Browsing by Subject "Poetry"

Although Charles Baudelaire's poetry was censored in part for his graphic representations of death, for Baudelaire himself, death was the ultimate censorship. He grappled with its limitations of the possibility of articulation in Les Fleurs du mal, Le Spleen de Paris, "Le Poème du hachisch," and other works. The first chapter of this dissertation, "Dead Silent," explores Baudelaire's use of apophasis as a rhetorical tactic to thwart the censoring force of death as what prevents the speaking subject from responding. Chapter two, "Voices Beyond the Grave," then investigates the opposite poetics of articulation and inarticulation, in the form of post-mortem voice from within the cemetery, and particularly as didactic speech that contradicts the living. "Baudelaire's Widows" argues that the widow is for Baudelaire a figure of modernity par excellence, auguring the anticipation of mourning and the problem of remembering the dead as a lifelong cognitive dilemma. Chapter four, "Lethal Illusions," combines analysis of suicide in "La Corde" and "Le Poème du hachisch" with interrogation of mimesis. If the intoxicant serves as suicide and mirror, the production of illusion is the possibility and the fatal pathology of art. Yet art simultaneously channels a truth understood as the revelation of illusions--not least the illusion of a life without death.

This dissertation examines the collaborative poetry and poetics of four early modern women writers: Mary Sidney Herbert (1561-1621), Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645), Katherine Philips (1631-1664) and Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656 – 1710). It critically recovers women’s poetry and their different modes of literary collaboration at the same time as it explores their unique manuscript and print practices. The critical methods employed are primarily historicist and formal and founded on close reading of revision processes, literary source materials and formal poetics. Additionally, each chapter argues that the contexts of relationship and community are integral to understanding how women writers employed collaborative writing practices as well as the significance of collaboration as an alternative to competition. I conclude that, across the long seventeenth century, the intellectual social agency of women writers grows through their collaborative writing practices, evidenced by publication and print.

This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between nineteenth and twentieth century artists and the paranormal. Historically, the term “paranormal” has denoted an array of otherworldly phenomena that has captivated artists and the public alike. Indeed, this period, host to William Blake’s spiritual visions and William Butler Yeats’s ghostly dictations, showcases the indelible influence the paranormal has had on art. Unsurprisingly, this influence has long attracted critical attention. The prevailing narrative of critics such as Leon Surette and Helen Sword argues that the period’s artists expressed their paranormal interests by aestheticizing the practices of spiritualist movements, which professed the existence of a “spirit world” that could be contacted by humans via séances or psychic mediums. But there has been little consideration of how artists identified these interests with the very mechanics of artistic creation, believing art could engage otherworldly phenomena in ways that spiritualist techniques could not.

In Guided by Voices, I argue that a diverse strand of nineteenth and twentieth century artists conceived of poetry as an access point to a transgressive, generative kind of paranormality. Some, for instance, understood the poetical text and its creator as haunted entities, while others believed their poetry-making could conjure spirits. Regardless, these poets all turned to the paranormal to achieve liberation. In their quest to expand the imaginative possibilities of their craft, they invoked the paranormal to revolutionize our perceptions of language, humanity, and politics. When read as such, their work comprises a distinct historical arc, a tradition of liberated poetics that unifies artists across disparate times and spaces. Hence, Guided by Voices not only reassess artistic engagements with the paranormal but also illuminates conceptual-historical links between artists that scholarship has not yet recognized.

Over three chapters and an epilogue, I demonstrate how parapoiesis, the unique enmeshment of poetry and the paranormal, enables a series of liberations: liberation from embodiment; liberation from poetic form; liberation from individuality; and liberation from sociohistorical reality. Close readings of primary sources direct my assertions, as do some wide-ranging theoretical reference points. I harness Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to help articulate my definition of the paranormal, for example, and I incorporate Georges Bataille’s ideas about the mythic to flesh out my examination of poetical mythmaking. The project does, however, draw as much from a popular imaginary as it does academic discourses; folk spirituality’s characterizations of ghosts, magic, and the occult also help anchor my claims.

