In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contemporary IlluminationsReading Donne's "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day through Three Twenty-First-Century PoemsTheresa M. DipasqualeIn his contribution to the 2017 volume John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Judith Scherer Herz, Jonathan F. S. Post explores "a nearly endless landscape of comparisons and contrasts" that unfolds between Stephen Edgar's 2008 poem "Nocturnal" and Donne's "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day."1 Post's essay illuminates what Calvin (...) Bedient, in the same volume, calls the "great glacier-gloom" of Donne's "Nocturnall," its devastated "solemnity."2 In doing so, Post renders largely moot many questions that have preoccupied critics of Donne's poem: whether or how this poem reflects Donne's experience; whether the woman lamented by the speaker is a fiction or a historical person lamented by the poet; and if the latter, whether the poem mourns the 1617 death of John Donne's wife, Anne More Donne; the 1627 death of Donne's patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford; or the Countess' near-fatal illness in 1612–13.3 These biographical and historical questions are not without value, but they draw the critic's attention away from more compelling questions regarding the "I" of the poem—a persona who claims not to be a person at all, but an inscription, a grave, "A quintessence" derived or "expresse[d]/... even from nothingnesse."4In this article, I widen and intensify the pool of light cast on Donne's "Nocturnall" by Post's presentist and intertextual analysis of Edgar's poem, examining three of the many other twenty-first-century poems that tap into Donne's poem, allude to it, quote it, adopt its structure, or respond to the anguish it expresses.5 Each of the three I discuss is [End Page 1] luminous in its own right but also a potent critical response to Donne's five-stanza poem. Each teaches something different about Donne's lyric. The poets whose work I consider—Liz Lochhead, Jay Wright, and Meena Alexander—all address twenty-first-century concerns; they grapple with questions and sorrows beyond the scope of Donne's conscious imagining yet latent in his poem. Each picks up where critics leave off when they "assume," as Alison R. Rieke notes, "that the speaker... is a husband or lover, possibly Donne, who experiences grief upon his wife's or mistress' death."6 Each takes up the challenge that Donne's persona issues when it denies that it is either "a man" (30) or any other living thing.In the first stanza of "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day," this anti-persona observes that "all" other things around it are "Dead and enterr'd" and "yet" that "all these seeme to laugh, / Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph" (8–9). If it is an incised text rather than a human being, the poem's "mee" can no more speak than laugh; it is as silent as the grave it marks or as the dead flesh interred there. Indeed, it goes on to claim that it is "every dead thing" and that love's alchemical "art" has "expresse[d] / A quintessence even from" this mass of nonliving objects, this "nothingnesse" (12, 14–15). Struggling to define its anti-essential essence, it declares itself a mass burial site: "I, by loves limbecke, am the grave / Of all, that's nothing" (21–22). An epitaph, dead things, nothingness, a grave: all these are silent. And yet, in Donne's poem, they strenuously assert their nonbeing; they pulse with a paradoxically audible sense of self. After "Compar'd with mee" in the final line of the opening stanza, the reader encounters sixteen additional instances of the first-person singular in the poem's forty-five lines: "my" appears once, "mee" five times, and "I" eleven times. And the "I" issues a directive to readers: commanding, in the opening line of stanza 2, "Study me then, you who shall lovers bee" (10). But those who obey this order, making themselves students of the poem's inscribed nothingness, find themselves dismissed in the poem's final stanza. Having insisted that its "Sunne" will never "renew... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Echoes of Romanticism and Expatriate Englishness in Charlotte Brontë's The ProfessorDavid SiglerCharlotte Brontë's many debts to Romanticism, and especially Lord Byron, are a well-known feature of her fiction. Yet only recently has this become an important part of the discussion surrounding The Professor, her first-written and last-published novel. The novel, written between 1844 and 1846 and published posthumously in 1857, is increasingly seen to be in dialogue with William (...) Wordsworth and Walter Scott, in addition to Byron. Anna Barton, seeing Brontë as "the pupil of Wordsworthian Romanticism" and "a daughter of Romanticism," shows how The Professor develops "intertextual exchanges that perform the failure of the Romantic lyric within the Victorian novel."1 Tanya Llewellyn has argued that the protagonist William Crimsworth, seemingly influenced by Byron's Turkish tales, Orientalizes the women in his life as a way to manage sexual threats.2 Mandy Swann, meanwhile, sees in Brontë's early work an ambivalent response to the Romantic figure of the poet-prophet, as part of the author's general struggle, early in her career, to theorize female creativity.3Yet in other recent accounts, William Crimsworth seems to be as un-Byronic and un-Wordsworthian as possible. Crimsworth has been said to be a "particularly off-putting" narrator, "defensive and humourless," whose "dubious masculinity," passionlessness, and, in one reading, stiflingly repressed homosexuality render him a comically overliteral thinker.4 I will suggest that this incapacity in him for meaningful human engagement is what leads him to fixate on British Romantic poetry as a solution, however backhanded, to his erotic and professional difficulties. [End Page 30] Yet as the echoes of Romanticism that haunt his erotic and professional relations quickly take on lives of their own, they enable the story, and its ethical vision, to exceed William's control. Once the novel directs its protagonist's obsessive personality in the direction of Romantic poetry, it can become an intriguing meditation on ethics, expatriate Englishness, and time.William Crimsworth is a hardworking Englishman living and working in Brussels. The city, which William finds too "cosmopolitan," becomes the site of his zealous self-exploration