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Tocheva, Polya. "The Language of Man and the Language of God in George Herbert's Religious Poetry." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2003. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/TochevaP2003.pdf.
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Buckner, Elisabeth. "Superior Instants: Religious Concerns in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson." TopSCHOLAR®, 1985. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2195.
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When I decided to write a thesis on Emily Dickinson's poetry, my intention was to show that she did, indeed, implement a concrete philosophy into her poetry. However, after several months of research, I realized that this poet's philosophy was ongoing and sometimes inconsistent. Emily Dickinson never discovered the answers to all of her religious and spiritual questions although she devoted her entire life to that pursuit. What Dickinson did discover was that orthodox religion had no place in her heart or mind and she must make her own choices where God was concerned. Immortality was an intense fascination to Emily, and many of her poems are related to that subject. In fact, the majority of Dickinson's poems deal, in some way, with spirituality. Emily Dickinson is a poet who deserves to be studied on the basis of her philosophical pursuits as well as her style. Dickinson scholarship has improved in the past several decades; however, Emily Dickinson has yet to receive the attention she deserves as a philosopher and thinker.
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Workman, Jameson Samuel. "Chaucerian metapoetics and the philosophy of poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8cf424fd-124c-4cb0-9143-e436c5e3c2da.
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This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.
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Newnum, Anna Kristina Stenson. "The poetry of religion and the prose of life: from evangelicalism to immanence in British women's writing, 1835-1925." Diss., University of Iowa, 2014. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5819.
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The Poetry of Religion and the Prose of Life: From Evangelicalism to Immanence in British Women's Writing, 1835-1925&" traces a tradition of religious women poets and women's poetic communities engaged in generic and theological exploration that I argue was intimately intertwined with their social activism. This project brings together recent debates about gender and secularization in sociology, social history, and anthropology of religion, contending that Victorian and early-twentieth-century women poets from a variety of religious affiliations offer an alternative path into modernity that embraces the public value of both poetry and religious discourse, thus questioning straightforward narratives of British secularization and poetic privatization during the nineteenth century.
These writers, including contributors to The Christian Lady's Magazine, Grace Aguilar, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Eva Gore-Booth, and Evelyn Underhill, turned to social engagement and immanence, a theory of divinity within the world rather than above and apart from it, to bridge a widening gap between religious doctrine and poetic theory. Appropriating the growing interest in immanent theology within British Christianity allowed women to write about the small, the domestic, the human, and the everyday while exploring the divine presence in them, thus elevating and publicly revealing experiences traditionally allocated to women's private lives. Just as the women in this study questioned the distinction between the divine and the everyday, they also blurred the generic boundaries of poetry and theological prose. As lyric poetry was increasingly identified with private experience, they used literary experimentation across the genres of poetry and theological prose to engage public debates on a surprisingly large number of issues from factory reform, to mental disability, to urban poverty, to women's suffrage, to pacifism.
This project includes four chapters, each of which examines a female poet or a poetic community of women connected through the publishing world. The first two chapters focus on tensions among commitments to poetry, religion, and social reform within Anglicanism. Trapped between the desire to encounter a transcendent God and the desire to celebrate earthly ephemera and improve earthly conditions, these poets demonstrate the tension from which a poetics of immanence arose. My third and fourth chapters follow the extension of immanence in late-nineteenth-century Catholic verse and early-twentieth-century mystical verse. These writers used a growing theological emphasis on immanence to justify poetry that relied on female experience, to suggest that the divine was at home in the constantly evolving natural and social worlds, and to illustrate God's equal proximity to the mundane and the marginalized, inspiring challenges to social and institutional hierarchies.
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Beahm, Brittany. ""To take posesion of the crown" : forms, themes, and politics in Julia Palmer's centuries /." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2007. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd1771.pdf.
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Hand, Jessica Danielle. "God Made the Apples, We Made the Bites." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2011. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/108.
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These poems trace different manifestations of religion, particularly Christianity in the Bible Belt, and the effect upon families and relationships. Issues of war, death, illness, and sexuality also permeate these lyrical narratives.
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Hopkins, Stephen Chase Evans. "Solving the Old English Exodus: An Active Problem Solving Approach to the Poem." Miami University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=muhonors1303488106.
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Soud, William David. "Toward a divinised poetics : God, self, and poeisis in W.B. Yeats, David Jones, and T.S. Eliot." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:331a692d-a40c-4d30-a05b-f0d224eb0055.
