The diverse voices of African American poets from the nineteenth century have yet to receive their due. The critical gap is regrettable, because the nineteenth-century phase of the African American poetic tradition, although sparser and less philosophically unified than some later phases, nevertheless constituted a true tradition, connecting writers to one another and to writers of the coming century. Nineteenth-century black poets laid the groundwork for their artistic descendants both stylistically (by “signifyin’” on the tropes of their contemporaries) and thematically (by interrogating Euroamerican claims to exclusive political and moral authority), while building communal sites for literary and political activity such as the black press, the book club, the abolitionist circuit, and the university. In order to adequately theorize the nineteenth-century African American poetic tradition, we need a new critical narrative that would contextualize nineteenth-century African American poetry by emphasizing its interactions with various currents of literary and political enterprise in America and abroad. This study will gesture towards some of the possible outlines of such a narrative, while also suggesting a new set of hermeneutics for apprehending the achievements of early black poets, urging an examination of the early black poetic tradition in terms of performativity. A critical emphasis on performativity is particularly well-suited to the explication of nineteenth-century African American poesis for several reasons. Firstly, because the poetry so often centers around acts of repetition and revision, the primary texts are vulnerable to being misunderstood as imitative. By insisting that poetry’s meaning is generated through relationships between poets, texts, and various readers, the performative emphasis helps to spotlight the competitive and revisionary nature of much black poetry. Secondly, when African American poems are read as performances, their political dimensions come into sharp relief. This study examines the performances, personas, and prophecies of George Moses Horton, Frances Harper, Joshua McCarter Simpson, and Albery Allson Whitman in order to generate a deepened critical understanding of nineteenth-century African American poesis. / text

This thesis examines the representation of glass in French and Belgian poetry associated with the Symbolist and Decadent movements. It incorporates a number of authors, particularly focussing on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Laforgue, Rodenbach, and Maeterlinck, but also encompassing more minor writers where appropriate, as well as some writers on the periphery of Symbolism and Decadence. The thesis investigates how the growing use of glass in architecture, technology, and visual art influenced late-nineteenth-century poets, providing these writers with a means by which to understand their social context as well as a multi-faceted metaphor through which to interrogate their own poetic mechanisms. Glass, in its various manifestations - windows, lenses, hothouses, aquariums, Exhibition halls, Art Nouveau glasswork, and stained glass - prompts meditation on such questions as: the interaction between subject and object; the relationship between fiction and reality; the infinite; poetic form; nature and artifice; and aesthetic identity. Ultimately, I combat the traditional understanding of this poetry as being solely concerned with the pure realm of dreams, the soul, and the 'Idée'. Instead, I insist on the material world as a starting point for this poetry, demonstrating that it is not immune to environmental factors, but rather that it uses its environment as a route towards the elusive 'Idée'. Glass is key to this process because its very ambiguity makes it a suitable embodiment of the tension between the material and the unknown, invisible, or ideal.

Many efforts have been made by nineteenth and twentieth-century critics alike to classify Charles Algernon Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) as blatantly sacrilegious. This evaluative approach, however, fails to account for the thematic significance of Swinburne’s nuanced use of Christian imagery. Through a reading of three representative poems from the collection – “Dolores,” “Anactoria,” and “Laus Veneris” – this thesis demonstrates that Swinburne appropriates the Catholic concepts of transubstantiation, confession, and suffering for a specific aesthetic purpose. In the Catholic tradition, these concepts symbolically represent a unification of ostensibly antithetical states to achieve transcendence. For instance, the doctrine of transubstantiation unites the spiritual acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice through the physical consumption of bread and wine. Far from being, as Robert Buchanan famously claimed, “unclean for the mere sake of uncleanness,” Swinburne strategically appropriated the mechanism of religious transcendence in order to affect a poetic escape from the very moral categories it represented.

Despite the recent scholarship that has been performed on Margaret Fuller, very little has focused on the varied body of poetry she composed during her brief life. By dividing her poetic works into three categories – those written to an early “lover,” those focusing on the theme of androgyny, and those written during her “mature period” of 1844 – one is better able to follow Fuller on the emotional and intellectual journey that served as the foundation for all of her writings. In addition, the study of Fuller’s poetry provides a clearer understanding of how this erudite woman transcended gender boundaries in her writings, as well as in the choices she made in her daily life, further emphasizing her reputation as a revolutionary woman of nineteenth century.

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Although the literary quality of women's poetry from the nineteenth century has long been criticized by literary scholars, recent work in reception studies has documented readers' aesthetic experiences with such poetry in order to appreciate its popularity and appeal (Stauffer). Extending this work in literary reception studies, I draw on scholarship in rhetorical studies, specifically rhetorical aesthetics (Clark), to demonstrate how conventional poetic forms and sentimental appeals can be used by marginalized communities to facilitate identification. I examine Songs and Flowers of the Wasatch, a collection of primarily Latter-day Saint women's poetry compiled by Emmaline B. Wells for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, as a case study in rhetorical aesthetics. The collection was compiled with the intent to change popular opinion about Utah woman and foster community within women's movements of the time, including suffrage. By analyzing how these poems operated rhetorically--facilitating aesthetic experiences through familiar poetic forms and sentimental appeals--I conclude that the collection helped change negative public opinion of Latter-day Saint women. I argue that rhetorical aesthetics and reception studies offer an alternative way for literary and rhetorical scholars to reevaluate the value of women's nineteenth-century poetry. This project invites additional scholarly inquiry into how women and other historically marginalized groups have used art to create rhetorically powerful aesthetic experiences that prepare minds for change.