School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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End date: 2003 × Subject: criticism and interpretation ×

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    A pompous high priest: Urizen's ancient phallic religion in The four Zoas
    OTTO, PETER ( 2001)
    Despite the ubiquity of the word "phallus" and its cognates in feminist, deconstructive and psychoanalytic (particularly Lacanian) criticism of the last three decades, Blake critics have shown little interest in the remarkable array of phalli found in the illustrations to The Four Zoas. Arguably, this neglect extends to the illustrations as a whole. In 1973 Grant noted that "the publication of G. E. Bentley Jr.'s monumental Clarendon edition of Vala or The Four Zoas in 1963" had not inaugurated "a tradition of commentary on the drawings." Twenty-seven years later, the situation is not markedly different.This neglect is in part due to the manifold difficulties of the poem. As Ault writes, "The Four Zoas is the most uncanonical, unmanageable, and recalcitrant text Blake ever wrote. The poem's internal operations exceed the possibility of mastery by virtue of their heterogeneity and complexity." These difficulties are generated in part by two factors: the assumption that after The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Swedenborg exerted no significant influence on Blake's artistic practice or iconography; and the still widespread commitment in Blake studies to an idealizing, logocentric (rather than prophetic imagination. The first discounts the most important context for the poem’s illuminations; the second leads viewers to downplay or ignore the poem’s powerful representations of the tormented, suffering body of humanity.
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    Gwen Harwood
    Trigg, Stephanie (Oxford University Press, 1994)
    The poetry of Gwen Harwood is famously passionate and sensual. Some readers have sought to interpret the dramatic situations of her poems as autobiographical narratives. Conversely, when these scenarios seem too suggestive, Harwood's more personal poems are sometimes allegorised into safer, more neutral statements about art and poetics. In this lively book Stephanie Trigg argues that greater attention to Gwen Harwood's ability to impersonate or improvise a range of voices can liberate the reader from the tyranny of the biographical equation. Trigg pays tribute to the passion and eroticism of Harwood's love poetry without seeking to probe the more private mysteries of its composition. In doing so, she posits a new way of reading one of Australia's finest poets. Harwood's fascination with the nature of art is also taken up in a study of her affiliations with poetic tradition. These relations are never straightforward, and this book suggests that feminist literary theory can help us read Harwood's complex, dynamic relations with the poetry of the past. Its conclusions will surprise many readers.