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Reder, John P. "Seeing tongue, tasting eye words as food in American verse /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1851880381&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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McCurry, Sara Kathleen. "The places of contemporary American poetry /." view abstract or download file of text, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3181111.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2005.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 260-266). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Cole, Jessica. "American Sign Language poetry literature in motion /." Diss., [La Jolla, Calif.] : University of California, San Diego, 2009. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p1462125.
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Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009.Title from first page of PDF file (viewed April 3, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-76).
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Jenkins, Sarah E. "Facing God : contemporary American devotional poetry /." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2008. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd2392.pdf.
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Radway, John North. "The Fate of Epic in Twentieth-Century American Poetry." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26718713.
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This dissertation explores the afterlife of the Western epic tradition in the poetry of the United States of America after World War Two and in the wake of high modernism. The ancient, Classical conception of epic, as formulated by Aristotle, involves a crucial, integral opposition between ethos, or character, and mythos, or the defining features, narratives, and histories of the world through which ethos moves. The classical epic and its direct line of succession, from Homer to Virgil to Dante to Milton and even to Joel Barlow, uses the opposition between ethos and mythos to create literary tension and drive. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, Ezra Pound upended this tradition dynamic by attempting to create a new form of epic in which mythos, not ethos, was the principal agonist, and in which large-scale aspects of the political, literary, and economic world struggled for survival on their own terms, thus divorcing epic from its traditional reliance on ethos. Chapter One explores this dubious revolution in terms of Pound’s larger project of breaking away from his nineteenth century forbears. The remaining chapters comprise three case studies of the divergent ways in which later twentieth century poets sought to salvage something of the traditional epic dynamic from the ruin wracked by Pound and his acolytes. Chapter Two explores John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, an epic-like poem that models itself subtly on Dante’s Commedia while placing a profound and deliberate emphasis on ethos even at the expense of mythos. Chapter Three explores Robert Lowell’s career-long effort to expose the terrifyingly inexorable nature of mythos, constructing an inconceivably enormous presence against whom character and divinity alike struggle in vain. Finally, Chapter Four examines Adrienne Rich’s early and middle years as an attempt to outline and enact a politically and socially efficacious means by which ethos might finally overcome mythos and liberate itself not only from the recursive historical traps of Pound, modernism, fascism, and patriarchy, but also from the literary history and tradition that lured humanity into believing that those traps ever existed. Berryman’s intervention in the epic tradition is heavily literary and overtly personal; Lowell’s is cynical, apocalyptic, and descriptively political; and Rich’s is revolutionary and messianic. Together, these three poets represent a meaningful sampling of the afterlife of the epic tradition in late twentieth-century America.English
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Corrigan, Paul T. "Wrestling with Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry." Scholar Commons, 2015. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5671.
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In the current “secular age,” more and more people find beliefs and behaviors associated with traditional religion intellectually and ethically untenable. At the same time, many “postsecular” writers, both believers and nonbelievers, continue to write with religious or religiously-inflected forms, themes, and purposes. In the United States, postsecular poets “wrestle with angels” by engaging constructively and deconstructively with matters traditionally considered the domain of religion and spirituality. While the recent work of Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, John McClure and others puts the concept of the postsecular at the cutting edge of various fields of study, including religion, sociology, and literature, this dissertation presents the first study of contemporary postsecular poetry. The central question is, how should we define and describe contemporary postsecular poetry in the United States and how should we understand its religious and literary significance? To answer this question, this dissertation presents a broad survey of postsecular contemporary American poetry, offers extended analyses of the work of two preeminent postsecular poets—Li-Young Lee and Scott Cairns—and probes the implications for readers of the poetic forms found in such texts.
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Allen, Edward Joseph Frank. "Lyric technologies : the sound media of American modernist poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708318.
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Ma, Ming-Qian. "Poetry as re-reading : American Avant-garde poetry and the poetics of counter-method /." Evanston Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2008. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0809/2008000308-t.html.
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Shaffer, Erin Louise. "WHAT'S MISSED: POEMS." Oxford, Ohio : Miami University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1058649471.
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Thirkell, Adrian Marcus. "Freedom and Association in the Poetry of Robert Frost." W&M ScholarWorks, 1991. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625678.
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Salzer, Maureen Shannon 1959. "Modernism's ventriloquist texts: American poetry, gender, and Indian identity." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282683.
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This dissertation analyzes the intersections of modern American poetry, Native American literature, American anthropology, modernist movements in literature and art, and American social and political history between 1890 and 1930. These seemingly disparate phenomena, taken together, constitute a revolution in American literary and cultural history. To connect the subject areas, the initial chapter develops a theoretical framework based upon postmodern, feminist, postcolonial, and cultural studies theories which analyze power relationships among groups. Issues germane to the discussion include: the politics of representation, particularly of marginalized groups such as Native Americans; the marketing of experimental, modernist literature; the translation of texts from oral cultural traditions into printed English; the factor of gender as it relates to dominant culture appropriations of non-dominant-culture texts and materials; and the commodification of the landscape and native cultures of the Western and Southwestern United States. Each of the next three chapters focuses on a non-Indian woman who, in some fashion, placed what came to be known as Indian literary art before the non-Indian reading public: Natalie Curtis, Mary Austin, and Harriet Monroe. While two of these women considered themselves advocates of Indian rights, all contributed, in various ways, to the stereotyping of Indian peoples and cultures prevalent between 1890 and 1930 and continuing today. Each chapter demonstrates a move forward in time and further from the Native American contexts in which the texts originated. Ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis published The Indians' Book in 1907 and introduced the reading public to a large collection of Indian verbal art. Poet and writer Mary Austin wrote and published "re-expressions" of Indian verbal art and, in 1923, published The American Rhythm, a book which argues that indigenous models offer non-Indian writers the greatest potential for the development of a truly American literature. Editor Harriet Monroe published "Indian-like" poetry in her highly-influential Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, including two "aboriginal" numbers or issues. The final chapter analyzes the work of contemporary poet Wendy Rose (Hopi-Miwok), arguing that Rose effectively speaks back against the damaging influence of non-Indian appropriations of Indian texts.
