My dissertation investigates American modernist poetry in light of two early twentieth-century trends: a turn to questions of linguistic variety and uniformity and explosive advances in technologies ...of mass communication. The project explores the ways that poets of the period drew upon both of these trends to challenge the long-standing equation of national subjectivity with discourses of linguistic standardization. Consequently, I define American modernist poetics as an engagement with—and redefinition of—the concept of the vernacular, traditionally figured as a set of localized, informal discursive practices, within an increasingly vehicular linguistic, cultural, and technological context. This redefinition challenged the traditional relationship between orality, usually conceived of as a vernacular, nonstandard linguistic practice, and writing, considered both the embodiment of and the touchstone for linguistic standardization. To frame my discussion, my introduction briefly reviews the poetic project of Walt Whitman. Whitman's poetics, I argue, evaded the historical and cultural changes of the late nineteenth century by attempting to re-oralize the written word. Doing so would, he felt, invest American English with the imprimatur of authenticity that was essential in order for it to be taken seriously as a vehicle for poetic production. His poetic strategies differ greatly from those of three American modernists—William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes—who were, for various reasons, disaffiliated from the concept of a standard language. These poets foreground the informal and non-standard elements of American English in ways that require readers to be aware of the poem as both a visual icon and an auditory echo. In particular, they employ what might be termed a poetics of vernacularity, one that highlights the arbitrary nature of standard language conventions and, in so doing, emphasizes the interdependence of oral and written codes. Consequently, I argue, these poets undercut the assumptions underlying standard language ideology, as well as the traditional link between that ideology and the construction of national subjects. In so doing, they redefine not only the concept of vernacularity, but also that of national identity. Their playful, cross-coding poetics reconfigure both of these concepts as performative acts rather than essentialist categories.
This work examines Louise Glück's characteristic use of myth-narrative lyric personae as an attempt to reconcile postmodern lyric with a poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity and the ...sacred. Read in this light, Glück's career—which spans the last forty years of the 20th century—parallels the contemporaneous growth of the women's spirituality movement. For Glück, as for so many women and men in the latter half of the 20th century, to conceive of the sacred is necessarily to reconceive of it. Sociologist Joan Borysenko highlights the inextricability of the biological, the psychological, and the spiritual by identifying formative moments in the feminine life cycle as “bio-psycho-spiritual experiences,” while psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva identifies similarly transformative occasions as “borderline experiences” in which subjectivity is put into a state of being “in-process/on-trial.” Glück represents this kind of interrogation of identity as mystical; such occasions shape her understanding of identity and spirituality and subsequently her poetics. In Chapter 1, I explore how maternity prompts a reconsideration of identity in Glück's inaugural volume, Firstborn. The ecofeminist conclusions such reexamination suggests lead to the employment of myth-narrative lyric personae in her next collection, The House on Marshland. Chapter 2 illustrates the ways in which consideration of the poet's own adolescent anorexia in Descending Figure fosters a deeper understanding of the individual's relationship to the sacred. In The Triumph of Achilles, a sense of the inextricability of mortality and desire and of the physical and the spiritual influence the poet's relationship to the lyric mode and her return to Judeo-Christian mythology qua mythology. In Chapter 3 we see that, following such revelations regarding identity and the sacred, in Ararat and The Wild Iris the poet interrogates the relationship between the human and nonhuman; in these volumes, Glück employs linguistic ritual—confession and prayer—to represent the deconstruction of religious discourse. In Chapter 4, we see that in her most recent volumes, Meadowlands and Vita Nova, Glück offers the poetic imagination and creativity as means by which the subject reconceives of the self and the sacred.
