Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
English Language and Literature Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Publication Year
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Milton, Immortality, And Obtaining Eliot's "Significant Emotion", Aaron By Gorner
Milton, Immortality, And Obtaining Eliot's "Significant Emotion", Aaron By Gorner
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T. S. Eliot famously asserts that very few can actually access "significant emotion" in poetry, and do so by understanding where relics of the classical tradition assert their immortality. In my article, I support Eliot's claims by demonstrating two (previously undiscussed) occasions where Milton, via Paradise Lost, inserts Christianity into the classical world: Satan and Abdiel alluding to Virgil's Remulus and Ascanius, and then Eve and Adam with Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus. Ultimately it will be apparent that not only does Milton's poetry obtain Eliot's "significant emotion" and its associated immortality, …
A Sharply Worded Silence: Silence As The Revelatory Link Between Past And Future In Faithful And Virtuous Night, Noah Hickman
A Sharply Worded Silence: Silence As The Revelatory Link Between Past And Future In Faithful And Virtuous Night, Noah Hickman
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Given the recent celebrity of 2020 Nobel Prize Laurette Louise Glück, the 2014 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night enjoys a relative bounty of reviews and criticism for such a recent collection. Most of these reviews make oblique reference to Glück’s use of silence in the collection, but none forward any serious argument regarding the function of silence in the argument of the collection. This essay argues that Glück relies on silence as a kind of revelation for her speakers, marking the end of a given system of being and the inauguration its supplanting ontology. Within the collection, Glück’s silence represents …
The Battle Of The Sexes: Montagu V. Swift, Madison Savoie
The Battle Of The Sexes: Montagu V. Swift, Madison Savoie
Undergraduate Honors Theses
Two of the most interesting “guardians” of eighteenth-century sociocultural standards were the satirists Jonathan Swift and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Swift is remembered by scholars as one of the “greatest prose satirists in the history of English Literature,” but Montagu, until recent decades, has been less well-known. This thesis will look at the satirical poetic dialogue between the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift and the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and provide insights into the sociocultural dynamics of gender in eighteenth-century British print life as revealed by the individual texts.
The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland
The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
In 1921 Langston Hughes penned, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” in his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Hughes 1254). Weaving the profound pain of the African American experience with the symbolism of the primordial river, Hughes recognized the inherent power of water as a means of spiritual communication and religious significance. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the American pastoral as typified by white poets such as Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, the African American poets emerging from the Harlem Renaissance established a more nuanced pastoral landscape embedded within urban cultures, utilizing water in particular as …
"History Real Or Feigned": Tolkien, Scott, And Poetry's Place In Fashioning History, Kaleigh Jean Spooner
"History Real Or Feigned": Tolkien, Scott, And Poetry's Place In Fashioning History, Kaleigh Jean Spooner
Theses and Dissertations
Most critics of The Lord of the Rings correlate Tolkien's work to ancient texts, like Beowulf, the Elder Edda, and medieval romances. While the connection between these traditional materials and Tolkien is valid, it neglects a key feature of Tolkien's work and one of the author's desires, which was to fashion a sort of history that felt as real as any other old story. Moreover, it glosses over the rather obvious point that Tolkien is writing a novel, or at any rate a long work of prose fiction that owes a good deal to the novel tradition. …
"A Poem Containing History": Pound As A Poet Of Deep Time, Newell Scott Porter
"A Poem Containing History": Pound As A Poet Of Deep Time, Newell Scott Porter
Theses and Dissertations
There has been an emergent trend in literary studies that challenges the tendency to categorize our approach to literature. This new investment in the idea of "world literature," while exciting, is also both theoretically and pragmatically problematic. While theorists can usually articulate a defense of a wider approach to literature, they struggle to develop a tangible approach to such an ideal. By examining Ezra Pound's critical approach to poetry, especially in The Cantos, an applicable visualization of a global approach to literature becomes more transparent.
