- Title Information
- Title
- Making a Living Poetry: The Process of Poetic Vocation in Postwar America
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Neilson, Jeffrey P
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2014
- Physical Description
- Extent
- xi, 298 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Gould, Philip
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Herrnstein Smith, Barbara
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Nabers, Deak
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Shoptaw, John
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. English
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- 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.
- Subject
- Topic
- Modern American poetry; poetics; religion and literature; pragmatism; post-secularism
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20141006
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z0FN14JV
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations