients. In addition, the 1 2th and early 13th cs. produced a range of school-poetry in less ambitious but widely popular forms: topical satires like the mock-visionary Apocalypse of Colias, aimed at ecclesiastical corruption, and the Specu lum stultorum of Nigel de Longchamps, an elabo rate beast-fable allegorizing monastic ambition; narrative imitations of ancient comedy like the Pamphilus, which had a lasting influence on love narrative in several langs. ; and a body of pseudo Ovidian poetry inc!. the mock-autobiographical De vetula, which was long considered an authentic Ovidian work. A number of the greatest examples of medieval religious poetry date from the later 1 3th c., nota bly the Philomena of John Howden (d. 1 275), a meditation on the power of love as exemplified in the lives of Christ and the Virgin; the hymns and sequence for the feast of Corpus Christi tradition ally attributed to Thomas Aquinas ( 1 229-74) , the highest achievement of theological poetry in the trad. of Adam of St. Victor; and the work of a number of Franciscan poets, above all the Dies irae and Stabat mater dolorosa associated with the names of Thomas of Celano (d. 1 255) and Jacopone da Todi ( 1 230-1 306 ) . But in other areas the great proliferation of vernacular lit. led to a decline in the production of Lat. poetry, and the typical 1 3th-c. works are didactic treatises, designed to systematize and compress the materials of the traditional curriculum, secular and religious, in accordance with the needs of a newly compart mentalized system of education. Examples in clude the De laudibus divinae sapientiae of Alexan der Nequam (d. 1 2 1 7 ) , an encyclopedic review of Creation as a manifestation of divine wisdom; the Aurora, a versified biblical commentary by Peter Riga (d. 1 209 ) ; and the Integumenta Ovidii ofJohn of Garland. The 1 4th c. produces such late flow erings as the devotional verse of the Eng. mystic Richard Rolle (d. 1 349) and the powerful anat omy of the social ills of England in the Vox claman tis ( 1 380-86) ofJohn Gower, but the most signifi cant work of this period, the Lat. verse of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, belongs to the history of the Ren. See also BYZANTINE POETRY; GOLIARDIC VERSE; LEONINE RHYME; MEDIEVAL ROMANCE; MEDIEVAL POETRY; MEDIEVAL POETICS; RENAISSANCE POET ICS. ANTHOLOGIES AND TEXTS: MGH, Poetae latini aevi Carolini, ed. E. Diimmler, L. Traube, P. von Winterfeld, and K. Strecker, 5 v. ( 1 881-1937 ) ; Migne, PC and PL-the fullest collection of texts; Analecta hymnica-the fullest collections of hymns; Carmina Burana, ed. J. A. Schmeller, 4th
ed. ( 1907)-the only complete text, later ed. by A. Hilka and O. Schumann, though only v. I , pts. 1-2, v. 2,pt. I, and v. 3, pt. I, have appeared to date ( 1 931-7 1 ) ; Early Lat. Hymns, ed. A. S. Walpole ( 1 922 ) ; Med. Lat. Lyrics, 5th ed. ( 1 948) , More Lat. Lyrics from Virgil to Milton ( 1977 ) , both ed. and tr. H. Waddell; The Goliard Poets, ed. and tr. G. F. Whicher ( 1 949) ; F. Brittain, The Med. Lat. and Romance Lyric, 2d ed. ( 1 95 1 ) ; Oxford Book of Med. Lat. Verse, ed. F. J. E . Raby ( 1959 ) ; Hymni latini antiquissimi xxv, ed. W. Buist ( 1 975 ) ; Seven Versions of Carolingian Pastoral, ed. R. P. H . Green ( 1 980) ; Poetry of the Carolingian Ren., ed. P. Godman ( 1 985)-long intro. HISTORY, CRITICISM, AND PROSODY: Keil-col lects the principal Med. Lat. grammarians and prosodists; Meyer; Manitius-the standard lit. hist.; H . Walther, Das Streitgedicht in der lateinische Literatur des Mittelalters ( 1 920); Faral; Lote; Cur tius; Raby, Christian and Secular; D. Norberg, Poesie latine rythmique ( 1 954) ; Beare-good survey; M . Burger, Recherches sur la structure et l'origine des vers romans ( 1 957 ) ; K. Strecker, Intro. to Med. Lat. , tr. and rev. R. B. Palmer ( 1 957)-with excellent in tro. and bib!., and "Mittellateinische Dichtung in Deutschen" in Reallexikon I; Norberg-best ac count ofMed. Lat. prosody; Norden-artprose; A. C. Friend, "Med. Lat. Lit." in Fisher; M. R. P. McGuire, Intro. to Med. Lat. Studies ( 1 964) ; J. Szoverffy, Annalen der lateinische Hymnendichtung, 2 v. ( 1 964-65 ) , Weltliche Dichtungen des lateinische Mittelalters, v. 1 ( 1 970) , Lat. Hymns ( 1989 ) ; Dronke; Lausberg-rhet.; Murphy-survey of med. rhet.; F. Brunholzl, Ceschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, 1 - ( 1 975-; Fr. tr., 2 v., 1 990) ; P. Dronke, The Med. Lyric, 2d ed. ( 1 978) , The Med. Poet and His World ( 1 985) ; C. Witke, Numen litterarum ( 1 971 ) ; P. Klopsch, Einfilhrung in die mittellateinis che Verslehre ( 1 972);J. Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages ( 1 980 ) ; The Interp. of Med. Lat. P. , ed. W. T. H. Jackson ( 1980 ) ; Brogan, 720 ff. ; P. Godman, Poets and Emperors ( 1 987) ; O. B. Hard ison, Jr., Prosody and Purpose in the Eng. Ren. W.w.; T.V.F.B. ( 1 989)-incl. Med. Lat. III. RENAISSANCE AND POST-RENAISSANCE. The Ren. turned away from medieval varieties of rhy thm and rhyme in Lat. p . towards versification based on a closer study and understanding of the forms of C!. Antiquity. The result, from the 1 4th to the early 1 7th c., was not only a flood of poetry in the vernacular langs. and meters imitating C!. themes and forms, and poetry in vernacular langs. imitating C!. meters (see CLASSICAL METERS IN MODERN LANGUAGES ) , but also an immense out put ofLat. verse itself. Petrarch ( 1 304-74) showed the way with h undreds of hexameters on personal and intimate themes in his three books of Epistolae metricae ( Metrical Letters, 1 333-54) . Petrarch also attempted a hexameter epic on the Punic Wars, Africa ( 1 338-41 ) , left incomplete after many revi sions, and 1 2 eclogues, Bucolicum carmen (Pastoral Songs, 1 346-68) , that allegorize his ideas on po-
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LATIN POETRY etry and politics. Similar incursions into epic and pastoral marked the history of Lat. p. in the 15th c., e.g. the incomplete Sjorzias by Francesco Filelfo ( 1 398-148 1 ) about the author's Milanese patrons; a supplementary 1 3th book of the Aeneid by the humanist Maffeo Veggio ( 1 406-58) ; and ten widely admired eclogues by Mantuan (Battista Spagnoli, 1447-1 5 1 6) that recall models by Virgil and Petrarch while yet evincing a distinctive piety, humor, and satire. Further, some of the best Ren. Lat. p. appeared in Cl. forms that Petrarch did not use, such as epigram, elegy, and ode (qq.v. ) . Panormita (Anto nio Beccadelli, 1 394-1 471 ) initiated Naples' Golden Age with his Hermaphroditus ( 1 425) , two books oflicentious epigrams that out-Martial Mar tial. His protege, Giovanni Pontano ( 1 429-1503 ) , wrote with skill i n many genres, incl. four sets of elegies in the Ovidian manner, the early Parthe nopeusfor his mistress Fannia, the mature De am ore coniugali for his beloved wife Adriana, the late Eridanus for young Stella, and finally De tumulis (Burial Mounds) for deceased loved ones. The finest Ren. Lat. p. is supremely conscious of its imitative debt to Cl. texts, and it gains a characteristic resonance from the explicit recall of ancient poetry. At the Florentine Academy, An gelo Poliziano ( 1 454-94) urged poets by precept and example in five verse essays, Silvae (Forests, 1 475-86) , to cultivate Cl. allusions. Poliziano him self produced some of the finest Ren. epigrams in a Cl. vein in his Epigrammata ( 1 498) , as did his friend and later rival Michael Marullus (ca. 1 4531 500) in four books of short poems on his exile from Constantinople and his love for his mistress Neaera. But Marullus's greatest work was his four books of Hymni naturales (Hymns of Nature) in various meters-hexameter, Alcaic, Sapphic, iam bic-proclaiming the tenets of Neoplatonic phi losophy. Two high points of creative imitation were attained by the Neapolitan Jacopo Sannazaro ( 1 458- 1 530 ) : the Piscatoriae (Piscatorial Ec logues, 1 526) that adapt to a seaside setting con ventional rhetorical structures of pastorals (q .v. ) by Virgil, Calpurnius, and Nemesianus; and an epic on Christ's nativity, De partu virginis (Virgin Birth, 1 526) , that appropriates formulas, expres sions, and even whole lines from the epics ofVirgil, Ovid, Claudian, and others. The more Ren. humanists sought to recover the past, the greater they realized their distance from it. Their imitations of ancient poetry only drew attention to incontrovertible differences between pagan Classicism and Christian humanism. One consequence was an effort to develop new forms and thus expand the repertory of Lat. p. The disillusioned Venetian historian Andrea Navagero ( 1 483-1529) , e.g., destroyed his own didactic verse, but his heirs managed to publish his lively experiment in 47 pastoral epigrams, Lusus pastor alis (Pastoral Diversions, 1 530) , with great impact on both Lat. p. and the vernacular. In yet another
notable departure, Girolamo Fracastoro ( 1 4831 553) , a professor of medicine at Padua, wrote Syphilis ( 1 530 ) , three books attributing the origins of venereal disease to the New World and propos ing a cure. The Reformation in the North and the Counter Reformation in Italy accentuated the religious in tensity of much Lat. p. Marcantonio Flaminio ( 1 498- 1 550 ) , e.g., renounced his own early pas toral diversions in order to devote himself to para phrases of the Psalms in Cl. meters, Davidis psalmi ( 1 546) , and other Carmina sacra ( 1 551 ) . Mter publishing an influential versified De arte poetica ( 1 527 ) , Marco Girolamo Vida ( 1 485-1566) com posed a hexameter epic on the life ofJesus, Chris tias ( 1 5 35 ) , and a collection of Christian Hymni ( 1 550) . The devel. of Ren. Lat. p . beyond the Alps followed similar patterns, confirming the use of Lat. as a truly international lang. The Hungarian poetJanus Pannonius ( 1 434-72) and the Ger. poet Conrad Celtis ( 1 459-1508) wrote elegies, epi grams, hexameters, and hendecasyllables about their education in Italy and their efforts to bring humanist teachings to the North. The Fr. poet Salmon Macrin ( 1 490-1 557) graced the courts of Francis I and Henry II with a vast output of elegies, hymns, epithalamia, and assorted political verse. The Dutch poetJoannes Secundus ( 1 51 1-36) dis played metrical and ling. virtuosity in odes, epi grams, epistles, and three books of elegies, but he earned fame throughout Europe for his Basia (Kisses) , 1 9 voluptuous songs for a mistress named after Marullus's beloved Neaera, at once appro priating the erotic lyric from antiquity and an nouncing his competition with It. Ren. poets. With the devel. of the vernaculars and the pres tige of their lits. throughout Europe in the 1 6th c . , many poets who wrote superb Lat. lyrics turned to their own langs. for more ambitious projects. Lodovico Ariosto ( 1474-1533) in Italy, Joachim Du Bellay (ca. 1 525- 60) in France, Jan Ko chanowski ( 1 530-84) in Poland, and John Milton ( 1 608-74) in England exemplifY the trend. Nota ble exceptions include two 1 7th-c. Jesuit poets, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski ( 1 595-1640) in Po land andJacob Balde ( 1 604-68) in Germany, who wrote exquisite religious lyrics that accommodate scriptural poetics to Cl. meters. Though vernacu lar lit. finally gained ascendance, the composition of Lat. p. has survived even until our own day in schools and universities as an accomplishment proper to a Cl. scholar. See also IMITATION; REN AISSANCE POETICS. ANTHOLOGIES: Poeti latini del quattrocento, ed. F. Arnaldi et al. ( 1964)-with It. trs.; Lateinische Gedi chte deutscher Humanisten, ed. H. C. Schnur ( 1 967)-with Ger. trs.; Musae reduces, ed. P. Laurens, 2 v. ( 1 975 )-with Fr. trs.; An Anthol. oj Neo-Lat. P., ed. F. ]. Nichols ( 1 979 )-with Eng. trs.; Ren. Lat. Verse, ed. A. Perosa and]. Sparrow ( 1 979) . EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS: Johannes Secun-
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LATVIAN POETRY dus, Love Poems, ed. and tr. F. A. Wright ( 1 930) , and in The Lat. Love Elegy, ed. and tr. C. Endres ( 1 981 ) ; G. Fracastoro, Syphilis, ed. and tr. H . Wynne-Finch ( 1 935 ) ; Conrad Celtis, Selections, ed. and tr. L. Forster ( 1 948) ; M. K. Sarbiewski, Odes, tr. G. Hils ( 1 646), ed. M.-S. Roestvig ( 1953) ; ]. Sannazaro, Arcadia and the Piscatorial Eclogues, tr. R. Nash ( 1 966) ; ]. Milton, Variorum: Lat. and Gr. Poems, ed. and tr. D. Bush et al. ( 1 970 ) ; A. Nav agero, Lusus, ed. and tr. A. E. Wilson ( 1 973) ; Petrarch, Bucolicum carmen, ed. and tr. T. G. Bergin ( 1 974) , Africa, tr. T. G. Bergin ( 1 977) ; M. G. Vida, De arte poetica, ed. and tr. R. G. Williams ( 1 976) , Christiad, ed. and tr. G . C . Drake and C . A . Forbes ( 1 978 ) ; Ren. Lat. P., ed. and tr. I. D. McFarlane ( 1 980) . HISTORY AND CRITICISM: L. Bradner, Musae An
glicanae: A Hist. of Anglo-Lat. Poetry 1500-1 925 ( 1 940 ) ; P. Van Tieghem, La Lit. lat. de la Ren. ( 1 944) ; L. Spitzer, "The Problem of Lat. Ren. Poetry," SP 2 ( 1955 ) ; G. Ellinger and B. Ristow, "Neulateinische Dichtung im Deutschlands im 16. Jh.," Reallexikon 2.620-45 ; ] . Sparrow, "Lat. Verse of the High Ren.," It. Ren. Studies, ed. E. F. Jacob ( 1 960) ; W. L. Grant, Neo-Lat. Lit. and the Pastoral ( 1 965 ) ; ]. Ijsewijn, Companion to Neo-Lat. Studies ( 1 977) ; w. ]. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses ofPastoral ( 1 983) . W.J.K. LATIN PROSODY. See CLASSICAL PROSODY. LATVIAN POETRY. The beginnings of L. p., in deed its very roots, are to be found in L. folksongs called dainas. Most of the dainas date from the days of serfdom and express the L. ethos that has changed little over the cs.: respect for nature, a work ethic, attitudes that edifY family ties, fore bearance, emotional restraint. These motifs are often found in L. p. L. lit. proper begins in the middle of the 1 9th c. with the so-called National Awakening move ment, a movement primarily initiated by L. intel lectuals, some of them gifted poets who, inspired by the Fichtean notion of Volksseele, turned to in digenous sources ( national history, folklore, my thology) for the inspiration and subject matter of their poetic efforts. Juris Alunans ( 1 832-64) in augurates L. p. with his opuscule, Dziesminas (Dit ties) , in 1 856, which set a precedent. The volume, however, is distinctly a notch above the devotional verse offered up to that time by well-meaning Ger. pastors whose knowledge of L. was very minimal. This generation of committed poets, most ofthem students at the University of Tartu, set the tone for what was to become known as "national romanti cism." Among them: Auseklis (pseudonym of Mikelis Krogzems, 1 850-79) , a fiery poet much inspired by Schiller; Andrejs Pumpurs ( 1 8411 902 ) , who in imitation of the Finnish and Esto nian national epics attempted a similar feat with his Lalplesis (The Bearslayer) , though with lim ited success; Krisjanis Barons ( 1 835-1 923 ) , known -
for his labors to collect and classify dainas, the number of which now reaches two million. A rival intellectual impulse came with Marxism in the 1 880s, precipitating a movement called the New Current and thereby an ideological schism that runs deep in L. lit. A syncretic vision, however, is profferred by Janis Rainis (pseudonym ofJanis Plieksans, 1 865-1 929 ) . The national past and my thology are often sources of his poetry, yet his philosophical thought extends beyond the fold of nationalism to embrace a religion of all humanity. His wife Aspazija (pseudonym of Elza Rozen berga-Plieksane, 1 868-1 943 ) , the first L. feminist, combined in her poetry a flamboyant neoroman tic nationalism with a social conscience that in veighs against social and economic injustices and bourgeois prejudices and complacency. Close to Aspazija's emotional intensity in some respects are Fricis Barda ( 1 880-1 9 1 9 ) andJanis Poruks ( 1 8711 9 1 1 ) , poets oflyrical moods and subtle tonalities. Other poets who became popular before World War I include PlUdonis (pseudonym of Vilis Le jnieks, 1874-1 940 ) , a master of robust rhymes and rich images, sometimes a la impressionism; Karlis Skalbe ( 1879-1945 ) , a popular poet of simple forms, with affinities to the dainas; and Anna Bri gadere ( 1861-1933 ) , best remembered as the spokesperson of the humble and the young. With L. national independence in 1918, L. p. became more susceptible to the literary currents of Western Europe. Edvarts Virza (pseudonym of Lieknis, 1 883-1940) studied and translated Fr. poetry and became the official voice of the new authoritarian regime installed by a coup d'etat in 1 934. His most celebrated work is an extended prose poem, Straumeni, that praises the virtues of bucolic life on a L. farmstead. Expressionism left an impact on Peteris E rmanis ( 1 893-1969 ) , the first L. poet to experiment with free verse. The coup d'etat brought to the fore a group of staunchly patriotic poets. Janis Medenis ( 1 9036 1 ) tried to adapt folk meters to modern verse. Zinaida Lazda ( 1 902-6 1 ) became much admired for her lyrical landscapes, her celebration of sim ple life a la dainas. But there were also poets who deviated from the officially sanctioned poetics. Eriks Adamsons ( 1 907-47) was an essentially ur ban poet, introspective and complex, ironic and refined, scornful of rural simplicities. Aleksandrs Caks (pseudonym of C adarainis, 1 902-50) is con sidered the most original modernist and the one whose legacy to the following generation of poets is most felt. Forceful and iconoclastic, mocking and ironic, insisting on the importance of rhythm over rhyme, he shocked the traditionalists and fascinated the young. In the late 1 930s, as Europe was in the throes of apocalyptic events, a new generation of poets came of age. When the Soviet Armies occupied Latvia in 1 944, most of them preferred to go into exile. Veronika StreJerte (pseudonym of Rudite Strelerte:Johansone, b. 1 9 1 2) is a poet of profound
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IAUDA meditative moods and restrained patnotlc feel ings, much appreciated for her finely sculpted verse. Andrejs Eglitis (b. 1 9 1 2 ) , the widely pro claimed national bard, popular and prolific, is most celebrated for his thunderous poem, "God, Thy land is aflame." Velta Toma (b. 1 9 1 2 ) , a some what controversial figure for her nonconformist ideas, cultivates a forceful personal expression. Velta Snikere (b. 1 920) , a multifaceted personal ity, grafts new sensibilities of surrealist penchant onto the folkloric traditions. Exile nurtured a new generation of poets, who share a certain aversion to loud political commit ment and to emotion-drenched rhet. and a distrust for traditional poetic forms. The first cenacle was formed in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen to become known as the Hell's Kitchen Poets. Among them: Linards Tauns (pseudonym of Arnolds Berzs, 1922-63) , an urban poet fascinated by the Babel of New York City, a visionary seeking more height ened forms of existence; Gunars Salins (b. 1 924) , who interweaves urban with rural images, folk loric patterns with jazz rhythms; Baiba Bicole (b. 1 93 1 ) who celebrates, in rites sacred and erotic, encounters with the physical world; Aina Krau jiete (b. 1 92 3 ) , intellectual and erudite, given to ontological adventures, exploring alternate states of being. Outside the cenacIe, but aesthetically affinitive, are Astride Ivaska (b. 1926), whose sub tle tonalities celebrate the preciousness of lang., weaving nuance to nuance, connecting sound and sense in configurations familiar and yet original; and Olafs Stumbrs (b. 193 1 ) , whose existential anguish and loneliness subtend the satire of the social scene, much laced with black humor and sarcasm. Andrejs Irbe (b. 1 924) , living in Sweden, probes the ever-evanescent inner self that inti mates affinities with the mysterious Nordic land scape that too escapes finality. In the homeland, the coevals of the exiles lived on the native soil and among their people, whose lang. constantly replenishes their work. But they also created under duress, never knowing the offi cial level of tolerance for deviation from Soviet doctrine. Vizma BelSevica (b. 1 931 ) was first hailed, then silenced, then rehabilitated for her poetry, so often characterized by ontological intro spection and contemplation of the collective des tinies ofthe L. people. Imants Ziedonis (b. 1 933) , prolific and immensely popular, subject to contra puntal moods, celebrates the beauty of the land and the vitality of the people and mourns the effacement of the past through urbanization and industrialization. Ojars Vacietis ( 1 933-83) , fre quently dubbed "the L. Yevtushenko," versatile and impulsive, always managed to remain in the good graces of the Soviet authorities, while not sparing his caustic wit. Maris Caklais (b. 1940) , intensely personal and very popular among the young, combines the rustic and the refined, the spontaneous and the analytic, giving his verse a wide tonal range and a fine filigree texture. Next
to these poets another generation, both abroad and in the homeland, has already come to the fore, generally more polyphonic, more acerbic, more experimental than their elders. Most recently, the advent of openness (glasnost) and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 are not only certain to leave a lasting impact on the present and future generations but will also necessitate a revaluation of those poets whose works, long suppressed, are now being published. ANTHOLOGIES: Latvju modernas dzejas antologija, ed. A. Caks and P. Kikuts ( 1 930 ) ; LatvieSu taUlas dziesmas, ed. A. Svabe et aI. , 1 2 v. ( 1 952-56) ; Latvju sonets 100 gados 1856-1956, ed. K. Dzilleja ( 1 956) ; Lettische Lyrik, ed. E. Eckard-Skalberg ( 1 960 ) ; Dze jas un sejas / LatvieSu dzeja svesuma, ed. T. Zeltins et al. ( 1 962) ; Poetry/rom Latvia, ed .J. Anerauds, 3 v. ( 1 982 ) ; Lettische Lyrik, ed. E. Zuzena-Metuzala ( 1 983) ; Contemp. L. P., ed. I. Cedrins ( 1 984 ) . H ISTORY AND CRITICISM: E. Virza, La Litterature lettonne depuis l 'epoque de reveil national ( 1 926) ; A. Johansons, LatvieSu literatura ( 1 953 ) ; J. Andrups and V. Kalve, L. Lit. ( 1 954 ) ; M. Dombrovska, LatvieSu dzeja ( 1 966) ; A. Ziedonis, The Religious Philosophy o/Janis Rainis, L. Poet ( 1 969 ) ; R. Ek manis, L. Lit. under the Soviets: 1 940-1975 ( 1 978 ) . J.S. LAUDA (Lat. "praise" ) . It. genre of religious ori gin and content. It was first created probably as a vernacular equivalent or adaptation of the Med. Lat. hymn (q.v. ) , e.g. the Stabat mater and the Dies irae. Its devel. is connected with the 1 3th-c. cult, esp. widespread in the Umbrian region ofItaly, the confraternity of the Scourgers (Flagellanti) . U m brian in origin is its earliest surviving example, the Laudes creaturarum ("Praise of the Creation"; in Lat., ca. 1 224) of Francis of Assisi. The greatest cultivator of the I., Jacopone da Todi ( 1 236?1 306) , set its range oftopics (from simple thanks giving to complex multivocal dramatizations of liturgical themes) and meters ( of great freedom and variety, but the typical form was the ballata with a 2-line ripresa [xx] and a 4-line monorhymed stanza [ aaax bbbx, etc . ] composed generally of oltonari, hendecasyllables [q.v. ] , and settenari) . Ja copone's ca. 1 00 surviving laude found no direct imitators of note, but the genre survived into the 1 6th c .-G. Ippoliti, Daile sequenze aile laudi ( 1 9 1 4 ) ; P. Dronke, The Mediaeval Lyric ( 1 969 ) ; M . Fubini, Metrica e poesia, 2d e d . ( 1 970) ; Wilkins; D . L.Jeffrey, The Early Eng. Lyric and Franciscan Spiri tuality ( 1 975 ) , ch. 4; Elwert, Italienische, sect. 909 1 ; P. S. Diehl, The Med. European Religious Lyric ( 1 985 ) . T.W.; C.K. LAUREATE . See POET LAUREATE. LECTURE. See DECONSTRUCTION; SOUND; TEX TUALITY. LEICH. Poem in unequal stanzas, cultivated in
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LETIRISME Ger.-speaking areas in the 13th and 1 4th cs. Music survives for a few examples. The term I. originally designated an instrumental melody, a sense which persists in addition to that of "non-isostrophic poem," a semantic loan on the pattern of OF lai first attested in Ulrich von Liechtenstein (mid 1 3th c . ) . The I. has affinities with the Med. Lat. sequence, Occitan and OF descort, OF lai, Occitan estampida and OF estampie (qq.v. ) . Like sequence and lai (but unlike descort) , the I. may be used for religious as well as secular subjects. There are considerably more examples of the secular I . Its themes are in the main those of Minnesang (q.v. ) . A new devel. , not paralleled in the Romance analogues, is the intro. of a dancing section into the I. in Heinrich von Sax, Ulrich von Winterstetten, and Tannhiiuser; this is associated with dactylic rhythms ( Tanzi) . Tannhiiuser is unique in introducing into the I. the didactic themes of princely panegyric arrl lament for dead rulers. The I. is usually considerably longer than most isostrophic poems. A high proportion of unique strophes is characteristic of the religious I. and the Tanzi. There may also be contiguous or noncon tiguous repetitions of strophic patterns, or partial or approximate responsion between sections. There is a proliferation of short rhyming units, with a high incidence of different types of rhyme . The I. i s frequently divided into two halves, but in the Tanzi. a ternary division is also found; inter nally, the strophes are frequently bipartite, less often tripartite. The religious I. has affinities with Lat. sequence, but in the main the I. is more closely akin to its Romance analogues. See also MINNESANG; GERMAN PROSODY, Middle High Ger
man.