“I Take--No Less Than Skies”: Emily Dickinson And Nineteenth-Century Meteorology, Kjerstin Evans Ballard
“I Take--No Less Than Skies”: Emily Dickinson And Nineteenth-Century Meteorology, Kjerstin Evans Ballard
Theses and Dissertations
Emily Dickinson's poetry functions where scientific attention to the physical world and abstract theorizing about the ineffable intersect. Critics who emphasize the poet's dedication to the scientific often take for granted how deeply the uncertainty that underlies all of Dickinson's poetry opposes scientific discussion of the day. Meteorology is an exceptional nineteenth-century science because it takes as its subject complex systems which are inexplicable in Newtonian terms. As such, meteorology can articulate the ways that Dickinson bridges the divide between the unknown and the known, particularly as she relates to the interplay of nature and culture, the role of careful …
Songs Without Music: The Hymnes Of Le Franc De Pompignan, Theodore E. D. Braun
Songs Without Music: The Hymnes Of Le Franc De Pompignan, Theodore E. D. Braun
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
In the first edition of his Poesies sacrees (1751), Jean-Jacques Le Franc de Pompignan (1709-1784) published 40 poems in four books, each containing ten poems.1 These Poesies sacrees, or Sacred Poems, were to be printed three times in his Oeuvres choisies or Selected Works of 1753, 1754, and 1754-55. This modest collection was to be enlarged to 85 poems divided into five books of unequal length in its definitive form in the de luxe quarto edition of 1763 and finally as the first volume of his Oeuvres in 1784, which is the text I am using in this …
George Canning, Liberal Toryism, And Counterrevolutionary Satire In The Anti-Jacobin, Martha Thompson
George Canning, Liberal Toryism, And Counterrevolutionary Satire In The Anti-Jacobin, Martha Thompson
Theses and Dissertations
One of the most defining moments in the histories of British satire and the public sphere took place in the late 1790s in an abandoned house in Piccadilly. Here George Canning and several fellow conservatives began writing and circulating their weekly newspaper the Anti-Jacobin. Although the periodical has been critically neglected, it is a valuable model for exploring how literary (partisan) politicians attempted to form a rational and critical public sphere through their satiric poetry. Founded by George Canning and edited by William Gifford, the Anti-Jacobin seems to reflect a reactionary conservative's ideology and has been summarily dismissed because of …
Translation As Katabasis And Nekyia In Seamus Heaney's "The Riverbank Field", Gerrit Van Dyk
Translation As Katabasis And Nekyia In Seamus Heaney's "The Riverbank Field", Gerrit Van Dyk
Theses and Dissertations
Translation has been at the heart of Seamus Heaney's career. In his poem, "The Riverbank Field," from his latest collection, Human Chain, Heaney engages in metatranslation, "Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as / 'In a retired vale...a sequestered grove' / And I'll confound the Lethe in Moyola." Curiously, with a broad spectrum of classical works at his disposal, the poet chooses a particular moment in Virgil's Aeneid as an image for translation. What is it about this conversation between Aeneas and his dead father, Anchises, at the banks of the Lethe which makes it uniquely fitting for …
First Psalm: Poems And Paintings, Ashley Mae Christensen
First Psalm: Poems And Paintings, Ashley Mae Christensen
Theses and Dissertations
This collection of poems and paintings seeks to find the places where visual and written communication intersects, and the places where those two media diverge. The collection consists of poems and paintings juxtaposed, as if in conversation with one another throughout the pages. The collection treats each painting and poem as a separate attempt at prayer. As a reader turns the pages, similar questions are asked again and again, but in different settings and with different outcomes. This collection focuses on finding reconciliation between the oral culture of storytelling and the written culture of ideas, all within the context of …
Gesamtkunstwerk And Other Trifles: Poems, Derk A. Olthof
Gesamtkunstwerk And Other Trifles: Poems, Derk A. Olthof
Theses and Dissertations
In all their various categories, the arts serve as the dominant subject matter of Gesamtkunstwerk and Other Trifles. The title itself begins with a German word-meld—gesamt (total) + kunstwerk (work of art). Thus a primary aim of these poems is to bring as many elements of art together as possible and to use their various forms (self-portraits, nocturnes, odes, etc.) as metaphorical frameworks that inform abstractions such as regret ("How to Draw Regret"), psychological disorders ("Insomnia Nocturnes") and confusion in how one should feel about living realities as opposed to inanimate objects ("Dead Starling"). Most of the poems …
