VOLUME 1(1) • 2013
Dying away the death of a thorny rose
A dual nature by all means, owing to his mixed heritage, Dimitrie Anghel, “the poet of flowers” finally succumbed to the terrible stress of loving and living with a woman who, being so much like himself, recoiled, struck back and eventually turned into his worst enemy. She happened to be the wife of..
The black sun of melancholia
The narcissistic personality like Gérard de Nerval will ultimately grow into a melancholic when contemplating himself in a Fata Morgana. The past will come down upon him with as much intensity as the present moment, and the fragile ego which is, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, the shadow cast by the loss..
Aren’t we all puppets on ill-intended strings?
Heinrich von Kleist, a poet-philosopher who set on a quest to define hope and happiness, and eventually got lost amidst his frustrations, created a fictional world populated with characters that are seemingly manoeuvred – even though they do possess coherent, stable will – and look like voiceless pu..
Driving fate, from death to the eternal depths of fire
In an attempt to decipher the sources that triggered Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s lifelong obsession with death, the present paper proposes a reconsideration of the poet’s artistic creation in the light of his biography. Highly intelligent, and also extremely sensitive, guided by a rational eccentricity,..
Journeying into the blackest night unto the land of bliss
Besides the initial accusation of forgery with regard to the ancient manuscripts containing the Rowley corpus, today a second possible forgery is contemplated in the wake of Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton: could the boy-poet have faked his own death to reach fame, could he have continued to actual..
Grant me surcease from sorrow
The paper takes a look at Sappho’s life and work in order to account for her suicide, which is almost certainly a legend, at least in the form transmitted by tradition. Sappho gave archetypal or paradigmatic expression to erotic feelings while proving remarkable stylistic and prosodic skill as well ..
Watchman, what of the night?
Family studies focusing on four poets who committed suicide and two other poets who suffered from manic-depressive illness converge upon earlier findings which indicate that there is a familial, genetically-based pattern to suicide in this somehow exclusivist world of poetry-making. The other predic..