THE BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH POETRY IN ENGLISH: A Survey, 1830-1918

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=110 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="039f0f21egerdp.jpg"> <div> <B>THE BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH POETRY IN ENGLISH: A Survey, 1830-1918</B></div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="038f2f02egerdp.jpg"> <div> <A HREF="lecture_teaching.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Lecture/Teaching Topics for Adults"><U><B>Lecture/Teaching Topics for Adults</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id65.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Teenager Education Topics "><U><B>Teenager Education Topics</B></U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="id75.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="THE BEGINNINGS"><U><B>The Beginnings</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id93.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="EMMA LAZARUS (18491887) and JewishAmeric"><U><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700f099000000.gif" HEIGHT="16" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id79.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="ISAAC ROSENBERG (18901918): Jewish Poet"><U><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700f099000000.gif" HEIGHT="16" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Isaac Rosenberg</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id15.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Contact JEWISH VOICES"><U><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700f099000000.gif" HEIGHT="16" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Contact JEWISH VOICES</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Jewish Voices 200 Years of Jewish Poetry"><U><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700f099000000.gif" HEIGHT="16" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Home</B></U></A></div> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" height=370 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="03bf0f03.jpg"> <div> <I><B>The Beginnings of Jewish Poetry in English, 1830-1918 (a survey)</B></I></div> <bR> <div>     Jews have been writing poems in English since 1800. Why is  there still no history of this complex, exciting work, much less an anthology for both sides of the Atlantic? Three of the four poets in this series are women, whose voices have normally been suppressed; the fourth, Isaac Rosenberg, has been co-opted as a British patriot.</div> <div>     </div> <div>     These writers have attempted against tough odds to champion the value of their Jewish legacies in Christian cultures; they have broken taboos, suppressed, satirized, compromised, borrowed and reclaimed.  Their forms, their rhetorics show struggle and achievement; they manifest both the cravings and the pains of literary proto-Zionism–-as they work against Christian Victorian norms. </div> <div>     </div> <div>      These sessions expose the term “great literature” as a mask for “Christian literature.”</div> <div>     </div> <div>      A) <B>Grace Aguilar</B> (1816-1847), popular as a novelist,  but ignored as a poet: a Sephardic English Jew  fixated on themes of exile and assimilation at just the crucial time when British Jews were seeking full civil rights.  Aguilar is the first Jew to write midrashic poems  on Biblical themes; she is also among the first to jump the boundaries of Victorian women’s “domestic sphere” to write explicitly political poetry.  Her work is vigorous, stark, subtle in its critique of British Christian culture.</div> <div>     </div> <div>      B)  <B>Amy Levy</B> (1861-1889), also a novelist, published three volumes of poetry before she committed suicide.  The first Jewish woman to matriculate at a British university (Cambridge), deeply but cunningly indebted to Robert Browning, she writes feminist poems that assault the Christian and Hellenic foundations of modern culture; simultaneously she writes poems--plaintive, furtive, brash, structurally stunning--about her exclusion from British Christian society.</div> <div>      </div> <div>     C) <B>Emma Lazarus</B> (1849-1887), known only by less than half the sonnet she wrote for the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, published three volumes of poetry and a passionate prose tract decrying the Russian pogroms and analyzing the conditions of world Jewry.  Her poetry reflects her understanding of Jewish history, her fascination with specific Jews (Rashi, Heine), and her mastery of traditional Western forms.  The neglect of her poetry has been an appalling, if typical, oversight in American literary history.</div> <div>      </div> <div>     D) <B>Isaac Rosenberg</B> (1890-1918), eclipsed by the Christian Wilfrid Owen as the sacrificial soldier-poet of World War I, presents a deliberately roughened and highly crafted modernism.  His poems explore Jewish themes of prejudice, community, and Zionism in vivid, strikingly new language.  The “war poems” are notable for a pathos of the human body unlike anything found in Owen.  His many, overlooked lyrics on Biblical themes--- particularly on King David and the Babylonian Captivity---are rich, spare, simultaneously traditional and incisively new.</div> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>