Where have all the poets gone?

Against the background of a diminished presence of poetry in the life of the Church, this essay sets out to trace the theological contours of poetic expression. The territory covered takes in the poetic texts found throughout Scripture (where we see poetry sanctified for the purpose of divine revelation) to the use of poetry in worship (where we see how it has sanctified the Church to doxological purpose). An absence of poetic texts in Church life risks two possible outcomes. First, it provides fertile ground for an arid rationalism as a result of uncoupling of the imagination and affections from the knowledge of God. Second, it can contribute to a sidelining of aesthetics in Church life and a resultant dichotomizing of the sacred and secular. The essay concludes by considering how churches might respond to the absence of poets. This takes in new approaches to the use of the Psalter in worship and the composition of poetry that reflects the impulses of contemporary Christian life. (This paper was selected as the winning entry in the 2016 Fraser Essay Prize competition.)Publisher PD

The Twenty-ninth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2000 George Eliot for The Twenty-First Century: Middlemarch and The Poetry of Prosaic Conditions

Jerome Beaty should have given this lecture: 1 I have spoken and written in celebration of his scholarship and record that I was sad to be speaker not listener. Taking his amusingly grandiose title I place mine after it, and discussing Middlemarch and its poetry of (and in) prosaic conditions, respect his theme. I consider George Eliot\u27s poetic language in Middlemarch at a time when many poets and novelists are interested in generic crossing and dislocation (as they have been in different ways from modernism to post-modernism) but when critics are less concerned with George Eliot\u27s art, and literary art in general, than they once were.2 Forty years ago, I was one of several scholars, including Jerome Beaty, W. J. Harvey, Reva Stump, and Jerome Thale, concerned to praise George Eliot\u27s art, reacting against F. R. Leavis and Joan Bennett, the only senior modem critics who seemed sufficiently engaged to provoke argument as they underestimated her control and form. Also wanting to modify the excessive formalism of the New Critics, Beaty and I, in very different ways, analysed the aesthetic and formal powers of the novelist at a time when her art was neglected, as I think it is now. In the late fifties and early sixties, the art of fiction was in no danger of being disregarded. New Criticism was obsessed by complexity in unity, but within the parameters laid down by Henry James, for whom George Eliot was one of the large loose baggy monsters: his named monstrosities were novels by Thackeray, Dumas and Tolstoy, his Middlemarch \u27a treasurehouse of detail but an indifferent whole\u27. The danger was not the neglect of the novelist\u27s art but of the Victorian artist in fiction, and George Eliot was a prime example. Our concern was not a simple interest in unity and enclosure. In Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel Beaty showed the way in which the discrete conceptions of Miss Brooke and Middlemarch came together, in craft and haphazard. I became interested in the novelist\u27s modifications of unity, her attention to what Robert Louis Stevenson called the strange irregular rhythm of life, the narrative3 and language of the not-so omniscient and not-so impersonal narrator, and her affective form. Now I want to look at poetic language in her great novel. Middlemarch, prose epic of middling achievement, teems with poetry. Like her other novels, it uses poetic epigraphs, some by George Eliot, some unsurprisingly by Goethe, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Scott, and Tennyson, three startlingly by Donne, Blake and Whitman. It assimilates quotation, identified like Dray ton or unidentified like Spenser. It imagines readers of poetry. Lydgate grows up loving Scott, like his author, and refreshes Keats\u27s pot of basil with bitter brilliance. Rosamond\u27s favourite poem is \u27Lalla Rookh\u27. Fred adapts Homer\u27s Cyclops for the Garth children. George Eliot writes a lyric for Will Ladislaw, poet and musician, individualizing and placing his hymnlike love-song, \u270 me, 0 me, what frugal cheer / My love doth feed upon\u27, a rare poem written for a novel, like those composed for Mordecai in Daniel Deronda, Hardy\u27s Ethelberta, Joyce\u27s Stephen Dedalus, and D. H. Lawrence\u27s Quetzalcoatl

Russian Formalism

Russian Formalism, one of the twentieth century's most important movements in literary criticism, has received far less attention than most of its rivals. Examining Formalism in light of more recent developments in literary theory, Peter Steiner here offers the most comprehensive critique of Formalism to date. Steiner studies the work of the Formalists in terms of the major tropes that characterized their thought. He first considers those theorists who viewed a literary work as a mechanism, an organism, or a system. He then turns to those who sought to reduce literature to its most basic element.<p

