This thesis discusses the notion of free verse in poetry with emphasis on Walt Whitman and Amy Lowell. The majority of the paper consists of original poetry by the author.

This four movement cantata is scored for solo mezzo-soprano, chamber chorus, and large chamber ensemble. The text that is set in this piece is an amalgamation of adaptations of three poems by Walt Whitman (Proud Music of the Storm; That Music Always Round Me; Darest Thou Now, O Soul) and a poem by W.B. Yeats (The Everlasting Voices), from which the work derives its name. The piece depicts a journey of the soul from a place of intellectual and spiritual barrenness to a place of enlightenment and fulfillment, aided by musical forces of the universe. These forces, embodied by the chorus and chamber ensemble, seek out a despairing human soul, embodied by the solo mezzo-soprano. The musical forces infuse themselves into the soul, which is then empowered to not only understand the musical art but to explore the depths of humanity and to fully connect with the universe.

"Whitman's Inscriptions" examines the link between civic space and material practice in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Louisa May Alcott. Combining media studies, bibliography, and urban history, my dissertation argues that these four authors used manuscript as a medium of civic engagement in their published works. In each chapter, my comparative analyses of manuscript practices and published texts examine the historical layers of storage, formatting, and circulation conventions that assumed new forms in literary writing under the specific technological conditions of the industrial-urban era. Walt Whitman is the central figure of my project, as my dissertation title suggests, because his writings record the "noise" of the mid-nineteenth-century's industrial-urban conditions.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006. / Title from title screen (site viewed on Mar. 30, 2007). PDF text: 228 p. ; 7.06Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3221293. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-65).

In the foundational scholarship on literature and evolution, there remains a tendency to focus on Darwinian evolution's influence on Victorian literature. Without ignoring Darwin's importance to both the late-19th century and our own time, this dissertation contributes to an emerging interest among historians and literary scholars in exploring the pre-Darwinian, transatlantic contexts of evolutionary discourse. By returning to a time when 'the development hypothesis' was a more fluid concept, we can examine how writers and poets on both sides of the Atlantic were able to actively shape its meanings and to use it as a framework for reflecting on their literary craft. In this dissertation, I argue that for Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, development is a key term in their particular constructions of a distinctive American literature in the 1840s and '50s. It underlies Whitman's conception of an experimental poetic voice in the 1855 Leaves of Grass as well as Melville's ambitions for literary narrative in Mardi and Moby-Dick. At the same time, the sweep of their careers well beyond the publication of Origin of Species in 1859---into the last decade of the nineteenth century---allows us to chart their later responses as evolution increasingly gained acceptance and Darwin became a front man of sorts for evolution. Although Whitman and Melville continue to incorporate evolution and scientific modernity into their late-career self-fashioning, we can trace a movement toward increasing distance, disillusionment, and abstraction in these deployments. This dissertation has implications not only for contemporary Whitman and Melville studies but also for re-assessing the broader trajectory of 19th-century American literary history. In conventional textbook accounts, the influence of Darwinian evolution is measured primarily in terms of the emergence of literary naturalism, a realist genre known for its unsparing look at lives caught in the scope of unsympathetic natural forces. Here, I suggest that developmental evolution offered alternative formal and epistemological possibilities for mid-19th-century American literature, enabling Whitman and Melville to develop hypotheses about literary truth and human value. / text

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1987. / Bibliography: leaves 230-235.

Thesis--University of Illinois. / Bibliography: p. 172-176.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Virginia, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-214). Also available online through Digital Dissertations.