Some things I’ve written on poetry, dictionaries, etc.:
.
2024
‘Antedating (in) the Oxford English Dictionary’ in Notes and Queries 71.1 (2024) 95-98. [link] [pdf]
.
.
.
2023
‘Women’s Words and the Words of Women in the Oxford English Dictionary’ in Review of English Studies 74.316 (2023), 730-751. [link] [pdf].
‘Women’s Words and the Words of Women in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1700-2022: Supplementary Data & Notes’. 2023 [pdf].
.
.
2021
‘ “Alien” vs Editor: World English in the Oxford English Dictionary, Policies, Practices, and Outcomes 1884-2020’ in International Journal of Lexicography 34.1 (2021) 39-65 [link] [PDF].
This article discusses the changing ways in which the Oxford English Dictionary has recorded the vocabularies of ‘World English’—English as spoken outside of the British Isles—from the first to the present edition. The final section details changes in policy and methods in the current revision and expansion, evaluating both its practices vis-à-vis its predecessors, and the picture it gives us of the current state of World English.
2020
.
The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry (Oxford: OUP, 2020). [link]
A Choice Reviews highly recommended title.
Read Mia Gaudern’s review in Modern Language Review.
Read Stephanie Burt’s review in Modern Philology.
Click image to embiggen the cover (image from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi (10thC).
This book studies a selection of poets inhabiting our ‘Age of the Arbitrary’, whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of ‘fallacy’ or ‘true meaning’. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem, The Life of Words (the book, not the blog!) pays extended attention to poems by G. M. Hopkins, Anne Waldman, Ciaran Carson, and Anne Carson, and to the collected works of Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, and J. H. Prynne.
.
.
‘Poetry in the Oxford English Dictionary: A Quantitative Profile’ in Poetry and the Dictionary, edited by Andrew Blades and Piers Pennington (Liverpool University Press, 2020). [link]
My chapter in this collection of essays on poetry and dictionaries gives an account of the role that poetry has played in the OED’s corpus of quotation evidence, driven mainly by quantitative analyses of the three main editions (OED1, OED2, and the current OED3 revision).
.
.
2017.
‘Getting More Out of the Oxford English Dictionary (by Putting More In)’ in Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 38.2 (2017): 106-113. [link] [pdf]
A report on my project to enhance the Oxford English Dictionary with metadata about quotation genre, author gender, edition of inclusion, and much more.
\
2016
‘The “Oxford Dictionary” in T. S. Eliot’ in Notes & Queries 63.2 (2016): 293-296. [link] [pdf]
A short article discussing Eliot’s uses of the dictionary, including an apparent confusion over what the term “Oxford Dictionary” might refer to..’
.
.
.
‘T. S. Eliot in The Oxford English Dictionary’ in Notes & Queries 63.2 (2016): 296-301.[link] [pdf]
Another shorty, this time looking at Robert Burchfield’s treatment of Eliot as a source of quotations in the second Supplement of the OED..
.
.
.
Etymologies (poems by Asa Boxer) [link]
I wrote a companion essay to Asa Boxer’s chapbook of etymologically derived poems.
.
.
.
.
.
2015
“All corruptible things: Geoffrey Hill’s Etymological Crux” in Modern Philology 112.3 (2015) : 522-553. [link] [pdf]
In this article I trace out some ways in which the intellectual and theological traditions of etymological study have shaped central, persistent difficulties in Hill’s poetry and poetics. One reason the piece is as long as it is is that these are true difficulties for Hill, and at times intractable. His working out of these cruxes, in poetry and prose, involves first a process of working them in. In my discussion I touch on medieval Jewish and Christian uses of etymology, but most of the focus is on Hill’s engagement with Milton, Coleridge, and Hopkins. There is also some discussion of Eliot, Donne, Blake, and Pavese. Important words that receive attention include: actuality/reality, anacolouthon, arbitrary, atonement, become, be/is (to be), cant, case, crux, fable, métier, solving/solution, and un-/un-re-.
