Displacement and Don Juan
Unlike the fitfully epic Don Juan , I’d like to begin in medias res , with the anger of Lord Byron. We join him thick in the struggle with a central concern of DJ’s composition: the perils of transmission:
Pray when I send you a parcel or packet—do acknowledge it—I care nothing about my letters or your answers—I only want to know, when I have taken trouble about a thing that it has arrived.
By the time he fired off those impatient words to his publisher John Murray in 1821, Byron had been living abroad and publishing overseas for five years. They were years marked by drastic shifts of tone in his writing – from earnestness to playfulness in his poetry, and quite the reverse trajectory in correspondence with Murray. The relationship between best-selling poet and savvy publisher, certainly the most lucrative of its day, degenerated into recrimination and finally broke down altogether, thanks in large part to the “friction of distance.” The distance that Don Juan’s publication had to negotiate between author and press – all the land and water as well as political borders between Italy and London – cultivated the ingredients of miscommunication. It invited excruciating delay, crossed signals, censorship, confusion, if not outright misplacement. Frustrating to be sure, and yet, as I hope to suggest, such travails had their unexpected payoff: they goaded DJ into an innovative grappling with displacement—an inexorable force that both overrides a poet’s authority and revives it, as a revenant, a potently disrupted address.
The kick-start to Byron’s poetic career was Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II, inspired by an extensive continental tour in 1809-11. Even that early work was written over...
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...livering itself over to the future. It deliberately subjects its address to unconceived purpose. It is an open-endedness that preserves a sense of validity only within the process of being - inevitably, inexorably - displaced. Frustrated by the process of long distance publication, obsessed with the perversion of address, Byron finally gestures to the materiality that has sidelined him, rendered him a ghost presenting ghosts to an unknown futurity. “’Why then publish?’ Byron asks himself in late passages of a poem that would never be fully published - and his answer seems one of the most straightforward in DJ: “what I write I cast upon the stream, / To swim or sink—I have at least my dream” (XIV.11). Studied carelessness, surely; petulance, perhaps – but there is more, the legacy of writing over distance: a sense of authority that most comes to life by being undone.
The publication history of all of John Clare’s work is, in the end, a history about editorial control and influence. Even An Invite to Eternity, written within the confines of a mental institution seemingly distant from the literary world, is not an exception to this rule, for it and Clare’s other asylum poems do not escape the power and problem of the editor. And, further, this problem of the editor is not one confined to the past, to the actions of Clare’s original publisher John Taylor or to W.F. Knight, the asylum house steward who transcribed the poetry Clare wrote during his 20 odd years of confinement. In fact, debates continue and rankle over the role of the editor in re-presenting Clare’s work to a modern audience: should the modern editor present the unadulterated, raw Clare manuscript or a cleaned up, standardized version as Taylor did? Only exacerbating and exaggerating this problem o...
For it is a commonplace of our understanding of the period that the Victorian writer wanted above all to “stay in touch.” Comparing his situation with that of his immediate predecessors, he recognized that indulgence in a self-centered idealism was no longer viable in a society which ever more insistently urged total involvement in its occupations. The world was waiting to be improved upon, and solved, and everyone, poets, included had to busy themsel...
Everett, Nicholas From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamiltong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.
Ogden Nash is a great American author, best known for his “pithy and funny light verse” (“Ogden Biography” 1). New York Times refers to him as America’s “best-known producer of humorous poetry” due to his buffoonery verse style. Born in the August of 1902 in Rye, New York as a child he moved often due to his father’s exporting-importing company (1). After completing high school at St. George’s School he attended Harvard University unfortunately quitting a year later. Reflecting on better times, Nash taught at his previous high school but left less than a year later, with little success in establishing another job (2) (“Ogden Nash” 1-2). Nash tried many different careers throughout the next decade finally finding success as a poetic advisor at Doubleday publishing house. Advertising gave him the opportunity to explore various styles of writing where he eventually came up with his own unique style. During this period he moved to Baltimore, the place he ultimately considered his home, married Francis Leonard and promoted from the market department to the editorial department at Doubleday (“Ogden Nash” 1-3).
Poetry’s role is evaluated according to what extent it mirrors, shapes and is reshaped by historical events. In the mid-19th century, some critics viewed poetry as “an expression of the poet’s personality, a manifestation of the poet’s intuition and of the social and historical context which shaped him” ( Preminger, Warnke, Hardison 511). Analysis of the historical, social, political and cultural events at a certain time helps the reader fully grasp a given work. The historical approach is necessary in order for given allusions to be situated in their social, political and cultural background. In order to escape intentional fallacy, a poet should relate his work to universal
We all know what it is like to wake up in the morning, with our head aching, and our body feeling like it was just hit by a train. College students world wide know this feeling. These are the results of binge drinking. The question of why college students continue to submit themselves to alcohol is unknown. While many reasons are given, the cause generally falls into one of three categories, peer pressure, insecurity, or to help solve there problems. But the one thing students don’t realize are the consequences and effects that binge drinking can have, health and social problems are just a few.
The world is changing and evolving at an astounding rate. Within the last one hundred years, the Western community has seen advances in technology and medicine that has improved the lifestyles and longevity of almost every individual. Within the last two hundred years, we have seen two World Wars, and countless disputes over false borders created by colonialists, slavery, and every horrid form of human suffering imaginable! Human lifestyles and cultures are changing every minute. While our grandparents and ancestors were growing-up, do you think that they ever imagined the world we live in today? What is to come is almost inconceivable to us now. In this world, the only thing we can be sure of is that everything will change. With all of these transformations happening, it is a wonder that a great poet may write words over one hundred years ago, that are still relevant in today’s modern world. It is also remarkable that their written words can tell us more about our present, than they did about our past. Is it just an illusion that our world is evolving, or do these great poets have the power to see into the future? In this brief essay, I will investigate the immortal characteristics of poetry written between 1794 and 1919. And, I will show that these classical poems can actually hold more relevance today, than they did in the year they were written. Along the way, we will pay close attention to the style of the poetry, and the strength of words and symbols used to intensify the poets’ revelations.
..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meaningless reduction/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and memory of a man has been sacrificed, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The “Dirge” which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The “Dirge” the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the internal contradictions in Kenneth Fearing’s poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a powerful modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.
1 Modern Poetry. Third Edition. Norton. I am a naysayer. 2003. The 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary' of the Williams, William.
Lord Byron had a variety of achievements during his time. Among these various achievements, he had a very significant and profound impact on the nineteenth century and it’s “conception of archetypal Romantic Sensibility. (Snyder 40). “What fascinates nineteenth century audiences about Byron was not simply the larger than life character of the man transmuted into...
the “wet, ungenial summer” and “incessant rain” of their stay with Lord Byron at Villa
In Emily Dickinson’s “Publication—is the Auction,” the speaker expresses his or her complicated negative feelings toward publishing. Through an array of literary devices (such as the opening metaphor), stylistic choices (such as the use of dashes and capitalization), and mixed diction (ranging form religious to simply aesthetic) the speaker argues that publication strains a writer’s integrity and is essentially selling out.
Thorslev, Peter L., Jr. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1962. Print.
Wolfson, S. & Manning, P. 2003. The Longman Anthology of English Literature Vol 2: The Romantics and their Contemporaries. London: Longman.
Yet the laurels attached to Johnson’s name are immense. Though he had to bear physical, financial hardship, he rose to great heights. Had it been any other person, it would not have been possible for him to attain so much in the literary field as Johnson. His father, when he died, left him penniless with an inheritance of twenty pounds. The next thirty years for him was a long struggle with poverty.