488 research outputs found
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One Sees What One Sees
English and American Literature and Languag
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Heine and the Composers
English and American Literature and Languag
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Truth and Lies in the Stravinskyan Sense: Oedipus Rex
English and American Literature and Languag
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Early Cantos I-XLI
Here begins the great unwieldy poem, all light and mud, to which Ezra Pound devoted much of his life. It was the work of a poet too ambitious, too afraid of being cramped, to work according to a plan. Instead of a plan, Pound devised a strategy for creating a self-scrutinizing text, continually extending itself, ramifying outward, as it groped to comprehend its own prior meanings, to improvise new networks of connection, and to assimilate new material: a text shaped like a developing brain. New Cantos form themselves out of schemes to make sense of old Cantos: so the story of The Cantos comprises two intertwined stories, one concerning Pound's writing of the poem, the other concerning Pound's interpretations of what he had already written.Literature and Comparative Literatur
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Modernist Poetic Form
If Modernism implies experimentation with the limits of art, shocks and thrills beyond all previous bounds, then, in the matter of poetic form, the Victorians were more Modernist than the Modernists themselves. As inventors of new stanza forms, transgressors of prosodic boundaries and explorers of new sonorities of verse, the Victorians were unsurpassable - the Modernist poets began their careers in a world in which the Victorians had already broken all the rules and developed strange and idiosyncratic new rules. It might be good to start this review of Modernist poetic form with a catalogue of some of the formal innovations of the nineteenth century, and their relation to the aesthetics of Modernism. / Scrutiny of rhyme / Rhyme has always been a somewhat dubious attribute of English poetry, partly because classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use it. Around 1603 Samuel Daniel felt he had to publish A Defence of Ryme, because Campion and others had attacked it; and Milton began Paradise Lost (1674) with a note defending the rhymelessness of his epic: he called rhyme 'to all judicious ears, triveal, and of no true musical delight'. By the nineteenth century the propriety of rhyming was no longer an issue - the canon of rhymed poetry was obviously too magnificent to be dispensed with - but poets kept experimenting with aspects of rhyme.English and American Literature and Languag
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The Witches and the Witch: Verdi's Macbeth
The witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth equivocate between the demons of random malevolence and ordinary (if exceptionally nasty) old women; and both King James I, whose book on witchcraft may have influenced Shakespeare, and A. W. Schlegel, whose essay on Macbeth certainly influenced Verdi, also stress this ambiguity. In his treatment of Lady Macbeth, Verdi uses certain musical patterns associated with the witches; and like the witches, who sound sometimes tame and frivolous, sometimes like incarnations of supernatural evil, Lady Macbeth hovers insecurely between roles: she is a hybrid of ambitious wife and agent of hell.English and American Literature and Languag
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Yeats and Modernism
When Yeats died in January 1939, he quickly became the ghost that haunted Modernism. First to register the shade's presence was W. H. Auden, who wrote his famous elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” in February 1939: Now he is scattered among a hundred cities, And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections . . . The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. . . . For Auden, Yeats is a distasteful Orpheus, whose corpse dismembers into the scattered leaves of his volumes of poetry, undergoing a queasy process of digestion in the guts of his readers.English and American Literature and Languag
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Kurt Weill as Modernist
Kurt Weill seems the opposite of a Modernist when compared with Schoenberg, or with the fictitious composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s Doktor Faustus–composers who seem furiously to reject the warm-hearted, gemütlich aesthetic of much nineteenth-century art. But in such works as Die Dreigroschenoper and Der Jasager, Weill, like Thomas Mann himself, shows himself a Modernist of a sophisticated sort by devising a new sort of irony, an irony that does not reject bourgeois values but instead dwells in an interspace between derision and warmth.English and American Literature and Languag
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