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The Material Imagination: Poetic Itineraries from Bradstreet To

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The Material Imagination: Poetic Itineraries from Bradstreet To THE MATERIAL IMAGINATION: POETIC ITINERARIES FROM BRADSTREET TO OLSON by JOSHUA S. HUSSEY (Under the Direction of DOUGLAS ANDERSON) ABSTRACT This study considers Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Olson as poetic world-builders. It examines the diverse heterocosms—alternate universes—that these writers construct by bridging the gap between an external, material world and the abstract, sense-driven world of the interior. By considering language as an objective technology, this project looks at language as micro-systems that evolve over time. By studying these micro-systems of language, we can begin to describe states of being as they are rendered through poetry. The chapter on Anne Bradstreet considers her public and private poems as the beginnings of lyric poetry in America, and I argue that the rhetoric of her private poems, meant as a kind of archive for her family, follow the guidelines for meditation put forth by St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Along the same lines, the chapter on Jonathan Edwards considers his scientific essays and the posthumous Images or Shadows of Divine Things as spiritual lexicography, as a method of categorizing and defining worldly phenomena. This should interest anyone with knowledge of eighteenth-century Calvinism as it describes Edwards’ deep investment in the physical world, an uncommon assumption for his perspective. Lastly, the chapter on postwar poet Charles Olson describes his work through the work of George Butterick, the curator of the Olson Collection at the University of Connecticut in the 1970s and 1980s. Butterick is responsible for The Guide to the Maximus Poems (1981) which considers Olson’s Maximus Poems as an archival storehouse and textually links to the more esoteric references in order to explain them. This study links these culturally unique writers by looking at their works as repositories for spiritual data, where poems operate both as spiritual archives and linguistic presences. INDEX WORDS: Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Olson, George Butterick, Wallace Stevens, N. Katherine Hayles, Susan Howe, heterocosm, imagination, sensation, perception, material metaphor, external, internal, poetry, material, immaterial, consciousness, meditation, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Puritanism, Calvinism, Postmodernism, Early American, maker, world, world building, memory, intelligence, contemplation, morphology, image, shadow, divine, dictionary, natural, nature, archaic, form, substance, content, affection, interior, exterior, natural philosophy, spiritual, lexicography, empiricism, archive, repository THE MATERIAL IMAGINATION: POETIC ITINERARIES FROM BRADSTREET TO OLSON by JOSHUA HUSSEY BA, University of California Los Angeles, 2003 MA, University of Georgia, 2008 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2014 © 2014 Joshua S. Hussey All Rights Reserved THE MATERIAL IMAGINATION: POETIC ITINERARIES FROM BRADSTREET TO OLSON by JOSHUA S. HUSSEY Major Professor: Douglas Anderson Committee: Fredric Dolezal Cody Marrs Andrew Zawacki Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2014 iv DEDICATION For my parents, Kathleen and Steve. For my brother, Christopher. For my daughter, Asa. For my wife, Gabriel, and Kathryn and Dan, my other parents. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, deep gratitude to Doug Anderson for his tireless line edits, patience with overwrought prose, absolute availability, and all the gratis coffees and luncheons. His mentorship will stick with me for countless lives after this one. To Fred Dolezal, for his help with Johnson, the eighteenth century, and teaching me how to read Locke’s Essay through a linguist’s eyes. Next time he asks me to sweep his roof, I’ll still demand a push broom and point out where it started to burn the first time we fired his kiln. To Andrew Zawacki, for first instructing me on Olson. Je t’en dois une. To Cody Marrs, for quick and precise advice over coffee, and being willing to advise this project at the last minute. To Jim Maynard, for his exceedingly intelligent assistance with George Butterick’s papers at the University of Buffalo Poetry Collection, and for not saying much when I hung up smelly bike clothes on the reading room coat rack. To Melissa Watterworth Batt who helped coax so many creative paths from the Olson Collection at Storrs. She is a natural inheritor of George Butterick’s mind. To Nancy Schiller, Elizabeth White, Kristin Nielsen, Heather Smedberg, and the staffs from UCSD’s Mandeville Special Collections, UConn’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, Princeton’s Rare Books Archive, and University of Buffalo’s Poetry Collection, librarians who helped me research specific pieces of this project, in different capacities. vi To Mike Plescia for helping with many of the swirling ideas in this project, and for working them out over the phone. And without these academic bodies from the University of Georgia, this project would have been impossible: University of Georgia Graduate School Summer Fellowship (2012), a Willson Center travel grant (2013), University of Georgia Graduate School Dean’s Award (2013), and an English Department Travel Award (2013). I have deep gratitude for all of this research support. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................v LIST OF TABLES ...........................................................................................................................x LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... xi CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Plural Worlds ...........................................................................................1 The Mind’s Graphical Interface ...............................................................................6 Some discussion of the Imagination’s language maps ............................................9 Technological afterlife ...........................................................................................13 Notes ......................................................................................................................21 2 Anne Bradstreet’s Spherical Worlds ............................................................................27 Critical Reflections ................................................................................................29 Collecting the Self..................................................................................................37 Contemplations ......................................................................................................51 Symbolic nature .....................................................................................................57 Notes ......................................................................................................................59 3 The Weird Papers of Jonathan Edwards ......................................................................63 Heterocosmic debris...............................................................................................65 Spider’s Mind.........................................................................................................68 Communication circuit...........................................................................................73 viii Emblematic imaginations.......................................................................................79 Jonathan Edwards’ empty room.............................................................................84 Edwards’ geometric shadows ................................................................................92 Appendix of Images ...............................................................................................94 Notes ....................................................................................................................100 4 The Inverted Archaeologies of George F. Butterick ..................................................104 Database and domain ...........................................................................................106 Articulation ..........................................................................................................112 Error .....................................................................................................................116 Ordinary/Archaic Time ........................................................................................122 Inverted Archaeology...........................................................................................128 A taste for stone ...................................................................................................129 Mayan Glyph .......................................................................................................137 Morphology and change ......................................................................................140 Postmodern immanence .......................................................................................146 The meditative poem and the volatile image .......................................................150 Olson writes to Martz...........................................................................................153 Close ....................................................................................................................158
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