Laura Riding, William Empson and the Critics – a Survey of Mis-History
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93708615 Bloom S Shakespeare Through the Ages Othello Harold
Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It Hamlet Henry IV (Part I) Julius Caesar King Lear Macbeth The Merchant of Venice A Midsummer Night’s Dream Othello Romeo and Juliet The Sonnets The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Twelfth Night Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages OTHELLO Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Volume Editor Neil Heims Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages: Othello Copyright © 2008 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Othello / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom ; volume editor, Neil Heims. p. cm. — (Bloom’s Shakespeare through the ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7910-9575-1 (acid-free paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Othello. 2. Othello (Fictitious character) I. Bloom, Harold. II. Heims, Neil. III. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Othello. PR2829.O77 2008 822.3’3—dc22 2007026815 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. -
Introduction
© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. introduction Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan in “Paradise Lost.” It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. —shelley, The Defence of Poetry 1. “Too full of the Devill” Paradise Lost is not an orthodox poem and it needs to be rescued from its orthodox critics. This book contends that the best way back to the poem Milton composed, rather than the one the orthodox would have us read, is to reassert the importance of Satan, heretic and hater. I shall be doing this in various ways. One is through revising the history of the Satan that Milton reimagines for us, since a mistaken idea about it has been widely accepted in recent years. It is the combat myth, I argue, that has always been at the center of that history, and Milton knew it. His more perceptive readers have kept it there, for the opposition is central to the poem. “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.”1 Blake’s aphorism has become so famous that it is hard to hear what it says. I think that, like much Romantic criticism, it is right, or at least helpful, except for the implied accusation of ignorance. -
Title Page of Her First Collection of Poems, the Close Chaplet (1926), Following Their Divorce in 1925
! 1! “Hospitality to Words”: Laura Riding’s American Inheritance and Inheritors Philip John Lansdell Rowland Royal Holloway, University of London Submitted for the Degree of PhD ! 3! Abstract This thesis situates the work of Laura Riding in an American tradition of “hospitality to words” extending from Emerson and Emily Dickinson through Gertrude Stein to John Ashbery and contemporary language-oriented writing. The theme is introduced in terms of her linguistic and spiritual ideal of home as a place of truthful speaking, related in turn to her identity as an American writer who renounced the craft of poetry in mid-career. First, Riding’s poetry is “hospitable” in ways akin to Dickinson’s, broadly characterized by Riding’s term, “linguistic intimateness.” There are similarities in their word-conjunctions and styles of poetic argument, as well as their ideas of poetry as “house of possibility” and spiritual home. Riding’s work is then compared with that of her older friend of the late 1920s, Gertrude Stein. The chapter details the shift in Riding’s critical view of Stein; then focuses on the similarly “homely” characteristics of their prose writing and poetics, with particular reference made to Riding’s “Steinian” poems. The central chapters clarify Riding’s conception of truth and related questions of authority, history and responsibility. Chapter 4 explains her poetic vision of “the end of the world” as the introduction to a new world and potentially a new home, and chapter 5 extends the account to include her post-poetic work, The Telling compared to her earlier, collaborative The World and Ourselves. -
William Empson: Genius of Ambiguity Charles I
