This study registers the continuing presence of allegory in modern and contemporary American poetry, and argues that the persistence of allegory marks a distinct response to our condition in ...modernity. After an examination of the demotion allegory in the romantic period, this study provides various definitions of modernism and postmodernism to demonstrate why, for some postmodern theorists, allegory has returned to favor. Whereas theories of allegory have come to the fore in the postmodern period, this study remarks the presence of the allegorical impulse in modernist texts. The work of T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens as representative of the modernist period, and the work of Frank Bidart and Jorie Graham as representative of the contemporary period, provide illustrations of the persistence of allegory. This study concludes that the allegorical impulse of twentieth-century American poetry is rooted in modernism and that forms of this modernist endeavor with allegory continue today as an important response, rather than a capitulation, to our postmodern situation.
Best known for his minimalist fiction, Pacific Northwest writer Raymond Carver was an equally accomplished poet. Between 1985 and 1989, he published three major collections, Where Water Comes ...Together with Other Water, Ultramarine, and A New Path to the Waterfall . In addition, he published small-press editions mixed-genre collections, and British selected and collected editions. The American publication in 1998 of Carver's collected poems, All of Us, testifies both to the quantity and the quality of Carver's poetic output. Though there have been several scholarly studies of his fiction, this first study of Carver's poetry offers an informed reading of representative poems, an application of biographical information on reading the poems, and a consideration of poems within the context of identifiable thematic constructs; as such, it is both a biographical and thematic study. Carver's poems are economical, prosaic, emotional, conversational, and accessible. His early poems show the influence of Ernest Hemingway's prose, William Carlos Williams' emphasis on things and the use of the American idiom, and Charles Bukowski's concern for the working class. In his later poems, his work shows the influence of Czeslaw Milosz's “more spacious form,” and of companion and wife Tess Gallagher, from whom he learned to use both the figure of the double and the distinctive lyric-narrative style in which he became the anecdotal hero of his own poems. Additionally, Gallagher worked with Carver in arranging his poems into books. Thematically, Carver's poems explored issues which provide new directions for American male poets at the end of the century and beyond. As they surface in Carver's poems, these issues include exploring the relationship between creativity and destruction; the ways in which memory allowed him to expand his experiences of the moment by blending the past into the present moment; the difficulties and joys of his family and personal relationships; and how aging is a part of the process of mortality, most evident in the poems he wrote while facing his own death from cancer.
Measures have to do with how we think about things. One of the ways we think about things is in poems. One of the ways we think about poems is in criticism. Contemporary literary criticism and ...contemporary poetry in America seem at cross purposes. In fact, the formal literary critics writing recently seldom address the poems of their contemporaries. While structuralists and other schools of critics seek terms, generalizations, and whole systems to account for and to understand poems, poets themselves repeatedly assert that each of their poems is its own poetic and no system applies to their writing. It is in the prose statements of poets--in essays, in interviews, and reviews--that a reader can find the most direct and simplest affirmations of an aesthetic that, while hard to define, is easy to see in practice. This paper attempts a criticism sympathetic with the contentions of those poets by avoiding a priori terminology, that is, by avoiding the appliances of criticism, and by self-consciously persisting in close reading of texts as the directing force of its of its argument, as, in fact, the sole component of its argument. Such categories as the paper constructs in its second part (poems about paintings, poems with typographical eccentricities, poems about the sea, and poems about politics) involve a common thread, the analogy of the pulsebeat asserted in part one, to support rather than subvert those contentions. In its last chapters the paper addresses first books of poems by Amy Clampitt and Denis Johnson in order to focus on the recurrence both of the pulsebeat analogy and those subject matters outlined in part two. Thus, the paper attempts to assert a continuity between the prose statements and the poetic practices of established contemporary poets and the work of new poets. By attempting to remain descriptive rather than prescriptive, the paper tries to evoke the essential element and quintessential spirit of all of the poems treated in it: The measure is always the poem.
This dissertation explores the feminist uses of language in contemporary American poetry by women. Three broad categories form the foci for the main chapters: "Metaphors of Form and Vision: the ...Creative Process and Feminist Aesthetics," "Anger, Power and Selfhood: Women of Color and Feminist P
