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The Stanza in Postwar Anglophone Poetry Caleb Paul Agnew A Form that is Many Forms: The Stanza in Postwar Anglophone Poetry Caleb Paul Agnew Millersville, MD B.A., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia December 2019 ii ABSTRACT “A Form that is Many Forms: The Stanza in Postwar Anglophone Poetry” argues for the importance of stanzaic prosody in an era of unprecedented formal freedom, asserting that the shifts in stanzaic technique in the later twentieth century precipitate productive collisions between transhistorical poetic traditions and contemporary cultural pressures. My project follows the insights of Debra Fried and Jonathan Culler, who contend that critical neglect of the stanza hampers poetry studies generally. I propose that a combinatory model of stanzaic form—in which various verse segments such as rhyme, meter, syntax, and visual shape intersect to form multilinear patterns—more accurately tracks the turns and counterturns of twentieth-century verse experiments. This model facilitates the various investigations of my three chapters, each of which examines an individual poet’s rearrangements of existing stanzaic patterns to forge new links between the forms of literary history and the concerns of contemporary audiences. My first chapter begins in the early postwar era, as I consider how W. H. Auden’s verse responds to a shifting memorial culture in the wake of the world wars, and reinterpret his directive that poetry be “memorable speech.” Understanding poetic memorability as a complex “structuring of forgetfulness” involving mnemonic schemes, formal echoes, and the amnesiac structures of literary history, I argue that Auden shapes many of his stanzaic forms to tie together cultural imperatives of memory and the inevitability of forgetting. My second chapter enters the global economy of the late twentieth century, connecting the stanzaic structures of Derek Walcott’s Omeros to the poem’s imbrication in networks of touristic value and exchange. Like the signs that organize touristic gazing, the stanzas of Omeros cater to Anglo-American audiences in search of exotic difference and frame that difference within recognizable iii conventions, yet I argue that its verse also disrupts touristic practices of formalist reading, forcing the reader to recognize that forms invoke cultural and historical obligations beyond the economic circuits of touristic desire. My third chapter explores Jorie Graham’s visual prosody, arguing that her typographical stanzaic patterns rearrange the poetic text as a material body and offer a new somatic paradigm for formal poetics. I demonstrate how her work moves from the traditional free verse stanzas of poets like Williams or Plath toward schemes of extreme linear contrast, increasingly employing “coaxial” arrangements and “machine-cut” stanzas to explore the possible bodies verse may take on the page in an era of climate change and technological transformation. Auden, Walcott, and Graham engage diverse cultural formations through the stanza, a structure both remarkably central to postwar poetry and curiously neglected by poetry scholars. In renewing attention to stanzaic prosody, my dissertation aims to ask more incisive questions about the nature of structural progression and sonic return in contemporary poems and to trace more complex genealogies of formal influence. I study the postwar stanza not only to assess historical changes in verse technique, but also to track concomitant shifts in poetry’s social role, attending to the questions of memory, difference, and survival that poets and readers route through verse form. “A Form that is Many Forms” thus situates the stanza within discursive paradigms beyond the aesthetic and illuminates its response to the cultural traditions and historical conditions that shape its manifold contemporary reinventions. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to thank my committee first, because you have endured an onslaught of wild assertions and unruly drafts over the years with patience and good humor. Thanks to Jahan, whose ability to see both the forest and the trees simultaneously is surpassed only by his endless generosity and encouragement. Thanks to Steve, whose clear vision of the opportunities and pitfalls at every turn of this project has kept me on the path. Thanks to Chip, whose unfathomable knowledge of poetry and careful attention to style have both galvanized this project and saved it from error. I have been lost in a wood many times during these four years, but I have never lacked for Virgils to guide me. I’d like to thank many other teachers who have left an indelible mark on the way I see poetry: Michael Levenson, Andy Stauffer, Lisa Russ Spaar, George Lensing, Reid Barbour, Joe Viscomi, Alan Shapiro, and Eric Nebbia. I cannot thank you enough for the work you do. Thank you to the many other faculty members of the University of Virginia department of English who have been wonderful teachers and supportive