This study explores the impact of changing definitions of confession on the critical reception and interpretation of the poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. In light of the ongoing ...criticism concerning “confessional poetry” in the forty-one years since Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) was published, it may seem difficult to justify yet another study of confessional poetry. However, the term has been so thoroughly assimilated into our critical vocabulary that we have lost an authentic sense of its meaning. “Confessional poetry” is in some ways an arbitrary term that has a very tenuous connection with the poetry it purports to describe. Even though the original sense of the term “confession” was a religious one, the term “confessional poetry” was coined in response to specific (and secular) poetic techniques employed by Robert Lowell in Life Studies. Over the past forty-one years, the connotations of the term have become increasingly wide-ranging. Poets as diverse as Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Sharon Olds have been called “confessional” poets—as have John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Frank Bidart, Jack Gilbert, and Louise Glück. Despite great variation in the extent to which details of these poets' lives appear in their work, even the hint of an autobiographical element to their work often ensures that they will be labeled as “confessional” poets. Consequently, formulating any sort of standard criteria by which to evaluate “confessional poetry” has become very difficult. Further, in the cases of the poets in this study—Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes—we have often neglected to ask where, specifically, the “confessional” label originates.Since the appearance of W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle and Robert Lowell's Life Studies in 1959, the body of criticism surrounding confessional poetry has functioned as Hepworth and Turner's “external control” of its definition (albeit from many different perspectives). Ultimately, although the central requirements of confessional poetry remain the same—intimacy, a sense of guilt, and a difference in status between the confessor and the confessant—it is still impossible for critics to irrevocably determine what poetry is “confessional” and what is not.
A poetry collection written in free verse and divided into the four sections "In the Garden of the Three Islands," "Encanto," "Journey to Luna" and "In the Ritual of Calling". The work develops the ...general theme of the journey in its physical and imagined forms; more specifically, the poet tackles the intertwined themes and questions of culture, nation, history, community, womanhood and identity. The overriding project in this collection could also be said to be the articulation of what it means to be a Filipino/Filipina; the work can be seen as an extended reflection on this theme. The section "In the Garden of the Three Islands," at first notes the particularities of the poet's journeys, noting the loneliness and difficulty accompanying the passage from one physical state to another and later its emotional counterpart, struggling to find through word and image the ways to picture self and country in another clime. In "Encanto" the poet celebrates the formative influences of everyday life, of folk culture and mythic belief, memory and personal history as the sources for strength and voice. In "Journey to Luna" and "In the Ritual of Calling" the poet considers and aligns herself within the larger picture of Filipino diasporic movements across the world, tracking these through history and the experiences of colonization to the present.
In "Sharpening the Truth: A Fusion of Personal and Impersonal in Lyric Poetry," I discuss what I have learned from writing personal poetry. The work of Sharon Olds, an early influence evident in my ...dissertation, uses circumstantial personal details that block the reader from "fusing" wholly with the text. In contrast, the work of Yehuda Amichai, a later influence on my poetry, offers a model of how to avoid the pitfalls of the circumstantial personal: while using autobiographical experience as a base, it strips away contextual personal details, thereby allowing for a more total "fusion" with the text. Personal details can still be used; the poet just needs to be more selective in choosing specifics that include, not exclude: for example, personal details with symbolic import or mythic weight. Amichai compensates for the loss of the circumstantial personal by using common knowledge, figurative language, and the use of commentary. The poems in Counting Down Our Small Time are divided into four sections, each preceded by a summatory epigraph. These sections deal with some core concerns of mine as a writer: my parents' conflict-fraught marriage; the loss of innocence; love; growing up and leaving home; and death.
This dissertation asks two questions: (1) why have contemporary poets become increasingly interested in translation and study of modern European poets' writings and (2) what is the legacy modern ...European poets' have given contemporary culture? The study concludes that modern European poets' writings embody an “urgent humanity” (Steiner), profound moral courage in opposing tyranny (Felstiner), and sheer beauty and power (Brodsky) that partially account for contemporary appeal. The study hypothesizes that in addressing the future, modern European poets spoke directly to contemporary culture. The response of contemporary poets represents a dialogue between the first half of the century and the second that renews and extends the tradition of European humanism. The dissertation suggests that because compilations of complete writings of most major modern European poets remain unavailable in English, comprehension of the modernist legacy is fragmentary rather than whole. The dissertation concludes that available writings of modern European poets, both poetry and prose taken together begin to register the spiritual pulse of this age; lend insight, proportion, and depth to contemporary inquiries of the interior life; and illuminate Europe's historical record. The dissertation recommends: (1) that modern European poets' writing be studied in conjunction with historical sources; (2) that modern European poetry be studied in the context of literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual sources poets' prose and critical biographies indicate are central to the poetry; (3) that complete writings of all major modern European poets be translated into English; and (4) that new translation of collected poems and complete writings of major modern European poets be modeled on the collaborative translations of Anna Akhmatova's poems by poet Stanley Kunitz and Russian scholar Max Hayward. Poems in the dissertation manuscript explore impulses in modern European poetry. Modern European poets Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Pasternak (Russian); Rilke and Celan (German-language); Jabès, Apollinaire, and St. John Perse (French-language); Machado, Lorca, and Paz (Spanish-language); and Montale and Pavese (Italian) are subjects of study. “Reconstruction” refers to Jung's concept that whatever values nature destroys externally, she rebuilds within.