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This thesis examines the traces of theological and broader religious discourses in selected works of three major twentieth-century poets. Each of the texts examined in this thesis encodes within its poetics a distinct, theologically derived conception of the ontological status of the self in relation to the Absolute. Yeats primarily envisions the relation as one of essential identity, Jones regards it as defined by alterity, and Eliot depicts it as dialectical and paradoxical. Critics have underestimated the impact on Yeats’s late work of his final and most sustained engagement with Indic traditions, which issued from his friendship and collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami. Though Yeats projected Theosophical notions on the Indic texts and traditions he studied with Purohit, he successfully incorporated principles of Classical Yoga and Tantra into his later poetry. Much of Yeats’s late poetics reflects his struggle to situate the individuated self ontologically in light of traditions that devalue that self in favor of an impersonal, cosmic subjectivity. David Jones’s The Anathemata encodes a religious position opposed to that of Yeats. For Jones, a devout Roman Catholic committed to the bodily, God is Wholly Other. The self is fallen and circumscribed, and must connect with the divine chiefly through the mediation of the sacraments. In The Anathemata, the poet functions as a kind of lay priest attempting sacramentally to recuperate sacred signs. Because, according to Jones’s exoteric theology, the self must love God through fellow creatures, The Anathemata is not only circular, forming a verbal templum around the Cross; it is also built of massive, rich elaborations of creaturely detail, including highly embroidered and historicized voices and discourses. Critics have long noted the influence of Christian mystical texts on Eliot’s Four Quartets, but some have also detected a countercurrent within the later three Quartets, one that resists the timeless even as the poem valorizes transcending time. This tension, central to Four Quartets, reflects Eliot’s engagement with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. Eliot’s deployment of paradox and negation does not merely echo the apophatic theology of the mystical texts that figure in the poem; it also reflects the discursive strategies of Barth’s theology. The self in Four Quartets is dialectical and paradoxical: suspended between time and eternity, it can transcend its own finitude only by embracing it.
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Updegraff, Derek Kramer Johanna Ingrid. ""Fore ðære mærðe mod astige" two new perspectives on the Old English Gifts of men /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri--Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/5623.
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The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on October 6, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. Johanna Kramer. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Langdell, Sebastian James. "Religious reform, transnational poetics, and literary tradition in the work of Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2e8eb46-5d08-405d-baa9-24e0400a47d8.
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This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.
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Welch, Mary T. "Early English religious literature : the development of the genres of poetry, narrative, and homily /." Read thesis online, 2009. http://library.uco.edu/UCOthesis/WelchMT2009.pdf.
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O'Neill, Helen Josephine. "Once preferred, now peripheral : the place of poetry in the teaching of English in the New Zealand curriculum for year 9, 10 and 11 students : a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, The University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand /." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Culture, Literature and Society, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/950.
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A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his (or her) feeling through words. This may sound easy. It isn't ... . It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel. e. e. cummings: 'A Poet's Advice'. (1-3, 27-28) Fifty years ago poetry was a key element in the English programme in most secondary schools. Today it is marginalised, with many teachers avoiding teaching poetry as far as possible. The consequence is a cycle of disadvantage whereby many students, never having studied, let alone attempted to write a poem in school, leave without having encountered literature at its most intense and concentrated. Since the study of poetry can also be avoided almost entirely in university English departments, such students will, in their turn, when they themselves become educators of the next generation, similarly avoid teaching poetry. This thesis investigates the pedagogical and curricular contexts within which English has been taught in New Zealand since 1945, and within which poetry has become increasingly marginal. Surveys of and interviews with students past and present, teachers and teacher-educators enable me to identify a range of reasons why this has happened, and a cycle of deprivation has developed. The thesis also identifies, however, ways in which the cycle of deprivation can be broken, and the teaching of poetry made central to the teaching of written, oral and visual language in accordance with the principles of the current New Zealand curriculum for the teaching of English.
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To, On-nie Annie. "The teaching of poetry writing in a school using Chinese as a medium of instruction the learning experience of secondary one students /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2007. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B38713469.
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Piper, Susan Nicole Whyte Alyson Isabel. "Poetry centers for the purpose of lowering inhibitions of English language learners in the constructivist English language arts classroom." Auburn, Ala, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10415/1833.
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Gardner, Calum. "Roland Barthes and English-language avant-garde poetry, 1970-1990." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2016. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/94082/.
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This thesis looks at the engagement of English-language poets with the writing of Roland Barthes, and considers how a reading of Barthes may help understanding of a range of challenging experimental work. The introduction to the thesis lays a groundwork of how Barthes has been read in English since the first widely available translations of his work appeared in the 1960s, and thus establishes the intellectual context in which poets have written since. Beginning in the first chapter with Veronica Forrest-Thomson, the first of these poets to have looked at Barthes in detail, it looks both at poetry and of poets’ writings in the fields of criticism and poetics. From Forrest-Thomson the thesis moves in the second chapter to North America and considers the place of Barthes, particularly his Writing Degree Zero, in the intellectual context out of which emerged what has come to be known as ‘language writing’, combining a survey of this writing with close readings of the work of Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, and others. In the third chapter, the investigation of this diffuse tendency in poetry is followed through various strands, focussing in particular on periodicals and archival material. Finally, the fourth chapter looks at Anne Carson, Deborah Levy, and Kristjana Gunnars, and considers Barthes’ relevance to their texts’ thinking about writing. The intersection of theory and the emotional life is explored using the theoretical lens of Chris Kraus’ experimental fiction, particularly her notion of a ‘lonely girl phenomenology’. Barthes has had a diverse range of effects on poets’ thinking about writing and their writing practices, and our understanding of Barthes as a writer, what we mean by the ‘Barthesian’, and individual notions of his such as the ‘death of the author’ and his work on the possibilities of the fragment, have changed over time. The thesis considers the potential of Barthes’ writing to help us think about literature and its future utility for poetry studies.
