This thesis explores the sources of documentary in the work of Muriel Rukeyser. It argues for a distinct correlation between her writing and the modes, techniques, and ideologies of the documentary movement as it flourished during the 1930s, the decade in which Rukeyser came of age. Although recent scholarship has noted Rukeyser's debt to the photographic and reportorial trends of the 1930s, such scholarship focuses primarily on her early, modernist poetry, and does not investigate the enduring influence of documentary on her work. My thesis addresses this lack, charting the dialogue that emerged between Rukeyser's relational poetics and documentary's similarly intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to the realities of the world. It posits that Rukeyser's interest and involvement in the various aspects of documentary lasted for the duration of her life. It further argues that this profound connection goes some way to explaining her guiding poetic principles. Chapter one discusses Rukeyser's experimentation with the documentary form of the photo-text. It examines a process by which Rukeyser's belief in the necessity of the confluence of image and word took shape. Chapter two investigates Rukeyser's engagement in the documentary discourse of biography. It examines the extent to which the 1930s' impulse towards the aesthetic and iconographical depiction of human lives informed Rukeyser's own methods of biographical representation. Chapter three locates the sources of Rukeyser's engagement with documentary within the discipline of American Studies, and examines her contribution to the American project of national and literary re-discovery. Chapter four explores Rukeyser's involvement in travel reportage and touring the American landscape. It illustrates how Rukeyser pioneered a poetic cartography that provided witness to both the past and the present. In so doing, she constructed a mapping device by which to read her own poetics of connection.

This thesis examines the relationship of John Ashbery’s poetry to developments in cognitive studies over the course of the last sixty years, particularly the science of linguistics as viewed from a Chomskyan perspective. The thesis is divided into four chapters which position particular topics in cognitive studies as organising principles for examining Ashbery’s poetry. The first chapter concentrates on developments in syntactic theory in relation to Ashbery’s experiments with poetic syntax. The second chapter examines the notion of “intention” and “intentionality” in Ashbery’s writing from the perspective of cognitive “theory of context” writing, particularly the work of Deirdre Wilson and Daniel Sperber. The final two chapters consider cognitive questions using Ashbery’s poetry as a means of entry into controversial areas in formal cognitive studies. The third chapter examines his poetry in relation to temporality, suggesting that Ashbery’s experiments with time form “theories of consciousness” as they consciously manipulate readerly consciousness and attention. The final chapter explores perception in relation to Ashbery’s writing. The thesis argues that poetry can be conceived of as a less formalised method of cognitive study, and that poetic experiment can lead to significant reconceptualisations of cognitive notions which may play a role in framing critical questions for more formal experiments in cognitive science-philosophy going forward. The thesis concludes with reflections on the wider implications for literary cognitive studies in general.

This thesis addresses a condition of ‘overtakelessness’ – a word used by Emily Dickinson to refer to the irretrievability of the dead – developing it as a conceptual framework to explore contemporary elegy in the work of five North American poets: Susan Howe, Mary Jo Bang, Anne Carson, Dean Young, and Mark Doty. Overtakelessness, a term to describe that which is unavoidable but cannot be encompassed, serves to illuminate the divide between desire and fulfilment in poetic encounters with loss. In Chapter 1, I argue that Susan Howe’s ethical configuration of lost others as retrieved textual traces from the archive represents her attempt to establish a visual and material conception of overtakelessness, and places under scrutiny the role of language in the scene of elegy. I show in Chapter 2 that Mary Jo Bang’s failure to reach her son can be attributed to the fact that language, like the sought other, has an unfathomable surplus that cannot be encompassed, and that the printed word is unequal to the task of articulating grief. In Chapter 3, Anne Carson’s interaction with personal relics represents an exploration of what constitutes her brother’s absence, and an implicit recognition that material objects – and the overtakelessness that they carry into her work – have supplanted his presence. Chapter 4 demonstrates that an engagement with overtakelessness is problematised further by the poet’s preoccupation with an unassimilable self as Dean Young’s alter ego undergoes an imagined disintegration. Finally, in Chapter 5 I propose that for Mark Doty overtakelessness has personal, social and political dimensions as he responds to an actual catastrophe, the AIDS epidemic, and explores the tension between private and public loss. I show in this thesis that overtakelessness emerges in the poetic space, suggesting that the elegy’s encounter with the dead might equally be described as a negotiation with overtakelessness itself.