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Rinner, Jenifer. "Midcentury American Poetry and the Identity of Place." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/18524.
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This dissertation argues that the midcentury period from 1945-1967 offers a distinct historical framework in American poetry that bears further study. This position counters most other literary history of this period wherein midcentury poets are divided into schools or coteries based on literary friendships and movements: the San Francisco Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, the Confessionals, the Black Arts poets, the Deep Image poets, and the New Critics, to invoke only the most prominent designations. Critics also typically share a reluctance to cross gender or racial lines in their conceptualizations of the period. Of the few books that survey this period as a whole, most propose the defining features of midcentury poetry as formal innovation (or lack thereof) and a renunciation of the past.
By contrast, I argue that such divisions and limiting categories do not attend to some of the most important features of midcentury poetry. I suggest that midcentury poetry most often demonstrates a renewed interest in locating a particular identity in a specific place. To illustrate this point, I explore depictions of identity and place in the works of three poets who are rarely studied together, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop. Each chapter examines the changes in poets' careers by focusing on how the relationship between place and identity differs in their early and late work. I contend that the few generalizations we have about the trajectory of this period (that poets moved from using more traditional forms to more open forms, for example) are not entirely accurate and, even more, that the accounts that we have of the poets' individual careers could be enhanced by a comparison between their early and late depictions of identity and place. I argue that the concerted exploration of the intersection of place and identity calls for a reconsideration of midcentury poetry: not just the categories we have but the poets and poems we read.
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Randall, D'Arcy Clare. ""Adam and his mother" : maternal performance in late twentieth-century American women's poetry /." Digital version:, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3008425.
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Upton, Corbett Earl 1970. "Canon and corpus: The making of American poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11286.
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viii, 233 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.This dissertation argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" I mean extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry. Through case studies, I examine longstanding assumptions about these poets and the literary histories and myths surrounding their legendary texts. In carefully historicized readings of these and other iconic poems, I elucidate the pressure a single poem can exert on a poet's reputation and on American poetry broadly. I study the iconic poem in the context of the poet's corpus to demonstrate its role within the poet's oeuvre and the role assigned to it by canon makers. By tracing a poem's reception, I aim to identify the national, periodic, political, and formal boundaries these poems enforce and the distortions they create. Because iconic poems often direct and justify our inclusions and exclusions, they are of particular use in clarifying persistent obstacles to the canon reformation work of the last thirty years. While anthologies have become more inclusive in their selections and self-conscious about their ideological motives, many of the practices regarding individual poets and poems have remained unchanged over the last fifty years. Even as we include more poets in the canon, we often ironically do so by isolating a particular portion of the career, impulse in the work, or even a single poem, narrowing rather than expanding the horizon of our national literature. Through close readings situated in historical and cultural contexts, I illustrate the varying effects of iconic poems on the poet, other poems, and literary history.
Committee in charge: Dr. Karen J. Ford, Chair; Dr. John T. Gage, Member; Dr. Ernesto J. Martinez, Member; Dr. Leah W. Middlebrook, Outside Member
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Luck, Jessica Lewis. "Gray matters contemporary poetry and the poetics of cognition /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2006. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3215175.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2006.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1339. Adviser: Paul John Eakin. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed March 22, 2007)."
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Hay, Rebecca Cecilia. "Nostalgia: Movement and Stasis in Contemporary American Poetry." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2013. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3475.
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A remarkable amount of award-winning contemporary American poetry incorporates nostalgia as a prominent idea discussed. This poetry appears to use nostalgia as means to a greater end. In other words, nostalgia, while a dominant theme within different works, is more a way to treat concepts such as representation and memory, more so than the work being an actual commentary on nostalgia itself. Given the poetry's predominant concept, it seems poets such as Carl Dennis, Natasha Trethewey and Ted Kooser could be representative of a literary historical moment. This moment is one which comments heavily on the past's presence within the present. While each poet's writing is heavily influenced by nostalgia, I posit the theory that these poets are speaking to a greater literary historical moment found in both the literature itself as well as current trends in literary theory. It is not that these poets are writing to a specific theory, rather, their Pulitzer-prize winning poetry is rooted in a trend of yearning for the past. As overt a connection between contemporary poetry's treatment of nostalgia and nostalgia theory itself, little, if any, literary criticism has connected these two. In his essay "Theorizing Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be," Paul Grainge contends, "Since the late 1980s, when memory became a topic of concerted critical interest, nostalgia has been taken up in critiques of reactionary conservatism, in accounts of retro phenomena, in relation to the growing memorial tendencies in Europe and America, and as central to particular theories of postmodernism" (20). Grainge continues on to describe two forms nostalgia takes: "mood" and "mode." Similarly, Svetlana Boym suggests nostalgia as either "reflective" or "restorative" (41). This type of current scholarship addressing nostalgia seems to set up a nostalgic reading of texts as more the end game of the literature—the literature is nostalgic. However, if literature then ends as only nostalgic, there seems to be a lack of nostalgic theory's breadth. Dennis, Trethewey and Kooser all address this gap through their poetry—expanding the notion of nostalgia as being more the vehicle leading one through the landscape of memory. Suggesting nostalgia as merely reflective or restorative, as Boym and Grainge have done, seems to create a sense of nostalgia as stagnant rather than as a dynamic movement within the literature, and even the act of recollection itself. The three poets addressed in my project all suggest at some level that this residue of the past can lead one to see that perhaps experience itself delights in memory. Furthermore, nostalgia's dependence upon present memory indicates not just a longing for the past, but rather the past's presence in the present. The act of remembering serves as a type of catalyst which transforms memories to manifestations in present circumstance.