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Hawkins, Emma B. "Gender, Power, and Language in Anglo-Saxon Poetry." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278983/.
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Many Old English poems reflect the Anglo-Saxon writers's interest in who could exercise power and how language could be used to signal a position of power or powerlessness. In previous Old English studies, the prevailing critical attitude has been to associate the exercise of power with sex—the distinction between males and females based upon biological and physiological differences—or with sex-oriented social roles or sphere of operation. Scholarship of the last twenty years has just begun to explore the connection between power and gender-coded traits, attributes which initially were tied to the heroic code and were primarily male-oriented. By the eighth and ninth centuries, the period in which most of the extant Old English poetry was probably composed, these qualities had become disassociated from biological sex but retained their gender affiliations. A re-examination of "The Dream of the Rood," "The Wanderer," "The Husband's Message," "The Wife's Lament," "Wulf and Eadwacer" and Beowulf confirms that the poets used gender-coded language to indicate which poetic characters, female as well as male, held positions of power and powerlessness. A status of power or powerlessness was signalled by the exercise of particular gendered traits that were open for assumption by men and women. Powerful individuals were depicted with masculine-coded language affiliated with honor, mastery, aggression, victory, bravery, independence, martial prowess, assertiveness, physical strength, verbal acuteness, firmness or hardness, and respect from others. Conversely, the powerless were described with non-masculine or feminine-coded language suggesting dishonor, subservience, passivity, defeat, cowardice, dependence, defenselessness, lack of volition, softness or indecisiveness, and lack of respect from others. Once attained, neither status was permanent; women and men trafficked back and forth between the two. Depending upon the circumstances, members of both sexes could experience reversals of fortunes which would necessitate moving from one category to the other, on more than one occasion in a lifetime.
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Hung, Yat-fung Lucretia. "Introducing poetry into the junior form English classroom a case study in a Hong Kong Chinese medium-of-instruction school /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2007. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B38709363.
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McGrane, Paul Steven. "The genesis of Clough's poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:18be6cf8-b6fd-469e-8c88-5a1ae59b56ac.
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This thesis examines the early poetry of Clough, written between 1830 and 1841, in the light of the information about his personal and intellectual life provided by published and unpublished manuscripts, essays, letters and diaries. More specifically, it sets out to determine the degree to which the seeds (thematic and formal) of Clough’s more mature work can be discerned in the earlier. Chapter One discusses the influence of Clough’s childhood reading, and particularly the heroic ideal as encouraged by his mother. It traces the way this developed, particularly under the historical ideas of Thomas Arnold and the Liberal Anglicans, and the fatalistic moral problems this created. Chapter Three considers Clough’s responses to the Oxford Movement. It teases out those elements that attracted Clough and those he came to reject, particularly in the light of Tractarian ideas about reserve, in relation to poetry, truth and personal behaviour. Chapters Two and Four provide chronological, text-by-text accounts of the Rugby and Balliol poems respectively, offering judgments about influences, dates and sources, and interpretations in the light of Chapters One and Three respectively. Chapter Two argues that much of the Rugby poetry reflects an escapist lament for the past and a failure of will to restore it. Chapter Three argues that Clough’s engagement with Tractarian ideas about reserved truth provides the key context for many of these poems. Chapter Five traces the way in which Clough’s early poetics, derived from Wordsworth via Thomas Arnold, were gradually replaced by his more mature, ambiguous approach which also emerged from his encounters with Tractarian reserve. Two appendices collect ten poems and poetic fragments omitted from Mulhauser’s standard edition; three additional variant texts for poems included by Mulhauser; and four previously unpublished letters to Clough from his friend WilliamTylden.
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Kuehnova, Sarka. "John Milton's Paradise Lost : language, ambiguity and the ineffable." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.365537.
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Stuhr, Tracy Jill. "Re-sounding natures : voicing the non-human in Medieval English poetry." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1911.
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This dissertation examines how the non-human (the natural, not the other-worldly) world and its creatures were voiced in several late medieval English texts: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale and Manciple's Tale, and the Towneley Second Shepherds' Play. The dissertation is organized into three chapters which severally allocate voicing the non-human to three different (although conceivably overlapping) modes of representation - acoustic, formal, and performative. Underpinning this project is the objective to place these texts in a historicized ecocritical context.
