'From Neo-Latin to Vernacular: Marvell's Bilingualism and Renaissance Pedagogy'

This chapter contextualises Marvell's Latin poetry in relation to seventeenth-century pedagogical theory and practice, with particular focus on bilingual textbooks, double translation methodology, and etymological alertness. An analysis of several Marvellian case-studies serves to highlight the influence of pedagogical bilingualism upon his poetic creativity.

Time Out of Time: Derrida, Cixous, Improvisation

This article considers the paradox of improvisation as a gift out of time, which is completely in tune with time, subject to time. It does so through an alignment of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and the poetic writings of Hélène Cixous. Ever mindful of the possible impossibility of improvisation in Derrida’s work, improvisation here is given over to Cixous, to the side of life, and is theorised as a type of ‘feminine writing’, as an inventive strategy that calls forth the unknown other and dreams of a gift in life that is out of time.

Both English and Latin: Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Milton's Neo-Latin Writings (219pp.)

Review by Emma A. Wilson, Milton Quarterly 49.1 (March, 2015), 54-59:

‘This volume provides an invaluable new perspective on both Milton’s neo-Latin poems and also the major vernacular poetry by insisting politely but firmly upon the bilingualism of their author and the manifest effects of that bilingualism upon style and intertextuality in his corpus. Through a dextrous combination of manuscript research, modern understandings of bilingualism, and crucially meticulous and demanding close readings, this volume succeeds in vivifying a wealth of new relationships between Milton’s neo-Latin works and his vernacular poems … Haan is expert in probing and elucidating the multiple linguistic and cultural lenses through which Milton projects his work, and the resulting volume brings a new set of historical contexts and consequences for both the major and minor texts, whilst also more importantly furnishing an exciting new method with which to approach these works as a whole ... Haan's linguistic expertise and meticulous archival research combine to create a critical work in which discoveries gradually accumulate and speak to one another in very specific, nuanced dialogues between chapters ... opening up exciting new reading vistas ... The final two chapters, in which Haan harvests some of the fruits of her considerable and fantastic labor in the archives and in current linguistic research into bilingualism, bring to light fresh perspectives on some of Milton's major published poetic works.’


Both English and Latin: Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Milton’s Neo-Latin Writings (2012) (Back Cover):

Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester:
‘Estelle Haan is the world’s foremost authority on Milton’s Latin poetry, and probably the most distinguished student of that poetry in the history of critical commentary. This is a work of extraordinary authority written by a scholar at the height of her powers. In short, this is a terrific book, elegant and informative.’

Anne Mahoney, Tufts University:
‘This book ssucceeds in presenting Milton's poetry as a single, unified body of work. Its biggest strength is the many close readings of Milton's Latin verse as engagements with classical Latin literature. In addition to introducing the Latin verse to new readers, it provides a new approach to Paradise Lost, one that accounts for one of the difficulties of Milton’s text—its language—in a novel way.’


Abstract:

Both English and Latin examines the interplay of Latin and English in a selection of John Milton's neo-Latin writings. It argues that this interplay is indicative of an inherent bilingualism that proceeds hand-in-hand with a self-fashioning that is bicultural in essence. Interlingual flexibility ultimately proved central to the poet of Paradise Lost, an epic uniquely characterized by its Latinate vernacular and its vernacular Latinitas.

'A new sword on an old anvil': W.B.Yeats, Robert Graves and the Anglo-Irish Tradition

Throughout his writing life, Robert Graves was consistently and often publicly hostile to the work of W.B. Yeats, whilst still also owing a considerable debt to the older poet (who he never met). This essay explores Graves' complex responses to Yeats, arguing that his antagonism may be understood in the light of his own Anglo-Irish background, and is implicated in his relations with his father, Alfred Perceval Graves, as well as his experience of the First World War. Probing the suggestiveness of Graves's claim in 1959 that his poems 'remain true to the Anglo-Irish poetic tradition into which I was born', it traces the relation between Yeats and Graves through correspondence, critical writings, and through a comparative reading of Yeats's A Vision and Graves's The White Goddess, and reveals underlying similarities in their critical and mythological thinking in spite of Graves's public disavowal of the Yeatsian aesthetic.

