History Commons^™

Milton And The Middle Ages: Poetic Analogues And Visual Representations Of The War In Heaven, Expulsion Of The Rebel Angels, And Michael And The Dragon, Steven Hrdlicka

Quidditas

Milton is not typically connected to the Middle Ages as much as to the later Enlightenment and the Romantic periods. Yet many distinctively medieval ideas can be seen in Paradise Lost, especially in the scenes that are related to the War in Heaven. Milton’s account of the war displays a medieval understanding of history in terms of typology in the drama of salvation. Particular details about the war itself such as St. Michael and Lucifer’s sword fight, Jesus’ eventual ending of the war, and the human characteristics of the fallen angels all have clear parallels in longstanding Christian poetic and …

Danish Midsummer: My Bodtker Grant From Dahs, Kelsi Vanada

The Bridge

Though many Americans can trace their family history back to their European ancestors, I have met very few people outside of my own family who have maintained relationships with the branches of their families still living in Europe. I have always been proud of the fact that I know many of my family members living in Denmark today. These ties between the Danish and American sides of my family are strengthened every time one of us travels to visit relatives in the other country, so I am extremely grateful that the Danish American Heritage Society (DAHS) awarded me an Edith …

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 …

Four Poems From The King’S Coin: Danish-American Poems, Finn Bille

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

The Signifying Power Of Pearl, Jane Beal

Quidditas

The spiritual language, Ovidian love stories, and use of liturgical time in Pearl all invite allegorical interpretations of the poem. While there is clearly a literal, elegiac sense to the poem, there are also allegorical meanings. This makes perfect sense in light of the tradition of four-fold scriptural and literary interpretation in the Middle Ages, which the Pearl-Poet clearly used to understand biblical parables and compose his poetic masterpiece. The poet’s use of metaphoric language, memory of the legends of Orpheus and Eurydice and Pygmalion and Galatea, and astute interweaving of parables from the church liturgy alongside invocations of the …

Piet Hein ( 1905-1996): A Renaissance Man, Inger M. Olsen

The Bridge

A man who in the year 2000 had had his collections of poems and Crooks published in 1,700,000 copies, who had invented lamp shades, a sundial, and the super ellipse as well as games, who had received the Dansk Design Center's annual prize in 1989 should be easy to locate among people whose biography have been written. Those were my thoughts when I started researching this paper, and great was my surprise when I found that was not at all the case.

Temples Of Caesar: The Politics Of Renaissance Georgics Translations, Kimberly Johnson

Quidditas

Between the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the regicide of Charles I, three major English translations of Virgil’s middle poem, the Georgics, were published. Each translation appeared at a moment of religio-political crisis in England, a coincidence made more significant by the ambivalent political stance of Virgil’s text, which simultaneously communicates praise for Octavian and suspicion about an imperial program that disenfranchised the agricultural classes, an oversight which Virgil records in the Georgics as impiety. This paper charts the ways in which seemingly innocent translation decisions manage to perform a critical interrogation of monarchal authority, particularly as it …

Old Icelandic Gaglviðr, Aurelijus Vijūnas

Quidditas

This essay discusses a debated word form gaglviðr occurring in stanza 42 of the Old Icelandic poem VÄluspá 'The Prophesy of the Seeress'. The noun gaglviðr is problematic both from the semantic point of view (Old Icelandic gagl 'gosling', viðr 'tree; forest' 'gosling forest'?), and because it possesses a variant spelling galgviðr ('gallows' tree;’gallows' forest') which occurs in another manuscript containing the same poem. In the present paper, the form gaglviðr is considered to be the correct and the original form of this word, whereas the form galgviðr is interpreted as a scribal error. Various existing semantic analyses of the …

Valmiki And Hesse: Maya Through The Ages, Kevin Blankinship

BYU Asian Studies Journal

The Vedic poet Valmiki could hardly have imagined that, with his discovery of shloka, or poetic meter, and the subsequent advent of literature as a separate aesthetic genre, Hindu notions of reality would lend expression of outrage to war-weary Germans thousands of years later. Or perhaps he did: Brahma’s benediction provided that, “so long as the mountains and rivers . . . stay on the face of the earth / So long will the story of Rama endure / So long will your fame remain.”1

Kim Chi-Ha's Poetry Of Yesterday And Today, Gerrit Van Dyk

BYU Asian Studies Journal

I n the 1970s, the Korean poet Kim Chi-ha was perhaps the most internationally well known Korean artist. During this time, Kim wrote many poems speaking out against the Park Chung Hee regime which began with Park’s coup in 1961. One of Kim’s most famous works, “The Five Bandits” (The Golden-Crowned Jesus and Other Writings) was so politically charged that it began a series of incarcerations of the poet on allegations of communist sympathies. Many international organizations and dignitaries defended Kim and called on Park to release the poet from prison. After Park’s death, Kim was released, and …

Danish Poets Today

The Bridge

The Danish poet, playwright and novelist Pia Tafdrup read from her work Queen's Gate and presented some of her other poems at the session Danish Poets Today With the author's permission we are able to present one of the poems from Queen's Gate.

