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Chapter 6 - Form, Matter, and Metaphysics in Walter Pater’s Essay on ‘Style’
- from Part I - General
- Edited by Charles Martindale, University of Bristol, Elizabeth Prettejohn, University of York, Lene Østermark-Johansen, University of Copenhagen
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- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
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- 14 November 2023
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- 09 November 2023, pp 118-132
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Summary
‘Style’ is a comparatively rare instance of Pater’s direct theorising; even by the standards of his other overtly theoretical interventions, the essay stands out for the breadth and importance of its subject and its capstone prominence within Appreciations, one of the two most influential volumes of literary criticism the nineteenth century produced. Scholars have often turned to ‘Style’ as if it were the author’s manifesto or summa on the subject, yet the essay tends to disappoint precisely on these terms. If ‘Style’ is the key to Pater’s aesthetic principles, most readers have found the lock jammed; or worse, they have concluded that the essay betrays the essential nature of his aestheticist vision. By contrast, this chapter argues that, while elusive, ‘Style’ is in fact a lucid and authentic intervention that at once tacitly responds to several of the most influential writers and critics of Pater’s generation (Wilde, Arnold, Saintsbury, Newman), while clarifying – rather than contradicting – his own convictions on the relationship between literary beauty or ‘perfection’, and the idea of transcendent ‘truth’.
7 - Style
- from Part I - Parts of Prose
- Edited by Daniel Tyler, University of Cambridge
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- The Cambridge Companion to Prose
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- 05 November 2021
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- 18 November 2021, pp 112-128
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Summary
Michael D. Hurley’s chapter considers the many applications of the concept of style and pursues its historical fortunes across a range of writers. Although style has been variously configured and refigured, what is apparent is that the ideal of clarity, so frequently promoted by style guides and other textbooks, is not the only objective of style, especially not in literary fiction and non-fiction.
Frederick D. Aquino and Benjamin J. King, eds., The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. xvi + 607, £110, ISBN: 9780198718284
- Michael D. Hurley
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- British Catholic History / Volume 34 / Issue 4 / October 2019
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 October 2019, pp. 675-678
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- October 2019
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Chapter 15 - Sound
- from Part II - Form, Genre, and Mode
- Edited by Sarah Haggarty, University of Cambridge
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- William Blake in Context
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- 23 March 2019
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- 14 March 2019, pp 139-146
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Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
- Edited by Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
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- 27 April 2015, pp ix-xxx
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The dietary inflammatory index is associated with colorectal cancer in the National Institutes of Health–American Association of Retired Persons Diet and Health Study
- Michael D. Wirth, Nitin Shivappa, Susan E. Steck, Thomas G. Hurley, James R. Hébert
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- Journal:
- British Journal of Nutrition / Volume 113 / Issue 11 / 14 June 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 14 April 2015, pp. 1819-1827
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- 14 June 2015
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Diet is a strong moderator of systemic inflammation, an established risk factor for colorectal cancer (CRC). The dietary inflammatory index (DII) measures the inflammatory potential of individuals' diets. The association between the DII and incident CRC was examined, using the National Institutes of Health–American Associations of Retired Persons Diet and Health Study individuals (n 489 422) aged 50–74 years at recruitment, starting between 1995–6, and followed for a mean of 9·1 (sd 2·9) years. Baseline data from a FFQ were used to calculate the DII; higher scores are more pro-inflammatory, and lower scores are more anti-inflammatory. First, primary CRC diagnoses were identified through linkage to state cancer registries. Anatomic location and disease severity also were examined. Cox proportional hazards models estimated CRC hazard ratios (HR) and 95 % CI using quartile 1 as the referent. DII quartile 4 compared to quartile 1 was associated with CRC risk among all subjects (HR 1·40, 95 % CI 1·28, 1·53; P for trend < 0·01). Statistically significant associations also were observed for each anatomic site examined, for moderate and poorly differentiated tumours, and at each cancer stage among all subjects. Effects were similar when stratified by sex; however, results were statistically significant only in males. The only result reaching statistical significance in females was risk of moderately differentiated CRC tumours (DII quartile 4 v. quartile 1 HR 1·26, 95 % CI 1·03, 1·56). Overall, the DII was associated with CRC risk among all subjects. The DII may serve as a novel way to evaluate dietary risk for chronic disorders associated with inflammation, such as CRC.