La concentration. Le mouvement du discours poetique dans le poeme EIN WURFHOLZ de Paul Celan

This article demonstrates how poetic discourse signifies by its movement of language at the example of a poem by Paul Celan.

Vom Innen und vom Aussen. Zum Raum in der Poetik Paul Celans

This article deals with the conception of space in the poetics of Paul Celan in relation to French theory (Kristeva, Blanchot, Foucault). It analyses in detail one poem to show how Celan constructs his concept of space in the poetic form, relating it to Martin Buber dialogical thinking.

Die Konzentration. Zur Bewegung des dichterischen Sprechens in der Poetik Paul Celans

This article demonstrates the mouvement of poetic speech in Celan's poetics at the exemple of one poem, thus stressing the significance of the poetic form.

Epistolarum Familiarium Liber Unus in The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume XI (672pp.)

This edition of Milton’s Epistolarum Familiarium Liber Unus and of his Uncollected Letters, will appear as 672 pp. of The Complete Works of John Milton Volume XI, eds. Gordon Campbell and Edward Jones (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2016). A diplomatic Latin text and a new facing English translation are complemented by a detailed Introduction and commentary that situate Milton’s Latin letters in relation to the classical, pedagogical and essentially humanist contexts at the heart of their composition. Now the art of epistolography advocated and exemplified by Cicero and Quintilian and embraced by Renaissance pedagogical manuals is read through a humanist filter whereby, via the precedent (and very title) of Epistolae Familiares, the Miltonic Liber is shown to engage with a neo-Latin re-invention of the classical epistola that had come to birth in quattrocento Italy in the letters of Petrarch and his contemporaries. At the same time the Epistolae are seen as offering fresh insight into Milton’s views on education, philology, his relations with Italian literati, his blindness, the poetic dimension of his Latin prose, and especially his verbal ingenuity as the ‘words’ of Latin ‘Letters’ become a self-conscious showcasing of etymological punning on the ‘letters’ of Latin ‘words’. The edition also announces several new discoveries, most notably its uncovering and collation of a manuscript of Henry Oldenburg’s transcription (in his Liber Epistolaris held in Royal Society, London) of Milton’s Ep. Fam. 25 (to Richard Jones). Oldenburg’s transcription (from the original sent to his pupil Jones) is an important find, given the loss of all but two of the manuscripts of Milton’s original Latin letters included in the 1674 volume. The edition also presents new evidence in regard to Milton’s relationships with the Italian philologist Benedetto Buonmattei, the Greek humanist Leonard Philaras, the radical pastor Jean Labadie (and the French church of London), and the elusive Peter Heimbach.

Cracks and Fissures: Gower's Poetics on the Edge

This essay examines Gower's oft-discussed flexible or situational ethics with a focus on the way in which he positions his poems, especially the Confessio Amantis between several different elements. His multi-linguality has concerned readers for a long time, as have his idea of the "middle weie" and, more recently, the way in which he does not offer an overall fixed moral sense but rather focuses on the contradictions inherent in the human condition. The central thesis of the essay is that Gower uses all of these elements to create a poetic that is placed on the edge rather than in a commonplace centre. It is here that we can see cracks and fissures emerge in Gower's work, and it is here that we can begin to better understand his poetics.

Spanish Golden Age Poetry in Motion: The Dynamics of Creation and Conversation.

The fourteen essays of this volume engage in distinct ways with the matter of motion in early modern Spanish poetics, without limiting the dialectic of stasis and movement to any single sphere or manifestation. Interrogation of the interdependence of tradition and innovation, poetry, power and politics, shifting signifiers, the intersection of topography and deviant temporalities, the movement between the secular and the sacred, tensions between centres and peripheries, issues of manuscript circulation and reception, poetic calls and echoes across continents and centuries, and between creative writing and reading subjects, all demonstrate that Helgerson's central notion of conspicuous movement is relevant beyond early sixteenth-century secular poetics, By opening it up we approximate a better understanding of poetry's flexible spatio-temporal co-ordinates in a period of extraordinary historical circumstances and conterminous radical cultural transformation