This thesis examines the poetry of William Bronk (1918-99). Through close readings of individual texts and broader thematic explorations it demonstrates that Bronk can and should be viewed as a religious poet. In agreement with previous scholars, via original thematic and formal comparisons of the poets’ work, it positions Bronk as a poet of the sublime and a follower of Wallace Stevens. Based initially on distinct differences in the ideas expressed by Bronk and Stevens, it progresses to demonstrate that Bronk should be understood in a context of postmodernity, and reveals key parallels and similarities between his work and that of notable post-structuralist theorists. It offers the first sustained and detailed overview of the unique place that sleep and dreaming hold in his poetry. These aspects of the discussion variously contribute to a fuller understanding of Bronk as a religious poet. The later chapters of the thesis offer an important overview of the development of his religious outlook, from his first published work in the 1950s to his death in 1999. This is vital to understanding the poetry because previous published criticism has invariably presented a single religious or atheistic stance and overlooked the often contradictory theological dialogue sustained across his poetry. The thesis therefore provides a critical overview of his changing ideas of God, and their interaction with concepts of life and the self, identifying key moments in their development. Beyond original contribution to the existing knowledge and critical understanding of Bronk’s work through original close readings of many poems from across his career, and the hitherto unremarked explorations of its post-structuralist character, the general argument of this thesis – that Bronk is a religious poet of positive agnosticism – will aid all serious readers of his poetry.

This thesis combines creative and critical components. The creative is a poetry manuscript titled Two Camps, the critical an expository and formal study titled The American Family Elegy After 1995. The poems explore psychological tensions within family narrative via an elegiac conceit that interprets the voice of a central elegised figure within the supplemental voice of a poet-speaker. The manuscript title draws on the Book of Genesis concerning family, relocation and inheritance, pointing to tensions between territories of life and death as well as particular themes within the poems. These last include family relocation during the central elegiac figure's childhood, that same figure's internment in a prison camp during war, and the separation between elegiad figure and the lyric voice that elegises him. To situate this manuscript within a critical understanding of American elegy, the critical thesis comprises three chapters examining the American family elegy subgenre. Its first chapter analyses previous elegy criticism to highlight primary ways of interp,reting American family elegy beyond an axis of consolatory binaries. The second chapter examines Christian Wiman's The Long Home (1998) for its formal qualities as well as the structural arc it displays while questioning the poet's own capacity to 'learn to grieve' (Wiman, The Long Home, 17). Chapter three assesses Tracy K. Smith's collection Life on Mars (2011), its appropriation of pastoral tradition within elegy, and its revision of that tradition toward an acceptance of loss that renovates a didactic capacity for the elegy. Finally, a self-reflective essay connects the creative and critical components of this thesis, making explicit the biographical impetus of the creative work while demonstrating the interrelation between the creative manuscript and the critical study.

This thesis examines the strange career of Sterling Brown, a poet, literary critic and civil rights activist who was highly acclaimed between 1930 and 1945. In this period, he chose to sideline his creative writing and involved himself instead in social research. He turned to folklore, the Federal Writers’ Project, the Carnegie Myrdal Study of the Negro in America, and to reportage of the wartime South. This thesis is distinctive in examining these endeavours and provides new perspectives on Brown’s efforts to transform the national discourse about black Americans. Increased migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I led to a dialogue about race relations, black identity, and the future of the South that intensified during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Brown was central to debates during the New Negro Renaissance, within the Popular Front, and in investigations of black life sponsored by the New Deal government and philanthropic foundations. This thesis argues that the projects in which Brown involved himself in these years expose a tangled interracial debate on whose opinion would dominate in the representation of black character, identity, and culture. Brown and his black contemporaries in the social sciences influenced the building and dissemination of knowledge about African Americans within a challenging context. Their shared efforts to change the national dialogue about the ‘race problem’ have been under examined. Prevented by segregation and discrimination from gaining access to a wide audience, their desire to surmount these barriers helps to explain why Brown made this strange career choice. This thesis demonstrates that where he differed from his intellectual allies was in his conviction that black culture was a dynamic force that was as important as the ‘harder’ components of politics, class or economics. Brown’s prescient insights made him a founding figure in the fields of American cultural history and black studies.