colleagues: Victoria Olwell, Steve Arata, Elizabeth Fowler, Anna Brickhouse, Katherine Maus, Mrinalini Chakravorty, Clare Kinney, Njelle Hamilton, and Rebecca Rush. I have been fortunate to learn from all of you. I am indebted to a number of remarkable people who have helped me to sharpen my writing and thinking over the past six years. To Ethan King, without whom I’d never have made it out of coursework, I owe a great debt. To Kelli Shermeyer, Grace Vasington, Devan Ard, and Emelye v Keyser, who have generously given so much of their time and attention to this project, I cannot describe my gratitude to all of you. Thank you to all my fellow travelers in poetry over the last fifteen years: Adam Smith, Sam Barham, Kelly Ostergren, Joe Albernaz, Ben Miller, Maria Carlos, Kyle Rosko, Michael Lawson, Pete Mills, Lindsay Turner, Rob Shapiro, Peter Miller, Adam Friedgen, Olivia Milroy, Annie Thompson, Jordan Burke, Austin Washburn, and Joe Wei. My love for poetry is impossible to distinguish from my affection for all of you, and you are the readers I imagined while writing this. To all the other luminaries of the poetic world whose paths I have been fortunate enough to cross—Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Walt Hunter, Brian Reed, Paul Muldoon, Marjorie Perloff, Stephanie Burt, Roland Greene, Omaar Hena, Jonathan Culler, Juliana Spahr, Virginia Jackson, Ted Chamberlin—your words and your work have meant more than you know. Thanks to the army of incredible people at the University of Virginia whose work around the periphery of this project made it possible: Randy Swift, Colette Dabney, Chris Ruotolo, Cathryn Davis, the staff at Special Collections, and the hundreds of people who checked books out to me in Alderman Library over the years. An enormous thank you to Ivy Hauser, Kelly Knowles Lisowski, and Connor Sullivan, for being my cohort before I knew what one was. Thank you to Christian Kohlmann and Chase Haislip for reminding me that a degree in literature cannot hold a candle to the joys of literature. Thank you vi to Jordan Cook, Lara Musser, and Jesse Bordwin for being excellent colleagues and even better friends. The deepest thanks goes to the extraordinary group of humans who entered this program with me six years ago. I count myself truly lucky to have spent time in your orbit. Thank you to my wife Taylor, whose faith in me is far more constant than my efforts and my successes. This is for my daughter Rylan, whose experience of poetry is only beginning, yet whose delight in the magic of words is the envy of every seasoned reader. Toward the end of this project I was reading more Dr. Seuss than anything else, and I can only hope my work studies poetic technique in order to celebrate it, with Rylan’s joy and the Cat in the Hat’s wisdom: “It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how.” vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction The Form Lurking in the Mind: Stanzaic Structure and Postwar Prosody 1 Chapter 1 Stanzaic Form and Poetic Memorability in W. H. Auden 38 Chapter 2 Formalist Tourism and the Stanza in Derek Walcott’s Omeros 91 Chapter 3 Bodies Changed to Different Forms: Jorie Graham’s Visual Prosody 141 Coda A Form that is Many Forms 195 Works Cited 204 viii No quarrels are as bitter as those of persons whose prosodic theories differ: I like to think this testifies to the interest of the subject. - W. H. Auden I love forms, but I do not wish to come across as some kind of rheumatic formalist. - Agha Shahid Ali 1 Introduction The Form Lurking in the Mind: Stanzaic Structure and Postwar Prosody The middle decades of the twentieth century see an unprecedented expansion of stylistic experimentation with poetic form in Anglophone verse. No longer consistently rooted in end rhyme and meter—the patterns traditionally combined in stanzas—poetic form becomes a ground for experimentation, as poets entertain various ways of organizing the language of verse: America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 155)1 As Allen Ginsberg assesses the state of “America” (1956) he reflects upon the state of poetic form, and begins the final verse paragraph with a sardonic remark on his own selling of “strophes,” a Greek word often used interchangeably with the Italian “stanza.”2 He satirizes the craft of poetry in traditional forms as a mass production of identical, interchangeable commodities, comparing his strophes with the mass-produced automobiles that symbolize the modern American economy. He cheekily distinguishes his work by prosodic difference—his strophes are not exact copies (“different sexes”)—and treats this product differentiation as a 1 While MLA format mandates the double-spacing of all block quotes, including poetry, in this dissertation I will endeavor to present all substantial quotations of poems so that they appear approximately identical to their presentation in source texts, with the acknowledgement that no copy can replicate the original exactly.
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