F. Wolf, Uber die Lais, Sequenzen und L. ( 1 841 ) ; O. Gottschalk, Der deutsche Minnel. ( 1 908) ; R. J. Browne, Stylistic and Formal Hist. of the MHG L., Diss., Yale ( 1 955 ) ; K. H. Bertau, Sangverslyrik ( 1 964) ; H. Kuhn, "L.," &allexikon; I. Glier, "Der Minnel. im spiiten 13. Jahrhundert," Werk-Typ-Situation, ed. 1. Glier et al. ( 1 969 ) ; J. Maillard, "Lai, L.," Gattungen der Musik, ed. W. Arlt et al. ( 1 973 ) ; H. Spanke, Studien zu Sequenz, O.L.S. Lai und L. ( 1 977) ; Sayce. LENGTH. See DURATION. LEONINE RHYME, VERSE. "Once rhyme in vaded the hexameter," John Addington Symonds remarked, "the best verses of the medieval period in that measure are I." Also the worst (Raby) . Ordinarily the term I. r. refers to internal rhyme in the Med. Lat. hexameter (i.e. the word at line end rhyming with the word preceding the cae sura ) ; technically it denotes an oxytonic word-end ing (a "feminine" rhyme; see MASCULINE AND FEMININE ) . Though there are examples in CI. Lat. poetry (e.g. Ovid, Ars amatoria) and epitaph verse, I. r. flourished in Med. Lat. after the 9th c., being so popular it was imitated in Ir., Eng. (the OE
Rhyming Poem) , Ger. , and (esp.) Fr. It is regularly mentioned in the medieval prosody manuals of ars metrica and Seconde rhitorique (q.v. ) . Presumably
the device came into verse from one ofthe clausu lae of rhythmical prose, the cursus leoninus, though the origin of the term is uncertain: some trace it to Pope Leo the Great, others to Leoninus, a 1 2th-c. Benedictine canon of Paris (fl. 1 1 35; see Erdmann) . Leonine verse refers to a hexameter-pentameter couplet (not always rhymed ) , as in Eberhard 's Laborintus-the meter known to antiquity as the elegiac distich (q.v. ) . Both in these couplets and in hexameter couplets more elaborate schemes of internal rhyming quickly developed both in Occi tan and OF, such as rhyming the lines' first two hemistichs together and last two together (Lat. versus interlaqueati, Fr. rime enterlacee, "interwoven rhyme" ) ; or a double rhyme in the first line, a second double rhyme in the second, and a third binding the ends of the two lines-which by break ing gives the aabccb scheme of Fr. rime couee, "tail rhyme" (q.v. ) . Thus the partitioning of long-line Lat. verse via internal rhyme paved the way for a multitude of short-line lyric stanzas in the ver naculars. W. Wackernagel, "Gesch. des deutschen Hex ameters und Pentameters bis auf Klopstock," Kle inere Schriften, v. 2 ( 1873 ) ; E. Freymond, "Uber den reichen Reim bei altfranzosischen Dichtern," ZRP 6 ( 1 882) ; Schipper 1 . 305 ff; Kastner; Meyer, 2.267; K. Strecker, "Leoninische Hexameter und Pen tameter im 9. Jahrhundert," Neues Archi fur iiltere deutsche Geschichteskunde 44 ( 1 922) , 2 1 3 ff. ; C. Erdmann, "Leonitas," Corona Quernea: Festgabe Karl Strecker ( 1 941 ) ; Lote, 2 . 1 41 ff. ; Curtius, 8.2-3; T.V.F.B. Raby, Secular, 1 .228, 2 . 1 ; Norden. LESBIAN POETRY. See LOVE POETRY. LETRILLA (diminutive of letra, a short gloss ) . A Sp. poem generally written in short lines, often having a refrain, and usually written on a light or satiric topic. Such poems can be found as early as the 1 4th c. at least, but were apparently not given the name I. until much later. Famous examples are Gongora's A ndeme yo caliente, y riase la gente ("As long as I am comfortable, let people laugh if they wish") and Quevedo's Poderoso caballero es don Dinero ("A powerful gentleman is Sir Money" ) . Navarro. D.C.C. LETTER, VERSE. See VERSE EPISTLE. LETTRISME. A movement which first gained prominence in Paris following World War II. Founded by the Romanian expatriot Isidore Isou, who wished to reduce lang. to its constituent ele ments, L. sought to displace surrealism (q.v. ) as the leading avant-garde movement. Since the early 1950s, Maurice Lemaitre has been L. 's prin cipal theorist and chief organizer; Jean-Paul Cur-
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LEXIS tay has introduced several innovations. L. derives from the It. futurists' parole in liberta ("liberated words" ) , from the Rus. futurists' exploration of transrational lang. (zaum--see FUTURISM ) , and from the dadaists' experiments with opto-pho netic poetry. Like dada (q.v. ) , L. is a violently antagonistic movement that attacks the founda tions of bourgeois society through the medium of the written word by reducing the letters of the alphabet to a series of phonetic or visual counters. By emphasizing the autonomy of the individual letter at the expense of the larger word, L. aims to destroy signification itself. Meaning is not only fragmented but totally effaced. In theory (and to some extent in practice) the principles underlying L. may be applied to all forms of human endeavor. While Letterists have become involved in such areas as politics, econom ics, erotology, and even pharmacy, their more sig nificant contributions have been in the realm of the arts. Of these, poetry and the plastic arts have provided the most fertile ground for experimen tation. L. originally focused on sound poetry (q.v. ) , combining letters i n various fashions according to their phonetic values, then visual poetry (q.v. ) , varying the size and shape ofletters t o produce the graphic equivalent of drawing. Usurping the tra ditional prerogatives of painting, graphic conven tions were placed at the service of the visual com position, and the concept of visual poetry gave way to that of visual art. An inherently interdisciplinary genre, L . j uxta poses elements such as letters, photographs, mis cellaneous signs, and pictorial images in an at tempt to transcend the limits of traditional representation. The linguistic sign is stripped of its linguistic function: letters are powerless to as sert themselves, and the whole field of signs is reduced to the status of random marks on the page. The only recourse left to the spectator is to focus on the letters' visual properties. Lacking verbal identity, the letters function exclusively as pictorial signs, with the result that their signifi cance derives according to the rules governing abstract art.-1. Isou, Intro. a une nouvelle poesie et a une nouvelle musique ( 1 947 ) , Les Champs de force de la peinture ( 1 964) ; M . Lemaitre, Qu 'est-ce que 1£ L. ? ( 1 954) , Bilan lettriste ( 1 955 ) , L. et hypergraphie ( 1 966) ; J.-P. Curtay, La Poesie lettriste ( 1 974) ; D . Seaman, Concrete Poetry i n France ( 1 981 ) ; VLang 1 7 ( 1 983)-valuable bibl. W.B. LEXIS. The term "I." (Gr. "diction") , was accepted as Eng. usage by the OED in the 2d ed. ( first citations 1 950, 1957 [Frye] ) and defined as "the diction or wording, in contrast to other elements, of a piece of writing. " "L." is a more useful term than "diction" because more neutral. Even where "the diction of poetry" is distinguished from "po etic diction" (esp. in the 1 8th-c. sense) , "diction" may elicit only the question of unusual lang. rather than all questions concerning the lang. of
poetry. L. in poetics is further to be differentiated from l . in linguistics ( OED, sense l .2 ) . The primary rule for thinking about 1 . i s that words in a poem always exist in relation, never in isolation: "there are no bad words or good words; there are only words in bad or good places" (Nowottny 32 ) . Otherwise, classitying l . can be a barren exercise, just as concentrating on isolated words can be barren for a beginning poet. Consis tency within the chosen area of 1 . is necessary for a well-made poem, and consistency is not necessar ily easy to achieve (Johnston) . Ascertaining the consistency of 1. in a poem enables the reader to hear moves outside that range (e.g. Kenner on Wordsworthian 1. in Yeats's "The Tower" [ Gnomon ( 1 958) ] ) . Great skill in l . implies that a poet knows words as she or he knows people (Hollander 228) , knows how "words have a stubborn life of their own" (Elton) , and knows that words need to be "at home" with the "complete consort dancing together" (Eliot, Little Gidding 21 6-25, the best modern poetic description of 1 . "that is right" ) . Some useful categories for studying 1 . may be drawn from the OED (preface on "General Knowl edge " ) , where vocabulary is classified as follows: ( 1 ) Identification, incl. usual spelling, pronuncia tion, grammatical part of speech, whether special ized, and status (e.g. rare, obsolete, archaic, collo quial, dialectal) ; (2) Morphology, including etymology, and subsequent word-formation, in cluding cognates in other languages; (3) Significa tion, which builds on other dictionaries and on quotations; and (4) Illustrative quotations, which show forms and uses, particular senses, earliest use (or, for obsolete words, latest use) , and conno tations. Studies of I . might test these categories for any given poem. It should be remem bered that in common usage "meaning" refers to definition under category (3) , but "meaning" as defined by the OED includes all four categories. And "mean ing" in poetry, fully defined, includes all functions of the word (see MEANING, POETIC ) . L. includes all parts of speech, not simply nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Emphasis on what is striking tends to isolate main parts of speech and imposes a dubious standard of vividness (though see ENARGEIA ) analogous to Arnold's critical method of reading "touchstones" (q .v. ) . Even arti cles matter (Browning sometimes drops them; cf. Whitman and Forster on passages to India) . Verb forms matter (seeJames Merrill's Recitative [ 1 986] 2 1 on the prevalence of first-person present active indicative) . The metaphorical force of, for exam ple, prepositions must be remembered as well as their double possibilities (e.g. "of," as in "the love of three oranges," a favorite device of Stevens ) . Different langs. offer different possibilities for plurisignation and ambiguity according to their grammatical structures (see SYNTAX, POETIC ) . Discussions of 1 . often tend more toward polem ics than poetics. It may be impossible to separate the two, but the effort is essential (Nowottny is
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LEXIS exemplary ) . Coleridge's dictum should be kept in mind: that every great and original author "has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed" (cited in Wordsworth 1 8 1 5) , a task that perforce includes polemics. Thus Eliot's at tacks on the Keats-Tennyson line of 1 . , esp. as developed by Swinburne, are better read generi cally in terms of charm and riddle (qq.v. ) , as Frye does ( 1 976; and see Welsh) , rather than in Eliot's terms. Similarly, readers and critics must be vigi lant so as not to read modern assumptions about l. back into older poetry. Thus, says Strang, "the reader of Spenser should approach the text as being in Spenser's lang., which is a very different matter from reading him as if he were writing modern Eng. with intermittent lapses into strange expressions which require glossing." Here critics must avail themselves of the results of historical scholarship on the contemporaneity or archaism (q.v.) of words-often a difficult assessment. There are only a few general questions concern ing I . , and they have remained for centuries. The most fruitful may be the more particular ones. One longstanding general issue is whether a spe cial 1. for poetry exists, or should exist. This in turn depends on what poetry is thought to be, or what type of poetry is in question. Of discussions in antiquity, those by Aristotle, Dionysius of Hali carnassus, Horace, and Pseudo-Longinus are the most important. Aristotle's few remarks remain pertinent: poetic l. should be both clear and strik ing, "ordinary words" should be used for clarity, and "unfamiliar terms, i.e. strange words, meta phors" should be used to make l. shine and to avoid l. that is inappropriately "mean." There should be a mixture of ordinary and unfamiliar uses of lang. (Poetics, tr. Bywater [ 1 909] ) . In the Middle Ages and early Ren., the issue of diction takes on particular importance as Med. Lat. gives way to the vernaculars. Dante's De vulgari eloquen tia (Of Eloquence in the Vernacular, ca. 1 303; tr. R. S. Haller [ 1 97 3 ] ) is the central text in the questione della lingua; Dante debates this same division at some length, setting 1. in the context of the disputes on the suitability of the vernaculars for elevated expression, on the biblical origins of lang., and on prosody. He judges the best 1 . to be "illustrious ," "cardinal," "courtly," and "curial" (i.e. well-balanced, as in a law-court) . In DVE 2.7, Dante gives detailed criteria for those words that are suitable for "the highest style." Some are as specific as those constraining Valery's well-known search for "a word that is feminine, disyllabic, includes P or F, ends in a mute syllable, and is a synonym for break or disintegration, and not learned, not rare. Six conditions-at least! " (Nowottny 2 ) . Here Dante classifies words i n the "noble vernacular" as "childish" (too elementary) , "feminine" (too soft in sound, and unelevated) , and "manly"; only the last type will serve for poetry. These last, in turn, are either "rustic" or "urban," and only the urban will serve for poetry. And of the
urban words, some are "smooth-haired or even oily" while others are "shaggy or even bristly." Only words that are "smooth-haired" or "shaggy" are suitable for the high style in poetry, as, for exam ple, in tragedy; words that are "oily" or "bristly" are "excessive in some direction." Dante sees that the main question, as so often, is appropriateness or decorum (q.v. ) , but not simply for a given type of writing. He also stresses appropriateness for the person using a given 1 . , a criterion unfamiliar to many current writers. Only those with sufficient natural talent, art, and learning should attempt the most demanding 1 . , says Dante, for 1. has its own implicit demands. Even today it remains true that the use of 1 . reflects a poet's judgment, for good or ill. The term "poetic diction" is strongly associated with 18th-c. poetry, largely because of Words worth's attacks on it in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads (3d ed., 1 802; see also the "Appendix on . . . Poetic Diction" and "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" [ 1 8 15] ) . Wordsworth remarks that "there will be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction," by which he means the epithets, periphrases, personifications, archaisms (qq.v. ) , and other conventionalized phrases all too often employed unthinkingly in Augustan poetry. As against Thomas Gray, for example, who wrote that "the lang. of the age is never the lang. of poetry" (Letter to R. West, April 1 742) , Wordsworth advocated using the "real lang. of men," esp. those in humble circumstances and rustic life. But Wordsworth's many conditions gov erning such "real lang." in poetry must be kept clearly in mind (e.g. men "in a state ofvivid sensa tion," the lang. adapted and purified, a selection only ) . Coleridge, with his superior critical mind, saw that "the lang. of real life" was an "equivocal ex pression" applying only to some poetry, and there in ways never denied (Biographia litera ria, chs. 14-22 ) . He rejected the argument of rusticity, asserting that the lang. of Wordsworth's rustics derives from a strong grounding in the lang. of the Eng. Bible (the Authorized Version, 161 1 ) and the liturgy or hymn-book. In any case, the best part of lang., says Coleridge, is not derived from objects but h'om "reflection on the acts of the mind itself." By "real ," Wordsworth actually means "ordinary" lang., the "lingua communis" (ef. OED, Pref. ) , and even this needs cultivation to become truly "com munis" (Coleridge cites Dante ) . Wordsworth's real object, Coleridge saw, was to attack assump tions about a supposedly necessary poetic diction. The debate is of great importance for 1 . It marks the shift from what Frye calls a high mimetic mode to a low mimetic one, a shift still governing the 1 . of poetry today. (In Fr. poetry, the shift comes a little later and is associated with Hugo [ 1 8 27 ] . ) Coleridge disagreed with Wordsworth's conten tion that "there neither is, nor can be any essential difference between the lang. of prose and metrical
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LEXIS composition." Though there is a "neutral style" common to prose and poetry, Coleridge finds it "a singular and noticeable fact . . . that a theory which would establish the lingua communis not only as the best, but as the only commendable style, should have proceeded from a poet, whose dic tion, next to that of Shakespeare and Milton, ap pears to me of all others the most individualized and characteristic." To be sure, some words in a poem may be in everyday use; but, he adds, "are those words in those places commonly employed in real life to express the same thought or outward thing? Are they the style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken words? No! nor are the modes of connections; and still less the breaks and transitions" (Biographica literaria, ch. 20) . In Cole ridge's modification of Wordsworth's well-inten tioned arguments, readers may still find essential principles applicable to questions of poetic 1 . The 20th c . has, in one sense, taken u p Words worth 's words, steadily removing virtually every restriction on diction. The 20th c. now generally bars no word whatever from the 1 . of poetry, at least in the Germanic and Romance langs. Strug gles over appropriate 1 . in the 19th c. included attacks on the romantics, Browning, and Whitman. Attempts by Bridges and others to domesticate Hopkins' extraordinary 1 . are well known. In the early 20th-c. , Edwardian critics with genteel no tions of poetry objected to Brooke writing about seasickness and Owen's disgust at the horrors of World War I (Stead) . Wordsworth's "real lang. of men" was twisted by some into attacks on any unusual l . whatsoever-difficult, local, learned a problem to this day, though now less from gen teel notions than egalitarian ones inappropriately extended to the 1 . of all poetry. Yet the 1 . of poetry may still be associated with the lang. of a certain class-see Tony Harrison's poems playing Stan dard Eng. against working-class Eng. But if poetry now generally admits all types of 1 . , it remains true that the 1 . of poetry-of the Bible, Shakespeare, and the ballads, for example-needs to be learned; otherwise most older poetry, as well as much contemporary, cannot be well read at all (Vendler 56) . The 1 . of the Authorized Version and of the Gr. and Lat. classics has been influential on Eng. poetry for centuries, and the manifold strategies and effects of allusion (q.v.) must not be overlooked. Virgil 's 1 . in eclogue, georgic, and epic was admired and imitated well past the Ren. (see I MITATION; INFLUENCE ) . Historical changes in the lang. make the use of good dictionaries mandatory. In Eng., the OED (both eds.) is the most generous and its quotations invaluable, but other dictionaries are also needed (e.g. of U.S. Eng., for etymology; see Kenner on Pound 's use of Skeat) . The elementary philologi cal categories of widening and narrowing, and raising and lowering, in meaning are useful. (Cf. "wanton," where solely modern senses must not be applied to Milton's use, or even as late as Bridges'
"Wanton with long delay the gay spring leaping cometh" ("April, 1885") ; "gay" is well known.) Hidden semantic and connotative changes must be esp. watched, along with favorite words in a given time (Miles) and key words whose meaning was assumed and so not defined (Becker) . The 1 . of some modern poets pays attention to historical linguistics, while that of others is largely syn chronic; readers should test. Etymologies are stories of origins. The etymolo gist cares whether they are true or false, but a poet need not (Ruthven) ; mythologies are for the poet as useful as histories. Philology may include cer tain assumptions about poetic 1. (see Barfield against Max Muller) . Etymologies may include histories of war and struggle (for nationalism in volves lang. just as class does ) . Poets may exploit the riches of etymology (see Geoffrey Hill's Mys tery of the Charity of Charles Peguy on Eng. and Fr. 1 . ) . Etymology may function as a "mode of thought" (Curtius) or as a specific "frame for trope" (see Hollander on Hopkins) or both. In vented or implied etymologies can also be useful ("silva" through Dante's well-known "selva" links by sound and sense with "salveo," "salvatio," etc . ) . Milton plays earlier etymological meaning against later meaning, such play functioning as a trope for the fallen state oflang.: the prelapsarian "savage" hill, for example, is closely connected to its Lat. root "silvaticus" and Eng. "silvan," but with post lapsarian "savage . . . obscur'd" solitude, the later meaning of "savage" as "barbaric" is implied (PL 4. 172, 9.1085 ) . Eng. is unusually accommodating, combining as it does both Latinate and Germanic words. Other important word-roots should also be noted (cf. the etymological appropriateness of "sherbet" in Eliot's 'Journey of the Magi" ) . L . may be considered along an axis of old to new, with archaism (q.v. ) at one end and innovation (neologism being one part) at the other. Archaism may be introduced to enlarge the 1 . of poetry, sometimes through native terms (Spenser, Hop kins) . Or it may be used for certain genres (e.g. literary imitations of the oral ballads) or for spe cific effects, ironic, allusive, or other. Innovation may remain peculiar to one poet or may enlarge the stock of the poetic lexicon. Neologisms (new coined words) tend now to be associated with novelty more than freshness, and sometimes with strained effects. The very word indicates they are not common currency. Some periods are condu cive to expanding I. in general (the mid 1 4th c . ; the late 16th c.) o r t o expanding I. in some areas (computer terms, nowadays, though they have yet to be entered in general poetic I . ) . Where poets d o not invent or resuscitate terms, they draw on vocabulary from different contempo raneous sources (see the OED categories ) . For eign, local, and dialectal words are noted below. The precision of terms drawn from such areas as theology, philosophy, or the Bible must not be underestimated, for controversy can center on one
