This dissertation rereads sonnets by three crucial but misunderstood early twentieth-century women poets at the intersection of the study of American literary history and scholarship of the sonnet as a genre, exposing and correcting a problematic loss of nuance in both narratives. Genre scholarship of the sonnet rarely extends into the twentieth century, while early twentieth-century studies tend to focus on nontraditional poem types. But in fact, as I show, formal poetry, the sonnet in particular, engaged deeply with the contemporary social issues of the period, and proved especially useful for women writers to consider the ways their identities as women and poets functioned in a world that was changing rapidly. Using the sonnet’s dialectical form, which creates tension with an internal turn, and which engages inherently with its own history, these women writers demonstrated the enduring power of the sonnet as well as their own positions as women and poets. Tying together genre and period scholarship, my dissertation corrects misreadings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and Helene Johnson; of the period we often refer to as “modernism”; and of the sonnet form.

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.

Following the path of the use of the Petrarchan sonnet in Renaissance England, this article explores why this specific form was so prevalent from the court of Henry VIII to that of his daughter, Elizabeth I. The article pays specific attention to the works of Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, paying close attention to social, political, and gender issues of the period.

“Voiceprints of an Astronaut” is a multi-faceted collection of poems that explores the fluid borders between memory and the imagined, the personal and the sociohistorical. The “voiceprints” of the title poem are the words, both imagined and real, of the only twelve men who ever walked on the moon. My own device, of an imagined ‘interview’ with figures from history, is deployed in the title poem. It is also used, for example, in the form of voiceprints from R.L. Stevenson, (“Tusitala”), Mary Queen of Scots’ maidservant, (“Beheaded”,“A Prayer fir James VI”), an acrobat-magician from the Qin Dynasty, (Bi xi Terracotta) and a time-travelling 14th century monk transposed to the Scottish Poetry Library (“In the Library”). In poems such as “Earthrise”, “Starlight from Saturn”, “In the Library”, and “Lines for Edwin Morgan” the tone is lyrical, taking the form of the sonnet, or sometimes simply reflecting the ghost of a sonnet framework. Recent events such as the Haiti earthquake are reflected, at times, by a purely personal response, such as in “Beads”, while poems about the Aids epidemic in the 80’s, (“Lunch-times with Rick”, “The Quilts”) spring from a period as Medical Correspondent for the Guardian, covering Aids conferences in London, Stockholm, Montreal and San Francisco. Others, such as “Roosevelt’s Bats”, “Fire-and-Forget” and “At Sea” are responses to modern war and conflict. In all of these, my aim has been to explore the political through the personal. The poems in this collection reflect an adult life split, almost equally, between two cities: Edinburgh and London. Regular visits too, to North America are another influence. An important part of the journey involved in writing these poems was a discovery of a Scots voice I thought I’d misplaced, only to find again, in poems such as “Beheaded” or “Haud tae me”. Some of these poems are autobiographical, dealing with parenthood, childhood, and growing up. Others, such as “Dana Point” or “Boy with Frog” celebrate a moment, a time and a place. In the case of the series of poems beginning with “Jim” and ending with “Black and White” the places and times take the form of memories, both in Scotland and Canada, of a much older sister. The critical essay that forms the second part of this thesis is entitled “Politics and the Personal in the Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence: Edwin Morgan's “Glasgow Sonnets”, Tony Harrison's “from The School of Eloquence” and selected sonnets by Paul Muldoon”. The first chapter examines the use of the sonnet form in Edwin Morgan’s “Glasgow Sonnets”; the second chapter concerns the sonnets written by Tony Harrison in from The School of Eloquence and Other Poems, published in 1978, while the third chapter looks at selected sonnets by Paul Muldoon.

The poetry collection in four sections features pieces concerned with memory, particularly of the author’s childhood in Ireland. Difficult family relationships as well as early romantic failures are prominent obsessions. Landscapes and careful portraits of characters recur. Travel to Eastern Europe and within the author’s adopted United States give the opportunity to meditate on larger issues and spans of time. Domestic pleasures and the struggle to be a good parent and husband provide the ultimate trajectory of the work. The nonfiction memoir consists of eight essays which tackle among other topics a failed first marriage, a return visit to the author’s high school in Dublin, an analysis of how the dead come back to haunt us in the everyday, and a mirroring of colonial exploration in contemporary lives. The common thread is the many ways “home” can be understood and run away from.

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Thesis--Münster. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (1st prelim. p.).

This thesis presents original poems by the author, as well as a comparison of the religious sonnets by John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Somehow Holier ruminates playfully on the problem of suffering and our responses to it. These poems take as their subjects theology, history, art, my wife's struggle with chronic migraines, and gardening. "Res Gestae Variorum," a crown of sonnets at the center of the book, recounts the lives of would-be Christian saints, like the third-century theologian Origen, whose penchant for suffering obstructed them on the path to holiness. In "Mater Misericordiae" I flip through a calendar filled with famous depictions of Mary while my wife consults with a doctor. These poems blend humor and pathos, striving at once to laugh in the face of pain and account for its awful cost. Throughout, I'm in conversation with the poets who've influenced my voice as a writer: Charles Wright, Phillip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney.

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