Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University

This thesis examines a neglected transatlantic link between three post-war British poets – Charles Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull and Andrew Crozier – and a group of Depression-era modernists: the Objectivists. This study seeks to answer why it was the Objectivists specifically, rather than other modernists, that were selected by these three British poets as important exemplars. This is achieved through a combination of close readings – both of the Americans’ and Britons’ poetry and prose – and references to previously unpublished correspondence and manuscripts. The analysis proceeds via a consideration of how the Objectivists’ principles presented a challenge to dominant constructs of ‘authority’ and ‘value’ in post-war Britain, and the poetic is figured in this sense as a way-of-being as much as a discernible formal mode. The research concentrates on key Objectivist ideas (“Perception,” “Conviction,” “Objectification”), revealing the deep ethical concerns underpinning this collaboration, as well as hitherto unacknowledged political resonances in the context of its application to British poetries. Discussions of language-use build on recent critical perspectives that have made a case for the ‘re-forming’ potential of certain modernist poetries, particularly arguments about ‘paratactic’ versus ‘fragmentary’ modernisms, and as such the three British poets’ interest in the Objectivists is interpreted as a response to a need for restitution following the trauma of World War II. Ultimately, it is argued that this interaction (which this thesis figures in explicitly transatlantic terms) was a challenge to the emphasis placed on collective and normative viewpoints in much post-war British poetry, many of which were located in an organic conception of ‘nation.’ This study claims that the Objectivists’ example posited a contrasting poetic, foregrounding individual agency and capacity for thought as the only viable means for the poet to re-connect with and make meaningful statements about society and the world.

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The present study examines a specific form of literary memorialization of Scottishness, stubborn and elusive as that term might be, under the concrete political, social, and economic conditions of the late eighteenth-century. It holds that literary history and criticism can make a significant contribution to understanding Scottish history, both in its own terms and in relation to British history writ large. It inserts into these histories a much wider range of late eighteenth-century Scottish poets than previous scholarship and deepens our understanding of the cultural and discursive manifestations of British state formation under the extreme stress of war and revolution. It also reveals the way the political crisis of the French Revolution converged with pre-existing concerns about the impact of union on the Scottish economy and society, as well as with shared Anglo-Scottish critiques of state power that feature so prominently in the political history of this period. Many of the poets studied here have never figured significantly in political, cultural, or literary histories of the period and, with a few notable exceptions, no analysis of their poetry, whether in political or literary terms, has yet occurred. Consequently, this study brings both historical and literary analysis to bear on a large and diverse group of Scottish poets with a range of political and aesthetic perspectives that reflect not only on the question of Scottish, English, and British "identities," but on the formation of British poetry more generally. / text

This thesis examines works by the British interwar writers W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice in the context of their relationship with the contemporary style of visual art known as Art Deco or the Moderne. It is my contention that, having absorbed many of the Art Deco idioms as an accepted part of the world they experience, these are reflected in the writers' works, firmly relating the work to a unique historical moment, place and social and cultural environment. In my reading of their work I identify sources of inspiration in their themes, idioms and imagery common to the artistic style, and investigate the extent to which their work has been informed in content and composition by visual art. Using diaries, travelogues, letters, essays, prose and poetry, I will argue that if Art Deco characterised the interwar period, it follows that it will also characterise the work of Auden and MacNeice. As such, I seek to reframe their work in an entirely new context, one seemingly unnoticed by earlier critics. My project also considers the ways in which a worldview is formed and environments are learned from childhood, with reference to early twentieth-century psychologists Erich Fromm, Lev Vygotsky and Maria Montessori, in order to posit the notion that growing up in the heyday of Art Deco, Auden and MacNeice may have subceived a great many of its motifs. I also identify the ways in which the writers engage visual art with intent, and establish a relationship between the writers and Art Deco's politics, imagery and composition through discussion of individual poems and their co-authored book Letters From Iceland (1937). In particular, the thesis examines the presence and impact of Art Deco elements in their work, such as Cubism (using both visual and literary examples), Futurism, the cinema, the Ballets Russes, and interwar attempts at producing what Wagner termed gesamtkunstwerk, the 'total work of art'.

Robert Frost’s legendary description of “the sound of sense” to define his poetics has for decades sounded like little more than common sense. His idea is now taken to be fairly straightforward: the inflections of an utterance resulting from the tension between demotic speech and poetic form indicate its purport. However, our accepted notion of Frost’s formulation as simply the marriage of form and meaning misconstrues what is potentially revolutionary in it: if everyday speech and verse form generate tension, then Frost has described a method for mediating between reality, represented by speech, and art, represented by verse form. The merger is not passive: the sound of sense occurs when Frost “drag[s] and break[s] the intonation across the metre.” And yet Frost places speech and verse form in a working relationship. It is the argument of this dissertation that poets reckon with what is often understood as discord between poetry and reality by putting into correspondence forms of speech and the forms of poetry. The poets I examine–Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton–are concerned with their positions in local communities that range from the family unit to ethnic, religious, racial, economic, and sexual groups, and they marshal forms of speech in poetic form to speak from those locales and to counter the drag and break of those located social and political realities. They utilize what I call their “local languages”–the speech of their particular communities that situates them geographically in local contexts and politically in social constructs–in various ways: they employ them as raw material; they thematize them; they invent idiosyncratic “local” languages to undermine expectations about the communities that speak those languages; they devise generalized languages out of standard and nonstandard constructions to speak not just to and from specific locations but to speak more broadly about human experience. How, these poets ask, can poetry respond to atrocities, deprivations, divisions, and disturbances without becoming programmatic or propagandistic and without reinforcing false preconceptions about the kinds of language suitable for poetry? They answer that question with the living speech of their immediate worlds.