10th SAAS CONFERENCE
“The Backyard of the U.S. Mansion: Critical readings of poverty and wealth in the United States”
Alcalá de Henares (Madrid). April 14-16, 2011
12) The Poetics of Poverty in American Poetry
Panel Chair: Viorica Patea
Institution: Universidad de Salamanca
E-mail: vioricap@usal.es
"Steep'd me in poverty to the very lips."
(Shakespeare, Othello, V.ii.)
*
A poor—torn heart—a tattered heart—
That sat it down to rest—
Nor noticed that the Ebbing Day
Flowed silver to the West—
Nor noticed Night did soft descend—
Nor Constellation burn—
Intent upon the vision
Of latitudes unknown.
(Emily Dickinson, # 78)
*
Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.
Come, let us pity the married and the unmarried.
(“The Garrett”, Ezra Pound)
*
By constantly tormenting them
with reminders of the lice in
their children's hair, the
School Physician first
brought their hatred down on him.
But by this familiarity
they grew used to him, and so,
at last, took him for their friend and adviser.
(“The Poor”, William Carlos Williams)
*
This panel invites papers that reexamine the aesthetic, socio-economic as well as the emotional and psychological implications of poverty in American Poetry. Poverty represents a crucial and recurrent motif in many poems. Poets have often projected themselves into the personae of the disenfranchised, the poor, the marginal, the exile. The poor are victims and overcoming poverty has triggered a wealth of utopian and ideological thinking, leading to radical poetics. Poets have meditated on poverty, indicted or glorified it in numerous ways. For Aristotle “poverty is the parent of revolution and crime” (Politics). Poverty is linked to suffering, socio-political factors, and a long history of discrimination that includes concerns of class, gender and race which provide the necessary ingredients for poeticizing. T. S. Eliot’s second tempter’s allurement “To set down the great, protect the poor,/ Beneath the throne of God can man do more?” in Murder in the Cathedral repeats a biblical motif that has become a constant theme in word literature from Goethe’s Faust to Dostoyevski’s The Dispossessed as well as the object of numerous socio-political treatises.
Yet poverty is also considered a source of virtue and unspoiled simplicity associated with original innocence. Hence the poor are the paradigm of purity. As such poverty can function as the symbol of total abandonment of materialistic desires and the expression of spiritual plenitude giving rise to forms of asceticism and the belief that the poor are often happier than the rich since they appreciate existence more fully.
From an aesthetic point of view poverty spells concision and economy of words which are deeply inscribed in the modernist agenda of early twentieth-century poetics when brevity is perceived as more effective and genuine than rhetoric.
On the other hand, the poverty of words invites reflections on linguistic boundaries and limitations vis a vis the inexpressible.
Suggested topics:
- The poetic tradition of social concerns: poets, movements, schools, groups.
- Poems of class, gender and social discrimination.
- Denouncing poverty: poverty as social shame, experiences of deprivation and discrimination, socio economic aspects of poverty.
- The figure of the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized.
- Emotional and psychological implications of poverty and suffering.
- Poverty as virtue versus poverty as social shame.
- The poverty of words: the aesthetics of economy and concision of modernist aesthetics.
- The limitations of words vis a vis the inexpressible.
and many other related topics in American poetry are welcome.
10th INTERNATIONAL SAAS CONFERENCE
Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, 14-16 April 2011
THE BACKYARD OF THE U.S.A. MANSION: Critical Readings of Poverty and Wealth in the United States
Name: |
Academic Affiliation: |
E-mail: |
Title of Proposal: |
Panel: |
Special requirements, if any: |
Abstract (400-600 words):
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Please, complete this form and send it, in electronic format (via e-mail), to the Chair of your selected panel. Deadline for sending proposals is October 29, 2010.