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LEXIS word. Studies working outward from single words (e.g. Empson; Lewis; Barfield on "ruin") are valu able reminders of historical and conceptual sig nificance in 1 . Shakespeare has contributed most to the en largement of our stock of words; critics regularly note how often he provides the first example of a given word in the OED. His many mintings incl. adaptations from the stock of both Eng. (e.g. "lonely,"' presumably from Sidney's "loneliness") and other langs. ("monumental," from Lat. ) , ap parent inventions ("bump") , shifts in grammatical function ("control" as a verb rather than a noun) , and other strategies. His mastery of I. is seen above all in his boldness and innovation. He possesses easily the largest known vocabulary ofany poet (by some calculations, about 2 1 ,000 words, as against Milton's 8,000 ) , but it is his extraordinary use of so large a word-hoard (as against ordinary recog nition of a large reading or speaking vocabulary) that is so remarkable (Jespersen) . Most new words are now generally drawn from scientific or technical sources, though poetry makes comparatively little use of them. In the 1 8th c., poets could say that "Newton demands the Muse" (see Nicholson) , but poets today do not generally say that "Einstein demands the Muse." A. R. Ammons is one of the few modern poets exploiting the possibilities of new scientific 1 . e.g. "zygote" ( 1 89 1 , OED) rhymed with "goat"; "white dwarf' ( 1 924, OED 2d ed. ) ; and "black hole" ( 1 969 ) . Of the large stock of slang and colloquial expressions, many are evanescent or inert, though special uses may be effective. Shake speare's gift for introducing colloquial I. is a salu tary reminder not to reject colloquialisms per se. Along the axis ofold to new, the most interesting question is why and how some 1 . begins to sound dated. Archaisms and innovations alike are easy to hear. So also is the 1 . we designate as, say, 1 8th-c. or Tennysonian or Whitmanian. But what is it that distinguishes the poetic 1 . of a generation ago, and why do amateur poets tend to use the 1 . of their poetic grandparents? The aging of words or the passing of their claim on our allegiance is of con tinuing interest to poets as part of the diachronic aspect of their art. Different types of poetry require different lexi cal praxis, though such requirements vary accord ing to time and place. Oral poetry (q.v.) makes use of stock phrases or epithets (q .v.) cast into formu lae (see FORMULA ) . Some of Homer's epithets became renowned, e.g., "poluphloisbos" ("Ioud roaring") for the sea (see Amy Clampitt's echo of this) . Compound epithets in OE poetry are known by the ON term "kenning" (q .v.) and sometimes take the form of a riddle. Different genres also require different praxis (Fowler 7 1 ) , a require ment much relaxed today. Epic (q .v.) required a high-style 1 . , as did the sublime (qq.v.; see Monk ) . Genres o f the middle and low style drew from a different register. Satire (q .v. ) usually works in the
middle style but allows much leeway, esp. inJuve nalian as against Horatian satire. Any 1 . may be come banal-e.g. that of the 1 6th-c. sonneteers or that of some pastoral (q.v.) writers (cf. Coleridge, Letters, 9 Oct. 1 794: "The word 'swain' . . . conveys too much of the Cant of Pastoral" ) . Connotation (q.v.) or association is governed partly by genre, and is all-important for 1 . L. also depends partly o n place. The largest division in Eng. is between Great Britain and the U.S.A., but poetry from elsewhere (Ireland, Af rica, Asia, Australasia, Canada, the Caribbean) also shows important differences. Establishing a distinctive poetic style in a new country with an old lang. presents peculiar problems which novelty in itself will not solve. Within a country, 1 . will vary locally, and poets can make memorable uses of local terms (Yeats of "perne" in "Sailing to Byzan tium," Eliot of "rote" in The Dry Salvages; Whitman uses native Amerindian terms) . The question of dialect shades into this. Burns and Hardy draw on local and dialectal words. Hopkins' remarkable 1 . derives from current lang., dialectal and other, as well as older words; a few (e.g. "pitch") have specific Hopkinsian usage (see Milroy) . Foreign words, a special case, work along a scale of assimi lation, for standard 1 . includes many words origi nally considered foreign. Considerable use of for eign 1 . (apart from novelties like macaronic verse [q.v. ] ) implies a special contract with the reader, at least in societies unaccustomed to hearing more than one lang. L. may also vary according to class (see above) . It is still a matter of dispute how far it varies according to gender. Interpretive categories are numerous, and read ers should be aware ofthem as such; even taxono mies are interpretive. Beyond the categories al ready mentioned, 1 . may be judged according to the degree of "smoothness" (Tennyson as against Browning is a standard example; see Frye 1957) , "smoothness" (recollect Dante above ) centering on the large and important question of sound in I. (cf. Seamus Heaney on Auden: "the gnomic clunk of Anglo-Saxon phrasing . . . pulled like a harrow against the natural slope of social speech and iambic lyric" [ The Government of the Tongue ( 1 989) 124] ) . Or I . may be judged by the degree of difficulty (Browning, Hopkins, Eliot, Stevens) , though once-difficult 1 . can become familiar. Strangeness in 1 . can contribute to the strangeness sometimes thought necessary for aesthetic effect ( Barfield) or for poetry itself (Genette, arguing with Jean Cohen, also compares the ostranenie of the Rus. Formalists, and the lang. of a state of dreaming ) . Some poets are known for difficult or strange 1 . (e.g. Spenser, the metaphysical poets, Whitman, Browning) but readers should also note consummate skill in quieter effects of 1 . (e.g. Frost, Larkin, Bishop ) . A distinctive praxis i n 1 . i s part of what makes a poet familiar, and the 1 . of an individual oeuvre may be studied in itself (see Fowler 128-29 ) . The
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LIED discipline of the art of 1 . is still best apprehended by studying the comments and revisions of good poets. See also ARCHAISM; AUREATE DICTION; DENOTA TION AND CONNOTATION; EPITHET; PERIPHRASIS; POETIC LICENSE; SYNTAX, POETIC. GENERAL STUDIES: O . Elton, "The Poet's Dic tionary," E&S 14 ( 1 929) ; C. Becker, The Heavenly City of the 1 8th-C. Philosophers ( 1 932 ) , esp. 47-63 on key words; O. Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the Eng. Lang., 9th ed. ( 1 938 ) ; W. Empson, The Structure of Complex Words ( 1 95 1 ) ; D . Davie, Purity ofDiction in Eng. Verse ( 1 952 ) ; Curtius; B. Groom, The Diction of Poetry from Spenser to Bridges ( 1 955) ; Frye; C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words ( 1 960) ; W. Nowottny, The Lang. Poets Use ( 1 962) -essential reading;]. Miles, Eras and Modes in Eng. Poetry, 2d ed. ( 1 964 ) ; K. K. Ruthven, "The Poet as Etymolo gist," CQ 1 1 ( 1 969) ; O. Barfield, Poetic Diction, 3d ed. ( 1 973)-essential reading; F. W. Bateson, Eng. Poetry and the Eng. Lang., 3d ed. ( 1973) ; A. Sherbo,
Eng. Poetic Diction from Chaucer to Wordsworth ( 1 975 ) ; N. Frye, "Charms and Riddles," Spiritus Mundi ( 1976); A. Welsh, Roots of Lyric ( 1 978 ) ; M . Borroff, Lang. and the Poet ( 1979) ; G . Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse (tr. 1982 ) , esp. 75-102; G. Johnston, "Diction in Poetry," CL 97 ( 1 983) ;
Fowler-excellent on 1. and genre;J. Boase-Beier, Poetic Compounds ( 1 987) ; C. Ricks, The Force of Poetry ( 1 987) ; A. Ferry, The Art of Naming ( 1 988 ) ; ]. Hollander, Melodious Guile ( 1 988 ) ; H . Vendler, The Music of What Happens ( 1 988 ) . SPECIALIZED STUDIES: S. H . Monk, The Sublime ( 1 935) ; V. L. Rubel, Poetic Diction in the Eng. Ren. ( 1 94 1 ) ; M. H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse ( 1 946) ; ]. Arthos, The Lang. of Natural Description in 1 8th-C. Poetry ( 1 949) ; M. M. Mahood, Shake speare 's Wordplay ( 1957 ) ; Wimsatt and Brooks, ch. 1 6; A. Ewert, "Dante's Theory of Diction," MHRA 31 ( 1 959) ; C. K. Stead, The New Poetic ( 1 964) ; G. Tillotson, Augustan Poetic Diction ( 1 964) ; W. ]. B . Owen, Wordsworth as Critic ( 1969) ; H . Kenner, The Pound Era ( 1 971 ) , esp. 94-19 1 ;J. Milroy, The Lang. of G. M. Hopkins ( 1 977 ) ; N. Hilton, Literal lmagi nation: Blake's Vision of Words ( 1 983) ; M . H . Abrams, "Wordsworth and Coleridge o n Diction and Figures," The Correspondent Breeze ( 1 984) ; R. W. V. Elliott, Thomas Hardy 's Eng. ( 1 984) ; E. Cook,
Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens ( 1 988 ) ; C. Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice ( 1 988) R. O. A. M . Lyne, Words and the Poet ( 1 989)-Virgil; B. M. H. Strang, "Lang.," Spenser Encyc., ed. A. C.
Hamilton et al. ( 1 990) .
E.C.
LIED. See SONG. LIGHT VERSE. The term I. v. is an omnium gatherum; although it once referred principally to vers de societe, its meaning in the 20th c. includes a
wide variety of verse: folk poetry, nonsense verse (q.v. ) , ribald verse, comic poems, and kitsch. lethe earlier meaning of the term was too narrow, it has
now been stretched so far that it has lost its shape. While the word "light" has been applied to lit. or music to mean "requiring little mental effort; amusing; entertaining" since the 16th c. ( OED) , the first serious attempt to define the term I. v. came in the 19th c . , when Frederick Locker-Lamp son compiled the anthology Lyra elegantiarum ( 1 867) . An earlier anthology, Thomas D ' Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy ( 1 71 9 ) , is considered the first I. v. collection in Eng. As the title implies, Locker-Lampson was less interested in comic verse than in vers de societe, verse distinguished by its wit and polish and intended to amuse polite society. In the 20th c., a series of anthologists broadened the term to include poetry that is homely or comic. In The Oxford Book of L. v. ( 1 938) , w. H . Auden held that I. v. meant any poetry that is "simple, clear, and gay." He included performed poems, nonsense verse, and poetry of ordinary life; I. v. was no longer aristocratic. While Auden was influential, however, not everyone followed his lead. In 1 941 Michael Roberts explicitly distin guished between comic verse, and "I. v. or vers de societe." In 1958, Richard Armour defined I. v. as "poetry written in the spirit of play," then added that I. v. "can safely be limited to what is called vers de societe: humorous or witty verse that comments critically on contemp. life. It is usually to some degree funny." Such anthologists as G. Grigson and W. Harmon have extended the definition of I. v. even further to include bad poetry, for example, or Cole Porter's lyrics. Matters have been further complicated by Kingsley Amis, who in the New Oxford Book of Eng. L. V. ( 1 978) argued that the best I. v. is necessarily conservative; in this he followed a view set forth by D. Macdonald in his 1960 parody anthology. One result of this widening and blurring of meaning is that the term I. v. is sometimes used pejoratively to mean trivial or unimportant poetry. Because some critics now include the magnifi cently dreadful verse of such writers as William McGonigal or Julia Moore, the term is also some times used to mean any bad verse. Yet no one would dismiss Chaucer's tales, Jonson's epigrams, Pope's The Rape of the Lock, Byron's Don Juan, Rossetti's Goblin Market, or Eliot's cats-all of which find a place in both standard anthols. and in collections of I. v. Thus the term seems, how ever, to have retained favorable connotations for sophisticated readers who know enough about what is "weighty" to recognize and enjoy what is "light." Some critics fear this audience may be diminishing. Grigson says that nonsense verse "is in danger now because it does demand an ac cepted idea of the nature of verse in general, a widely shared idea of the ways in which poetry works." Many varieties of I. v. depend on whether one defines the term principally by reference to tech nical virtuosity or by reference to content. Among the important types of!. v. as defined by technique
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LIMERICK are limericks, clerihews, and double daclyls (qq.v. ) . The limerick is the oldest of these; the clerihew is the most anarchic, with its formalized irregularity; the double dactyl has attracted distin guished poets. Arguably the Japanese form of senryil also fits in this category. If one does not insist on the comic nature of I. V., then other polished fixed-term poems would be included: ballads, double ballade, rondeau, sestina, and tri olet (qq.v. ) . Finally, there is poetry distinguished by clever use of certain techniques: verse with interlocking rhymes like Edward Lear's limericks; acrostics (q.v. ) like Jonson's "Argument" to Volpone; verse with extensive alliteration or asso nance (qq.v. ) , as was occasionally practiced in the Middle Ages-e.g. poems where every word in the line begins with the same letter. (A modern exam ple of alliterative ingenuity is the poem by Alaric Watts which begins "An Austrian army awfully arrayed / Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade" and proceeds through the alphabet.) There is also visual poetry, pattern poetry, and concrete poetry (qq.v.) such as Lewis Carroll's "Mouse's Tail" in Alice in Wonderland. In all such verse the sophisti cation of the craft-ingenuousness, skill, and pol ish-is apparent, the technique serving as foil to the content. But the problem with defining I. v. solely on technical grounds is that it then seems to include poetry not usually considered light. George Herbert's "Easter Wings" is shaped as craftily as Carroll's "Mouse's Tail," while Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" plays with words in much the same pun ning way as many limericks do. But neither is I. v. If one turns from technique to content, how ever, other problems arise. Auden focuses on con tent in his three categories of I. v.: "poetry written for performance, to be spoken or sung before an audience"; "poetry intended to be read, but hav ing for its subject-matter the everyday social life of its period or the experiences of the poet"; "such nonsense poetry as , through its properties and technique, has a general sense of appeal." His first category includes folk poetry such as riddles, folk songs, or the songs of Thomas Moore or Ira Gershwin. Yet one might object that all poetry is intended to be spoken to an audience, even if the audience is the reader speaking to himself. The lyrics W. S. Gilbert wrote for Arthur Sullivan's music are hardly folksongs, although clearly I. v. Furthermore, the boundary between folksongs and popular songs or between popular songs and light opera is no longer clear, as the careers of Bob Dylan and Stephen Sondheim demonstrate. Auden's category of nonsense verse, however, is uncontroversial. for nonsense is among the oldest of I. v. As Grigson points out, "The moment lit. develops, nonsense lit. must be expected as both a counter-genre and an innocent game." One of the few points on which most critics agree is that I. v. requires the formal confines of verseform. If one transmogrifies a limerick or dou-
ble dactyl into prose, one destroys part of its es sence. Nonsense verse cast into prose may retain its humor, but it is no longer I. v. The poet Ogden Nash illustrates this point: he regularly stretches metrical forms with his irregular line length, yet his work depends on the reader's recognizing the rules he violates. In "Very Like a Whale," for example, his mock-attack on the lang. of poets is made more effective by the insistent rhymes nes tled among the aggressively antimetrical lines. If the complaint were paraphrased in prose, it would be prosaic in every sense ofthat word, but in verse it amuses, felicitously. Auden's other category is verse rooted in every day life. CI. Gr. offers the verse inscriptions-epi grams and epitaphs-collected in The Gr. Anthol ogy; today one might include clever graffiti. Occasional verse (q.v. ) would also fit in this cate gory, from Thomas Gray's "On a Favourite Cat Drowned ina Tub of Goldfishes" to William McGo nigle's poem on the beaching of the great Tay whale. Clearly the slighter the occasion, the lighter the verse. And because their targets are quotidian, satire, burlesque, and mock-heroic (qq.v.) could also be considered I. v. One might of course object that mere homeliness or topicality does not in itself make a work I. v., that not all comic verse is light, and that not ali I. v. is comic or vers de societe. While most readers recognize I. v. as poetry that amuses by reflecting an aspect of their everyday lives in a clever way, probably none would agree on a body of works that meet a univo cal set of criteria defining them as I. v.; rather, the works merit inclusion in the class by what Wittgen stein calls "family resemblances." The criteria are diverse and overlap, so that not every poem need meet every criterion. ANTHOLOGIES: Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, ed. T. D 'Urfey ( 1 71 9 ) ; Lyra elegan tiarum, ed. F. Locker-Lampson ( 1 867 ) ; Speculum Amantis, Musa Proterva, both ed. A. H. Bullen ( 1 888, 1 889) ; A Vers de Societe Anthol., ed. C. Wells ( 1900 ) ; Oxford Book of L. v., ed. W. H. Auden ( 1938 ) ; Faber Book of Comic Verse, ed. M. Roberts ( 1 942 ) ; What Cheer, ed. D. McCord ( 1945 ) ; The Worldly Muse, ed. A. J. M. Smith (1951 ) -serious I. v.; Penguin Book of Comic and Curious Verse, ed. J. M. Cohen ( 1 952); Silver Treasury of L. v. , ed. O. Williams ( 1 957) ; Parodies: An Anthol., ed. D. Mac donald ( 1960) ; New Oxford Book of Eng. L. v., ed. K. Amis ( 1978 ) ; Faber Book ofEpigrams & Epitaphs ( 1 978) , Faber Book of Nonsense Verse ( 1 980) , Oxford Book of Satirical Verse ( 1 980) , all ed. G. Grigson; Oxford Book of Am. L. v., ed. W. Harmon ( 1 979) ; The Tygers of Wrath, ed. X . J. Kennedy ( 1981 ) ; Norton Book of L. V., ed. R. Baker ( 1986) . GENERAL: L. Untermeyer, Play in Poetry ( 1938) ; R. Armour, Writing L. v., 2d ed. ( 1 958) ; T. Au garde, Oxford Guide to Word Games ( 1 984) . F. T. LIMERICK. The most popular form of comic or light verse (q.v. ) in Eng., often nonsensical and
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LINE frequently bawdy: in a famous joke, when Bennett Cerf, then head of Random House, was asked how they chose the winner of their I. contest, he said it was simple: they threw out all that were indecent, and the winner was the one that was left. The verseform of the I. is very exacting: 5 lines of accentual verse (q.v.) rhyming aabba, the first, second, and fifth lines having 3 stresses, the third and fourth 2; the rhythm is effectually anapestic or amphibrachic. The first syllables of each line (and unstressed syllables elsewhere in the lines, though less frequently so) may be omitted. The pattern, once caught, is unforgettable (slashes denote stresses, and xs weak syllables ) : (x) (x) (x) (x)
X X X X /X
xI I I I
X X X (X) X
XIXXI XIXXI XI XI X / X X /.
It may be that the third and fourth lines are actually hemistichs, so that the form is actually 4 lines of 3-3-4-3 stresses, i.e. the form of hymn meter known as Short Measure, though the rhythm is not the same. Also possible is that lines 1-2 are hemistichs of a 6-stress long line and lines 3-5 the sections of a 7-stresss long line, the long-line coup let having 6 + 7 stresses, i.e. Poulter's Measure (q.v. ) , though again, the rhythm differs (see BALLAD METER ) .
The I. is unique in that it is the only Eng. stanza form used exclusively for light verse. It was popu larized by Edward Lear (A Book of Nonsense [ 1 846] ) ; however, the etymology of the term "I.," never used by Lear, is unknown. Theories concern ing its origin range from the belief that it was an old Fr. form brought to the Irish town of Limerick in 1 700 by returning veterans of the Fr. war, to the theory that it originated in the nursery rhymes (q.v. ) pub. as Mother Goose's Melodies ( 1 79 1 ) . What is certain is that the I. may be found in a volume entitled The History ofSixteen Wonderful Old Women ( 182 1 ) and in Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen ( 1 82 2 ) , possibly by R. S. Sharpe. Lear cites the latter volume as having given him the idea for his Is. Whatever its origin, the I. has a secure place in the history of Eng. verse. In the wake of Lear, such notable authors as Tennyson, Swinburne, Kipling, Stevenson, and W. S. Gilbert attempted the form, and by the beginning of the 20th c. it had become a fashion. The chief ten dency in the modern I. has been the use of the final line for surprise or witty reversal, in place of the simply repeated last line of Lear's day. See also CLERIHEW; NONSENSE VERSE.-L . Reed, The Com plete L. Book ( 1 925) ; Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes, ed. I. and P. Opie ( 1 951 ) ; A. Liede, Dichtung als Spiel, v. 2 ( 1963 ) ; W. S. Baring-Gould, The Lure of the L. ( 1972) ; The L.: 1 700 Examples ( 1 970, 1 974) , The New L. ( 1 97 7 ) , both ed. G. Legman; C. Bibby, The Art of the L. ( 1 978) ; G. N. Belknap, "Hist. of the L.," PBSA 75 ( 1981 ) ; Penguin Book of Ls., ed.
E. O. Parrott ( 1 984) .
T.V.F.B.; A.PR.
LINE (Sanskrit piida, Gr. stichos [q.v. ] , Lat. versus "verse") . The concept of the I. is fundamental to the concept of poetry itself, for the I. is the differ entia of verse and prose: throughout most of re corded history, poetry has been cast in verse, and verse set in Is. (see VERSE AND PROSE ) . That is, verse is cast in sentences and Is. , prose in sentences and paragraphs. The sense in prose flows continu ously, while in verse it is segmented so as to in crease information density and perceived struc ture. It is impossible that there could be verse not set in Is. It is possible there could be poetry not set in Is., if one defines poetry in terms of content or compression of content; and certainly there are hybrid forms such as rhythmical prose (see PROSE RHYTHM ) and the prose poem (q.v. ) . But we must assume that the preponderance of the world's poetry has been cast in verse precisely to take advantage of those resources which verse-for which I . is a virtual metonym-has to offer (see PROSODY ) .
