Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Imperial Shame, Magnificent Decay: Decadent Poetics and the Colonial West Indies
Get PDFIn the introduction to The Poet of Guiana, a selection of works by Walter MacArthur Lawrence published posthumously in 1948, the editor, Patrick H. Daly, identifies Lawrence as ‘the leader of the Aesthetic movement in Guiana because of the high regard he had for literary purity as such’. Daly praises Lawrence, who was born in British Guiana 1896 and died in 1942, as ‘the most intellectual and urbane Guianese poet of his generation’, known for his ‘chaste, strenuous, athletically supple and pure verse’. And though Lawrence was ‘prone to excess emotional fervour and long, complex sentences […] his poetry generally has euphony’. Daly describes Lawrence’s talent as being ‘like a delicately strung instrument: the higher it is the deeper is its possessor’s sensitivity’. While Daly stipulates that ‘hypersensitivity’ in an artist is abnormal, he echoes Walter Pater by defending Lawrence on the grounds of ‘temperament’. Lawrence’s ‘sensitivity claimed as its ancestry merely the artist’s temperament […]. He would have been less than an artist – and more than an artist – had his art not been agonised by profound sensitivity’.[i] In describing Lawrence as an artist agonized by sensitivity but not hypersensitive, graceful yet prone to emotional excess, Daly locates Lawrence’s poetry on the line between aestheticism and decadence, between refinement and an abnormal over-refinement. This is a distinction Daly affirms by identifying Lawrence with the virtuosity of Algernon Charles Swinburne while disavowing Swinburne’s more scandalous traits:
We consider Lawrence to have been the first of the moderns in this country, but his contact with the final, spiritual moments of Victorianism, and the influence of his masters, Swinburne (that is Swinburne’s desirably effective orchestration without Swinburne’s irreligion) and Wordsworth, gave him strength and uniformity.[ii]
[i] P. H. Daly, [Biography], in Walter MacArthur Lawrence,The Poet of Guiana, Walter MacArthur Lawrence: Selected Works, ed. by P. H. Daly (Georgetown: Daily Chronicle, 1948), pp. 5-17 (p. 8).
[ii] Ibid., p. 9
Aimer naïvement Baudelaire
Get PDFJ’ai rencontré Baudelaire en quatrième année de lycée, en Italie : ces « Correspondances » déjà merveilleuses, et l’analyse de mon enseignante d’italien. Peu de temps après, est venu tout le reste : les poèmes moins connus, les poèmes bien trop connus et infiniment interprétés, les vers et la prose, les projets de préface, les journaux intimes, les critiques, les lettres à sa mère et à ses éditeurs, les élans de brutale misogynie et xénophobie et les prières à Dieu pour apprendre à s’aimer soi-même. C’est à travers ce prisme vertigineux de facettes superposées que Baudelaire est avec moi depuis ma première année de master
‘À une passante’: A Passing Appreciation
Get PDFThis appreciation of Baudelaire is shamefully non-decadent. During French language classes, students sometimes encounter the pluperfect subjunctive as an instance of the conditionnel passé deuxième forme, which may give rise to understandable consternation on everyone’s part. In full awareness that the poet’s primary intention was doubtless to exemplify this feature of French modality, as a language tutor this is my cue to share a personal favourite example of this verb form, namely the conclusion of Baudelaire’s celebrated sonnet, ‘À une passante’, ‘Ô toi que j’eusse aimée’. Even a fleeting encounter with the poem would suggest that its meaning is past conditional as a kind of imagined memory of the future: ‘Oh you who I would have loved’. With that point duly resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, we can return to the excitement of the translation passage we were supposed to be working on
Review: Patricia Pulham, The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
Get PDFPatricia Pulham’s The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities offers a fresh perspective on the erotic charge attributed to statues and sculptures throughout history. From Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion to the tableaux vivants of ‘living statues’ regularly performed on London’s music hall stages (p. 14), the study provides convincing evidence that the long-held erotic resonance of statuary is fuelled by a ‘tension between animation and stasis’ and its unique placement within ‘the liminal spaces between movement and stillness, life and death’ (p. 13).  
Christopher Phillips, Civilian Specialists at War: Britain’s Transport Experts and the First World War
Get PDFBair Irincheev, Vyborg 1944: The Last Soviet-Finnish Campaign on the Eastern Front, translated by Kevin Bridge
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Editorial
Get PDFHere in the UK the NHS is, as might be expected, very much in the news, and the threat of the world-wide pandemic, as our readers will know, has affected all our practices, exposing inequalities, economic, political and social failures, which demand attention. This volume of the journal, produced under the shadow of our contemporary anxieties, addresses the imperative of the present situation. The contents of this issue reveal aspects of the current contexts in which art therapy practitioners, artists, trainers, students and researchers, are exploring experience, developing new practices and creating fresh understanding.