This thesis reads John Ashbery as a major poetic thinker about nature whose work convenes a multitude of nature writing traditions, from classical pastoral to the 21st-century eco-sublime. Challenging a critical consensus that would cast Ashbery as either a belated romantic in search of lost nature or an arch-postmodernist who dissolves "nature" into text, this study reveals his deep historical awareness of the transmission and collision of literary ecologies. The poet who emerges delights in putting different poetic natures into contact with each other—and in humorously making nature unnatural. Surveying Ashbery’s long historical moment, the thesis uses four terms of critique—transparency, vagrancy, flow, and badness—to map his "invisible terrain." Chapter one historicizes Ashbery’s turn to a poetics of contradictory "transparencies" during his sojourns in France from 1956-1965 and his concurrent dream of writing poems that would be like "natural landscapes" in a world of "painted ones." Chapter two considers the pastoral and anti-pastoral topoi of Ashbery’s Vietnam-era poetry and his tendency to "wander away" from political commitment. Chapter three examines Ashbery’s recurrent tropes of "flow" and his tendency to literalize the stream-of-consciousness metaphor and "dissolve" his own style at decisive moments of his career. Chapter four reads the "bad" nature poetry of Ashbery’s late period (1987 to the present) as the culmination of a career-long investment in camp irony’s "good taste of bad taste" and as a response to ecological crisis. The coda, a survey of Ashbery’s critical prose, examines his penchant for “a completely new kind of realism."

This thesis presents four categories of form basic to all of Stephen Crane's poetry: antiphons, apologues, emblems, and testaments. A survey of previous shortcomings in the critical acceptance of Crane as a poet leads into reasons why the categorization of form here helps to alleviate some of those problems. The body of the thesis consists of four chapters, one for each basic form. Each form is defined and explained, exemplary poems in each category are explicated, and specifics are given as to what makes one poem better than the next. The thesis ends with an elevation of Crane's worth as a poet and a confirmation of the merits of this new categorization of form.

Du recueil A Boy’s Will (1913) au recueil In the Clearing (1962), l’œuvre du poète américain Robert Frost (1874-1963) déploie sa réflexion sur le concept d’écart, et le présente comme principe majeur de son esthétique et de sa stratégie d’écriture. Utilisant une approche fondée sur la micro-lecture des poèmes, cette thèse entend mettre en lumière la richesse d'une thématique frostienne qui permet de repenser la dialectique entre centre et marge à différents niveaux d'analyse : cette dialectique semble à l’œuvre non seulement dans la représentation poétique des espaces nord-américains mais aussi dans le rapport des textes à l'espace métaphorique du canon, ainsi que dans l'ambiguë mise en scène du sujet dans son rapport aux espaces intime, social et politique. Nous souhaitons montrer que le poète et les personae multiples qu’il adopte au fil des recueils privilégient un positionnement détaché, qui n’est ni complètement au centre ni complètement à l’écart, mais pour ainsi dire dans l’écart. Cette position de léger retrait, à la fois sereine et équilibriste, dessine ainsi un triple autoportrait du poète. Il fait le portrait d’un artiste chez qui la tension entre tradition et modernité, entre formes fixes et libre expérimentation, relève d'une position compliquée et féconde, qui permet à Frost de se situer à la fois à l'intérieur et légèrement à l'écart du genre de la poésie pastorale ; d'autre part, il esquisse le portrait « bougé » d'un sujet en mouvement au sein du paysage de Nouvelle-Angleterre, sujet que des tentatives d’ancrage dans certains territoires installent dans une position de voisinage méfiant avec son prochain, à la fois contre les autres et tout contre eux. Enfin, l’œuvre laisse apparaître en filigrane l’autoportrait d’un Américain utilisant la stratégie de l’écart dans l’habile mise en scène de sa propre iconisation. / From the collection A Boy’s Will (1913) to the collection In the Clearing (1962), the works of American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) can be viewed as a reflection on the concept of deviation, presenting it as a major principle in his aesthetics and writing strategy. This doctoral dissertation provides a close reading of many poems, with a view to highlighting the highly seminal quality of the Frostian theme of the slight deviation, which allows one to rethink the dialectic between the center and the margins at different levels of analysis. This dialectic appears not only in the poetic representation of North American space, but also in the established connection between the texts and the metaphorical space of the canon, as well as in the ambiguous presentation of the poetic figure in relation to the intimate, social or political spheres. We wish to show that the poet together with the multiple personae that he uses in the collected poems, favor a specific vantage point, a detached position which is neither in the center nor completely in the margin, but rather within the limits delineated by some deviation. This slightly withdrawn position, which is both dispassionate and perilous, sketches out a triple self-portrait of the poet. It is the self-portrait of an artist for whom the tension between tradition and modernity, between fixed forms and free poetic experiments, creates a complicated but fertile position which allows Frost to position himself both within, and slightly on the margin of, the genre of pastoral poetry. Frost's poems also depict the portrait of a moving poetic figure in the New England landscape, a figure who is put, because of his attempts at settling in certain territories, in a situation where neighbors are both aware and wary of each other. Lastly, the poems could be regarded as the self-portrait of an American posturing as a marginal figure in the skillful staging of his own iconization.

