POETRY IN REVIEW

1990

2016

After the Second World War, poetry in Scotland required regeneration. The Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s had been a major force of revitalisation, led by Hugh MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve, 1892-1978), aligning poetry, literature and all the arts in Scotland with renewed political ambition for an independent nation. After the war, MacDiarmid was still a major force among the new generation of poets, but the younger men and women would not follow his lead in any direct sense, and in any case, MacDiarmid had nothing but disdain for disciples. The prevailing imperative among the major poets who began publishing in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was not one of nationalism but of individual voice, language and, crucially, location. Each had their own favoured terrain in different parts of Scotland, a geography of the imagination that made singular use of coordinate points drawn from their places of birth or upbringing, their societies and languages. Most of them were men. The generation of poets who began publishing in the 1970s and 1980s, many of the best of them women, brought another kind of regeneration, in terms of gendered identity. These poets demonstrated that their perspectives and experiences as women were as valid and valuable as those of the men of the previous generation, from whom they had learned much, and further, that regardless of gender-experience, their enquiries and judgements were equally valid and vital. From the 1990s through to the twenty-first century, the increasing range of priorities and perspectives challenges any simplification of overall trend, but the general sense of multi-facetedness, plurality or diversity, within the changing dynamics of an increasingly self-aware, politicised nation, was repeatedly demonstrated by, and characteristic of, all the poets working in this era. One book consolidates the immediate postwar situation: Modern Scottish Poetry: An

[sic] - a journal of literature, culture and literary translation, 2012

In his essay on Australian poetry of the early twentieth century, Nicholas Birns claims that the poetry of the given period was not at the time fully appreciated in the rest of the world, and that metropolitan centres placed low esteem on Australian poetic production (173). There was the lack, as he puts it, of "an efficient market", caused by various factors, including the remoteness and isolation of the country, its distance from the hotspots of political crisis, and its "perceived rejection of modernism" (Ibid). It was the Anglo-American experimental modernism that the young Australian poets rejected, composing verse that "tended to rhyme and obey metrical contentions" (Ibid, 174) or at least have a certain melodic quality. In its stylistic aspect, this poetry was rather traditional, and the themes used were also quite different from those explored by American or English modernist poets: exploration by sea and land, and the European explorations of Australia in particular, was a very popular theme, along with the descriptions of nature and typically Australian landscape (as was the case, for instance, with the Jindyworobak school of poetry). Australian literature of the first half of the twentieth century, as noted by Tom Englis Moore, a well-known poet and professor of Australian literature, was marked by "[t]he ideals of peace, freedom and social justice combined with a marked realism" (Waten 26). The anti-realist strain in Australian literature was rather weak at the time when poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound wrote their best works across the globe. The only group of poets truly infatuated with modernism gathered around Max Harris (1921-1995) and called themselves the Angry Penguins. The group that was stimulated by the literary magazine Angry Penguins, was founded in Adelaide in 1940 by Harris and is today probably best-known not for their attempts to introduce modernism into Australian poetry, but for the infamous literary hoax perpetrated by two poets of a more traditionalist orientation, James McAuley [sic]-a journal of literature, culture and literary translation Art and Subversion No. 1-Year 3 12/2012-LC.2

Word and Text, 2022

One hundred years ago T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, the acme of High Modernism (along with Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and, for fiction, James Joyce's Ulysses, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Franz Kafka's composition of The Castle, to name but these), in which the poet articulated his response to post-WW1 disillusionment. 1 Five years before the appearance of Eliot's 'long poem', Ezra Pound, who will, ironically somewhat belatedly, utter his famous slogan 'make it new', 2 had begun serializing his Cantos in Poetry, an epic magnum opus which took him half a century to complete and cast a long shadow across the best of postmodern(ist) poetry, such as William Carlos Williams's Paterson (1946), 'a hodgepodge, the American version of Pound's more famous "ragbag"', 3 Charles Olson's own epic project of the Maximus Poems (1950-1970), and, more generally, much of the experimental poetic output of the second half of the 20 th century that still owed its aesthetic principles, however distantly, to an 'ideogrammic' method of composition. 4 Fast forward to our contemporary epoch and the (broadly defined) ethno-ethicalincluding in the sense of a localism, or ethos-and political re-anchoring of much post-WW2 (especially North American) poetry, in the wake of (inter alia) Olson's epochmaking castigation of the moral failure of Poundian aesthetics, but also ethnopoetics à la Jerome Rothenberg, which emphasized connections between human activity and the environment that produces it, continues to leave its indirect imprint on some of the latest poetic agendas. Witness trends such as 'poetry and the environment' (Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver), 'nature poetry', or a renewed tradition of 'ecopoetics'-a (re)opening of

Victorian Studies, 2021

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones.

The Journal of Medical Humanities, 2007

Victorian Poetry, 2004

Nordic Irish Studies, 2004

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To date, most investigations in the field of affective neuroscience mainly focused on the processing of facial expressions, overlooking the exploration of emotional body language (EBL), its capability to express our emotions notwithstanding. Few electrophysiological studies investigated the time course and the neural correlates of EBL and the integration of face and body emotion-related information. The aim of the present study was to investigate both the time course and the neural correlates underlying the integration of affective information conveyed by faces and bodies. We analysed EEG activities evoked during an expression matching task, requiring the judgment of emotional congruence between sequentially presented pairs of stimuli belonging to the same category (face-face or body-body), and between stimuli belonging to different categories (face-body or body-face). We focused on N400 time window and results showed that incongruent stimuli elicited a modulation of the N400 in all comparisons except for body-face condition. This modulation was mainly detected in the Middle Temporal Gyrus and within regions related to the mirror mechanism. More specifically, while the perception of incongruent facial expressions activates somatosensory-related representations, incongruent emotional body postures also require the activation of motor and premotor representations, suggesting a strict link between emotion and action. For a long time, the field of Affective Neuroscience has been dominated by studies of emotional facial expressions. Nonetheless, it is now well agreed that also " emotional body language " (EBL) plays a fundamental role during social interactions, given the relevance of body postures in expressing our emotional and mental states 1–3. Neuroimaging studies revealed that the visual processing of human body is mainly underpinned by the extrastriate body area (EBA), in lateral occipitotemporal cortex 4, 5 , and by the fusiform body area (FBA), in the posterior fusiform gyrus 5–7. Beyond these, other regions engaged during the elaboration of EBL include both emotion-related brain areas and networks for action representation, suggesting a link between emotion and action 8. The existence of the human putative mirror mechanism for action (MM), whose activity is modulated by both action execution and action observation, provided new insights on the role of motor-related areas in perception of EBL. The MM for action, exemplified by the activation of the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the premotor cortex (PMc) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) 9, 10 , could indeed provide the neurobiological basis for many emotional and social cognitive skills 11, 12. According to the hypothesized " two-system " model of emotion-behaviour connectivity 12 , a first network including subcortical structures, would support the rapid and automatic perception of EBL. A second system (involving lateral occipital cortex, STS, intraparietal lobule, fusiform gyrus, amygdala and PMc), would further estimate the behavioural expression of a given emotion, deciding for the best response to the stimulus. Moreover, these two systems are linked to a third network, the " body awareness system " , which involves the insula, soma-tosensory cortex, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Previous event related potentials (ERPs) studies showed that the structural encoding of human bodies and body parts, as for faces, is indexed by the N170, a negative component peaking between 140 and 230 ms after stimulus presentation at occipitotemporal sites 13–15. Later on, semantic information conveyed by bodies, and the elaboration of action's meanings, intentions and rules of execution are indexed by modulations of the N400 component.