j_ WILLIAM EMPSON: GENIUS OF AMBIGUITY CHARLES I. GLtCKSDERG* W ILLIAM EMPSON employs a method that is highly technical and specialized, but it must be admitted that it yields some astonishingly fruitful rosults. At least, it pro vides in the field of literary criticism an effective cure for glib generalizations. Instead of offering us brilliant theorizing and un focused emotional reactions, the stock-in-trade of the impres sionist, this enterprising scholar-critic patiently undertakes the task of disentangling the ambiguities of meaning in the skein of poetic context. He uses the word "ambiguity" in a special sense as any "consequence of language, however slight, which adds some nuance to the direct statement of prose". He is thus in terested in catching overtones of expression, hidden nuances and implications not revealed by a superficial reading of the text, subtleties and indirections precipitated by means of protracted analysis and the developed technique of free association. In herent in poetry is the process of diffused association, and the richer, the more varied and original the diffuson, the greater the genius of the poet. And greater, too, by implication, it would seem, is the genius of the critic who can bring this diffused glory to light. Words may possess, as I. A. Richards has taught us on nu merous occasions, a number of distinct meanings- meanings I ·l that cluster together in a system of interanimation. The in .1, dwelling ambiguity springs from an indecision as to the meaning . ~ intended. Frequently the meaning branches off in different di r ections, and it is a nice question for the reader to determine I which road to take. -
Robert Graves
Robert Graves Robert Graves The University of San Francisco aims “to cultivate the heart that it may love worthwhile things.” First editions with inscriptions and corrected galley proofs of such a writer as Robert Graves, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, have the magic to thrill the student, to give him a love of learning sufficient for a lifetime. Therefore, the University and the Gleeson Library Associates thank Mr. Walter Bartmann for adding to the cultivation of our students by the donation of his collection of first editions of Robert Graves. All titles of this collection are contained in the checklist except ephemera. Titles with asterisk are not in the collection but will be added. ANNUAL MEETING Gleeson Library Associates APRIL 29, 1962 A Checklist Robert Graves Section I Poetry, Novels and Essays 1916 Over the Brazier. David and Goliath. With author's book-plate. 1917 Fairies and Fusiliers. 1919 The White Cloud.* 1920 Treasure Box. Privately printed and signed. 1921 The Pier-Glass. 1922 On English Poetry. Robert Graves http://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.0020390s 1923 The Feather Bed. No. 82 of 250 signed. Whipperginny. 1924 Mock Beggar Hall. The Meaning of Dreams. 1925 Welchman's Hose. 525 copies. John Kemp's Wager: A Ballad Opera. My Head! My Head! Contemporary Techniques in Poetry: a Political Analogy. Poetical Unreason and Other Studies. 1926 Another Future of Poetry.* Impenetrability. 1927 Poems 1914–1926. No. 18 of 115 signed. The English Ballad. Lars Porsena or The Future of Swearing. Lawrence and the Arabs. 1928 Mrs. Fisher or The Future of Humour. -
A MEDIUM for MODERNISM: BRITISH POETRY and AMERICAN AUDIENCES April 1997-August 1997
A MEDIUM FOR MODERNISM: BRITISH POETRY AND AMERICAN AUDIENCES April 1997-August 1997 CASE 1 1. Photograph of Harriet Monroe. 1914. Archival Photographic Files Harriet Monroe (1860-1936) was born in Chicago and pursued a career as a journalist, art critic, and poet. In 1889 she wrote the verse for the opening of the Auditorium Theater, and in 1893 she was commissioned to compose the dedicatory ode for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Monroe’s difficulties finding publishers and readers for her work led her to establish Poetry: A Magazine of Verse to publish and encourage appreciation for the best new writing. 2. Joan Fitzgerald (b. 1930). Bronze head of Ezra Pound. Venice, 1963. On Loan from Richard G. Stern This portrait head was made from life by the American artist Joan Fitzgerald in the winter and spring of 1963. Pound was then living in Venice, where Fitzgerald had moved to take advantage of a foundry which cast her work. Fitzgerald made another, somewhat more abstract, head of Pound, which is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Pound preferred this version, now in the collection of Richard G. Stern. Pound’s last years were lived in the political shadows cast by his indictment for treason because of the broadcasts he made from Italy during the war years. Pound was returned to the United States in 1945; he was declared unfit to stand trial on grounds of insanity and confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for thirteen years. Stern’s novel Stitch (1965) contains a fictional account of some of these events. -
Ii the New Criticism and Leavisian Criticism
