Ineke Bockting Livres

Alors que l’Europe s’embrase en août 1914 sans que personne n’imagine encore l’ampleur du conflit, les débats sont déjà nombreux sur la pertinence de l’engagement qu’il soit politique, idéologique, économique ou religieux. Les Etats, les groupes d’opinion et les individus optent pour des positions dictées par leur conscience ou par les intérêts politiques. La guerre durant, les neutralismes les plus affirmés vont être mis à mal. Dans le cadre d’une approche historique, géographique, littéraire et artistique, l’objet de cet ouvrage est d’examiner l’évolution des enjeux géopolitiques et des débats d’ordre moral, spirituel ou idéologique qui ont conduit les défenseurs de la neutralité à maintenir leur position pendant toutes ces années ou à s’engouffrer de gré ou de force dans la voie de l’interventionnisme.

«The duty of the present is neither to copy nor to deny the past but to resurrect it», wrote W. H. Auden in 1948. The European voices that William B. Yeats and Sir Geoffrey Hill choose to resurrect reflect their shared hope in the future of humanity, as the essays in this book demonstrate. From Greek and Roman voices, through the Italian Renaissance and into our troubled present, these poets use myth, as Auden suggested, «to make private experiences public» and «public events personal». They write about the past to maintain continuity and provide the transmission of cultural values or to avoid the repetition of atrocities. As visionary poets, their talents at reviving the poetic voice captivate and inspire. The essays in this volume elucidate both their poetic vision and resistance. The chapters in this book derive from an international conference on Yeats and Hill that took place at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 2013. They are preceded by abstracts and a general introduction in French.

Poetry and religion have been linked since the first written texts of humanity, even before the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible. Exploring the relationship between poetry and religion within the realm of poetry in English, this volume begins in medieval times and ends with a collection of poems published in 2010, with strong emphasis given to the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. Nineteen essays cover the work of poets from various periods and continents, ranging from Julian of Norwich and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing to Thomas Traherne, George Herbert, John Donne, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, R. S. Thomas, Grace Nichols, Jean Breeze, Elizabeth Jennings, James Dickey, and Geoffrey Hill. This book will be of special interest to lovers and scholars of poetry. Close reading of texts, combined with original research and varying critical frameworks, provide a stimulus to read or re-read the poems discussed. The texts in this volume represent the papers given at an international symposium held at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 2011.