John Skelton and Poetic Authority

John Skelton and Poetic Authority

Author: Jane Griffiths

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-02-23

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 019927360X

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John Skelton and Poetic Authority is the first book-length study of Skelton for almost twenty years, and the first to trace the roots of his poetic theory to his practice as a writer and translator. It demonstrates that much of what has been found challenging in his work may be attributed to his attempt to reconcile existing views of the poet's role in society with discoveries about the writing process itself. The result is a highly idiosyncratic poetics that locates thepoet's authority decisively within his own person, yet at the same time predicates his 'liberty to speak' upon the existence of an engaged, imaginative audience. Skelton is frequently treated as a maverick, but this book places his theory and practice firmly in the context of later sixteenth as well asfifteenth-century traditions. Focusing on his relations with both past and present readers, it reassess his place in the English literary canon.


Approaching Authority

Approaching Authority

Author: Anthony Flinn

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780838753408

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This study, using the example of Yeats, Eliot, and Williams, examines the principal gestures of Modernist poetic speakers attempting to identify, mediate, and project cultural authority. To effect this mediation, the poetic speakers must engage in "transpersonality"; by association with the objects of presences in the poem, they must translate their finite egos into mediating voices detached from the concerns of unique selfhood. However, complete transpersonality brings silence: the fact of utterance presupposes a unique perspective, never the totality of perspectives that an atemporal authority possesses. So, rather than the speaker's elevation to a position of authority, the necessary result of the transpersonality is instead that the speaker approach authority in calculated acts of mystification.


Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority

Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority

Author: Ellen Oliensis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-05-28

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0521573157

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This book explores how Horace's poems construct the literary and social authority of their author. Bridging the traditional distinction between 'persona' and 'author', Ellen Oliensis considers Horace's poetry as one dimension of his 'face' - the projected self-image that is the basic currency of social interactions. She reads Horace's poems not only as works of art but also as social acts of face-saving, face-making and self-effacement. These acts are responsive, she suggests, to the pressure of several audiences: Horace shapes his poetry to promote his authority and to pay deference to his patrons while taking account of the envy of contemporaries and the judgement of posterity. Drawing on the insights of sociolinguistics, deconstruction and new historicism Dr Oliensis charts the poet's shifting strategies of authority and deference across his entire literary career.


Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples

Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples

Author: Matteo Soranzo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1317079450

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Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples approaches poems as acts of cultural identity and investigates how a group of authors used poetry to develop a poetic style, while also displaying their position toward the culture of others. Starting from an analysis of Giovanni Pontano’s Parthenopeus and De amore coniugali, followed by a discussion of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Matteo Soranzo links the genesis and themes of these texts to the social, political and intellectual vicissitudes of Naples under the domination of Kings Alfonso and Ferrante. Delving further into Pontano’s literary and astrological production, Soranzo illustrates the consolidation and eventual dispersion of this author’s legacy by looking at the symbolic value attached to his masterpiece Urania, and at the genesis of Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis. Poetic works written in neo-Latin and the vernacular during the Aragonese domination, in this way, are examined not only as literary texts, but also as the building blocks of their authors’ careers.


Whitman Possessed

Whitman Possessed

Author: Mark Maslan

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2001-11-08

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780801867019

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Whitman has long been more than a celebrated American author. He has become a kind of hero, whose poetry vindicates beliefs not only about poetry but also about sexuality and power. In Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popular Authority, Mark Maslan presents a challenging theory of Whitman's poetics of possession and his understandings of individual and national identity. By reading his works in relation to nineteenth-century theories of sexual desire, poetic inspiration, and political representation, Maslan argues that the disintegration of individuality in Whitman's texts is not meant to undermine cultural hierarchies, but to make poetic and political authority newly viable. In particular, Maslan explores the social impact of nineteenth-century sexual hygiene literature on Whitman's works. He argues that Whitman developed his ideas about poetry, sexuality, and authority by responding to a prominent argument that desire subjected male bodies to a penetrating and feminizing force. By identifying poetic inspiration with this erotic dynamic, Whitman imbued his poetic voice with a kind of transformative power. Whitman aligned his poetry with an impartial authority hard to find elsewhere and inclined his work as a poet to speak for the voiceless, for the masses, and for an entire nation.


Campania in the Flavian Poetic Imagination

Campania in the Flavian Poetic Imagination

Author: Antony Augoustakis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-17

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 0192534831

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The region of Campania with its fertility and volcanic landscape exercised great influence over the Roman cultural imagination. A hub of activity outside the city of Rome, the Bay of Naples was a place of otium, leisure and quiet, repose and literary productivity, and yet also a place of danger: the looming Vesuvius inspired both fear and awe in the region's inhabitants, while the Phlegraean Fields evoked the story of the gigantomachy and sulphurous lakes invited entry to the Underworld. For Flavian writers in particular, Campania became a locus for literary activity and geographical disaster when in 79 CE, the eruption of the volcano annihilated a great expanse of the region, burying under a mass of ash and lava the surrounding cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. In the aftermath of such tragedy the writers examined in this volume - Martial, Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus - continued to live, work, and write about Campania, which emerges from their work as an alluring region held in the balance of luxury and peril.


The City of Poetry

The City of Poetry

Author: David G. Lummus

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-17

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1108875963

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What did it mean to be a poet in fourteenth-century Italy? What counted as poetry? In an effort to answer these questions, this book examines the careers of four medieval Italian poets (Albertino Mussato, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio) who wrote in both Latin and the Italian vernacular. In readings of defenses of poetry, speeches and letters on public laurel-crowning ceremonies, and other theoretical and poetic texts, this book shows how these poets viewed their authorship of poetic works as a function of their engagement in a human community. Each poet represents a model of the poet as a public intellectual - a poet-theologian - who can intervene in public affairs thanks to his authority within texts. The City of Poetry provides a new historicized approach to understanding poetic culture in fourteenth-century Italy which reshapes long-standing Romantic views of poetry as a timeless and sublimely inspired form of discourse.


Quotation and Modern American Poetry

Quotation and Modern American Poetry

Author: Elizabeth Gregory

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 1996-07

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780892633470

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In this volume Elizabeth Gregory addresses a number of key issues surrounding the formation of the American poetic canon. Taking as her primary examples T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, William Carlos Williams' Paterson, and selected poems by Marianne Moore, she examines the ways in which modern American writers struggled with questions of literary authority and cultural identity in relation to pre-existing European models. Gregory focuses on these issues through analysis of the use of quotation in modern and postmodern literature, a practice that was strikingly divergent from the accepted use of literary allusion. Her introduction traces a history of quotation as it has been practiced in literature from classical to modern times. She then focuses on the texts of Eliot, Williams, and Moore--three central figures of American modernism whose work the author believes represents a spectrum of responses to the established European model of poetical discourse. Gregory's selection of Moore also allows her to deal with feminist concerns as they emerge in the more general modernist dialogue. How was a female writer to make use of a literary canon that traditionally excluded female participation? "The implications of Gregory's argument . . . will surely be of especial interest to feminist scholars of American poetry."--Lois Parkinson Zamora, University of Houston.