In English literary studies, classical epic poetry is typically regarded as a masculinist genre that imparts and reinforces the values of dominant culture. The Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, after all, ...were written by men, feature male heroes, and recount the violent events that gave rise to the misogynistic societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Yet, in the twentieth century, women poets have found inspiration for their feminist projects in these ostensibly masculinist poems. The four poets in this study, for example, have drawn from the work of Homer and Virgil to criticize the ways that conventional conceptions of gender identity have impaired both men and women. One might expect, and indeed, most critics argue, that women like H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson invoke their classical predecessors only to reject them and the repressive values that they represent. Close readings of these poets' work, however, demonstrate that, far from dismissing the ancient poems, Helen in Egypt, Annie Allen, Meadowlands, and Autobiography of Red are deeply invested in them, finding in them models for their own social critiques.The work of these four poets emphasizes that the classical epics are not one-dimensional celebrations of violence and traditional masculinity. Indeed, the work of Homer and Virgil expresses anxiety about the misogynistic values of the heroic code to which its warriors adhere, and it urges that war and violence are antithetical to civilized society. In examining the ways that modern women poets have drawn from these facets of the ancient works to condemn the sexism, racism, and heterocentrism of contemporary culture, my dissertation seeks to challenge the characterization of classical epic that prevails in English literary studies and to assert the necessity of understanding the complexity of the ancient texts that inspire modern poets. Taking an intertextual approach, I hope to show that close readings of the classical epics facilitate our understanding of how and why modern women have engaged the work of their ancient predecessors and that this knowledge, in turn, emphasizes that the epic genre is more complex than we have recognized and that its tradition still flourishes.
This volume of original poetry is prefaced by a critical introduction studying the structures and themes of poems in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris. The introduction focuses on Glück's use of persona ...poems to counteract the poems spoken in the voice of a woman who can be closely identified with the author. The main themes the author deals with in her poems are religious doubts, the ending of relationships, and human anxiety towards death. The poems following the introduction also, initially, use personae as a means to take attention away from speakers readily identified with the author. However, most of these poems are narrative in scope, and they deal with religious doubts, tension among family members, and a female speaker's coming of age in the context of both familial and romantic relationships.
This creative writing dissertation begins with an introduction, “The Education of the Poet and its Effect on ‘The First Book,’” an essay in which the author examines “poetic voice”: how she perceives ...it best manifests in poets during their apprenticeships in poetry. In support of her thesis, the author uses texts such as Helen Vendler's Coming of Age As a Poet, Mary Kinzie's The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling, and Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets on Poetry (ed. by Martin Lammon). A collection of forty-five poems (in five sections) follows this introduction. The first and second sections are selections of free verse poems written in the last year of the author's Ph.D program. The third section is a selection of sonnets. The fourth section is a miscellany of experiments in poetic form: a villanelle, a poem in couplets, a poem in blank verse, several prose poems, and a litany, among other forms. The fifth section is a selection of free verse poems written at the start of the author's Ph.D program. Through the content of the various sections, the author intends to show how experimentation with poetic form was a necessary component in her development as a poet.
The Road Between Cemeteries is a creative dissertation, a book of poems that makes use of many various forms and styles. I am interested in both the lyric and the narrative traditions and the heart ...of this collection, I believe, lies in the space between; the narrative is the road, moving inexorably forward, and the lyric, the passenger dreaming, questioning out the window. I am also interested in contemporary relationships, both those of a private nature such as we have with our parents, spouses, children, and those of a public nature, such as with our heroes in literature, sports and music. A main question the poems wrestle with is how we as humans face the inevitability of our own mortality and the mortality of those we hold dear in both the private and public sphere. Therefore, there are a number of elegies and would-be elegies in the collection that contemplate the permanence and wonder of death, especially in an age when traditional cures such as religion have lost command. A second thematic strand is the question of identity. I am interested in how we define ourselves to ourselves, to others, and how our relative connection or disconnection from other people as well as our past history informs that conception of identity. These poems assert that, though these are difficult questions, often irresolvable mysteries that strain our abilities to live meaningful lives, there is hope, a dignity in making the endeavor, and that the very act of the artist, in this case the poet, can create, out of chaos, meaning. These poems arm themselves with insights from the past, observations concerning the present and, with these tools, surge forward (with more than a little anxiety) to peek in the fogged over windows of the future.
This manuscript builds upon two major areas of my research study: women's spiritual feminism and religious writing; and poetry, specifically poetry that engages the themes of family, Catholicism, and ...Southern culture (regionalism). As a spiritual feminist, I am interested in joining the conversation of other women spiritual writers who have found many aspects of the Judeo-Christian hegemonic tradition challenging, demanding, and often severe towards women. These women writers have attempted to find connection to the Divine in many new ways, for example: through embracing and privileging their own voices and experiences; through devising new patterns of spirituality that do not focus on traditional religion; or through revisioning images, icons, and texts (especially the Bible) central to Judeo-Christian culture. In my own writing, I look for the Divine both in my experiences as a woman and as a Catholic Christian. My poetry, therefore, represents my contribution to the discourse begun by other women writers as well as my own continuing search for spiritual connection as a Catholic. In the process of writing these poems, I have discovered new appreciation both for the many spiritual feminist essayists, poets, critics, and fiction writers that I have been blessed to read, as well as developed a deeper level of faith—a faith solidly grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition passed down to us by men. But also included are poems about my family and images of the South that have been so formative in my poetic development, elements whose significance did not reveal themselves to me until I became an expatriate Southern writer in Nebraska. Besides religion, what endures is family, and the persistence and Longevity of the South. I needed the distance that Nebraska afforded me in order to see. Finally, what bridges my spiritual/religious poems with my secular poems is the notion of witnessing. Not only do I witness my experience with Jesus, but I give witness to my life as a woman and a poet.
