This thesis looks at Edward Dorn s work from his early poems in the late 1950 s to Gunslinger, his mock epic of the American West written between 1968 and 1974. The overall background premise to the present study is that, in this period, Dorn s work develops from a form of lyric, in his early work, to the construction of a multiple and epic consciousness within the four books of Gunslinger. Some critics of Dorn see quite radical shifts within this development, which often leads to a periodizing of Dorn s work. But this thesis argues for a strong continuity that runs alongside these shifts, driven by a consistent anti-capitalism that informs Dorn s writing. Chapter 1 assesses several of Dorn s early poems and finds within the construction of his poetic subject, a tendency to undo and undermine the traditional lyric voice of interiority. Comparisons are made with Frost and Thoreau, and Olson is introduced as Dorn s first and foremost major influence. The poet s dealing with otherness is considered, as are the influence of Whitman and Blake among others, with the aim of placing Dorn in a literary sense, and showing how his poetry continues and subverts various traditions and conventions of poetry, In Chapter 2, examples of Dorn s prose works - short stories, sketches and his autobiographical novel By the Sound (1971) - are explored both in their own terms and as experiential backdrop to the poetry. This section is particularly concerned with Dorn s configuration of poverty in his work and how it is consstructed as a form of American otherness. Chapter 3 s primary concern is with Dorn s treatment of the American West in his 1964 volume Hands Up! Particularly important here is Dorn s undemining of myth, its process of privileging certain stories to the detriment of history, and the West s reliance on capitalism. The second half of this chapter continues these ideas through an assessment of 'The Land Below'. Chapter 4 critiquse Geography (1965) through the influence of Charles Olson and the cultural geographer Carl Otwin Sauer. The first half is concerned with Dorn s push for expansiveness in his poetry and his attempts to achieve, what he calls, a 'condition of the simultaneous.' The second half of the chapter however, locates in this collection, a poetics of melancholy and isolation that is more in keeping with his early work and in tension with his development toward epic. Chapter 5 assesses The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), focusing primarily on the two long poems of the volume, 'The North Atlantic Turbine' and 'Oxford.' This section looks at the further expansion in Dorn s poetics with the collection s global reach, and also considers the introduction of the experimentation with made-up voices. The final chapter on Gunslinger looks first at Dorn s treatment of the first-person pronoun as a continuation of his consistent testing of poetic subjectivity. Also explored, are 'The Cycle' and Dorn s creation of Robart as a monstrous manifestation of capiralism and finally, how the poem utilises the genre of eopc. The goal of the thesis is to explore beneath the presumptions about Dorn s development as a poet and understand how the complexities of such a development are played out within the texts themselves. Also, the aim here is to show how the movement from lyric to epic takes place in Dorn s work by very gentle degrees and is inextricably connected to his anti-capitalist politics.

