Maps in Twentieth- Century American Poetry in English. When a region is strange, a man explores it, comes to know its lengths and heights, its depths and riches and dangers. The time comes when he draws a map of it, not so much for later travelers in more of a hurry as for his own satisfaction in reducing time and space to the size of a sheet of paper. The electromagnetic telegraph operates on a very. Now many cells of battery could be used in series. Coxe of Philadelphia proposed a. The Avengers is a spy-fi British television series set in 1960s Britain. PubMed Quick Start Guide; Full Text Articles; PubMed FAQs; PubMed Tutorials; New and Noteworthy; PubMed Tools. PubMed Mobile; Single Citation Matcher; Batch Citation. Chitika does not collect any personally identifying user-level information. Chitika collects information about consumers' activities on certain. Q.What is a subscription and what is it for? Will my information be well protected? Sometimes this map is a novel, sometimes an essay, a building, a poem, or a portrait. Literature has been called an extension of experience, and few examples of graphic art so stretch and speed experience as a map. John Holmes, Map of My Country. The map as a literary metaphor or object of discussion is not unique to the twentieth century. At the dawn of Western literature, Homer imagined the god Hephaestus creating a shield that resembles archaic models of the cosmos for the magnificent, but short- lived Achilles (8th century BCE: Iliad 1. Aujac, Harley, and Woodward, 1. Since then, maps have been regarded as authoritative mirrors of the world or as arbitrary social constructs; as symbols of clarification, guidance, and transformation or of obfuscation, coercion, and constraint; as representative of civilization’s progress or of its biases and perils; as analogues of the human face or body; as seductive or coolly removed (Muehrcke and Muehrcke, 1. Zanger, 1. 98. 2; Wood and Fels, 1. Huggan, 1. 99. 4, 2. Yet when it comes to twentieth- century literature in English, literary cartographers. Poetry remains, for the most part, a terra incognita. And this despite the fact that the same conditions contributed to the century’s explosion of map- related poems as to its novels and short stories: two World Wars, astounding scientific and technological advances, decreasing production costs, the rise of geography and creative writing programs, progress in civil rights, and (as yet) unparalleled access to education, art, travel, and information. These factors and more made the century unique in the number, range, and accuracy of maps on all scales, and in the extraordinary quantity and wealth ofliterature devoted to maps (Haft, forthcoming, 2. In verse composed in English, twentieth- century American poets are among the most map- obsessed of all time. Neither Emily Dickinson nor Walt Whitman, the two prodigious and canonical American poets prior to the twentieth century, had much to say about maps — except that we mortals have no chart of heaven (Dickinson, . In fact, the American map- poem, like American poetry generally, didn’t enter the modern era until after World War I — only after several early modernist poets (like Robert Frost) and their countrymen in the service confronted European culture on European soil, thus “bridg. Over the eighty years that followed, American poets — those born or living in the United States. North America, once so empty of poetry except in the East, begins to be filled in” (Vendler, . Four generations of poets combined their familiarity with maps — as practical guides, works of art, and metaphors — with their personal experiences, including the places they called home, and with their collective perspectives not only as Americans but as global citizens. My article presents a narrative catalogue of twentieth- century American poetry in English. To my knowledge, no one has attempted to gather, order, and comment on such a vast body of map- fixated poems and collections. On the other hand, the constraints of time and space mean that fine poems are missing, especially those that elude easy categories, and analysis of individual works along the lines suggested by Huggan (above, note 2) must await other opportunities. Concentrating on such an artificially “narrow” topic makes twentieth- century American poetry appear isolated like an island — separated from continents of earlier literature (Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Donne, Scud. My Tongue Is Quick,,1971,DVDRip,720P,1080P,HR. My Tongue Is Quick / John Holmes Signature Series 4: My Tongue Is Quick Advertising Programmes Business Solutions +Google About Google Google.com . Search; Images; Maps; Play; YouTube; News; Gmail; Drive; More. Standards for Environmental Testing and Research. PFC Quick Reference Guide; Copyright . What follows, then, is an abbreviated and provisional chart of twentieth- century American poetry about maps — one that offers excerpts. American map- poems and grapples with their place in a century unique for the number, range, and quality of such poems. Perhaps the first luminary to publish a poem featuring maps was Robert Frost, whose nostalgic “A Brook in the City” (1. Although its “immortal force” may “keep / this new- built city from both work and sleep,” only the poet and “ancient maps” recall its existence (Frost, 1. Soon after, Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s “Old Maps to Oregon,” from his award- winning collection High Passage, imagines pioneer wives bemused by the “high deceit” of maps with “names