Merit Beyond Any Already Published: Austen And Authorship In The Romantic Age, Rebecca Lee Jensen Ogden
Merit Beyond Any Already Published: Austen And Authorship In The Romantic Age, Rebecca Lee Jensen Ogden
Theses and Dissertations
In recent decades there have been many attempts to pull Austen into the fold of high Romantic literature. On one level, these thematic comparisons are useful, for Austen has long been anachronistically treated as separate from the Romantic tradition. In the past, her writings have essentially straddled Romantic classification, labeled either as hangers-on in the satiric eighteenth-century literary tradition or as early artifacts of a kind of proto-Victorianism. To a large extent, scholars have described Austen as a writer departing from, rather than embracing, the literary trends of the Romantic era. Yet, while recent publications depicting a “Romantic Austen” yield …
Facing God: Contemporary American Devotional Poetry, Sarah E. Jenkins
Facing God: Contemporary American Devotional Poetry, Sarah E. Jenkins
Theses and Dissertations
My thesis examines the connection between scripture and contemporary American poetry. Scripture is inherently poetic, employing devices that require analysis and explication. Poets drawing from scriptural text for narrative, language, or form are not looking to replace scripture, or even enhance it. Poets create new experiences in language, and their writing can illuminate the poetics of scripture. My thesis will examine work by three contemporary poets who have imitated, alluded to, and re-created scripture: Jacqueline Osherow's "Scattered Psalms" from 1999 collection Dead Men's Praise; Louise Glück's 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Wild Iris; and Morri Creech's "The Testament of Judas" …
Keeping Gardens: Poetry And Essay, Deja Anne Earley
Keeping Gardens: Poetry And Essay, Deja Anne Earley
Theses and Dissertations
This creative thesis includes two creative non-fiction essays and twenty-two poems, introduced by a critical essay that examines my work. The poems and essays share an origin in personal experience as well as an interest in language. Specifically, the poems and essays explore issues of family, relationships, spirituality, and observations of the natural world. The introductory essay discusses my interest in re-fashioning individual vision through the act of writing, relating to Helene Cixous's idea of creating a "portrait of God" through the act of art. The essay also examines the connections between the genres of creative non-fiction and poetry, in …
Bayard Taylor's The Prophet: Mormonism As Literary Taboo; Calaveras County Comes Of Age; The Erosion Of Belief In The Poetry Of Clinton F. Larson, Thomas D. Schwartz
Bayard Taylor's The Prophet: Mormonism As Literary Taboo; Calaveras County Comes Of Age; The Erosion Of Belief In The Poetry Of Clinton F. Larson, Thomas D. Schwartz
Theses and Dissertations
The three papers included in this thesis reflect my development as a graduate student during the course of my master's program at Brigham Young Universtiy. I came to Brigham Young University interested in creative writing and developed a love for research and criticism. My work in nineteenth century American literature led to the first two papers. Both deal with literary history, the first narrow in scope, devoted to a study of the significance of a single play, the second broad in scope, devoted to a study of the unifying thread of anti-sentimentalism in the writings of the major American realists. …
The Poetry Of Matthew Arnold: A Study In Versification, Douglas A. Mathewson
The Poetry Of Matthew Arnold: A Study In Versification, Douglas A. Mathewson
Theses and Dissertations
Despite the great number of published works that deal with English prosody or the more restricted subject of versification, there is a noticeable scarcity of studies that describe the practices of individual poets. One of the more apparent reasons for the meager number of versification studies is the instability of the basic criteria by which a poem is examined. Prosodists quite simply find it difficult to establish concrete principles of scansion that are acceptable to all other prosodists. Without going into discussion of the various schools of thought on metrical structure, suffice it to say that there are conflicting opinions …