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This dissertation reveals a twentieth-century tradition of poetic formalism that positions race, gender, and sexuality as formal concerns, and further, as key factors in the development of contemporary formal poetics. My readings of three contemporary poets, Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley, combine formalist analysis with cultural approaches, including critical race theory and queer theory, to show how contemporary poets use form to confront racist, sexist, and homophobic representational traditions and to reshape identity discourse. This project intervenes in a critical tradition that divorces poetic form from political context and neglects formal aspects of poetries that engage with social identities, especially African American poetry. As Notley, Oliver, and Bridgforth portray racial, gender, and sexual diversity—including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered bodies—they invent and remake forms, genres, and textual strategies, from the feminist epic to the performance novel. These new forms exceed the strategies of rupture, fracture, and fragmentation that marked many modern and postmodern experiments and, in fact, reveal the limitations of rupture as a means of political critique. Instead, they widen the field of formalism, incorporating performance genres (epic, storytelling, blues) and new textual strategies to call attention to the histories of bodies and their representations, assert interdependent identities, promote pluralism, and insist on the interrelationship of literature, orality, and bodily experience. / text

Robert Frost’s legendary description of “the sound of sense” to define his poetics has for decades sounded like little more than common sense. His idea is now taken to be fairly straightforward: the inflections of an utterance resulting from the tension between demotic speech and poetic form indicate its purport. However, our accepted notion of Frost’s formulation as simply the marriage of form and meaning misconstrues what is potentially revolutionary in it: if everyday speech and verse form generate tension, then Frost has described a method for mediating between reality, represented by speech, and art, represented by verse form. The merger is not passive: the sound of sense occurs when Frost “drag[s] and break[s] the intonation across the metre.” And yet Frost places speech and verse form in a working relationship. It is the argument of this dissertation that poets reckon with what is often understood as discord between poetry and reality by putting into correspondence forms of speech and the forms of poetry. The poets I examine–Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton–are concerned with their positions in local communities that range from the family unit to ethnic, religious, racial, economic, and sexual groups, and they marshal forms of speech in poetic form to speak from those locales and to counter the drag and break of those located social and political realities. They utilize what I call their “local languages”–the speech of their particular communities that situates them geographically in local contexts and politically in social constructs–in various ways: they employ them as raw material; they thematize them; they invent idiosyncratic “local” languages to undermine expectations about the communities that speak those languages; they devise generalized languages out of standard and nonstandard constructions to speak not just to and from specific locations but to speak more broadly about human experience. How, these poets ask, can poetry respond to atrocities, deprivations, divisions, and disturbances without becoming programmatic or propagandistic and without reinforcing false preconceptions about the kinds of language suitable for poetry? They answer that question with the living speech of their immediate worlds.

Depuis le début du vingtième siècle, une poésie écrite fait entendre dans l’ensemble des Amériques la voix des personnes d’origine africaine ; ce phénomène est distinctement moderne, dans la mesure où une telle voix était jusqu’alors impensable dans un champ littéraire conçu selon des termes peu conciliables avec l’idée d’une perspective propre à un groupe social ou ethnique. De la « Harlem Renaissance » des années 1920 au « negrismo » cubain, du « Teatro Experimental do Negro » brésilien au « Black Arts Movement » nord-américain ou au « Caribbean Artists Movement » caribéen, nombreux ont été les moments de manifestation de cette quête d’une voix noire en poésie. L’appropriation par les poètes de pratiques orales, en particulier, a joué un rôle moteur dans l’émergence de cette communauté de discours poétique transnationale. L’objectif de ce travail est d’interroger les apports méthodologiques de la littérature comparée dans l’éclaircissement des enjeux proprement littéraires de cette poésie moderne des « Amériques noires ». / From the early Twentieth Century on, a written poetry has been carrying in the entire Americas the voice of people of African descent; this phenomenon is distinctively modern, as far as such a voice had until then been unconceivable within a literary field conceived in terms that were hardly compatible with the very idea of a perspective proper to one particular social or ethnic group. From the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920s to the Cuban “negrismo”, from the Brazilian “Teatro Experimental do Negro” to the “Black Arts Movement” or the “Caribbean Artists Movement”, there have been numerous manifestations of this quest of a Black poetic voice. The poets’ appropriation of oral practices, in particular, played a dynamic role in the appearance of this transnational poetic community of discourse.. The aim of this work is to question the methodological benefits of comparative literature in the clarification of what is at stake literarily speaking in this modern poetry of the “Black Americas”.

and Prague's role within it. It also looks at the cultural relationship between Chapman's journey to Czechoslovakia. The second chapter focuses on the clash bet Chapman and the Czechoslovak intermediaries of US culture such as Josef Škvorecký, Lubomír Dorůžka, and Jan Zábrana and the competing versions of African American poetry, especially in Abraham Chapman's anthology of Black diaspora poetry Černošská : světová antologie

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x, 237 p. / We have too frequently approached American World War II poetry with assumptions about modern poetry based on readings of the influential British Great War poets, failing to distinguish between WWI and WWII and between the British and American contexts. During the Second World War, the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki obliterated the line many WWI poems reinforced between the soldier's battlefront and the civilian's homefront, authorizing for the first time both civilian and soldier perspectives. Conditions on the American homefront--widespread isolationist and anti-Semitic attitudes, America's late entry into the war, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese internment, and the African American "Double V Campaign" to fight fascism overseas and racism at home--were just some of the volatile conditions poets in the US grappled with during WWII. In their poems, war shapes and threatens the identities of civilians and soldiers, women and men, African Americans and Jews, and verse form itself becomes a weapon against war's assault on identity. Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Richard Wilbur mobilize and challenge the authority of traditional poetic forms to defend the self against social, political, and physical assaults. The objective, free-verse testimony form of Reznikoff's long poem Holocaust (1975) registers his mistrust of lyric subjectivity and of the musical effects of traditional poetry. In Rukeyser's free-verse and traditional-verse forms, personal experiences and public history collide to create a unifying poetry during wartime. Brooks, like Rukeyser, posits poetry's ability to protect soldiers and civilians from war's threat to their identities. In Brooks's poems, however, only traditionally formal poems can withstand the war's destruction. Wilbur also employs conventional forms to control war's disorder. The individual speakers in his poems avoid becoming nameless war casualties by grounding themselves in military and literary history. Through a series of historically informed close readings, this dissertation illuminates a neglected period in the history of American poetry and argues that mid-century formalism challenges--not retreats from--twentieth-century atrocities. / Committee in charge: Karen Jackson Ford, Chairperson; John Gage, Member; Paul Peppis, Member; Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, Outside Member