Contributors
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- By C. Alan Anderson, Celso Arango, David B. Arciniegas, Igor Bombin, Robert W. Buchanan, C. Robert Cloninger, Joshua Cosman, C. Munro Cullum, Felipe DeBrigard, Steven L. Dubovsky, Robert Feinstein, Lynne Fenton, Christopher M. Filley, Laura A. Flashman, Morris Freedman, Oliver Freudenreich, Kimberly L. Frey, Lauren C. Frey, Kelly S. Giovanello, Deborah A. Hall, John Hart, Kenneth M. Heilman, Katherine L. Howard, Robin A. Hurley, Daniel I. Kaufer, Sita Kedia, James P. Kelly, B. K. Kleinschmidt-DeMasters, Benzi M. Kluger, David G. Lichter, Deborah M. Little, Deborah M. Lucas, Thomas W. McAllister, Mario F. Mendez, Doron Merims, Steven G. Ojemann, Fred Ovsiew, Brian D. Power, Bruce H. Price, Gila Z. Reckess, Martin L. Reite, Matthew Rizzo, Donald C. Rojas, Michael Henry Rosenbloom, Elliott D. Ross, Jeremy D. Schmahmann, Stuart A. Schneck, Jonathan M. Silver, Mark C. Spitz, Sergio E. Starkstein, Katherine H. Taber, Robert L. Trestman, Hal S. Wortzel
- Edited by David B. Arciniegas, C. Alan Anderson, Christopher M. Filley
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- Behavioral Neurology & Neuropsychiatry
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- 05 February 2013
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- 24 January 2013, pp vii-x
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Chapter 1 - The Elements of Poetic Form
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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- Poetic Form
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- 05 November 2012
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- 08 October 2012, pp 16-52
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Summary
[A]lways somewhere under the live and speaking idiom of the Voice in poetry there is the count, the beats you can count on your fingers. Yes always under the shout and the whimper and the quick and the slow of poetry there is the formal construction of time made abstract in the mind’s ear. And the strange thing is that that very abstract dimension in the poem is what creates the reader’s release into the human world of another.
W. S. GrahamGerard Manley Hopkins observed that the ‘artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism’. His phrase catches well the sense in which words are heightened into poetry by organising language into expressive patterns (parallelisms): sounds into rhyme schemes, rhythms into metre, lines into stanzas; and so on. This chapter identifies, and attempts briefly to characterise, these common poetic building blocks that combine to create the different poetic genres considered in the book’s subsequent chapters.
It must be emphasised from the outset that even where they draw on longstanding and widely used conventions, the descriptive categories required for such a taxonomy are on inspection nothing like as sturdy as the ‘building blocks’ metaphor implies. The very term for the study of verse form itself is a point of contention (although this book treats ‘versification’ and ‘prosody’ as synonyms, there are arguments for distinguishing between them), and a similar contrariety, inconsistency and confusion over terms – the implications of which extend far beyond mere semantics – seemingly attends every poetic feature and effect. ‘I have read or invented twenty definitions of Rhythm and have adopted none of them’, complained Paul Valéry: ‘If I merely stop to ask what a Consonant is, I begin to wonder’. Such vacillation and vertigo is understandable, even inevitable. More than this, it is welcome. Analysis of verse form invites ‘wonder’ in both senses of the word, and persistent uncertainty over even the most basic elements may helpfully disturb critical complacency into aesthetic appreciation for what may be felt beyond what can be classified. The definitions that follow are, then, all working definitions as opposed to definitive categorisations; the approach of this chapter and the book is avowedly pragmatic: ‘to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits’.