as he mingles, ever defensively, with the locals.5 Approaching the city like "a morning traveller," as he puts it, William must analyze his foreignness if he is to survive his own residual and aspirational Englishness.6 The phrase "morning traveller" is drawn from Robert Southey's 1798 poem "The Traveller's Return," which describes love as an echo-effect. It is a very auditory poem: Southey's "morning traveller" spends the day listening to unfamiliar sounds, until, in the evening, he hears a "distant sheep-bell," which teaches him that "sweetest is the voice of Love / That welcomes his return."7 A sheep bell is, of course, a tracking mechanism, facilitating the free movement and eventual return of sheep to a shepherd. Southey's speaker learns to grasp the hidden similarity between love and the sheep bell. Just as the sound of the bell goes away and comes back, signifying the wandering and return of livestock, the human "morning traveller" must begin to identify with it. He himself, hearing the sound, gets interpellated by it, once it becomes his objective correlative. Brontë's The Professor, in matters of love, uses Romantic poetry, including Southey's, as a similar tracking device for William. The echo it produces constantly and ambivalently connects the protagonist to England and secures his place within the ideological apparatuses of the state.Judith Butler has observed that "my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others."8 She explains that because there are aspects of oneself that remain forever baffling and inexplicable, we should suppose that other people—who can also seem foreign and inexplicable—contain similar aporias. If their accounts of themselves are difficult for us to understand, we should recognize, through our inability to sympathize, that we too are surely baffling and that they, like us, are likely also baffling to themselves. Thus, [End Page 31] through the sheer dubiousness of understanding other people, we can achieve a kind of negative shared humanity. We all probably confront an inassimilable kernel... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Names Alive Are Like the Names in GravesBlack Life and Black Social Death in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinLee Spinks"After blackness was invented / people began seeing ghosts."1One of the most powerful and provoking responses to the political rise of Donald Trump appeared with the 2018 publication of Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Hayes began writing these poems (...) straight after Trump's remarkable triumph in the 2016 presidential election, and they race to keep pace with the rapidly metastasizing effects of the Trump phenomenon, from his relentless radicalization of the modes and mores of political speech ("Newshounds ponder the tweets of a bullhorn"), his continuous assault on American democratic institutions, and his singular success in marshalling a newly cohesive political constituency seduced by the reactionary allure of resurgent white nationalism or what Hayes caustically calls "a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty / stupidity" (AS: 38).2 As the phrase "mandate for whiteness" suggests, integral to the story of Trump's ascendancy in American Sonnets is another story, a story about race and social authority in the time of Black Lives Matter when blackness remains "the color of this country's current threat / advisory" (AS: 10). At home and abroad the appalling incandescence of Hayes's contemporary American political moment is reflected by the names of its black victims, names like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and, perhaps most explosively of all, George Floyd, whose May 2020 police killing on a Minneapolis street reprised such a familiar configuration of racial power that Hayes had already glimpsed its spectral outline two years earlier: "A [End Page 60] brother has to know how to time travel & doctor / himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck" (AS: 77).3Without compromising the intensity of Hayes's focus on this contemporary social emergency, I want in what follows to expand our sense of the historical and metaphysical scene of his writing by reading it as an imaginative response to a larger and more fundamental question: What does it mean to live a black life in an antiblack world? I'm moved to do so by the double register of his writing vividly exemplified by the penultimate sonnet in the sequence which memorializes "All the black people I'm tired of losing / All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson / Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago / Baltimore, where the names alive are / Like the names in graves" (AS: 81). What's remarkable, to my mind at least, about the phrase "the names alive are / like the names in graves" is its fusion of a directly contemporary perception of the precariousness of black existence within a culture of white supremacy (the perception that every black life could share the social fate of Tamir Rice at any particular moment) with an encompassing metaphysical vision of blackness as the embodiment of social death and the continuing afterlife of slavery. Paying close attention to several of Hayes's poems, I will trace this double register to explore a number of ideas central to his thinking in American Sonnets including the foundational role of antiblackness in organizing American reality for both black and white identities, the dialectical relationship between antiblackness and the libidinal economy of white supremacy, and the hope of imagining new possibilities of life capable of contesting the antiblack conditions of contemporary social existence.4 In doing so I will place particular emphasis on Hayes's development of a distinctively dialectical and dialogical style of poetic address that reimagines lyric subjectivity as a drama of racial becoming focused on the relationship between black social death and the culture of white supremacy.5Black Social Death and the Libidinal Economy of WhitenessBefore continuing let me briefly develop three ideas above which help shape my reading of American Sonnets: the social life of social death, the continuing afterlife of slavery, and what Hayes calls in my epigraph "the [End Page 61] invention of blackness." The first draws on the Afropessimist radicalization of Orlando Patterson's famous redescription of slavery as social death that sees the slave as a "social nonperson" whose relation to... (shrink)