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In an insightful and provocative juxtaposition, Margaret Dickie examines the poetry of three preeminent women writers—Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich—investigating the ways in which each attempts to forge a poetic voice capable of expressing both public concerns and private interests. Although Stein, Bishop, and Rich differ by generation, poetic style, and relationship to audience, all three are twentieth-century lesbian poets who struggle with the revelatory nature of language. All three, argues Dickie, use language to express and to conceal their experiences as they struggle with a censorship that was both culturally sanctioned and self-imposed. Dickie explores how each poet negotiates successfully and variously with the need for secrecy and the desire for openness.

By analyzing each poet's work in light of the shared themes of love, war, and place, Dickie makes visible a continuity of interests between these three rarely linked women. In their very diversity of style and strategy, she argues, lies a triumph of the creative imagination, a victory of poetry over polemic. ... Read more

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Between 1950 and 1979, May Swenson and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged over 260 letters.These letters have interested scholars of American poetry for the commentary they contain on important work that each poet was publishing at the time, but equally for what these letters reveal about the relationship between the two writers. In Dear Elizabeth, three letters and five poems from Swenson to Bishop, including an unfinished draft never published before, are gathered into one small volume with an insightful essay by scholar and poet Kirstin Hotelling Zona. ... Read more

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In a February 1966 letter to her artistic confidant, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop tellingly grouped four midcentury poets: Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and herself. For Bishop--always wary of being pigeonholed and therefore reticent about naming her favorite contemporaries--it was a rare explicit acknowledgment of an informal but enduring artistic circle that has evaded the notice of literary journalists for more than forty years. Despite the private nature of their dialogue, the group's members--Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman--left a compelling record of their mutual interchange and influence. Drawing on an extensive range of published and archival sources, Thomas Travisano traces these poets' creation of a surprisingly coherent postmodern aesthetic and defines its continuing influence on American poetry.

The refusal of this "midcentury quartet," as Travisano calls them, to voice a formalized doctrine, coupled with their intuitive way of working, has caused critics to miss the coherence of their project. Travisano argues that these poets are not only successors to Pound, Auden, Stevens, and Eliot but postmodern explorers in their own right. In forging their own aesthetic, characterized here as a postmodern mode of elegy, they encountered significant resistance from their immediate modernist mentors Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Marianne Moore.

Jarrell, whom others of the group regarded as a critic of particular genius, was first described as a post-modernist in a 1941 review by Ransom that Travisano cites as the earliest known use of the term. In Jarrell's review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle six years later, he named Lowell a postmodernist and identified traits, among them the use of pastiche, that are now considered by theorists such as Fredric Jameson as specifically postmodern. And Bishop's inventiveness allowed her to adapt a self-exploratory mode often, but imprecisely, termed confessional to challenging forms such as the double sonnet, villanelle, and sestina.

Each of these poets suffered a devastating loss during childhood and lived through the twentieth-century disasters of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the cold war. The continual tension in their poetry between subjectivity and form, claims Travisano, reflects the plight of the fractured individual in a postmodern world. By arguing so sharply for the importance of this circle, Midcentury Quartet is certain to redraw the map of postwar American poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Enduring scholarship
Elegantly meant and beautifully worded, Thomas Travisano's book evinces his love for the poems of this quartet of poets.He does something that's rare, perhaps too rare, in modern literary scholarship--he considers theaesthetics and poetics inherent in the poets' work with a respect usuallyreserved for 'thematics.'His scholarship is a marvel of idea andinvention, the tone modest yet full of authority.Dr. Travisano is theperfect model for younger scholars in his stance toward his subject,reminding readers of the poets' greatness- the qualities of expression andin their complex relationships with their friends-without the self regardthat so often taints scholarly work.The four authors are alive inTravisano's prose; they couldn't have a better scholar on their side. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on September 22, 1997. The length of the article is 680 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Flores raras e banalissimas: A historia de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop.
Author: Celso de Oliveira
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 1997
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: v71Issue: n4Page: p798(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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Whether looming over public squares or dotting old battlefields, monuments certify a culture’spresent by securing its past and pledging its future. They embody exemplary persons or events and the shared ideals they stood for, prompting an obligation to keep those ideals standing now and forever. But monuments also exaggerate the staying power of civilizations and of art. In the second half of the twentieth century, postmodern critics often decried monuments not only for their pretensions and stiffness but also for their supposed role in perpetuating oppressive cultural conventions. Even so, many artists and thinkers of the same period tried to reimagine monuments in ways that were humbler and more provisional but still culturally confirming.

In Castings, Guy Rotella examines the work of five important poets who have engaged in that effort: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Considering their wider careers as well as particular poems—includingBishop’s "The Monument," Lowell’s "For the Union Dead," Merrill’s "Bronze," Walcott’s "The Sea Is History," and Heaney’s "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge"—Rotella argues that these writers are less concerned with defending or condemning monuments than with pursuing ancient and current debates about the political, aesthetic, and broadly cultural issues that monuments condense. Among these concerns are the competing claims of life and art, persistence and change, meaning and meaninglessness, the self and society,and the governing and the governed.