“Method as Tautology in the Digital Humanities” in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing) 30.2 (2015): 280-293 (advance access, Nov 30, 2013). [link] [pdf]
In this article I develop a concept of method in computer assisted literary criticism, using some my recent work with the OED and poetry. The article is both a case study describing my work modelling allusion, influence, and intertextuality, and also—and more to the point—a reflection on the intellectual activities of modelling and method-making, and their relationship to the humanistic research questions that give rise to them. In “Method as Tautology” I develop a series of metaphors to think about the relationships among researcher, research question, research object, and digital method, and the relation of these to the disciplinary concerns of literary criticism. Along the way I discuss the “discipline” of DH, its inter-disciplinarity, and how it might relate to other disciplines, and relate them together.
2013
“Poetic Antagonyms” in The Comparatist 37 (2013): 169-85. [link] [pdf]
In this article I discuss what happens when a certain type of word–one which has two meanings that contradict each other–occurs in a poem. The paradigmatic such word in English is cleave, which means both “split” and “join” (and so figures its own split meaning, the two opposite senses joined within it). I discuss this and other words, and their implications for reading, in a small selection of poems by Dickinson, Heaney, Plath, Hill, and Rosenberg. Shakespeare and Crashaw and Keats are in there, and so are Empson, Derrida, Hillis Miller, Plato, Freud, and the KJV.
2010
Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill (Oxford: OUP, 2010). [link]
In this book I think about the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century’s leading poet-critics. I start with with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas and continues by situating these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also as drastically other. This otherness is bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot’s career-long contemplation of the ideal of poetic ‘integrity’, and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century’s great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. I then go on to argue, via close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.
Defending Poetry has been reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, Essays in Criticism, Christianity & Literature, The Heythrop Journal, The Year’s Work in English Studies, American Literary Scholarship, Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies.
The book has been cited in J. Quinn, Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (OUP: 2015); S. Lidström, Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (Routledge: 2015); M. Sperling, Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Language (OUP: 2014); Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (OUP, 2013); F. L. Aldama, Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry (Palgrave: 2013); S. Khagi, Silence and the Rest: Verbal Skepticism in Russian Poetry (Northwestern UP: 2013); C. Bugan, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation (Legenda: 2013); A. Hassan, Annotations to Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! (Glossator: 2012); P. Pennington, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (OUP: 2013); and S. Ang, in Texas Studies in Literature & Language (2013).
2009
‘Tête-à-tête, Face-à-face: Brodsky, Levinas, and the Ethics of Poetry’ in Poetics Today 30.2 (Summer 2009). [link] [pdf]
Probably this was my first “good” publication. In the article I tried to place Emmanuel Levinas’s writings alongside Joseph Brodsky’s critical prose. It occurred to me that, like Levinas’s radical commitment to the other, Brodsky’s radical commitment to poetry—what Seamus Heaney called his ‘peremptory trust in words’—was set at a similar theoretical distance from the idea that the didactic, the deontological, or the political may be constitutive of ethics. I didn’t mind admitting from the outset that Brodsky’s maxim, ‘aesthetics is the mother of ethics’, is inimical to Levinas’s project—which is to establish ethics as the mother of philosophy, as it were. The rapprochement attempted here was never intended to be final in any sense. Instead, in collocating Levinasian reflection on encounter, the originary, and the face-à-face with Brodsky’s writings on poetry as a ‘tête-à-tête relation’, I wanted to give philosophical substance to Brodsky’s musings on the ethics of aesthetic encounter while simultaneously demonstrating one way Levinas can inform literary criticism. Along the way I was able to make a correction to current convention in English-language writing on Levinas, suggesting what I think is a preferable set of terms (because more accurate, more precise, and yet simpler) to render his several ways of designating self and other: Autrui, autre/Autre, moi/Moi.