The South Is Following Me Again is a collection of poetry composed over a three-year period, which focuses on my interest in my roots as an ex-patriot from the American South and the growing occurrences of runaway rhythm within my own work as I researched and defined the term. There is a strong theme of ‘Southernism’ that permeates the collection and is evident in the nostalgically atmospheric poems such as “A Haunting”, “Greenhouse Effect”, and “Textually Active” as they present an interesting and somewhat foreboding sense of the South. The collection then moves into a series of four southern dialect poems, which explore phonetically written poetry of a southern family, as it evolves away from the Southern epicentre of the collection. Delicate issues such as Mexican/American immigration in the poem “Immigration Policy”, and deaths and illnesses of friends and lovers in “Poem for a Murdered Friend”, “Radio Therapy”, and “Audience Participation” are dealt with strategically by refusing to sentimentalise or moralise the subject. There are a few poems that deal with love and sex in engaging and playful forms, as can be seen in “Answering God’s Call” and the “Torture Garden” series, which leads characters through a memorable visit to a hardcore fetish night, and marks the point in the collection where the reader is furthest removed from the South. Some of the poems hinge on more intellectually surreal concepts such as “Esoteric”, “The Guards”, “Timeless”, and “Café Tutu Tango” and challenge the reader to disentangle the rhythm from the content of the lines. Moving on from the esoterically obscure, the poems “Travelling Horses”, “Bottoms Up”, and “Bombilation: a cousin of Howl” echo my growing understanding of runaway rhythm as it pushes against the elements that bind together the sense and movement of the lines. Finally, the collection ends with the long, elegiac poem “A Natural Beauty”, which brings together aspects of the American South and the United Kingdom, and in which the rhythms are intertwined with memory to provide an extended release for the reader. The critical element, entitled “Runaway Rhythm 1900-2011”, defines the term “runaway rhythm” as a rhythm that is formed by various nuances of grammar, syntax, and poetic mechanisms to create minute separations between the movement and sense of the lines. In utilising this form of rhythm, the poet encourages the reader to engage with the poem by drawing their attention to the content and theme while simultaneously linking it to the structure. I will be focusing on runaway rhythm in selected works by Marianne Moore, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley and discussing how it is still used by contemporary poets Adam York and Gerald Stern, and within my own collection.

This thesis brings together the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, revealing their respective work as peculiarly engaged with memory. Poetic memory is examined at different levels: not just what it means actively to remember, but also how a poem might be more or less characteristically memorable. Hardy and Frost are also revealed as poets who see the unique properties of poetry as a genre in which certain phenomena, people and places might be remembered, if not preserved. While having a strong basis in close analysis and literary history, the project breaks new ground in setting concepts familiar to poetry scholarship within a scientific framework. Interdisciplinary in nature, this thesis uses evidence from psychological experiments to emphasise the cognitive fundamentals which underpin those Hardy and Frost poems remembered as aesthetic or cultural artefacts. Four core chapters explore issues of expectation, recognition, voice and identity, showing the meeting points for Hardyean and Frostian memory and offering new readings which connect these canonical figures. Throughout, the thesis foregrounds Hardy’s and Frost’s concern for local memories. Beginning with how the formal properties of Hardy’s and Frost’s verse appeal to human cognitive pre-dispositions, the project ends by considering how identity is culturally conditioned, and how Hardy’s and Frost’s poetry restores to significance those individuating features otherwise forgotten by cognitive and cultural memory systems. Using archival material and the respective letters of Hardy and Frost alongside the poems allows this project to offer a thorough reading of a topic close to both poets’ hearts. Beyond a study of two specific poets, this thesis also reveals why and how poetry might be sought after as a valuable mnemonic device and sheds new light on the act of reading poetry.

The driving ambition of this thesis lies in identifying and disclosing distinct and divergent examples of 20th century American long poems. This task will be carried out with a particular focus on stressing the idiosyncrasies of these practices rather than merely revising previous attempts at constructing a lineage or history of the American long poem. What is crucially at stake in this proposed critical movement is a distinction between ‘The Long Poem’ as an object of literary history as opposed to an ‘act of extended inquiry’ which can be comprehended in and on its own terms. In this task, I employ three key terms: Idiosyncrasy, Extension and Inquiry, which together frame my project as a disclosure of how poetic texts extend idiosyncratically over significant length, breadth and depth. In discussing ‘idiosyncrasy’ I necessarily negotiate questions of subjectivity, perception, intersubjectivity— namely, the questions which are proposed and explored by phenomenology. In this regard, my methodology is informed by a phenomenological taxonomy, developed from the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. The grouping of poets featured in this thesis are all American writers who have published extended works since the 1950s, and each is associated to varying extents with schools of avant-garde, post-Modernist or ‘New’ poetics. George Oppen has been regarded as an ‘Objectivist’ poet and is often discussed alongside his contemporaries Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker and Charles Reznikoff; James Schuyler’s close association with Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest and John Ashbery locate him among the New York School in the 1950s; Robin Blaser was instrumental in many of the publications and events which surrounded the San Francisco Renaissance; Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe and Leslie Scalapino all published poems and works of poetics in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school publications in the 1970s-80s; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis has worked since the 1970s with both Language and Objectivist poetics, though her sustained interest in and engagement with ‘the long poem’ distinguishes her as a leading figure in the discourse of extended poetics in her own right. In each of these readings, significant efforts are made to discuss each poet outside of their conventional place within their ‘school’ or ‘tradition’. The purpose of this is to seek access to the idiosyncrasies of poets and their works as opposed to merely relying on generalised reckonings. In this manner, the specific ways in which individual poets extend their poetics into substantial inquiries will be made apparent using the terms employed by the poets themselves. It is my intention for this thesis to stand as an opening of the discourse of ‘The American Long Poem’ to complex and developed questions of extension in poetry, with a view to framing 20th century American poetics as being particularly oriented towards carrying out intellectual and perceptive inquiries in the form of works of poetic extension.