Structure. Readers and auditors of poetry per ceive the I. as a rhythmical unit and a unit of structure. As a unit of measure (q.v. ) , it is linked to its neighbors to form higher-level structures, and as a structure itself, it is built of lower-level units. In metrical verse the I. is usually segmented into elements-hemistichs (q.v. ) , measures (q.v.) or metra (see METRON ) , or feet (see FOOT)-but it is the I. which generates these intralinear units and not vice versa. Ls. are not made simply by defining some unit of measure such as a foot and then stringing units together, because the units are susceptible of differential constraint at differ ing points in the I . The I., that is, has a shape or contour, and a structure as a whole, over and above the sum of its constituent elements. In various verse systems these elements are bound together in differing ways, such as structural alliteration in OE. It is true that, in the handbooks, meters are usually specified by the type of foot and number of feet per I.-i.e. monometer (a I. of 1 foot) , dimeter (2 feet) , trimeter ( 3 feet) , tetrameter (4 feet) , pentameter (5 feet) , hexameter (6 feet) , heptameter ( 7 feet; see the separate entries on each of these) . But these simplistic descriptors do not capture the internal dynamics of a I . form such as the Gr. hexameter. How do readers and auditors recognize the I. as a rhythmical unit? In isometric (q.v.) verse, meter measures out a constant spacing, either of a cer tain number of events or a certain span of time (depending on one's theory of meter) which the mind's internal counter tracks in cognition; meter also provides predictable internal structure. The I. can also be bound together by syntactic and rhetorical structures such as parallelism and an tithesis (qq.v.) which have their own internal logic of completion; these structures may or may not be threaded into meter: in biblical Heb. verse they
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LINE are, in Whitman they are not. Line End. But probably the most common strat egy is to mark the end of the I., since without some sort of signal, we would not know where one I. ended and a second one began. Traditionally the signal has been thought to be a "pause" (q.v. ) , though not a metrical (I.-internal) one but rather some kind of rhetorical or per formative one. ( Some have suggested that its duration is some thing like "half a comma.") But this claim derives not from prosody (verse theory ) , or from claims made in poetics (q.v.) about the nature or onto logical status of poetry as sound (q .v. ) , but rather from assumptions put in play about performance (q.v. ) , about the reading aloud of verse. On this account, performers of poetry recognize the I. as a unit (by seeing it as such when read from the page) and mark its end in delivery with a linguistic pause or paralinguistic cue such as elongation of the final syllable. Auditors hear these cues, which cross or ignore syntax, as boundary markers. An alternative conception of the signal, which depends rather on assumptions about the status of poetry as a visual text on a page, is "white space to the right of the I." This is perceived in reading, is irrelevant to performance, and may by taken not only as a terminal marker but even as a part of structure (see below ) . But both these answers specify phenomena after the I . ends. A more powerful conception of the signal, not committed to any doctrine about either performance or text, would be, "some kind of marker," not after the final syllable of the I. but in the final syllables of the I. In Gr. and Lat. poetry, where the meter is quantitative, auditors could recognize the ends of Is. because they were marked by an alteration in the meter, either an increase in the formality in its closing syllables, a cadence (q.v. ) , or unexpected shortening at I.-end, eatalexis (q.v. ) . In the hexameter, for example, the I. closes on a spondee-two heavy syllables in suc cession-rather than a dactyl, a closural pattern which is obligatory. In post-CI. verse, I.-ends have been most often marked by some distinctive sound echo, chiefly rhyme (q.v. ) , though important also are the several other strategies of sound-repetition which approach rhyme (are rhyme-like) or ex ceed rhyme: homoeoteleuton, assonance, identi cal rhyme (qq.v. ) . Short Is. in particular seem to demand the support of rhyme, else they will be mistaken for the cola that are parts of longer Is.; this is a major factor in the devel. ofthe lyric (q .v. ) . Also important are strategies for end-of-I. semantic emphasis: Richard Wilbur, for example, some times employs the strategy of putting important words at I.-end, words which may offer an elliptical synopsis or ironic commentary on the argument of the poem. All these strategies, taken together as devices for end-fixing, i.e. marking or weighting I.-ends so as to highlight or foreground them per ceptually, constitute one of the most distinctive categories of metrical universals, conspicuous in a
wide range of verse systems. The phenomenon of extra syllables at I.-end is fairly extensive and is taken account of in several prosodies: I. endings are classified depending on whether the last stress falls on the final syllable of the I. (a "masculine" ending) or the penultimate one (a "feminine" one; see MASCULINE AND FEMI NINE) . The distinction dates from at least Occitan poetry, and may date from ancient Gr. Classifying types of I. endings was also one of the central "metrical tests" which several British and Ger. Shakespeare scholars of the later 19th c. hoped would yield a definitive chronology of the plays. Spedding in 1 847 suggested the "pause test," which tabulated frequencies of stopped vs. enjam bed Is. Bathurst ( 1 85 7 ) , Craik, and Hertzberg discussed "weak endings"; Ingram ( 1 874) distin guished types of these as "light" endings (enjam bed Is. ending on a pronoun, verb, or relative bearing only secondary stress, plus a slight pause) and "weak" (enjambment on a proclitic, esp. a conjunction or preposition, allowing no pause at all-see Brogan for citations ) . But statistical evi dence which is purely internal is vulnerable to textual criticism and, where not supported by other types of evidence, vulnerable altogether. Line and Syntax. The syllables of the I. are the arena for deploying meter or rhythm; they are also of course the ground of syntax and sense: these two structures overwrite the same space. Some verse forms regularly align I. units with sense units; such Is. are known as end-stopped. The ("closed") heroic couplet (q.v. ) , for example, ends the first I. at a major syntactic break and the second at a full stop (sentence end) . But few meters do so every I . : the demands of narrative or discursive continuation are simply too strong. Systematic contrast or oppo sition of I. units and sense units (I. end and sen tence flow) is the complex phenomenon known as enjambment (q.v. ) . In enjambed verse, syntax pulls the reader through I.-end into the next I., while the prosodic boundary bids pause if not stop. In reading, the mind makes projections, in that pause, based on what has come before, about what word is most likely to appear at the beginning of the next I . , expectations which a masterful poet will deliberately thwart, forcing rapid rereading: in Milton such error is the emblem of man's post lap sari an state. Certainly in modern times, at least, it has been thought that one of the chief functions of I. division is to stand in tension with or counterpoint to the divisions of grammar and sense, effecting, in the reader's processing of the text, multiple simultaneous pattern recognition. Most of the time this results in heightened aes thetic pleasure, but it may also work in reverse: in Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "We Real Cool," the severe and reiterated rupture of subjects from predicates across I.-end dislocates sentences, em phasizing subjects (pronouns) severed from ac tion (verbs) , generating extreme discomfort. Even in enjambed verse, the word at I.-end, which the
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LINE French call the contre-rejet (see REJET) , receives some sort of momentary foregrounding or empha sis. This is not a matter of the word marking the end but of the end marking the word. Aural Line and Visual Line. Since the advent of writing in Greece, ca. 750 B.C. , and certainly since the advent of printing in the West, ca. 1 450 A.D., the I . has had a visual reality in poetry as seen, but long before that time and without interruption throughout print culture it has continued to have an auditory reality in poetry as heard. This gives the I.-poetry itself-a fundamentally duality, in the eye and ear, as seen/heard ( Hollander) , a duality complicated, however, by the appearance offree verse (q.v. ) . Arguments about the historical or ontological precedence of the aural over the visual I. therefore miss the point: these forms are, for us, now, both realities; the important question is how they interaffect each other-whether, for example, the break at I.-end demands an auditory pause in performance. Levertov has argued that there must be linkages of this sort, so that print texts of poems are in fact "accurate scorings" of them as read aloud. Margaret Atwood concurs when she calls the I. "a visual indication of an aural unit." Line Forms. Up to the advent of free verse, 1. forms and -lengths are mainly determined by genre specification, so that a poet who wishes to write, say, in elegiac distichs (hexameter plus pen tameter) knows or learns, by reading her prede cessors, what forms have already been tried, for what kinds of subjects, with what kinds of tone, and with what success. In metrical verse, that is, 1. forms were mainly determined by history and con vention, by the interplay of tradition and the indi vidual talent; and the prosody which generated them was aurally based. Free verse, by contrast, foregrounded visual space and posited the I . within a two-dimensional matrix where blanks, white spaces, drops, gaps, vectors, and dislocations became possible. This is not to say that free verse abandoned aurality, for some poets, such as the Beats, Olson with his "projective verse," and the proponents of Sound Poetry (q.v. ) and "Text Sound," continued to speak programmatically of the I. as based on the energy of the breath. It is only to say that visual prosody (q.v.) was made central to free verse at least in claim, and if aural prosody was at the same time not dispensed with, no poet seemed to wish or prosodist to be able, at least for the first century of free-verse practice, to give a coherent account ofthe relations of the one to the other. To think, however, that the free-verse I. can function solely as visual prosody, without the re sources of aural prosody to aid it, is to commit what Perl off calls the "linear fallacy," making some free verse indistinguishable from prose chopped up into Is. The sonic and rhythmic devices of aural prosody offer poetry effects not available to prose: and if these are to be discarded, visual prosody
must provide others, else the distinction between prose and verse collapses. One might respond that several Eng. poets-Jonson and Pope, to name but two--wrote out drafts of their poems first in prose before versifying them; and verse translators rou tinely work through intermediary prose versions. But this shows simply that they wished to clarify the argumentative or narrative structure first to get it out of the way, so as to concentrate on poetic effects-else why versify at all. Whether or not visual prosody has been able to generate other devices, and whether or not free verse in fact abandons aural prosody, are disputed questions. It is often held that visual prosody can do much with "placing"-i.e. framing or high lighting words or phrases by isolating them as Is. The I. is thus reduced to the measure, though in a differing sense (if that is possible ) , since mea sure traditionally implied regularity (see VARI ABLE FOOT) . But probably few would hold that the visual I. does not affect the aural I. at all. Levertov says that the free-verse I .-break affects both rhy thm and intonation: it is both "a form of punctua tion additional to the punctuation that forms part of the logic of completed thoughts," which intro duces "an a-logical counter-rhythm into the logi cal rhythm of syntax," and also, more importantly, a device which affects "the melos of the poem" by altering pitch patterns, since "a pitch pattern change does occurwith each variation oflineation" (italics original ) . If so, then linkage between the two prosodies is preserved . Again, the full demon stration of these matters still remains to be given. But what, after all, is the status of the visual I.? In the days of the mechanical typewriter, I.-end seemed a right-hand terminus: the next I. could only begin by the long carriage return to the left hand margin and down. But on the computer, we learned, Is. are stored in a file in one continuous row of characters, with a special character be tween each I. which is recognized by the computer as a command to return to the left-hand margin for formatting on screen (i.e. on the page) . This shows that the visual display of the Is. was merely epiphe nomenal-a function of the medium of presenta tion-not inherent to the nature of the thing itself. Is this an analogy for cognition? We know that, in perception, Is. are processed sequentially. The I. is a frame, and frames are arrayed seriatim. I n cognition, however, their semantic content i s rear ranged in short-term memory so as to make possi ble synchral (aserial ) recognition of information. The articulation (jointure) of the frames one to the next is subject to some flexibility (thus extra metrical syllables at the end of one I. and inver sions at the beginning of the next are allowed) ; at the same time, there is good evidence that the ends of the frames are usually more highly con strained than their beginnings, a fact which sup ports the frames as perceptual units, not mere arbitrary sectionings of the Heraclitean flow. It is these articulated frames across which sentences
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LINGUISTICS AND POETICS are stretched to make the distinctive discourse which is verse. See now FREE VERSE; METER; PROSODY; STANZA; STiCHOS; VERSE AND PROSE; VERSIFICATION; VIS UAL PROSODY. C. A. Langworthy, "Verse-Sentence Patterns in Eng. Poetry," PQ 7 ( 1 928) ; ] . S. Diekhoff, "Termi nal Pause in Milton's Verse," SP 32 ( 1 935 ) ; A. Oras, "Echoing Verse Endings in Paradise Lost," So. Atlantic Studies S. E. Leavitt ( 1953 ) ; C. L. Steven son, "The Rhythm of Eng. Verse,"JAAC28 ( 1 970) ; D. Crystal, " Intonation and Metrical Theory," TPS ( 1 97 1 ) ; C. Ricks, "Wordsworth," EIC 2 1 ( 1 97 1 ) ; B. Stablein, "Versus," MGG, 1 3 . 1 5 1 9-23; H. McCord, "Breaking and Entering," and D. Laferriere, "Free and Non-Free Verse," Lang&S 10 ( 1 977) ; ] . Lot man, The Structure of the Artistic 1ext (tr. 1 977) , ch. 6; D. Levertov, "On the Function of the L.," ChR 30 ( 1 979) ; Epoch 29 ( 1 980) , 1 6 1 ff.-symposium; M. Perloff, "The Linear Fallacy," GaR 35 ( 1 981 ) , response in 36 ( 1 9 82 ) ; Brogan; ] . C. Stalker, "Reader Expectations and the Poetic L.," Lang&S 1 5 ( 1 982) ; P. P. Byers, "The Auditory Reality of the Verse L.," Style 17 ( 1 983) ; R. Bradford, '''Verse Only to the Eye'?; L. Endings in Paradise Lost," EIC 33 ( 1983) ; S. A. Keenan, "Effects ofChunking and L. Length on Reading Efficiency," VisLang 1 8 ( 1 984) ; The L . i n Postmodern Poetry, e d . R . Frank and H. Sayre ( 1 988). T.V.F.B. LINE ENDINGS. See LINE; MASCULINE AND FEMI NINE. LINGUISTICS AND POETICS. We are concerned here with the two senses of the term "poetics" (q.v. ; hereafter p.) which have been developed since about 1 960: p. as a theory of the essential property of lit., "literariness"; and p. as the theoretical or systematic study of the texts, and genres of texts, which fall under the category of lit. The intellec tual bases for the conjunction of!. and p. were laid in Switzerland and in Russia in the early years of this century by the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, reconstructed by two of his Geneva students from their notes of his lectures and pub. in 1 9 1 6 as Cours de linguistique generaIe (see STRUC TURALISM ) ; by the aesthetic theory of the Rus. Formalists (see RUSSIAN FORMALISM ) , articulated most memorably in Victor Shkl6vsky's essay "Art as Technique" ( 1 924) ; and by the narrative analy sis of Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale ( 1 928 ) , which is procedurally relevant to poetry as well as to narrative in offering a model for the application of I. to poetry (see PLOT ) . But the period of greatest activity in I. and p. began in the 1 9 60s, when these works became available in translation-Saussure (Eng. tr. 1 959), Shkl6vsky and the Formalists (Eng. and Fr. trs. 1 965 ) , Propp ( Fr. 1 957, Eng. 1 958 ) . The climate in I. in the 1 9 60s was one of great ambition and confidence, and p. was blessed with the attention of some creative thinkers, notably Roman Jakobson and
Roland Barthes; the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, adapting Propp's model for the structural analysis of myth (q.v. ) , was also important in showing the way for one kind of linguistic analysis of lit. The 1 960s saw the birth of what came to be known as "structuralist p." (see Culler) , embodying general theory of lit. and also linguistic theories of both poetry and narrative as genres, with the devel. of!inguistic methodologies for analysis of the genres. This period moreover saw the foundation of a more pragmatic, less theo retical discipline of "stylistics" (q.v.) or "linguistic crit." devoted to the linguistic analysis of literary texts. Citing the Formalists and Jakobson as his authorities, Tzvetan Todorov, the Fr. translator of the Formalists, argued that the business of p. was not the crit. or interp. of individual works but the articulation and codification of the abstract prop erties which make every literary work possible and which make it "literary." P. then was to be a general science devoted to identifying the defining quality of the literary work. There is an act of idealization in this definition of the goals of p. which is strik ingly similar to that proposed at the time by Chom sky in his definition of the goals of I.: the linguist is ultimately concerned with abstract universals of lang., not with individual sentences, which are regarded merely as manifestations of underlying structural principles. The distinction, in I. and in p., derives ultimately from Saussure's separation of langue (lang. as system) from parole (utterance) . The generative analogy caught on with the struc turalists, who extrapolated a concept of "literary competence" presumed to be a cognitive property of readers who had "internalized" the universal rules oflit. What is the substance of!iterary universals? The most powerful suggestion came from RomanJak obson ("L. and P. ," in Sebeok) . A literary work is first and foremost a "verbal message": p. seeks that which makes it literary, given that it is inherently verbal. His proposal, natural enough for one who was essentially a linguist rather than a literary scholar or an aesthetician, is conceived in terms of a specific kind of deployment of the structural resources of lang. (see POETIC FUNCTION ) . The power and facility ofJ akobson's synthesis are clear in his theory of metaphor and metonymy (qq.v. ) , which are seen as poetic figures based on the same structural principles which allow us to understand the nature of two kinds of aphasic disorder (and, so abstract are these principles, much else in "or dinary lang." ) . These principles, drawn ultimately from Saussure and fundamental to all modern I. and semiotics (q.v. ) , are what are generally called "paradigm" and "syntagm" or, byJakobson, "selec tion" and "combination": in a memorable dictum,
" the poeticfunction projects the principle of equivalence from the axis ofselection into the axis of combination." This superficially cryptic formula is quite simple in its meaning. Language-users, constructing
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LINGUISTICS AND POETICS phrases, sentences, and texts, are obliged to per form two operations: to select units from sets of alternatives-"cat" rather than "kitty," "rug" rather than "mat," "white" rather than "black," the phoneme / i/ rather than / a/ , and so on-and to combine their selections sequentially along the syntagmatic chain according to the structural rules of the lang.: "The white cat purred on the rug." An utterance becomes poetic when a lan guage-user selects items which have some para digmatic relationship (Jakobson's "equivalence" [q.v. ] , but it could be any systematic relationship, even opposition) and lays them in an extra level of patterning along the same syntagm, the paradig matic equivalences being salient. In "The white cat sat on the black mat," the subject and object phrases are equivalent syntactically, Determiner + Adjective + Noun, making them parallel; the ad jectives are antonyms made even more contrastive by the parallelism; the three words "cat," "sat," and "mat" are phonologically equivalent by virtue of being monosyllables sharing the phoneme / a/ . Jakobson's example is "I like Ike." When such patterns draw attention to the verbal texture of the message itself, lang. becomes poetic. These structural principles form the basis of many traditional prosodic and rhetorical devices, e.g. oxymoron, chiasmus, alliteration, rhyme (qq.v. ) ; Jakobson illustrates them copiously i n the seminal "L. and P." But this is only part of the point. Jakobson's theory encouraged structural thinking in general and the application to literary forms of notions such as binary opposition, underlying sys tem, syntagmatic ordering, and transformation. The same intellectual conditions that produced Jakobson and Levi-Strauss's minute structural (but minimally interpretive) analysis of Baude laire's "Les Chats" also made welcome the story grammar model of Propp, and thereby grounded, through the combination of Propp and I., the structuralist narratology of the 1960s. To return to Jakobson's "poetic principle," his proposal hypothesizes the effect as well as the me chanics of poetic structure. "The set (Einstellung) [this gloss could be construed in the sense of 'orientation,' a term he uses elsewhere in the paper1 toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of lang." The linguistic form of the text is "fore grounded" ( Mukar ovsk9 ) , made perceptually sa lient. The poetic function oflang., "by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects." The brilliance of this comment lies in its synthesis of Saussurean I . and formalist aesthetics: a t a stroke Jakobson has provided a linguistic mechanism for the percep tual difficulty and the distancing of meaning which Shkl6vsky-a central figure in Jakobson's first intellectual milieu, pre-Revolutionary Rus sia-specified as conditions for the aesthetic ef fect of "defamiliarization": "The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms
difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important" (1924) . Jakobson's I., then, supports the importance of Shkl6vsky's aes thetics as a reference-point in modern p. One of the most controversial aspects ofJakob son's poetic theory is his claim that p. is part of I . : "P. deals with problems of verbal structure . . . . Since I . is the global science of verbal structure, p. may be regarded as an integral part of I. . . . Insistence on keeping p. apart from I. is warranted only when the field of I. appears to be illicitly restricted." Setting aside the questions of whether I. could in principle by itself provide an adequate p., and whetherJakobson's p. is itself adequate, we may consider in what sense his p. is part of I. according to his own definitions. Certain basic structural principles, expressed at an extreme level of generality, are repeatedly found mani fested in details of linguistic form at the different levels of phonology, syntax, and semantics. Certain configurations-alliteration, for example-are said to be "poetic"; they are found in some texts, such as poems by Baudelaire and Shakespeare, in respect of which the designation "literary" is given and unquestioned, and in certain other texts such as "I like Ike" which would not be called literary the poetic function is a relative rather than an absolute matter. The same linguistic principles, or variants of them, are found in other linguistic domains, but without the "projection of the prin ciple of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination." Conceived thus, p. could be said to be a part of I., since its defining concepts and procedures are solely derived from I . ; but so could aphasiology, phonology, and the other fields thatJakobson treated in this brilliantly rational yet reductive way. The analyses of poems given by Jakobson and his co-authors employ linguistic theory literally; whenJakobson identifies something as a feminine rhyme or an indefinite article, the grammatical designation is literal. However, other branches of structuralist p. appeal to linguistic concepts in a less direct, more metaphorical way. For example, Propp's Morphology of the Folktale ( 1 928, tr. 1 958) describes the general structure of stories on the analogy of grammatical structure; and that is ex plicitly the procedure of the structural narratol ogy of Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Todorov. The appropriation of linguistic concepts for the de scription of larger structures in lit., in myth, and in other fields such as architecture, fashion, and cinema-areas for which no adequate metalan guage had previously existed-was the central feature of structuralism in the 1 960s. This move ment embodies a second relationship of I. and p . , a second way i n which the appeal t o I. has pro gressed and refined literary theory. Saussure had maintained that the I. he sketched
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LINGUISTICS AND POETICS was only one part of a more general discipline, "semiologie," devoted to "the life of signs within society," Roland Barthes, half a century later, de veloped the general framework of "semiology," instanced some of the social constructs and con ventions which belonged in this field, and pro posed a positioning for both lang. and lit. within this framework. The implication in Saussure is that lang. and !. form just one of the fields within semiology, but what emerges from Barthes is that lang. and !. are privileged, paradigmatic branches of semiology (or what we would now call "semiot ics" ) . Structure in other branches was modeled on linguistic structure, so the procedural assumption followed that linguistic methods and concepts which had been developed for the study of lang. could be extended to other semiotic fields: thus paradigm, syntagm, constituent structure, and transformation could be found in culinary conven tions, fashion, etc. Obviously this was a significant methodological gain, allowing the instant founda tion of new disciplines with their metalanguage ready-made . The most highly developed of these was literary structuralism. Lit., on that model, relates to lang. in two dis tinct ways. First, it is lang., literally, in that its medium is words and sentences. And it is also like lang., in that it is a second-order semiotic system patterned on higher units which mirror the struc ture of the lang. medium. The plot of a narrative text, for instance, is not actually a sentence (though of course it is mediated through sentences ) , but it can be presented as sentence-like in structure, the actions which advance the story being like verbs, and the characters who perform these ac tions being like nouns in grammatical functions such as subject and object. The work of Barthes, Greimas, Todorov, and others illustrates the use of !. as a source of structural analogies for the consti tutive elements of poetry and of narrative. Al though this analogical, basically semiotic proce dure is easiest to illustrate with reference to "syntactic" studies of plot, it has been followed fruitfully in theorizing on other dimensions of lit. and on the nature oflit. (Eco; Lotman) . The applications of!. to lit. reviewed so far have been bold and fruitful, and rightly prominent in scholarly debate. It might be said that the main contri bution of structural and semiotic p. has been to present certain postulates about I. and p. with such notable force and clarity that metatheoretical debate in the field has been wonderfully facili tated. But such clarity of definition is bought at the price of deliberate limitation of goal, and structuralist p. does not exhaust the range of lin guistic contributions to the study of lit. A major restriction is the decision to limit attention to the Jormalaspects oflang.-to syntactic, phonological, and (structural) semantic patterns. Little consid eration is given to the pragmatic, functional , or social dimensions of lang. in lit. Lang. is not only formal pattern, it is also discourse, mediating social
