The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

1426 Pages·1993·138.03 MB·English

THE NEW
PRINCETON
ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF POETRY AND POETICS
THE NEW '
PRINCETON
ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF POETRY
AND POETICS
ALEX PREMINGER
AND T. V. F. BROGAN
CO-EDITORS
FRANKJ. WARNKE,"*" O. B. HARDISON,
AND EARL MINER
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
1993
Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
41 William Street, Princeton New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom:
Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Preparation of this volume was made possible in part by generous grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency
dedicated to furthering the values of humane scholarship and culture in
America, and by grants from other major foundations and private donors who
wish to remain anonymous. Without their support this book would not have
been possible. Publication has been aided by a grant from the Lacy Lockert
Fund of Princeton University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, co-editors;
FrankJ. Warnke, O. B. Hardison, Jr., and
Earl Miner, associate editors
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references
ISBN: 0-691-03271-8 (hardback edition)
ISBN: 0-691-02123-6 (paperback edition)
1. Poetry—Dictionaries. 2. Poetics—Dictionaries.
3. Poetry—History and Criticism.
I. Preminger, Alex. II. Brogan, T. V. F. (Terry V. F.)
PN1021.P75 808.1'03—dc20 92-41887
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the
guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production
Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Composed in ITC New Baskerville and custom fonts
Designed and produced by Leximetrics, Inc., South Bend, Indiana
Printed in the United States of America
79 108
for
Jacqueline Vaught Brogan
Augusta Preminger
and for
R. M. E. De Rycke
PREFACE
This is a book of knowledge, of facts, theories, questions, and informed
judgment, about poetry. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive, comparative,
reasonably advanced, yet readable reference for all students, teachers, scholars,
poets, or general readers who are interested in the history of any poetry in any
national literature of the world, or in any aspect of the technique or criticism of
poetry. It provides surveys of 106 national poetries; descriptions of poetic forms
and genres major and minor, traditional and emergent; detailed explanations of
the devices of prosody and rhetoric; and overviews of all major schools of poetry
ancient and modern, Western and Eastern. It provides balanced and comprehen-
sive accounts of the major movements and issues in criticism and literary theory,
and discussion of the manifold relations of poetry to the other fields of human
thought and activity—history, science, politics, religion, philosophy, music, the
visual arts.
This third edition follows upon the first edition of 1965, supplemented in 1974,
which was well received and which has been consulted, over the years, by countless
readers both in America and abroad: indeed, one Burmese scholar wrote us to say
" there are relatively few books in our library, and the Princeton Encyclopedia is one
of the most heavily used of all. We have few good accounts of English poetry
available to us here; indeed, we have few reliable accounts of Burmese poetry
either. We send our students to the Encyclopedia for both."
In late 1984, when the Editors agreed to undertake a third edition, it was
obvious to all that what would be required would be almost entirely a new text.
The period since 1965 has been a time of extraordinarily vigorous, almost dizzying
change in literary studies: both the amount and the variety of work has increased
geometrically over that prior to 1965, with the result that issues of interpretation,
history, gender, culture, and theory now dominate the critical scene which were
largely unknown in 1965. The same can be said for developments in the poetries
of Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America: recent political changes in
these areas of the world have been swift, extensive, and complex, resulting in
burgeoning national literatures. All told, the last 25 years have witnessed enor-
mous changes in both the practice of criticism in the West and also the writing of
poetry around the world.
-[vii]-
PREFACE
We have sought to produce a work which retains what was most valuable from
the last edition, adds extensive coverage of all new poetries and critical theories,
provides more extensive bibliographies on every topic for further reading, im-
proves on cross-referencing, and is written in clear prose, yet keeps within the
bounds of a single volume. Virtually no former entry has been reprinted without
significant changes, and over 90% of the original entries have been extensively
revised. Most major entries have been rewritten altogether. We have added 162
entirely new entries. Still, we have not diluted the editorial standards for scope,
treatment, accuracy, and clarity of discourse which readers have come to expect
from this book. The design of the book, its organizational principles and format,
will be familiar to readers of the previous editions.