II THE NEW CRITICISM AND LEAVISIAN CRITICISM Though the New Criticism had its ongms in Britain in the criticism of T. S. Eliot, the theory of I. A. Richards and the practice of William Empson, its most powerful impact has been in America. John Crowe Ransom, who published a book entitled The New Criticism in 1941, was the leading American influence and he acknowledged a debt to Eliot and Richards. The other major American New Critics were Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and W. K. Wimsatt. Indirectly related to the New Criticism are such important figures as Kenneth Burke and R. P. Blackmur. The early New Critics were politically conservative and their attitudes to literature were shaped by their opposition to certain twentieth-century tendencies of thought, such as Marxism. The fundamental aim of American New Criticism was to create a critical alternative to impressionism and historical scholarship, and thus there are some parallels with Russian Formalism. It advocated 'intrinsic' criticism - an impersonal concern for the literary work as an independent object - and opposed 'extrinsic' critical approaches, which concerned themselves with such matters as authorial intention, historical, moral or political considerations, and audience response. The earlier New Criticism was primarily interested in lyric poetry and regarded most highly forms of poetry in which irony, tension, paradox and ambiguity interact with the semantics of language in such a way, they believed, as to render poetic meaning unique and un paraphrasable. They claimed, however, that poetry could impart knowledge but a form of knowledge radically different from knowledge in the scientific sense. -
(London, 1988), P. 125. PROLOGUE
NOTES PREFACE 1. William Empson, Arguejying (London, 1988), p. 125. PROLOGUE: FAMILY TIES 1. Dame Felicitas Corrigan, Siegfried Sassoon: Poet's Pilgrimage (London, 1973), p. 17. 2. See Keith Middlemass, Edward VII (London, 1975), p. 44. 3. See Stanley Jackson, The Sassoons: Portrait of a Dynasty (London, 1968), pp. 84-88. 4. Jackson (1968), p. 75. 5. In 1871 her sister Laura became the second wife of Lawrence Alma- Tadema (1836-1912), the Dutch-born painter who in the 1880s and 90s achieved popular successes with his imaginary scenes from classical Greece, Rome and ancient Egypt. 6. Jackson (1968), p. 76. 7. In The Old Century there is mention of a cook and two maids, with a nurse - later replaced by a German governess - to look after the boys. The male element consisted of the head-gardener, two under-gardeners and Richardson the groom. 8. Philip Hoare, Serious Pleasures: the Life of Stephen Tennant (London, 1990), p. 88. 9. His book collecting may have reminded him of his grandfather Sassoon David Sassoon, who had spent his leisure hours building up a library of rare Hebrew manuscripts. Cf. Jackson (1968), p. 38. 10. Cf. Sassoon's own account of this venture in The Old Century, pp. 279-82. 11. Corrigan (1973), pp. 55-6. 12. Rupert Brooke's last girlfriend, the actress Cathleen Nesbitt (1888-1982) records in her memoirs, A Little Love (London, 1977), that she met Brooke later that same day and that he was full of indignation about Sassoon's remark. That she should recall such a trivial incident over sixty years later (and at the time Sassoon was still a complete unknown) is hard to believe, especially since, according to Sassoon's version, Brooke did not really make an issue out of it. -
Introduction
Notes Quotations from Love’s Martyr and the Diverse Poetical Essays are from the first edition of 1601. (I have modernized these titles in the text.) Otherwise, Shakespeare is quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Jonson, unless otherwise noted, is quoted from Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), and Edmund Spenser from The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Osgood and Fredrick Padelford, 10 vols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57). Introduction 1. Colin Burrow, ‘Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems’, Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (London: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 3. 2. J. C. Maxwell (ed.), The Cambridge Shakespeare: The Sonnets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), xxxiii. 3. See, for instance, Catherine Belsey’s essays ‘Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis’, in Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 34–53, and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90–107. 4. William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1. 5. I admire the efforts of recent editors to alert readers to the fact that all titles imposed on it are artificial, but there are several reasons why I reluctantly refer to it as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’. Colin Burrow, in The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chooses to name it after its first line, the rather inelegant ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay’, which, out of context, to my ear sounds more silly than solemn. -
Laura Riding Pointed to the Fact That, Looking at the Canon Of