Emily Dickinson's work can be understood in terms of dynamic and variable interactions with uncertainty. Sometimes uncertainty is horrifyingly meaningless, whilst on other occasions it is liberating and meaningful; Dickinson's grotesque is predicated upon the interplay of both these perspectives. Dickinson's grotesque dialectic between enabling and disabling interactions with uncertainty resists monolithic critical appropriation. Theories of the grotesque enable us to unify the critical discord between conservative and radical depictions of Dickinson's work. Using the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, I explain the dialectic between the different interactions with uncertainty and demonstrate how they are shaped contextually. Gothic context engenders fearful responses to uncertainty; female creativity engenders ambivalence; embodying contexts produce liberating uncertainty. Dickinson's gothic elucidates a need for meaning, and a corresponding fear of representational insufficiency. This desire for certainty is extrapolated from a Calvinist sensibility, whereby uncertainty denotes unregenerate being. The apophatic poems move towards meaning by perpetually surpassing their own conceptual limitations. However, this process becomes self-defeating as the act of negation itself turns into the kind of uncertainty it was supposed to overcome. Female creativity is achieved through internalizing overwhelming, masculine power as the basis of poetic autonomy. Dickinson's poetic self partially overcomes the oppressive, binary distinction between male and female positions. I compare Dickinson with Harriet Prescott Spofford, illustrating how both writers narrate their assimilation of alterity as a terrifying encounter with an omnipotent male muse.

P. Blanvillain, T. L. Johnson. / Bibliography: leaf 5. / NASA Grant NGL-22-009-124.

This thesis re-evaluates the work of the poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974), concentrating, in particular, on the indeterminacies, contradictions and aporia which it finds to be characteristic of her ostensibly frank and self-revelatory writing. The study is based on a close textual analysis of Sexton's writing, is informed by oststructuralist theories, and is sustained by an examination and discussion of archive collections of her previously unpublished papers. In seeking an understanding of Sexton's poetics, the thesis identifies and interrogates the strategies of denial and obfuscation apparent in her own explication of her work - principally, by scrutiny of the unpublished, and previously unresearched, drafts of a series of lectures which she delivered in 1972. Chapters One and Two consider the origins of 'confessional' or - Sexton's preferred term - 'personal' poetry and reassess her place within contemporary poetry. They suggest that Sexton's writing is engaged in a process of negotiation and contestation, both with the boundaries and expectations of confessionalism, and with the strictures of T. S. Eliot's theory of 'impersonality'. In support of these arguments, Chapter Two offer a reading of Sexton's little-known poem, 'Hurry Up Please It's Time', alongside its intertext, Eliot's The Waste Land. Chapter Three reassesses received views of the supposedly beneficial interrelationship between confessional speaker and reader. It examines Sexton's appropriation of dramatic masks and personae and her use of metaphors of striptease and prostitution, and suggests that these are employed simultaneously to appease and to repel an intrusive audience. Similarly, Chapters Four and Five trace Sexton's problematisation of two previously-accepted tenets of confessional poetry: its status as autobiography and its truthfulness, drawing attention to the techniques employed in order to give the impression of both. Chapter Six considers Sexton's problematic engagement with a language which is not malleable, transparent, and referential but, rather, is experienced as uncooperative and occlusive. Finally, the thesis recuperates Sexton from the common charge of narcissism, arguing that it is the writing, rather than the poet, which is self-reflexive and self-conscious. In this respect, it concludes that her work - perhaps unexpectedly - anticipates many of the tendencies of postmodernist writing.