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Castiglione, Davide. "Difficulty in Anglo-American poetry : a linguistic and empirical perspective." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2016. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/33560/.
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This project sets out to develop a model for a study of difficulty in poetry as systematic and nuanced as possible. In doing so, it endeavours to make a significant theoretical and practical contribution to the fields of stylistics, poetics and literary theory. Throughout the twentieth century, the notion of difficulty in poetry has never ceased to interest linguists, literary theorists, psychologists and researchers in education. The popularity of the notion among non-specialist is equally significant, as it is not uncommon for readers to justify their lack of interest in poetry on the grounds of its supposed difficulty. Notwithstanding this, the dynamics of text-reader interaction – the defining trait of difficulty, as argued in Chapter 1 – remains notably underexplored. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature by (a) providing a psychologically plausible and linguistically sound account of difficulty; and by (b) unifying under a coherent framework the insights offered by a large body of materials – from critical readings of literary works to anecdotal evidence, from psychological models of comprehension to controlled psycholinguistic experiments. In terms of methodology, a linguistic, text-based approach is intertwined with an empirical, reader-based one. This combined effort leads to an in-depth analysis of a set of poems from both perspectives (Chapter 3 to 5). Such a qualitative approach allows for the identification of textual and readerly components typical of difficulty. On the textual side, I identify twenty-four features, called linguistic indicators of difficulty and affecting all the linguistic levels – graphology, syntax, lexis, semantics and text structure. Based on scholarly remarks and experimental evidence, these indicators are likely to hamper readers’ comprehension and thus increase the processing effort they require. These two main readerly dimensions of difficulty I qualify as online (i.e. affecting the processing effort in actual reading) and offline (i.e. affecting the post-reading understanding of a poem). In turn, online and offline difficulty are cued by observable readerly behaviours (e.g. interpretive uncertainty, slowed-down reading, statements of rejection) that are explored in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall, difficulty is viewed as a response phenomenon that has a strong linguistic motivation. For reasons of focus and critical consistency, the model is applied to twentieth and twentieth-first century Anglo-American poems only. This temporal restriction acknowledges the critically established connection between difficulty and modernism (e.g. Adams 1991, Adamson 1999, Diepeveen 2003). The case studies from Chapter 3 to 5 focus on Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Susan Howe and Jeremy H. Prynne as representing different aspects of difficulty. Chapter 6 extends this purview to a larger corpus, featuring Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. All these poets have been deemed ‘difficult’ by other critics, so the corpus rests on an intersubjective agreement that was missing in previous accounts. The hope is that the model proposed will be fruitfully extended and applied to non-Anglo-American literary traditions as well as to poetry written in earlier centuries.
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Smith, Julian Patrick. "The poetry of Charles Bukowski." Thesis, University of Hull, 1989. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:5866.
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Lee, Bethany Tyler Marks Corey. "The museum of coming apart." [Denton, Tex.] : University of North Texas, 2009. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-11000.
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Brozovich, Lauren Kaye. "Environmental Spiral: Scientific Mediation in Twentieth-Century American Poetry." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11017.
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This dissertation asks how the heightening of artistic and scientific mediation has affected the representation of the environment in modernist and contemporary American poetry. In chapters on Marianne Moore, A.R. Ammons, and Jorie Graham, I contend that the twentieth century sees a crucial shift in the representation of the environment, as poets become increasingly attentive to the self-reflexive non-transparency of their own medium and incorporate the mediating discourse of science into their work. While science has served as a source for poetic imagery for centuries, suddenly in the twentieth century, mathematical equations--expressed entirely in symbols--appear in the middle of poems, and qualitative scientific language, remarkable for its opacity to the non-specialist, is woven into the texture of verse. Writing at the height of High Modernism, Moore is fascinated by natural history's fusion of art and science. For Moore, the mimetic copies displayed in natural history museums (for instance, glass flowers) reveal things about real creatures that an unmediated encounter could not. Her incorporation of replicas of natural creatures into her poems about real environments enables her to evoke what I term the "synthetic" super-real. In the early 1960s, Ammons is intrigued by the latest scientific discoveries, especially the mathematical modeling of nonlinear dynamical systems. While philosophers have argued that the poet and the scientist occupy separate spheres, Ammons fuses mathematical modeling and sensuous description. His hybrid poetic style enables him to represent the temporal evolution of nonlinear dynamical systems and the operation of forces within a field. In Sea Change, Graham, writing in the imagined wake of future climate change, fundamentally transforms poetic representational techniques, as she creates a frame-shattering poetic form that is uncomfortably poised on the threshold between a climate model and a sensuously embodied environment. By exemplifying recourse to the mediating discourse of science, these poets extend the representational limits of their own aesthetic medium, as they pave the way for twenty-first-century poets who, with greater urgency than ever before, attempt to represent the environment in an era marked by man-made climate change.