The work of elegy, of remembering the dead, is rooted in the linguistic figuring of loss. This dissertation looks at major shifts in the treatment of elegiac language in late medieval literature, ...changes characterized by an insistent rejection of inherited discourses of loss and a vigorous search for what these poems perceive as an appropriate, adequate language of commemoration, by beginning with Chaucer's early dream-vision The Book of the Duchess and treating at length the dream-vision Pearl. Pearl, a poem concerned with a parent's grief over the death of a child, has been viewed variously as a biographical expression of real-life tragedy, a generic consolatio extending a long literary tradition, a traditional allegory concerning the soul's learning of spiritual truths, and, recently, as a political allegory celebrating Ricardian iconography. I contend that Pearl radically revises commemorative language by using a controversial medium, vernacular scriptural paraphrase, to embrace the dead. By treating The Book of the Duchess and Pearl as case studies, my dissertation also explores what happens to medieval elegies when the theoretical paradigms prominent in current medieval literary scholarship, especially types of historicism roughly patterned after new historicism and psychoanalysis, are applied to the late medieval poetics of loss. In the case of these elegies, as I suggest, the interpretive methodologies of such engagements erase the word-based work of the poems through an imposition of a political and aesthetic narrative that refuses to acknowledge both generic difference and the poems, rejection of inherited forms. They similarly fail to recognize that disparate media (manuscript image, dramatic procession, scriptural paraphrase, vernacular poetry) articulate meanings in different registers, and that these late fourteenth-century elegies initiate an intermedial conversation between these forms to revise and fundamentally revision memorial language. In the dissertation's closing section I explore the themes of recollection at work in the reception of medieval texts—processes both intrinsic and external to these texts. I center on the exemplary case of J. R. R. Tolkien and his important, life-long relationship to Pearl. In 1927 Tolkien published a poem titled “The Nameless Land.” The sixty-line poem is a curious exercise—an experiment in form, intended as an approximation of the exceptionally difficult interwoven and alliterative structure of Pearl in modern verse. The poem is a condensation of Tolkien's theories about the methodologies of medievalism; I discuss how Tolkien uses the poem's frame to give voice to a medievalism that consciously resists the influential Victorian poetic-nostalgic model promoted by Tennyson. As I show, Tolkien's medievalism is an inspired habit of remembrance rooted in formal linguistic analysis. Its tone was deeply influenced by Tolkien's relationship to Pearl, a poem that urges us to reflect on our commemorative pathways, the resources we draw on to recall the dead.
This project is a book-length collection of poems, arranged according to various themes. The first section deals with my experience of living in a physical body, or as Virginia Woolf wrote, "telling ...the truth about my own experiences" in the physical world. The middle section is composed of a poem cycle revolving around the consequences of war and violence, specifically with my family's survival of World War II. The poems in the last section are concerned with nature and the relations between aging parents and their adult children, as well as the evolving path of a long marriage. Most of these poems are written in either free verse or in forms of my own invention, but I have experimented with blank verse, the sonnet, the pantoum, and the haiku, and include poems written in those forms. These poems attempt to illuminate the internal world by focusing on particulars of the external world. Like Williams, I find inspiration for my poetry in "things," using objects, dreams, and memories as openings into that internal world. I scan my surroundings constantly for signs of these doors to poetry. For me, poetry is that place between dream and consciousness, a transcendent location that is rooted in the real world.
For more than fifty years, Philip Levine has successfully written verse and prose on a number of subjects and themes including the complexities of familial relationships, the anarchists of the ...Spanish Civil War, the importance and effects of memory in life, race relations in the United States, the poet’s Jewish identity, and the very struggles that writing meaningful poetry involves. A cursory look at the scholarship on Levine’s poetry reveals that these are the topics frequently discussed and analyzed. However, as anyone can recognize in the criticism on Levine’s verse, Levine’s reputation does not rest so much on his attention to these themes and topics as it does on his presentation of and sympathies with individuals working in the context of modern industrial society. This dissertation identifies and analyzes Levine’s presentations of work and working-class individuals. Starting with the argument that more scholarship needs to be performed on Levine’s poetry than what currently exists, the dissertation’s first part points to Levine’s reputation in and contributions to American poetry. Proceeding to undertake the further study called for in part one, the second part of the dissertation identifies representative examples of working-class elements within Levine’s poetry and places them within historical context as far as poetry is concerned in general. Part three specifically looks at the ways in which Levine’s poetry expresses and relates to Marx’s idea that all of history revolves around the concept of class struggle. The final section of the dissertation explores how Levine’s poetry represents Marx’s theory of alienation among the working-class, identifying and analyzing key examples from throughout the poet’s oeuvre. INDEX WORDS: Working-Class, Work, Labor, Proletariat, Philip Levine, Marx, Marxism, Industrialism, American Poetry, American Verse, Factory, Alienation, Class, Estrangement, Family