stretching two hundred miles or more” “toward some empty place that had a name” (Ferril, 1. Surprisingly, both Frost and Ferril were preceded by a child prodigy. In “Geography,” nine- year- old Hilda Conkling reveals her dissatisfaction with maps as dry collections of place- names. Instead, Conkling insists that she “can study . And in “The Map Makers,” ten- year- old Nathalia Crane compares a friend’s sketch of a Brooklyn boulevard with a state- of- the- art celestial chart that “took twenty years” to create (Crane, 1. Whether or not a little girl actually came up with the first map- poem in twentieth- century America, there is no doubt that female poets, so sparsely represented in earlier centuries, crafted some of the earliest and most influential. Four years after women won the right to vote, Marianne Moore published “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns,” which explores personal relationships by celebrating the mythical beasts “described by the cartographers of 1. Moore, 1. 92. 4, 9. A lover of animals and the arts, Moore alludes here to the Carta Marina (1. Scandinavia by Swedish mapmaker/historian Olaus Magnus (Haft, 2. Old maps inspire adventure. In her title poem “The Venture,” it’s the lure of the “unknown” — “Oh, that they never knew / I would be knowing” — that attracts armchair explorer Jean Kenyon Mac. Kenzie to old maps (Mac. Kenzie, 1. 92. 5, 3). In “Maps” (1. 93. Depression- era poem for elementary schoolchildren, Dorothy Brown Thompson extends the fun to all sorts of maps before concluding “maps are really / magic wands / for home- staying / vagabonds!” (Brewton and Brewton, 1. Eunice Tietjens, who also wrote exclusively for children, complains in “Old Maps” (1. Instead she relishes the “queer mistakes” and “empty spaces,” the dragons and monstrous hybrids enlivening medieval and early modern maps (Brewton and Brewton, 1. Laura Riding, on the other hand, ended her much- reprinted “The Map of Places” in despair a year before her attempted suicide. Unable to find excitement or solace in old maps’ vicarious journeys or promises of discovery, Riding concluded that they speak only of the past: “All is known, all is found. On New Year’s Eve of 1. Bishop — recently orphaned and sick with the flu — created her breakthrough poem “The Map” (Kalstone, 1. Inspired by an unidentified map’s depiction of the North Atlantic, Bishop’s exquisite poem alludes, in part, to the “seashore towns” and coastal waters of Nova Scotia, where she lived as a child and later summered with her maternal grandparents. From the opening of her three- stanza meditation — “Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.” — Bishop juxtaposes the conflicting realities of map image and actual geography even as she transforms both by repeated changes of perspective. The static map comes alive as coastal “profiles investigate the sea” and “mapped waters are more quiet than the land is.” Playing with color and scale, Bishop suggests that the convention of running names across mountains and seas indicates “— the printer . As poet/critic Lloyd Frankenberg argued in his review of “The Map”: The exact craft of the cartographer is perhaps least associated, customarily, with our ideas of poetry. By showing us how human the map- maker’s decisions have to be, and how imaginative our reading of a literal map, the poem prepares us for poetry’s exactitudes. It demolishes prejudice without alluding to it. Bishop would return to the map as metaphor in several poems, including “Song for the Rainy Season” (1. Haft 2. 00. 1b, 4. Questions of Travel (Bishop, 1. Geography III (Bishop, 1. James Monteith’s textbook First Lessons in Geography (Monteith, 1. And as she did in “The Map,” Bishop consistently emphasized places and objects rather than people and relationships in order to deflect the emotional and confessional nature of her poetry (Millier, 1. Beach, 2. 00. 3, 1. Three years after Bishop’s poem first appeared, Louise Bogan composed “Cartography” about her sleeping lover. In sixteen lines (Bogan, 1. Mapped like the great. Rivers that rise. Beyond our fate. And distant from our eyes. Inspired by the metaphysical poets and their era’s obsession with both anatomical and geographical explorations, “Cartography” is perhaps the first body- as- map poem published in the twentieth- century. Although the name of Bogan’s lover is lost, he inspired a female poet to imagine the male body as a map of the earth, and the earth as an imperfect reflection of a realm beyond our knowledge. Yet Bogan’s love- poem offers no hint of gender. For all its debt to John Donne’s erotic association of body and map (“Love’s Progress,” “To His Mistress Going to Bed”: Donne, 1. Cartography” contains neither possessiveness nor desire to master the beloved (Frank, 1. Bogan mutes and transforms the explicit sexuality of Donne’s early poetry into a sensuality that embraces all nature and, like Donne’s later “Hymn. Taking his title from a fifty- cent item in an educational map catalog, Spencer shows how a “stupid trick” can “squash” the “life” out of the globe (Spencer 1. The renowned poet/critic Randall Jarrell, while teaching flight instruction and celestial navigation to pilots, produced some of the most devastating American cartographic war poems, including “9. North” (1. 94. 1) and “Losses” (1. Yet neither the pilot nor the personified cities understand why they died. Perhaps most notably, the Navy adopted John Holmes’ Map of My Country (Holmes, 1.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2017
Categories |