The subject of this thesis is William Carlos Williams and the circle of writers around him in the 1930s. During this decade Williams was a key figure in the formation of an alternative left-wing American canon, and active in a group that included Nathanael West, Louis Zukofsky and Kenneth Burke. This thesis explores the political and aesthetic grounds on which that canon was constructed. The assumption that Williams was already a successful writer after Spring and All (1923) has often led to a disproportionate emphasis on his poetry and the ‘modernist’ aspects of his aesthetics. This thesis makes the case for the significance of Williams’ 1930s prose writings in the growth of the Proletarian Literature movement, and challenges the assumption that ‘Marxist’ literature of the 1930s was at odds with ‘modernist’ literature of the 1920s. I investigate the key concepts of Williams’ own aesthetic philosophy, ‘Objectivism,’ ‘Pragmatism,’ ‘Contact,’ and ‘Localism,’ and show how these concepts became politicized during the 1930s. By exploring the relationship between art and politics, and the ways in which Williams was radicalized by the Great Depression, this thesis attempts to expand critical notions of ‘radicalism’ to include a broader New Deal alliance between traditional democratic liberalism and Marxist economic determinism. Focusing on concepts of ‘Nativism’ and ‘Americanism,’ this thesis also charts America’s burgeoning cultural nationalism during the 1930s, and demonstrates how America’s founding values were challenged by political, economic and social upheaval in the wake of the Depression. By locating Williams’ desire for radical economic change within the context of the Jeffersonian movement, I demonstrate how a historical assessment of America’s past led Williams and the writers mentioned above to question America’s attitudes towards individualism, the redistribution of wealth, the forces of corruption and plutocracy, and the effectiveness of democracy to bring about social justice.

The fact that American Buddhist poetry has a broad programme of matters and styles is more bewildering than clarifying. Although not apparently contradictory, this genre presents so wide a range of salient Buddhist teachings, such as karma, suffering, impermanence, emptiness and selflessness. In fact, a reader is not only engaged in these various abstruse teachings which intrinsically defy intellectual logic, but is also attuned into the different unconventional poetic prosodies. It is thus even more challenging to understand these poems. In order to equip the reader with pertinent knowledge and deepen their understanding, the fust and foremost issue lies in what the defining characteristics of this diverse genre are. This study made a thorough investigation of prominent works by three notable American Buddhist poets, namely Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Phi lip Whalen, all of whom make a significant contribution to this genre, both thematically and stylistically. The study has revealed that, with regard to poetic content, the mind among the various teachings constitutes the most central theme, and it also functions as the common underpinning among the three poets. Their constant observation of the mind is always present in their verse. While some of their poems mainly describe. the various natures of the mind ranging from its being loose and turbulent to its being still and calm, the other poems suggest their penetration into the higher truths based upon the tranquil and wise mind. Correspondingly, as far as poetic styles are concerned, the natures of the mind are instrumental in shaping and ornamenting the poems. When the mind wanders aimlessly, the poem looks less controlled witnessed by the irregularity of, or sometimes sheer absence of, line length, meter, rhythm and rhyme. That is to say, the poem isjust as fluid and free as the unstable mind. On the contrary, once the mind is focused and powerful enough to see the truths by itself, the poets' transcendental experience is deliberately conveyed in a poetics of deep consciousness of which meaning and form renders a mood of calmness, purity and epiphany. The three poets demonstrate such a change even within a single poem through a conspicuous alteration of versification: wisdom is expressed, and strictly traditional stanzaic patterns and aureate diction are then chosen. This dynamism is also characteristic of American Buddhist poems.

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This thesis will demonstrate that an engagement with Surrealism alongside John Ashbery’s poetry can provide a mutually beneficial discussion through which to further understand both. Through its phenomenological attention, Ashbery’s poetry configures the everyday experience of his reality in a way that responds to, and invites, a surrealist perspective. The first chapter explores Joseph Cornell, collecting and the ‘found object’, with an emphasis on Ashbery’s first collection, Some Trees (1956). The second Chapter examines dreams and dreaming throughout Ashbery’s first four collections, ending with an analysis of Three Poems (1972). Merleau-Ponty is used to demonstrate the oneiric implications of Ashbery’s poetics of phenomenology as a basis for Surrealism, whereby a perception of reality becomes comparable to a dream. My third chapter presents Ashbery’s book-length poem Flow Chart (1991) alongside the Canadian filmmaker, Guy Maddin. The concept of noise, alongside the pioneering presence of Surrealism in early radio, is used to understand treatments of memory that connect Maddin’s films to Ashbery’s interruptive poetics and lead both to be understood through Georges Bataille’s notion of ‘The Labyrinth’. The fourth chapter discusses the relationship between visual perspective and a surrealist imagining of childhood. This chapter returns to the enduring importance of ‘The Skaters’ in order to understand the poem’s relation to collage, ‘play’ and metaphor as key examples of how Ashbery’s poetry comes to realise Breton’s surrealist dictum: ‘always for the first time’.