This study examines the notions of universality William Carlos Williams tries to not constitute but recognize in the world of things (or objects). He finds universality embodied in the particular. Each individual that shows up in his poems has its own uniqueness, yet is ordinary at the same time. As readers see the remarkable presence of each object, they can feel some experiences common to them because they have experienced situations each object is constituting with its own individuality and interactions between the objects. Even locality becomes universal. As a practiced place with history and heredity, each locality shares empirical reality and processes of cultural transformation with one another. This sharing makes it possible for particularities to lead to universality.
Most of Williams' poems are created from acute perceptions of everyday people and objects, and from their raw potentiality. His frequent use of juxtaposition of images offers multiple suggestions. Thus, his poems serve as open-ended fields for process of perception and vision. For readers to capture the suggestions, first they are required to free from their pre-conceptions or preoccupations to lead to their own pure awareness. This awareness refers to the clarity and intensity of vision. Williams believes that imagination and this vision are combined to form aesthetic, reflective, and creative meditation as a way to gain universal vision. He asks us to discern or discover universality in the particulars and expand our horizons with this vision.

This study aims to explore Natasha Trethewey's work, focusing mainly on her Pulitzer-Prize winning volume Native Guard. In this volume, Trethewey tried to restore the hidden and forgotten part of American history through poems of mourning, photo texts, and a personal journal. This study concentrates on the poems concerning both the death of Trethewey's mother, and her guilt and mourning. Her interminable mourning for her mother expanded and continued to recollect the hidden and forgotten history of the African-American Native Guard during the Civil War. This study suggests that Trethewey linked some photo texts as a reminder of hidden moments or hidden realities, to the historical facts in American society. In some interviews, Trethewey mentioned that a certain moment or a certain element in a photo―Barth's punctum―could attach with and extend to an imagined world. As for Trethewey, the punctum of a photo could play a significant role in excavating hidden realities. This study further examines the journal of an imagined African-American soldier during the Civil War, which was constructed as a sonnet cycle. Through this personal journal, narratives can be traced of the community neglected, hidden, and forgotten by American official history. Moreover, this study emphasizes that Trethewey built a “lyrical monument” or “a monument in words” both for her mother and for African-American soldiers through the book, Native Guard.

This paper aims to argue how Carol Ann Duffy's poems explore the poetic constructions surrounding the issues of immigration, ethnicity and nationalism under the Thatcher Years. Focused on the voices and positions of 'outsiders,' Duffy's poetry ―The Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990), and Mean Time (1993) ― is not only interested in the impact of the free-market economic policies upon the material lives of the common people, but also examines the treatment of national identity as strategically constructed and disseminated rhetoric of the policy.
Furthermore, Duffy's way of poetry writing reminds us Jacque Ranci`ere's critical theory of “The Politics of Literature.” With the concept of “the distribution of the sensible,” Ranci`ere points out that literature (and aesthetics) is about “determining what presents itself to sense experience” and it essentially involves the inscription of the sense of community, like politics. He also stresses that literature is more radically political in the sense of bringing in disagreement than politics. Evoking Ranci`ere's theory, Duffy's poetry seeks to invalidate the political subjectivization by continuously disrupting the immigration control, racial discrimination and possessive individualism under the Thatcherite. Ultimately, this paper analyzes how Duffy's poems destabilize supposedly fixed entity of collective identity―class, gender, race, religion, emphasizing the 'in-between' space of the 'outsiders.' In so doing, Duffy offers us the new possibilities of poetry writing in the post-Utopian age.

This essay explores the modernist paradox that modernists return to and engage with tradition in order to pursue originality and newness, and their oblique relationship with the tradition by reading Eliot's “Tradition and Individual Talent.” And then I argue that the paradox and their indirect relationship are part of the reason why for modernists there is no clear distinction between writing and translating by looking at Eliot's The Waste Land and Pound's partial translation of Homer in his The Cantos. Allusion and translation are useful implements through which modernists revisit the tradition or previous writers. Eliot alludes to so many previous writers including Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare etc that The Waste Land becomes derivative and unoriginal; Pound transforms Homer so much by deleting large parts of the Homeric original, using the Renaissance Latin translation by Andreas Divus and inserting its publication information as part of his translation that his Homeric translation becomes creative and original. In this context, it would be hard to answer which one is writing and which one is translating for modernists. To them, the distinction between writing and translating does not matter; what truly matters to them is “make it new”, to pursue newness and originality.

This study aims to reveal that the grotesque characteristics displayed in Dickinson's poetry originate from the carnival tradition, as they parodize, deride and degrade Puritan theology or dominant reason. The study will first provide the grounds of why the author sees grotesque characteristics in Dickinson's poems as carnival tradition. Then, it will provide cases of grotesque characteristics found in her poems. Lastly, the study will suggest that the grotesque characteristics are a form of indirect resistance to the value system in the religion of the era, embodying Dickinson's sense of introspection and critical attitude against the problems of the reality.

This essay explores how Lacanian pedagogical dynamics is beneficial to read modern poetry in the classroom. One of the key concepts in psychoanalysis is the unconscious, which makes Jacques Lacan distinct from Freudian scholars. Shoshana Felman employs the psychoanalytic concept, the unconscious, in showing the radical shift of position between teachers and students. The essay attempts to evince the poets' concerns over the unconscious in their poems; Wallace Stevens juxtaposes imagination and the real in his verbal painting of mind-scape and Emily Dickinson shifts the position between master and slave or host and visitor. In their works, the replacement or displacement of the relationship between authors and readers is inevitable because the unconscious is not object, but speaking subject next to the conscious. For both poets, readers and authors are mutual cooperative listeners to the voice of the poetic unconscious.

Lenard Duane Moore is lesser known haiku poets up to date. However, his poetic perspective as well as his composition of haiku has been neglected although Moore's various attempts are significant. Moreover, Moore's haiku reflects stark differences from African American writers. Moore is originally from Jacksonville, North Carolina and his poetry shows how he has been intimately connected to the land and society in which he has lived. This experience and memory became the background of his haiku. One might argue that composing haiku in English has limits, however, the point is how Moore composed haiku, what kind of elements does Moore put emphasis on haiku and its significance should be considered. Unlike other American haiku poets, Moore's attempt to write “un-American” is evident in all his works.

Taking note that Chinese scholarship on Ezra Pound and Cathay, has been closely related to China's state-led cultural propaganda, this paper first surveys the short history of Chinese reception of Cathay from the 1930s to the present in terms of the academic changes, embedded in China's soft power project. In doing so, it sheds light on what Sui Pui-fei calls “a self-Orientalizing strategy.” Then, looking into Pound's so-called mis-translation and Chinese re-translation, this paper discusses that Chinese efforts to produce a 'culturally correct' translation of Li Bai's poetry make another case of what I call 'the illusion of transparent translation.' Ultimately, it aims to reveal the tension between de-historicizing impulses and de-mythologizing efforts in the complicated process of globalizing a local cultural heritage.