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Micconi, Giovanna. "Circus Aesthetics, Travel, History, and Mourning in the Poetry of Robert Hayden." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26718732.
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Circus Aesthetics examines the work of the African American poet Robert Hayden and engages with the problem of identifying different frameworks with which to think about Hayden’s poetry and African American literature more broadly. In 1978, two years before his death, Hayden, the first African American poet to be nominated Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, was still struggling and fighting with the idea of being considered a “black poet” and with the socio-political implications and expectations that accompanied that label. During his address to the Library of Congress on May 8, 1978, he reiterated his discomfort at discussions of whether he was or was not a black poet and claimed that “poets too are keepers of a nation’s conscience, the partisans of freedom and justice, even when they eschew political involvement.” Hayden has often been analyzed and read in the context of his racial, religious, or stylistic affiliations (as an African American, a Bahá’í, or a modernist poet). His poetics, however, are inclusive and engage with the exploration of a universal ethos where alterity is examined and celebrated. Circus Aesthetics argues that Hayden’s formal and thematic features are grounded in the African American literary tradition as well as in cosmopolitan and Universalist principles, thus making of him a rooted “transpolitan,” who defies notions of national borders as well as western understandings of cosmopolitanism. Looking at Hayden’s poetry through careful and sustained close readings, this dissertation adds a new dimension to Hayden’s work by thinking of new, hemispheric ways in which to think of literature and the intersection of time, space, and history.African and African American Studies
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Manecke, Keith Gordon. "On location the poetics of place in modern American poetry /." Connect to this title online, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1070218804.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004.Document formatted into pages; contains 236 p. Includes bibliographical references. Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2008 Dec. 1.
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Gilbert, Adam John. "Morality, soldier-poetry, and the American war in Vietnam." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.607787.
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Goldsmith, Jenna L. "Life Matter: Women Subjects and Women's Objects in Innovative American Poetry." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/47.
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Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, and Juliana Spahr employ innovative poetic practices attuned to nature and environment in order to understand their personal lives and depict these understandings for readers. My dissertation investigates how these poets enact an inclusive posture toward environment that many innovative and experimental women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries possess, but are rarely recognized for. To this end, my dissertation provides counterarguments to characterizations of innovative or experimental poetic practices as reclusive, language-centric, opaque, and/or disconnected from the material world. I offer readings of poems, prose pieces, film, and art, to illustrate how materially innovative poetry compels an equally material framework for reading that is, at a foundational level, by and about the world.
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Belzil, Diane. ""Merely going round": engaging with poetic thought through play in Wallace Steven's poetry." Thesis, McGill University, 2014. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=121556.
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The following thesis examines the importance of play in Wallace Stevens's poetry and how it reveals a structural isometry between Stevens's poetics and the philosophical ethics of Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Emmanuel Levinas. This comparison demonstrates that Stevens is not concerned with writing toward the philosophical concepts of 'good' or 'truth,' but rather with determining the ontological condition of poetic thought, which he does by writing poetry that reaches toward the guiding fiction of his age, the Supreme Fiction. This study is conducted in three stages, each aiming to demonstrate the importance of change, abstraction, and pleasure (the three key terms in Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction) in determining how Stevensian play operates. The first chapter identifies a turning topos operating throughout Stevens's career in which poems are abstracted from extrapoetic reality by locating them in a separate space of thought, a play space. The second chapter looks more closely at this play space and the metaphors of dwelling, seasons, and climate that Stevens uses to describe it, arguing that the seasons' relationship to climate and climate's relationship to the Supreme Fiction finds a structural correlative in the ethical theories of Kant and Levinas. Much as Kant and Levinas's theories require a metaphysical grounding, Stevens's poetry is grounded by locating itself in a separate realm, poetic thought. The third chapter makes a diachronic study of Stevens's considerations of poetic thought as a separate realm, making particular use of Jacques Rancière's critique of ethics to demonstrate that Stevens's poetry is able to avoid the ethical turn through its own poetic turn.La thèse suivante examine l'importance du jeu dans la poésie de Wallace Stevens et comment il révèle une isométrie structurelle entre sa poétique et l'éthique philosophique d'Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer, et Emmanuel Levinas. Cette comparaison démontre que Stevens n'est pas concernée par les concepts philosophique «le bien» ou «la vérité», mais essai plutôt de déterminer la condition ontologique de la pensée poétique, ce qu'il fait en écrivant de la poésie qui tend vers la fiction dominante de son âge; la Fiction Suprême. Cette thèse est divisée en trois étapes, chacune visant à démontrer l'importance du changement, l'abstraction et le plaisir (les trois termes dans la poème de Stevens Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction) pour déterminer comment les jeux de Stevens fonctionnent. Le premier chapitre identifie un topos observé tout au long de la carrière de Stevens dans lequel les poèmes sont abstrait de la réalité extrapoetic, les situant dans un espace séparé de la pensée, un espae de jeu. Le deuxième chapitre examine de plus près à cet espace de jeu et les métaphores de l'habitation, des saisons et du climat que Stevens utilise pour le décrire. Tout comme les théories de Kant et de Lévinas nécessitent une mise en forme métaphysique, la poésie de Stevens sec localise dans un domaine séparé, la pensée poétique. Le troisième chapitre fait une étude diachronique des considérations de la pensée poétique comme un domaine distinct de Stevens, faisant un usage particulier de la critique de l'éthique de Jacques Rancière pour démontrer que la poésie de Stevens est en mesure d'éviter le tournant éthique à travers son propre tournant poétique.