and personal roles and relationships, constructing and reproducing ideology, historically and cultur ally situated. To cope with such factors-which after all have been among the traditional concerns ofliterary studies-we need a kind of!. which both the Saussurean and the Chomskyan schools have excluded, a I. of parole. This sort of I. has begun to be developed on several fronts in recent years. In fact, the need for such a I. to counter the restric tions of formalist p. had already been argued by Bakhtin/Voloshinov (perhaps one and the same person) in Russia around 1 930. Saussurean ! . was strongly attacked, and a notion of lang. as the interplay of socially and ideologically accented voices was developed. The Bakhtinian model has proved very fruitful since translations made it available to the West in the early 1970s; the tech nical !. of discourse has only recently begun to catch up. A wider and more catholic range of connections between ! . and p. is found if we extend the field to work in what is often generally called "stylistics" or "linguistic crit." This work is trans-generic, and many writings on fiction and drama are also rele vant to poetry because the discussion often con cerns general theory and methodology. In the 1 960s there was heated debate about the propri ety of applying ! . to lit., the linguists making such a proposal meeting the same Anglo-Saxon critical opposition that resisted Fr. structuralism. But in the last 20 years there has nevertheless been pub lished a considerable body of work in linguistic crit. giving practical demonstration of the value of I. to the student of lit. There have been empirical studies of every aspect oflang. in lit., written from the points of view of a wide diversity of linguistic models. Almost always there have been new de scriptive insights and new analytic terminology. Some of the more conservative work, which is eclectic in selecting tools from I. and linking them with time-honored rhetorical concepts, has been among the most useful in practical yield. But most linguistic critics have been less eclectic, choosing to focus a particular linguistic model on some specific dimension of poetic structure. Our understanding of Eng. metrical forms, for example, has been enhanced by a number of technical studies using different phonological theories, e.g. the 4-stress-level suprasegmental phonology of Trager and Smith (Chatman) or the generative phonology of Chomsky and Halle as developed by analogy in generative metrics (q .v. ) . A t the level of poetic syntax (q.v. ) , there have been a number of applications of transformational grammar-e.g. Ohmann's treatment of style in terms of deep and surface structure (in Chatman and Levin, eds., 1 967); Freeman's and Austin's studies of transformational preferences as the con stitutive elements of artistic design (in Freeman, ed., 1 98 1 ) ; and Thorne's generative studies of e e cummings and of Donne (in Freeman, ed., 1 970) initiating debates on linguistic deviation in poetry
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LIRA and the proposition that a poem autonomously creates its own lang. or at least a special dialect. Semantic and pragmatic structures have also been explored, e.g. Levin's comparison of componen tial semantics and speech-act theory (q.v.) in rela tion to metaphor-which requires a more thor interdisciplinary oughly approach-or Riffaterre's work on the semiotics of poetry, analy sis which focuses intensely on semantic structure (and which is grounded in a sophisticated devel. of Jakobson ) , or Pratt's approach using the con cepts of speech act and of natural narrative. These are but a few examples of a broad range of studies which were valuable in advancing the theory and procedures of linguistic crit. and of p. Of course it must be conceded that, in a period when I. itself was rapidly changing, it was inevita ble that some linguistic critics committed them selves to theoretical models that became out moded. However, this area of I . and p. has made many permanent contributions by debating issues and testing analyses in the lang. of poetry. The continuing liveliness of linguistic crit. has more recently been attested by completely new orienta tions, reaction against the predominant formalism of earlier research, and a growing concern with the social contexts and functions ofliterary discourse. These new interests come at a stage in the deve!. of !. when pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson ) , dis course analysis (specifically the analysis of belief systems ) , and functional grammar (Halliday) of fer theories and methods for further advances in the conjunction of ! . and p. See also DISTINCTIVE-FEATURE ANALYSIS; ME TER; POETICS; SEMIOTICS, POETIC; SOUND; SPEECH ACT THEORY; STRUCTURALISM; STYLISTlCS; SYN TAX, POETIC. F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale, ( 1 9 1 6 ) , 5th ed. ( 1 95 5 ) , crit. ed., ed. R Engler ( 1 967-74) , tr. R Harris ( 1 983) ; V. Shklovsky, "Art as Technique" ( 1 924) , rpt. in Rus. Formalist Crit., ed. and tr. L. Lemon and M. Reis ( 1 965 ) ; M. Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky 's P. ( 1 929, tr. 1 973 ) ; V. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Lang. ( 1 929-30, tr. 1 9 73 ) ; G. Trager and H. L. Smith, An Outline of Eng. Structure ( 1 95 1 ) ; "Eng. Verse and What It Sounds Like," spec. iss. of KR 1 8 ( 1 956) ; C. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology ( 1958, tr. 1968) ; R. Jakobson, "L. and P. ," in Sebeok, rpt. in Jakobson, v. 5; Sebeok; F. L. U tley, "Structural L. and the Literary Critic," JAAC 1 8 ( 1 960 ) ; S . R. Levin, Linguistic Structures in Poetry ( 1 962) , "The Conventions of Poetry," Literary Style: A Symposium, ed. S. Chatman ( 19 7 1 ) , The Semantics of Metaphor ( 1 977) ; R Jakobson and C. Levi-Strauss, "Charles Baudelaire's 'Les Chats'" ( 1 962 ) , rpt. in The Struc turalists from Marx to Levi-Strauss, ed. R and F. DeGeorge ( 1 972) ; R Barthes, Elements ofSemiology ( 1 964-67), SjZ ( 1 970, tr. 1 9 75 ) ; S. Chatman, A Theory of Meter ( 1 965 ) ; A. ]. Greimas, Semantique structurale ( 1 966) ; ]. Mukarovsky, "Standard Lang. and Poetic Lang." and R. Ohmann, "Lit. as
Sentences" in Chatman and Levin, eds. ( 1 967) ; N. Chomsky and M. Halle, The Sound Pattern of Eng. ( 1 968) ; G. N . Leech, A Linguistic Guide to Eng. Poetry ( 1 969 ) ; L. and Literary Style, Essays in Mod. Stylistics, both ed. D . Freeman ( 1 970, 1 98 1 ) ; T. Todorov, The Poetics of Prose ( 1 9 7 1 , tr. 1977 ) ; Liter ary Style: A Symposium, and Approaches to P., both ed. S. Chatman ( 1 9 7 1 , 1 973 ) ; R. Fowler, The tangs. ofLit. ( 1 971 ) , Lit. as SocialDiscourse ( 1 98 1 ) , Linguistic Crit. ( 1 986 ) ; S . Chatman and S . R . Levin, eds., Essays on the Lang. ofLit. ( 1 967) , "L. and Lit.," Current Trends in L. X, ed. T. A. Sebeok ( 1 973) ; P. Kiparsky, "The Role of L. in a Theory of Poetry," Daedalus 1 02 ( 1 973) , rpt. in Lang. as a Human Problem, ed. E. Haugen and M. Bloomfield ( 1 974) ; Culler; U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics ( 1 976) ; A. A. Hill, Constituent and Pattern in Poetry ( 1 976) ; T. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics ( 1977);]. Lot man, The Structure of the Artistic Text, tr. R Vroon ( 1 977) ; M. Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse ( 1 977) ; M. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry ( 1 978 ) ; Brogan, items E709-827-compre hensive list of work in structural and generative metrics to 1 98 1 , with numerous other studies in the linguistic analysis oflit. listed passim;]. Culler, "Lit. and L.," Interrelations ofLit. , ed.].-P. Barricelli and ] . Gibaldi ( 1 982 ) ; M. Halliday, A.n Intro. to Functional Grammar ( 1 985 ) ; D. Sperber and D. Wilson, Relevance ( 1 986 ) ; The L. of Writing, ed. N. Fabb et a!. ( 1 987) ; D. Birch, Lang., Lit. and Critical Practice ( 1 989); Lang., Discourse and Lit., ed. R. Carter and P. Simpson ( 1 989) ; K. Wales, A Diction R.F. ary of Stylistics ( 1 989) . LIRA. A Sp. stanza form of 4, 5, 6, or, rarely, more than 6 Italianate hendecasyllables and heptasyl lables, the term denoting loosely any short-stro phe can ciOn (q .v.) in Italianate verse. The name was first applied to the form aBabB (capitals de note hendecasyllabic lines) and was taken from the end of the first line of Garcilaso's A la flor de Gnido. Garcilaso ( 1 50 1 ?-1 536) supposedly imi tated it from Bernardo Tasso, who is credited with its invention. This form is sometimes designated the l. garcilasiana and has also come to be known as estrofa de Fray Luis de LeOn, l. defray Luis de Leon, and quintilla de Luis de Leon for being popularized through Fray Luis de Leon's works and later being replaced in popularity by other forms, particularly the l. sestina ( aBaBcC, also called media estan cia) .-Navarro. D.C.C. LITERARINESS. See LINGUISTICS AND POETICS; POETICS; RUSSIAN FORMALISM. LITERARY HISTORY. See CRITICISM; HISTORI CISM ; INFLUENCE; THEORY; TRADITION. LITHUANIAN POETRY. Written lit. arose in Lithuania during the Reformation and Counter Reformation. Before that, the poetic heritage of the nation was sustained by anonymous folk songs
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LITHUANIAN POETRY ( dainos) , mentioned in medieval sources. These dainos, of which about 200,000 have now been recorded, are best represented by lyrical love songs. The lyrical nature of poetic expression is characteristic of dainos in general, and it is strongly evident even in the war songs and ballads, while mythological songs are rare and epic narra tives are altogether lacking. The most typical of the dainos exhibit numerous diminutives and em ploy highly developed parallelisms and a rather intricate, basically erotic, symbolism. Because the text and melody are integrally connected in the dainos, the rhythm is of great importance, and, as a result of the free stress in L., it is variable and often mixed. The rhyme , however, is not essential. The stanzas have mostly two, three, or four lines, either with or without refrain. Some older songs have no stanzas at all. The earliest collection of dainos ( 1 825) is by Liudvikas Reza ( Rhesa, 1 7 761840) , the largest (4 v., 1880-83) by A.JuskeviCius ( 1 8 19-80 ) ; much more extensive collections are now being assembled by the L. Academy of Sci ences. The trad. of folk poetry became a strong factor in the formation of the distinctly national character of L. p . Written L. p. begins i n t h e 1 6th c. with versions of canticles and hymns (qq.v. ) , incl. those of Mar tynas Mazvydas (Mosvidius, d. 1563) , who also prepared in Konigsberg the first printed L. book, Catechismusa prasti szadei (The Plain Words of the Catechism, 1 547) , a tr. of the Lutheran catechism, and prefaced it with a rhymed foreword. The most outstanding 18th-c. work was Kristijonas Donelai tis's (Donalitius, 1 71 4-80) poem Metai (The Sea sons, 1765-75, pub. 1818) , a 3000-line poem in hexameters which exhibits in forceful lang. a keen love and observation of nature and depicts vividly the life and character of the common people. Imbued with the Pietist spirit, the poem transmits a moving sense of the sacredness oflife and of the earth. At some points it can be compared with the work ofJames Thompson and Ewald von Kleist. A more active literary movement appeared at the beginning of the 19th c . , marked first by pseudo-classicism and sentimentalism (q.v.) and later by the influence of romanticism (q.v.) and a growing interest in L. folklore. The latter trend was particularly evident in the poetry of Antanas Strazdas, who was one of the first to merge the folksong trad. with personal expression. The next peak in the devel. ofL. p. was Antanas Baranauskas ( 1835-1902) , whose picturesque poem AnykSCiu silelis (The Grove of AnykSCiai, 1 858-59) is a veiled lament for Lithuania under the Rus. czarist regime . Baranauskas was esp. successful in creat ing a melodious flow oflang. using the traditional syllabic versification that is not very well suited to L. The pre-20th-c. devel. ofL. p. was concluded by Maironis (pen name of Jonas MaCiulis, 1 8621932 ) , the creative embodiment of the ideals of the national awakening and a foremost lyric poet (cf. his collection Pavasario balsai [Voices of
Spring] , 1 895 ) . His formal and structural innova tions, particularly the introduction of syllabotonic versification, had great influence on the growth of the new L. p. Two other poets writing in a lyrical mode in some respects similar to that of Maironis were Antanas Vienazindys ( 1 841-92) and Pranas Vaicaitis ( 1 876-1901 ) . A t the beginning of the 20th c . , the general relaxation of Rus. political pressure and the ever growing cultural consciousness increased literary production and widened its horizon. New ap proaches were inspired by literary movements abroad. Already evident before World War I, these trends were fulfilled during the period of inde pendence ( 1 9 1 8-40) when L. p. reached high standards of creative art. Symbolism (q.v.) left a strong imprint on the early period, best repre sented by Balys Sruoga ( 1 896-1 947) , also an out standing dramatist; Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas ( 1 893-1967 ) , later a leading novelist as well; Faus tas Kirsa ( 1 891-1964); andJurgis Baltrusaitis ( 1 8731944), who, after achieving distinction among the Rus. symbolists, began to publish verse in his na tive L. around 1 9 30. I n the 1920s, the more con servative trends were countered by modernist po ets who, led by Kazys Binkis ( 1 893-1942) , formed the group Keturi vejai (Four Winds) . Somewhat later, neoromanticism, neosymbolism, aestheti cism (q.v. ) , and expressionism (q.v.) appeared on the scene, while the group Trei5ias frontas (Third Front) advocated poetry of leftist orientation. These trends were transcended, however, by the individual achievements of the four leading poets of the second generation: Jonas Aistis ( 1 904-73 ) , a highly intimate poet and a master of subtle and refined expression; Bernardas Brazdzionis (b. 1 907) , whose poetry, sometimes stylistically inno vative, sometimes rhetorical and of prophetic overtones, is a synthesis of national trads.; and Antanas Miskinis ( 1 905-83) and Salomeja Neris (pen name of S . Bacinskaite-BuCiene [ 1904-45 ] ) , both of whom have transformed the best qualities of the dainos into their own personal expression. The transitional features leading to the poetry of the next generation were best reflected in the verse of Vytautas Macernis ( 1 920-44) . The annexation of the country by the USSR during World War II was responsible for the schism that divided L. p . On the one hand, L. p. was haunted until 1 989 by the paralyzing specter of Socialist Realism, and on the other, it has been learning to speak in the many modes of Western culture of many things, first of all of the pain and righteousness of exile. While some poets at home became eulogists of the Soviet system, and others, mostly of the older generation, retreated carefully into their ultimate long silence, new authors came forth to claim the favors of both the Muses and the regime and, in recent years, of the Muses alone. Eduardas Miezelaitis (b. 1 9 1 9 ) , paradoxically a loyal Communist of philosophical bent, did much to help Soviet L. p . break through to a more
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LITOTES modern idiom. Justinas Marcinkevici us (b. 1 93 0 ) , also important a s playwright, i s perhaps t h e most popular poet today, speaking with great devotion, though at times with a forked tongue, of love for his country and people. Judita VaiCiunaite (b. 1 937) sings of love in intimate urban settings and of myth in dreams of the past. Sigitas Geda (b. 1 943) transforms both nature and myth into a single magical presence, his vision of the country and its soul. Marcelijus Martinaitis (b. 1 936) mostly converses with his own and the nation's conscience about history, myth, and the responsi bility of being human. Janina Degutyte ( 1 928-90) is an intensely personal, lyrical poet of great integ rity and noble dedication to humanity. A number of prominent artists, writers, and intellectuals found themselves in the forefront of the national movement for independence begin ning in 1989. One might say that their first obliga tion has become to create for themselves a free country, a fitting home for their Muse. Thus his tory has come full circle, returning to the situation at the end ofthe 19th c . , when the poet's voice was also first of all a clarion for freedom. In the West the foremost poet is Henrikas Radauskas ( 1 9 1 0-70 ) . He speaks in lucid and calmly measured d. verse of the beauty of the world seen as a carnival of love and death. His loyalty, however, is not with that world but with the enchanting mysteries of poetic speech that it en genders. Jonas Aistis and Bernardas Brazdzionis continue in their previous vein, except that both have adopted a voice of outrage at their nation's destiny. Kazys Bradunas (b. 1 9 1 7 ) looks inward and into the past to awaken the ancient spirits of his native earth and engage them in an ongoing dialogue with Christianity and history in the native land. Jonas Mekas (b. 1 922) , one of the moving spirits of the "underground cinema" in New York, also writes nostalgic and pensive verse full of self questioning and yearning for the truthful life. Algimantas Mackus ( 1 932-64) found his own truth in a radical confrontation with the fact of exile which required him to transform all the images of hope and faith from the traditional cultural heritage into grim totems of death . Liune Sutema (pen name of Zinaida Katiliskiene, b. 1 927) chooses the opposite task of allowing the alien world to grow into the very tissue of her soul to rejuvenate both her and the land of remem brance she carries within. Her brother Henrikas Nagys (b. 1 920) embraces both emotional expres sionism and Neo-romanticism. Alfonsas Nyka-Nil iunas (pen name of Alfonsas Cipkus, b. 1 9 1 9 ) , a cosmopolitan existentialist of a deeply philosophi cal bent, contemplates the large and bleak pres ence of Cosmos through the window of Western civilization. ANTHOLOGIES: TheDaina, ed. U. Katzenelenbo gen ( 1 935 ) ; Aus litauischer Dichtung, ed. and tr. H . Engert, 2d e d . ( 1 938) ; Litauischer Liederschrein, ed. and tr. V. Jungfer ( 1 948 ) ; L. Folksongs in America,
ed . .J. Balys ( 1 958 ) ; The Green Oak, ed. A. Landsber gis and C. Mills ( 1 962 ) ; Lietuviu poezija, v. 1-2, ed. V. Vanagas, v. 3, ed. K. Bradunas ( 1 969-7 1 ) ; Li tovskiepoety XX veka, ed. V. Galinis ( 1 971 ) ; Selected Post-War L. P., ed . .J. Zdanys ( 1 978 ) ; L. Writers in the West, ed. A. Skrupskelis ( 1 979) ; The A mber Lyre: 1 8th-20th-G. L. P. ( 1 983 ) ; Chimeras in the Tower: Selected Poems of Henrikas Radauskas, tr. J. Zdanys ( 1 986) . HISTORY AND CRITICISM: B. Sruoga, "L. Folk songs," Folk-Lore (London) 43 ( 1 932) ; .J . Mauclere,
Panorama de la litt. lithuanienne contemporaine ( 1 938) ; A. Vaiciulaitis, Outline Hist. of L. Lit. ( 1 942) ; .J . Balys, L. Narrative Folksongs ( 1 954) ; A. Senn, " Storia della letterature lituana," Storia della letterature baltiche, ed. G. Devoto ( 1 957) ; A. Rubu lis, Baltic Lit. ( 1 970 ) ; R. Silbajoris, Perfection of Exile ( 1 970 ) ; P. Naujokaitis, Lietuviu literatfiros is torija, 4 v. ( 1 973-76) ; lstorija litovskoj literatury, ed. .J. Lankutis ( 1 977 ) ; Baltic Drama, ed. A. Strau manis ( 1 9 8 1 ) .
R.S.
LITOTES (Gr. "plainness," "simplicity" ) . A form of meiosis (q.v. ) employing ( 1 ) affirmation by the negative of the contrary ("Not half bad"; ''I'll bet you won't" meaning ''I'm certain you will") or (2) deliberate understatement for purposes of inten sification ("He was a good soldier; say no more" for a hero) . Servius, commenting on Virgil's Geor gics 2 . 1 25, says , "non tarda, id est, strenuissima: nam litotes figura est" (not slow, that is, most brisk: for the figure is ! . ) . L. is used so frequently in Beowulf and other OE, ON, and Old Germanic poetry that it has become (with the kenning [q.v. ] ) one of its distinguishing features, e.g. "p<et w<es god cyning" (that was a good king ) , following a passage telling how the king flourished on earth, prospered in honors, and brought neighboring realms to pay him tribute. Chaucer's Cook is de scribed as "nat pale as a forpyned goost. / A fat swan loved he best of any roost" (Gen. Pro!' 2056 ) . Milton has: "Nor are thy lips ungraceful, Sire of men, / Nor tongue ineloquent" (Paradise Lost 8 . 1 8- 1 9 ) . Pope has more sophisticated subtleties, using I. as an effective satiric instrument. Like meiosis, hyperbole, irony, and paradox (qq.v. ) , I. requires that the reader refer to the ostensive situation, i.e. to the utterance's prag matic context, in order to perceive the disparity between the words taken literally and their in tended sense. Group Mu distinguishes I. from meiosis, or "arithmetical" understatement ("one says less so as to say more") by restricting I. to the "double" negation of a grammatical and lexical contrary. So Chimene's conciliatory remark to her lover, "Go, I do not hate you" (Corneille, Le Cid 3.4) , negates the lexeme "hatred," while at the same time the negative assertion posits the oppo site series of statements referring to the degrees between loving and not hating. Thus the seemingly negative construction of the I. not only suppresses a positive seme, replacing it with the correspond-
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LITURGICAL DRAMA ing negative one, but also replaces any one of a series of negative semes ( 1 33-38, 1 47) . Corbett illustrates how l. may function in forensic rhet. with an example of the lawyer who assists his client "by referring to a case of vandalism as 'boyish highjinks.' A rose by any other name will smell as sweet, but a crime, if referred to by a name that is not too patently disproportionate, may lose some of its heinousness" (488) . L. in this instance func tions like euphemism by reducing the resistance of the audience. In logic the device corresponding to l. is obversion. The distinction between l. and meiosis is that, in the former, calling a thing less than it is is done so as to make evident that it is actually larger, whereas in the latter, calling it less is meant to make it less.-K. Weyman, Studien fiber die Figur der L. ( 1 886) ; O. Jespersen, Negation in Eng. and Other Langs. ( 1 9 1 7 ) ; A. Hubner, Die "Mhd. Ironie" oder die L. im Altdeutschen ( 1 930) ; F. Bracher, "Un derstatement in OE Poetry," PMLA 52 ( 1937) ; L . M . Hollander, " L . i n ON," PMLA 53 ( 1 938) ; Sr. M. Joseph, Shakespeare's Use ofthe Arts ofLang. ( 1 947) ; C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhet. (tr. 1 969) ; Lausberg; Morier; Group Mu, 1 38, 1 47; Corbett. R.O.E.; A.W.H.; T.V.F.B. LITURGICAL DRAMA. Other terms for a relig ious play performed in a med. church may distin guish certain aspects of the play form-e.g. , mys tery, miracle, Lat. play, medieval drama-but liturgical seems best to categorize the ceremonial site and seedbed of the l. ds. These plays were regarded as appropriate ("Proper") in every kind of service from a monastic hour to the Introit of the Mass, and were chronologically arranged ac cording to seasonal religious feasts. The great Eas ter drama, the Visitatio sepulchri, in its mature versions was usually performed after the third responsory of the Easter Matins service, and was immediately followed by the closing hymn of that service, the Te Deum laudamus. Similarly, three of the St. Nicholas "miracle" plays at Fleury were grafted onto one or another monastic office for the feast of St. Nicholas, and the fourth came between the end of Matins and the beginning (Introit) of the Mass for that feast. Most medieval playscripts of the 1 2th and 1 3th cs. include the incipit of the traditional concluding hymn or antiphon of the service as the epilogue of the play, even when the play is preserved in a nonl. ms. Since the Easter and Christmas Matins services were-and are-the most elaborate of the church year, they could include a play more readily than could the central service, the Mass. The audience for the l. ds. was generally the cloistered monastic community, neither very large nor very lay. Sometimes present were members of a royal or noble court who were patrons of that church; Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII spent Christmas of 1 1 37 at Limoges, where two existing l. plays are known to have been performed in the
Church of St. Martial in that period. There is a widely received opinion that the purpose of the plays was to instruct the illiterate, in the same way that the Gothic cathedral was the people's Bible in stone. The circumstances of medieval monastic life and contemporary records, however, favor a nonpopular definition of the audience. The plays seem to have been the possession of sophisticated, vocational monks who knew the Bible and liturgy and were fluent in Med. Lat. Pope Gregory IX, clarifYing a 1 207 ruling by Innocent III, mentions a number of plays by their titles, and states that they "lead men to conscience . . . and are per formed to excite to devotion" (Ad devotionem exci
tandam) . The lang. of the mature plays is from three fourths to nine-tenths Lat. verse, the remainder l. antiphons (lines sung by one choir in response to another) . The verse is in a wide range of meters and stanza forms, the antiphons in traditional Lat. nonmetrical form. Most scholars agree that the melodies for the verses were composed in meas ures, not in the free-rhythm of plainchant. The musical meter was derived from that of the verses, care being taken to avoid false word-accents. This aesthetic is found also in the secular compositions of the troubadour and trouvere composers of the same period. In fact, the styles of the religious pieces and the secular songs are so similar that without the accompaniment of lang., a given mel ody can hardly be distinguished as religious or secular. The melodic style of the great Easter sequence, Victimae paschali, is similar to that of contempo rary, through-composed, secular pieces, and its words and music were often incorporated in the more complex Visitatio dramas. Verbal material of the famous hymn, Stabat mater, is likewise shared with the dialogue of the Cividale play, Planctus Mariae. Often surfacing in the heads of the l. d. composers were analogues of musical and verbal phrases from the large repertory of medieval hymns, some of which had been in circulation for 700 years. Because the authors of the l. ds. composed for the glory of God, like other religious craftsmen, their names and ranks are entirely unknown-with the exception of the wandering scholar Hilarius, whose works are in dramatic form but without music. The names of song-makers to the Fr., Eng., and Ger. courts of the same period, on the other hand, are on most of the secular mss. that have survived. There is little evidence of church bor rowing melodies from court, or vice versa, both kinds of composers being melodically prolific. The identity of the church composers can only be inferred from consideration of the role of the choirmaster, the director of the schola cantorum, the most experienced musician in the community. He was in the right place to compose, rehearse, and perform the plays with his choir of men and boys. He was in charge of the performance of l.