This paper examines assimilation and double-consciousness in the poetry of Charles Simic, Marilyn Chin, and Susan Atefat-Peckham. Each of these three poets writes in English in an American setting but has a different heritage. Simic is a native Yugoslavian (Serbia) who fled Europe during WWII. Chin arrived in the U.S. from Hong Kong as a child, and Atefat-Peckham is a first-generation American raised by Iranian parents. Each of these poets expresses some degree of assimilation and double-consciousness (as described by various theorists including W.E.B. Du Bois and Werner Sollors, among others) through the form and content of their poetry. This paper compares the three poets' work, attempting to draw inferences on how double-consciousness and assimilation is expressed in their poems and to what degree. This study argues that Simic is the least assimilated (as his poetry portrays the most severe double-consciousness), Chin is in-between and Atefat-Peckham the most assimilated.

Ces quarante dernières années, Louise Glück a su s’imposer dans le paysage de la poésiecontemporaine américaine sans que l’on ait jamais pu l’assigner à quelque genre que ce soit. Sa poésie déroute car traversée par le féminin, elle s’obstine pourtant à lui résister. Le moi glückien se dissimule derrière des masques plus ou moins opaques : des personae de la mythologie telle Perséphone auxmasques sournoisement transparents du recueil Ararat, sa voix poétique se fait plurielle mais singulière, celle d’un moi qui parle, toujours en proie au désir. Glück édifie dans chacun de ses recueils un réseau de paradigmes où la mémoire coexiste avec l’oubli, où la domesticité s’oppose à l’ailleurs hostile, où le mythe et l’ordinaire se confrontent et se confondent.Louise Glück esquive ces structures paradigmatiques à travers une poétique épurée et une ponctuation qui obscurcissent et diffèrent le sens jusqu’à l’éluder. L’entre-deux que son oeuvre explore forme à la fois un interstice et une béance : ce peut être la fissure d’Averno, la crevasse du deux-points ou le silence de Dieu dans The Wild Iris ; le milieu qui nous sépare de l’autre et de nous-mêmes et qui, simultanément, nous lie inextricablement à eux. Nous appelons ce milieu pluriel le neutre, concept que nous devons à Roland Barthes qui lui a consacré un cours au Collège de France en 1977-1978. Nous nous sommes inspirés de son approche pour lire la poésie de Glück, dont les personae sont habitées par un désir qui est, chez le poète, un désir d’écriture pour surseoir à la mort : un désir de neutre. / For forty years now, Louise Glück has been a major figure in contemporary American poetry, particularly because her poems shun the obvious and the lyric genres as we know them. If her poetry give the feminine to read, her work resists and endures it as a genre. The various masks the poet puts on may often seem transparent, but the poetic voice remains that of a persona, be it Persephone or even the ones in Ararat, her most life-inspired collection. Many and different are the faces to people her work, but behind the mask, Glück’s remains unique: her voice can be described as Dickinsonian in its bareness and subversive imagery: disguised as a desiring I, the impersonal threatens. Throughout her work, Glück has drawn a web of paradigmatic oppositions, only to be ‘baffled’: memory coexists with oblivion, the safe and cozy home is opposed to the dangerous outside world, the mythic and the mundane are intertwined in Meadowlands.Louise Glück evades and outplays the paradigm thanks to a bare language and a choice of punctuation, which darken and delay meaning to the extent of eluding it. Her poems explore an inbetweenness, which assumes the shape of a Freudian rift in Persephone’s soul, or of God’s silence to His creatures’s prayers in The Wild Iris. We are naming such in-betweenness the Neutral, a theory the French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes exposed in a lecture course at the Collège de France in 1977-1978. The Neutral is the desire and its intensity, it is what parts us from the other and from ourselves, what intimately binds us together. Our reading of Louise Glück’s poetry was firstly inspired by Barthes’s theory. We see in her work a desire for the Neutral which translates as a desire for the poet to write, and relentlessly defer the instant of death.

