Page 84 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 84
Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices
with the English romantic tradition were the most obvious, for example
in the poem The Frogs, which has often been compared to Keats’ and Shel-
ley’s poetry, literary historians soon enough recognised an equally strong
influence of the American tradition, namely Emerson’s transcendental-
ism, which was first highlighted by Barrie Davies and Carl F. Klinck (Ball
2013, Introduction). The ambivalent attitude to nature in Lampman’s po-
etry cannot be overlooked; both John Ower and Les McLeod notice alien-
ation which erupts with the intentional adoption of the English roman-
tic vocabulary in Lampman’s poetry and the emphasised distance between
the speaker’s self-awareness and nature, which is not created only through
rhetorical figures, but especially through semantic material (Ower 1976;
McLeod 1984). Richard Arnold connected this dichotomy directly to the
relationship with American transcendentalism (Arnold 1981, 33—56)—
84 arguing that Lampman tries to follow the transcendentalist philosophy,
but is not able to fully embrace it.
To illustrate Lampman’s dichotomy, let us examine some relatively
randomly selected, but characteristic excerpts from his texts. McLeod
takes a look at Lampman’s dichotomy by analysing the poem April from
the collection Among the Millet (McLeod 1984; Lampman 1888, 2—4, v.
36—42):
The old year’s cloaking of brown leaves, that bind
The forest floor-ways, plated close and true —
The last love’s labour of the autumn wind —
Is broken with curled flower buds white and blue
In all the matted hollows, and speared through
With thousand serpent-spotted blades up-sprung,
Yet bloomless, of the slender adder-tongue.
In the poem, McLeod focuses on the ambivalence of the seman-
tic connotations of the words ‘bind’, which suggests a sense of connec-
tion and entrapment simultaneously, and ‘plated close’, which ascribes to
leaves the quality of gold, but also conjures a confining sense of metal ar-
mour (McLeod 1984). What is at work here is double signification, where
lexemes have two opposing connotative values—the superficial one, a kind
of flaubertian dessus, and the deep one, a kind of dessous—or the superfi-
cial and deep levels of connotations are achieved through a combination
of various semantic fields. On the surface level, the imagery shows the
speaker’s struggle to identify with nature, in compliance with the tran-
scendentalist role models, while these connotations are simultaneously
subverted at the deep level. In the sonnet Snow from Lyrics of Earth, the
with the English romantic tradition were the most obvious, for example
in the poem The Frogs, which has often been compared to Keats’ and Shel-
ley’s poetry, literary historians soon enough recognised an equally strong
influence of the American tradition, namely Emerson’s transcendental-
ism, which was first highlighted by Barrie Davies and Carl F. Klinck (Ball
2013, Introduction). The ambivalent attitude to nature in Lampman’s po-
etry cannot be overlooked; both John Ower and Les McLeod notice alien-
ation which erupts with the intentional adoption of the English roman-
tic vocabulary in Lampman’s poetry and the emphasised distance between
the speaker’s self-awareness and nature, which is not created only through
rhetorical figures, but especially through semantic material (Ower 1976;
McLeod 1984). Richard Arnold connected this dichotomy directly to the
relationship with American transcendentalism (Arnold 1981, 33—56)—
84 arguing that Lampman tries to follow the transcendentalist philosophy,
but is not able to fully embrace it.
To illustrate Lampman’s dichotomy, let us examine some relatively
randomly selected, but characteristic excerpts from his texts. McLeod
takes a look at Lampman’s dichotomy by analysing the poem April from
the collection Among the Millet (McLeod 1984; Lampman 1888, 2—4, v.
36—42):
The old year’s cloaking of brown leaves, that bind
The forest floor-ways, plated close and true —
The last love’s labour of the autumn wind —
Is broken with curled flower buds white and blue
In all the matted hollows, and speared through
With thousand serpent-spotted blades up-sprung,
Yet bloomless, of the slender adder-tongue.
In the poem, McLeod focuses on the ambivalence of the seman-
tic connotations of the words ‘bind’, which suggests a sense of connec-
tion and entrapment simultaneously, and ‘plated close’, which ascribes to
leaves the quality of gold, but also conjures a confining sense of metal ar-
mour (McLeod 1984). What is at work here is double signification, where
lexemes have two opposing connotative values—the superficial one, a kind
of flaubertian dessus, and the deep one, a kind of dessous—or the superfi-
cial and deep levels of connotations are achieved through a combination
of various semantic fields. On the surface level, the imagery shows the
speaker’s struggle to identify with nature, in compliance with the tran-
scendentalist role models, while these connotations are simultaneously
subverted at the deep level. In the sonnet Snow from Lyrics of Earth, the