Ultimately, I argue that parapoiesis’ significance lies in its capacity to transform, often in a material sense, our world. Parapoiesis illustrates how and why poets perceive their works’ relationship with paranormality as intrinsic, procreative, and alchemical. I contend that these poets reveal a broader facet of nineteenth and twentieth century artistic production which maintains a contemporary resonance and usefulness: art’s paranormal entanglements deconstruct prevailing ideological narratives and histories, imagine alternative, liberatory ones, and, in doing so, alter the very material conditions within which culture itself germinates.

This dissertation traces the evolution of Whitman's democratic thinking across the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, covering the auspicious years 1855, 1856, 1860 and 1867. While democracy is the master political term within Whitman's later editions, it was nearly devoid from the original one, in which republican political concepts were still regnant. The argument put forth is that in the space of twelve years, Whitman's relationship to democracy went through a strikingly classic dialectic trajectory: emergence, consolidation and fissure. The immediate engine driving this progression was the Civil War, but behind this immediate cause was the slower, broader motor of modernization, particularly modernization's expansion of markets, for in the market's circulation and interconnection of people and commodities Whitman saw a model for an expansive and integrative democratic collectivity. The first chapter explores the importance to Whitman of the physical print room as a uniquely hybrid site in the course of modernization, for while it was one of the first to exploit the expanding industrial market, it also maintained pre-industrial forms of artisanal labor late into that progression. The print room thus became a site where the industrial market's reach and pre-industrial labor's affective relationship to the product and its consumers could be combined, and the print room therefore plays a central role, in ways both subtle and profound, in Whitman's poetry, in his understanding of the emerging democratic nation, and in his own literary productive practice. The second chapter turns from an investigation of democratic social space to an investigation of democratic time, noting how a nearly forgotten event, a loan between Whitman and James Parton, ended the "afflatus" under which the early editions were produced and prompted Whitman to revamp Leaves' relationship to history. Whitman's experience of personal debt failure led him to reconsider the ways in which his political project was susceptible to similar collapse, for the circuits of affective connection upon which his democratic project was based depended not only on their reach through space but on their forward projection through time, particularly the continual recycling of death into life, what Whitman called the "perpetual payment of the perpetual loan." Whitman sought to reduce this contingency by abstracting the political project of the work from his immediate social world (America) to a political philosophy (democracy) which stood above and outside of time. The 1860 edition thus marked the emergence of democracy as the book's central political philosophy. Yet this strategy proved insufficient when Whitman confronted the one barrier to affective exchange that his verse could not bridge: the dead bodies of the Union soldiers. This unbridgeable difference reverberated outward through the circuits of Whitman's poetry, dismantling the political and affective structures he had been building up to 1860. A text which previously declared the absence of both the past and death - "the greatest poet ... places himself where the future becomes present," "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death" - now becomes doubly haunted by ghosts, once by the dead bodies of Union soldiers which, as much as Whitman declares he "will henceforth forget," he cannot, and again by the strange emergence of new "Phantoms, gigantic, superb." These phantoms represent for Whitman the inversion of democracy's promise, democracy become nightmarish and zombie-like, and his fundamental triangle is haunted by its inverse: a melancholic Whitman; the overmastering re-emergence of the "bards of the past" and explicitly antiquated poetic forms; and a threatening, sovereign federal power autonomous from the people. The revisions Whitman introduced to the post-war edition of 1867 tell the story of a crisis in democratic confidence on behalf of democracy's former champion. Taken all together, the first four editions of Leaves form a chronicle of the archetypal democratic poet's struggle with democracy during U.S. democracy's most critical decade.

This dissertation examines the use of personae, the rhetorical artifices by which an author creates different voices, in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I argue that the Confessio attempts to expose how discourses of sexual desire alienate subjects from their proper place in the political world, and produce artificial personae that only appear socially engaged. The first three chapters consider the creation of the personae in the context of medieval Aristotelian political thought and the Roman de la Rose tradition. The last three chapters examine the extended discourse of Gower's primary personae in the Confessio Amantis, drawing upon Gower's other works and the history of Gower criticism.

This dissertation consists of an examination of the human cultural vocation in relation to the created order at large, with particular reference to the writings of theologian Colin Gunton, and writer, poet, and cultural critic Wendell Berry.

