Description
- Abstract:
- Making a Living Poetry investigates modern and contemporary American poetry’s reworking of the religious and romantic valences of a vocation in order to resist and reform the technocratic logic of the professional career. I account for the ways in which this trope has increasingly come to be practiced and understood in postwar America in terms of ethical and epistemological processes of becoming rather than teleological conceptions of formal mastery. The mutable senses of poetic ambition, commitment, survival, endurance, and evolution articulated in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, Adrienne Rich, and Yusef Komunyakaa signal a sustained reappraisal of the bifurcated and oversimplified narratives of secularization still inscribed within histories of literary modernity. By examining these poets’ formal experiments with the personal epic, open-field poetics, infinite seriality, polyvocality, hybrid prosodies, and rhetorical address, I articulate the complex resonance between modernist poetry’s aesthetic and cultural afterlives and postmodern modes of religiosity. I show that the process of vocation in postwar American poetry has radicalized various pragmatist conceptions of religious and artistic experience—conceptions according to which sacred and secular domains of artistic practice are reciprocally entangled and mutually co-productive of a late modern ethos of pluralistic engagement.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Neilson, Jeffrey P.,
"Making a Living Poetry: The Process of Poetic Vocation in Postwar America"
(2014).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0FN14JV
