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This thesis examines H.D.’s treatment of utopia, offering a new perspective both on H.D. studies and studies of utopia, which typically focus on prose. The thesis traces the chronological development of H.D.’s utopian poetry, starting with her early years of experimental Imagism in 1914 and ending with her epics in 1960. My study aims to diversify existing critical approaches to H.D. which, according to many feminist critics, are limited in their treatment of her poetry. Susan Gubar states that the “critical establishment” reads H.D.’s poetry “only one way, from the monolithic perspective of the twentieth-century trinity of imagism, psychoanalysis, and modernism” (20). My work challenges established readings of H.D.’s poetry through a distinctly utopian vision. Likewise, this thesis diversifies studies of utopia, which typically focus on prose, by analysing poetry. I provide a new approach to H.D. by reading her poetry in relation to theories of utopia offered by Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman and Ernst Bloch. I argue that looking at utopia in H.D.’s work is fundamental to an understanding of her as a female poet who resists patriarchy. I contend that in her poetry H.D. creates a feminist utopia as an antidote to the dystopia of war. Her poems envision alternative spaces that counter the war-shattered world. In those “other spaces,” to use Foucault’s expression, H.D.’s women transcend the limits of their prescribed social role or tarnished historical reputation to become leaders, saviours, and world-shapers.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the poems of a small number of contemporary American poets who have worked to undermine poetic traditions of sentimentality that have sometimes figured large in the representation of motherhood. The study focuses on writers who have been formative to my own practice and who have helped me consider a challenge that I have wrestled with in my own writing and personal life. I write about their practices in relation to my own creative project, and to a concern that the more challenging aspects of motherhood not be oppressed. The first two chapters define idealism and sentimentality as factors that have been an important strand of motherhood poetry, explore the ways in which some contemporary American poets have sought to counter these factors in their work, and address the ways in which poets such as Sylvia Plath have examined the loss of maternal identity, which acts as precursor to the depersonalization of the mother in poetry. The thesis then investigates the depersonalization of the maternal figure by addressing the ways in which the mother can be mechanized and objectified in poems, and explores the objectification of the child in the work of several poets, showing how children have been embodied as objects in order to counter the culturally enforced response a child’s presence engenders. These later chapters also explore some of the reasons a poet might objectify the mother and child figure, and address the effects of this approach. As a way of concluding each chapter, the study speaks to the creative manuscript and its contextualization, discussing the ways in which the research has influenced the writing of the poems. The creative portion of the work is a manuscript of poems titled 'The Reproduction Cinema', which also addresses maternal struggle. The study finds that the objectification and depersonalization of mother and child is one important method by which poets wishing to write against more traditional ideas of motherhood might do so. The conclusion suggests that this more inclusive version of a poetics of the maternal experience will help broaden the discourse around the poetry of motherhood.

This thesis explores the work of three post-war American poets—Robert Duncan, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt—for whom the practice of letter writing was already a disappearing art. In placing these poets and their letters side-by-side, the thesis makes connections between poets who have previously been seen as inhabiting different and largely discrete poetic spheres. The thesis intervenes in the growing field of epistolary scholarship, extending and amending the findings of previous critics who have observed the close relationship between letters and poems. It challenges a recent critical emphasis on letters as sources that should be considered independent from poems, arguing instead that the two art forms are deeply interwoven. Through an examination of particular case studies and detailed close readings of published letter collections and unpublished archival material, the thesis demonstrates how Duncan, Bishop and Clampitt used letters as inspiration and material for their poems. The thesis uncovers a shared lineage with nineteenth-century and earlier letter writing conventions, showing how these poets replicated prior practices including the coterie circulation of poems in letters, an Emersonian concept of friendship, a “baroque prose style” and miniature portrait exchange. For three poets who existed on the margins of various literary movements, as well as often being geographically isolated, letters were a vital source of friendship and companionship. However, in each case, letters were not perfect models of harmonious friendship and community. In fact, the sense of connection created through letters proved to be nearly always, and necessarily, virtual and delicate.

This thesis examines Hart Crane’s oeuvre through a detailed appraisal of his publishing history in little magazines. The main contention of this thesis is that Crane’s relationships with his periodical publishers shaped his poetic development, and that new light is shed on these works through their recontextualisation in their original periodical contexts. This raises a secondary question: how does Crane’s publication in journals and his relationships with editors affect the reception of his poetry, and can patterns established in his immediate reception be found in later criticism. This study takes a new approach in its methodology, both in relation to existing studies of Crane, and as a way of dealing with a writer’s body of work. By examining, as D. F. McKenzie has put it, ‘the sociology of texts’ and their ‘processes of transmission, including production and reception’, forgotten contexts of Crane’s poetry are able to emerge. As well as uncovering new works by Crane, an examination of Crane’s periodical networks highlights the influence of particular strands of Modernism on his development, such as ‘post-Decadent’ forms advanced in Greenwich Village journals, the American Futurist experiments active in American magazines based in Europe, and the proto-Surrealist experiments with metaphor that inform Crane’s own associative aesthetic. This study also traces the interconnections between poetic form and publishing. Crane’s long poems, 'The Bridge', ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’ and the ‘Voyages’, were all published in fragments in a number of different journals, and these publishing formats are found to be aesthetically significant for these texts, and articulate Crane’s wider interest in fragment and collage forms.