Coelum non animum muto? Milton's Neo-Latin Poetry and Catholic Italy

Milton’s Elegiarum Liber, the first half of his Poemata published in Poems of Mr John Milton Both English and Latin (1645), concludes with a series of eight Latin epigrams: five bitterly anti-Catholic pieces on the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, followed by three encomiastic poems hymning the praises of an Italian soprano, Leonora Baroni, singing in Catholic Rome. The disparity in terms of subject matter and tone is self-evident yet surprising in an epigrammatic series that runs sequentially. Whereas the gunpowder epigrams denigrate Rome, the Leonora epigrams present the city as a cultured hub of inclusivity, the welcome host of a Neapolitan soprano. In providing the setting for a human song that both enthrals its audience and attests to the presence of a divine power, Rome now epitomizes something other than brute idolatry, clerical habit or doctrine. And for the poet this facilitates an interrogation of theological (especially Catholic) doctrines. Coelum non animum muto, dum trans mare curro wrote the homeward-bound Milton in the autograph book of Camillo Cardoini at Geneva on 10 June 1639. But that this was an animus that could indeed acclimatize to religious and cultural difference is suggested by the Latin poems which Milton “patch [ed] up” in the course of his Italian journey. Central to that acclimatisation, as this chapter argues, is Milton’s quasi-Catholic self-fashioning. Thus Mansus offers a poetic autobiography of sorts, a self-inscribed vita coloured by intertextually kaleidoscopic links with two Catholic poets of Renaissance Italy and their patron; Ad Leonoram 1 both invokes and interrogates Catholic doctrine before a Catholic audience only to view the whole through the lens of a neo-Platonic hermeticism that may refreshingly transcend religious difference. Finally, Epitaphium Damonis, composed upon Milton’s return home, seems to highlight the potential interconnectedness of Protestant England and Catholic Italy, through the Anglo-Italian identity of its deceased subject, and through a pseudo-monasticism suggested by the poem’s possible engagement with the hagiography of a Catholic Saint. Perhaps continental travel and the physical encounter with the symbols, personages and institutions of the other have engendered in the Milton of the Italian journey a tolerance or, more accurately, the manipulation of a seeming tolerance to serve poetic and cultural ends.


First reviewer:
Haan: a fine piece by the senior neo-Latinist in Milton studies.

Second reviewer:
Chapter 7 is ... a high-spot of the collection. Its argument that in his Latin poetry Milton’s is a ‘quasi-Catholic self-fashioning’ stressing ‘the potential interconnectedness of Protestant England and Catholic Italy’ is striking and is advanced with learning, clarity and insight. Its sensitive exploration of the paradox of Milton’s coupling of humanistically complimentary and tolerant address to Roman Catholic friends with fiercely Protestant partisanship demonstrates that there is much greater complexity to his poetic persona than the self-construction and self-presentation of the later works would suggest. The essay is always adroit and sure-footed, often critically acute and illuminating (as, for example, in its discussion of the adjective and adverb mollis and molliter in Mansus, or in the identification in n. 99 of hitherto unnoticed Virgilian echoes). It has the added merits of being very well written, precise and apt in its citation of evidence, and absolutely central to the concerns of the volume.

Laganside: Poetry from Northern Ireland Today

An analysis of Alan Gillis's poem 'Laganside' as exemple of a post-ceasefire Northern Irish poetic.

Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the “Melville Revival”

Whilst Muriel Rukeyser's poetic affinity with Walt Whitman is generally acknowledged, the close relation of her work and poetic sensibility to the thought and writing of Herman Melville has somehow gone relatively unnoticed, and almost wholly unexamined. In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks called for the creation of a usable past that would energize America by recasting its cultural tradition. His plea addressed the need to rebuild a national heritage via the rediscovery of culturally “great” figures. By the late 1930s, many scholars and writers had answered the call, and the new discipline of American studies was beginning to take shape, aided by a reclamation of one of the country's greatest, most neglected, writers – Herman Melville. This was also the period in which Rukeyser “came of age”; a time when political and international conflicts and economic crises generated both the stark, documentary representation of present social realities and the drive to retrieve or reconstruct a more golden age that might mobilize a dislocated nation. The following article examines the importance of Melville to Rukeyser's work, and situates her within the “Melville revival” as an important figure in the movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century to reconstruct an American cultural character.

Canaries Coalmines Thunderstones 2010:"Suppressing the Medical Model”; “Family at War”; and “The Fallenness of Humanity"

A Poetic Annual