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LITURGICAL DRAMA music for every service of the year, and required his group of singers to learn by rote the many hundreds of I. items for these services. The Lat. name for the choir, chorus, appears in the rubrics (stage directions) of surviving mss. and suggests its dramatic function as commentator on the ac tion of the play, most frequently by an "Alleluia!" or two; otherwise, it was involved mai nly with the choral hymns or antiphons that framed the play as prologue and epilogue. The action of the plays, while centered in the Choir area, included the entire church, with pro cessions to various locations for scenes, and with frequent travel scenes, as in the Shepherds' jour ney from the fields to the Manger, the Magi's similar quest through the length of the nave, the Apostles' meeting with the Ch ristus on the road and their journey with him to the inn at Emmaus, the manyjourneys in the Lazarus play, and the long approach of the Marys to the Sepulcher in the
Visitatio. The acoustics ofthe stone and glass envelope of the medieval church maintained the ancient trad. of monophonic vocal music, the "live" and rever berative quality of sound therein being more hos pitable to the single melodic line than to poly phonic compositions for voices or instruments. Singers, then as now, had no problem "playing the building," and the medieval chorister-actor must have taken those acoustics for granted. Background and props for the play were sup plied by the building and its furniture-altar, chancel, nave, pulpit, and so forth . No scenery was used, though on occasion medieval gadgeteers contrived an "anastasis" to house the Sepulcher, outlined a lions' den for Daniel, and built a prison facade from which St. Paul escaped. All in all, the emphasis was symbolic, in contrast to modern representational naturalism. Only in the costuming of the actors was a con sistent effort made at verisimilitude, as exempli fied vividly by the rubric in the Fleury Lazarus that requires Magdalene to be dressed "in habitu . . . meretricio" (in the dress of a whore) . The early playwrights appear to have improvised costumes from the ecclesiastical wardrobe, in the manner of a 1 0th-c. Visitatio from Winchester, in which the three monks playing the roles of the Marys are directed to wear copes with the hoods on top of their heads to make them appear less tonsured, more feminine. The move toward verisimilitude was thus slow, but inevitable, as the scale of theat rical effort enlarged, so that eventually we find Norman chain-mailed soldiers guarding the Sep ulcher at the beginning of the Visitatio, as they had long been depicted in the visual arts. While this was a strong drift toward naturalism, the anachro nism of the chain mail was not distasteful to the medieval audience, salvation history being eter nally in the present. As Hardison observes, "anach ronism was a form of verisimilitude." The content ofthe plays is derived from Old and
New Testament narratives, I. antiphons and hymns, and saints' legends. New Testament narratives and saints' legends are favored, owing to the fact that the feast days of the medieval church were de voted exclusively to the celebration of the events of Christ's life and the lives of his saints. L.d. used narratives appropriate to the occasion. The only two surviving, producible plays with Old Testa ment affiliations are the Beauvais Play of Daniel, attached to the Advent season because Daniel is a prophet of Christ, and the Limoges Procession of Prophets (of Christ ) . Not until the 1 4th c., with the appearance of cycles of plays to be performed for a popular audience in celebration of the newly created feast day, Corpus Christi, were Old Testa ment stories used extensively, and by then the dramatic form had radically changed. The lang. was vernacular, the dialogue was spoken rather than sung, and many of the playlets were signifi cant mainly as links in a series of events stretching from Creation to the Day ofJudgment. In their heyday, the plays portrayed dramati cally the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Ascension. The most substantial cluster of plays dealt with the Resurrection: the lament of Mary at the cross, the visit of the other Marys to the Sepulcher (more than a thousand local ver sions) , and the Peregrinus (the risen Christus in disguise at Emmaus and afterward revealed to Doubting Thomas and the other disciples) . There is likewise a fine group of Nativity plays, con cerned either separately or in combination with the Shepherds, Midwives, Magi, Herod, Joseph and Mary, and the Innocents. On each side of this cluster are the additional Marian plays of the Annunciation, Purification, and Assumption. Other producible plays for the New Testament are the Resuscitation ofLazarus, the Sponsus (Wise and Foolish Virgins ) , and the Conversion of St. Paul. A final category of medieval church plays deals with miraculous events in the lives of the saints, a category formerly considered separate and called Miracle Plays . This distinction now seems invalid inasmuch as the I. circumstances of their produc tion and the aesthetics of their form are identical with those of the other music-dramas of the 1 2th and 1 3th cs. The scarcity of records has made the history of I. d spotty and rife with speculation and scholarly controversy. The place and date of origin, or simul taneous origins, may never be objectively deter mined, though we can generalize with some con fidence about the process by which the I. plays came into being. The practice of troping-ex panding I. chants with additional melodic and verbal material-beginning in the 9th c. invited dramatic and theatrical expression. Although there is no direct evidence for the evolution of the Visitatio from tropes of the Easter Quem quaeritis antiphons, this may have happened during the Carolingian Renaissance. As to what transpired between the very simple versions and the emer-
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LOVE POETRY gence of the most artistic versions of the Visitatio and others, we have little reliable information. See, however, Hardison for a quite different the ory. K. Young, The Drama of the Med. Church, 2 v. ( 1 933 ) ; O. B. Hardison, Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages ( 1 965) ; F. Col lins, The Production of Med. Church Music-Drama ( 1 972 ) , Med. Church Music-Dramas: A Repertory of Complete Plays ( 1 976); M. H . Marshall, "Aesthetic Values ofthe L. D.," Med. Eng. Drama, ed.]. Taylor and A. H . Nelson ( 1 972 ) ; C. Flanigan, "The L. Context of the Quem queritis Trope," CompD 8 ( 1 974) ; W. Lipphardt, Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele, 7 v. ( 1 975-) ; w. L. Smoldon, The Music of the Med. Church Dramas, ed. C. Bourgeault ( 1 980 ) ; ]. Stevens, "Med. Drama-Music Drama," New Grove; S. Sticca, Il Planctus Mariae nella tradiz ione drammatica del media evo ( 1 984); The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies, ed. T. P. Campbell and C. Davidson ( 1 985 ) ; The Saint Play in Med. Europe, ed. C. Davidson ( 1 986 ) ; M. Stevens, Four ME Mys tery Cycles ( 1 987) ; H.·J Diller, The ME Mystery Play (tr. 1992) . F.C. LJO DAHATTR. ON Eddie meter. Stanzas of I. contain two 3-line segments, each of which makes up a syntactic whole. The first two lines of each segment resemble fornyriJislag (q.v.) and the Ger manic long line: they have two stresses each, are linked by alliteration, and are separated by a cae sura. The "even" (third and sixth) lines, in a Scan dinavian innovation, have three (according to some scholars only two) stresses, but each alliter ates within itself, and there is no caesura.
(That river is called Vigrior, where Surtr and the sweet gods will meet in battle.)
LOCUS AMOENUS. See DESCRIPTIVE POETRY; EKPHRASIS; TOPOS. LOGAOEDIC. A term used sporadically by an cient metrists to refer to verses consisting of single long syllables in alternation first with double then with single shorts: ; - X , etc. Some 1 9th-c. metrists took the term to imply actual rhythmical equivalence be tween double and single short and applied it to a u
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LOGOPOEIA. See MELOPOEIA, PHANOPOEIA, LO GOPOEIA.
L. means literally "meter of songs," and it is gen erally used for verse in dialogue and didactic po etry. Addition of a second "even" line creates galdralag, a meter traditionally associated with magic chants. See OLD NORSE POETRY.-The Poetic Edda, tf. H. A. Bellows ( 1 923) and L. M. Hollander, rev. ed. ( 1 962) ; W. P. Lehmann, The Development oj Germanic Verse Form ( 1 956) ; P. Hallberg, Old Ice landic Poetry ( 1 975 ) . ].L.
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LOGOCENTRISM. See DECONSTRUCTION; IN FLUENCE; INTERTEXTUALITY; TEXTUALITY.
Vigrior heitir a, er finnaz vigi at Surtr oc in svaso goo
u
much larger class of ancient forms consisting (so they believed) of isochronous metra (see ISO CHRONISM) in which the normal time-values of longs and shorts were altered in such a way that dactyl, spondee, trochee, and single long syllable were all durational equivalents. The asclepiad (q.v.) in its Horatian form would accordingly be analyzed as a hexameter (p equals pause) : - I p . Though now I I I p I generally rejected in favor of some sort of choriam bic or aeolic (qq.v.) analysis ofthe sequences once called I., the theory still has occasional defenders, particularly among Classicists who are also musi cians. It encourages us to find in a piece of Gr. verse the equidistant strong stresses that one might look for in trying to set it to music, or that an Eng. or Am. reader would be inclined to intro duce when reciting it. And it becomes, with the elimination of the spondee and the addition of the first paeon to its repertory of isochronous metra, the "sprung rhythm" (q.v.) of Gerard Manley Hop kins. But in general the term has not been used by modern metrists in reference to mixed binary-ter nary (iambic-anapestic or trochaic-dactylic) me ters in modern Eng. verse, nor is it clear that such usage would be at all appropriate, since even its CI. sense is problematic, and it is by no means an obviously necessary term: thoughtless transfer ence of concepts and terms from CI. to modern metrics is one of the greatest dangers in prosody. P. Shorey, "Choriambic Dimeter and the Rehabili tation of the Antispast," 1flPA 38 ( 1 907)-favors the term; ]. W. White. The Verse oj Gr: Comedy A.T.C.; T.V.F.B. ( 1 9 1 2 )-opposes.
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LOGOS. See DECONSTRUCTION; ETHOS; PATHOS. LONG. See DURATION; QUANTITY. LONG METER, LONG MEASURE. See BALLAD METER; HYMN. LONG POEM. See EPIC; MODERN LONG POEM; NARRATIVE POETRY. LOVE POETRY. I. WESTERN II. EASTERN A. Arabic and Persian B. Egyptian C. Hebrew D. Indian E. Chinese F. Japanese I. WESTERN. In evaluating I. p., we must ask first
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LOVE POETRY whether the lang. is private and original or formu laic and rhetorical. Is the poet speaking for him or herself, or is the voice a persona (q.v. ) ? The poem, if commissioned by friend or patron, may be a projection into another's adventures, or it may be an improvised conflation of real and in vented details. A love poem cannot be simplisti cally read as a literal, journalistic record of an event or relationship; there is always some fictive reshaping of reality for dramatic or psychological ends. A love poem is secondary rather than pri mary experience; as an imaginative construction, it invites detached contemplation of the spectacle of sex. We must be particularly cautious when dealing with controversial forms of eroticism like homo sexuality. Poems are unreliable historical evidence about any society; they may reflect the conscious ness of only one exceptional person. Furthermore, homoerotic images or fantasies in poetry must not be confused with concrete homosexual practice. We may speak of tastes or tendencies in early poets but not ofsexual orientation: this is a modern idea. L. p. is equally informed by artistic trad. and contemp. cultural assumptions. The pagan atti tude toward the body and its pleasures was quite different from that of Christianity, which assigns sex to the fallen realm of nature. The richness of Western I. p. may thus arise in part from the dilemma of how to reconcile mind or soul with body. Moreover, the generally higher social status of women in Western as opposed to Eastern cul ture has given I. p. added complexity or ambiva lence: only women of strong personality could have produced the tormented sagas of Catullus or Propertius. We must try to identify a poem's in tended audience. In antiquity the love poet was usually addressing a coterie of friends or connois seurs; since romanticism, however, the poet speaks to him- or herself, with the reader seeming to overhear private thoughts. We must ask about pornographic material in I. p. whether it reflects the freer sensibilities of a different time or whether the poet set out to shock or challenge his contemporaries. Much I. p. is clearly testing the limits of decorous speech, partly to bring sexual desire under the scrutiny and control of imagina tion. In the great Western theme of the transience of time, vivid sensuous details illustrate the eva nescence of youth and beauty; the poet has a godlike power to defeat time and bestow immor tality upon the beloved through art. Romantic impediments give the poem a dramatic frame: the beloved may be indifferent, far away, married to someone else, dead, or of the wrong sex. However, difficulty or disaster in real life is converted into artistic opportunity by the poet, whose work prof its from the intensification and exploration of negative emotion. The history of European I. p. begins with the Gr. lyric poets of the Archaic age ( 7th-6th cs. B.C; see MELIC POETRY ) . Archilochus, Mimnermus, Sap-
pho, and AIcaeus turn poetry away from the grand epic style toward the quiet personal voice, atten tive to mood and emotion. Despite the fragmen tary survival of Gr. solo poetry, we see that it contains a new idea oflove which Homer shows as foolish or deceptive but never unhappy. Archilo chus' account of the anguish of love is deepened by Sappho, whose poetry was honored by male writers and grammarians until the fall of Rome. Sappho and Alcaeus were active on Lesbos, an affluent island off the Aeolian coast of Asia Minor where aristocratic women apparently had more freedom than later in classical Athens. Sappho is primarily a love poet, uninterested in politics or metaphysics. The nature of her love has caused much controversy and many fabrications, some by major scholars. Sappho was married, and she had a daughter, but her poetry suggests that she fell in love with a series of beautiful girls, who moved in and out of her coterie (not a school, club, or cult) . There is as yet no evidence, however, that she had physical relations with women. Even the ancients, who had her complete works, were di vided about her sexuality. Sappho shows that I . p . is how Western person ality defines itself. The beloved is passionately perceived but also replaceable; he or she may exist primarily as a focus of the poet's conscious ness. In "He seems to me a god" (fr. 3 1 ) , Sappho describes her pain at the sight of a favorite girl sitting and laughing with a man. The lighthearted social scene becomes oppressively internal as the poet sinks into suffering: she cannot speak or see; she is overcome by fever, tremor, pallor. These symptoms oflove become conventional and persist more than a thousand years (Lesky). In plain, concise lang., Sappho analyzes her extreme state as if she were both actor and observer; she is candid and emotional yet dignified, austere, al most clinical. This poem, preserved for us by Lon ginus, is the first great psychological document of Western lit. Sappho's prayer to Aphrodite (fr. 1 ) converts cult-song into love poem. The goddess, amused at Sappho's desperate appeal for aid, teasingly reminds her of former infatuations and their inevitable end. Love is an endless cycle of pursuit, triumph, and ennui. The poem, seem ingly so charming and transparent, is structured by a complex time scheme of past, present, and future, the ever-flowing stream of our emotional life. Sappho also wrote festive wedding songs and the first known description of a romantic moonlit night. She apparently invented the now-common place adjective "bittersweet" for the mixed condi tion of love. Early Gr. I. p. is based on simple parallelism between human emotion and nature, which has a Mediterranean mildness. Love-sickness, like a storm, is sudden and passing. Imagery is vivid and luminous, as in haiku (q.v. ) ; there is nothing con torted or artificial. Anacreon earned a proverbial reputation for wine, women, and song: his love is
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LOVE POETRY not Sappho's spiritual crisis but the passing diver sion ofa bisexual bon vivant. L. p. was little written in classical Athens, where lyric was absorbed into the tragic choral ode. Plato, who abandoned po etry for philosophy, left epigrams on the beauty of boys. The learned Alexandrian age revived I. p. as an art mode. Theocritus begins the long literary trad. of pastoral (q.v. ) , where shepherds complain of unrequited love under sunny skies. Most of his Idylls contain the voices of rustic characters like homely Polyphemus, courting the scornful nymph Galatea, or Lycidas, a goatherd pining for a youth gone to sea. Aging Theocritus broods about his own love for fickle boys, whose blushes haunt him. In his 1 cial and political reform , structural modern ization) as well as with an often simultaneous reception of Neoclassical and Enlightenment val ues. These features led to highly original and important achievements in virtually all the !its. Thus Ugo Foscolo ( 1 778-1 827) evoked the mel ancholy of night and the grave, while Giacomo Leopardi ( 1 798-1837) expressed the anguish of infinity and explored the dialectics of small things and cosmic feelings. Jose de Espronceda ( 1 80842) with his subjective lyrics and G. A. Becquer ( 1 836-70) with his tortured irony are the chief spokesmen for romantic poetry in Spain. Adam Oehlenschlaeger ( 1 779-1850) in Demark mixed fantasy and irony, while Edgar Allan Poe ( 1 80949) invoked morbid love and Gothic thrills. Karel Macha ( 1 8 10-36) in Czech, Sandor Petofi ( 1 82349) in Hungarian, and Mihai Eminescu ( 1850-89) in Romanian became symbolic for synthesizing
the emotional and linguistic values of their na tional communities at crucial historical moments. The emerging nations of South and North America found in romantic poetry a similar means of consolidating their identity and validating social and national values. In the United States, New England intellectuals were fascinated by the pc> etic and ethical potential of a vision in which God, nature, and humanity are in intimate relation or can be even seen as fused. Although movements such as New England Transcendentalism and the Am. Ren. expressed themselves chiefly in prose, the reflective poems ofW. C. Bryant ( 1 794-1 878) and R. W. Emerson ( 1803-82) and the fiery im agery and anaphoric cadences of Walt Whitman ( 1 819-92) also worked in the same direction. The Argentines Esteban Echeverria ( 1 809-5 1 ) and D. F. Sarmiento ( 1 81 1-88) succeeded in fusing na tive scenes (pampas and gauchos) with modern verse vehicles, while J. M. Heredia y Campuzano ( 1 803-39) of Cuba was the first great romantic lyricist of South America. Later r. was particularly fruitful in Polish and Rus. lits. A. S. Puskin ( 1 799-1837) orchestrated with subtlety the passions of the individual, calls for political freedom, philosophical irony, fantas tic imagery, and superb metrical technique to become the greatest Rus. poet of his century. Mik hail Lermontov ( 1 8 14--4 1 ) was more unilateral in his advocacy of the exceptional individual and pure liberties. Adam Mickiewicz ( 1 798-1855 ) , like Puskin, controlled a n astonishing range of romantic modes of expression, from apocalyptic and nightmarish to graciously playful. He was closely seconded by Juliusz Siowacki ( 1809-44) , Zygmunt Krasinski ( 1 8 1 2-59 ) , and Cyprian Nor wid ( 1 8 1 2-83) , whose sensibilitywas quickened by their lives in exile at a moment of national disaster. The literary influence of r. continued into the 20th c. Every literary generation may be said to have had its own neoromanticism and its antirc> manticism. Perhaps the most powerful direct in fluence, on Baudelaire and symbolism (q.v. ) , put in practice romantic notions of the general corre spondence of natural signs, of the secret connec tions between all parts of the universe, and of the release of imaginative power. Parnassian and Decadent (qq.v. ) poets reified romantic views into aesthetic objects, delighting in the imagery of precious stones, mysterious caves, diabolical men aces, and transgressions. A broad stream of idyllic, melodramatic, and sentimental writing in all gen res flowed into popular lit., creating a kind of mass r. Swinburne, Yeats, George, Hofmannsthal, de Regnier, and D 'Annunzio may all be said to be neoromantic at least at some points in their ca reers. Realism (q.v.) evolved out of the romantic concern with natural and social detail and based its narrative structures on myths of conflict and reconciliation, as well as on typologies of character originated by the romantics. The modernist movement, although it often
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ROMANTICISM attacked r., owed much to its impulses and expan sions of consciousness; Existentialism borrowed from r. its problematic of the individual; Expres sionism (q.v.) derived its frenetic and prophetic dimensions from r.; even postmodernism, with its interest in historical fragment, turns most often to romantic experiments (see MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM) . Even resolute 20th-c. adversar ies of r. like Brunetiere, Babbitt, Hulme, and Eliot derive from the romantic mainstream. The histori cal novel, structurally a romantic invention, con tinued to prosper as a new and independent genre. Other generic consequences of r. include the flourishing of the prose poem (q.v. ) , of fragmen tary fiction, and of fantastic and lyrical prose. The loosening of generic boundaries, the departure from metrical verse, the interaction of the arts, and the subjectivity of taste (q.v.) are components of the romantic program that remained un changed well into the 20th c., much as the poetic canon of the 1 9th and 20th cs. was the one set during the decades of romantic ferment. Perhaps even vaster was the romantic inheri tance in public and intellectual discourse and in ideology and theory from Freudianism, national ism, and socialism to the philosophies of Nietz sche, Dilthey, Bergson, and Heidegger. Furious opposition to r. used as its vehicles realism (q.v.) in the early 19th c., conservative and traditional ideologies at the end of the 19th c. (particularly in France) , colloquial diction (Pound ) , the cult of machines (Futurism, q.v.) , and radical political and philosophical critiques (by the mid 20th c., esp. in Germany ) . In the 1 960s, the world over, a youth culture in popular music and lit. Oim Mor rison, the cult of Hesse and Tolkien, etc . ) drew heavily on romantic materials. It is important to note that romantic discourses provided a deep ened textual polyvalence, an expansion of ambi guity (q.v. ) , and an involvement in the nature of textuality (q.v. ) . Crit. of the 1970s and 1 980s, esp. in the work of Paul de Man, foregrounded the deconstructive moment (see DECONSTRUCTION) , esp. the uncertainties and skepticism underlying romantic writing: many romantic writers had theo rized brilliantly on irony, doubt, and subjectivity and objectivity. These consequences and ramifications show that r. was far more than one literary movement among others. It came at a key moment in the history of Western culture, of which it was both a product and a shapero Perhaps more than other literary manifestations, r. is a case when poetry truly incorporates the questionings and values of society as a whole. Western society in the 1 8th c., first in a few of its parts then over larger areas and at a faster pace, underwent a modernization that had been many centuries in the making and was rapidly coming to a head, bringing with it urbani zation, industrialization, demographic explosion, rationalization, ordering and streamlining of so cial processes, analytical and transactional modes
