Abstract
Things have been present in poetry ever since it was created. We are not alluding to some obscure, marginal motifs here, but to the topic of poems as such.
The famous description of the shield of Achilles in Homer's Iliad demonstrates this: it became one of the textbook examples for any poetic description of a thing. Modern poetry brings about poems that German critic Kurt Oppert coined a new term for in 1926: Dinggedicht - a thing-poem or an object poem.
What inspired him were the works of certain poets writing in German, particularly Rainer Maria Rilke. Many poets from various countries and linguistic backgrounds followed in Rilke's footsteps and poems introduced in his collections Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1907) and Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (New Poems: The Other Part, 1908).
Naturally, the fact that the term was coined when thing poems gained a certain momentum does not mean that things entered poems at that fortunate time with Rilke as their sole poet. Ambiguous as it seems nowadays, Oppert was likely trying to stress the emergence of a new tone in post-symbolic poetry in which objective description surpasses the subjective expression.
We may dispute this claim, and indeed, some authors in this volume do, or we may take it as a point of departure to explore thingness in poetry. The individual chapters aim to introduce the topic of things and objects in poetry written in various languages and times.
Naturally, this book will not provide a complete overview; more likely, it will serve as an introduction into key terms and phrases that have been associated with things in the course of poetic history, such as "ekphrasis" and its examples from antiquity as well as the question of "objective lyricism" or "hyperobjects". This volume begins with ancient poetry, then moves on to demonstrate the significance of objects in the Chinese poetic tradition, but most importantly, it focuses on things and objects in the poetry of the twentieth and the twenty first century.
Apart from the key figures, such as R. M.
Rilke, Francis Ponge or W. C.
Williams, Polish and Russian authors are also discussed. One of the goals of this publication is to remember this topic within the Czech poetic tradition as well, be it in case of Jiří Wolker's well-known, and rather ideological poems, or of the Czech postwar Surrealist movement.
The individual chapters of this book are based on the international conference "Things in Poems - Poems of Things" which took place at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University from January 30th to February 2nd, 2019. This publication also includes the translation of two older papers by Bill Brown and William Waters that we consider highly valuable for the purpose of introducing this topic to the Czech milieu.
This book is also set to be published in its English version, though the content will differ slightly from the Czech one as it will be mostly targeted at foreign readers.