Recalling All the Olympians: W. B. Yeats’s “Beautiful Lofty Things,” On the Boiler and the Agenda of National Rebirth

While it has been omitted by numerous critics in their otherwise comprehensive readings of Yeats’s oeuvre, “Beautiful Lofty Things” has been placed among the mythical poems, partly in accordance with Yeats’s own intention; in a letter to his wife, he suggested that “Lapis Lazuli, the poem called ‘To D. W.’ ‘Beautiful Lofty Things,’ ‘Imitated from the Japanese’ & ‘Gyres’ . . . would go well together in a bunch.” The poem has been inscribed in the Yeats canon as registering a series of fleeting epiphanies of the mythical in the mundane. However, “Beautiful Lofty Things,” evocative of a characteristically Yeatsian employment of myth though it certainly is, seems at the same time to fuse Yeats’s quite earthly preoccupations. It is here argued that the poem is organized around a tightly woven matrix of figures that comprise Yeats’s idea of the Irish nation as a “poetical culture.” Thus the position of the lyric in the poet’s oeuvre deserves to be shifted from periphery towards an inner part of his cultural and political ideas of the time. Indeed, the poem can be viewed as one of Yeats’s central late comments on the state of the nation and, significantly, one in which he is able to proffer a humanist strategy for developing a culturally modern state rather than miring his argument in occasionally over-reckless display of abhorrence of modernit

The Shortest Way to Modernity Is via the Margins: J.H. Prynne’s Later Poetry

In the essay an attempt is made to investigate the processes of construction and reconstruction of meaning in the later books of the Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne. It has been argued that his poetry disturbs the act of meaning-making in a ceaseless experimental reconnection of words taken from multifarious discourses, ranging from economics to theology. Yet, what appears striking in this poetry is the fact that these lyrics take their force from figurative meaning with which the words are endowed in the process of a poem’s unfolding. Prynne appears to compose his lyrics by juxtaposing words that in themselves (or sometimes in small clusters) do yield a meaning but together exude an aura of unintelligibility. We may see this process as aiming at the destruction of what might be posited as the centre of signification of the modern language by constantly dispersing the meaning to the fringes of understanding. The poems force the reader to look to the margins of their meaning in the sense that the signification of the entire lyric is an unstable composite of figurative meanings of this lyric’s individual words and phrases. To approach this poetry a need arises to read along the lines of what is here termed “fleeting assertion”; it is not that Prynne’s poems debar centre in favour of, for instance, Derridean freeplay but rather that they seek to ever attempt to erect a centre through the influx from the margins of signification. Therefore they call for strong interpretive assertions without which they veer close to an absurdity of incomprehension; however, those assertions must always be geared to accepting disparate significatory influxes. Indeed, interpretation becomes a desperate chase after “seeing anew” with language but, at the same time, a chase that must a priori come to terms with the fact that this new vision will forever remain in the making

William Butler Yeats i Wielkanoc 1916, czyli wypisy z wysokiego modernizmu

The article proposes to read the poem by William Butler Yeats Easter 1916 in order to trace its relationships with the poetics of High Modernismrepresented by Ezra Pound, Thomas Staerns Eliot and James Joyce.During the analysis not only the historical and literary background ofthe poem is presented but also the relationship between the poet’s imaginationand the realities around him. Easter 1916 is regarded as one ofthe greatest works of modernist poetry

Estructuras fracasadas de vida o muerte en Solar Bones, de Mike McCormack

In the present essay I argue that that Mike McCormack’s acclaimed latest novel Solar Bones (Brit. 2016, USA 2017) thematises two impulses: on the one hand, the narrator, Marcus Conway, is seeking an order and structural coherence to his world, an order that throughout assumes a distinctly religious tint; on the other hand, the novel features various images of collapse of structures, ranging from the economic system all the way to actual buildings, all of which thwart his efforts. It is those twin movements, towards order and chaos, that reveal an association with Heidegger’s idea that only by becoming aware of death as one’s sole personal mode of life, does one begin to apprehend the essential structure of life, even if the glimpse of that structure is only ever available in its constant deferral.Este ensayo pretende demostrar que Solar Bones, la aclamada novela de Mike McCormack recientemente publicada (Reino Unido 2016, EEUU 2017), se articula a caballo entre dos impulsos: por un lado, el narrador, Marcus Conway, trata de encontrar un orden y una coherencia elemental para su mundo, en una búsqueda que adopta un matiz característicamente religioso; por otro lado, la novela muestra numerosas imágenes del fracaso del sistema, desde el orden económico hasta edificios reales, que frustran sus esfuerzos. A través de esos movimientos que simultáneamente tienden hacia el orden y hacia el caos se revela una relación con el postulado de Heidegger según el cual, cuando uno es consciente de la muerte como el único modo de vida puede empezar a percibir la estructura esencial de la ésta, incluso si dicho orden únicamente es perceptible a través de su constante aplazamiento

Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication, and Andrew S. Gross, The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature

1. Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication 2. Andrew S. Gross, The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. 288. ISBN: 9781474258753 Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015. Pp. 262. ISBN-13: 978-3825364700 Wit Pietrzak Pound’s work continues to excite and trouble, which finds its confirmation in the critical attention given to his life and work. This is no doubt down to ..

Shibboleths of Grief: Paul Muldoon’s “The Triumph”

The essay explores Paul Muldoon’s elegy for the fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson with a view to showing that “The Triumph” seeks to evoke a ground where political, cultural and religious polarities are destabilized. As the various intertextual allusions in the poem are traced, it is argued that Muldoon seeks to revise the notion of the Irish shibboleths that, as the poem puts it, “are meant to trip you up.” In lieu of this linguistic and political slipperiness, “The Triumph” situates Carson’s protean invocations of Belfast and traditional Irish music as the new shibboleths of collectivity

Poezja po końcu świata – Sylwetki i cienie Andrzeja Sosnowskiego

Poetry after the end of the world: Andrzej Sosnowski’s Sylwetki i cienieThe article focuses on the attempt to write out the notion of the end of the world as inherent in Andrzej Sosnowski’s latest book of poems. The poet shows that apocalyptic narrations are a mythical discourse that brings down the complex process of man’s existence to a simplifi ed binary formula, reducing being in the world to a life – death dichotomy. The aim of poetry in such a reality is to shake the cliché-ridden language into greater evocative potential so as to enliven it. In Sylwetki i cienie, the function of poetry in late modernity enters the spotlight: notional binaries are broken apart, replaced by a nuanced space of linguistic gam