Cardenal, Apocalypse and Other Poems. Poems for revolution.

The interrelationship of the ideas of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern of British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by millennium, but in their various ways the major Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley - question and even at times undermine the possibility of a successful secularization of this model. No matter how confidently the sequence of apocalypse and millennium seems to be affirmed in some of the major works of the period, the issue is always in doubt: the fear that millennium may not ensue emerges as a significant, if often repressed, theme in the great works of the period. Related to it is the tension in Romantic poetry between conflicting models of history itself: history as teleology, developing towards end time and millennium, and history as purposeless cycle. This subject-matter is traced through a selection of works by the major poets, partly through an exposition of their underlying intellectual traditions, and partly through a close examination of the poems themselves.

In Poetry and Apocalypse, Franke seeks to find the premises for dialogue between cultures, especially religious fundamentalisms—including Islamic fundamentalism—and modern Western secularism. He argues that in order to be genuinely open, dialogue needs to accept possibilities such as religious apocalypse in ways that can be best understood through the experience of poetry. Franke reads Christian epic and prophetic tradition as a secularization of religious revelation that preserves an understanding of the essentially apocalyptic character of truth and its disclosure in history. The usually neglected negative theology that undergirds this apocalyptic tradition provides the key to a radically new view of apocalypse as at once religious and poetic.

Taking D. H. Lawrence's late poetry as her starting point, Bethan Jones adopts a broadly intertextual approach to Lawrence's poetry that places it in the context of his prose works and his reading in mythology, cosmology, primitivism, mysticism, and astronomy. The result is a book that prioritises the masterpieces of Lawrence's mature style and shows his late poetry to be as accomplished as that of contemporaries like W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, RWTH Aachen University, language: English, abstract: “Themes of ruin and apocalypse intensify in several poems of the 1840’s” and as one of the today most approved writers of that time, Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry is certainly worth being investigated in this regard. In this paper I want to investigate the apocalyptic vision in Edgar Allan Poe’s poems “The Conqueror Worm”, published in 1843, and “The City in the Sea”, in its final version from the year 1845. I also have to mention that I will examine “The Conqueror Worm” as a poem on its own and not in connection with the tale Ligeia, into which the poem was later (1845) established. I have also decided to work with the five-stanza version of “The City in the Sea”, opposed to a widely spread opinion that the poem should only contain four stanzas . For an analysis concerned with this topic, it has to be made clear what I understand when I use the term apocalyptic. Therefore the paper starts with an attempt to define the term as good as possible. Afterwards I am going to give a thorough analysis of “The Conqueror Worm” first, and then I will analyze “The City in the Sea”. The analyses are going to include interpretations according to the apocalyptic vision in the poems. At the end of the paper I will give a short summary together with the most important outcomes of the analyses.

Poems for the End of the Age is a poetry book with an apocalyptic message. A reading of the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible and also known as the Revelation to John or the Apocalypse, has led the author to an entirely new and astounding interpretation of a number of Johns visions. His conclusion is that there will be an end-time upheaval in the world order and, specifically, a catastrophic war between the United States and Russia before the end of 2030. An Introduction offers the historical background and the detailed analysis of the Apocalypse for this frightening scenario. The following seventy rhymed quatrains are divided into two collections, namely, Reflections of a Believer and Empire of the Apocalypse. The former includes verses of a Christian, inspirational, and personal nature while the latter directly addresses the authors interpretation of the Apocalypse. In a poem of 100 rhymed quatrains entitled Discourse on the Mosel or The Century Poem, four characters, namely, an American, a German, an Israeli, and a Poet, discus their views of recent historical events and their prognostications for the future.

The closing years of the eighteenth century were the particular domain of literary radicals whose work challenged ideas on gender and sexuality. During this transitional period, the poetry of William Blake reflected the changing mores of society as well as his own developing notions of gender. This work presents an in-depth exploration of gender issues in Blake's three epic poems, The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. The opening chapter discusses basic concepts such as notions of apocalypse, utopia and gender, all essential to the author's reading of Blake. Background regarding the literary atmosphere of the time, which included influence from the tradition of dissent, English Jacobinism and early feminism, is also included, effectively setting the context for Blake's work. The book then examines the poems in chronological order. It concentrates particularly on male and female activity within each work (refuting the common assumption that Blake was anti-feminist) while exploring the symbolism of the poetry. Blake's repeated theme of the struggle between the sexes receives special emphasis, as does the progress of his gender vision through the three poems.

This collection uses a transnational approach to study contemporary English-language poetry composed by poets of South Asian origin. The poetry contains themes, motifs, and critiques of social changes, and the contributors seek to encapsulate the continually changing environments that these contemporary poets write about. The contributors show that English-language poetry in South Asia is hybridized with imagery and figurative language adapted from the vernacular languages of South Asia. The chapters examine women’s issues, concerns of marginalized groups—such as the Dalit community and the people of Northeastern India—, social changes in Sri Lanka, the changing society of Pakistan, and the formation of the identity in the several nation states that resulted from the British colony of India.

What’s new about the apocalypse? Revelation does not allow us to look back after the end and enumerate pivotal turning points. It happens in an immediate encounter with the transformatively new. John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics attempt to render the experience of such an apocalyptic change in the present. In this respect they take seriously the Reformation’s insistence that eschatology is a historical phenomenon. Yet these poets are also reacting to the Regicide, and, as a result, their works explore very modern questions about the nature of events, what it means for a significant historical occasion to happen. Lyric Apocalypse argues that Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics challenge any retrospective understanding of events, including one built on a theory of revolution. Instead, these poems show that there is no “after” to the apocalypse, that if we are going to talk about change, we should do so in the present, when there is still time to do something about it. For both of these poets, lyric becomes a way to imagine an apocalyptic event that would be both hopeful and new.

This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so. The religious and mystical dimension of poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. Chapters also explore how church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the period. This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of this important but often overlooked aspect of modern English poetry.