Original and provocative, Rotella’s readings will make us ponder how the human impulse to build to last, to reify our culturally derived and ideologically driven faiths, might coexist with those other creeds of our place and time: relativism, multiculuralism, and diversity. ... Read more

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Eucharist, Bishop, Church aims to define the relationship connecting the unity of the Church with the Eucharist and the Bishop as it was understood in the consciousness of the early Church. Written as the author's doctoral dissertation in 1965 for the University of Athens, the issues raised in this work are as relevant today as when Zizioulas first presented them. Zizioulas presents an episcopocentric structure of the Church as normative, constituted in the essential role of the bishop as president of the Divine Liturgy and the eucharistic community. This assertion, still novel when Zizioulas first described it, is widely accepted and forms the core concept of "eucharistic ecclesiology." Nevertheless, Eucharist, Bishop, Church continues to challenge many contemporary notions about the relationship of bishop and presbyter, parish and diocese, and local and universal church. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Good, but Early Work by Noted Greek Theologian
The author has made a name for himself in church circles even outside of Orthodoxy for his enlightening take on the centrality of the Eucharist in ecclesiology. I bought this thinking it was a new work, but it is in fact his original thesis from 1965. That said, it's still worth having and reading, regardless of one's denomination.

An Absolute Classic
This work by Metropolitan John Zizioulas is breath-taking in its ability to re-orient one's outlook towards the early church and by consequence, today's church. A few facts he demonstrates:

1) Paul's letters were written to be received and read in Eucharistic liturgies, and reading them outside that context impairs one's ability to understand them correctly.

2) The Bishop was the primary celebrant of the Eucharist during the first three centuries, and priests were typically simply co-celebrates with him.

3) The "parish" is a later construct of the Church, and its evolution muddied the clear connection between the Bishop and the Eucharist in the Church.

Zizioulas does an admirable job of making these points as well as others related to them. His writing is clear, non-polemical, and well-sourced. Although it is a historical study, it is quite applicable to today's Church, and all members of the apostolic Churches - Catholic and Orthodox - would do well to read this book to understand the inter-connection between the Eucharist, bishops and the Church.

Profound exploration of early Christianity
Zizioulas asks what Paul meant when he talks about "coming together as a church".And what does he mean by "church in the household"? Zizioulas points out that "there was one activity of the Church which never took place outside Christian homes: the celebration of the Eucharist" (p 51). He argues that the celebration of the Eucharist, along with the guidance ofthe bishops, that formed the heart of the early church.

The church was characterized as the "body of Christ", a phrase which can be understood only in the context of the Eucharist, and a phrase which was never used in either rabbinic or Gnostic sources.

In connection with this argument, Zizioulas has an interesting section the word "catholic". The letters of Ignatius (about 110 AD) are the first place the word is found in reference to Christianity. Famously, Ignatiuswrote: "Wherever the Bishop appears, there let the multitude of the people be, just as wherever Christ Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church" (letter to the Smyreans).

By the time of Polycarp the phrase "the Catholic Church throughout the whole world" was used. And, as the early Christians were under threat, not only by persecution but by a variety of heresies, orthodoxy became synonymous with the bishops and the Eucharist.

Anyone interested in early Christianity will certainly want to read this.
One complaint: there is no index!

Foundational Reading
Like the other reviewer I found this book to be very informative regarding the nature of ecclesiastical communion and the self-understanding (if such a reflective process even existed I have my doubts) of the Church in the early centuries. While ecclesiology as such is not strictly speaking a subject of dogma, since The Father Son and Spirit are the center, it is useful in an age when there is such misunderstanding and confusion about ecclesiology on the part of many Protestants, Roman Catholics and Orthodox.

Zizioulas, one of the world's leading ecclesiologists, demonstrates that the notion of Church centers around the interrelationship of Eucharist, Bishop, and Laity. Not positing authority in the power of the bishop, nor even in the people, but in the place of Christ's presence- the bread and wine as partaken of by the people of God. The total Christ, Head and Body, is manifested in the eucharistic celebration, given catholicity a qualitative and not a quantitative meaning. This raises the question, "does the Eucharist make the Church or vice versa?" It seems that Zizioulas would say both, but with the particular emphasis upon the former. Church qua Church only dangles off the mouth of the Father. It is always done unto, to use the phrase of Fr. Tarazi (which is why it is not its own object of study). But the context for this dangling is, according to Zizioulas, most manifest in the liturgy. So ultimately the notions of bishop, laity, eucharist are all interdependent. None exist without the other and they are continually in reference to one another.

Eucharistic ecclesiology has weaknesses when the attempt is made to make it cover too many bases, but it does seem to be the primal orientation of the early centuries and has received a wide resurgence in both East and West under such notables as Zizioulas, Afanasief, Meyendorff, de Lubac...

Other books of interest would include Zizioulas' masterpiece, "Being as Communion", which is, in my view, one of the best books to be read about any sphere of theology, "The Eucharist Makes the Church" by McPartlan (a comparison of Zizioulas and Henri de Lubac), "For the Life of the World" by Schmemann, and Werner Elert's classic study "Eucharist and Church Fellowship in the First Four Centuries". Enjoy!

Ut Unum Sint. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Studies in the Humanities, published by Thomson Gale on December 1, 2004. The length of the article is 7185 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The attack on surrealism in Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin letter.
Author: Zachariah Pickard
Publication: Studies in the Humanities (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 2004
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 31Issue: 2Page: 121(17)

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More than 120 interviews with relatives, friends, colleagues, and students honor one of America's finest poets--Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). Linking the interviews, Gary Fountain's narrative draws from Bishop's published and unpublished writings. 62 illustrations. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on April 1, 2003. The length of the article is 782 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery.(Book Review)
Author: George Monteiro
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: April 1, 2003
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 77Issue: 1Page: 107(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more