In the first chapter I analyze the figurative (and formative) sounds the natural world "speaks" as it advances a crescendo of insistent clamor in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I argue that this poem exploits the common (and serviceable) conviction of the analogous equivalency of the two categories woman and nature - in order to register the anxieties engendered by the encroachments of women and the natural world in post-plague England. The second chapter addresses how the voices of domestication and its discontents unfold in the use Chaucer makes of the protean genres of fable and exemplum, proverbs, and the deployment of similes in two of his bird tales. I rely on current theorizing of interspecies and intra-species domestication to identify and extract the discontents I have found to be inhering in its processes: savagery/violence, hybridity, uninvited and unintended transformations, and theft. The third chapter considers how human and non-human voices confoundingly yet steadily implicated and entangled in one another - performatively discover homes amid multiple ranges, including silence, volume, laughter, and music. This chapter represents the effort to subtend and complicate existing understandings of this popular late medieval pageant by thinking in terms of ranges, variations, and multivalent characterizations, rather than slots, hierarchies, stabilities, and characters who have become little more than canned effigies.
In conclusion, I argue that late medieval poetic texts show a remarkable diversity in the ways and means their authors chose to variously voice the non-human, and that the particular forms this voicing took shaped, even as it was shaped, by the non-human world around them. This diversity and variation enables a more complex understanding of the different avenues and directions this voicing afforded to succeeding generations.
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Alwazzan, Aminah. "The Strong Voices of Black Women and Men in the Selected Poetry of Langston Hughes." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 2019. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cauetds/161.
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This thesis discusses Langston Hughes’ poetry and details the African-American experience in a discriminatory society which was an essential theme of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement which enriched American life. Hughes’ body of work covers the entire range of the human experience, especially the experience of ordinary people. He believed that the role of the artist was to cover and illuminate every aspect of people’s lives. Part of this expansive philosophy towards art included giving a voice to African-American women and men who experienced both racist and patriarchal oppression.
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Schmid, Julie Marie. "Performance, poetics, and place: public poetry as a community art." Diss., University of Iowa, 2000. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/189.
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This dissertation refuses the assumption that poetry is a dying art form. In this study, I focus on poets Marc Smith, David Hernández, Patricia Smith, and Bob Holman. I place the work of these four poets within the context of the contemporary performance poetry movement and argue that from their position on stage, in the recording studio, or in front of the camera, they use the performance to forge bonds across racial, ethnic, class, and gender divides. Throughout this study, I trace the evolution of the contemporary performance poetry movement from the local to the national, the embodied to the virtual. I combine original research on public poetries such as the poetry slam, the poetry-music ensemble, and video-poetry and synthesize a variety of critical approaches, including cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and ethnomusicology. I analyze specific elements of the performance--the voice, music, the body on stage, and the dialogic relationship betwee performer and audience--and discuss how these poets use the poetry event to articulate a poetry-community-in-the-making. Throughout this study, I argue that these poetry events demand our active engagement with the performance and use emergent technologies to document and analyze this poetry community. As such, "Performance" ultimately demands that we not only rethink the relationship between these poets and their communities, but that we rethink the place of poetry in contemporary American culture.
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Cherry, Thomas Hamilton. "Variation Within Uniformity: The English Romantic Sonnet." TopSCHOLAR®, 2014. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1396.
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The English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century wrote numerous poems from genres and styles all across the poetic spectrum. From the epics of ancient origin concerning kings and fanciful settings to the political odes on fallen leaders and even the anthropological histories of what it meant to live in their time, these poets stretched their stylistic legs in many ways. One of the most interesting is their use of the short and rule-bound sonnet form that enjoyed a reemergence during their time. Though stylized throughout its existence, the sonnet most often falls into a specific form with guidelines and rule. What makes the Romantic interest in this form noteworthy is that like the other forms, they found new ways to use the sonnet as a means of poetic experimentation and creative expression. Exploring the various internal and external variations, those changes that took place within the lines and phrases of the sonnet and those that form the organizing and rhyming portions of the poem, this study seeks to establish the ways the Romantics took the uniform techniques of the sonnet and stretched its bounds to find new means of creativity. Close reading of the poems of William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals the variant use of caesura, creative dissonance, as well as original organization and rhyme scheme to accomplish purely Romantic goals within the uniformity of the sonnet form.
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Thomas, Nicola. "Landscape, space and place in English- and German-language poetry, 1960-1975." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/41884/.
