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Still Winter Falls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mary A. Favret
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Abstract

This essay follows closely a long tradition of poets writing about war as winter, emphasizing its most dangerous characteristics: an impersonal force that can bring indiscriminate annihilation, freezing numbness or insensibility, and blank illegibility. These poems tell of modern total war avant la lettre and its capacity to destroy what we can feel or know of its work. Focusing primarily on eighteenth-century British poets (Pope, Thomson, Cowper, and Wordsworth) but turning as well to Homer and our contemporary poets, the essay considers the particular threats of war to poetic creation and the difficult, often desperate means by which poets resist those threats. Perhaps most ominous in these figurations are representations of war as still, inactive, and somehow outside the logic of historical eventfulness. Thus the poets meditate as well on the very possibility of historical narrative amid the violence of war.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 5: Special Topic War , October 2009 , pp. 1548 - 1561
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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