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Strittmatter, Jorge Emilio. "Tres Poetas con Heráclito: Borges, Hahn, Pacheco." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1188431523.
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Quintanilla, Octavio. "Love Poem with Exiles." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2010. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28465/.
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Love Poem with Exiles is a collection of poems with a critical preface. The poems are varied in terms of subject matter and form. In the critical preface, I discuss my relationship with poetry as well as the idea that we inherit poems, and that if we are inspired by them, we can transform them into something new.
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Bennett, Sarah. "The American contexts of Irish poetry, 1950-present." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669957.
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Shafer, Joseph R. "Resistances in bodily form : post-1945 American Poetry and D.H. Lawrence." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2017. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/95178/.
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This project alters the field of American Studies and Modern American Poetry. For after Cold War critics of America's Myth and Symbol School had employed D.H. Lawrence for an American exceptionalism, and after Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) had disapproved of Lawrence, the British author has been marginalised by scholars of American Studies and American Poetry. As a result, Lawrence's foundational role within America's countercultural poetry has been overlooked. Robert Duncan, who led the Berkeley & San Francisco Renaissance, has repeatedly testified that Lawrence remains the 'hidden integer' within the poetics of Donald Allen's groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. This research project asks: how does the transatlantic reception of Lawrence change the tradition of post-1945 American poetry? Within the so-called 'New American Poetry,' queer, black, feminist, and non-academic voices emerged, yet their poetry defined itself by resisting the structures of 'closed-verse' as well. The break into 'open form' had renounced much of the American poetry tradition, especially the intellectualism of high-modernists. In this generational gap, Lawrence's banned writing on the sexual, sensual and political body becomes privileged by countercultural poets, and integrated into open-forms of poetry. Therefore this project also asks: how does the physical body, as found in Lawrence, surface within the disparate literary forms of leading poets and their coteries? Each chapter introduces an undocumented reception of Lawrence within a social network of post-WWII poets and follows a poet's reading of Lawrence's bodily form throughout their formative years. Featured poets include Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Sylvia Plath. The poets are chosen for their reliance upon Lawrence, but each poet also represents a wider social scene. As a new transatlantic and American literary history is charted, new readings emerge in new American poets and in Lawrence alike. In reinterpreting well-known and unknown poems though this lens, a new hermeneutic is explored wherein a bodily form surfaces within the spatial formations working upon the page.
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Perry, Katherine Denise. "Gender on paper gender performances in American women's poetry 1650-present /." Auburn, Ala., 2007. http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/2007%20Spring%20Dissertations/PERRY_KATHERINE_13.pdf.
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Mangus, Paul. "Match Bitten." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1619134112811225.
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Lagapa, Jason S. "Inarticulate prayers: Irony and religion in late twentieth-century poetry." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280295.
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Inarticulate Prayers: Irony and Religion in Late Twentieth-Century Poetry examines irony and its implications for religious belief within texts ranging from the New York School Poets to the Language Poets and, in Caribbean literature, within the poems of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Taking Jacques Derrida's distinction between deconstruction and negative theology as a point of departure, I argue that contemporary poets employ ironic language to articulate an ambivalent, and skeptical, system of belief. In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida contrasts his theory of differance--as a fundamentally negative and critical mode of inquiry--with negative theology, which ultimately affirms God's being after a process of negation. My study asserts that contemporary poets, in accord with principles of negative theology, engage in inarticulate, self-canceling and negative utterances that nevertheless affirm the possibility of belief and enlightenment. By postulating the affinity between contemporary poets and the apophatic tradition, I explain how the work of these poets, despite often being dismissed as arid exercises in poststructuralist thought, productively draws on linguistic theories and also advances beyond the "negativity" of such theories. Moreover, as it intervenes in recent debates over the absence of a spiritual dimension to contemporary poetry, my dissertation opens new perspectives through which to theorize postmodern literature. Demonstrating that experiments in language and form are driven by an ironic stance towards belief, authorship and literary tradition, Inarticulate Prayers ultimately redefines contemporary lyric and narrative poetry and asserts negation, inarticulateness, and contradiction as determining characteristics of postmodern writing.
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Piantanida, Cecilia. "Classical lyricism in Italian and North American 20th-century poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4422c01a-ba88-4fe0-a21f-4804e4c610ce.