This thesis reads the poetry and poetics of Charles Bernstein in relation to his interest in sophistry and sophistics. Taking his 1987 volume The Sophist as a central text, the influence of a sense of sophistics is developed across his wider range of published works. This involves identifying some of the many different interpretations of the sophists throughout the history of philosophy, from the early dismissals by Plato and Aristotle to the more recent reappraisals of their works. A secondary aspect of the thesis is in examining the renewal of interest in the Ancient Greek sophists and suggesting some of the affinities between contemporary literary theory and poetics and the fragments of the works of the major sophists (primarily Protagoras and Gorgias). Finally, I suggest that The Sophist itself is a valuable and contemporaneous re-examination of sophistic ideas, that in fact goes further than those by academics from within philosophy and rhetoric by virtue of employing the stylistic innovations and linguistic experimentation that was so central to the sophistic approach.

Initially developed and perfected by male poets, the history of the sonnet has been characterised by androcentrism. Yet from its inception the sonnet has also been adopted by women. In recent years feminist critics have begun to redress the form’s gender imbalance, but most studies of the female-authored sonnet have excluded the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and thus one of the most important periods in women’s history – the rise of feminism – leading to a flawed narrative of the genre. Repositioning Edna St. Vincent Millay as the starting point in a twentieth-century tradition, this study begins where most others end and examines how the emergence and development of feminism, specifically in an American context, underscores a significant female narrative of the sonnet that emerges outside of the male tradition. By reading the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Marilyn Nelson and Moira Egan within their specific feminist contexts and within the broader trajectory of feminism, it is possible to see how women in the era took ownership of the form. Ultimately, the thesis suggests that feminism has shaped an important narrative in the history of the genre that means today the sonnet is no longer exclusively male.

This thesis is the first book-length treatment of the poems in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934), providing a counterbalance to critical readings of Oppen's work which have to date focused on work published after his return to poetry (i.e. from 1962 onwards). It is a philosophical presentation of the work which argues that the poems are themselves philosophical presentations of objects, and by those objects and that presentation, of the historical circumstances of those objects and the poems themselves. Its method is Adornian in three senses: first, it holds that literature is not only subject-matter for a (sub)subset of philosophy but a potential mode of participation within it; second, the philosophical writing with which the thesis puts the poems into dialogue is not a single authorship nor strictly aesthetic, but a broad range of writings by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche (with a special emphasis on Hegel); and third, continual recourse is made to Adorno's own writings on art and objecthood. After a brief account of the pre-history of Objectivism, of Oppen's connection with Ezra Pound, and the circumstances of the work's production and appearance, the poems are analysed in depth alongside more thoroughly institutionally validated works by, among others, Pound and T.S. Eliot. The main focus of these readings is on the physical objects represented: their nature, type, consistency, and the fact and manner of their presentation. These objects are characterised by their resolute materiality – their distinctive hardness and their uniform impenetrable surfaces. These properties are analysed from literary-historical, historical and philosophical perspectives, i.e. in the contexts of modernist hardness and its precursors; industrial production and the individual; and the causes and consequences, in thought, of the experience of bare materiality that the poems present. Finally it considers how the poems, as well as registering a particular mode of object experience, themselves seek to produce it.