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"Bevis, Matthew"
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Edward Lear’s Happiness
[...]happiness also tells of skill, application, achievement; one can cultivate a happy knack (\"Of a person: dexterous, skilful, especially in one's choice of appropriate words\"; OED, 4.a). \"12 The words keep each other company, for example, in his poem \"The Nutcrackers and the Sugar-tongs,\" which sees the Nutcrackers bemoaning their existence \"While every one else takes his pleasure, and never / Seems happy unless he is riding a horse\" (CN, p. 272). When the Nutcrackers and Sugar-tongs finally manage to break for the border, the poem ends: There was an Old Man of Peru, Who never knew what he should do; So he tore off his hair, and behaved like a bear, That intrinsic Old Man of Peru.
Journal Article
Poetry by Numbers
Bevis discusses why poems are numbers. The Latin numerus may refer to \"number\" and also to \"rhythm, poetry, meter,\" and such numbers have been read both as a support and as a threat. In The Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham drew attention to \"accomptable number which we call arithmeticall (arithmos) as one, two, three,\" but also to something else that poems needed, something more flowing, less counterly': \"rithmos or numerositie\" (nicely glossed by the critic Steven Connor as \"not unnumerical, but rather 'numerous'--numerous without being numberable\").
Journal Article
The Funny Thing about Trees
Elizabeth Bishop's Tombstones seems to contain a sense of humor as well as a sense of wonder. Behind the astonishing tree, manmade objects dutifully line up to stake their claims for Man. Yet the objects' effort to stand out from the crowd feels ruefully comic, especially given that the tree steals the show. Analyzing the painting, Bevis examines the relationship between the headstone and the tree.
Journal Article
Wordsworth's Folly
Granted, many of Wordsworth's critics and parodists have been sceptical about this risky comic business; the Smith brothers prefaced their skit on Wordsworth in Rejected Addresses with these lines from Richard Cumberland: \"thou art Folly's counterfeit, and she/ Who is right foolish hath the better plea;/ Nature's true Idiot I prefer to thee.\" According to the OED, he can be a \"natural fool,\" one \"congenitally deficient in reasoning powers,\" or \"a professional fool or jester,\" and Wordsworth has the tradition of the holy fool in mind when he writes to John Wilson about his Idiot Boy: \"I have often applied to Idiots, in my own mind, that sublime expression of scripture that,'their life is hidden with God.' In Observations on Man (1749), David Hartley suggested that the most natural occasion for derisive laughter is \"the little mistakes and follies of children\", but this laughter is checked when we realise that they are rightly following the dictates of nature rather than custom: \"we often take notice of this, and correct our- selves, in consequence of being diverted by it.\" (i.440-1) Friedrich Schiller echoed and extended the point when con- sidering the naïve expressions and actions of the child in his essay \"On Naive and Sentimental Poetry': \"[M]ockery of in- genuousness yields to admiration of simplicity. [...]arises the entirely unique phenomenon of a feeling in which joyous mockery, respect, and melancholy are com- pounded . .
Journal Article
Byron's ifs and buts. Review article
Review of \"The Cambridge Companion to Byron\" edited by Drummond Bone. The essays bring out the protean nature of Byron's achievement and the implicit dialogue between them - facilitated by the index - contributes much to the volume which is at its best when bringing context to bear on text and elucidating Byron's craft as a writer. The review singles out Andrew Nicholson's contribution on Byron's use of the dash as pointing to new directions in Byron studies. (Quotes from original text)
Journal Article