This edition differs from its predecessors in five respects. First, some of the
accounts given in the original edition were the best of their kind available both
then and, with moderate revision, now. In these cases, we thought it essential to
build the new texts upon what our expert reviewers told us was irreplaceable in
the previous editions. We have not sought new treatments simply because they are
new. We have not, however, left former treatments unchanged; on the contrary,
we have in many cases reduced and combined the treatments given in the original
entries so as to make room for discussion of new perspectives on those topics. One
of the significant reasons for undertaking a new Encyclopedia is not merely so that
we can address new topics or approaches but also so that we can survey new work
on old topics. We are now able to give much more sophisticated accounts of some
traditional subjects (e.g. prosody) than were previously possible.
Second, we have increased dramatically our coverage of emergent and non-
Western poetries. It was the present work which first provided American readers
with extended surveys of the world's poetries, and we have sought to build upon
that foundation. Our foremost concern has been to produce more extensive, more
accurate, and more sophisticated accounts of the development of poetry in each
language. We now provide coverage of every significant poetic tradition in the
world, coverage which has increased, all told, by fully a third over that in the last
edition. We have made major expansions of our treatment of African, Middle
Eastern, Central American, South American, Caribbean, Pacific, and Asian poet-
ries. Certain traditions have been given greatly increased space. The numerous
languages and poetries of the Indian subcontinent are surveyed in an entry on
"Indian Poetry" which tripled in size and is flanked by new entries on "Indian
Poetics" and "Indian Prosody." African poetry written in both vernacular and
foreign languages is now covered in seven entries. Our treatment of the several
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PREFACE
indigenous languages of the Americas has been expanded.
This effort reflects not an intention to give disproportionate space to one group
of traditions over another but rather the dramatic increase in our knowledge of
non-Western poetries relative to Western ones over the past 25 years. We have
sought to bring a wider perspective into many other kinds of entries as well. In
many entries on poetics and theory, e.g. the entry on "Poetics" itself, we have
worked to differentiate the discussions of Oriental and Occidental poetics. We
have added a comparative dimension to a wide range of entries which treat topics
that might be assumed to be chiefly Western, e.g. "Epic," "Narrative Poetry,"
"Lyric" (now a global survey), "Love Poetry," "Rhyme," "Meter," and "Allegory,"
and even to smaller entries, e.g. "Rhyme-prose" (which discusses not only Latin
but Chinese, Persian, and Arabic) and "Poetic Contests." We have added major
new entries on Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese poetics.
Third, we now cover all those movements in recent criticism and literary theory
that bear on poetry. We provide entirely new accounts of "Criticism," "Theory,"
"Poetics," "Romantic and Postromantic Poetics," "Twentieth-century Poetics"
(five newly written sections), "Modernism and Postmodernism," "Structuralism,"
"Semiotics," "Marxist Criticism," "Psychological Criticism," "Feminist Poetics,"
"Reader-response Criticism," "Cultural Criticism," "Historicism," "Deconstruc-
tion," "Ethics and Criticism," "Pluralism," and "Representation." We expanded
the entry on "Poetry, Theories of." Several of these new entries are among the
longest in the volume. Throughout, we have sought to provide a balanced treat-
ment of critical issues and noncritical ones: many entries are subdivided so as to
treat both theory and history, for example.
Still, we must reiterate that this is primarily an encyclopedia of poetry, not an
encyclopedia of criticism. We treat those aspects of critical theory that bear on
poetry to any significant degree; hence the discussions always return to poetry.
When the first edition was compiled, in the early 1960s, the axes of criticism in
America were largely aligned with the study of lyric poetry, and New Criticism
overwhelmingly dominated pedagogy in American universities. In the intervening
25 years, the axes of criticism have in part shifted away from poetry to the study
of criticism itself, and poetry itself is now much less read in America than prose
narrative. Yet poetic traditions are flourishing elsewhere in the world, and readers
everywhere still want information about the forms and techniques of poetry. Many
readers will come to the present work for a clear explanation of hermeneutics or
deconstruction, of course, but many others will come for an informative overview
of Chinese poetry, and some will come simply wanting an accurate definition of
-[ix]-
PREFACE
zeugma. We hope to meet all these needs. In addition, where it has seemed
appropriate, we have allowed our coverage to extend a little way past poetry into
prose narrative and drama. Theory of narrative is addressed in long entries on
"Narrative Poetry" and "Epic," theory of drama, similarly, in "Dramatic Poetry,"
"Tragedy," and "Comedy." Conversely, some other entries that might be thought
merely to concern narrative, e.g. "Fiction" and "Plot," have been conceived more
broadly, as is proper.
