Browsing by Subject "American poetry"
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Item In different voices : form, identity, and the twentieth-century American persona poem(2015-05) Frye, Elizabeth Bradford; Bremen, Brian A.; Bennett, Chad; Kevorkian, Martin W; Lesser, Wayne; Wheeler, LesleyIn arguing for the persona poem as a viable tradition in American literature, Elizabeth Frye reconstructs a lineage of dramatic poetry that spans the entire twentieth century. Through comparative studies of canonical poets predominately working in the aftermath of high modernism, she examines several significant performances and contends that the genre persists as a site of necessary and complicated cross-identifications. Chapter One elucidates the profound connection between Langston Hughes’s and Gwendolyn Brooks’s use of the persona poem and the Great Migration. Frye understands the blues-inflected utterances of Hughes’s collection Fine Clothes to the Jew as deeply invested in formal itinerancy and geographic indeterminacy. Similarly, she suggests that Brooks’s dramatic projections of American soldiers in the aftermath of World War II betray the poets’ dual obsessions with large-scale migration and polyvocality. Chapter Two continues to treat the persona poem as a socially invested phenomenon. Frye reads the gendered vulnerability in scenes of nascent national development in John Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” and Robert Hayden’s “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley” as a response to the horrors of World War II and the transatlantic slave trade. Chapter Three scrutinizes the “confessional” paradigm by revisiting the other voices and other selves that recurrently interrupt Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. By insisting on the importance of dramatic poetry in these collections, Frye further complicates the frequently invoked conflict between impersonality and personality. Finally, a coda recognizes the work of Natasha Trethewey and Elizabeth Alexander as indicative of the contemporary gravitation toward the persona poem. She positions Trethewey and Alexander as the heirs to several poets whose poems are discussed in this study. In detecting a sense of bereavement in these poets’ willfully incomplete projects of recovery, Frye proposes that the persona poem is not only a powerful tool of historical engagement, but a means of critically examining the limits of both literary community and communion with the past.Item “Woven alike with meaning” : sovereignty and form in Native North American poetry, 1800-1910(2017-07-20) Grewe, Lauren Marie; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Winship, Michael; Bennett, Chad; Fitzgerald, StephanieThe story of American poetry has developed alongside the idea of America itself, becoming almost synonymous with national sovereignty projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time the figure of the Indian was, in poetry, customarily depicted as melancholy and moribund, a noble savage making way for a supposedly superior civilization and race. Yet indigenous North American poets also composed and published poetry and participated in reading communities during this time. Examining this poetry reveals how indigenous writers manipulated poetic genres to contest U.S. hegemony and assert sovereignties from the sexual to the tribal to the national. Indeed, understanding early indigenous poets’ formal choices and poetic communities challenges critical narratives of American poetry’s history as having been linear and progressive, demanding a new way of organizing the study of American poetry. In this dissertation, I argue that early Native North American poets chose to write in specific poetic genres in response to local, national, and international publishing worlds. Each chapter examines how indigenous poets comment on the practice and form of poetry, thus speaking to a diverse community of poets and readers through a variety of verse traditions. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft draws from multiple cultural traditions as she manipulates time and genre through her mourning poems, ballads, and lyrics in the Anishinaabe world of the Great Lakes. In the Chicago area, Simon Pokagon uses insurgent practices of appropriation to criticize and revise colonialist American poetry through cross-racial citations and borrowings in his birchbark pamphlets and novel. As public literary tastes shift from poems to legends at the turn of the twentieth century, E. Pauline Johnson helps invent a different kind of modernist poetry that challenges representations of indigenous peoples as pre-modern. Alex Posey composes skeptical elegies, dialect poems, and political newspaper verse from western and Creek literary forms in Indian Territory to heal a divided Creek Nation, practicing poetic appropriations that offered ways of relating to genre that remain powerful for Native American poets today.