Sharon Olds is among the most prominent contemporary heirs to the confessional mode of poetry pioneered by Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and others in the late 1950s and 1960s. Olds's ...writing of the body and her insistence on survival distinguish her work from her predecessors'. Yet she shares not only the confessionals' willingness to break taboos and reveal family secrets but also their interest in the relation of the self to other and to history. This dissertation studies the ways in which Olds brings a speaking I into her poems without embracing a naive sense of self. Olds's poetry stages an ambivalent dialectical movement between two psycholinguistic desires—a desire for closure, unity, and an essential body, on the one hand, and a desire for multiplicity, difference, and a self constructed in language, on the other. Through self-reflexive gestures, Olds's confessional poetry displays an awareness of its own constructedness, even as its narration of the past reveals Olds's commitment to poetry that grounds itself in embodied selves and a material reality beyond language.
For the last century, discussions of American poetry have touched on a central question: Is the lyric mode still viable? Recently, poststructuralist theorists and language poets alike typically ...answer “No,” contending that cultural, historical, and textual factors make the conception of an autonomous lyric subject a dubious one, one very much implicated in a bourgeois Romantic nostalgia. As a result, much recent critical practice disparages the lyric as the genre most closely associated with that Romantic notion of the self. This disparagement is traceable in part to the way many critics misunderstand contemporary poetry's connection to the Romantic legacy and the practice that places a solitary speaker voicing his or her passions in a “timeless” moment. This misunderstanding is complicated by a common misreading that sees Wordsworth's poetic theory as advocating simple expressivism. By overly emphasizing Wordsworth's equation—that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”—critics often ignore Wordsworth's qualification that the poet must have “also thought long and deeply.” This dissertation argues that the lyric mode remains viable in contemporary poetry because of the self-critical, self-reflective, and self-suspicious move already apparent in the lyric mode even as Wordsworth defines it in his Preface. Beginning by investigating the lyric aesthetics offered both in Wordsworth's Preface and in John Keats's letters, this dissertation focuses on four recent American poets who have chosen to work within the lyric tradition. By examining the prose and poetry of James Wright, Louise Glück, C. K. Williams, and Robert Hass, this dissertation illustrates how these poets have uncovered for themselves, in the mature phases of their careers, a lyric already suspicious and critical of its own assumptions. Rather than engage in postmodern semantic play, these poets clearly prefer the more familiar lyric terrain, finding there a necessary and vital lyric suspicion, that is, the ability to question the conventions of lyric poetry in order to purify its usage. This study concludes by insisting that these four poets' projects demonstrate the continued viability of the lyric mode, thus calling into question the polemical cries either to undermine radically the lyric mode or to abandon its enterprise altogether.
This creative writing thesis consists of two sections, the first a critical introduction, the second a selection of poems. Both examine the process of making art and of simply moving through the ...world as journeys through a foreign land, where a "book of myths"--that is, what one already knows--is not the best map to carry. Instead, the surest guide is the belief that each foreign language is also, in another sense, a native one. The journey through each new experience, language, or blank page benefits most from the process of listening to specific details and people instead of relying upon one general and inflexible goal or expectation. This approach results in a book of inclusion, a language and world that build a foundation upon each individual voice and thereby chip away at the kinds of blindness and deafness that have affected us throughout human history.