A Poética Multifacetada de Jerome Rothenberg investiga o modo operacional da poética de Jerome Rothenberg (1931). Nascido em Nova York, em 1931, Rothenberg fez parte de uma geração intermediária entre movimentos poéticos bastante conhecidos de público e crítica: a poesia beatnik dos anos 1950 e 1960 e a language poetry do início da década de 1970. Junto com o poeta Robert Kelly, Rothenberg concebe a deep image nos anos 1960, movimento de curta duração, mas essencial para seu desenvolvimento poético. Rothenberg é conhecido principalmente por ter criado o termo etnopoesia e por seus experimentos com o que chamou tradução total, ao traduzir a poesia indígena norteamericana. A tradução total foi um método inovador de considerar a musicalidade, a presença de distorções de palavras ou palavras sem sentido, e outros mecanismos poéticos das artes verbais indígenas como parte integrante da composição. Dessa forma, o resultado da tradução deveria necessariamente contemplar todos esses aspectos. A partir de seu dito o primitivo é complexo Rothenberg passa a considerar aspectos poéticos da produção oriunda de culturas orais, ditas primitivas, como a base de seu conceito de etnopoesia. Sua busca pelo primitivo também o conecta diretamente com outros autores lidos como experimentais na poesia, de William Blake e Walt Whitman a Allen Ginsberg, passando por uma tríade modernista: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams e Gertrude Stein. A hipótese desta tese é demonstrar que o impulso etnopoético, aparentemente restrito ao seu trabalho como antologista e suas traduções, na realidade é mais abrangente e inclui sua própria produção poética. A etnopoesia se torna o conceito pelo qual podemos ler o seu retorno à sua ancestralidade judaica e seus poemas que tratam de temas como a vida dos judeus na Polônia dos anos 1930, a tradição mística da cabala e o Holocausto. A tese aborda também questões como inserção no meio poético, autoria, influência e originalidade / The Multifaceted Poetry of Jerome Rothenberg deals with the methods applied by Jerome Rothenbergs poetics. Born in New York, in 1931, Rothenberg was part of a generation in between well known poetic movements: the beatnik poetry from the 1950s e 1960s and the language poetry of the 1970s. With fellow poet Robert Kelly, Rothenberg starts the deep image in the 1960, a short-lived movement, yet an essential one for his poetic development. Rothenberg is better known for having coined the term etnopoetry and for his experimentations with what he called total translation, while working with North-American Indian poetry. Total translation was an innovative method in considering musicality, the presence of word distortions or meaningless words and other poetic mechanisms of Indian poetry as an integral part of a poem or song, so that the resultant translation would necessarily contemplate all these aspects. From the perspective of his saying primitive is complex, Rothenberg starts considering the characteristics of poetry from oral culture, or those called primitive, as the basis for his concept of an etnopoetics. His search for the primitive also connects him with authors read as experimental in poetry, from William Blake and Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg, passing through the modernist triad Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. The hypothesis of this thesis is to show how the etnopoetic impulse, apparently restricted to his work as anthologist and translator, is, in reality, much more broad in its spectrum and includes his own poetic production. Etnopoetry then becomes the concept we can use to read his return to his Jewish ancestrality and the poems dealing with topics such as the life of Jews in Poland in the 1930s, the mystical kabbalah and the Holocaust. This thesis also shows his insertion in the poetic scene, and debates questions like authorship, influence, and originality

