English-speaking Germanists have shown considerably less interest in Gottfried Benn than their German colleagues. The latter have produced, in recent years, a multitude of critical works, approaching Benn from various angles and arriving at very different conclusions. Outside Germany, the picture is less variegated. The few voices to be heard seem to agree that there is, or may be, some value in Benn's poetic works, but little or none in his theoretical pronouncements. By offering a dissenting view, this thesis hopes to animate the discussion outside Germany and, with due respect, to expose and correct a number of misconceptions that have, in my view, tarnished Benn's image and brought upon him undeserved opprobrium. I shall endeavour to show that Benn's views on lyric poetry form a consistent and significant pattern of thought which defies the many suggestions we have heard of his fickleness, irrationalism, rigid formalism and all-pervading self-contradiction. A diachronic approach seemed best suited to counter the assumption of an essential stasis of Benn's views - an assumption that underlies tacitly most critical discussions of the various aspects of his alleged irrationalism. At the same time, this approach brings out the consistency with which Benn's views developed and crystallized. Three chapters of my thesis are devoted to tracing this development (chapters two, three and four): close interpretations of some critical and literary works, selected to represent the successive stages of Benn's evolving thought, are designed to illuminate and place into context Benn's understanding of the various issues he himself raised and elaborated over the years. From these analyses emerges a poetic theory identical with that presented at Marburg under the title 'Probleme der Lyrik' and discussed, for strategic purposes, in my first chapter. This rather extended discussion has three principal goals: First, to show that Benn, in order to be understood, must be approached as a poet and provocateur who aims at neither accuracy of quotation nor conceptual precision and consistency, but at effective formulation. Second, to present in a new light the salient aspects of Benn's poetological conception. The creative process is shown to be thought of as involving, at all stages, a close co-operation of intellectual and imaginative energies. It is suggested that the 'absolute poem' , as Benn envisages it, is a vehicle of depth and significance whose 'monologic' character activates and affects the reader; that poetic 'montage' aims at the production of an organic whole whose 'fascination' addresses itself to the reader's emotional and cognitive faculties; that the 'transcendence of the creative pleasure' is an aid in life. Third, to call attention to Benn's 'historical' stance which causes him to relate every important aspect of 'modern' poetry to the poetic tradition and invalidates the charge, levelled against Benn from various quarters, that he adopted a progressive pose to present an antiquated second-hand theory. Chapter five deals with the question of Benn's alleged self-contradiction. It argues that 'ambivalence' and 'tension', to be clearly distinguished from 'contradiction', are the principles informing the whole of his poetological thought, endowing it with perspective, depth, and ultimate credibility. In conclusion it is suggested that the generally accepted placement of Benn's poetology at the extreme 'absolute' , 'anti-human' end of the modernist spectrum and, consequently, our evaluation of its historical significance, need to be reconsidered.

In June 1917 W.B. Yeats wrote to his father : Much of your thought resembles mine . . but mine is part of a religious system more or less logically worked out, a system which will I hope interest you as a form of poetry. I find the setting it all in order has helped my verse, has given me a new framework and new patterns. (Wade 1954, 627) The new framework and new patterns that he claimed to have found in his system generated a new, and for Yeats, radically different sort of poetry. Before 1919 (The Wild Swans at Coole), the poetry had as its subject various traditional themes: the pity of love; the romance and heroism of Irish mythology; the threat of age, change and death. The poetry up to this point is, formally speaking, highly skillful, but locked into its own admissions of failure to touch or incorporate reality in any but a romantically defeatist way. However, the order which Yeats refers to in his letter, and the system he generated as a propaedeutic to this new order, once assimilated into the habit and texture of the poetry, generated new topics of its own which made those of the earlier work seem subjective, self- indulgent and intellectually uninformed. Yeats's poetry now changed drastically in focus and form, from subjective to objective poetry. Whereas the earlier poetry had opposed reality with romantic heroism or selfdestructive despondency, the poetry subsequent to his change of practice, incorporates a new vision of reality as the intrinsic architechtonics of poetry itself. Now the measure of human and aesthetic completion is no longer an inexplicable and inscrutable sadness, but an intelligent and informed detachment, an energy of mind that Yeats called "gaiety". My thesis explores this energy of mind and what it meant for Yeats and his poetry. My contention is that the idea of gaiety provides a way for Yeats to grant meaning to his life, a way for him to create himself. As the poetry is completed thanks to the new system, so is the poet. In order to see this, it is necessary to read the poems as a series of collections, or stories, that resonate back and forth with meaning and qualification and understanding. Yeats's system is his myth, and he writes his poetry in terms of and informed by that myth, shaping and re-shaping the experience of the created and fictional self until it has meaning in a way that the real self does not. The thesis explores this process of creation firstly in theoretical terms, using Lotman's ideas of Story and Myth, and looking at Yeats's intellectual and poetic inheritance. It goes on to examine some of the great poems in an attempt to define gaiety, and how Yeats achieves it in the poetry, and then to look at the early, pre-system poems to see how they differ. Finally, it takes the last of Yeats's lyric collections, Last Poems, and shows how gaiety works in the most mature poetry when the poems are read as narrative events within a story.

