By convention epinician poetry claims to be both obligatory and truthful, yet in the intersection of obligation and truth lies a seeming paradox: the poet presents his poetry as commissioned by a patron but also claims to be unbiased enough to convey the truth. In Slater's interpretation Pindar reconciles this paradox by casting his relationship to the patron as one of guest-friendship: when he declares himself a guest-friend of the victor, he agrees to the obligation ‘a) not to be envious of his xenos and b) to speak well of him. The argumentation is: Xenia excludes envy, I am a xenos, therefore I am not envious and consequently praise honestly’. Slater observes that envy may foster bias against the patron, but the problem of pro-patron bias remains: does the poet's friendship with and obligation to his patron produce praise at the expense of truth?

This thesis explores the theme of the motivation of soldiers in Greek lyric poetry while holding it up against the backdrop of epic. The motivation of soldiers expressed in lyric poetry depicts a complex system that demanded cohesion across various spheres in life. This system was designed to create and maintain social, communal, and political cohesion as well as cohesion in the ranks. The lyric poems reveal a mutually beneficial relationship between citizen and polis whereby the citizens were willing to fight and potentially die on behalf of the state, and in return they received prominence and rewards within the community. It is no coincidence that these themes were so common in a genre that was popular at the same time as the polis and citizen army were both developing.

This dissertation is has two parts: a critical essay on the lyric subject, and a collection of poems. In the essay, I suggest that, contrary to various anti-subjectivists who continue to define the lyric subject in Romantic terms, a strain of Post-Romantic lyric subjectivity allows us to think more in terms of space, process, and dialogue and less in terms of identity, (mere self-) expression, and dialectic. The view I propose understands the contemporary lyric subject as a confluence or parallax of imagined and felt subjectivities in which the subject who writes the poem, the subject personified as speaker in the text itself, and the subject who receives the poem as a reader are each repeatedly drawn out of themselves, into others, and into an otherness that calls one beyond identity, mastery, and understanding. Rather than arguing for the lyric subject as autonomous, expressive (if fictive) "I,” I have suggested that the lyric subject is a dialogical matrix of multiple subjectivities—actual, imagined, anticipated, deferred—that at once posit and emerge from a space whose only grounded, actual place in the world is the text: not the court, not the market, and not a canon of legitimized authors, but in the relatively fugitive realm of text. In this way, there is no real contradiction between what Tucker terms the intersubjective and the intertextual. The lyric space I am arguing for is ultimately a diachronic process in which readers take up the poem and bring that space partially into their bodies, imaginations, and consciousness even as the poem brings them out, or to the edge, of each of these.

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Este trabalho consiste em um estudo métrico e rítmico das Odes Píticas de Píndaro, bem como uma tradução desses mesmos poemas com o objetivo de reproduzir os aspectos métricos e rítmicos identificados durante o estudo. Trata-se, portanto, de uma abordagem que privilegia não o sentido, como se faz de costume no âmbito acadêmico, mas, sim, alguns elementos formais bem específicos (o metro e o ritmo), os quais são caros ao tema central da tese que defendemos: a da unidade rítmica nos epinícios aqui estudados. / This work is comprised of a metrical and rhythmical study of Pindar\'s Pythian Odes, as well as a translation of said poems with a view to reproduce the metrical and rhythmical aspects that were identified during the study. Hence, this approach focuses not on the meaning of the poems, as it is usually done in the academy, but on specific formal elements (meter and rhythm) that are dear to this thesis\' central theme: the rhythmic unity of these victory odes.

Thesis advisor: Paul Mariani / The fireplace has long stood at the center of the American home, that hearth which requires work and duty and which offers warmth and transformation in return. Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet takes a look at three major twentieth-century men whose poetry manifests anxieties about staying home to "keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby's chariot turning," as Wallace Stevens described it (L 246), during a time of great literary change when their peers were widely expatriating to Europe. Fireplaces considers contemporary poet Stephen Dunn as an inheritor of this mottled Modernist lineage of male lyric domesticity in the Northeastern United States, a tradition rattled by the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 after which Dunn leaves his wife and family home to remarry, thus razing the longstanding domestic frame of his poems. Ultimately Fireplaces leaves us with a question for twenty-first century verse--can a male poet still write about home? Or has the local domestic voice been supplanted at last by a placeless strain of lyric. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Blood Riveris an exploration of lineage and blood connection as families are made and remade over generations. The poems rise from the physical body, from birth, and again from death. The lyric is used as a mode of investigation as she writes to discover what it means to become a mother, what it means to be a daughter and wife, and finally what it means to remake the self in order to embody all that we are. The poems are born from the heart and explore the connections between us all.

<p>Gilles Deleuze's definition of the other as the expression of a possible world has introduced a novel ontological organization into philosophy. It makes possible the conception of a singular being which may be expressed by a potentially infinite number of possible worlds. This, in turn, has lead Deleuze to propound the idea of "a life," immanent and impersonal but singularly determinate, as different from the universe of subjects, objects, and the transcendence that appears as their concomitant. This study resituates Wallace Stevens in the ontological universe of "a life" as opposed to the common practice of associating him with the questions of subject, object, and transcendence. It observes that Stevens's poetry primarily invests the field of the other, which functions as the structure of the perceptible. The result is a poetry predominated by a yearning for the immanence of "a life," an outside, that escapes the limits of the subject and is "disappointed" with the function of transcendence, rather than being explained by them. The study argues that Stevens's poetry can be read as a dramatization, itself regulated by an affective charge, of the passion for an outside, which goes beyond the framework of subjectivity and "feels" the inhuman stirring beneath the human.</p> / Dissertation

This research is an analysis of the range of skills and knowledge required to produce, effectively, results in the Art of Lyric Improvisation in the field of jazz singing. Lyric Improvisation is the art of retaining the primary lyrics of a song but, using improvisational inventiveness, changing every other aspect. The study focuses on the manipulation of melody, rhythm, time feel, style, range, articulation and improvisation in the performances of renowned jazz vocalists Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae. The research is based on their multiple recordings of "Sometimes I'm Happy" (Youmans/Caesar) between the years1955-1965. The method compares different elements of the individual singers' improvisations to the published notation. These elements include: syncopation of the rhythm, motific development, expanding the range of pitch, variances in timbre and articulation and spontaneous re-composition of the melody all while maintaining the original lyric. The outcomes, however, can be applied over a multitude of tunes from any American Song Book composer or jazz standard sung in historically swing styles of the past century, or with contemporary developments.

This thesis contends that Sappho's Fr. 16 is intended to oppose the definition of the term Καλόѵ in Tyrtaeus' elegies 10 and 12. An analysis of Tyrtaeus 10 reveals the poet's attempt to institute a new civic courage in Sparta, one shaped by an understanding of honor and shame centered around the young man's willingness to fight and, if necessary, die in battle. Remarkably, the successful practitioner of this courage will literally come to sight differently in the eyes of his fellow citizens. In Tyrtaeus 12, this courage is more clearly defined as τò Καλλɪσɪoѵ, the focus of a new system of virtue that ranks the good of the common above all else, but that provides as much recompense for the warrior and his family as advantage for the city. Sappho's response in her Fr. 16 is to reject any understanding of the Καλόѵ that relies on convention, replacing it with the personal predilections of each individual. As she demonstrates, however, this view contains severe limitations and is inherently destructive of the city. The “debate,” conducted by both poets partly through Homeric allusions, continues the opposition between public and private begun in Homer.