The table talk of W.H. Auden
In New York, between 1946 and 1948, the scholar and poet Alan Ansen made rapid notes of Auden's inimitable conversation. This book is a record of Auden's private, offhand and sometimes wayward remarks and opinions about art, literature, music, politics, religion and sexuality.
James Merrill’s Secret Scansions
ABSTRACT: As the Ouija board provided James Merrill with his esoteric themes, iambic pentameter was his medium for “evoking fresh speech.” He attributed his unfamiliar rhythms to “secret scanning” in a meter that had been stable for centuries. His frequent use of less common modulations like headless lines, epic cesuras, and compression often makes the verse—both lyric and epic—sound loose or unmetrical but also rich and strange, even when the themes are more down-to-earth. The essay reviews the fine details of iambic scansion Merrill used to create unprecedented rhythms.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.