of thinking and behavior, and democratization. Modernization was sometimes revolutionary, but even when it was not it deeply upset the archaic rhythms, the "biological" patterns of traditional behavior. The importance of r. consists in having provided a framework for processing these water shed changes. Inside r. , modernization could be denied, approved, qualified, critiqued, and ques tioned. R. was thus the new idiom for conversing with modernization; it contained human and world models, images and visionary projections that allowed coping with modernity. R. furnished a structure for questioning and interpreting the world. The capacious systems of Kant and Hegel pro vided a conceptual vocabulary and theoretical un derpinnings that proved indispensable and that are, if at all, becoming obsolescent only at the end ofthe 20th c. However it was poetic lang. (whether in verse, in prose, or on the stage) that proved the most adequate medium for responding to moder nity. It had the kind of variety and indeterminacy, richness and flexibility that could make it a privi leged ground for experimenting with human po tentialities and responses, redeeming the past, as similating the present, and projecting the future. These romantic experiments functioned for a long while (and are still being used) as a storehouse for conceptual and imaginative materials. They not only served intellectuals of all kinds but also per meated deeply all levels of discourse and all social classes. They still exert a powerful influence: many of the discourses of racial and gender equal ity, canonical expansion, global democracy, and multiculturalism prominent at the end of the 20th c. are rooted in romantic categories and experi ments. See also COCKNEY SCHOOL; FANCY; IMAGI NATION; INFLUENCE; ORIGINALITY; PREROMANTI CISM; SATANIC SCHOOL; STURM UND DRANG; VISION; and see the various national poetry sur veys. REFERENCE: D. H. Reiman, Eng. Romantic Poetry 1 800-1 835: A Guide to 1nformation Sources ( 1 979) ; F. Jordan, Eng. Romantic Poets: A Rev. of Research and Grit., 4th ed. ( 1 985) . ANTHOLOGIES: R Reconsidered, ed. N . Frye ( 1963) ; Eng. Romantic Writers, ed. D. Perkins ( 1967) ; R and Gonsciousness, ed. H. Bloom ( 1 970) ; R : Points of View, ed. R. F. Gleckner and G. E. Enscoe, 2d ed. ( 1970) ; The Romantic Period in Germany, ed. S. Prawer ( 1970 ) ; Eng. Romantic Poets: Mod. Essays in Grit., ed. M. H. Abrams, 2d ed. ( 1975 ) ; R, ed. H. Eichner ( 1 977) ; R and Lang. , ed. A. Reed ( 1984) ; Ardis Anthol. ofRus. R , ed. C . Rydel ( 1 984) ; GeT. Aesthetic and Lit. Grit., ed. H. B. Nisbet, K. M. Wheeler, and D . Simpson, 3 V. ( 1 984-86) ; European R, ed. G. Hoffmeister ( 1990) . STUDIES: 1 . Babbitt, Rousseau and R. ( 1 9 1 9 ) ; A. O. Lovejoy, "On the Discrimination ofRs.," PMLA 39 ( 1 92 1 ) ; O. Walzel, Deutsche Romantik, 5th ed. (1 923-26) ; A. Castro, Les grands romantiques espag-
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RONDEAU nols ( 1924) ; A. Farinelli, Il romanticismo nel mondo latino, 3 v. ( 1927 ) ; R. Ullmann and H. Gotthard, Gesch. der Begrf i fs Romantisch ( 1927) ; A. Viatte, Les Sources occultes du r. , 2 v. ( 1 928) ; A. Monglond, Le Preromantisme fran(ais, 2 v. ( 1 930) ; H. A. Korff, Geist der Goethezeit, 5 v. ( 1940-5 7 ) , esp. v. 3 (3d ed. 1 956) and 4 (2d ed. 1 955) ; A. Beguin, CAme romantique et Ie reve ( 1946 ) ; N. Frye, Fearful Symme try ( 1 947); P. van Tieghem, Le Romantisme dans la litt. europeene ( 1 948) , Le Romantisme ( 1 963) , Le romantisme jran(ais, 9th ed. ( 1969 ) ; E. A. Peers, Short Hist. of the Romantic Movement in Spain ( 1 949) ; w.]. Bate, From Classic to Romantic ( 1 946) ; G. Hough, The Last Romantics ( 1 949) , The Roman tic Poets, 2d ed. ( 1957) ; R. Wellek, "The Concept of 'R.' in Lit. Hist." ( 1949 ) , and "R. Re-examined," in Concepts of Crit. ( 1 963) , Confrontations ( 1965 ) ; Wellek v. 2 ; M. Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2 d ed. ( 1 95 1 ) ; Abrams; Frye; D. C izevskij, On R. in Slavic Lit. ( 1 957) ; M. Souckova, The Czech Romantics ( 1 958) ; H. Bloom, The Visionary Company ( 1961 ) ; R . Haym, Die romantische Schule, 6th ed. ( 1961 ) ; F. Strich, Deutsche Klassik und Romantik, 5th ed. ( 1 962) ; w. L. Renwick, Eng. Lit. 1 789-1815 ( 1 963) ; 1 . Jack, Eng. Lit. 1815-1832 ( 1963 ) ; F. Kermode, Romantic Image, 2d ed. ( 1964 ) ; F. Schultz and H. ]. Luthi, "Romantik," Reallexikon 3.578-94; L. Furst, R. in Perspective ( 1969 ) ; M. Peckham, The Triumph of R. ( 1 970) ; M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism ( 1 97 1 ) , The Cor respondent Breeze ( 1 984) ; O . Barfield, What Cole ridge Thought ( 1 97 1 ) ; "Romantic " and Its Cognates: The European Hist. of a Word, ed. H. Eichner ( 1 972) ; P. Cornea, Originile romantismului romdnesf ( 1 972) ; Neues Handbuch der Literatur wiss., ed. K. von See ( 1 972-) , v. 1 4-16; Wilkins; B. Zelinsky, Rus. R. ( 1974) ; A. Vecchio, Il romanti cismo italiano ( 1 975 ) ; F. L. Baumer, "R. (ca. 1 780ca. 1 830) ," and R. Wellek, "R. in Lit.," DHI; G. Hoffmeister, Deutsche und europiiische Romantik ( 1 978) ; M. Brown, The Shape of Ger. R. ( 1979 ) ; M . Cooke, Acts of Inclusion ( 1 9 79 ) ; G . T. Hughes, Romantic Ger. Lit. ( 1 979) ; T. Rajan, Dark Interpreter ( 1 980) ; ]. R. de ]. Jackson, Poetry of the Romantic Period ( 1 980) ; T. McFarland, R. and the Forms of Ruin ( 1981 ) ; M. Butler, Romantics, RebeL5, and Re actionaries ( 1 981 ) ; G. Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen franzosisch Revolution und Restauration ( 1 983) ;].]. McGann, The Romantic Ideolof!J ( 1983) ; P. de Man, The Rhet. ofR. ( 1 984) ; V. Nemoianu, The TamingofR. ( 1984); L. G. Leighton, "R.," in Terras; C. Chase, Decomposing Figures ( 1986) ; S. Curran, Poetic Form and British R. ( 1 986) ; T. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime ( 1 986) ; R. and Contemp. Crit. , ed. M. Eaves and M . Fischer ( 1 986) ; L. Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the Am. Ren. ( 1987) ; R and Feminism, ed. A. K. Mellor ( 1 988) ; C. H. Siskin, The Historicity ofRomantic Discourse ( 1988 ) ; P. Lacoue-Labarthe and ] .-L. Nancy, The Literary Absolute (tr. 1 988) ; C. Jacobs, Uncontainable R ( 1989 ) ; El Romanticismo, ed. D. T. Gies (1989 ) ; T. Ziolkowski , Ger. R. and Its Institutions ( 1 990) ; H.
Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative ( tr. 199 1 ) . V.P.N. ROMANY POETRY. See GYPSY POETRY. RONDEAU. Originally the generic term for all Fr. fixed forms (r., rondel, triolet [qq.v. ] ) , these being derived from dance-rounds ( rondes or rondels) with singing accompaniment: the refrain was sung by the chorus-the general body of dancers-and the variable section by the leader. The written forbears of the r. are generally thought to be the rondets or rondets de carole from 1 3th-c. romances (cf. CAROL ) . The form by which we know the r. today emerged in the 1 5th c., and by the begin ning of the 1 6th c. had displaced all competitors. This form, practiced particularly by Clement Ma rot, consists of 13 lines, octo- or decasyllables, divided into three stanzas of 5, 3, and 5 lines. The whole is constructed on two rhymes only, and the first word (-sound) or words of the first line are used as a rentrement (refrain ) , which occurs as the ninth and fifteenth lines, i.e. at the end of the second and third stanzas, and usually does not rhyme. If we let R. stand for the rentrement, the r. has the following scheme: aabba aabR aabbaR. During the course of the 1 6th c. the r. gradually disappeared. It was restored to fashion at the be ginning of the 1 7th c. by the prtcieux poets, esp. Vincent Voiture, on whose example Theodore de Banville based his 19th-c. revival of the form. Although Musset had experimented with the form earlier in the 1 9th c . , taking some liberties with the rhymes, it was Banville's practice which provided the model for the later 19th-c. explora tions of the fomI. In England, aside from 1 6th-c. examples (Wyatt in particular) , the 1'. , did not really flourish until the end of the 19th c., when under Banville's influence Fr. forms attracted the enthusiasm of poets such as Austin Dobson, Ed mund Gosse, W. E. Henley, Ernest Dowson, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Bridges. In Eng. it has, unlike the triolet (q.v. ) , often been used as a vehicle for serious verse. In Germany, where it has also been called Ringelgedicht, Ringelreim, and Rundreim, the r. was used by Weckherlin, Gatz, Fischart, and later Hartleben. The management of the rentrement is the key to the r. 's expressive capabilities. Banville says that the rentrement is "both more and less than a line, for it plays the major role in the r. 's overall design. It is at once the r.'s subject, its raison d 'itre and its means of expression." Fr. poets, wishing to keep the Tentrement unrhymed yet fatally drawn to rhyme, found a solution in the punning rentrement, which rhymes with itself rather than merely re peating itself. Consequently, in the Fr. r. the rentre ment tends to remain unassimilated, full of wit, buoyancy, and semantic fireworks. The Eng. poets, on the other hand, sought to integrate the rentre ment more fully, both by frequently allowing it to rhyme with either the a or b lines, thus pushing the r. in the direction of that exclusively Eng. form,
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RONDEAU REDOUBLE the roundel (q.v. } , and by exploiting its metrical continuity with the rest of the stanza. The Eng. rentrement is also usually longer than the Fr., four syllables rather than one or two. In short, the Eng. r. is altogether graver and more meditative than the Fr. , its rentrement more clearly a lyric destina tion, a focus of self-recollection, intimate knowl edge, and haunting memory. As a type of truncated refrain, the rentrement probably evolved from copyists' habits of abbrevia tion, common in the Middle Ages. In Fr. prosody, rentrements are usually associated with the r., but whenever the refrains of any poem, in any lang., whether r.-derived or not, are an abbreviated ver sion of the first line either of the poem or of each stanza (e.g. Wyatt, "In aeternum," "Forget not yet," " Quondam was I " ) , then the term rentrement can be justifiably applied. The r. redouble, similar in form, is rare even at the time ofMarot, who is known to have composed one in 1526. In the 1 7th c. a few isolated examples occur in the works of Mme. Deshoulieres andJean de La Fontaine; Banville uses the form in the 1 9th c. Marot's r. r., 24 lines in six quatrains plus the rentrement, may be schematized as follows (R signi tying the rentrement and capitals and primes denot ing whole-line refrains ) : ABA:B' babA abaB babA' abaB ' babaR. Each line of stanza 1 is employed in turn as the last line of each of the following four stanzas, which thus serve to develop the content of stanza 1 ; the final stanza then makes a comment or summation. See also RONDEL; ROUNDEL. T. de Banville, Petit Traite de poesie frant;aise ( 1 87 2 ) ; J. Gleeson White, Ballades and Rondeaus ( 1 88 7 ) ; Kastner; Thieme, 380-lists 1 0 works 1 364- 1 897; H. L. Cohen, Lyric Forms from France ( 1922 ) ; H. Spanke, "Das lateinische R.," ZFSL 53 ( 1 929-30) ; Patterson; M. Fran hasize evenings, sunsets, mists, and the moon, for Zukovskij strives less to capture surroundings than to share with the reader a mood of doleful. pensive gloom. With Z ukovskij, for the first time in Rus. p., the word acquires multiple meanings and shades that are more essential than its basic deno tation. In his search for the suggestive, poly semous word, Zukovskij foreshadows the symbol ists. The most popular part of his legacy consists of his ballads, the most famous of which is Svet lana, a Russified version of Burger's ballad Lenore. Z ukovskij 's most enduring contribution to Rus. letters remains his innumerable trs. of European and Eastern poets, e.g. Goethe, Schiller, Scott, Byron, Homer's Odyssey, The Mahabharata, The Shahname, and many others. The other major poet of the Golden Age, Z uk ovskij 's contemporary, Konstantin Batjuskov ( 1 787-1855 ) , lapsed into insanity in 1 822 and remained so for the rest of his life. He left behind a small collection of poetry and several prose ex periments. Unlike Zukovskij's verse, Batjuskov's is vivid, buoyant, permeated with light, and rather erotic, traits esp. evident in his anthology verse, where Batjuskov strives to depict the color, physi cality, and object-studded concreteness of the an cient world he reconstructs. In his efforts to find the precise, expressive poetic word, Batjuskov clearly anticipates the acmeists (see ACMEISM) . The fragile hedonism ofa fictitious antiquity. how ever, does not save Baljuskov from a profound pessimism: in his world, fleeting passion, pleasure, and beauty yield to tragedy, evil, and death. Marked by a mellifluous euphony unique in Rus. p., Batjuskov's poems suggest the influence of It. verse, which he knew intimately. Opposition to the Karamzinian school came from the Archaists, among whom numbered the later DerZavin; Nikolaj Gnedic, the translator of the Iliad; and Sergij S irinskij-S ixmatov, the author of two epic poems. They formed a group called The Society of Lovers of the Rus. Word (Beseda liubitelej russkogo slova; 1 8 1 1-1 6 ) , at meetings of which they made speeches and read from their
works. The Society published ajournal containing its members' creative efforts. Karamzin's follow ers. who included Batjuskov and Z ukovskij , founded, in opposition to the Society, a humorous counterpart called Arzamas (q.v. ) , which dis banded once the Society ceased to exist. The Ar chaists did not consider smoothness and melodi ousness poetic virtues; in their view, the expressiveness of poetic lang. required heavy, awk ward rhythms, archaic polysyllables, and complex syntax. These notions were articulated and put into practice in the interesting though ponderous verses of Aleksandr Radiscev ( 1 742-1802) , whose predecessors were Trediakovskij and Semen Bo brov ( 1 762- 1 8 l O ) , author of philosophical odes and darkly romantic descriptions oE nature. Other opposition to and polemics with Zukovskij carne from P. Katenin ( 1 792-1853) , author of folkloric ballads ( Ol'ga, Ubijca [The Murderer] , Le§ij [The Forest Spirit] ) , and Wilhelm Kjuxelbeker ( 1 7971 846) , a poet, dramatist, and literary critic. The Golden Age and Rus. p. as a whole reached their apogee in the work of Aleksandr Puskin ( 1 799-1 837) , who not only deserves the title of genius but belongs in the select company of the four or five geniuses (along with Dante, Shake speare, and Goethe) who herald the efflorescence of a new European lit. Puskin's oeuvre assimilated the poetic achievements of the 1 8th and early 19th cs. and set the course for Rus. lit. thereafter. It is not surprising that a bona fide cult of Puskin remains active even in contemp. Rus. cultural life, a cult that surpasses the veneration for Tolstoj and Dostoyevsky. If in his early works Puskin proved to be the heir and pupil of Zukovskij , Baljuskov, and Dedavin, his verses nevertheless showed such mastery and finish that they instantly proclaimed him the foremost poet of his era. His period of apprenticeship culminated in 1820 with the mock heroic poem Ruslan i Ljudmila (Ruslan and Liud mila ) . Puskin's Southern exile ( 1820-24 ) , when he was banished from Petersburg for his political verses, coincided with the romantic period of his creativity. His so-called "Southern" or "Byronic" poemy portray the romantic hero fleeing civiliza tion for such exotic climes as the Caucasus and a gypsy camp. The structure of these narratives in deed recalls Byron's Oriental tales, but Puskin's romantic hero proves spiritually and morally bankrupt when confronted with the sincere, pas sionate emotions of representatives of the primi tive world (Kavkazskij plennik [The Prisoner of the Caucasus] , Cygan,V [The Gypsies] ) . In the later Poltava ( 1 828) , Puskin synthesized the historical poema with a romantic love narrative, while glori fying the achievements of Peter I. The theme of Peter becomes central in Puskin's masterpiece, the epic Mednyj vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman, 1 833) , which dramatizes the Petersburg flood of 1 824. Puskin depicts the conflict between the state, symbolized by the statue of Peter I, and the
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RUSSIAN POETRY individual-the simple, modest man whose hap piness is destroyed at the ruler's command. While acknowledging the claims of the individual and his right to happiness, Puskin's poema shows the inevi table conflict between that right and the demands of the state. During his Southern exile Puskin also em barked on his most ambitious work, which he completed only seven years later ( 1 823-30) : his verse-novel Evgenij Onegin (Eugene Onegin) . At the center of the novel, which charts the tragic fate of the Rus. intelligentsia, stands the disillu sioned, skeptical, Byronic hero Onegin, incapable of finding either occupation or happiness. After killing his friend, the young romantic poet Lenskij , i n a duel, Onegin travels and finally discovers love, only to have his impassioned declaration spurned, at which juncture the novel breaks off. With the luckless heroine of the novel , TatJana, originates the series of pure, strong, young Rus. women whom Turgenev later immortalized. The ex tremely simple plot of Eugene Onegin is amplified by numerous "lyric digressions" which enable the author to participate in the novel both as one of its personae and as commentator. For this work Puskin created the special "Onegin stanza" (q.v. ) , a quatorzain with a complex rhyme scheme remi niscent of the Eng. sonnet. As part of his increasing absorption with history, Puskin in 1 825 wrote Boris Godunov, a tragedy in blank verse assessing the role of the populace in historical cataclysms. A particularly productive period of Puskin's creativity was the autumn of 1 830. Forced by cholera quarantine to remain at his estate in Boldino, Puskin completed in an amazingly short span a series ofsuperb works, inc!. his "little tragedies": "Mozart and Salieri" ("Mo cart i Salieri") , "The Stone Guest" ("Kamennyi gost''') , "The Covetous Knight" ("Skupoj ryear''') , and "The Feast during the Plague" ("Pirvo vremja cumy" ) . These highly condensed scenes investi gate fatal passions such as love, greed, and envy, exploring the tragic, irreconcilable contradictions and polarities of human existence: love and death, inspiration and toil, age and youth. Finally, Puskin bequeathed to Rus. lit. a fund of lyric poetry on a broad range of themes, among them love, nature, and philosophical issues. Each of these master pieces, which he wrote throughout his life, repre sents a different psychological situation for the articulation of which Puskin unfailingly finds the single word that perfectly meets the requirements of the moment or scene. That word may belong to any lexical or cultural level, be it colloquial, book ish, archaic, or vulgar. As an entity Puskin's poetry cannot be identified with any poetic system or movement such as romanticism or realism. Always comprehensible to any educated native speaker (hence their ostensible simplicity and accessibil ity) , his poems at the same time defY translation into a foreign lang. precisely on account of the impossibility of locating the perfectly equivalent
word, the only suitable word, within another lin guistic system. Puskin died prematurely in a duel without hav ing realized many of his plans and, really, his seemingly limitless potential. Around him had clustered a group of gifted poets usually called the Puskin Pleiad, comprising primarily his friends Evgenij Baratynskij, Anton Del'vig, Petr Vjazem skij, Nikolaj Jazykov, and several others. Of these, the most formidable poet was indisputably Bara tynskij ( 1 800-44) , whose epic Eda ( 1 824) implic itly criticized Puskin's brand of romanticism: it replaced exotic gypsies and Circassian damsels with a Finnish peasant girl, and the enigmatic romantic hero with a commonplace officer-se ducer. His other well-known poema, Bal (The Ball, 1 828) has as its heroine a society beauty who poisons herself because of an unfortunate ro mance. Puskin himself thought highly of Baratyn skij 's poemy, which contrasted dramatically with his own. As a lyric poet, Baratynskij began with meditative elegies that usually mourned irretriev able happiness and juxtaposed the lyric protago nist's past with his melancholy present. Pessimism becomes the dominant note in Baratynskij 's ma ture lyrics, so much so that in "Poslednij poet" (The Last Poet, 1 835) he perceives civilization as inimical to beauty; contemp. society leaves the poet no option but to die in disillusioned isolation. Particularly imposing is Baratynskij's tragic mas terpiece "Osen'" (Autumn, 1 837 ) , which juxta poses the death of nature in autumn to the autumn of human life. Baratynskij reinforces the dark, morose ponderousness ofhis reflections with complex syntactic constructions and an intention ally archaic lexicon which contrast sharply with the unusual lightness of Puskin's verse. Mixail Lermontov ( 1 81 4-41 ) essentially also be longs to the Puskin Pleiad, though critical opinion has traditionally assigned Lermontov the role of Puskin's successor and placed him on a par with Puskin in the history of Rus. lit. Lermontov's short and luckless life (military service, Caucasian exile, death by duel at age 26) allowed him little oppor tunity to realize fully his poetic talent. Although he attained instant fame in 1 837 with his poem on Puskin's death, his active literary career lasted only four years, during which he produced the most memorable instances of the quintessential Rus. romantic poema: Pesnja pro kupca Kalasnikova (Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov, 1 838) , which borrows from folklore for its dramatic story oflove and death in the time of Ivan the Terrible; Mcyri (The Novice, 1840 ) , the final confession of a fugi tive novice that in structure and rhythm recalls Byron's Giaour; and Demon ( 1 829-4 1 ) , an operatic account of the fatal love ofthe spirit of evil for the beautiful Tamara. A profound and sweeping disil lusionment imbues Lermontov's lyrics-disillu sionment with his generation, himself, and life at large (e.g. "Duma" [Ballad] , "Poet" [The Poet) ) . In a world that is "dreary and dismal," bereft of
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RUSSIAN POETRY love, populated by a cruel and vicious humanity intent on brutalizing the poet-prophet, death of fers the only deliverance. Lermontov's verse is energetic and abrupt, "an iron verse, steeped in bitterness and malice." This energy gains addi tional force in several poems from the masculine rhymes ofLermontov's iambic tetrameter. Ternary meters, however, occur much more often in his poetry than in Puskin's. The next important stage in the history of Rus. p. finds its most gifted representative in Fedor Tjutcev ( 1 803-73) . A lyric poet of genius as well as a government official and diplomat, a salon wit, and one of the most educated men of his time, Tjutcev wrote very little and published even less: his collected poems, which embody his soul 's in nermost secrets, his sancta sanetorum, fill only a single slender volume. Tjutcev's philosophical po ems reveal a Schellingian pantheism which con ceives of nature as an organism animated by a spirit incomprehensible and inaccessible to hu mankind: Nature is not what it seems to you, It is no blind nor soulless image It has a soul, and freedom too, It has love, it has a language. The boldness of Tjutcev's metaphors stems from his metaphorical perception of the universe. Thus in his "documentary description" of his vi sion, summer lightning is God's stern pupils shin ing through his heavy lashes, the Earth's head is crowned with the sun, and its feet are washed by spring waters; the poet sees the gentle smile of fading autumn. Love lyrics which are decidedly tragic in concept and mood occupy a special place in Tjutcev's oeuvre, doubtless owing to the poet's protracted liaison with a much younger mistress who died of consumption. For Tjutcev, love is the manifestation of elemental forces; it dooms hu man life, unavoidably leading to death-a tragic conception of passion that has affinities with Tur genev's in his fiction. Tjutcev infuses his descrip tions of his beloved's last moments and her depar ture from life with searing, inexpressible pain, and locates that heart-wrenching loss within a general landscape of human suffering. Technically, Tjutcev expanded the traditional rhythmic system of Rus. p., partly through an increased use of the trochee (as opposed to the iambic meters favored by Puskin's school ) , and esp. through his con scious violation of the rhythmic structure of syl labotonic versification. His unorthodox shifts in rhythm as an artistic device prepared the ground for the dol'nik (q.v. ) , a tonic meter widely used at the beginning of the 20th c. Although chronologically Tjutcev's poetic out put spills over into the 1 860s, it nevertheless brings the Golden Age to a close. Interest in verse diminished perceptibly in the 1 850s as it was ousted by prose, which rapidly gained dominance as a genre. Both literary theory and crit. of this