Unindo crítica cultural à pesquisa acadêmica, pretendemos mapear a poesia de Patti Smith e Ana Cristina Cesar, partindo de seus respectivos contextos da década de 1970 o movimento punk nova-iorquino, nos Estados Unidos, e a poesia marginal, no Brasil , para então explorar seus pontos de convergência, no que tange a uma micropolítica do feminino e a uma estética de confrontamento. Pensamos ambas as poetas como cartógrafas de uma época e das transformações intrínsecas a essa época, mapeadas por elas no fazer poético, no corpo da linguagem, por meio de uma política-estética; por elas somos levados à política como estética; à política menor, do eu mínimo, de Deleuze, em caráter contingente, de subjetividade e feminilidade. Discutimos também como, a voz do feminino localizado em Patti e Ana C. dá vazão à abertura de um novo tipo de experimentalismo que se integra a uma genealogia de arte/cultura e ao legado da poesia moderna travando diálogo com elementos catalisadores do pós-moderno que desembocariam no contemporâneo. / By merging cultural criticism and academic research, we aim to rummage the poetic works of Patti Smith and Ana Cristina Cesar, starting from their respective contexts in the 1970s the New York punk scene in the United States, and marginal poetry in Brazil , and on to explore their points of convergence within the micropolitics of the feminine and an aesthetics of confrontation. The two poets are taken as cartographers of a time and of the changes that are intrinsic to that time, which they chart on the making of poetry, on the body of language, by means of a politics-aesthetics. We are led to politics as aesthetics a politics of what is contingent, of subjectivity and of femaleness; Deleuzes minor politics, or politics of the minimal self. We will also discuss how, in the voices of the feminine (further than that of feminism) that underpin their poetics/aesthetics, a new kind of experimentalism opens up within a genealogy of art and culture and the legacy of modern poets thus engaging in a dialogue with a small/minor History, with the microsphere, the outsider, and disruption; unfoldings of nascent notions of the post-modern and the contemporary.

This poetic thesis is an exploration of the darker side of relationships. There are two parts of this thesis and they are to be read independently of each other. Part one is concerned with the chaotic relationship structure between lovers, husbands and wives, and the unexpected anguish that results from living an inauthentic life. Part two of my thesis is a rumination of a past close friendship and the tragic death of that friend. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Cette thèse explore le fonctionnement de la poésie moderniste américaine sous l’angle de la relation. Critiquant la rhétorique de la rupture généralement associée à l’esthétique des avant-gardes modernistes, notre parcours suit la ligne sinueuse de la poétique de la relation de H.D. [1886-1961] à Robert Duncan [1919-1988]. Loin de tracer une trajectoire chronologique entre ces deux points, qui ne sont pas envisagés comme les œuvres-limites d’un nouveau canon, cette étude a pour point central The H.D. Book. La poésie dite de l’après-guerre émerge comme celle d’un perpétuel entre-deux-guerres, et sa postmodernité, comme une illusion. L’analyse montre que le passage du modernisme historique à son avatar métamoderniste s’effectue par la reconfiguration du mode disjonctif en mise en relation. Ligne fuyante du modernisme, la relation Duncan-H.D. est une utopie. C’est pourquoi elle permet sa critique. Celle-ci implique le passage d’une politique individuelle de l’invention [Pound, Eliot…] à une éthique de l’écriture. Cette aventure, fondée sur des échanges poétiques et épistolaires publiés et inédits, passe par Eliot, Pound, Levertov, Olson et Creeley, mais aussi par Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Valéry ou encore Deleuze, Meschonnic et Glissant. Du H.D. Book à Ground Work, comme de Hymen à Trilogy, la philosophie du devenir, qui s’étend de l’héraclitéisme à la relation d’Édouard Glissant, en passant par le flux bergsonien et par l’empirisme radical de Williams James, offre un cadre conceptuel propre à rendre compte de l’écriture comme processus, de l’espace poétique comme champ de composition, du texte comme système complexe et du poème comme projet. / Starting with a critique of the rhetoric of rupture that is ordinarily closely linked to avant-garde aesthetics, this dissertation seeks to probe the ground of modernist American poetry through a poetics of and as relation. Viewing modernism and postmodernism from this standpoint has dramatic consequences on the assumptions of language theory and innovative poetry. Steering away from a single or dual literary portrait, this study follows the winding path relating early modernism to its metamorphic—or metamodernist—version. Largely focused on the late works of H.D. and Robert Duncan, my objective is not to establish the personal or literary boundaries of another counter-canon. Rather, the Duncan-H.D. line provides a critical outlook on the stakes of nodal or network writing. This involves a shift from the individual’s politics of invention [Pound, Eliot…] to an ethics of relational composition [Duncan, H.D.