Description
- Abstract:
- My dissertation explores the problem of experience in the work of three twentieth-century American poets: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. In the broadest sense, it might be understood as an effort to rethink what Eliot called a "dissociation of sensibility" through a set of terms seldom applied to American Modernist poetry and its heirs. The project is largely motivated by my suspicion that some of the most significant and most often overlooked engagements with the "dissociation" that Eliot identifies become legible in light of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the vexed position of the lyric poet in the wake of large-scale industrialization and the rise of mass forms of media. American poetry's response to the scattered, ephemeral, or distracting character of modern experience is most often charted in relation to early Modernist attempts to secure the sovereign subject an experiential grounding through the presentation of fixed concrete particulars. Williams's mantra "no ideas but in things," Eliot's objective correlative, the Imagist call for a "direct treatment of the thing": all tend toward what Hugh Kenner calls a "renaissance of attention," the recuperation of new, fresh, or immediate experience through the apprehension of stable objects. By contrast, Moore, Bishop, and Merrill, suspicious of the claims of immediacy, elect to host the blanks or gaps in conscious subjective experience. The conscious mind's inability to keep pace with the movements of mass media, to amalgamate its "chaotic, irregular, fragmentary" forms, leads them to develop compositional habits that rely on a practice Benjamin identifies with early films, namely, "reception in a state of distraction." In so doing, they cultivate poetic economies that allow them to speculate on the integrity of ephemeral experience, the value of which cannot be rendered upon receipt of conscious subjective sense impressions.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Koelz, Stephen Edward,
"Speculating Experience: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill"
(2008).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0DR2SW9