Chapter 5 - Epic
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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- 05 November 2012
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- 08 October 2012, pp 120-144
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Ma qui la morta poesi resurga (But let dead poetry rise again)
Dante (Purgatorio I)Overview
Epic poetry has always laid claim to being the most magisterial and inclusive of poetic genres. It combines the primitive and the sophisticated, spanning both oral and written modes of composition. If it seems most at home in cultures that value the heroic (ancient Greece, classical Rome, Renaissance England), its persistence as a form argues for an abiding cultural concern with heroism, however much it consorts with ironic dust, to adapt a line from Donald Davie.
Epic’s claim to inclusiveness derives initially from the weight and scope of epic subject matter, traditionally communicated through a narrative that starts in medias res (literally, ‘in the middle of things’). The Iliad opens in the final year of the Greek siege of Troy, the Aeneid with a storm at sea threatening the lives of Aeneas and his men, fleeing from Troy. The convention of starting in medias res tells us much about epic, especially that it involves a turbulent sense of struggle and outcome, of causes and consequences, of murky doubt and attempted prophetic clarity. Epic form provides a means through which massive countervailing forces can find expression. Central to its generic identity is the sense of task. The leading figures must fulfil their destiny; the poet must write his or her poem.
Acknowledgements
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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- 05 November 2012
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- 08 October 2012, pp vii-viii
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Frontmatter
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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- 08 October 2012, pp i-iv
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Chapter 8 - Ballad and Narrative
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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- 05 November 2012
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- 08 October 2012, pp 189-212
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And at the moment when I fix my story…
Byron, Beppo (1818)Overview
‘A narrative poem’, the Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics asserts, getting to the heart of the matter, ‘is one that tells a story’. Yet even a short lyric such as Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (1800) depends for its effect on the suggestion of a story, albeit one told in a highly elliptical form. In this case the story element is pointed up by the link and contrast between the poem’s two stanzas, one set in the past when ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (1), the second in the present when it turns out to be the troublingly connected case that ‘No motion has she now, no force’ (5). Does Lucy’s lack of motion serve as a reproach to the speaker for his former insensibility, or did that earlier ‘slumber’ serve as a displaced intimation of her current state? Lyric poetry usually contains a narrative element, while narrative frequently contains passages that have lyrical possibilities.
Overlap is inevitable since poetic compositions refuse to obey pre-existing theoretical or taxonomic imperatives, even if it is important not to blur real distinctions, as Chapter 7 has argued. Narrative poetry has its own evident traits, on which this chapter will focus. Indeed, the recognition of generic overlap is less a warning than an invitation to re-consider; it is sometimes the case that, in narrative, the reader senses a ghostly alternative in which narrative serves as the medium for impulses which might otherwise have sought lyrical expression. When Byron depicts Lara, for example, as a figure for whom ‘troubled manhood followed baffled youth’ (Lara [1814], 18.36), he plays, and his readership knows he is playing, with this idea that narrative is a medium through which the poet dramatises a version of himself.
Chapter 4 - Elegy
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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- 05 November 2012
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- 08 October 2012, pp 100-119
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Summary
For so to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise
Milton (Lycidas)The earliest surviving elegies of ancient Greece engaged miscellaneous topics: the term elegy denoted a specific verse form rather than specific subject matter; elegion referred to a poem in couplets composed of a hexameter followed by a pentameter. There is a suggestion of sadness and lament in the term elegos (Latin elegi), however, so it may be that the oldest elegies were originally connected with grief, and that the mournful elegos was discontinued by the lyric poets ‘under some kind of pressure from the religious reforms of the sixth century’, such that it survived ‘only as a literary term’. In any event, Latin adaptations of the elegiac form continued the miscellaneous approach of the Greek exemplars, albeit with an increasing focus on the amatory complaint. Early English versions of ‘elegy’ admitted an equal variety of themes. It was not until around the sixteenth century that the English elegy took on its modern meaning, as being identified with mortal loss and consolation.
