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Photocopy of typescript. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Thesis (M.A.)--Missouri State University, 2008. / "December 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaf 9). Also available online.

One of the most unique and striking features of T. S. Eliot's poetry up to and including The Waste Land is its imagery. Far from being mere decoration, the images in these poems play a vital role in the process of poetic communication. This paper attempts to examine in some detail Eliot's image, the important influences which contributed to its development, and its function in these poems. The poems of Prufrock and Other Observations show that Eliot had perfected his own "imagism" before coming into contact with Imagist theories through Ezra Pound in 1914, These poems reveal Eliot's characteristic method of using images—which are mainly precise renderings of an urban scene—as "objective correlatives" for a wide range of thoughts and feelings, in order to dramatize the plight of the poem's speaker. It was through a close study of such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue, the Jacobean dramatists, the Metaphysical poets and the philosopher Henri Bergson, that Eliot discovered his own poetic voice. Although he knew little before 1914 of the Imagists— notably T. E. Hulme, who was to influence him much later— Eliot's "imagism" shows certain similarities, in theory and practice, with the work of this important poet and theoretician. These similarities are examined in this paper to help define Eliot's own "imagism". After 1914, Ezra Pound played an important part in the development of Eliot's imagery. In general, Pound showed Eliot methods for extending to the limit the impersonality which was already a feature of Eliot's poetry. This led, through a mutual interest in the poems of Théophile Gautier, to Eliot's satirical poems in the Poems 1920 volume. These poems juxtapose concepts in the form of concrete images, many of which are drawn from a wide variety of literary sources. But Eliot was restricted by Gautier's rhyming quatrain: in the satires, dramatic intensity is sacrificed for excessive superficiality and undue complexity. "Gerontion," however, marks a return to the energy of the Prufrock poems by using images to present an awareness of individual and cultural neurosis. Finally, The Waste Land marks a climax in Eliot's development by fusing and harmonizing methods previously acquired, and achieves unity through a complex pattern of images, many of which grow out of the preceding poems. At their best, these images are not only precise sensual experiences but powerful expressions of feelings and thoughts. As such, they give ample proof that the image in Eliot's poetry is the primary means of poetic expression. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The following three chapters identify influences of the Imagist movement and the avant garde painters on the early poetry of Williams, and particularly on those poems that deal with flowers. This study is restricted to the earlier poems for several reasons, the most obvious being that Williams simply does not employ floral imagery to any extent in The Collected Later Poems. For instance, of the almost three hundred poems in The Collected Earlier Poems nearly sixty take flowers as their title or rely on floral imagery for part of their power. Nearly half that many use arboreal imagery, another prominent and important "object" in Williams' poetry, and, of course, many more use other images from the natural world. On the other hand, in The Collected Later Poems only three poems have flowers in their titles. Even in these three Williams was more interested in depicting sociological situations than in description, for his conception of poetry changed radically after the 1930's. He became convinced at that time that poetry should be serious rather than entertaining. Further, he became a staunch advocate of the "anti-poetic" theory of beauty whose chief tenet was that beauty and ugliness were part of a single whole. Nothing beautiful, like a flower, could exist without its soil of ugly, drab antecedents. James Guimond believes that this is the reason why Williams ceased presenting "his beautiful objects in splendid, static isolation from time and the world around them" (1, p. 50). Possibly 14 for these reasons the nature imagery is not nearly so dominant in these poems as in those written before 1940. Nor has the poetry of Paterson or Pictures from Breugel been included in this study. Because of the tremendous attention given them in the last five years, their nature imagery has been well covered. However, of the nature, and especially floral, imagery of the earlier poetry little has been said. Hopefully, this study will show that Williams made extensive and successful use of flowers in his poetry because they were the particular objects of the concrete world which best lent themselves to the related techniques and goals of first the Imagistic movement in poetry and later the Stieglitz school in painting.

British fiction and poetry explodes with textual visuality in the early twentieth century: color, shape, and form, as manifested in description, impression, and image. This dissertation computationally models that visuality, using the eye as a governing metaphor: retinal cones are modeled by inferring textual color, and retinal rods are modeled through object-detection via word sense disambiguation and categorization. Findings include a 93% increase in color expressions across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a 15% increase in the proportions of object and artifacts, and revealing correlations along lines of literary genre, subject heading, and more. These correlate with historical materialities such a dye manufacture, trends in the visual arts such as post-impressionism, and movements in literature such as imagism. A model of literary description, meanwhile, finds that, while visuality increases over time, proportions of description decrease, suggesting structural decompositions in fiction, occurring in parallel with disseminations of vision. NOTE: To view an interactive archived copy of this dissertation, please see the Columbia University Libraries Archive-It version here: https://wayback.archive-it.org/1914/20230920182940/https://dissertation.jonreeve.com/