Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of…

Poetry is about the experience of meaning as well as the meaning of experience. To read a poem is to feel one's way into the inner workings of its language, rather than to peer through that speech to an extractable truth. Most students of literature today have difficulty in grasping the performative or rhetorical dimensions of the texts with which…

The humanities are at the heart of knowing about the human condition; they are not a luxury. The erosion of support for the humanities and the perennial anxiety about the state of the humanities are systemic. The author contends that until people acknowledge this fact, they will keep lurching from one point to another, unable to recognize the…

The essay distils from Badiou's writing a pedagogy based on his theories of knowledge and truth, as brought to bear on poetry and the arts. By following Badiou's implicit ontology of learning, which presupposes a dynamic and passionate engagement with a concrete situation, the essay argues that Badiou's view of modernity, in particular,…

Trauma theory has been and continues to be important to critical work in every period of literary study. This essay argues that the subtle literary strategies of one fourteenth-century poem can help to address a blockage about representation current in that theory. Geoffrey Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" meditates upon trauma by rendering…

Walt Whitman defies ontology: he strives to be eternal, to journey ever in the now, and thus to forswear beginnings. And there is a great deal of "place" in Whitman, space both concrete and metaphorical, Alabama and Maine, body and "kosmos." But Whitman the man was born in Huntington, Long Island, which is a good a place to start exploring how…

Both film and ancient religious writing have much in common, especially in regard to their ability to convey powerful messages to modern audiences. A study analyzed the timeless meta-narratives in the ancient Hindu poem, the "Bhagavad Gita," and in the 1998 American film, "The Thin Red Line." It used the methodology of…

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) has much to teach about arts education. However, the first question that many today might ask is, Should we listen to him at all? Wordsworth, some members of the postmodern academy have determined, was a bad man. He was unkind to his family and friends, they say, and they are uncomfortable with the politics he…

Examines three representative short poems to illustrate some of the difficulties that traditional textual criticism would encounter with them. Outlines some ways in which different approaches could deal with these difficulties. (RL)

Asserts that the poetry of James Reeves has been neglected but shows, through attention to his poetry, that perhaps he wanted to be inconspicuous. (SRT)

In "The Reason for Poetry," the first of two lectures contained in this booklet, the poet William Meredith argues for a more generous definition of poetry. To move away from the narrow appreciation of poetry as "what I like," Meredith suggests that readers must shift their focus from their own expectations on reading a poem to…

Just as we learn how to vote by comparing records, by analyzing statements, by fitting what we see and hear to our own measurements, we can develop our own standards in the process of evaluating and enjoying poetry. (RL)

The author of this article provides a critical assessment on the persona in Kenneth Rexroth's poem "Doubled Mirrors." He says that the poem is a simple metaphor that beautifully illustrates something central to the human experience. Rexroth's persona tells that the two raccoons eating pears "know me and do not run away." If there is not a bond…

Examines the poetry and prose of James Dickey, analyzing his departure from conventional rhyme and the experiences influencing his writing. (HTH)

Suggests that a quote from the 17th-century English physician and writer Thomas Browne captures the essence of the poetry of healing. Argues that healing, at its highest calling, combines the technical mastery of the problem with the response of the whole human being to the mystery; and that this many-faceted response is poetry. (SR)