No description available.

No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how Stevens creates a new Romanticism. It argues that Stevens demonstrates a double view of Romanticism as having positive and negative aspects and it relates discussion of this double view to the development of his poetry and theories of poetry. Stevens shares with the Romantics the belief that through the power of imagination the problem of dualism - especially the split between art and existential reality - can be solved. Prom Stevens's perspective, thinking about what should be respected and what should be corrected in Romanticism provides grounds for the creation of his own new Romanticism. In chapters one and two, by examining the conflict between imagination and reality in the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, I explore the intertextual relations between Stevens and the Romantics from a perspective informed by the implications of Stevens's work and thought. In chapters three and four, focusing on Stevens's treatment of the relation between imagination and reality, I examine the nuanced differences between his work and that of the Romantics. Chapter five provides a prologue to 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction', the culmination of Stevens's concern with imagination and reality. In the final chapter I examine how Stevens's new Romanticism, especially its emphasis on the imagination's activity, is concretised in 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction'. I also explore how the later development of his sense of reality affects his poetic creativity. By examining the influence of the Romantics on Stevens and his response to them, the nature of his poetry can be more accurately understood. Throughout the thesis, I engage, as appropriate, with the work of many critics who have written on Stevens. It is my hope that my own approach gives a folly considered and detailed account of a topic often addressed more briefly by other commentators.

This thesis describes the representation of Christianity in the writings of John Berryman-his struggle with the faith being the most central and incessant preoccupation of his verse. Focussing on each major stage of his artistic development in tum, I demonstrate how its depiction is influenced by biographical factors, his scholarship and sources, and his evolving poetic style. In The Dispossessed the issue of faith is evident, but obscured; however, much of his unpublished verse of the period is characterised by a more transparent confessional idiom, frequently expressing his dilemma of conscience over the question of religious commitment. His failure to develop an effective poetic voice is the main reason why his religious poetry of the 1930s and 1940s remained in the private sphere. He achieved his stylistic breakthrough with Berryman's Sonnets, where the struggle with his conscience is depicted as a religious conflict, in which his adultery means a confrontation with the Law of God. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet features a more developed representation of a similar conflict; the two alternative life choices before him are personified in the characters of Anne Bradstreet and the 'poet'. Difficulties of faith continue to play a major role in The Dream Songs, where the poet, adopting the persona of Henry, directly confronts God and Christianity with the problem of evil and the historical quest for Jesus. His poetry portrays a perceived conflict between faith and reason, and an intellectual pursuit for the truth epitomised by his poem 'The Search'. However, the poet's 'conversion experience' during the composition of Love & Fame is depicted as a response to the direct intervention of God in his life. His subsequent devotional poetry is dominated by his new sense of relationship with the' God of Rescue', who increasingly becomes associated with the full Christian conception of Jesus Christ the Saviour.

By the time the Fugitive movement was launched between 1922 and 1925, Ransom's poetic technique had changed in a remarkable fashion which is the main topic of the thesis. Gone was a direct, almost brutally sarcastic manner to be replaced with a polished irony that places a considerable distance between him, his subject and his reader. He is no longer involved in the narrative action of the poems as in Poems about God, and there is more concentration on the action of the poems than description. In The Fugitive (1922-1925) Ransom published his most successful poems such as: "Ego", "Bells for John Whiteside Daughter", "Philomela", "First Travels of Max", "Captain Carpenter", "Prometheus in Straits" "Ada Ruel", "Old Mansion", "Blue Girls", "Adventure This Side of Pluralism", an "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son". These poems and a number of others were also published in separate collections, Chills and Fever (1924), Grace after Meat (1924). Some of these poems underwent few changes while others were revised drastically. The Fugitive group disbanded in 1926 and their magazine ceased publication. In 1927, Ransom published Two Gentlemen in Bonds. In this last book of verse Ransom introduced sonnets for the first time in his publications, though he had experimental once before in "Sunset". After 1927 some members of the Fugitive group began to reestablish contact and they soon became Agrarians in the economic, political, agricultural, and perhaps literal sense of the word. During the Agrarian years (1927-1938), Ransom was busy in three spheres: professor of English at Vanderbilt University, contributing to the editorship of the Agrarian publications, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, (1930), and Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (1936), and finally publishing his first works of literary criticism; God without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defence of Orthodoxy (1930) and The World's Body (1938).

No description available.

Wallace Stevens was profoundly affected by Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God and his poetry reflects an ongoing struggle to understand what it means to be a poet in an age of disbelief. Although Steven’s early poetry suggests that this loss of belief created a sense of crisis in the poet, his later work indicates a full acceptance, even an embracing, of this loss, recognising it as the inspiration for poesis. The thesis considers Stevens alongside of such thinkers as Nietzsche and (the later) Heidegger and shows how the poet came to regard the shaking of the metaphysical foundations as a gift offering the possibility for poetry.