VOLUME 1(1) • 2013
And so much sleep, and death, and white is in my soul
Changing names so as to be in tune with his late-hour location and because he had an identity problem, Benjamin Fondane also changed his life-course when he would not abandon his sister and chose instead, to join her to death, in the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. pp. 156–162 Keywords: i..
Plunging headlong into the dead death
The article explores the tumultuous life and work of Gherasim Luca, one of the founders of Romanian surrealism. Based on a many-sided, self-conflicting personality, the hypersensitive nature of the poet converted into a deeply personal “phonetic language” to describe mesmerizing worlds, swarming wit..
Drinking the milky blackness
Now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century – Harold Bloom including him in his list of one hundred literary geniuses – Paul Celan left a literary legacy of highest rank. His creative originality was called in question when the “Goll affair” came to public knowledge with all its ..
Putting on bodily sadness
The fierce competition with her peers and mostly with herself to always come first, against an impossible, because vainglorious, philosophy: “How could anyone not like me?” and against her severely melancholic temperamental background proved to be a fatal combination for Irina Andone, who was hardly..
The almost unnameable lust
Escaping from the imprisonment of the suburban housewife duties, Anne Sexton’s development into a confessional feminist poet in a conventional patriarchy is unparalleled. Through poetry her self-consciousness flourished, and thus she had the short-lasting independence she so much strove for. The pap..
Spring is a hard time to live through
Analysis of selected works by Sara Teasdale will explore the style of her poetry, highlighting its evolutionary character in connection with life experiences that finally led to her committing suicide. The ambivalence of this poetry (beauty and love / loneliness and solitude) expresses exactly the w..
Dying is an art that I do exceptionally well
The following is an attempt to explore those symbolic itineraries along which Sylvia Plath engages in her work, as possible answers to her existential Angst; it is meant to unveil the deep coherence of her poetic imaginary, to account for its continuities and discontinuities, while bringing to light..
The old dead love of death
The name of Sylvia Plath has become almost synonymous with suffering and tragic death, not only because of the depression and suicide that are the trademarks of her life, but also because of the close correspondence between the facts of her life and the motifs of her poetry and prose. Various answer..
Of suicide I continually think
John Berryman might well be taken as a perfect example of artist ensnared in the catch-22 of childhood trauma, madness, alcohol abuse, and suicide. His solution to escaping this trap by purging it into his work makes us able to catch a glimpse of the excruciating quest a bipolar goes through. Pp. 92..
Before long, stars will nestle in my weary brow
Georg Trakl is mainly seen today as a tormented creative consciousness with a keen sensitivity for poetic and esthetic transfiguration of personal psychic processes. The paper explores the poet’s biography, as well as selections from his poems, in the light of his schizophrenic geniality and alleged..
I got them before they could get me
Vachel Lindsay, who endeavored to carry poetry back towards the old Greek, half-chanted lyric, thus changing it into a song art appealing to the ear rather than the eye was a dependent personality who later in life developed his depressed mood and came to be a paranoid personality. pp. 82–84 Keyword..
I mean to tap the reservoir of pain
John Davidson’s desire to foreground irony and science took him to a world where the outside perception matters more than the inside, driving him away from his dream and turning him into a recluse, who eventually got drowned into his personal torment and emotional problems. The constant feeling of a..