While examining T. S. Eliot's experiment in his apprentice poems written in his adolescent years but not published in his life time, this article investigates the ways in which he trained himself to find his own distinctive voice and realize the essential characteristics of modern poetry in his early poetic works. The young Eliot had a strong sense of the tradition of English poetry as well as self-restraint that his familial and educational culture imposed on him, but he had also an intense desire to create a new poetry in the real-life modern language. Reading the great authors as well as minor authors, and “borrow[ing] the best verse of other languages and the best prose of all languages,” he modified vigorously the various poetic forms and contents and fused them together, and succeeded in modernizing his poems. He called his own poetic experiment a “cross,” that he borrowed from Samuel Butler's Life and Habit. When he mastered entirely the diverse poetic techniques in his early poems, he became able to speak in his own voice and lay a solid foundation for his later works such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets.

This essay aims to analyze Hopkins's “Epithalamion”, comparing it to Patmore's works, while showing that it is indeed deserving of its designation as an epithalamion. Patmore's The Angel in the House and other poetical works were not only beloved of the time but also represented the epitome of the ideal 19th century Christian marriage. Hopkins's inclusion of naked boys bathing in the dean and a priest bathing in a neighboring pool, has led to his “Epithalamion” being regarded by many as mysterious. This paper shows how these concepts find their origin in Patmore's works. First, the dean is erotically described and the boys are depicted as pure, resembling the descriptions and concepts in Patmore's work. The two poets use similar dictions and rhymes; “loins/loin'd” and “shout/rout” in the context of the union between man and woman. Secondly the stranger in “Epithalamion”, a priest who bathes in a pool after feeling “a sudden zest” from observing vigorous boys play, is similar to the man who feels at peace and also sinks into a holy pool after seeing children playing in Patmore's poem. Hopkins's dictions like “summer's sovereign good,” “earthworld, airworld, waterworld,” “shadowiest,” are strikingly similar to Patmore's “in thy sovereign heart,” “The Heavens and the Earth,” “the gay Waters,” and “shadows of the heavens.” Patmore focuses on the role of a dean in a wedding, influences Hopkins' stranger and priest feeling delight with the Incarnation through the wedding sacrament. Thus it can be said Hopkins's “Epithalamion” owes much to Patmore's.

This paper explores how American poet Philip Whalen has sought to expand the Beat Generation's counterculture poetics in the 1950s by utilizing Japanese Buddhist philosopher D.T. Suzuki's modern Zen theory. For Whalen, Suzukian Zen, especially its emphasis on Zen as everydayness and freedom, provided a critical aesthetic principle as he tried to challenge the idea of cultural conformity largely mandated by Cold War US ideologies. By closely reading his early Buddhist poems such as “Harangue from Newport” (1957), “A Reflection on My Own Times” (1959), and “NEFAS” (1966), I show the ways in which Whalen enacted what Jack Kerouac calls “spiritual emancipation,” a term that highlights the essence of the Beat spirit against US nationalism and Cold War containment culture in the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, I ultimately suggest that Whalen's Buddhist poetry creates an open space of dialogue and social criticism between those who have engaged in American counterculture movement.

Sylvia Plath was a mother of two kids and went through various reproductive situations including menstruation, pregnancy, parturition, miscarriage, as well as relational situations with her newly arrived kids and a lost kid. However, her poems have been rarely analyzed in terms of motherhood poetry. Generally, she has been discussed in the discourse of confessional poetry and her private events, mostly scandalous cases, were frequently summoned as a source of her poetics.
However, her experience as a mother gives us a lens to analyze her poems from a different perspective. Focusing on the matricentric voice of Plath, I propose that her poems aimed at discussing what mothers actually feel and think, therefore, give us a chance to understand motherhood, not as a sacred experience of a glorified figure, but as a struggling and transforming experience of women's own.
Mothers go through a liminal stage once a baby comes out of their body. This strange, but oddly familiar bodily experience leads mothers to actively participate in defining what motherhood means to them as if finding an answer to a riddle, and this process made Plath write a series of maternal experiences and, at the same time, create a lyrical subject, the mother-poet that Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar called as “a significant genre for the mid- and late twentieth-century women.”

The racial injustice is manifest aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. Then, how should people react to this unrest racial conflict? There are various responses on this issue from social movement in the social network to protests on the street. However, Richard Wright confronted this matter in a different way. He put an effort to overcome all the hatred and anger and expressed through his writing. In fact, Wright is well known as prose writer; however, he composed more than 4000 haiku at the end of his life. Through his haiku, Wright shows an attitude that he transcend all the difficulties and seeks harmony and balance through nature. Therefore, this paper will explore Wright's overcoming racial injustice through new genre, haiku. Wright accused the racial conflict in a non violent way by using haiku. Furthermore, Wright overcomes such difficulties through nature as well. This attitude is still worth in this racial unrest times.

This paper purports to investigate William Empson's poetics of ambiguity represented in Seven Types of Ambiguity, framing it as “poetic skepticism.” To do so, it pays attention to a few critical occasions that he deals with certain types of ambiguity in the poems of Shakespeare, Richard Crashaw, and George Herbert via the suspension of judgment (epoché), bound to the equilibrium of hidden meanings (isosothenia). Empson's poetic skepticism illuminates poetry's natural predilection for the proliferation of meanings that fends off any dogmatic assertion of impetuous judgment and unitary interpretation. Empson's rival critics have often criticized its strenuous elicitation of open-mindedness, intellectual freedom, and epistemological modesty for propagating interpretive anarchy or even semantic nihilism. As opposed to this view, the paper explores how Empson's poetic skepticism brings about a sense of unity, while defining it as a broad, open-ended semantic community that accommodates contradictions and disjunctions entailed by poetry. Empson's distinctive critical approach testifies that all poems are inherently associated with skepticism, as they demand the suspension of judgment for its cornucorpian substance and its resistance to dogmatism.