The reasons for this identification of elegy with loss and mourning are many and varied. Most important, though, was the Reformation. The Catholic tradition of praying for the repose of the soul offered a ritual for expressing grief, whereas the Protestant doctrine that replaced it held that nothing mourners might do could influence the fate of the deceased; and so, the elaborate practice of the Catholic Requiem Mass disappeared, chantries were closed, and the focus of funeral observances consequently shifted towards the secular. Dennis Kay describes how, just as the sonnet is an ‘aggregative form’ – in which practitioners ‘defined their individuality against their predecessors’ and ‘consciousness of tradition, repetition, translation, and imitation was inseparable from innovation and invention’ – the post-Reformation elegist faced ‘in an especially well-defined way the problem of fitting words to the special requirements of an occasion and of arguing for uniqueness both for the subject and for the elegy’. Hence the habitual elegiac protestations of sincerity, inexpressibility and individuality.
Chapter 3 - The Sonnet
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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- 05 November 2012
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- 08 October 2012, pp 76-99
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Summary
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is …
Wordsworth (‘Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room’)Established in thirteenth-century Sicily, the sonnet is the most enduring, the most widely used and the most immediately recognisable of all ‘closed’ poetic forms. The early Italian sonneteers – Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Dante and, of course, Petrarch – determined its verse structure: fourteen lines, rhymed abba; abba; cde; cde (the last six lines may alternatively be rhymed cdc; dcd, or any similar combination of two or three non-consecutive but interlocking rhymes). These sonnets typically progress in two parts: a thought or problem is proposed in the first part and addressed, contradicted or otherwise resolved in the second. The ‘turn’ towards resolution, known as the volta, occurs at the point where the rhyme scheme changes; the poem’s argument hinges, in other words, between the first eight lines (the ‘octave’) and its final six (the ‘sestet’).
Subsequent evolution of this ‘Italian’ form has tended to be described with irrational nostalgia. The ‘law’ of the sonnet’s structure is said to have ‘written itself explicitly and finally’; its ‘standards’ are thought ‘irremovable’. Such purism is prosodically naive. However well the ‘Italian’ metre and rhyme patterns suited the Italian tongue, different languages afford different formal possibilities. When the sonnet was first adopted into England in the early sixteenth century, the Italian hendecasyllabic metre had first to be adapted: it was naturalised into the English iambic pentameter (similarly, when the sonnet was translated into French at the same time it was naturalised into alexandrines). That metrical mutation goes unremarked upon because it is generally thought unremarkable; comment and disapproval is reserved for the way English poets refashioned the Italian rhyme scheme, by increasing the number of end rhymes from four or five to seven. But in the case of its rhyme as in its metre, the literary structure of the English sonnet expresses something about the linguistic structure of the English language. Because there are more rhyming possibilities in Italian than in English, and Italian rhymes may also be employed less intrusively (in that they are all feminine), English poets wishing to enjoy the same flexibility in their sonneteering reduced the burden of rhymes they were required to repeat.
Chapter 7 - Dramatic Monologue
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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- 05 November 2012
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- 08 October 2012, pp 167-188
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Summary
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet …
T. S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)All monologues are dramatic. A single person speaking is always addressing that speech to someone, even if only to himself or herself. As a poetic genre, however, the dramatic monologue entails something more than the mere ‘drama’ of articulation and audience. Verse monologues appear as far back as Anglo-Saxon poetry, as seen in, for instance, The Seafarer, The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament. But whereas such poems offer the poet’s voice, dramatic monologues – which did not emerge as a distinct genre until the late nineteenth century – offer a poetic persona, a fictional voice.
The distinction between a monologue that is dramatic and the genre known as the ‘dramatic monologue’ may therefore be simply stated. Yet readers are rarely willing to concede such a neat categorisation. As was discussed in the chapter on elegy, artifice does not exclude the possibility of authenticity; confection and confession may blur. In the Victorian period, when the dramatic monologue was first popularised and arguably enjoyed its highest achievement, fictional characters were frequently believed to express the beliefs and desires of their creators. It is tempting to imagine that modern readers are beyond this kind of apparently naive confusion. But the confusion today is, if anything, even greater. Whereas Victorian readers might take (or mistake?) the poem for the poet, modern critics tend towards the opposite error: all confessional verse is treated as if it were fiction. One reason for this is that the novel has become the main form of literary consumption; as such, Jonathan Culler observes, narrative is treated not as one possible literary form but as the very condition of experience. Reacting against the notion of lyric as expression of intense personal revelation, criticism and pedagogy has ‘adopted the model of the dramatic monologue as the way to align poetry with the novel: the lyric is conceived as a fictional imitation of the act of the speaker, and to interpret the lyric is to work out what sort of person is speaking, in what circumstances and with what attitude or, ideally, drama of attitudes’.
