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Translation--from both a theoretical and practical point of view--articulates differing but interconnected modes of circulation in the work of writers originally from different geographical areas of transatlantic encounter, such as Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean. After Translation examines from a transnational perspective the various ways in which translation facilitates the circulation of modern poetry and poetics across the Atlantic. It rethinks the theoretical paradigm of Anglo-American “modernism” based on the transnational, interlingual and transhistorical features of the work of key modern poets writing at both sides of the Atlantic--namely, the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa; the Chilean Vicente Huidobro; the Spaniard Federico García Lorca; the San Francisco-based poets Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser; the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite; and the Brazilian brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. Another central aim of this book is to analyze how the literary history of modern poetry—traditionally produced within mononational and monolingual frameworks—is altered by a comparative approach that incorporates different languages, poetic traditions, and cultures connected by the heterogeneous geopolitical space of the Atlantic Ocean.

An Atmospherics of the City traces Baudelaire’s evolution from an aesthetics of fetishizing, in which the function of poetry is to produce beauty out of the ordinary by means of the poet’s artifice, to a poetics of allegory that reads the modern city’s atmospherics as a product of urban noise and as a function, therefore, of what today would be recognized as entropy. In this later stage, the function of the poetic becomes one of disalienation; it strives to awaken readers to the presence of Evil as a malevolent force that is responsible for the depredations of human history over time. This evolution, in which poetic practice is redefined for the modern age as one of bearing witness to that which is most alien to (and destructive of) the poetic, is traced through readings of verse poems drawn principally from the “Tableaux Parisiens” section of the Fleurs du Mal (in that volume’s second edition of 1861), and of prose poems from the posthumously published Le Spleen de Paris, defined here as a poet’s “urban diary” and understood as a manifestation of temporality in its very absence of structure. Motifs such as the pane of glass and the statue are traced as their significance evolves from a very early poem (“Je n’ai pas oublié”) through later poems in both verse and prose.

This collection intervenes in recent debates over formalism, historicism, poetics, and lyric by focusing on one of literary criticism’s most important, most vested, and perhaps least well-defined or definable terms. Rhythm in these essays is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. It is a key term through which Romantic, Modern, and contemporary literary theory define form, either in conversation with or opposition to meter. It has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice if not identity as such. Through their exploration of rhythm’s genealogies and present critical debates, the essays consistently warn against taking rhythm to be a given form sorted out through scansion, description, and taxonomy and roped back into interpretation. Pressing beyond the poetry handbook’s isolated descriptions of technique as well as inductive declarations of what rhythm “is,” each essay builds toward methodological inquiry about what it means to think rhythm. With contributions from many of the foremost scholars in the fields of prosody and poetics, Critical Rhythm develops new critical models for understanding how rhythm, in light of its historicity and generic functions, permeates poetry’s composition, formal objectivity, circulation in national and other publics, performances, and present critical horizons.

This book explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its three crowns: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The author views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social. The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. The second section focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante's Vita nuova, Petrarch's lyric sequence, and Boccaccio's The Decameron. The author also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante's Rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women's use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio—but not by Petrarch—were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in “Dante and the Lyric Past” to Petrarch's regressive stance on gender in “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature”—and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d'Arezzo—these sixteen essays frame the literary culture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways.

Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Spanning most of the 20th century, this study investigates poems by Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (two “Objectivist” writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s), Clark Coolidge and Tina Darragh (two “Language Poets” with books from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively), and Harryette Mullen (a post-Black-Arts writer who flourished in the 1990s). By reverse-engineering poems, this study sets the critical record straight on multiple counts. Moreover, reading these poems in tandem with their source texts puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde poems are nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Indeed, beyond the particular arguments and local readings, Dictionary Poetics argues that the new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics maps and articulates the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.