Images Of Migration And Change In The German-Language Poetry Of Galsan Tschinag, Richard Hacken

Faculty Publications

Presented March 25, 2004, at the European presentation for Migrations in Society, Culture, and the Library held in Paris. Migration in the works of Galsan Tschinag could be discussed on a number of levels. The first is an actual geographic migration documented in the published diaries of Tschinag. The next level of migration could be a linguistic migration of ideas and words from Tschinag's native Tuvan language which has no written script sometimes to Mongolian, but most often to German. The main focus is on the diverse images of migration in his German-language poetry, often illustrating transmigration of spirits between …

Pain For Pen: Gaspara Stampa's Stile Novo, Amy R. Insalaco

Quidditas

The Italian critic and scholar, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) dismisses Gaspara Stampa's Rime (1553) thus:

She was a woman; And usually a woman, when she is not given to ape men, uses poetry and submits it to her affections because she loves her lover or her own children more than poetry. The lazy practice of women is revealed in their scanty theoretical and contemplative power.

For him, Stampa’s poetry is somehow inferior to her male counterpart’s poetry because it lacks “theoretical and contemplative power.” This essay will analyze aspects of Stampa’s poetry which disprove this claim.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner: Nothing’S Paradox In Donne’S “Negative Love” And “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’S Day”, Sean Ford

Quidditas

John Donne's complicated use of paradox is nowhere more inviting than in the grammatical and conceptual use of the word "nothing," especially when Donne chooses to give this noun the quality of substance and presence, rather than using it to denote the absence of anything. Two poems in particular, from the Songs and Sonets, give affirmative existence to a nothing in order to make distinct arguments regard- ing the status of an existing thing. Both “Negative Love” and “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day, being the shortest day” rely on this paradox to give a precise definition of the …

Review Essay: Jeffrey Powers-Beck. Writing The Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue, Owen Staley

Quidditas

Jeffrey Powers-Beck. Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. 290 pp. incl. bibliography, 3 appendices, and index. $54.50 cloth. ISBN 0–8207–0283–5.

“Sad Stories Of The Death Of Kings”: Lyric And Narrative Release From Confining Spaces In Shakespeare’S Richard Ii, Jennifer C. Vaught

Quidditas

The relation of Shakespeare's plays to other literary forms like lyric and narrative is a topic that continues to invite speculation. A number of his plays contain songs and sonnets, reported stories and winter’s tales. In this essay I examine lyrics and narratives in Richard II and their dialogic relation to the surrounding text. In a play about a self-enclosed King these utterances tend to occur in enclosures: Richard delivers lyrics while immured at Flint Castle and the dungeon at Pomfret, whereas his Queen laments in an enclosed garden and promises to tell the King’s story during her exile in …

John Skelton's "Agenst Garnesche": Poetic Territorialism, At The Court Of Henry Viii, Victor I. Scherb

Quidditas

John Skelton's 1514 flyting "Agenst Garnesche" has been subject to little critical scrutiny. This neglect can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Christopher Garnesche's contribution is missing, but it is also characteristic of the relative neglect accorded to the flyting as a genre, a neglect that has also colored the interpretation of many of Skelton's more abusive poems. One critic, for example, has dismissed the poem as being "nothing but personal abuse of a particularly virulent type . . . adorned with a singular collection of epithets and incomprehensible allusions, which serve only to befog and irritate the reader." …

Review Essay: Willbern, David. Poetic Will: Shakespeare And The Play Of Language, Frederick Kiefer

Quidditas

Willbern, David. Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1997. xix + 237 pp. $37.50.

Review Essay: De' Medici, Lorenzo. The Autobiography Of Lorenzo De' Medici The Magnificent: A Commentary On My Sonnets, Joseph Rosenblum

Quidditas

de' Medici, Lorenzo. The Autobiography of Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent: A Commentary on My Sonnets. Trans. James Wyatt Cook. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 129. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Binghamton, N.Y., 1995. 289 pp. $28.

Divergent Journeys: Devils, Readers, And The Narrator's Art In 'Þe Deuelis Perlament', Gary D. Schmidt

Quidditas

In 1509, Wynkyn de Worde published a five-hundred-line poem that he, in defiance of the poet's own suggestion that the piece be called 'þe Deuelis Perlament' (1 490), entitled 'The Parliment of Fyendys'. It would remain known by that title — if it can be said to have been known at all — for the next three centuries, when the Roxburghe Club reprinted de Worde's text about 1820 for private distribution. A wider audience would wait almost another half-century for Furnivall's EETS edition in 1868. But still another century would pass before 'þe Deuelis Perlament' began to be taken seriously …

Review Essay: Kugel, James L., Ed. Poetry And Prophecy: The Beginnings Of A Literary Tradition, Janine Marie Idziak

Quidditas

Kugel, James L., ed. Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y. 1990. 251 pp. $13.95.