In other words: towards a poetic theology of the spoken Word of God

In this paper, Jacob Rollison considers poetry in its various relations. Poetry raises questions regarding the relation of the world to a ‘beyond’, and the relation of representation to presence. The question poetry poses to theology is: if Jesus Christ is the Word, is this to be understood prosaically or poetically? as representation or presence? To probe this question Rollison draws on the work of the French theologian, sociologist and poet Jacques Ellul. For Ellul, poetry manifests the inseparability of form and content in communication, resisting Kierkegaard’s ironic stance by viewing the word as inseparable from the life of the one who speaks it. This points, in turn, to an inseparability of form and content in theology and the presence of God in his revelation. In contrast to the post-structuralist view, the world is not a text. For Ellul, the central medium is God’s speech, temporal and non-spatial in its essence. His poetics of speech is in turn based on the poetics of the Word of God. The form, then, of the Apocalypse in Revelation ‘allows the comprehension of its content’: theology is a poetic listening and responding to the Word, architecture in movement. The concerns of theology as poetry are not simply with poetic ideas but with the richer world of poetic existence.Publisher PD

The Role of Poetry and Language in Hegel\u27s Philosophy of Art

Hegel\u27s view of poetry clarifies the overall role of language in his system and allows him to makes sense of a difficult linguistic issue: how to distinguish between poetry and prose. For Hegel, this distinction is crucial because it illuminates the different ways poetry and prose allow us to understand ourselves as members of an ethical community. In this paper, I argue, using Hegel, that the distinction between poetry and prose can only properly be understood in terms of their fundamentally different kinds of content instead of in terms of any formal differences between the two. Then, I address an objection to Hegel by Paul de Man which uses Hegel\u27s concept of memory to collapse the distinction between poetry and philosophical prose. Finally, I argue that Hegel can respond to this objection by showing how de Man misunderstands how philosophical thought conceptually develops from memory

Hegel on the Meanings of Poetry

Since Socrates\u27 attack on poetry, philosophers and critics have been faced with the problem of reconciling two convictions which seem equally pressing. While poetry (or imaginative literature) is and has been valued as a source of insight and knowledge, it also seems clear that poetic meaning is of a rather different sort than that found in science, ordinary language, or (to introduce the classical contrast) prose. Philosophical theories of poetry, then, take one of two forms: either they deny one of these two beliefs, implying perhaps that poetry has only nonsensical or literal meaning, or they provide a cognitive analysis of poetry which differentiates its meaning from that of prose. Hegel took the second alternative, maintaining both that poetry has been the most universal and cosmopolitan instructor of the human race and that the logic or meaning of poetry is radically unprosaic. Poetry\u27s cognitive value, like that of philosophy, religion, and the other forms of art, can be expressed most generally by saying that it is a form of absolute spirit in which knowledge is thorough self-knowledge; the mode or form of this knowledge is reason or dialectic as opposed to the rigid categories of the understanding. These formulas by themselves are not illuminating, being in Hegel\u27s terms mere abstract universals; they take on concrete meaning only when we see them functioning in their capacity of actually explaining the essential forms, aspects, expressions, and historical varieties of poetry

CONNOTATORS, BLENDED SPACES, AND FIGURES OF GRAMMAR: REFLECTIONS ON TRADITIONAL CHINESE POETICS THROUGH A SEMIOTIC STUDY OF SU MANSHU’S POETRY

This essay probes into the craft and criteria of traditional Chinese poetry through a study of Su Manshu’s poetry. Su Manshu has been praised as one of the last representative figures of classical Chinese poetry, while his distinctive poetic techniques rendered him a precursor of the New Literary Movement in the early years of the Republic of Chi na. A semiotic examination of Su Manshu’s poetry and its intricate relationship with tradition and transformation in Late Qing literary arena makes an ideal case study of the criteria of classical Chinese poetry. Su Manshu’s poetry is interwoven with conno tative elaboration allusions, metaphors and multifarious figures of speech. Meanwhile, function words, colloquial markers and illocutionary acts play in its “less poetic” grammar, making it the construction of both archaic and modern transmutations in the era of paradigm shifts.&nbsp; The approaches of semiotics and linguistics are expected to offer novel perspectives of the poet, providing a methodology hitherto rarely used, if ever, in studies of Chinese poetics

The Heresy of Paraphrase Revisited

I try to rejuvenate Cleanth Brooks\u27s old thesis about the \u27heresy of paraphrase.\u27 This I do by analysing a couple of well-known poems and by performing thought experiments of the possible world kind. They show that paradigmatic examples of poems are not paraphrasable. A prosaic text can be improved with the aid of a paraphrase, but a typical poem cannot. The deeper explanation for the non-rephrasability of poetry is that our understanding of it is basically tacit. In this way I hope to give Brooks\u27s original thesis a more solid foundation