…]. Therefore, the emphasi! s is laid on published and unpublished poetic exchanges and epistolary relations also involving Levertov, Olson, Pound, and Creeley among others, gradually producing the multilinear mapping of a nomadic poetry. Duncan and H.D.’s relational poetics, as evidenced by The H.D. Book and Ground Work, or Hymen and the War Trilogy, draw on a “boundless creational field,” which is predicated on the Jamesian “lines of influence” and the Deleuzian “lines of flight,” ultimately underwriting Glissant’s philosophy of relation and Meschonnic’s groundbreaking language theory. H.D.’s Sapphic rewriting of classic symbols into complex images, like Duncan’s field poetics and serial writings, provide the ground for a reworking of twentieth-century modernism.

Ce travail s'inscrit dans un questionnement sur les liens entre la littérature et la science au XXème siècle, appliqué à l’œuvre littéraire du poète américain E.E.Cummings (1884-1962). La première partie du travail consiste à voir comment Cummings répond dans son œuvre aux conceptions de la science et de la connaissance qui font partie de son arrière-plan culturel et littéraire, en particulier celles exprimées par les philosophes transcendantalistes et pragmatistes du XIXème et du début du XXème siècles. Il sera également question du caractère matérialiste et concret de l'écriture poétique de Cummings au début de sa carrière poétique, en réaction à ces courants de pensée. Les conceptions personnelles et les critiques de Cummings au sujet de la science et du langage scientifique seront ensuite dégagées : le poète s'attache à mettre en valeur les limites du langage savant et l'aspect déshumanisant des sciences et des techniques. Il montre la fracture qui s'instaure entre l'humanité et la nature, dont il souligne la spontanéité. La seconde partie étudie comment Cummings, en dépit de ses critiques, met en œuvre un véritable imaginaire scientifique dans ses poèmes et dans ses pièces de théâtre. Cet imaginaire lui permet de reconstruire sur le plan poétique la plénitude du cosmos et de l'humain mise à mal par les sciences. Le poète peut alors élaborer sa propre définition de l'intuition, proche de celle de Bergson, et esquisser le portrait du poète "homo faber", l'homme aux prises avec la matérialité du monde, dont l’œuvre et l'action répondent aux conséquences de celles de l'"homo sapiens", l'homme savant qui s'est détaché de la nature. / This dissertation questions the links between literature and science during the 20th century, as they can be observed in the literary works of American poet E.E.Cummings (1884-1962). The first part of this study is about how Cummings meets in his works to the conceptions of science and knowledge that are part of his cultural and literary background, especially those expressed by transcendantalist and pragmatist philosophers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It will also deal with the concrete and materialistic aspect of Cummings' poetical writings at the beginning of his literary career as a reaction to these schools of thought. Cummings' personal conceptions and criticism about science and scientific langage will then be revealed : the poet endeavours to highlight the limits of scholarly langage and the deshumanizing aspect of sciences and techniques. He shows the newly installed breach between mankind and nature, whose spontaneity he emphasizes in his works. The second part studies how Cummings, in spite of his criticisms of science, makes use of a truly scientific imagination in his poems and theatrical works. This enables him to reconstruct, on a poetical level, the wholeness of cosmos and mankind that was jeopardized by science. He can then develop his own definiton of intuition which is close to that of Bergson, and draw a portait of the "homo faber" poet, or the man struggling with the materiality of cosmos as opposed to the "homo sapiens", a learned man who set himself apart from nature.