Review Essay: John D. Bernard, Ceremonies Of Innocence: Pastoralism In The Poetry Of Edmund Spenser, Steven Max Miller

Quidditas

John D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, Cambridge University Press, 1989, ix, 242 pp., biblio., $42.50.

Gaspara Stampa's Poetry For Performance, Janet L. Smarr

Quidditas

During the mid-sixteenth century in Italy, when a remarkable number of women joined in the production of poetry, one of the channels open to their pursuit of intellectual life and fame was the Venetian saloon. There music and poetry mingled as poems were frequently sung or recited before an audience rather than read privately in silence. The poetry of Gaspara Stampa was produced for this milieu. Published in 1554, a year after her death, her collection of more than three hundred poems has been approached in two main ways: as the autobiographical self-expression of a passionate woman and more recently …

Chaucer's Sense Of An Ending, Colleen Donnelly

Quidditas

The problem of closure plagued Chaucer throughout his career, and critics have continued to point out his 'inability" to end or finish many of his poems. This lack of closure often frustrates the casual reader and perplexes the serious scholar, leaving both to wonder if Chaucer was incapable of bringing his poems to an end or if he simply intended to tease his audience with such inconclusiveness. Neither answer is quite satisfactory. To understand that this inconclusiveness was deliberately created by Chaucer the master poet, and not by Chaucer resignedly handing the pen over to the befuddled persona whoo records …

Mary Bardenfleth - "I Remember", Caroline Olsen, Translator

The Bridge

These are some memories of a woman whose life spanned a whole century, from 1886 to 1986. As a Danish immigrant in Minneapolis, she saw the changes in the Danish community from the time when the newcomers clung to their heritage, until today, two or three generations later when almost no one speaks in the mother tongue. Her special gift for story telling, her acting ability, and her amazing memory of poetry made her a very unusual, lovable person. Her outgoing personality and friendliness touched the lives of countless people.

Sodom And Gomorrah: The Use Of Mandeville's Travels In Cleanness, Liam O. Purdon

Quidditas

The Pearl-Poet's late fourteenth-century appropriation in Cleanness of a mid-fourteenth century work, Mandeville's Travels, has been an established fact since the publication of Robert J. Menner's edition of the poem. The poet uses the Travels as a source for two important episodes: the description of Sodom and Gomorrah's cataclysmic destruction and the description of Belshazzar's brief and idolatrous reign in Babylon. While many points of connection between the Travels and Cleanness in the Sodom and Gomorrah episode have been identified, the poet's dependence on Mandeville in this scene raises two questions that have not yet been satisfactorily answered. …

Gawain's "Anti-Feminism" Reconsidered, S. L. Clark, Julian N. Wasserman

Quidditas

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the protagonist survives the return blow for which he had contracted with the Green Knight but finds to his dismay that he has unwittingly failed a more significant test. As the awareness comes to Gawain that the Green Knight and his Yuletide host share one identity, that it was upon Bercilak's instructions that his wife attempted to seduce him, and that Morgan la Fée had, in effect, master-minded the whole plan, Gawain reacts with bursts of anger which, wen analyzed, speak not only to the Pearl-Poet's skill at characterization but also …

Bacon's Allegory Of Science: The Theater Of The New Atlantis, Patricia Demers

Quidditas

I conceive that I perform the office of a true priest of the sense (from which all knowledge in nature must be sought, unless men mean to go mad) and a not unskilful interpreter of its oracles. ("The Plan of the Work," The Great Instauration)

Dramatic poesy among the ancients ... has been regarded by learned men and great philosophers as a kind of musician's bow by which men's minds may be played upon. (Translation of the "De Augmentis," The Second Book)

"Diuine Resemblaunce": Colin Clout's Vision Of Grace, John C. Ulreich

Quidditas

Colin Clout's vision of the Graces is the imaginative center of Book VI, and in a sense of the whole Faerie Queene, "the sacred noursery / Of vertue" (VI. Proem 3), wherein both the Knight of Courtesy and the reader are instructed in the "vertuous and gentle disciple" of the imagination ("Letter to Raleigh," II, 495). Spenser's readers have been virtually unanimous in their agreement with C. S. Lewis, that the vision on Mount Acidale is "the key to Spenser's whole conception of Courtesy." But there has been considerably less agreement about the precise significance of Spenser's vision. In …

Vegetable Love: Metamorphosis And Morality In Hesperides, Frances M. Malpezzi

Quidditas

Recent critics of Hesperides, less content than their predecessors with the plucking of but one of Herrick's golden apples, the examination of its beauty, and the savoring of its sweetness, have attempted the task of surveying the landscape of the entire garden, elucidating the pattern of its design, and identifying the various species of plants growing therein. The emphasis now is on seeing Hesperides as an integrated and thematically unified construct. The studies by Whitaker, Chambers, Deming, Rollin, and DeNeef are concerned with the ceremonial mode that pervades the poems in Hesperides. The consensus of these writers is …