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This thesis examines representations of space, place and landscape in English and German-language poetry of the period 1960-1975, a key transitional phase between modernity and postmodernity. It proposes that the impact certain transnational spatial revolutions had on contemporary poetry can only be fully grasped with recourse to comparative methodologies which look across national borders. This is demonstrated by a series of paired case studies which examine the work of J. H. Prynne and Paul Celan, Sarah Kirsch and Derek Mahon, and Ernst Jandl and Edwin Morgan. Prynne and Celan’s 'Sprachskepsis' is the starting point for a post-structuralist analysis of meta-textual space in their work, including how poetry’s complex tectonics addresses multifaceted crises of representation. Mahon and Kirsch’s work is read in the context of spatial division, and it is argued that both use representations of landscape, space and place to express political engagement, and to negotiate fraught ideas of home, community and world. Jandl and Morgan’s representations of space and place, which often depend on experimental lyric subjectivity, are examined: it is argued that poetic subject(s) which speak from multiple perspectives (or none) serve as a means of reconfiguring poetry’s relationship to space at a time when social, literary and political boundaries were being redefined. The thesis thus highlights hitherto underexplored connections between a range of poets working across the two language areas, making clear that space and place is a vital critical category for understanding poetry of this period, including both experimental and non-experimental work. It reveals weaknesses in existing critical taxonomies, arguing for the use of ‘late modernist’ as category with cross-cultural relevance, and promotes methodological exchange between the Anglophone and German traditions of landscape, space and place-oriented poetry scholarship, to the benefit of both.
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Plaisance, Patrick Lee. "John Donne's Thwarted Redemption of Poetry in "A Valediction: of the Booke"." W&M ScholarWorks, 1996. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626057.
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Birkett, Thomas Eric. "Ráð Rétt Rúnar : reading the runes in Old English and Old Norse poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e7ea1359-fedc-43a5-848b-7842a943ce96.
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Responding to the common plea in medieval inscriptions to ráð rétt rúnar, to ‘interpret the runes correctly’, this thesis provides a series of contextual readings of the runic topos in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse poetry. The first chapter looks at the use of runes in the Old English riddles, examining the connections between material riddles and certain strategies used in the Exeter Book, and suggesting that runes were associated with a self-referential and engaged form of reading. Chapter 2 seeks a rationale for the use of runic abbreviations in Old English manuscripts, and proposes a poetic association with unlocking and revealing, as represented in Bede’s story of Imma. Chapter 3 considers the use of runes for their ornamental value, using 'Solomon and Saturn I' and the rune poems as examples of texts which foreground the visual and material dimension of writing, whilst Chapter 4 compares the depiction of runes in the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda with epigraphical evidence from the Migration Age, seeking to dispel the idea that they reflect historical practice. The final chapter looks at the construction of a mythology of writing in the Edda, exploring the ways in which myth reflects the social impacts of literacy. Taken together these approaches highlight the importance of reading the runes in poetry as literary constructs, the script often functioning as a form of metawriting, used to explore the parameters of literacy, and to draw attention to the process of writing itself.
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Hay-Whitton, Alexander Mark. "Pope's portraiture : a critical examination of portraiture in the poetry of Alexander Pope." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21879.
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Bibliography: pages 202-210.This work examines and critically evaluates what the author considers to be the chief concerns of Pope's verse portraits, and particularly attempts to trace the manifestations of these concerns in the formal, rather than argumentative or polemic, qualities of Pope's writing. The works selected have accordingly been primarily those in which the density of poetic description of character was sufficient to indicate implicit qualities of psychological interest, sometimes at remarkable variance with more express argument of contemporary theories. Starting from an initial agreement with Dr Johnson concerning Pope's shortcomings as a philosopher, the author chooses works for detailed study on the basis of the various ways they present human types and characters: through a semi-dramatic narrative presentation, through brief life-histories, through descriptive character-sketches, or through implication of character by environment. The author bases much of his work on the idea of a dual interest in Pope's verse, which is partly satiric and aimed at moral.or social correction, partly humorous and aimed at examination or elucidation of human nature. The Dunciad and An Essay on Man are examples of the two interests as opposite extremes; but in most of Pope's work, the author maintains, the functions are complementary.
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Gary, Barry. "Desire: An Essential Element in Wallace Stevens' Poetry." TopSCHOLAR®, 1988. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2387.
Full textAbstract:
Man naturally pursues that which brings pleasure, and Wallace Stevens recognizes this inescapable desire, exploring it fully in his poetry, prose, and letters and depending upon it to build the foundation for many, if not most, of his major themes. For Stevens, one's world evolves through the use of poetry, and this world, complete with jubilations of fulfilled desire and frequent despair as illusions of fulfillment are destroyed, chronicles the life of every man. As a result, different kinds of desire and different attempts at satisfying these desires emerge as one reads Stevens--three of which will be advanced in this study.
The first, the desire for an ideal truth, takes an intellectual approach, searching for a clue to reality, for a "first idea." This ideal, though, in order to prove satisfactory to the intellect, needs to reconcile the apparent "war between the mind and sky." How do the realm of the imagination and the realm of reality work together? For Stevens, the attempt at an intersection often occurs in the realm of poetry, a world which provides a means of ordering the chaos of reality.