Chapter 6 - Soliloquy
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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Summary
Now I am alone
HamletSpeak of me as I am
OthelloOverview
This chapter explores the use of poetry in drama, and will focus mainly but not solely on Shakespearean and Renaissance drama, giving particular attention to the use of blank verse as a medium for soliloquy, on subsequent developments in Romantic poetry where the extended exploration of thought in long speeches leads to the emergence of the ‘dramatic poem’ (the subtitle of Byron’s Manfred) and on later attempts, notably that of Yeats, to revive the form of verse drama. The possibility of definitional overlap between this chapter and those on lyric and dramatic monologue is evident; indeed, it is embraced, in the spirit of this book’s understanding of the fluidity of generic categories. All three forms seek to express a speaker’s thought and feelings, with greater or lesser degrees of detachment.
‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense’; ‘But do not let us quarrel any more, / No, my Lucrezia’; ‘O world, thy slippery turns!’ The three openings come from a lyric, a dramatic monologue, a soliloquy. All three speak from the subject position of the ‘I’; Keats calls up a complex emotional state of ‘drowsy numbness’ that involves, as the cunningly positioned verb ‘pains’ brings out, a state of intensified awareness that borders on suffering; Robert Browning uses a measured pentameter that sidles into the soul of his ‘Faultless Painter’ (see the poem’s subtitle) to evoke Andrea del Sarto’s internalised sense of failure and self-thwarted constraint; Shakespeare gives Coriolanus a generalised idiom appropriate to a man whose moments of greatest understanding (as at the climax when he holds his mother’s hands and is persuaded by her not to burn Rome) seem to take place in silence. Each genre is in living contact with the others.
Poetic Form
- An Introduction
- Michael D. Hurley, Michael O'Neill
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Michael D. Hurley and Michael O'Neill offer a perceptive and illuminating look into poetic form, a topic that has come back into prominence in recent years. Building on this renewed interest in form, Hurley and O'Neill provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction that will be of help to undergraduates and more advanced readers of poetry alike. The book sees form as neither ornamenting nor mimicking content, but as shaping and animating it, encouraging readers to cultivate techniques to read poems as poems. Lively and wide-ranging, engaging with poems as aesthetic experiences, the book includes a long chapter on the elements of form that throws new light on troubling terms such as rhythm and metre, as well as a detailed introduction and accessible, stimulating chapters on lyric, the sonnet, elegy, soliloquy, dramatic monologue and ballad and narrative.
Note on Texts
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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Chapter 2 - Lyric
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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And isn’t a song, or a poem, or indeed a speech itself, with its caesuras, pauses, spondees, and so forth, a game language plays to restructure time?
Joseph Brodsky (‘To Please a Shadow’, Less Than One)Overview
Lyric, traditionally grouped since Aristotle’s Poetics with narrative and drama as one of the three main literary kinds or genres, has been the subject of much definitional head scratching. As Scott Brewster notes at the start of a discussion which considers the many difficulties in arriving at a single, clear-cut sense of the word, ‘the term derives from the Greek word lurikos (“for the lyre”)’, and its associations with music and with the expression of strong feeling, in a structure considerably briefer for the most part than plays or narrative poems, are at the centre of this chapter’s re-consideration of the form. Lyric can co-exist with other forms and can emerge from narrative poetry, as in ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ sung in the midst of Tennyson’s The Princess (1847), or it can contribute to a drama, as in Feste’s songs in Twelfth Night; it can sustain, as in John Berryman’s Dream Songs (first group published 1964) or Tennyson’s In Memoriam, much longer structures, whose essential unit is the short poem (as will be discussed in the final section of the chapter); it can overlap with forms such as elegy or, rather, elegy can be a poetic form that participates in the generic nature of lyric.
Contents
- Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
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- 08 October 2012, pp v-vi
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