Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English Spring 4-30-2018 The Sonnet in Twentieth-Century America Zachary Rearick Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Recommended Citation Rearick, Zachary, "The Sonnet in Twentieth-Century America." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2018. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/195 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SONNET IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA by ZACK REARICK Under the Direction of Mark Noble, PhD ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the use of the sonnet in twentieth-century poetry. In it, I dispel the notion that the rise of Modernism resulted in the disuse of poetic forms such as the sonnet during the period. I also analyze sonnets by two specific schools, the Harlem Renaissance and the Confessionals, to demonstrate the importance of the form throughout the century. The project pursues the question of how poets in the twentieth century continued the formal tradition. I conclude that twentieth-century sonneteers rejected Modernism’s call for free verse, marking their allegiance to tradition at a time when it was being heavily challenged. This paper thus contributes to the discussion of how formal poetry responded to the attacks on it by Modernists and what those responses mean for our understanding of the century’s contribution to the larger history of formal poetry. The assumption that Modernism represents the dominant literary aesthetic of the twentieth century has characterized the period as hostile to formal poetry, but the large number of formal poems written during the century does not support this notion. “The Sonnet in Twentieth-Century America” connects the modern poetics to a formal tradition that it has often been said to leave behind, thus rethinking the period’s contribution to the history of formal poetry. INDEX WORDS: Sonnet, Modernism, Formal Tradition, Harlem Renaissance, Confessionals THE SONNET IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA by ZACK REARICK A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2018 Copyright by Zachary Taylor Rearick 2018 THE SONNET IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA by ZACK REARICK Committee Chair: Mark Noble Committee: Stephen Dobranski Paul Schmidt Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2018 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................................... 1 2 CHAPTER ONE: MODERNISM VS. THE SONNET ........................................................ 10 2.1 Defining Modernism .................................................................................................... 12 2.2 The Battle for Sappho: H.D. vs. Sara Teasdale ......................................................... 24 2.3 H.D. and Form .............................................................................................................. 30 2.4 Teasdale and Form ....................................................................................................... 39 2.5 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 55 3 CHAPTER TWO: THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE SONNET ........................................ 57 3.1 Dating and Defining the Harlem Renaissance .......................................................... 62 3.2 The Harlem Renaissance as the Age of Expression .................................................. 65 3.3 Countee Cullen vs. Langston Hughes ........................................................................ 71 3.4 The Jazz and Blues Poems of Hughes ........................................................................ 76 3.5 The Sonnets of Cullen ................................................................................................. 80 3.6 The Sonnet and the Heterogeneity of the Harlem Renaissance .............................. 91 3.7 The Love Sonnets of Alice Dunbar-Nelson ............................................................. 111 4 CHAPTER THREE: THE CONFESSIONAL SONNET .................................................. 126 4.1 Anne Sexton and “Angels of the Love Affair” ......................................................... 139 4.2 Robert Lowell and The Dolphin ................................................................................ 154 4.3 John Berryman and Sonnets to Chris ....................................................................... 175 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………..193 WORKS CITED........................................................................................................................ 197 1 1 INTRODUCTION The twentieth century saw the continuation of a tradition that stretches back to the advent of Modern English: the sonnet tradition. As recent sonnet anthologies such as The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, The Oxford Book of the Sonnet, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet show, poets composed sonnets during this century with frequency, and the Library of America’s anthology American Sonnet: An Anthology proves the inclusion of American verse in this endeavor. As the following chapters of this project will demonstrate, twentieth-century American sonneteers participated in the sonnet tradition in complex ways and for a variety of purposes. The fact that sonnets were produced throughout the century is one manifestation of the way that poets of this period both participated in and extended the larger tradition of formal poetry in English. Reading twentieth-century sonnets with that tradition in mind will result in the creation of fruitful and robust scholarship that reflects these poems’ depth. Twentieth-century sonnets have not always received such critical attention. Although anthologies such as those above prove that poets produced sonnets during this time, a high volume of criticism concerning these sonnets does not exist. Herbert S. Donow’s exhaustive work The Sonnet in England and America: A Bibliography of Criticism, for instance, includes no secondary materials written after the turn of the twentieth-century. Donow explains that “the sonnet . has gradually ceased to attract critics as a special topic” and that the secondary literature that does treat the sonnet during this time period contributes at best “marginally” to the general discussion of the sonnet, adding that these works seem to merely “mention poems that happen to be sonnets” (xii). “We may,” he speculates, “be witnessing the assimilation of the sonnet” (xii). That critical gap reflects long-accepted narrative of the ascent of Modernism and its dispatching of formal poetry, which I will challenge in the first chapter of my project. Two 2 later schools of sonneteering, which will form the subject matter of the project’s other two chapters, embody the kind of subversive approach to English poetry’s most important form that occurred during the twentieth-century: the Harlem Renaissance and the Confessional poets. My first chapter examines the relationship between literary Modernism and poetic form. Chapter One begins by addressing two of the most important questions asked by modernist scholars: what is Modernism and when did it begin and end? After reviewing what critics have said on the subject, I outline the major aspect of Modernism relevant for my own project, its antipathy to form, which many have tabbed as one of the movement’s few consistently present features. I also set the chronological parameters for my own discussion of the movement, the first half of the twentieth century, with the first three decades as Modernism’s peak years. After that, I follow the work of Leonard Diepeveen in his book The Difficulties of Modernism, in which he identifies a binary of “difficult” vs. “simple” works in the twentieth century. This binary associates experimental modernist texts with “difficulty” and non-modernist texts, such as formal poetry, on the side of “simplicity.” Difficult Modernism, Diepeveen convincingly argues, prevailed over simplicity during the mid-century professionalization of literary studies. This resulted in what Pericles Lewis calls “the victory of free verse” (5) in which Modernism supplanted formal poetry, leaving writers after the 1930s predisposed to compose unrhymed, unmetered verse. Or so many critics have claimed. Lewis is not alone in arguing that the composition of formal poetry waned after this “victory,” and critics have tended to view the century through the lens of Modernism. This view has resulted, however, in the scholarly gap described above, as formal poetry continued to be written with frequency and volume that undermines statements like that of Lewis. Using the sonnet, arguably the form par excellence in English, as a specific 3 marker for the composition of formal poetry, I demonstrate that, in utilizing this form, a significant number of twentieth-century American poets participated in the formal tradition. The lack of scholarship concerning the century’s formal poetry has come not from