Stevens' investigation of human desire in this world is not limited to the intellect, however. At times the sensuous world itself provides the most appropriate objects for our desire. The wonders of our world, the mere experience of living, may provide needed stability in an otherwise precarious existence. Just as the jar placed in Tennessee gives order to the surrounding landscape, a life of observation and experience, established through the beautiful objects which are the focus of the lover's desire, attempts to provide an order.
The third, and perhaps the most interesting desire, occurs in the mind of the believer. Stevens recognizes the basic need for a deity; however, he also recognizes the origin of belief to be the collective creation of the myth-making force of a people, implying the ability to create new beliefs as unsatisfactory gods fade from importance. Stevens takes part in this recreation of myth through the emergence in his poetry of supreme fictions, possibilities he provides as examples of adequate beliefs.
This study, then, focuses on desire as a major thematic element in Wallace Stevens' poetry and emphasizes the role of desire in man's search for a harmonous existence with this world. In three major chapters the desire to reach an ideal truth through the blending of reality and Imagination, the desire to find pleasure in a world of objects, and the believer's creation and "decreation" of major fictions will be examined as key aspects of the essential element of desire in Wallace Stevens' poetry.
29
Carden, Stephen. "An Exploration of Sound & Sense in Poetry." TopSCHOLAR®, 1991. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1378.
Full textAbstract:
Various theorists have treated the problem of sound and sense in poetry. The influence of sound in poetry can be found both in the overall musical structure of a poem and in the internal sounds of rhythm and diction. Plato suggests that rhythm and harmony have a direct effect on man, and can establish either balance or disproportion within the soul. The debate whether sound determines sense or sense determines sound is rejected in favor of a third possibility: an interdependent relationship between sound and sense, an intrinsic formal structure, as the ideal governing the creation of poetry. Further, Aristotle proves to be quite close to Plato in suggesting a moral character to certain sounds. Poe, in emphasizing the distinction between poetry and prose, points to sound as the distinguishing characteristic of verse. Yeats stresses the rhythm of poetry in linking man with an ancient past. Eliot uses care in describing the function of music in poetry, but reaffirms its significance as interdependent with the meaning of the words. Stevens explores the relationship of music and poetry, and offers a rich theory that poetry is the embodiment in sound of a bridge between spirit and reality. The influence of free verse on Eliot and Stevens appears in their conversational tone, yet the sound of their poetry determines its value to a significant extent. This tracking of the ideas about sound and sense from Plato and Aristotle to Poe, Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens helps to clarify the nature and range of the problem.
30
Lynch, Elizabeth. "“Beauty Joined to Energy”: Gravity and Graceful Movement in Richard Wilbur’s Poetry." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2015. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2094.
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Throughout his work, Wilbur maintains a thematic and aesthetic fascination with kinetic energy, especially insofar as this graceful movement often seems to defy the world’s gravity. Wilbur’s energetic verse and imagery invites readers to delve into the philosophical and spiritual meditations of his poems, as well as to notice the physical world anew. The kinetic aspects of Wilbur’s subject matter, wordplay, wit, and figurative language elucidate the frequent tempering of gravity with levity within his work. Many critics have studied Wilbur’s philosophy, Christianity, metaphors, wordplay, and approach to language as found in his poetry, but this essay attempts to use a framework of kinetic energy potential energy, gravity, and weight to understand these various aspects of his work.
31
Pullen, Christine. "Amy Levy : her life, her poetry and the era of the new woman." Thesis, Kingston University, 2000. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/20661/.
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This study explores the links between the life and the poetry of the late-Victorian feminist and writer Amy Levy. Despite a resurgence of interest in Levy's writing, until the present time there has been a paucity of scholarly research into her biography. Levy's life coincided with the period when the movement for female emancipation was gaining momentum, and her adult years witnessed the emergence of the late-Victorian cultural icon known as the New Woman. Previous studies have primarily focused upon the New Woman as she was represented in late nineteenth-century discourse. My study aims to redress this balance by demonstrating that the fictional New Woman of the 1890s had many real-life precursors and counterparts - of whom Levy was one. The primary objective of the thesis is to challenge received opinion about Levy's life and poetry. The previous dearth of information about her personal history has led to the construction of the image of an isolated individual pursuing an exclusively personal agenda. In reality, she was an active member of a circle of pioneering intellectuals and political activists who were at the cutting edge of 'modern' thought. Contemporary studies have identified Levy as a lesbian, and this view of her sexuality has had a profound influence upon recent critical analysis of her verse. My study argues that this judgement about her sexual orientation is fundamentally flawed, and that her approach to personal relationships was determined by social exclusion rather than sexual difference. An aspect of Levy's poetry that has generally been overlooked is its engagement with eugenic discourse. The core element of my biography is an extended analysis of Levy's relationship with Karl Pearson, the eugenic theorist and mathematician. As far as I am aware, this aspect of her life has not been recognised in any other study. My thesis argues that Levy's relationship with Pearson not only locates her at the centre of the ongoing late nineteenth-century dialectic on sex and the woman question, but also offers a radical new insight into her writing. As this synopsis suggests, my thesis invites a reappraisal of Levy as a woman and as a poet. At a time when increasing attention is being focused upon the newly recovered canon of Victorian women's poetry, I argue that the hitter personal struggle for survival which created the tension between hope and despair in Levy's verse, contributes to a deeper understanding of the real life history behind the cultural construct known as the New Women at the fin de siecle.