This thesis aims to explore the strategies of revisionary mythmaking employed by H.D., Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich. Although I also turn to their prose writings, the main focus remains on poetry. The analysis of their poetry draws its insights from French feminist theory, particularly the theories of Luce Irigaray. The relationship between myths and construction of identity is explored through detailed reading of the poetry of these three poets. It investigates traditional patriarchal myths, such as classical, religious, historical, myths created and perpetuated by psychoanalysis, myths of womanhood and motherhood, as well as their function in organizing our perceptions of what constitutes reality. The thesis contests these myths' claim to universality. The poets not only challenge patriarchal myths in their poetry, but they also seek to present alternatives to established traditions. They work towards the rejection of clearly defined patriarchal binary oppositions, and instead propose a different kind of difference which is non-oppositional and non-hierarchical. Through detailed reading of their poetry, which is informed by theory, I suggest that the idea of a changeless and static self is rejected by the poets. In their work they deal with the lack of articulation of female subjectivity within patriarchal constructs, and identify the broken mother-daughter bond as a very important aspect of this impossibility. They repeatedly return to the semiotic where this vital bond is still intact, and patriarchal binary oppositions has not been established yet. Hence, multiplicity and ambiguity are always foregrounded as a key theme. The three poets ultimately posit that patriarchal myths are neither 'natural' nor 'compulsory'. They challenge patriarchal myths and language through their revisionary mythmaking and their articulation of female experiences that have been unheard, denied validity, and devalued. These strategies contribute to the ongoing process of subverting established myths, and ultimately, construction of alternative modes of imagination.

Both John Ashbery and Michael Palmer are noticeably absent from recent surveys of the ethical turn in innovative American poetry during the latter half of the twentieth century. By analysing the work produced during the first half of their careers as they write a poetic subject into existence, this thesis will demonstrate that the reason for this absence is due to the “necessary difficulty” of their respective poetic projects. Rather than identifying particular personal and political issues that might help explain away the difficulty of their work, my reading of Ashbery and Palmer will illustrate how difficulty is the constitutive feature of the ethical considerations and commitments informing their attempt to call attention to the initiating encounter between self and other that permits ethical praxis in the first place. Using a methodology derived from Mikhail Bakhtin’s aesthetic theories and Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenological ethics, Ashbery and Palmer will be shown to enact a “poethic sensibility” that reconfigures reading and writing poetry as a way of living in the social world of others as a responsive and responsible subject. Furthermore, the concern they exhibit regarding their own ethical subjectivity will be shown to extend to the reader’s, as s/he is encouraged to realise his/her own “response-ability” through the lived experience of proximity engendered by their necessarily difficult texts. By departing from the presupposition that the poem and the self it represents and/or articulates are intended to be properly comprehended by another person, this thesis will explore the ethical encounter that occurs between the poet and the reader at the very limits of the known and knowable, where “(my)Self” encounters “(an)Other” in its absolute, irreducible alterity as the constitutive moment of ethical subjectivity.

This thesis poses the question, ‘can we find Kindness in modernist American poetry?’ It is a work comprised primarily of detailed and extended close readings that will track Kindness through selections from the works of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff. Working within an understanding that no interpretation can be naïve, this thesis argues a case for Kindness as a “grammar of reading” that accounts for the readerly experience of the neophyte by considering the notion of “reading in exile”. This is undertaken not only as an ethical step towards accessibility in texts that are conventionally identified as presenting a stark and difficult aesthetics but also with the historical considerations of the relationship between high art and mass culture, with which recent thought on modernism is concerned (Huyssen, Perelman, Jennison). This “grammar of reading” is developed through interpretations of twenty-­‐first century theorists such as Derek Attridge (“singularity”), Jane Bennett (“vibrant matter”) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (“reparative reading” and the “paranoid position”). The theoretical work of this “grammar of reading” is based around the notion of “behaviour” as it evinces a potential critical position that can account for naïveté, vulnerability, and not knowing within reading and within poems themselves. The attendant aim of this project then is to explore the potential and implications of identifying a recognizable Kindness in early-­‐twentieth century modernist poetry.

This thesis challenges the critical codification of John Berryman as a “Confessional” solipsist that has to date excluded his oeuvre from efforts to contextualise historically the mid-century generation of American poets. Its exploration of both the literary and the sociopolitical concerns that have shaped his verse furthers current understanding of the work by placing a new emphasis upon the interdependence of poetic self and public world. Through a chronological survey of Berryman’s published poetry, prose and manuscripts, I demonstrate his fears of marginalisation and the loss of individual agency to represent not an inner but an outward gaze, symptomatic of a wider malaise in post-war American society. Later chapters develop this framework by establishing parallels between the poems’ permeability to the flux of contemporary experience and their ambivalent depictions of Berryman’s growing literary fame. The result, I argue, casts fresh light upon the work as a movement towards a radical metapoetics that figures the persona as the simultaneous product of society and of the text’s public reception. Berryman’s staging of the symbiotic relationship between art and life foregrounds the central function of both self- and sociopolitical critique within his poetry: it highlights the impact of the failed American Dream upon public life and literary ambition. The Introduction provides a detailed outline of the approach and contents of the thesis. Chapter 1 examines the poet’s apprentice work in The Dispossessed and Sonnets to Chris, and relates dissatisfaction with the New Critical literary school to his subsequent discovery of a “new and nervous idiom” for the post-war world. In Chapter 2, I trace the motifs of national and literary expatriation in Berryman’s first long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet to discuss the dispossessed poetic “I” as a vehicle for exploration of American tensions past and present. Chapters 3 and 4 present a sustained analysis of Berryman’s epic poem The Dream Songs. Whilst Chapter 3 focuses upon the work’s depiction of American dystopia, Chapter 4 addresses its performance of Berryman’s own literary success, arguing for the later Songs’ origins in an anxiety of reception that desires to cement the poet’s status in an uncertain world. My final chapter reads Berryman’s last volumes Love & Fame and Delusions, etc. of John Berryman in the light of these discussions, suggesting his conflicting perceptions of fame to function as a catalyst for renewed efforts to reconcile the poetic self with wider society.