Franca Bellarsi

‘Alien Hieroglyphs of Eternity’ and ‘Cold Pastorals’: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Siesta in Xbalba’ and John Keats’s Great Odes

Abstract Examining the poetry of Allen Ginsberg in the light of that of John Keats, the possible connections between ‘Siesta in Xbalba’ — a long poem by Ginsberg that received much more critical attention in the eighties than today — and Keats’s so-called Great Odes are investigated. ‘Siesta’ is here read as a composite mainly recycling ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, whose themes and motifs Ginsberg both preserves and subverts. This is the first attempt to conflate ‘Siesta’ with Keats’s Great Odes.

Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic

ions of Duchamp, Picasso, and Cézanne, as well as those of Valéry’s musical theory of poetry. Once again, it is shown that Stevens’s techniques of defamiliarization of the ordinary are inseparable from his re-enactement of European abstractions (David Haglund, p. 129), and that it is European rather than American abstract art which enabled him ‘‘to think through the limits and powers of abstraction’’ (Edward Ragg, p. 149). 582 Reviews