Poetry, Signs, and Magic

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University of Delaware Press, 2005 - 327 pàgines
Poetry, Signs, and Magic brings together in a single volume fourteen new and previously published essays by the eminent Renaissance scholar and literary critic Thomas M. Greene. This collection looks back toward two earlier volumes by Greene, his first essay collection The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature, and Poesie et Magie, whose theme is here explored again at greater length and depth, from linguistic and literary critical perspectives. Greene argues that certain poetic gestures draw their peculiar strengths by serving as vestiges of poetry's ancestral acts - magic, prayer, and invocation. Poetry, in other words, feigns an earlier power, but in this diminishment there occurs a verbal subtlety, and figural poignancy, commonly associated with art's aesthetic pleasures. Greene employs his well-known skills as a close reader to texts by a range of writers including a variety of contemporary theorists. in diverse contexts the distinction between disjunctive and conjunctive linguistics, dual theories of sound and meaning of crucial importance to Plato and Aristotle, to Catholic and Protestant debates on the sacraments, to the more recent skeptical methodologies of Derrida and de Man. Thomas M. Greene was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Des de l'interior del llibre

Continguts

Language Signs and Magic
29
Poetry as Invocation
43
Rabelais and the Language of Malediction
62
Labyrinth Dances in the French and English Renaissance
76
The Poetics of Discovery A Reading of Donnes Elegy 19
132
Shakespeares Richard II The Name in Bolingbrokes Window
147
Pressures of Context in Antony and Cleopatra
158
Ceremonial Closure in Shakespeares Plays
177
The Balance of Power in Marvells Horatian Ode
206
Coleridge and the Energy of Asking
222
Poetry and the Scattered World
245
Poetry and Permeability
260
Notes
277
Bibliography
308
Index
320
Copyright

Magic and CounterMagic in Comus
189

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Passatges populars

Pàgina 181 - the play. .. . Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair, Unless I be reliev'd by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardon'd be Let your indulgence set me free. (Epilogue, 13-20)
Pàgina 151 - God says to Cain: What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength.
Pàgina 151 - unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength. (Genesis
Pàgina 57 - Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 10 (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odors plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which
Pàgina 236 - so shall thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Pàgina 242 - May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth! With light heart may she rise, Gay fancy, cheerful eyes, Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; To her may all things live, from pole to pole, Their life the eddying of her living soul!
Pàgina 200 - song: I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of death. (559-61) And Comus of the same song: Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment? (243-44) This last phrase,
Pàgina 169 - Not by a hired knife, but that self hand Which writ his honour in the acts it did Hath, with the courage which the heart did lend it, Splitted the heart. This is his sword, I robb'd his wound of it: behold it stain'd With his most noble blood.
Pàgina 210 - is ostensibly intended to reassure only deepens one's disquiet. So when the Falcon high Falls heavy from the Sky, She, having kill'd, no more does search, But on the next green Bow to pearch; Where, when he first does lure, The Falckner has her sure. (91-96)
Pàgina 207 - brings his own deliberately dry and dispassionate art. The "Horatian Ode" is framed with shadows. It begins with an emergence from them: The forward Youth that would appear Must now forsake his Muses dear, Nor in the Shadows sing His Numbers languishing.

Sobre l'autor (2005)

Thomas M. Greene was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he taught for nearly five decades.

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