Gunton presents a vision of the human vocation within the created world as offering a “sacrifice of praise,” a vision with a distinctive stress on the agency of the Holy Spirit, in which the concepts of perfection, particularity, relationality, and mediation play determinative roles. Humans are enabled to participate in the Holy Spirit’s perfecting of creation through cultural practices that support personal particularity and mediate interpersonal relations between God, humans, and non-human creatures. This vision seeks to both integrate and uphold the integrity of all dimensions of cultural life – the Good, True, and Beautiful or ethics, knowledge, and art – in contrast to what Gunton sees as the fragmented yet homogenizing ethos of postmodern culture.

However, despite his stated concern for particularity, Gunton offers little in the way of particular concrete exemplification of what a “sacrifice of praise” or its related “ethic of createdness” looks like in practice except for the celebration of the Eucharist. The vision of “sacrifice of praise” as presented by Gunton is not sufficiently generative of specific cultural, artistic, or ecological practices that will enable persons to participate in the Holy Spirit’s perfecting of creation.

It is argued that the integrative imagination of Wendell Berry, as embodied by his Sabbath poetry and poetic practice, can be employed to meet the deficiencies of Gunton’s vision, providing powerful, concrete exemplifications of Gunton’s major concerns and developing his concepts of perfection, particularity, relationality, and mediation further. Berry argues that locally adapted poetry is a practice that enables the formation of a sympathetic and placed imagination, such that humans can perceive ways to work in harmony with the material creation. Crucial to this practice and formative process is a rich vision and goal of Sabbath and, consequently, Sabbath-worthy work. His account of poetry and his own poetic output, together with analogous (agri)cultural practices, constitute a fully integrated vision of human culture – imagination, work, economy, and the arts – that advances the main trajectories offered by Gunton.

These two accounts of the human vocation resonate generatively because Gunton and Berry both operate from perspectives that keenly recognize the God-giftedness of creation. Berry’s perspective is from the “ground up” as it were, in part utilizing the practice of poetry to attend to particularities in light of a holy vision of Sabbath rest. Gunton’s perspective is more overtly and rigorously theological, governed above all by a theology of the triune economy and the outworking of the economy within the created order, particularly the perfection of creation by the Spirit. Berry’s Sabbath vision, as embodied in his poetic practice, brings two key resources to Gunton’s pneumatological vision of the human vocation as offering a “sacrifice of praise”: i) a concrete and particular example of human engagement with place and culture-making that exemplifies Gunton’s desire for fully integrated cultural engagement of the True, Good, and Beautiful, and ii) an expansion of Gunton’s vision of the human vocation vis-à-vis creation, that is, a “sacrifice of praise,” by including the cultural category of work and economy.

I argue that experimental poets, beginning with Gertrude Stein but proliferating later in the century with such poets as Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Joe Brainard, and Barbara Guest, were drawn to comics for the way they perform, while undoing, the most conventional appeals to authorship, authenticity, personhood, and the unified text. Examining twentieth-century poetry in juxtaposition with comics as an often-overlooked interlocutor, I show how comics—from their inception—have always held an influential place in an US, poetic avant-garde. Drawing on critical work in visual cultural studies and popular culture as well as queer theory and literary studies, this project revises the term “avant-garde” and its loaded connotations of privilege, elitism, and obscurity, to include a myriad of popular frameworks that expand literary histories of the US American avant-garde and its recognized artists.

In comparing US poetry and the comics field in the twentieth century, I attend to the places, socialities, and shared materials of the avant-garde in order to move beyond an inversion of long-standing concerns for the “great divide” between “high” and “low” art. Rather than attempt to reverse hierarchical classifications, I chronicle production continuities (e.g. publication models, modes of distribution, editorial influences, and common audiences) between avant-garde culture and mass media in order to emphasize overlapping contexts between these seemingly disparate fields. Attending more closely to the sites of formation, dissemination, and the literal and symbolic boundaries of these contexts, I use the comparison to open up a more nuanced dialogue about American culture with respect to experimental poetry and its interactions with popular, pictorial media. My consideration of long-publishing comics in poetry—from the Nancy comics to Krazy Kat and Dick Tracy—not only highlights the ways these poetic works challenged conventions in their use of comics media, but also how multi-authored texts provide agitating, lyrical depictions in response to reductive classifications of race, gender, and sexuality in the twentieth century. Drawing from José Esteban Muñoz’s queer theory of disidentification, I analyze poetic texts alongside close readings of the comics they use to reveal how these literary forms mirror and respond to one another in, turn, to challenge how we perceive popular images and texts as fixed, irrelevant, or boring.