This collection of essays on Old Norse-Icelandic poetry is concerned with the blurring of boundaries between genres and periods. Many of the texts and topics taken up have been difficult to categorize and have received less attention than they deserve. The boundaries between genres (skaldic and eddic), periods (Viking Age, medieval, early modern) or cultures (Icelandic, Scandinavian, English, Continental) may not have been as clear to medieval authors and audiences as they seem to modern scholars. When questions of classification are allowed to fall into the background, it becomes easier to appreciate the poetry on its own terms, rather than focus on its ability or failure to live up to anachronistic expectations. Some of the essays in this collection present new material for consideration, while others revisit assumptions about authors and texts and challenge or suggest revision of them. They reflect the idea that poetry with “medieval” characteristics continued to be produced in Iceland well beyond the fifteenth century, the traditional end of the medieval period of Scandinavian literature, and even beyond the Reformation in Iceland (1550). These studies point out the need for more work: research has focused on the “best” skaldic poetry (that which follows Snorri Sturluson’s definitions most closely) and the most purely Nordic and Germanic of the eddic poems, but poetry that slides across the boundaries of genre or periodization or cultural origin has been left by the wayside. These essays present new evidence, offer new interpretations, and hope to awaken new appreciation for undervalued poetry.

From 1920 until his death in 1962, consciousness and its effect on humanity and the natural world was Robinson Jeffers’s obsession. Understanding and explaining the biological basis of mind is one of the towering challenges of modern science to this day, and Jeffers’s poetic experiment is an important contribution to American literary history— no other twentieth-century poet attempted such a thorough engagement with a crucial scientific problem. Jeffers invented a sacramental poetics that accommodates a modern scientific account of consciousness, thereby integrating an essentially religious sensibility with science in order to discover the sacramentality of natural process and reveal a divine cosmos. Inventing the Language to Tell It traces Jeffers’s creation of the poetics that expresses his sacramental-materialist vision, and it proposes that this poetics stands in contrast to modernism by its refusal to divorce mysticism from science. The tension between materialism and mysticism, oppositional powers harnessed together to achieve a single purpose, is the cardinal indicator of his sacramental poetics. This study examines this tension as it runs through his work, charting the initial struggle the poet had with accommodating consciousness to his sacramental materialism and detailing the gradual shift to an understanding of the biology of mind.

Whereas Romantic studies often have focused on British Romanticism in its relations to the past—Romanticism as ruins, memory, and mourning—Modernity’s Mist draws attention to an understudied aspect: Romanticism’s future-oriented poetics. This book explores the epistemological uncertainties that arise from the sense of an unknowable futurity at the outset of the nineteenth century. It situates that uncertainty in relation to an intellectual history of changing concepts of time and to the shifting historiographical debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the future was newly characterized both by its radical unpredictability and by the unprecedented speed with which it approached. In the work of John Keats, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt, Modernity’s Mist describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority—“what might will have been”—the imagining of the historical present as opening up a range of interpretive and dramatic possibilities, whereby the present becomes a process that will always remain incomplete. While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Modernity’s Mist is interested in why they felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age, and it describes the poetic strategies they used to convey that sense of mystery. In the poetic grammar of anticipation, these writers do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make available to the imagination a new way of thinking about the historical dimensions of the present when faced with the temporal situation of modernity.

This book uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on “transpacific Buddhist poetics,” while the second maps the less well-known terrain of “transpacific Daoist poetics.” In Chapters 1 and 2, the text explores Ernest Fenollosa's “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo (“New Buddhism”). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of “emptiness” in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose “transpacific Daoist poetics” has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.

St. Francis of Assisi (c.1181–1226) and Jacopone da Todi (c.1236–1306) were but two exemplars of a rich school of mystical poets writing in Umbria in the Franciscan religious tradition. Their powerful creations form a significant corpus of medieval Italian vernacular poetry only now being fully explored. Drawing on a wide range of literary, historical, linguistic, and anthropological approaches, the author crafts an innovative portrait of the artists as legends and as poets. He investigates the essential features of emerging Franciscan tradition, in motifs of the body, metaphors of matrimony, and musical harmony. He also explores the relationship of Francis's poetic mission to Genesis, the relationship between erotic love and ecstatic union in both poets' work, and the poetics of the sermon.

The Rilke Alphabet examines key terms in Rilke’s poetry, letters and prose to reveal major themes in his work, such as love, death, immanence, beauty, art, faith, suffering, hope. The book examines controversial words that indicate Rilke’s political commitments, including his short-lived admiration for Mussolini, his personal beliefs, including his support for non-traditional relationships, and unexpected likings, for Buddhism and female mystics.