George Monteiro

The Experienced Emblem: A Study of the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson once said that her way of looking at things was “New Englandly.” The expression has often provided her readers and critics with both a wedge into her sometimes gnomic poems and a check against their occasional temptations to fly off into interpretative fancy. What seeing “New Englandly” entailed, however, was never explained by the poet. For most readers it has come to mean in the broadest sense that her work should be interpreted in the context of and as part of New Englands intellectual, religious, and literary history. But Ne England also has a social and cultural history, and it is of course only logical that Emily Dickinson should have her own place in that history, albeit an original one.

Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature

Both in his own poetry and the poetry he attributed to his other identities, the modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was strongly influenced by British and American 19th-century writers. This work analyzes Pessoas intertextual links to his English-language predecessors.

The presence of Pessoa : English, American, and Southern African literary responses

The Presence of Pessoa is the first study of Pessoas influence on twentieth-century poets, who have responded to him in surprising and sometimes comic ways. Monteiro traces the Pessoan threads in the work of such contemporaries as Joyce Carol Oates, Allen Ginsberg, John Wain, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as earlier poets Thomas Merton, Edouard Roditi, and Roy Campbell. The complete text of Campbells pioneering biocritical study of Pessoa, left unfinished at Campbells death, is published for the first time in book form. Besides tracing Pessoas influences on the English-speaking world, Monteiro provides refreshingly new and penetrating interpretations of Pessoas Mensagem (Message) and the modernist novella O Banqueiro Anarquista (The Anarchist Banker). In particular, The Presence of Pessoa includes an innovative reading of Oatess The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories and Ferlinghettis novella Love in the Days of Rage.

Truckers' Language in Rhode Island

IN RECENT YEARS, American Speech has published three studies of the language of truck drivers in the United States. Here is a fourth. Unlike the prior studies, however, this one is limited to the terms used by truck drivers in a single state--Rhode Island. Moreover, I have included in this list a few pertinent office and management terms covering shipments, billing, and loads. All such terms are, of course, well known to the truck drivers themselves.

James Weldon Johnson: A Durable Fire

protected Zichron’s crops from theft by such a wide range of thieves that they included Turkish quartermasters as well as Arab bandits. As the friendship develops, epstein tells Halkin more and more stories about “the early days,” and for detail, complexity, and style, epstein’s sometimes lengthy memoirs rival the best in modern adventure writing. Halkin is aware that epstein knows more about the secrets surrounding the nili spy ring than he has revealed, so Halkin continues to press his investigations; epstein, however, is never willing to go beyond specific set points with regard to what he has to say about the betrayal. And then, quite by chance, Halkin realizes that the truth may be even more elusive than he had anticipated and that epstein may indeed be the ultimate practitioner of the magician’s art. A Strange Death, by focusing our attention on a microcosm of Palestine, says much about the modern history of the whole, and with regard to the interplay between memory and truth, Halkin is nothing short of profound. Truth, whatever it might be, Halkin seems to suggest, may be beside the point, for it is memory that interprets our past and memory which winds up influencing our future.

Scudder, Rolfe, and Browning

ing of self-conscious thoughts that inhibit the distressed Lucrece into a throng of poetic presences that jostle harmoniously, indeed enablingly, at the threshold of his own creative process. In so utterly transforming the description of Lucrece’s distraction at the moment of writing into a description of a concentrating influence on his own creativity, Keats’s astonishing boldness of adaptation may itself be read as a correlative for the sense of wonder conveyed through paradox in his description of a liberating rather than inhibiting intrusion of poetic influences at the moment of composition (Gleckner 14–22 and Bennett 161; for a more troubled view, Kucich 140). Here again, Keats’s imitation in opposition shows all the gratitude and intelligence Christopher Ricks has found characteristic of his allusions to Shakespeare (157–78).

To Point or Not to Point: Frost's “Stopping By Woods”

To say that the woods are 1) lovely, 2) dark, and 3) deep differs considerably from claiming that they are lovely in that they are dark and deep. In Frost’s line, the general adjective lovely is explained by the more particular modifiers dark and deep. In the editor’s line, the egalitarian threesome is non-parallelas if we proclaimed that a farmer grew apples, Mclntoshes, and Northern Spies. (141)

Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Literature

Both in his own poetry and the poetry he attributed to his other identities, the modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was strongly influenced by British and American 19th-century writers. This work analyzes Pessoas intertextual links to his English-language predecessors.

An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship

A commentary on Pessoas work exploring some of the cultural, political and personal implications of the artistic impersonation that made him a figure of modern literature. The book demonstrates the scope of Pessoas writing and traces the ways in which his four main authors are related.

Dickinson’s “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers

(1989). Dickinson’s “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers. The Explicator: Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 34-37.