32
Creedon-Carey, Una A. "“The Whole Vexed Question”: Seamus Heaney, Old English and Language Troubles." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1432295982.
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Haraldsson, Kim. "The Poetic Classroom : Teaching Poetry in English Language Courses in Swedish Upper Secondary Schools." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Sektionen för lärarutbildning (LUT), 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-15732.
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This study aims at shedding some light on teachers’ attitudes and views on poetry as a part of English language studies. More specifically, it intends to explore whether there is support for the generally preconceived idea that poetry’s role in today’s language studies has diminished. This essay presents previous research regarding the development of poetry teaching in classrooms and the importance of reading poetry. Thereafter it includes a smaller qualitative survey, which was sent out to teachers in Swedish upper secondary schools, on their views concerning poetry and its incorporation in their courses, as well as reasons behind their choices. Although the study did not receive enough answers to warrant general conclusions on how teachers in Halland view poetry, the results do show tendencies toward a view of poetry as being strenuous to work with due to students’ resistance and negative attitudes. Moreover, that poetry is one area of English language studies that the majority of teachers view as less important. Furthermore, the results reveal that a teacher’s personal interest in poetry, or lack of interest, affects the amount of time and focus placed on poetry in the classrooms.
34
Lamson, Morgen. "Boethian Colorings in Geoffrey Chaucer's Earlier Poetry: The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame." TopSCHOLAR®, 2007. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/431.
Full textAbstract:
There has been much written on Boethius and his impact on Chaucer's greater known works, such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, yet there has not been much light shone on his other works, namely The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame, which are a rich mix of medieval conventions and Boethian elements and themes. Such ideas have been explored through the lenses of his five, shorter "Boethian lyrics" - "The Former Age," "Fortune," "Truth," "Gentilesse," and "Lak of Stedfastnesse" - particularly because it is within these five poems that the metafictional narrative approach or framing of Chaucer's Boethiusinfluenced work, through narration and possible consolations, are fleshed out and brought into focus. However, the "Boethian lyrics" are not necessary in the study of the three earlier poems The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame. Using the convention of the frame tale with the dream vision in these three poems allows for the narrator to be brought to an understanding in each of these texts, strongly suggesting that this approach is something that Chaucer came across in Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. To merely go through and catalogue all Boethian elements as lifted directly from Consolation would accomplish nothing but a catalog of similarities. In that same vein, to analyze the "Boethian poems" would also be treading over familiar scholarly ground. In examining an intermediary group of texts as a bridge between Boethius's classical philosophy and Chaucer's courtly poetry, particularly The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame, this more concretely shows the extent of Boethius's coloring injected into Chaucer's writings from early in his writing career. Through close readings and secondary outside research, I am confident that another chapter of Chaucerian scholarship, one that has rarely been explored, much less written, can be added.
35
Lindberg, Jessica E. "Confluence." restricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04192007-132555/.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (M.F.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007.Title from file title page. Leon Stokesbury, committee chair; Wayne Erickson, Beth Gylys, committee members. Electronic text (57 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Dec. 21, 2007.
36
Zonglin, Chang. "Schemata, metaphor and literary readings : a case study of Chinese EFL learners reading poems." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.391430.
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Schmittauer, Janet Elaine. "Words into bytes : an analysis of the initial-drafting behaviors of freshmen-composition students in a curriculum focusing on contemporary American poetry." The Ohio State University, 1987. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1287431183.
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Sadedin, Ann. "The uncentred self : image and awareness in the Middle English religious lyrics /." Connect to thesis, 1995. http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00000220.
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Brown, Margaret. "Museum-Making in Women's Poetry: How Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson Confront the Time of History." TopSCHOLAR®, 2007. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/965.