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This thesis defines ‘classical lyricism’ as any mode of appropriation of Greek and Latin monodic lyric whereby a poet may develop a wider discourse on poetry. Assuming classical lyricism as an internal category of enquiry, my thesis investigates the presence of Sappho and Catullus as lyric archetypes in Italian and North American poetry of the 20th century. The analysis concentrates on translations and appropriations of Sappho and Catullus in four case studies: Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) in Italy; Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Anne Carson (b. 1950) in North America. I first trace the poetic reception of Sappho and Catullus in the oeuvres of the four authors separately. I define and evaluate the role of the respective appropriations within each author’s work and poetics. I then contextualise the four case studies within the Italian and North American literary histories. Finally, through the new outlook afforded by the comparative angle of this thesis, I uncover some of the hidden threads connecting the different types of classical lyricism transnationally. The thesis shows that the course of classical lyricism takes two opposite aesthetic directions in Italy and in North America. Moreover, despite the two aesthetic trajectories diverging, I demonstrate that the four poets’ appropriations of Sappho and Catullus share certain topical characteristics. Three out of four types of classical lyricism are defined by a preference for Sappho’s and Catullus’ lyrics which deal with marriage rituals and defloration, patterns of death and rebirth, and solar myths. They stand out as the epiphenomena of the poets’ interest in the anthropological foundations of the lyric, which is grounded in a philosophical function associated with poetry as a quest for knowledge. I therefore ultimately propose that ‘classical lyricism’ may be considered as an independent historical and interpretative category of the classical legacy.
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Richardson, Scott. "Taking the repeats: Modern American poetry in imitation of eighteenth-century musical forms." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20986.
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Skelley, Steven J. "Yeats, Bloom and the dialectics of theory, criticism and poetry." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1992. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13628/.
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This thesis begins by showing how a strong and subtle challenge to poetry and theories of poetry has been recently argued by writers like Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller—critics whose ironic linguistic "disfigurations" of lyrical voice have thrown poem and poet into an anti-mimetic free fall, an abyss of bewilderment or undecidability. To its credit, de Manian deconstruction strongly misreads various mimetic approaches to William Butler Yeats, as its corrosive irony empties out theories of imitation. Chapter two explains how New Criticism, biographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical criticism, all treat Yeats's poetry as a reflection or imitation of some prior being, text, or doctrine; and chapter three how, most recently and energetically, various new historicisms treat his poems as ideological artifacts determined by the world or history, but as artifacts that must seek to change the world in order to have value. Harold Bloom's theory meets such challenges. It enacts deconstruction's misreading of poem and poet without reducing them to a linguistic abyss; and it re-envisions mimetic approaches by reading poems in terms of genealogical influence, without moralizing. Chapter four investigates Bloom's vision of strong poetry as a "supermimesis" or in terms of gnostic figures of "negative transcendence." Bloom's work, however, also needs Yeatsian creative correction. As the fifth and sixth chapters show, it needs, like Yeats's poetry, to hold itself more open to the chaos of history. Invoking instruction from the very poetry that has so influenced Bloom's theory of influence, yet from which Bloom has turned away, this thesis re-interprets Yeats's poems and Yeats criticism generally. Using Yeats's openness to history to revise Bloom and his pragmatic theory of misreading to re-interpret Yeats, the thesis attempts to advance dialectically both Yeats criticism and Bloomian theory.
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Platt, Mary Hartley. "Epic reduction : receptions of Homer and Virgil in modern American poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9d1045f5-3134-432b-8654-868c3ef9b7de.
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The aim of this project is to account for the widespread reception of the epics of Homer and Virgil by American poets of the twentieth century. Since 1914, an unprecedented number of new poems interpreting the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have appeared in the United States. The vast majority of these modern versions are short, combining epic and lyric impulses in a dialectical form of genre that is shaped, I propose, by two cultural movements of the twentieth century: Modernism, and American humanism. Modernist poetics created a focus on the fragmentary and imagistic aspects of Homer and Virgil; and humanist philosophy sparked a unique trend of undergraduate literature survey courses in American colleges and universities, in which for the first time, in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of students were exposed to the epics in translation, and with minimal historical contextualisation, prompting a clear opportunity for personal appropriation on a broad scale. These main matrices for the reception of epic in the United States in the twentieth century are set out in the introduction and first chapter of this thesis. In the five remaining chapters, I have identified secondary threads of historical influence, scrutinised alongside poems that developed in that context, including the rise of Freudian and related psychologies; the experience of modern warfare; American national politics; first- and second-wave feminism; and anxiety surrounding poetic belatedness. Although modern American versions of epic have been recognised in recent scholarship on the reception of Classics in twentieth-century poetry in English, no comprehensive account of the extent of the phenomenon has yet been attempted. The foundation of my arguments is a catalogue of almost 400 poems referring to Homer and Virgil, written by over 175 different American poets from 1914 to the present. Using a comparative methodology (after T. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 1993), and models of reception from German and English reception theory (including C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text, 1993), the thesis contributes to the areas of classical reception studies and American literary history, and provides a starting point for considering future steps in the evolution of the epic genre.
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Morse, Andrew. ""A new discipline of vision" : the synthesis of poetic and scientific epistemologies in contemporary speculative verse /." view abstract or download file of text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3102180.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 232-241). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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El-Komy, Amir. "Irony and distance in John Crowe Ransom's poetry : a computer-assisted study." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2004. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7221/.