This dissertation examines how three ancient Christian poets scripted female biblical figures as models of emboldened faith for all to emulate. Through imagined speech and narrative embellishment, they brought familiar figures to life for the entertainment, edification, and instruction of their audiences. These male poets, writing in Syriac and Greek, explored the hermeneutical possibilities of female voices and perspectives. While previous scholars have shown that early Christian authors portrayed female martyrs and ascetics subverting normative behavioral expectations, I argue that poetic depictions of biblical women form an additional category of exempla who pressed the bounds of acceptable speech and action. Through attending to the underexplored genre of poetry, this dissertation brings greater depth and nuance to previous accounts of how late ancient Christians constructed holiness and gender.

The dissertation investigates the poetry of three roughly contemporaneous authors from the late fifth and early sixth centuries: Narsai, Jacob of Serugh, and Romanos Melodos. While these three helped to set the interpretative and theological trajectories of their respective ecclesial communities in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions, they have never been brought into sustained conversation. Writing in Syriac, Narsai and Jacob were heirs to common literary and theological traditions, while the poems of Romanos Melodos, a Syrian composing in Greek, show thematic and artistic affinities with Syriac poetry, thus pointing to the interconnectedness of the multilingual regions of the eastern Roman and Persian empires.

Selecting from the sizeable extant corpora of these authors, I focus on poems recounting New Testament narratives about four unnamed women: the Canaanite woman, the Hemorrhaging woman, the Sinful woman, and the Samaritan woman. In the initial three chapters I trace the interrelated themes of the body, ethnicity, and the voice to illuminate the distinct interpretative approaches and exegetical concerns of the three poets. Each of these themes supplies a lens through which the three poets underscore the tenacity of biblical women. Narsai and Jacob emphasize the moral agency of biblical women more consistently than Romanos, in part due to their poetic style as well as their strategies of characterization.

At the heart of the dissertation is a chapter on representations of women’s voices, in which I show how the three poets alternatively depicted transgressive female speech and curbed potential dangers of female audacity. The penultimate chapter examines the constellation of terms the poets use to speak about boldness, employing the tools of feminist and philological analysis to show how idealized religious boldness was created through language subject to the ambiguities of gender. The final chapter reflects on the significance of this reception history for understanding the dynamics of verse exegesis in Late Antiquity. While Narsai, Jacob, and Romanos stand as three independent artists, they jointly contribute to the poetic mode of biblical interpretation. Inhabiting the voices and vantage points of female biblical characters, the poets produce complex portraits of bold, self-assertive women pursuing the life of faith.

Drawing upon the literary treasury of Syriac and Greek poetry, this study contributes to the historiography of late ancient literature and the construction of gender. It maps new territory in the reception history of these biblical narratives through close, comparative readings that reveal the distinctive portraits of biblical women painted by Syriac and Greek poetic literature. Within liturgical and academic settings where women’s activity and speech were strictly curtailed, these representations of tenacious, outspoken women provide invaluable insights into how Christian authors inhabited marginalized subject positions to imagine idealized models of faith.

The Poetics of Labor argues for a reconsideration of how manual labor functions within poetic texts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. As scholarship over the last forty years and onward has demonstrated, eighteenth-century poetry illustrates widespread changes in the way that poets and artists choose to situate labor and laborers in their work, as well as the increasing presence of plebeian authors. However, scholarship often fails to consider the central aesthetic role that labor plays in a text, especially as poets experiment with the perceived boundaries between manual labor and intellectual or artistic creation. I argue that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century laboring-class poets and authors use writing as a way of re-imagining their experiences of manual labor, simultaneously exposing the practices of labor in an emerging capitalist market while also advocating for seeing labor from local, communal perspectives. Within the fields of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary and ecocritical scholarship, I also contend that the revival of laboring-class poets, and their inclusion into the canon, remains dependent upon scholars seeing these poets for their aesthetic capabilities, rather than merely their socioeconomic status.

