Byron to D'Annunzio: from liberalism to fascism in national poetry, 1815–1920

ABSTRACT. From Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824 to D'Annunzio's capture of Fiume for Italy in 1919, the nationalism of universal liberalism and independence struggles changed, in literature as in politics, to cruel dictatorial fascism. Byron was followed by a series of idealistic fighter‐poets and poet‐martyrs for national freedom, but international tensions culminating in World War I exposed fully the intolerant, brutal side of nationalism. D'Annunzio, like Byron, both a major poet and charismatic war leader, was a key figure in transforming nineteenth‐century democratic nationalism into twentieth‐century dictatorial fascism. The poet's ‘lyrical dictatorship’ at Fiume (1919–20) inspired Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922, with far‐reaching political consequences. The poet became the dangerous example of a Nietzschean Übermensch, above common morality, predatory and morally irresponsible. This article shows how the meaning of nationalism was partly determined and transformed by poets, illustrating their role as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.     

The Green Matzevah

ABSTRACT

This article examines the extent to which historical memory, including the symbolism of Auschwitz-Birkenau, can be considered not only in terms of its close connections to both Polish and Jewish national and political imaginaries, but also in terms of its entanglements with survivors’ memories of nature. I analyse the presence of the post-camp space of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Helena Birenbaum’s poetic testimonies. This is a space that has often been described as tainted and contaminated while being treated as a lifeless “landscape of death” and cemetery. Readings of Birenbaum’s testimonial poetry alongside archival and field research conducted at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum have enabled me to talk about grey and green camp’s landscape. I have sought to demonstrate that such spaces function in Auschwitz testimonies under the cover of metaphorical constructions and poetic images that I call “the green matzevah,” that contain significant analytical and empirical potential. I explore how the camp’s dead grey zones have over the years turned into green matzevahs, i.e. terrain that has experienced post-traumatic curating by invasion of plants. I argue that drawing attention to the world of nature as represented in testimonies can expand knowledge of the camp, challenging the martyrological framing that prevailed under communism and help to imagine how to preserve a memory of this place when there are no human witnesses.     

Spinoza's counter-aesthetics

ABSTRACT

Spinoza says very little about art or literature in his work; a fact which partly explains the absence of references to him by the German initiators of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, including Baumgarten, Kant and Hegel. Spinoza's resolute opposition to teleology, however, provides an even more compelling reason for his absence, given the teleological conception of literary and artistic form common to the notion of aesthetics at the time of its emergence. Is it possible to fashion a counter-aesthetics from the materials provided by Spinoza's philosophy? I argue that his reading of the great Spanish Baroque writers, especially Luis de Góngora and Baltasar Gracián (whose works were found in his library), provided him with an alternative conception of literary form based on a rejection of formal coherence and closure in favor of constitutive incompleteness and an opening to the infinite.     

John Hewitt’s curatorial eye: art and poetry in the municipal galleries

ABSTRACT

This article examines the art writing of the poet, critic, and curator John Hewitt in mid-twentieth century Ireland and Northern Ireland. Hewitt’s promotion of modern art and artist collectives in Ulster through shifting definitions of internationalism and regionalism will be linked to the art writing of Herbert Read and the late poetry of W.B. Yeats. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to Hewitt’s poetry and art writing reveals the sustained imbrication of politics, poetry and the visual arts in his thinking. Hewitt’s ottava rima poem in response to Yeats, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited, October 1954”, will be reassessed with recourse to the context of the Municipal Gallery in Dublin and its mid-century sculpture collections. By identifying artworks within the Municipal Gallery poem, the article illustrates Hewitt’s broader dialogues with the late Yeats and the art scene in Ireland.