This thesis examines the impersonal modes refined by Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. It argues that these major poets, commonly placed at opposite ends of the spectrum of modernism, share important formal and thematic preoccupations. Each evolves an impersonal sensibility designed to free the poet from the limitations of his merely private associations and social circumstances, and to licence extraordinary ambitions: Pound’s paradiso terrestre and Stevens’ supreme fiction constitute unifying artistic responses to a shaken, fragmenting and sceptical culture. Supreme fictions are not in vogue, and both poets have been chastised for the didacticism, elitism, or even pretension latent in their poetic theories: it is argued that their reach exceeds their grasp. But this thesis is not a critique of theory; it is a study of praxis. It explores the techniques of both poets’ greatest poems, and proposes the impersonal mode as one reason for their uncanny power. Chapter I explores poetic impersonality under three headings: “Inheritance”; “Sensibility”; and “Technique”. Chapter II contrasts the irregular progression of Pound’s early verse with the eerie precision of Stevens’ Harmonium. Chapter III traces the expansion of Pound’s impersonal voice through A Draft of XXX Cantos, and argues that “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is of crucial importance to the development of Stevens’ later style. Chapter IV argues that, in the plangent and elemental forms of Cantos XLVII and XLIX, and in the rôle of the “possible poet” explored in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”, Pound and Stevens come closest to fulfilling their early desires for a transcendent and autonomous rhetoric. Chapter V finds each poet plunged into crisis, toppling the fleeting consolations of Canto XLVII and “Notes”, and requiring new, more urgent and more expansive poetic modes. Pound’s Pisan Cantos, in their search for an idiom newly resistant to severe external pressures, are comparable to “The Auroras of Autumn” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”, which reveal Stevens’ own bout of intense creative uncertainty. Chapter VI shows how the enduringly impersonal techniques of Pound’s and Stevens’ final poems – which preserve, on their surface, a grammatical and lexical detachment – increasingly come to register deeper emotions. The effect of subduing personal experience to an impersonal aesthetic is to enhance the poignancy of the very emotions and frailties that are all but veiled.

A sequence of poems, mostly in a phonetically rendered Eastern New England accent, follows the exploits and thoughts of a young man from central Massachusetts, as well as a cast of secondary characters. This is followed by an essay that examines the sequence's salient aspects of language, voice, place, and mythology, and attempts to situate each in a context of forbears and influences.

Despite the vast amount of critical writing on the Language movement, little attention has been paid to the specific linguistic and cognitive processes involved both in the creation and comprehension of this innovative work. Motivated by the assumption that an experience with literature is an experience with language, this study investigates the poetry and poetics of three writers closely associated with Language writing and their works in the 1980s: Susan Howe and The Europe of Trusts and Articulations of Sound Forms in Time; Lyn Hejinian and My Life; and Rosmarie Waldrop and The Reproduction of Profiles. The approach taken in this dissertation is to investigate innovative writing with reference to linguistic and cognitive features through the perspective known as cognitive poetics which emphasizes the primacy of the reader in the experience of literary reading. The thesis offers insights into both the psychological and linguistic aspects of literary reading, shifting the focus from interpretation--whether that of the author or that of the critic--to the basis of these aspects in textuality. Textuality concerns both the material text as object, but also the connections the reader makes between stylistic features and felt experience. This dissertation thus addresses literary writing as discourse--as a social act of communication, incorporating other voices, viewpoints, times and cultures. It is suggested here that the complex interplay between word and grammar, world and ideology evident in these texts is connected to Language writing and contemporary verse culture more generally, and that cognitive poetics offers an explicit way to account for the effects of the syntactic experimentation and ideologies of this writing. Especially relevant to this study has been the tendency to site language in landscape to create what I call a poetics of languescape. The collection of poetry, Continental Drift, that completes this study emerges from these correspondences.