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King David and the Idea of Jewish Poetry
David, the “monarch minstrel,” has been a powerful figure for English-speaking writers, who have taken his harp--and its reappearance in Psalm 137--as an emblem of their literary aspirations, their sense of diaspora, their difficulties in writing new songs in a strange land, and their (Zionist) hopes for the Ingathering of the Exiles.
Female as well as male poets have taken David’s harp from the willow tree to intervene politically in the Jewish-Gentile encounters of the last two centuries, using the Davidic idea to express their sense of continuity with traditional Judaic culture and the possibilities for Jewishness in the modern world.
19th and 20th century works by such writers as Penina Moise, Marion Moss, Isaac Rosenberg, Louis Untermeyer, Abraham Moses Klein, Harvey Shapiro, Charles Reznikoff, William Pillin, Arthur Jacobs, Dannie Abse, and others.
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