The Woman in the Box is Smiling is a collection of poems, prose poems, short-short stories, and short stories. The introduction is a personal essay which discusses form as a device used to gain control over subject matter.

This thesis consists of a series of nine poems which deal with the theme of finding a balance between energy and form in life and in poetry. Fourteen miscellaneous poems are also included. In addition, an introduction by the author explains the purpose of the thesis as a whole and explicates the poems in terms of this purpose. The introduction discusses the meaning of each poem and the techniques used to convey its message. Each poem in the series of nine poems is also related to the. overall theme of the series.

While scholars have carefully and rightly noted the profound influence that More’s abolitionist writings had on both the abolition movement and the developing women’s rights movement, they omit what is an essential examination of her poetics, particularly the self-conscious poetic form that she develops in her poem, “Slavery, A Poem” (1788). In conjunction with noting the rhetorical and textual devices that More implements in “Slavery” to illustrate the art of self-conscious poetics, this paper explores these same devices in a later satirical essay of More’s entitled Hints towards forming a Bill for the Abolition of the White Female Slave Trade, in the Cities of London and Westminster (1804), arguing that, by comparing the rhetorical points of overlap in these two pieces, we can identify that More’s contribution to her contemporary literary culture transcended mere female participation and publication. More importantly, through “Slavery” and Hints, More develops a unique rhetoric – a poetics of control – with which to discuss the physical constraints of slavery, the trope of the individual versus the collective, and the essential poetic and rhetorical practice of blending authorial creativity with conventional constraint. / text

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La présente recherche est consacrée au sonnet contemporain en Russie et en France. Elle évoque l’évolution du sonnet dans les deux pays et analyse en détail les œuvres de cinq poètes français et cinq poètes russes. Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Roubaud, Laurent Fourcaut sont présentés à côtés de Yuri Veynert et Yakov Kharon, Iossif Brodsky, Victor Sosnora, Alexeï Tsvetkov, Timour Kibirov. La période étudiée s’étend des années 40 du XXe jusqu’à la première décennie du XXIe siècle. Les composants structurels du sonnet en tant que forme fixe et ses aspects génériques sont mis en examen afin de révéler les niveaux possibles de lecture et les liens des sonnets contemporains avec la tradition sonnettiste. L’étude met en relief quatre grands thèmes du sonnet : l’amour, la politique, la mort et le jeu. / The present research is dedicated to the contemporary sonnet in Russia and in France. It traces the evolution of the sonnet in both countries and focuses on works of five French and five Russian poets. Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Roubaud, Laurent Fourcaut are juxtaposed to Yuri Veynert and Yakov Kharon, Joseph Brodsky, Victor Sosnora, Alexei Tsvetkov, Timur Kibirov. The period under study goes from 1940s to now. The thesis deals with structural components of the sonnet as a poetic form and a genre in order to reveal the possible levels of reading and to establish relationship between the contemporary works and the sonnet tradition. The study highlights four major themes that are love, politics, death and game.

This thesis offers the first critical examination of the sound of laughter in Romantic poetry. Part one locates laughter in the history of ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and explores the interplay between laughter and key intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and social issues in the Romantic period. I chart a development in thinking about laughter from its primary association with ridicule and the passions up to the early decades of the eighteenth century, to its emerging symbiosis with politeness and aesthetic judgement, before a reassertion of laughter's signification of passion and naturalness by the end of the eighteenth century. Laughter provides an innovative means of mapping cultural markers, and I argue that it highlights shifts in standards and questions of taste. Informed by this analysis, part two offers a series of historically aware close readings of Romantic poetry that identify both an indebtedness to, and refutation of, earlier and contemporaneous ideas about laughter. Rather than having humour or comedy as its central concerns, this thesis identifies the pervasive and capricious influence of the sound of the laugh in the writing of Robert Burns, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. I detect the heterogeneous representations of laughter in their work that runs across a diverse range of genres, poetic forms, themes, and contexts. As such, I argue against the serious versus the humorous binary which prevails in literary criticism of Romanticism, and suggest that laughter articulates the interplay between the elegiac and the comic, the sublime and the ridiculous, the solitary and the communal. Moreover, I detect a double-naturedness to the sound of laughter in Romantic poetry that registers the subject's capacity to signify both consensus and dispute. This inherent polarity creates a tension in the poems as laughter ironically challenges what it also affirms. Never singularly fixed, the sound of laughter reveals the protean nature of Romantic verse.