In the selection of new topics, we have exercised care. Rigorous screening has
reduced a much longer list of current critical topics and terms to 162 new entries.
We do not provide coverage of critical terms which are minor or narrow or which
have had a very short half-life: these can be found in any of the numerous
dictionaries and literary handbooks that have appeared in recent years.
Fourth, the Editors have taken a more active role in the building of bibliog-
raphies. On virtually every topic, we now provide more extended yet still rigorous
finding-lists for further reading. As before, bibliographies are confined to secon-
dary works only; primary texts are normally cited in the text of the entries.
Bibliographic items appear in chronological order, all works by one author being
listed together; editions cited are the best or most recent ones that are authorita-
tive, not the first, and reprints are ignored. Periodical abbreviations conform to
the acronyms in the MLA International Bibliography or other standard sources such
as L'Annee philologique.
Fifth, cross-referencing both within entries and by independent blind entries—
a practice not fully exploited in previous editions, which were not prepared on
computer—has been greatly expanded. Experience with the first two editions
showed that the value of cross-references is difficult to overestimate. We have
added nearly five hundred new blind entries and literally thousands of cross-refer-
ences in the text and at the ends of entries. In blind entries, cross-references are
often listed in order of significance rather than alphabetically.
The author or authors of each entry are listed by acronym at the ends of their
respective contributions. The sequence of initials at the end of an entry does not,
therefore, necessarily reflect decreasing order of responsibility for authorship. The
relations between old authors and new (i.e. between original texts and revisions)
and the proportions of work among multiple authors have been varied and
complex; in some cases the author whose initials appear last was the principal
author. It has proven impossible to represent all these relations succinctly, and
since this entire volume has been very much a collaborative effort, it has seemed
to the editors reasonable simply to list authors by initials in chronological se-
-[x]-
PREFACE
quence. Note, too, that sections of longer entries are commonly separately
authored, so that one acronym at the end of an entry does not necessarily indicate
that it had a sole author. We have tried to give credit to each person who made a
significant contribution to an article. The names and affiliations of authors corre-
sponding to their acronyms will be found in the list of Contributors, in a format
which we believe to be improved over that used in previous editions. By policy,
every manuscript submitted was read by the Editors and refereed by at least one
independent expert, often several, then revised by its author in light of these
reviews before being accepted for publication.
Some comment should be made about the circumstances in which this volume
appears. The original editorial team which began work in 1984 comprised five
editors, who divided responsibilities as follows: Professor Preminger handled the
national poetry entries; Professor Brogan handled poetics, prosody, rhetoric, and
genre; Professor Miner handled Asian poetries; Professor Warnke handled trans-
lations; and Professor Hardison handled criticism. But in 1988, Professor Warnke
was killed in an accident in Antwerp, and in 1990, Professor Hardison died
unexpectedly in Washington, D.C. Finally, Professor Preminger, the major force
behind this book since its inception, was forced to withdraw prematurely in 1988
on account of declining health and unsuccessful surgery. Editorial work sub-
sequent to these events fell to the remaining full Editor. For these and, even more
directly, other reasons having to do with the state of the professoriate and the
conditions of knowledge just now, this has been a difficult time to attempt a work
such as the present one.
A reference work must always distance itself from its time while it works to
embrace that time. It has not been our aim simply to cover recent trends: an eye
for fashion is not one of the requisites of reference works. Our purpose has been
to record, assimilate, and appraise new perspectives, not to embody any one of
them. In certain respects the shape of the Encyclopedia has adapted itself to the
changed critical climate which it seeks to embody and describe, while in other
respects—and in the long view these are surely the more important—it has sought
to place new critical perspectives within the larger philosophical contexts so far
developed for discourse in poetics, giving due attention to ways in which the new
views may have altered the boundaries of those contexts. In certain respects—on
issues of gender, for example—critical work over the past 25 years has altered the
nature of our thinking about literature permanently. But some other theories have
quickly come and gone, and yet others are still too new to judge very well. We do
not bring forth a new edition of this work in the belief that the new modes of
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