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Another City a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the College of Arts

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Another City a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the College of Arts Another City A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Steven M. Coughlin May 2013 © 2013 Steven M. Coughlin. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Another City by STEVEN M. COUGHLIN has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Mark Halliday Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT STEVENM. COUGHLIN, Ph.D., May 2013, English Another City Director of Dissertation: Mark Halliday The dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay titled “Stevens’ Ontology: Struggles of the Mind” and a book manuscript titled Another City. “Stevens’ Ontology: Struggles of the Mind” presents an examination of the ontological vision Wallace Stevens presents in his poem “Sunday Morning” and then considers problems this vision encounters in subsequent poems. Among the issues Stevens struggles with are the demands of his ego upon his imagination to elevate himself to the status of a deity, the pressures of personal grief and social unrest upon Stevens’ desire to remain a detached observer, and Stevens’ inability to produce a vision liberated from Christian rhetoric. Another City is a collection of poetry that explores family trauma and the role of the imagination as an alternative to grim reality. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Part One: Stevens’ Ontology: Struggles of the Mind ......................................................... 5 Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 26! Part Two: Another City ..................................................................................................... 27! Helen’s Barroom ............................................................................................................ 28 Bing Crosby Sings the Blues ......................................................................................... 29! Boy at Night ................................................................................................................... 31! Did Not Speak ................................................................................................................ 33 Another Life ................................................................................................................... 48! A Small Sign .................................................................................................................. 50! 1993................................................................................................................................ 51 The Small Routine ......................................................................................................... 52 What the Doctor Did Not Know .................................................................................... 54! Rockland, 1995 .............................................................................................................. 57! Doogie’s House .............................................................................................................. 59! Matlock .......................................................................................................................... 61! A Certain Kind of Light ................................................................................................. 62! Getting It Right .............................................................................................................. 63! Adam’s Thirst ................................................................................................................ 64! The El Comino ............................................................................................................... 65 The Invented City .......................................................................................................... 67! A Job in California ......................................................................................................... 68! Special Recognition ....................................................................................................... 70! The History of Longing ................................................................................................. 72 Winter Refrain ............................................................................................................... 78! Sacred Heart ................................................................................................................... 79! Another City ................................................................................................................... 81! 5 PART ONE: STEVENS’ ONTOLOGY: STRUGGLES OF THE MIND Among the many issues confronting Western civilization at the beginning of the twentieth century was the struggle to achieve spiritual health in an age of lost faith. With Christianity’s inability to adequately adapt to the complexities of Western Civilization in the modern age--from existential issues raised by Darwin’s theory of evolution to technological progress displacing people from community to the violent horrors unleashed by military advancement during World War I--many people, including several poets of this period, began to question, even rebel, against the idea of a Christian God as a saving spiritual figure and instead pursued alternate avenues for existential enlightenment and relief from spiritual angst. D.H. Lawrence, for instance, placed an emphasis on sexuality and the primitive subconscious to access his own secular sublime. William Carlos Williams attempted objective representation of the physical world for spiritual fulfillment; as “The Red Wheel Barrow” succinctly suggests, so much spiritual sustenance can be found by directly embracing the world around us. Both W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot sought mythology to provide spiritual salvation. Yeats, in provisionally embracing mythological systems, experienced multiple transcendent visions. Eliot, discouraged by the spiritual degradation of Western civilization, explored various myths from ancient and pre-modern cultures in an attempt to find a saving myth. Although Eliot later embraced Christianity as his preferred mythological vehicle, a poem like “The Waste Land,” written in 1922, provides a strong example of Eliot’s struggle to find a saving myth: in the fifth section alone Eliot searches for the smallest “fragments” from Christianity, Buddha’s Fire 6 Sermon, the ancient myth of the Fisher King, and the Upanishad to shore “against my ruins” (431). These examples demonstrate the existential necessity many Modernists felt to fill the void of lost faith. Yet one Modernist in particular, Wallace Stevens--heavily influenced by the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and Keats--turned toward the creative powers of the imagination to fill his own spiritual needs, and it is my goal in this essay to explore Stevens’ existential journey in greater depth. This comes not only from an inclination to better understand Stevens’ work but also because in several of my own poems I make imaginative attempts to rectify personal grief and trauma. Although not as existential in nature, these poems, like Stevens’, reflect a desire to use the imagination to transcend the limitations of actual experience. Therefore, I now aim to provide an analysis of one of Stevens’ early poems, “Sunday Morning,” to establish the ontological vision Stevens pursues--albeit, with various amendments and changes in mood--for the rest of his writing life. After establishing the basic concepts of Stevens’ ontology I will consider some of the major issues he encounters: first, problems that occur from the demands of Stevens’ ego upon his imagination to elevate himself to the status of a deity; second, the pressures of personal grief and social unrest upon Stevens’ desire to remain a detached observer; and finally, Stevens’ inability to produce a vision liberated from Christian rhetoric. It is not my intent to argue against the quality or stature of Stevens’ poetry but to demonstrate the overwhelming complexities of his poetic task and the difficulties Modernists like Stevens encountered in trying to achieve spiritual health in an age of lost faith. 7 “Sunday Morning” is a poem in eight stanzas that argues for the imagination as a preferable alternative to the Christian concept of God. The poem begins with a woman who, instead of attending church on a Sunday morning--perhaps Easter--sits outside to enjoy the sensual pleasures of “late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” (1-2). Near her is a “cockatoo” busy in its own “green freedom” (3)--note the word “green,” which for Stevens, along with other bright colors, often suggests the dynamism of the active imagination. In this leisurely state, the woman begins to daydream, but soon her thoughts are confronted by “the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe” (6-7), Jesus’ death. For this woman such reflections are unwelcome. Indeed, unlike the cockatoo in its “green freedom,” this woman remains bound to the “procession of the dead” (10) as her daydream carries her “dreaming feet/ Over the seas” (9) not to a place of existential liberation but to “silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre” (14-15). However, we should observe this
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