The introduction investigates the formal and socioeconomic changes in early- to mid- eighteenth-century England that result in attempts to make labor appear more authentic poetically. I define what this project means by “labor”, and provide a background for popular poetic forms, such as the pastoral and georgic, and how labor has traditionally related to poetic representations prior to the eighteenth century. My first chapter sketches out a portrait of the emergence of laboring-class poetry and literature in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Comparing and contrasting the depictions of labor that emerge in both laboring- and middle-class poetry, I interrogate whether the scholarly focus upon class perspective matters when discussing labor and economics. I argue that rather than pitting class perspectives against one another, scholarship should examine the literary discourse about labor that is emerging in the century, and how it imagines a form of labor that relies upon human dependence rather than monetary profit. Close readings of Stephen Duck, John Clare, George Crabbe, and William Wordsworth, among others, provide the literary foundation for my arguments.

My second chapter considers the conclusions drawn in the first chapter through the lens of women laboring writers, whose laborers were often deemed unworthy of “useful” employment. My chapter positions a reading of these women from the perspective of shadow labor, investigating how Mary Collier, Elizabeth Hands, and Ann Yearsley develop formal and structural parallels between their poetry and their thematic content, mimicking the hidden realities of their work. While all these women advocate for new definitions or practices of labor that would permit their labors to be recognized, their vision fall shorts of enumerating how such communities could be envisioned.

My final two chapters analyze literary works that directly attempt to demonstrate an alternative to capitalist-driven agricultural life through fully developed, imagined communities. My third chapter examines The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827), a poetic collection by the rural laboring-class poet, John Clare, whose work embodies both a kind of rural idyll and a harsh realism. Analyzing the rhythms of the seasons against the aesthetic and formal patterns in his collection, I argue that Clare’s focus upon habit and ritual life challenges economic approaches to labor equality that emerge in the eighteenth century, specifically reading Clare’s poems against the work of Marx, Engels, and British socialists. My final chapter further considers the influence of socialism upon labor and community in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), a socialist utopian prosaic romance. I read Morris’s text as an attempt to bring into fruition the rejection of capitalist principles and communities that poets have been hinting at throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, this chapter also queries what happens when a perspective of labor conflates labor with other activities, particularly pleasure and art, so that neither of these activities can distinguish themselves from one another. Considering the delicate balance between nightmare and paradise that exists in utopian visions, I argue that Morris’s highly aesthetic forms of labor place unequal demands upon men and women, threatening the equality of person and occupation that socialism demands.

While my research responds to important trends within the fields of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship, especially the revival of laboring-class poets and the turn toward ecocriticism, my project attempts to portray a comprehensive view of labor that assesses both the degrading and redemptive qualities found in the work of laboring poets. As opposed to the division between manual and intellectual labor that often appears in criticism, I attempt to demonstrate poetic depictions of laboring experiences that bring the imagination and body together. Seeing manual labor as an experience that can influence both the body and the mind allows, in turn, for laborers to be seen as multi-faceted authors worthy of serious scholarly critique, beyond the implications of their socioeconomic status.

This dissertation looks at feminist and antiracist interventions in contemporary literature and culture and the ways in which poetry and the concept of poiesis can be taken up to imagine more equitable political praxis. My first chapter offers a sustained close reading of Diane di Prima’s Loba and its mythical, feminist intervention within “open field” poetry, a movement associated with the Black Mountain poets. The remainder of the dissertation extends my analysis of poetic “opening” into other contexts, advocating for newly imagined forms of care in the worlds of poetry, academic and online discourses, collective protest movements, and popular music. My project examines “poetry” not just as a particular genre or medium, but as a mode of thinking and being in the world. I turn to poetry for the tools it has the capacity to give us: the ability to read closely and carefully; the understanding that “meaning” can be layered, subjective, and even contradictory; the desire to inwardly reflect and reach outside of ourselves, simultaneously; a call to witness. Poetry offers a way of writing, but also a way of reading, interpreting, and responding. In this spirit, I include “Interludes” that offer pauses, spaces for reflection, and bridges between the major contexts and concepts of different chapters; these Interludes, as well as my Introduction and Conclusion, each contain an original poem and encourage the interrelationship between scholarly and creative modes of writing.