This dissertation works to illuminate modern poetry’s ambivalent stance toward the concept of utopia through the work of two of its most politically engaged practitioners. One of the most quoted literary maxims of the twentieth century is W.H. Auden’s assertion, in his 1939 elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” that “poetry makes nothing happen.” For Yeats, poets serve as harbingers of new worlds, imaging more ideal societal orders while working to actualize these private speculations in the public realm – a viewpoint which Auden, always concerned to define poetry’s social niche, finds both ludicrous and naggingly attractive. This dissertation examines this ambivalence, tracing the two poets’ modulating views on poetry’s world-building capacities, and their shifting stances toward the Shelleyan analogy between poetic forms and social formations. Spanning a period from the 1880s of early Yeats to Auden’s death in 1973, and devoting two chapters to each poet, I take up the following questions: Why is their work so often concerned with the future? What images of better worlds does it present? And more expansively, how can lyric poetry – so often predicated upon solitude – work to embody social aspirations?
Given the sheer prevalence of an affirmative future-orientation in the two poets’ work, I see them as embodying (albeit in various ways at different stages in their careers) a poetics of utopia, whereby both poetry itself and the vocation of writing it stand as crucial manifestations of the impulse to strive after better ways of life in more ideal futures. Engaging with theorists of utopia from Lewis Mumford and his contemporary Ernst Bloch to, more recently, Fredric Jameson and Ruth Levitas, I work to mediate among the various senses of “utopia” with which the two poets engage in their work. Writing in dialogue with recent efforts to recuperate the drive for social change at the root of the utopian impulse, I highlight the centrality of this impulse not just to the work of Yeats and Auden, but to twentieth-century poetry more generally, as it strives to underscore its indispensability to our search for better futures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/65465 |
| Date | 19 June 2014 |
| Creators | Cole, Stewart |
| Contributors | Woodland, Malcolm |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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