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By the time the Fugitive movement was launched between 1922 and 1925, Ransom's poetic technique had changed in a remarkable fashion which is the main topic of the thesis. Gone was a direct, almost brutally sarcastic manner to be replaced with a polished irony that places a considerable distance between him, his subject and his reader. He is no longer involved in the narrative action of the poems as in Poems about God, and there is more concentration on the action of the poems than description. In The Fugitive (1922-1925) Ransom published his most successful poems such as: "Ego", "Bells for John Whiteside Daughter", "Philomela", "First Travels of Max", "Captain Carpenter", "Prometheus in Straits" "Ada Ruel", "Old Mansion", "Blue Girls", "Adventure This Side of Pluralism", an "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son". These poems and a number of others were also published in separate collections, Chills and Fever (1924), Grace after Meat (1924). Some of these poems underwent few changes while others were revised drastically. The Fugitive group disbanded in 1926 and their magazine ceased publication. In 1927, Ransom published Two Gentlemen in Bonds. In this last book of verse Ransom introduced sonnets for the first time in his publications, though he had experimental once before in "Sunset". After 1927 some members of the Fugitive group began to reestablish contact and they soon became Agrarians in the economic, political, agricultural, and perhaps literal sense of the word. During the Agrarian years (1927-1938), Ransom was busy in three spheres: professor of English at Vanderbilt University, contributing to the editorship of the Agrarian publications, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, (1930), and Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (1936), and finally publishing his first works of literary criticism; God without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defence of Orthodoxy (1930) and The World's Body (1938).
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Hemmert, Andrew James. "Engine Burning Through." OpenSIUC, 2017. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/theses/2107.
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Herd, Gavin David. "Fit to cope with our occasions : John Ashbery's place in postwar American poetry." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.339219.
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Richardson, C. Scott. "Taking the repeats: Modern American poetry in imitation of eighteenth-century musical forms." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/9311.
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This dissertation surveys the various efforts by modern American poets to imitate the repetitive structures of eighteenth-century instrumental music, setting in a wider historical context some of the central achievements of the twentieth-century long poem, as well as offering readings of some lesser-known but interesting works that draw on musical structures and processes as their formal models. The introduction examines why such disparate poets have wished to organize their work through some analogue to musical form. Taking their cues from western instrumental composition, writers have let the shapes of their poems be determined not by the demands of narrative for succession or the demands of discursive argument for progressive development but instead by music's repetitive imperative. In musical structures such as the variation set, the fugue, and the sonata, poets found constructive techniques congenial to the twentieth-century mind. Eighteenth-century musical genres can be seen as anticipating in a remarkable manner modern ideas concerning the circular patterns of thought and experience. The first chapter examines poetry modeled on the variation set, surveying works by Randall Jarrell, Wallace Stevens, Harry Mathews, Charles Olson, and Frank O'Hara. The second chapter deals with poetic fugues, including works by May Sarton, William Bronk, Weldon Kees, Delmore Schwartz, and Sylvia Plath. It also examines the validity of fugal analogies at both the macro- and micro-level of analysis in two key modern long poems, Ezra Pound's Cantos and Louis Zukofsky's "A". The final chapter examines poetic versions of sonata forms, including the sonata-based genres of symphony and quartet. It deals with works by Donald Justice, Conrad Aiken, John Gould Fletcher, Stevens, W. C. Williams, and John Ashbery. T. S. Eliot is central to the discussion: the chapter reexamines the validity of musical analogy in relation to Four Quartets and places Eliot's achievement in historical context, as a culmination of earlier currents and as a dominant presence in later musically-patterned poetry.
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Smith, Hazel. "The sense of neurotic coherence : structural reversals in the poetry of Frank O'Hara." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1988. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39283/.
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Stanton, Brandi. "On location race and family in the poetry of Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, and Cathy Song /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2009. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3378394.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2009.Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 8, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3857. Adviser: Susan Gubar.
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Michel, Christopher Joseph. "Searching Assurances." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1150734392.
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Snapp, Lacy. "'A Dream of Completion': The Journey of American Working-Class Poetry." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2019. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3593.
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This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings of the working class. This dream could include moments of temporary leisure, but also feeling completed by societal acceptance or understanding. Finally, I include the contemporary poets Laux, Addonizio, and Espada. They complicate the “dream of completion” narrative with issues surrounding gender and race, and do not seek to find resolution.
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CARTER, STEVEN MICHAEL. "EPISTEMOLOGICAL MODELS SHARED BY AMERICAN PROJECTIVIST POETRY AND QUANTUM PHYSICS." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/187927.
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The American Projectivist verse of Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan contains within its poetics many epistemological assumptions shared by quantum physics. These assumptions exist in three broad categories: perception, process, and wholeness. In physics, the epistemology of perception has been profoundly altered by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation, which creates a symbiotic relationship between the observer and the observed. At least one photon of light is necessary to observe an electron; one photon is sufficient to alter the electron's momentum or position; therefore, a physicist affects an electron's "fate" in the act of observing it. Similarly, in Projectivist poetics, the perceptions of the reader are often enlisted to help "compose" the poem which is offered to him in "pieces," or, as in Robert Duncan's poetry especially, in self-reflexive segments. By "self-reflexive," we further mean that the Projectivist poem often "mirrors itself" as an electron "mirrors itself" as wave or as particle, while it is paradoxically both. A Projectivist poem may pause halfway through and "unravel" itself, i.e., study its own etymology. The reader thus must participate in "putting the poem back together," as the physicist participates in the phenomena he observes. The second epistemological model in physics and poetry stresses becoming, rather than being. Matter at the subatomic level has been defined as energy-in-flux. Similarly, the Projectivist poems of Charles Olson especially often exist as "fields" with no syntactical beginnings or endings. Moreover, the "I" of the Maximus Poems is often seen in a perpetual process of becoming the world of spacetime in the poems, creating a system similar to the being-and-becoming model of particle-and-field in quantum mechanics. Third, wholeness is a premise governing poetry and physics separately and together. Jack Spicer's thematics blend matter and consciousness, as "love and death matter/Matter as wave and particle." Similarly, Robert Duncan's poetics describes a "dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity." In physics, wholeness is seen primarily in an "implicate order" which attempts to overturn the old paradigms of fragmentation and connect matter and consciousness, including language, as interrelated systems of information.
