Marianne Moore

#2

2005

Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century French poetry. Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valery, W. B. Yeats, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jacques Derrida. From his early twenties until the time of his death, this great writer produced poems of astonishing originality and beauty, many of which have become classics. In the Collected Poems, Henry Weinfield brings the oeuvre of this European master to life for an English-speaking audience, essentially for the first time. All of the poems - in verse and prose - that the author chose to retain are here, superbly rendered by Weinfield in a translation that comes remarkably close to Mallarme's own voice. Weinfield conveys not simply the meaning but the spirit and music of the French originals.^ Deeply affected by the religious crisis that shook the world of nineteenth-century intellectuals, Mallarme saw his task as "the Orphic explanation of the earth." His response was to develop a symbolic vocabulary with which to explore the deepest philosophical questions in highly condensed forms. Whether writing poetry in verse (the Poesies) or prose (the Poemes en Prose), or inventing an altogether new genre - as he did in the amazing "Un Coup de Des," his final work - Mallarme was a poet not only of supreme artistry but of great difficulty. To illuminate Mallarme's poetry for the twentieth-century reader, Weinfield provides an extensive commentary, which is an important work of criticism in its own right. Here the translator defines the major symbols in the poems, elucidates many of the difficulties and complexities of the poetry, and sets each poem in the larger context of the work as a whole.^ Weinfield also includes an introduction and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Publication of the Collected Poems is a major literary event in the English-speaking world. Here at last are the poetic works of an important figure in modern literature, masterfully translated and presented.

#3

Modern Biblical criticism (as opposed to pre-Modern criticism) is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible without appealing to the supernatural. During the eighteenth century, when it began as historical-biblical criticism, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: (1) the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and (2) the belief that the reconstruction of the historical events behind the texts, as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed, would lead to a correct understanding of the Bible. This sets it apart from earlier, pre-critical methods; from the anti-critical methods of those who oppose criticism-based study; from the post-critical orientation of later scholarship; and from the multiple distinct schools of criticism into which it evolved in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The emergence of biblical criticism is most often attributed by scholars to the German Enlightenment (c. 1650 – c. 1800), but some trace its roots back further, to the Reformation. Its principal scholarly influences were rationalist and Protestant in orientation; German pietism played a role in its development, as did British deism.