Souvent perçu comme le poète de la « nature » par excellence, William Wordsworth serait bien plutôt celui qui a donné définitivement congé à une riche tradition descriptive, puisque les évocations du paysage sont chez lui bien plus rares que chez tous ses prédécesseurs du XVIIIe siècle. Le présent travail se propose de prêter attention à cette raréfaction, qu’on peut également voir, sur le plan de l’histoire esthétique, comme le moment d’émergence d ’une modernité abstraite. La poésie wordsworthienne, qui a pour ambition de refonder le langage et les formes poétiques par un retour à l’authenticité de la nature, apparaît indissociablement comme une rupture avec un mode essentiel de la première modernité anglaise, celui des Géorgiques. Elle prend ainsi acte de la crise de la représentation qui affecte l’optimisme du XVIIIe siècle et qui empêche désormais de voir dans le paysage la manifestation d’ un ordre providentiel. Le « romantisme » anglais est ce qui surgit au défaut de la cosmologie, pour témoigner d’une fondamentale absence au monde. Cette évolution est ici étudiée en deux temps. On s’attachera d’abord à retracer, dans son détail, la trajectoire de la poésie de jeunesse de Wordsworth et de Coleridge, pour montrer que le moment refondateur de Lyrical Ballads intervient au terme d’un épuisement des formes et de la topique qui garantissaient traditionnellement l’intelligibilité du cosmos. Et l’on abordera ensuite trois moments distincts de la maturité poétique de Wordsworth [1798, 1802, 1807], qui suggèrent que le retour de l’idéologie dans son œuvre répond intimement à l’ébranlement radical dans lequel elle trouve son inspiration. / It is remarkable that Wordsworth should still be seen as the quintessential nature poet, when his poetry actually marks the demise of a well-established descriptive tradition in 18th-century English literature: depictions of landscape are much shorter and much less frequent in Wordsworth than in any of his predecessors. The present dissertation explores this paradox, a paradox which in historical and aesthetic terms could be read as heralding a « modern » shift towards abstraction. Wordsworth’s attempt to regenerate the forms and language of poetry through a recovery of « natural » authenticity amounts to a break with the Georgic mode crucial to English early modernity. It stems from the crisis in representation which attended the darkening of 18th-century optimism and meant that landscape could no longer be perceived as evidence of an immanent world-order. Romanticism in Wordsworth registers the default of cosmological discourse. I have tried to analyse this break in a twofold manner. The first part of this dissertation attempts to retrace, through close readings of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s early poetry, the gradual exhaustion of shared or conventional forms and meanings which led to the foundational moment of Lyrical Ballads. The second part, on the other hand, is concerned with Wordsworth’s subsequent evolution and attempts to chart it from three distinct moments [1798, 1802, 1807], suggesting that the poet’s increasing reliance on a conservative ideology is intimately bound up with the earlier, more radical aspects of his work.