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.

This dissertation is comprised of a collection of poems preceded by a critical preface. The preface reconsiders the value of discontinuous poetic forms and advocates a return to lyric as an antidote to the toxic aspects of what Tony Hoagland terms “the skittery poem of our moment.” I consider poems by Wendy Xu, Kevin Prufer, Sharon Olds, and Stephen Dunn in depth to facilitate a discussion about the value of a more centrist position between the poles of supreme discontinuity and totalizing continuity. Though poets working in discontinuous forms are rightly skeptical of the hierarchies that govern narrative and linear forms, as Czesław Miłosz notes in The Witness of Poetry, “a poet discovers a secret, namely that he can be faithful to real things only by arranging them hierarchically.” In my own poems, I make use of the hierarchies of ordered perception in lyric and narrative forms to faithfully illuminate the collapsed structures of my own family history in the shadow of Detroit. I practice the principles I advocate in the preface, using a continuous form to address fractured realities in a busy, disordered age when poets often seek forms as fragmented as their perceptions. These poems are distinctly American, but because there is no true royalty in America, our great cultural and economic institutions—television, music, film, magazines, and big business—take the place of the castle (the book’s emblem) while Michael Jackson ultimately rises as the commanding dead king whose passing prompts contemplation of the viability of popular culture, family, history, and geography. The fallen structures that litter the work are many: the twin towers, chess rooks, bounce castles, nuclear families, the auto industry. However, the sole structure cohering the whole is that of a lyric voice whose authority is derived through lived experience and presented in rich, continuous poetic forms.

How we approach a poem changes it. Recently, it has been suggested that one readerly approach - a bodily orientation characterised by distance, suspicion, and resistance - risks becoming reflexive, pre-conscious, and predominant. This use-oriented reading allows us to destabilise, denaturalise, dissect, defend, and define poetic texts through its manifestation in contemporary literary critique, yet it is coming to be regarded as the sole manner and mood of intelligent, intellectual engagement. In this thesis, I demonstrate the need to pluralise this attentive orientation, particularly when it comes to contemporary lyric poetry. I suggest how an overlooked mode of response might foster a more receptive mode of approach: the 'co-creative' response. Lyric poems mean to move us, and they come to mean by moving us. Recent 'simulation theories of language comprehension', from the field of cognitive neuroscience, provide empirical evidence that language processing is not a product of a-modal symbol manipulation but rather involves 'simulations' by certain classes of neurons in areas used for real-world action and perception. As habituation and abstraction increase, however, these embodied simulations 'streamline', becoming narrow schematic 'shadows' of once broad, qualitatively rich simulations. Poems, I suggest, seek to reverse this process by situationally novel variations of language, coming to mean in the broadly embodied sense in which real-world experiences 'mean'. Readers are asked to 'enact' the poem, to 'co-create' its meaning. Where critique traditionally requires that readers resist enactive participation in the aim of objective analysis, the co-creative response - a response 'in kind' by imitation, versioning, or hommage - asks readers to receive and carry forward the enactive unfolding of a poem with a composition of their own. I assert that, by thus responding with - rather than to - poems, we might foster an attentive stance of active receptivity, thereby coming to understand poems as the enactive phenomena they are.