Year of Award
2014
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Arts (MA)
Degree Name
English (Literature)
Department or School/College
Department of English
Committee Chair
Robert M. Baker
Keywords
Exteriority, Ashbery, Spicer, Stein, Eliot, Postmodernism, Subjectivity, Elizabeth Robinson, Hawkey
Abstract
This investigation traces the arc of fracturing and exteriorizing subjectivities in the post-Romantic poetries of Modernism and Postmodernism, ultimately considering the state of contemporary Postmodern subjectivity after the Language Poets. Focusing primarily on T.S. Eliot, John Ashbery, and Christian Hawkey, the thesis argues that the I/Other split associated with Romantic poetry’s idealized Othering of nature performs a major shift with the interiorizing fragmentation of the speaker(s) in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The anxiety produced by this claustrophobic, internal splitting of voices reaches critical mass in the chorus of difficult-to-trace speakers of “The Waste Land,” causing a breach of interior containment which projects the internal polyphony of voices outward. John Ashbery continues this exteriorizing polyphony, as evidenced in his ruminations on the surfaces of representation and his dispersal of subjectivity through the use of pronouns. With one foot moving forward into the post-structuralist avant-garde and another nostalgically reaching for a Romantic unity, Ashbery represents the messy progression of post-Romantic innovation. By the time of Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, the anxieties relating to the death of the contained, Romantic self have lessened with distance, but the legacy of Language poetics (which took the de-authoring, exteriorizing arc to its logical extreme) has left contemporary innovative poets with the challenge of reclaiming human subjectivity without ignoring the complications raised by generations of problematizing experimenters. By “collaborating” with dead poets and creatively “translating” foreign language texts, writers like Hawkey are seeking a “middle voice” that retrieves the human element while challenging the myth of a unified self.
Recommended Citation
Soloy, William John, "Stepping Outside: The Shifting Subjectivities of Post-Romantic Poetry" (2014). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 4250.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/4250
© Copyright 2014 William John Soloy