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

This thesis is the first sustained study of the poet John Clare and his relationship to health. It considers health as an under-explored physical and mental state evoked across his poetry and prose that has heretofore been overshadowed by a critical preoccupation with his supposed madness. Under the banner of the Medical Humanities, I angle a critical lens on Clare and health beyond biographical readings of his mental deterioration and onto his written responses to the medical, cultural, and social understandings of health by which he was surrounded. Specifically, I argue that Clare articulates both his comprehension and also experience of health through poetic form. I take a thematic approach to the reach of Clare's works composed between 1804-1864, and focus on what I argue to be the most predominant 'forms' that health takes across his poetics: voice, breath, and place. The chapters unfold the poet's engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical contexts such as nosology and theories of insanity, speech and elocution, climatic and atmospheric medicine, phrenology, and botany, in order to consider how the local formal techniques of his poems (metre and prosody, rhyme and other sonic devices, caesura, enjambment, and line-endings) shape and re-work the ideas of mental and physical health that these contexts put forward. Throughout the thesis I bring together formal and historical methodologies with modern phenomenological and cultural theories in order to draw out how Clare's exploration of health is both facilitated by the thinking of his own period, and also speaks to current research into health and illness as subjective experiences. Ultimately, I read health across Clare's poetry at the level of form in order to reveal how health inspires a textual mode that defies determinacy and unsettles distinctions between the healthy and the pathological. This thesis is the first sustained study of the poet John Clare and his relationship to health. It considers health as an under-explored physical and mental state evoked across his poetry and prose that has heretofore been overshadowed by a critical preoccupation with his supposed madness. Under the banner of the Medical Humanities, I angle a critical lens on Clare and health beyond biographical readings of his mental deterioration and onto his written responses to the medical, cultural, and social understandings of health by which he was surrounded. Specifically, I argue that Clare articulates both his comprehension and also experience of health through poetic form. I take a thematic approach to the reach of Clare's works composed between 1804-1864, and focus on what I argue to be the most predominant 'forms' that health takes across his poetics: voice, breath, and place. The chapters unfold the poet's engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical contexts such as nosology and theories of insanity, speech and elocution, climatic and atmospheric medicine, phrenology, and botany, in order to consider how the local formal techniques of his poems (metre and prosody, rhyme and other sonic devices, caesura, enjambment, and line-endings) shape and re-work the ideas of mental and physical health that these contexts put forward. Throughout the thesis I bring together formal and historical methodologies with modern phenomenological and cultural theories in order to draw out how Clare's exploration of health is both facilitated by the thinking of his own period, and also speaks to current research into health and illness as subjective experiences. Ultimately, I read health across Clare's poetry at the level of form in order to reveal how health inspires a textual mode that defies determinacy and unsettles distinctions between the healthy and the pathological.

This dissertation discusses the way in which mid-20th century American female poets Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Gwendolyn Brooks addressed anxieties around seeking, keeping, and surviving home spaces while incorporating elements of formal poetic structure (including metre, stanzaic configurations, and rhyme). Susan Fraiman, in Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins, suggests that domestic space and practice can become sites of improvisation, rebellion, and refuge. Building on this theory, I show how form and domestic subject matter can interact to signify active responses to trauma resulting from childhood abandonment, physical/sexual abuse, homophobia, madness, and systemic racism. I argue that poetic form at its most effective does not function as an homage to either patriarchal canonical models of restraint or craftspersonship but animates the work from the inside out and effectively creates poem-spaces that are metaphorical “homes” rather than “houses”.   My work adds to the fields of American poetry and prosodic scholarship by incorporating close reading techniques that neither follow New Criticism mandates that privilege authorial choice/structural integrity over biographical and sociopolitical resonances nor assign specific meaning to how form is used. Instead, this project encourages readers, students of poetry, and practitioners to rethink how formal structures in poetic work can emerge from and engage with the highly personal and how the implementation of formal technique can potentially offer shelter and a means of articulating trauma and resistance whilst extending into the public sphere (either thematically or through the vehicle of performance) to offer intimacy and forge community. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The mid-20th century American female poets Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Gwendolyn Brooks addressed anxieties around seeking, keeping, and surviving home spaces while incorporating elements of poetic form (including metre, stanzas, and rhyme). I show how form and domestic subject matter can interact to signify active responses to trauma resulting from childhood abandonment, physical/sexual abuse, homophobia, madness, and systemic racism. I argue that form at its most effective should be neither a “container”—a “house” of words—nor a sign that the poet is conservative and/or old-fashioned. Rather, I invite my readers to consider the formal poem as a potential “home” in which the structure becomes an extension of the inner personal forces that animate it, helping it to offer shelter and a means of resistance to the writer and reader/listener, as well as forge connections in the public sphere, both thematically and in performance.