Full textAbstract:
In The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement note that Michelet and Freud "both thought that the repressed past survives in woman; woman, more than anyone else, is dedicated to reminiscence" (5). Whether or not this is true of woman, that expectation of her—as keeper of the past—has perhaps subsisted in the deepest realms of the collective unconscious. From the work of Cixous and Clement, Julia Kristeva and Angela Leighton, I ultimately deduce that there are two perceptions of time: man's time has been associated with the straight, the linear, the historical, and the prosaic; woman's time has been associated with the circular, the cyclical, the monumental, and the poetic. Each time has its obstacles to overcome: man's time is stubbornly rooted in patriarchal language; woman's time is dizzyingly enigmatic. The struggles between these two times manifest themselves in the poetry of perhaps the two most canonical American women poets, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. In the corpus of each, I find a common mode of operation that attempts to reconcile man's and woman's time, to varying degrees of success. Emily Dickinson uses the language of linear history to stretch its boundaries; she experiments with the nature of time and memory as related to trauma, beginning to question and reform historical memory (men's and women's) and our experience of it in poems such as #1458, "Time's wily Chargers will not wait"; #563, "I could not prove the Years had feet"; #33, "If recollecting were forgetting"; and #312, "Her - 'last Poems'—." Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, is not as certain that the two can be so easily reconciled. Determined to establish her place in literary history and lay claim to posterity, but terrified that doing so will take away her present voice, Plath often represents woman—sometimes literally, as in "All the Dead Dears," and sometimes metaphorically, as in "The Courage of Shutting- Up"—as a potential museum, a live body always in danger of drying out and immobilizing, being admired as she is, frozen in the present moment, but denied future evolution. Through close readings of the poets' afore-mentioned works and others, in conjunction with the frequent application of critical/theoretical scholarship in feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and postcolonial veins, I will explore the attempted reconciliation of man's and woman's time in four chapters: "The Thrust of Manliness" concerns the limitations of linear time, including entropy, atrophy, and the charge of feminine reminiscence; "Morning Glory: Cycles and Resurrection" outlines the advantages of a circular perspective, including possibilities for change and resurrection; "Secretaries of Aporia: Recording without Meaning" explores the limitations of cyclical time as encased in linear time, particularly in the literary charge to detail without explaining; and "The Time of Trauma" underlines the historical and political implications of both the burden of reminiscence without return and the study of women's poetry in linear time.
40
Messem, Catherine. "'Angers, fantasies and ghostly fears' : nineteenth century women from Wales and English-language poetry." Thesis, Aberystwyth University, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.364769.
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Jan, Rabea. "Re-creating literature : translation in the English-language poetic tradition, with reference to Pope's Iliad and Pound's Cathay." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.296232.
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Taskesen, Bengu. "Sense Through Nonsense Reading Difficult Poetry." Master's thesis, METU, 2004. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12605178/index.pdf.
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This thesis analyses the difficulties in reading modern poetry that arise out of not the references but the unconventional use of language, and presents them in a theoretical framework based on Julia Kristeva&rsquos semanalytic theory and Melanie Parsons&rsquo
s application of it to a comparison of Nonsense literature and twentieth century poetry. Then aspects of the works of G. M. Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell are discussed and poems by these poets are analysed within this framework.
43
Ishee, Jeanette Carol. "An Insight into the Poetry of A C Swinburne: Art and the Image of the Poisonous Flower." W&M ScholarWorks, 1988. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625452.
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Seffers, Tracy Prior. ""A Bowery Nook Will be Elysium": The Image of the Bower in the Poetry of John Keats." W&M ScholarWorks, 1993. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625827.
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Kroska, Aaron. "In Some Asbestos World." PDXScholar, 2015. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/2131.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis consists of a collection of poems which explore the relationship between the imagination and that mysterious thing we call reality. They engage with the Emmanuel Kant's notion of the dichotomy between subject and object; thus, one of the central concerns of the project is whether the object can ever be understood by a subject, whose mind imposes its categories and other forms of mediation upon whatever it perceives. The poems also engage with Wallace Stevens' notion of a "Supreme Fiction," as the only means left to us, however imperfect it may be, with which we might approach the "original idea" that all other perceptions of reality only approximate. In the absence of the certainty of an interrogated reality, negative space, that which cannot be perceived by the senses, is explored, proposed, gestured toward. That genius behind the infinity of the world.
46
Seal, Jill. "Psalms, sonnets and spiritual songs : some traditions and innovations in English religious poetry, c. 1560-1611." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.363689.
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Kramer, Emily Marie. "Wandering: Dreams, Memory, and Language in Poetry." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1525179650285217.
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Ross, Sarah C. E. "Women and religious verse in English manuscript culture c1600-1688 : Lady Anne Southwell, Lady Hester Pulter and Katherine Austen." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.365585.
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O'Malley, Elizabeth. "“They All Write About Some Woman in Their Poetry”: The Heroines of Ulysses and As I Lay Dying." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2017. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/honors_theses/98.
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Buckalew, Faye Roberta. ""Thro' Sleep as Thro' a Veil": Losing the Self to Find the Self in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti." W&M ScholarWorks, 1993. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625824.
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