Lyric Vistas: Genre and the American Long Poem from Whitman to Neruda (1855-1950)
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
LYRIC VISTAS: GENRE AND THE AMERICAN LONG POEM FROM WHITMAN TO NERUDA (1855-1950) _______________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By Erin C. Singer August 2017 ii LYRIC VISTAS: GENRE AND THE AMERICAN LONG POEM FROM WHITMAN TO NERUDA (1855-1950) _________________________ Erin C. Singer APPROVED: _________________________ David Mikics, Ph.D. Committee Chair _________________________ Sally Connolly, Ph.D. _________________________ Sarah Ehlers, Ph.D. _________________________ Michael Snediker, Ph.D. _________________________ Alessandro Carrera, Ph.D. Dept. of Italian Studies University of Houston _________________________ Antonio D. Tillis, Ph.D. Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Department of Hispanic Studies LYRIC VISTAS: GENRE AND THE AMERICAN LONG POEM FROM WHITMAN TO NERUDA (1855-1950) _______________ An Abstract of A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By Erin C. Singer August 2017 iv Abstract The purpose of this study is to take a wide-open view of hemispheric American poetry. World literature and genre studies constitute the framework for analyzing three book-length poems that hybridize epic and lyric modes of poetry. Beginning in 1855 with Walt Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass, continuing through Hart Crane’s 1930 The Bridge, and culminating with Pablo Neruda’s 1950 Canto general, this dissertation dives into the mystery of how this hundred-year hemispheric collection of works composes a genealogy of American poetry and poetics. I also argue for poetry’s own critical and theoretical interventions, tracing idealist and materialist strains of thought in each of these epic projects. The method by which I perform my formal and thematic analyses is close reading. The poetic strategies discovered yielded a theoretical framework I call vista, a term that recasts space as scale, and emphasizes multiple points of view. Vista is a shifting of perspective, reliant on the subjectivity of the lyric mode but shading toward the epic. It implies enormous breadth and suggests futurity. Whitman’s vista encompasses certain things, Crane’s another, and Neruda’s still another. Ultimately, I conclude that the epic poem written in a lyric mode elides distances between literature and theory, between ideology and art, and between reality and the possibilities of the imagination. v Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my committee chair, David Mikics. Thank you for believing in this project from its earliest stages, and for the hours of careful reading and honest critique of my writing. Thank you also for tirelessly supporting me on the job market. It has been a real pleasure working with you. I also want to thank my committee members for their time and advice. Sally Connolly, Michael Snediker, Sarah Ehlers, and Alessandro Carrera: I feel lucky to have had the chance to work with all of you. Special thanks are owed to Sally for going above and beyond as a reader, for all her career advice, and for teaching that excellent course on the modern epic. Thank you to my colleagues in the UH English Department and the Writing Center over the past five years: Mark Sursavage, Paul Butler, Travis Webster, Rebecca Hallman, Liz Blomstedt, Maurice Wilson, and Lesli Vollrath. I owe everything I learned about teaching composition to Mary Gray. Thank you to Zack Turpin and Markie McBrayer for being the best friends ever. Thanks also to my colleagues outside UH for their job market and dissertation support, especially Jahan Ramazani, Anna Ziajka Stanton, RJ Boutelle, and Marvin Campbell. Thank you to my Houston friends for your unceasing encouragement: Susan Beall Kittey, Kristin Foster, Callie Kwartler, the Seven Deadlies, and my soccer team. I want to thank my family for their love and support: Joe Cooper, Bebe and Richard Hansen, Leigh Cooper; Keith and Soledad Singer, Jaylene Singer; Mary Wright and Jacquie Cooper. Finally, I dedicate this project to Thomas Singer, the world’s greatest husband. vi Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. vi Chapter 1: Introduction: Lyric Vistas .................................................................................. 1 Context and Vista ...................................................................................................................... 1 Selection Principles for Poems ................................................................................................. 4 Literature Review and Key Terms ............................................................................................ 5 How this Dissertation is Organized .......................................................................................... 9 Critical Intervention in the Field ............................................................................................. 10 Chapter 2: “All doctrines, all politics and civilization exurge from you”: A Private Politics in Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass ............................................................................. 12 Introduction: Privileging the Individual .................................................................................. 12 “Song of Myself” .................................................................................................................... 19 “A Song for Occupations” ...................................................................................................... 33 “The Sleepers” ........................................................................................................................ 42 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 50 Chapter 3: “I begin to feel myself directly connected with Whitman”: Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) .................................................................................................................. 53 Introduction: Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, and a Poetics of Vista .......................................... 53 Structure of The Bridge ........................................................................................................... 57 Book I, “Ave Maria” ............................................................................................................... 67 Book VIII, “Atlantis” .............................................................................................................. 84 Book IV, “Cape Hatteras” ....................................................................................................... 96 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 100 Chapter 3 Notes ..................................................................................................................... 102 Chapter 4: “We listen unceasingly to the call to fill this mighty void with beings of flesh and blood”: Pablo Neruda’s Canto general (1950) ......................................................... 104 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 104 Structure of Canto general .................................................................................................... 110 Embodiment and Blood ........................................................................................................ 119 Naming and the Nerudian Catalogue .................................................................................... 141 Towards a Hemispheric Vista ............................................................................................... 152 Chapter 5: Conclusion ................................................................................................... 155 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 162 1 Chapter 1: Introduction: Lyric Vistas Context and Vista At some point in the twenty-year time period between the 1840s and the 1860s, Whitman writes on a scrap of paper, “What may be said, and opens long long vistas, in connection, about Poetry fit for the New World?” (see below). Figure 1: Whitman Manuscript, courtesy the Walt Whitman Archive Vista, a term derived from the Latin vidēre (to see), comes up with great frequency in Whitman’s work: in the 1855 Preface, and in every edition of Leaves of Grass afterwards. In the 1855 Leaves, the word vista appears once; by the 1891-1892 edition, the term shows up fourteen times. Yet what has stuck with me are the “opens long long vistas” and, as Whitman writes in the Preface, “Here the theme is creative and has vista” (619). American poetry is uniquely positioned, in Whitman’s eyes, for a large-scale way of looking at the world that he calls vista. What first caught my attention about vista