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS/INGLÊS E LITERATURA CORRESPONDENTE MINDSCAPES: LAURA RIDING’S POETRY AND POETICS por RODRIGO GARCIA LOPES Tese submetida à Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina em cumprimento parcial dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de DOUTOR EM LETRAS FLORI.\NOPOLIS Dezembro de 2000 Esta Tese de Rodrigo Garcia Lopes, intitulada MINDSCAPES: LAURA RIDING’S POETRY AND POETICS, foi julgada adequada e aprovada em sua forma final, pelo Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, para fms de obtenção do grau de DOUTOR EM LETRAS Área de concentração; Inglês e Literatura Correspondente Opção: Literaturas de Língua Inglesa Anelise Reich Corseuil Coordenadora BANCA EXAMINADORA; é Roberto O ’Shea ientador e Presidente 'h/y Maria Lúcia MiUéo Martins Examinadora Susana Bornéo Funck Examinadora J^iz Angé^o da Costa Examinador ífid Renaux Examinadora Florianópolis, 11 de dezembro de 2000 In the memory of Laura (Riding Jackson (1901-1991) To my parents, Antonio Ubirajara Lopes and Maria do Carmo Garcia Lopes IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the several people and institutions that helped me, in inestimable ways, to succeed in accomplishing the present thesis. To my advisor, José Roberto O’Shea, for his infinite patience, collaboration, and understanding. To CAPES, for conceding me the scholarship that provided the necessary means to carry out original research on Laura Riding collections in the United States. To The Board of Literary Management of tiie late Laura (Riding Jackson: Dr. James Tyler, Dr. William Harmon, Robert Nye, Theodore Wilentz, Joan Wilentz, and especially to Alan J. -
The Emergence of Formalist Criticism: an Overview
THE EMERGENCE OF FORMALIST CRITICISM: AN OVERVIEW SANDEEP KUMAR SHARMA Research Scholar Department of English Punjabi University, Patiala (Punjab) INDIA In their critical theories, the stress was laid only on the ideas and intellectual contents of the work of art. Early Victorians had emphasized the moral, social and religious uses of literature which had resulted in extrinsic approach to literature. As a reaction to these movements a 'new' movement appeared on the literary scene which propagated for the study of the 'form' and 'artistic' aspects of a work of art, and was named 'Formalist' school or a school of 'new' critics. They felt that the only course open for the literary criticism to avoid being exploited by industrialism, and save literature from history, sociology and science. The concentration on the form, structure, technique, images, metaphors rhymes and such other items was thought to be worthwhile as it was thought that it could give the analysis of a literary work wider depth of meaning and help the critic explore the real depth of meaning. Key Words: Structure, Formalist Criticism, New Critics, Aesthetic Sensibility. The writers and critics of America and England were very much dissatisfied at the turn of the twentieth century. The intellectuals of that period suffered from literary unrest because their hopes and expectations which they had from the new century were going to remain unfulfilled. Though in the wake of scientific advances, the whole atmosphere was pregnant with intellectual activity, the literary theoreticians thought that there had come a stagnation in the field of literary criticism. This feeling of stagnation in criticism sustained because there were many critical schools prevalent which approached a literary work from external standpoints only. -
List 35: Robert Graves & Laura Riding
List 35: Robert Graves & Laura Riding McNaughtan’s Bookshop & Gallery 3a & 4a Haddington Place Edinburgh EH7 4AE +44(0)131 556 5897 [email protected] http://www.mcnaughtans.co.uk a b x @mcnbooks McNaughtan’s Bookshop & Gallery List 35: Robert Graves & Laura Riding items 1-2: Laura Riding 5. Graves, Robert. Poems 1929. London: Printed and published at the Seizin Press, 1929. 1. Riding, Laura. Twenty Poems Less. Paris: Hours Press, 1930. FIRST EDITION, NO. 17 OF 225 COPIES SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, 8vo, pp. [iv], 33, [3]. Original green cloth, spine lettered in FIRST EDITION, NO. 105 OF 200 COPIES SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, gilt. Spine slightly faded, front flyleaf toned. £250 folio, pp. [iv], 33, [3]. Original quarter black morocco, photo- graphically-decorated paper boards, spine lettered in gilt. One or two spots to page edges. Spine ends slightly rubbed. £350 Higginson & Williams A33. 2. Riding, Laura. Four 6. Lye, Len. No Unposted Letters to Cath- Trouble. Deya, Ma- erina. Paris: Hours Press, jorca: The Seizin Press, [1930]. 1930. FIRST EDITION, NO. 120 OF 200 FIRST EDITION, NO. 99 COPIES SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, OF 200 COPIES SIGNED BY small 4to, pp. [vi], 50, [4]. THE AUTHOR, folio, [vi], Original quarter black moroc- 27, [1]. Original quarter co, decorated paper boards (by white buckram, boards Len Lye), spine lettered in gilt. decorated in red, brown Spine just a touch rubbed at and textured gilt by Len head and tail. £300 Lye, spine lettered in gilt. Spine very slightly The second issue, with the tipped-in introductory note which was omit- soiled.