The Orphic Voice

The Orphic Voice PDF

Author: Elizabeth Sewell

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 1681376016

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A wondrously written book of literary criticism and philosophy that maps the relationship between poetry and natural history, connecting verse from poets such as Shakespeare and Rainer Maria Rilke to the work of scientists and theorists like Francis Bacon and Michael Polanyi. Taking its bearings from the Greek myth of Orpheus, whose singing had the power to move the rocks and trees and to quiet the animals, Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic Voice transforms our understanding of the relationship between mind and nature. Myth, Sewell argues, is not mere fable but an ancient and vital form of reflection that unites poetry, philosophy, and natural science: Shakespeare with Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico; Wordsworth and Rilke with Michael Polanyi. All these members of the Orphic company share a common perception that “discovery, in science and poetry, is a mythological situation in which the mind unites with a figure of its own devising as a means toward understanding the world.” Sewell’s visionary book, first published in 1960, presents brilliantly illuminating readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, among other masterpieces, while deepening our understanding not only of poetry and the history of ideas but of the biological reach of the mind.

The Orphic Moment

The Orphic Moment PDF

Author: Robert McGahey

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1994-01-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780791419410

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This book examines Orpheus as a figure who bridges the experience of the Greek tribal shaman and the modern poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the father of modernism. First mentioned in 600 B.C., Orpheus was present at the moment when the Apolline forms of western culture were being encoded. He appears again at the opposite moment embodied in the language-crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, which inaugurated the break-up of those forms and ushered in the Dionysian. Mallarmé's "Orphic Moment," when Orpheus's scattered limbs first begin to stir back to life, enacts a dance at the boundary of Apollo and Dionysos, marking the collapse of Apolline form back into its Dionysian ground in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy.

Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America

Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America PDF

Author: R. A. Yoder

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-07-28

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0520338537

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Orphic Voice(s): A Narratological Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses 10.1-11.84

Orphic Voice(s): A Narratological Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses 10.1-11.84 PDF

Author: Julian Wagner

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-08-30

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9004701540

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The book offers an in-depth narratological analysis of the 'Book of Orpheus' (10.1-11.84) of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Starting from fundamental aspects of narrative like time, space, and focalisation, the commentary highlights the polyphony of the various narrative levels. The complex and challenging design results from a constant oscillation between the narrator-persona of Ovid and the programmatic Orpheus-figure which has found a wealth of interpretations. In addition, the study places the 10th book in the overall narrative framework of Ovid's Metamorphoses with its density of intertextuality and metanarrativity.

Orphic Paris

Orphic Paris PDF

Author: Henri Cole

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1681372185

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A poetic portrait of Paris that combines prose poetry, diary, and memoir by award-winning writer and poet Henri Cole. Henri Cole’s Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet, explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family, poetry and solitude, the self and freedom. Cole writes of Paris, “For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it. Instead of worshiping a creator or man, I cared fully for myself, and felt no guilt and confessed nothing, and in this place I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew.” Written under the tutelary spirit of Orpheus—mystic, oracular, entrancing—Orphic Paris is an intimate Paris journal and a literary commonplace book that is a touching, original, brilliant account of the city and of the artists, writers, and luminaries, including Cole himself, who have been moved by it to create.

The Orphic Voice

The Orphic Voice PDF

Author: Åke Strandberg

Publisher: Uppsala, Sweden : Uppsala University Library

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13:

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This study situates the work of T.S. Eliot in the context of what some critics have called an "Orphic tradition" in Western Literature. This can be described as a mythopoetic heritage emanating from the Orphic mystery cults of ancient Greece, and from texts by early thinkers such as Plato and Heraclitus. The initial idea behind this historical perspective is to identify certain common denominators in Eliot and a few other poets associated with this literary tradition, particularly the French symbolists and Stephane mallarme

Orpheus and Greek Religion

Orpheus and Greek Religion PDF

Author: William Keith Guthrie

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1993-10-10

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780691024998

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The tales told of Orpheus are legion. He is said to have been an Argonaut--and to have saved Jason's life. Rivers are reported to have stopped their flow to listen to the sounds of his lyre and his voice. Plato cites his poetry and Herodotus refers to "practices that are called Orphic." Did Orpheus, in fact, exist? His influence on Greek thought is undeniable, but his disciples left little of substance behind them. Indeed, their Orphic precepts have been lost to time. W.K.C. Guthrie attempts to uncover and define Orphism by following its circuitous path through ancient history. He tackles this daunting task with the determination of a detective and the analytical rigor of a classical scholar. He ferries his readers with him on a singular voyage of discovery.

Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word

Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word PDF

Author: Olga Peters Hasty

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780810113152

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Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word explores the rich theme of the myth of Orpheus as master narrative for poetic inspiration and creative survival in the life and work of Marina Tsvetaeva. Olga Peters Hasty establishes the basic themes of the Orphic Complex--the poet's longing to mediate between the embodied physical world and an "elsewhere," the poet's inability to do so, the primacy of the voice over the visual world, the insistence on concrete imagery, the costs of the poet's gift--and orders her arguments in the tragic shape of the Orpheus myth as it worked itself out organically in Tsvetaeva's own life. Hasty delineates the connections between the Orpheus myth and other key mythological and literary figures in the poet's life--including Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin, and Rainer Maria Rilke--to make an important and original critical contribution.