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Kepple, Amy Jo. "Imaging the body in Contemporary Women's Poetry: Helga Novak, Ursula Krechel, Carolyn Forche, Nikki Giovanni." The Ohio State University, 1991. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1389348189.
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Fogarty, William. "Local Languages: The Forms of Speech in Contemporary Poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/19662.
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Robert Frost’s legendary description of “the sound of sense” to define his poetics has for decades sounded like little more than common sense. His idea is now taken to be fairly straightforward: the inflections of an utterance resulting from the tension between demotic speech and poetic form indicate its purport. However, our accepted notion of Frost’s formulation as simply the marriage of form and meaning misconstrues what is potentially revolutionary in it: if everyday speech and verse form generate tension, then Frost has described a method for mediating between reality, represented by speech, and art, represented by verse form. The merger is not passive: the sound of sense occurs when Frost “drag[s] and break[s] the intonation across the metre.” And yet Frost places speech and verse form in a working relationship. It is the argument of this dissertation that poets reckon with what is often understood as discord between poetry and reality by putting into correspondence forms of speech and the forms of poetry. The poets I examine–Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton–are concerned with their positions in local communities that range from the family unit to ethnic, religious, racial, economic, and sexual groups, and they marshal forms of speech in poetic form to speak from those locales and to counter the drag and break of those located social and political realities. They utilize what I call their “local languages”–the speech of their particular communities that situates them geographically in local contexts and politically in social constructs–in various ways: they employ them as raw material; they thematize them; they invent idiosyncratic “local” languages to undermine expectations about the communities that speak those languages; they devise generalized languages out of standard and nonstandard constructions to speak not just to and from specific locations but to speak more broadly about human experience. How, these poets ask, can poetry respond to atrocities, deprivations, divisions, and disturbances without becoming programmatic or propagandistic and without reinforcing false preconceptions about the kinds of language suitable for poetry? They answer that question with the living speech of their immediate worlds.
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Burke, Daniel E. "From pastorals to Paterson| Ecology in the poetry and poetics of William Carlos Williams." Thesis, Marquette University, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3634286.
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Modernist poet William Carlos Williams died in 1962—a landmark year in the history of the modern environmentalist movement. He did not live to see contemporary culture come to the deeper appreciation of humanity's place in the world which we now know as ecology. This dissertation will argue, however, that supporting his entire oeuvre of poetry are philosophical and poetic underpinnings which resonate strongly with—and usefully anticipate—our modern understanding of the interpenetrative relationship between natural and culture, human and nonhuman.
I begin by tracing the roots of Williams's "ecopoetics" back to the father of Williams's beloved free verse: Walt Whitman. Both Whitman and Williams use nature as subject and trope in their poetry, but the latter pointedly improves upon the work of the former by shifting the voice of his poetry from an anthropocentric (human-centered) perspective to a more ecocentric one—one which breaks down the traditional American Romantic notion of nature as apart from us, instead more readily acknowledging humanity as integral part and parcel of nature's cyclical systems.
In the middle sections of the work, the focus centers exclusively upon Williams, especially in his earlier poetry and prose collection Spring and All (1921), as well as in his later five-book epic Paterson. In these, I reveal three distinct ecopoetic qualities of his poetry: 1) a continuation of the ecocentric poetic voice; 2) treatment of the "imagination" as a natural force (akin to steam or lightning) which humans harness to generate art; and, 3) an anticipation of modern ideas about the "local" in his use of his native New Jersey landscape as poetic subject. Through close readings, the study highlights these qualities as integral facets of Williams's poetics, marking his as a proto-ecopoet.
The dissertation closes with a broader historical contextualization of Williams's ecopoetics as contrasted with other Modernists contemporary to his day—specifically Wallace Stevens and Lorine Niedecker. Through formal elements that mirror the previously argued traits of ecopoetics, we find Williams exceeding his peers and, I conclude, ultimately anticipating the kind of poetry we see being written by ecopoets in our own time.
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Ellasante, Ian, and Ian Ellasante. "Bridges Between Me: Liminality, Authenticity, and Re/integration in American Indian Literature." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/293493.
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With both its inherent alienation and freedom, the experience of liminality, or the occupation of transitional spaces, is in many ways universally human. However, by nature of their bicultural liminality and the oppressive and pervasive demand for what Paula Gunn Allen terms "Indianness" American Indian authors must also confront and negotiate questions of authenticity. In so doing, many have taken the opportunity to subvert those demands, to juxtapose their actual multifaceted identities against them, to make meaning from the contrast, and to create from that re/integrated space. This thesis elucidates these points as an introduction to the body of poems that follow. The poems, often instruments of my own liminality, explore the broad themes of place, family, and identity.