In poetry—so the story often goes—form is more important than content. After all, poets and critics since the early modern period have said so. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that content and form should be “organic” friends, with form the more important friend of the pair. Philip Sidney thought that the poet should make the “brazen” stuff of nature into better, “golden” forms of his choosing, as God himself might do. How did such an apparent preference for form over content happen? This dissertation suggests that one answer might be found in a study of pre-modern ideas of content, or what, in the literary criticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was called matere, or “matter.” In the later Middle Ages, matere referred at once to a writer’s source materials, her broader topic, and the parchment and ink with which she worked. A thing both physical and metaphysical, matere was seen to possess its own agency and force, and was held to be an equal partner to form in the making of poetry. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, these ideas of matter and form shifted. Since the Scholastics, medieval English poetic theory had held to a roughly Aristotelian notion of matter and form, wherein form inhered within matter. Poets could change the appearance of matter, but not its inner essence. An influx of Humanist and Neo-Platonic thought at the end of the fifteenth century, however, led to a different view in the sixteenth. Form came to be seen as an eidos, or “idea,” that was separable from matter—partly, because Humanist theory stressed style over content, and partly because of the renewed influence of these Platonic notions of form. My dissertation traces these different attitudes towards form, matter, and the literary over the course of four chapters, each focused on a single poet who wrote between 1400 and 1547: Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, John Skelton, and Thomas Wyatt. Where Hoccleve and Lydgate are shown to prioritize matter over form in their visions of poetry, Skelton and Wyatt gradually turn away from matter and towards form in their work. A consideration of each poet’s theoretical attitudes towards matter is paired, in each chapter, with a careful study of his practical treatment of source matter and manuscript materials. My introduction focuses primarily on those broader intellectual historical shifts that may have contributed to evolving conceptions of matter and form during the late medieval and early modern period. Ultimately, the dissertation concludes that, while early modern poetry remains as concerned with matter as it is with form, there is an ideological move away from ideas of materiality in the literary arts during the sixteenth century. This, in short, is the reason that Elizabethan poets claim that their work is, in Sidney’s words, “golden” rather than “brazen.” / English

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow are two American novels that intersect stylistically and thematically. This thesis argues that Pynchon’s novel mirrors and reinvents Melville’s novel. Gravity’s Rainbow is not simply engaging with Moby-Dick, but actively reprising it for the late 20th century through the power of Pynchon’s imagination. Pynchon responds to and reimagines Melville’s book by mirroring major themes and frameworks from Melville, by adopting some of his central images, and by mirroring his profuse use of technical language to express coded spiritual beliefs and deepening character analysis. The sublime white whale is reinvented as the Schwarzgerät, a German V2 rocket loaded with the mysterious polymer Imipolex G; this profound object stands symbolically at the center of the novel much as the whale, Moby Dick, does in Melville’s opus. The monstrous “grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air” (Melville 7) is re-forged as the “white finality” looming “up in the zero sky” (Pynchon 85, 87). Beyond the functions of the novels’ sublime central images, both novels are here recognized as relying on coded technical, specialist language to express metaphysical beliefs. Throughout each novel, the technical language codes the ineffable and the transcendent, allowing for an entry point to understand the functions of symbolic material. Gravity’s Rainbow echoes Moby Dick’s stylistic structure, which is vast and loose. Very few novels are identified from the world’s literary canon as “encyclopedic,” and the two here discussed are the only examples from American literature, according to Edward Mendelson’s “Encyclopedic Narrative” hypothesis, which is supported by literary critic Andrzej Kopcewicz. It is the similarities in the unconventional, encyclopedic literary style of Moby-Dick and Gravity’s Rainbow that offers one of the strongest arguments for their resonant kinship. I use the work of Lawrence Buell to deepen and critically engage the material; I also engage with the critical work of several other prominent scholars. The metaphors from science extend to the color theory at work in the main symbols present, which are white or suffused with light, such as the whale, rocket, doubloon and light bulb. This thesis argues that light and whiteness as characteristics of the symbolic objects represent evil, malignity or another dark force. I show that the color theory that ties the books together has its main genesis, for both Melville and Pynchon, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors.

This thesis re-examines several of Robert Frost’s poems in light of his identification as a synecdochist and aim of reaching an ever-widening audience to provide that audience with a “momentary stay against confusion.” It explores the potential of his poetry to serve as a model for contemporary engagement with the environment. Supported by excerpts from the poet’s letters, speeches and prose, it considers these poems as acts of ecopoesis or “making” of the “home or dwelling-place” as defined by Jonathan Bate in Song of the Earth and asserts that Frost’s poetic celebrations of the reciprocity between humankind and environment serve to subtly challenge assumptions of human supremacy over other inhabitants of Earth. With a primary focus on poems that were begun or completed during the first decade of the twentieth century – a time when the poet was out of necessity, actively and regularly engaged with a thirty-acre lot of land in Derry, New Hampshire – it argues that the poet’s conscious choice to dwell in rural settings where he could engage in a continued practice of reflection within revisited environment enabled the creation of vital poetry concerning what was in existence where he was in existence. Through discussion of John Elder’s essay “The Poetry of Experience” an account of his field experience of Frost’s enigmatic poem “Mowing,” it also explores the educational value of these poems as they provide opportunities for a wide range of readers to engage imaginatively with the environment, an activity of increasing importance as we face the challenges of global climate change in the twenty-first century.

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