period enthusiastically embraced the principle of utilitarianism, viewing lit. as a useful means of enlightening the common people and liberating them from social repression. Such a pragmatic approach to lit. esp. characterized the crit. of Nikolaj Cernysevskij and Nikolaj Dobroljubov, who derived their ideas from Comte and Feuer bach. Predictably, "ideological" prose fiction could fulfill the utilitarian task better than poetry, which at best was regarded as second-rate material for propaganda. Nikolaj Nekrasov's (182 1-78) phrase, "You may not be a poet, / But be a citizen you must," became the slogan of this influential literary camp with its leftist political values. Nekrasov, by birth a member of the landowning class, a brilliant publisher and editor, a successful gambler, and a wealthy snob late in life, was the sole authentically talented poet in this group. At the same time, Nekrasov was a man with a tragic and morbid attitude to life, which found expres sion in his portrayal of peasant and urban poverty and condignly earned him fame as a popular poet ofthe people. Given to calling his muse bloody and "horsewhipped," Nekrasov chronicled the suffer ings of Rus. peasant women, crushed by hard physical labor in addition to their husbands' drunkenness and beatings ("V doroge" [En Route] , 1 845; "Trojka," 1 846) . He immortalized the deni zens of city slums exhausted by hunger and cold ("Edu Ii noe'ju" [Whenever I drive at night] , 1847; "VOl''' [The Thief] , 1 850) , the forced laborers at their harrowing toil (" Zeleznaja doroga" [The Railroad] , 1 864) , the unfortunate sick peasants who lacked all rights ("NesZataja polosa" [An Un harvested Strip] 1854; "Razmyslenija u parad ' nogo pod"ezda" [Musings in the Main Driveway] , 1 856) , and the soldier flogged to death by his superiors ("Orina, mat' soldatskaja" [Orina, A Soldier's Mother] 1863 ) . In his huge epic poem ' Komu na Rusi iit' xoroso (Who Is Happy in Russia, 1 865-77) , Nekrasov attempted a comprehensive canvas ofRus. life in the post-Emancipation 1860s. Several successful sections aside, the poems as a whole failed to cohere and disintegrated into sepa rate units. Nekrasov's poetry tends toward simple rhythms, it favors ternary meters, and it does not aim for metrical variety; consequently, his verses often lapse into a monotonous uniformity of rhythm. Poets of the 1 850s-70s who could legitimately be called members of the "Nekrasov school" in clude the critic Dobroljubov, who produced poor poetry; the satirist and witty parodist D. Minaev, author of feuilletons in verse; M. Mixajlov, re nowned for his revolutionary activities and his civic and political verse, who was the originator of "prison" poetry and left excellent trs. of Heine; the satirical poet V. Kurockin, who earned a reputa tion for his trs. of Beranger; the self-taught mer chant's son 1. Nikitin, who concentrated on peas ant life; 1. Surikov; and several other lesser figures. The "art for art's sake" school that stood in opposition to the Utilitarians did not so much
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RUSSIAN POETRY defend "pure art" as reject a pragmatic approach to lit. and argue in favor of varied thematics. The most talented and "purest" lyricist among them was Afanasij Fet ( 1 820-92) , a follower of Schopen hauer, whose World as Will and Representation he translated. According to Fet, the "real" world and the world of poetry and beauty are two utterly unrelated realms. An officer and highly successful landowner in everyday life, Fet, when transported into the sphere of the sublime, became an in spired poet. The poet's task, he maintained, is to perceive the beauty which lies beyond the com monplace purview of the average being and to reveal that beauty to othel s. Love and nature are the most frequent themes in his lyrics. Fet's nature poems celebrate the alluring, festive beauty of the natural world in its manifold aspects: velvet night, mysterious dawn, dense forest, silver snow, trilling birds, delicate butterflies. Where other poets dwell on the psychological complexity of love re lationships, Fet confines himself to the selective mention of a few details from which the reader must deduce the portrait of the beloved or recre ate the situation. A momentary impression cap tured by the poet expands in the reader's mind into a poetic scene which reminds us simultane ously that beauty is transitory and that poetry can only suggest the inaccessible, ideal beauty of a world beyond our reach. Fet's substitution of synecdochic detail for the whole and the musical ity of his verse, achieved through systematic allit eration and assonance, make him the first Rus. impressionist poet, whom the symbolists revered as their most important forerunner. Boldly inno vative in rhythm, Fet combined diverse meters in a single poem, alternated very long lines with extremely short ones (sometimes consisting of only one word) within a stanza, and followed a stanza in binary meter with one in ternary. All these devices paved the way for the dissolution of syllabotonic versification that took place in Rus. p. at the turn of the century. Other talented proponents of anti-utilitarian tendencies in the mid 19th c. include Fer's friend A1eksej K. Tolstoj ( 1 8 1 7-75) , Jakov Polonskij, ( 1 8 1 0-97 ) , Apollon Majkov ( 1 82 1 -97) , Lev Mej ( 1 822-62) , Karolina Pavlova ( 1 807-93) , and oth ers. They strove to fuse musicality with reconcili ation in their depiction of reality, created beauti ful nature and love lyrics, and rediscovered historical and folklore themes. A decisive force in the battle against the utilitarian school was ex erted by anthology verse. Characterized by vivid ness and visual plasticity, anthology verse flour ished in the 1 850s and 60s, being a genre favored by almost all the poets of the "art for art's sake" movement. It comprised the most significant part of Nikolaj Scerbina's ( 1 821-69) output. Despite the decline of interest in poetry in the 1 850s at the hands of the utilitarian critics, by the 1 860s-70s the "art for art's sake" school had raised poetry to new heights, laying the groundwork for
its luxuriant flowering at the turn of the century, when their contributions were reassessed and as similated. The 1880s, however, witnessed once again a sharp decline in Rus. p. The civic ardor of the utilitarian school ended with the most popular poet of the 1 880s, Semen Nadson ( 1 862-87), who died from consumption. A sense of doom, a resent ment against middle-class satiety and crass vulgar ity, and a hatred for "the kingdom of Baal" domi nate Nadson's verses, which show talent but suffer from uniformity of both theme and rhythm. Al though the "pure art" school as a whole proved more fecund, its representatives in the 1 880s paled by comparison with its pioneers. Their ranks in cluded A1eksej Apuxtin ( 1 840-93), with his inti mate romances and lyrics in a gypsy vein, Konstantin Slucevskij ( 1 837-1904), and Konstantin Fofanov ( 1862-191 1 ) . These men stood on the threshold of Rus. symbolist poetry, when the brilliant new era of Rus. culture dawned-an era that lasted to 1917 and came to be known as the "Silver Age." Symbolism, which became the most influential poetic current of this period, found its theoretical underpinnings in the ideas of the Neoplatonic philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev ( 1 853-1900) . At the heart of Solov' ev's eschatological system rests the idea of the World Soul, the Eternal Feminine, the Feminine Cosmic Source, which can only be attained in the sphere of art. Through the percep tion of art alone, asserted Solov' ev, can one come into contact with other worlds. Hence, in the sym bolist scheme semantics become unstable and in tentionally polysemous (it is no accident that the symbolists cited Z ukovskij and Fet among their forerunners) . Considered the founder of symbolism, Valerij Bljusov ( 1 873-1924) willingly fulfilled his role as the movement's theoretician, leader, and publish er. From 1893-95 he pub. three collections enti tled Russkie simvolisty (Rus. symbolists ) . His own poetry, which is distinguished by picturesqueness and cold craftsmanship, has a rational, declarative cast and reveals Brjusov's technical adventurous ness: he tried his hand at every known poetic genre and all the meters and stanza forms common to world poetry. Two of Brjusov's predecessors who actually realized symbolist ideas were Konstantin Bal'mont ( 1 867-1942 ) , a brilliant master ofmusi cal verses and superb rhythms who emigrated in 1920, and Fedor Sologub ( 1862-1 927) , whose pes simistic poems juxtapose the doomed real world of mortality with the beautiful imaginary world of "the Star of Oilay" or "the Star of Mair." During the second phase of Rus. symbolism, which began ca. 1900, several outstanding poets of various ages joined the by-then-dominant move ment. Among the older symbolists one finds Vjaceslav Ivanov ( 1866-1949 ) , who left the Soviet Union in 1 924, and Innokentij Annenskij ( 1 8561909 ) . The immensely erudite Ivanov became the movement's most outstanding theoretician. His skillfully archaized, allusive verses, which draw
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RUSSIAN POETRY attention to their bookishness and the complexity of their rhythmic structure, make considerable demands on their reader. Like Ivanov, Annenskij came to literature relatively late; the majority of his poems were not published in his lifetime. Per meated by unrelieved pessimism, these lyrics re peatedly dwell on death, expressed in images bor rowed from the finely perceived details of everyday life. Ancient Greece appears in a guise of equally inconsolable gloom in Annensky's four tragedies, based on motifs from ancient myths. Younger symbolists of the second generation incl. Andrej Belyj ( 1 880-1934) and Aleksandr Blok ( 1 880-1921 ) . A splendid poet and prosodist, Belyj also shone as a prose writer and critic. His major collections of poetry, Zoloto v lazun (Gold in Az ure ) , Pepel (Ashes) , and Urna (The Urn) , reflect the abstruse complexity of the symbolist world view. Both the ideal expanse of the azure and purple sky and the brutal ordinariness of the earth, with its cities and villages, are described in almost Nekrasovian tones (indeed, Belyj dedi cated Pepel to Nekrasov) . The philosophical prin ciples of Baratynskij's and Tjutcev's lyrics find a new meaning and are assimilated into symbolism in Belyj, whose poetry brims with neologisms and shows true originality in stanza construction, whereby an individual word, emphasized through intonation, serves as the basis of a rhythmic pat tern and becomes a line of the poetic text. Sub sequently, these experiments by Belyj influenced the efforts of Majakovskij and Cvetaeva to break new poetic ground. A genius whose oeuvre constitutes the summit of poetic achievement in the early 20th c., Alek sandr Blok divided his collected lyrics into three volumes. In the first, which contains the famous collection of "Stixi 0 Prekrasnoj Dame" (Verses about the Beautiful Lady ) , true to the philosophy of Solov'ev, Blok exalts the ideal world of beauty, light, and worship of the Deity wherein resides his mystic beloved, the incarnation of the World Soul, the Eternal Feminine. In the second volume, the poet "moves from the divine realm to that of the creatures," abandoning the churches and temples, the poetic terems ( halls or towers) and azure skies, for the poeticized world of swamps and northern forests populated by evil spirits, phantasmal Pe tersburg, and winter blizzards. The poet's lyrical devel. culminates in the third volume with a sense of tragic, inconsolable despair that admits of no solution, even in death. Blok was the first poet of the era to write a poema, "Dvenadcat' " (The Twelve) , about the October Revolution, which he was prepared to accept regardless of the blood, devastation, and terror, for he perceived in the cataclysm a new and purifying beginning. The twelve rebels of his narrative simultaneously ap pear as twelve apostles, ahead of whom walks the figure of Christ, a symbol of the blessing given to the imminent world. Blok appreciably extended the rhythmic possibilities of Rus. verse, making
extensive use of dol'niki. The hallmarks of Blok's poetry are polysemous diction, melodiousness, and expressiveness. One other excellent poet and critic belonging to the youngest generation of sym bolists is Vladislav Xodasevic ( 1886-1939) , a sub stantial part of whose creative activity took place in emigration. The second decade of the 20th c. witnessed a reaction to the vagueness of symbolist poetry in the emergence of a counter-movement. Mixail Kuzmin ( 1 875-1936) , a poet who portrayed scenes (e.g. of the Rus. 1 8th c.; of Egypt during the Hellenistic era) in extremely vivid and sensual images, called [or "beautiful clarity" in poetry. A literary group headed by Nikolaj GumiIev ( 1 8861921 ) , later executed for his participation in an anti-Bolshevik plot, answered that summons. Call ing themselves "acmeists," the group's members decried the symbolists' neglect of the material world. To acmeism (q.v.) belong two of the great est 20th-c. Rus poets: Anna Axmatova ( 1 8891966) and Osip MandelStam ( 1 89 1-1938) . Both poets observed faithfully acmeism's principles of clarity and plasticity, its pictorial tendencies, and its grounding in material culture. In Rekviem (Re quiem) , pub. in the Soviet Union only in 1 987, Axmatova captured in mercilessly clear and ex pressive verses the horrors of the Stalinist terror of 1937. In one of her last works, Poema bez geroja (Poem Without a Hero) , she incarnated in mas terly rhythms the twilight of the Silver Age on the eve of the October Revolution. Denounced by the Party's Central Committee in 1946, Axmatova be came the focus of attacks by politically conserva tive critics. The course of her poetic devel. ran parallel to MandelStam's, who perished in Stalin's camps. Both moved thematically from paeans to the beauty of the Ancient and European worlds (esp. the dazzlingly beautiful and cold Peters burg) to the keen-sighted and unsparing depic tion ofthe cruelty, desolation, and vulgar medioc rity of post-Revolutionary Rus. life. One of the last poets "reared on acmeism" was Dmitrij Klenovskij ( 1 893-1 976 ) , the majority of whose works were written in emigration. With some reservations, one could include Georgij Ivanov ( 1 894-1958) among the younger acmeists. His fine lyrics matured from recherche exoticism to the tragic nostalgia of his later years in emigration. An essential role in the poetic life of the Silver Age was played by the futurists, who gave promi nence to the acoustic aspect of words (see FUTUR ISM) . Rejecting all earlier achievements in Rus. and world poetry, they elaborated the theory of the "self-oriented" (samovitoe) , i.e. self-significant word, devoid of all semantic associations. On its basis they created a "trans-sense" (zaumnaja) po etry: a poetry free of semantic significance, pos sessing only sound value. Their ideas link the futurists with dada (q.v.) and other avant-garde tendencies not only in poetry but also in the visual arts. The supreme futurist poet and theoretician
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RUSSIAN POETRY was Velimir Xlebnikov ( 1 885-192 2 ) , a master of experimental verse which richly illustrates his fac ulty for creating words. One of the most accom plished of the futurist poets was Vladimir Majak ovskij ( 1 894-1930), who resembled other futurists insofar as his rejection of the past logically forced him to accept the October Revolution, which he actively supported through his artistic work. Ma jakovskij 's maximalist temperament and hyper bolic tendencies led him to extremes of dedica tion, so that by the 1 920s his poetry became purely propagandistic. His political jingles evinced none of his earlier lyrical powers. Mter Majakovskij's suicide, Stalin proclaimed him the best poet of the Soviet era, an assessment which still obtains in official Soviet culture. Majakovskij wrote predomi nantly accentual verse in which the main rhythmic unit becomes the word (a single accent) , which itself can comprise a whole line; hence the "Iad derlike" effect of Majakovskij 's verses on the printed page. To some degree the influence of his rhythms is discernible in contemp. poetry, esp. that of Voznesenskij and Evtusenko. In contrast to the emphatically urban futurists, their contemporaries Nikolaj K1juev ( 1 885-1937) and Sergej Esenin ( 1 895-1925) found inspiration almost exclusively in the countryside. K1juev, who perished in the camps, produced heavily orna mental poetry, dense with imagery derived from the religious beliefs of the Schismatics and patri archal peasant life. Esenin, whose popularity con tinues to rise steadily, was Majakovskij's major rival during the 1 920s. In melodious verses that suggest Blok's influence, Esenin sang the beauty of nature, peasant life (often in idyllic tones) , and Christian ity, which he perceived as the peasants' religion. Mter the Revolution, however, his verses acquired a tragic tone as he mourned the fall of peasant Russia; the degeneration of love into lechery; and the fate of the poet, whose final refuge is the tavern. Sincere despair, which led him to suicide, sounds unmistakably in his last poems, "Moskva kabackaja" (The Moscow of Taverns) and "C ernyj celovek" (The Black Man) . The original and remarkable gifts of Marina Cvetaeva ( 1 892-1941 ) have their roots in B10k and Axmatova, but the devel. of those gifts was dis rupted by the Revolution and Cvetaeva's emigra tion in 1 922. Her energetic poems, packed with inner tension, in broken rhythms of short lines and frequent enjam bment, were created in unbearably trying circumstances, amidst poverty, constant travel , and misery exacerbated by Cvetaeva's cheerless temperament. An organic synthesis of Rus. folklore, 1 8th-c. odic rhetoric, and Deriavin, Puskin, the futurists, Goethe, and Rilke [her fa vorite poets] , her verses won Cvetaeva an enor mous audience in Russia in the 1 960s. Returning to her homeland in 1939, Cvetaeva could not en dure the conditions of her personal life (her daughter's arrest and her husband's execution) and committed suicide.
If poetic life in Russia remained fairly active during the 1 920s, that continuation was due largely to inertia. Literary societies and unions arose and disbanded in rapid succession. A partial list of the organizations that proliferated during this period includes Proletcult, devised to forge a proletarian poetry independent of former trads.; LEF (Majakovskij and Aseev) , which rejected art in the name of fact; the romantic Pereval (Divide) group, with Mixail Svetlov and Eduard Bagrickij; Kuznica (the Smithy ) , which included M. Gerasi mov, V. KiriIIov, and S. Rodov, who glorified the proletariat and the "metallic world of machines"; the imagists, incl. Esenin, Vadim S ersenevic, and Anatolij Mariengof, who in their polemics with futurism emphasized the imagistic nature of the poetic word; and the "Oberjuty," an avant-garde group that founded a theater of the absurd and produced surrealist and expressionist poems. Al most all the members of the group (Daniil Xarms, Nikolaj Olejnikov, Aleksandr Vvedenskij , Nikolaij Zabolockij , and others) were suppressed-and some were shot-in the 1 930s. The year 1 932 saw the elimination of these and all other groups when, by government decree, the Union of Soviet Writers was established as the sole legitimate writ ers' association. During the ensuing two decades Rus. p. ground to a standstill. Genuine poets fell silent, wrote "for the drawer" (with no hope of publishing their work) , or undertook translation. Such was the fate of the consummate poet Boris Pasternak ( 1 890- 1960 ) . Although initially allied with the futurists, Pasternak essentially continued the trads. of the Rus. and Ger. philosophical lyric (Tjutcev and Rilke ) . Laden with profound and complex imagery, his poetry has the intensity of passionate love lyrics. Despite various attempts to engage in postrevolutionary public life (he wrote a poema about the 1905 Revolution, for example) , Pasternak remained an individualist to the core, and the government never succeeded in wooing him to its side. For a long stretch after the forma tion of the Writers' Union, Pasternak kept silent, translating Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare and working on the novel Doctor Zhivago, the last sec tion of which is a verse cycle that draws richly on religious themes and motifs. Pub. in Italy in 1 957, the novel earned Pasternak the Nobel Prize the following year. But this unleashed a campaign of vituperative Soviet persecution against Pasternak that eventually pressured him into refusing the award. These events undermined Pasternak's already uncer tain health, and he died of cancer in 1960. The "thaw" ushered in by Stalin's death in 1 953 facilitated a renascence in Rus. p. that lasted al most two decades. Young poets entered the liter ary ranks to form the poetic avant garde of the Sixties. Adrej Voznesenskij (b. 1 933) instantly drew readers' attention through his unexpected rhymes, his virtuoso deployment of metaphor, and the boldness and originality of his ideas. In articu lating his hatred for despotism (a typical concern
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RUSSIAN POETRY after Stalin's death ) , his poems regularly pitted tyrants against such artists and "masters" as Rus. architects, Goya, Gauguin, Blok, and Rublev. Al though as individuals they perished, their art and art in general triumphed, thus achieving a moral victory over tyranny. Voznesenskij 's poetry evi dences his fascination with constructivism (q.v. ) in architecture, with cybernetics, and with modern physics, and juxtaposes the complex rhythms of the modern world with the banality of everyday existence. The complicated form ofVoznesenskij 's poems and his attraction to the technocratic tendencies of the West briefly made him the idol of the Rus. intelligentsia. His constant rival, who matched him in popularity and reached a wider audience, was Evgenij Evtusenko (b. 1 933) . Formally quite primitive (in rhythm, syntax, and imagery) , his poems suggest affinities with Majakovskij. Yet his best works not only boast a topicality and dynamic power, but boldly touch on topics forbidden in the Soviet press: Stalinism, anti-Semitism, Party bu reaucracy, corruption, bribery, and sex. The sensational success of Voznesenskij and Evtusenko overshadowed other poets whose tal ents compared with and perhaps even outstripped that of the two celebrities, for whom public adu lation abated at the close of the 1960s. That dec ade was uncommonly wealthy in talents that emerged suddenly after 30 years of incubation or repression. Of these the most memorable incl. Bella Axmadulina (b. 1 93 7 ) , author of subtle and profound philosophical verse; Aleksandr Kusner (b. 1 936) ; Nikolaj Rubcov ( 1936-7 1 ) , who died prematurely, leaving a body of nature lyrics; and Viktor Sosnora (b. 1 936) , who wrote on Rus. his tory. Alongside these poets appeared the expo nents of a new genre: "bards" who sang their verses to guitar accompaniment. Tape recorders expe dited the rapid dissemination of their poems. Of the bards, the most eminent are the subtle lyricist Bulat Okudiava (b. 1 924) , the keen satirist Alek sandr Galic ( 1 9 18-7 7 ) , and the tragic poet and actor Vladimir Vysockij ( 1938-80) . To this group also belongs Novella Matveeva (b. 1934 ) , who composes verses full of philosophical reflection and unexpected romantic imagery. With the 1 970s, the topicality and political sub text that marked the poetry of the previous dec ade receded into the background. A wholesale rejection of both classical and official Soviet cul ture now manifested itself in the works of poets belonging to this "barracks" school of poetry, whose spiritual fathers were the futurists and the Oberjuty. Nine large volumes of undigested raw material containing the verse, crit., diaries, and reminiscences of these poets were recently pub. by Konstantin Kuzminskij. Whereas the works ofGen nadij Aigi (b. 1934) regularly reveal his debt to the futurist trad . , the career of Naum Korzavin (b. 1 925) , now living in emigration, reflects a definite shift from anti-Stalinist political verse to philo-
sophical musings on the meaning of life and the poet's calling. Among the contemp. poets whose literary powers matured only in emigration, Alek sej Cvetkov (b. 1947) and Baxyt Kenziev (b. 1 950) deserve mention. In the United States they en countered poets working in the cl. mode: Igor' Cinnov (b. 1 909 ) , Ivan Elagin ( 19 1 8-87 ) , and Nik ol