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eBook details
- Title: Edmund Gosse and the Stubborn Villanelle Blunder (Critical Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 229 KB
Description
Contemporary American poets do not care for Victorian poetry. For evidence of this assertion we might look at the November/December 2007 issue of The American Poetry Review: What trace of the Victorian, if any, do we see? Paul Muldoon, an Irish transplant, vouchsafes an interview about Byron (Romantic, not Victorian, but nineteenth-century at least.) (1) A poem by Stefi Weisburd titled "Descent of Man" would have been impossible without Lyell and Darwin (not poetry, but Victorian); it mentions neither those Victorian scientists nor the pregnant contemporary phrase "intelligent design," but their influence is obvious: "Vestigial footprints, of human, of beast/score the earth like musical notes, / and what a beautiful score it is, only / the believers are too hoarse to sing." (2) Half of almost every page is blocked off for advertisements for new collections, editions, works of criticism, and creative writing programs, and these include a notice for a "Bilingual 50th Anniversary Edition" of C. F. Macintyre's French Symbolist Poetry and an epigraph by Flaubert gracing the advertisement for the James A. Michener Center for Writers MFA in Writing (France, not Britain). The many prizes are named after modernists: the 2007 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, The Robinson Jeffers Tor House 2008 Prize for Poetry, the W. B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Ira Sadoff's "History Matters: A Minority Report" mentions James Wright, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Emily Dickinson. Reginald Gibbons's essay "On Apophatic Poetics" mentions Catullus, Aquinas, Horace, Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Andrei Voznesensky, and Emily Dickinson--the last apparently a blow for the nineteenth century, but American. Yet Victorian Aestheticism has left accidental, unremarked, but decided traces on the landscape of contemporary American poetry in the "French forms," especially the villanelle, which Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Reading and Writing Metrical Verse defines as follows: