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The heat of Beowulf develops a new approach to the aesthetics of
Beowulf by engaging with the work of twentieth-century poets Robin
Blaser and Jack Spicer, whose avant-garde poetics were informed by
a serious encounter with the poem in the seminar of medievalist
Arthur G. Brodeur. By considering Blaser's and Spicer's poetics as
they were shaped by their encounter with Beowulf, the book is able
to open up questions about the non-representational poetics of the
poem, rebooting a mid-century approach to aesthetics on a new
critical trajectory. The book considers the poem's aesthetics
through relationship translation theory, as well as early medieval
discourses of sensory-affective experience and twentieth-century
phenomenology. The heat of Beowulf reexamines the scholarship on
Old English poetics from the mid-twentieth century as it
intersected with post-war avant-garde poetics, and how
understanding these critical histories can reshape how we read
Beowulf now. -- .
Featuring essays from some of the most prominent voices in early
medieval studies, Dating Beowulf playfully redeploys the word
'dating', which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical
impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new
relationships with an Old English poem. The volume argues for the
relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and
vice-versa, offering a riposte to antifeminist discourse and
opening avenues for future work by specialists in the history of
emotions, literary theorists, students of Old English literature
and medieval scholars alike. To this end, the essays embody a range
of critical approaches from queer theory to animal studies and
ecocriticism to actor-network theory. -- .
Manuscript Cotton Nero A.x takes its designation from the unique
cataloging system of seventeenth-century British antiquarian Sir
Robert Cotton's library: busts of historical figures atop shelves
provided the organizing principle, such that one found this
particular codex under the bust of Roman Emperor Nero, on the top
shelf, ten volumes over. (Another famous manuscript, containing
Beowulf, is called Cotton Vitellius A.xv.) Cotton Nero A.x contains
the only versions of the poems we now know as Pearl, Cleanness,
Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, generally agreed to
have been composed sometime in the latter half of the fourteenth
century-the time of Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer, though
radically different from either. No one knows who the poet was. No
one knows if more than one poet wrote some or all of the poems.
Together, they present a stunning array of themes, allegories, and
images that critics continue to puzzle over: Patience offers a
psychologically complex rendering of the Old Testament story of
Jonah and the whale; Cleanness explores its homiletic theme in
carnal and spiritual terms with complexity, irony, and even humor;
Pearl provides a dream allegory that pushes at the distinction
between its earthly and heavenly meanings, challenging the very
notion of metaphysical transcendence its form seems to point
towards. Finally, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the most secular
of the poems, is a sophisticated take on Arthurian legend that
unfolds like a psychosexual mystery novel, with no easy solution in
sight. All the poems are rendered in a difficult Middle English
dialect and intricate alliterative form, which sometimes involves a
complex rhyme scheme as well. As poet-medievalists, we bow before
the poetic achievement of the works in Cotton Nero A.x in all their
multi-faceted richness. This is not a translation, nor an
interpretation. It is what might be called a trace. A response. A
homework assignment from beyond the grave, for four students who
should have known better. A dream we hope to dream.
A stunning experimental translation of the Old English poem
"Beowulf," over 30 decades old and woefully neglected, by the
contemporary poet Thomas Meyer, who studied with Robert Kelly at
Bard, and emerged from the niche of poets who had been impacted by
the brief moment of cross-pollination between U.K. and U.S.
experimental poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a movement
inspired by Ezra Pound, fueled by interactions among figures like
Ed Dorn, J.H. Prynne, and Basil Bunting, and quickly overshadowed
by the burgeoning Language Writing movement. Meyer's translation --
completed in 1972 but never before published -- is sure to stretch
readers' ideas about what is possible in terms of translating
Anglo-Saxon poetry, as well as provide new insights on the poem
itself. According to John Ashberry, Meyer's translation of this
thousand-year-old poem is a "wonder," and Michael Davidson hails it
as a "major accomplishment" and a "vivid" recreation of this
ancient poem's "modernity."
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