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Copyright by Elizabeth Bradford Frye 2015 Copyright by Elizabeth Bradford Frye 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Elizabeth Bradford Frye Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: In Different Voices: Form, Identity, and the Twentieth-Century American Persona Poem Committee: Brian Bremen, Supervisor Chad Bennett Martin Kevorkian Wayne Lesser Lesley Wheeler In Different Voices: Form, Identity, and the Twentieth-Century American Persona Poem by Elizabeth Bradford Frye, M.A., B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2015 Acknowledgements I am indebted to my dissertation committee chair Brian Bremen for his support and guidance at each stage of this project’s development. The rest of my committee— Chad Bennett, Martin Kevorkian, Wayne Lesser, and Lesley Wheeler—also deserves great thanks for their boundless enthusiasm, careful readings, and invaluable guidance. I owe a great debt to several other faculty members who dramatically altered my understanding of poetry and what it can do in this world. Meta DuEwa Jones, Elizabeth Cullingford, Tom Cable, Dean Young, Frank Whigham, and Susannah Hollister played no small part in this project’s genesis and growth. Additionally, I appreciate the help of my graduate student colleagues who either through written responses or late-night conversations shaped this dissertation at every turn. Ashley Miller, Brad King, Sara Saylor, and Julia Delacroix should receive special recognition. I am thankful for the financial support of the University of Texas at Austin and for the opportunity to teach at this fine institution. The hours spent discussing poetry with my students has been one of the great pleasures of my life, and my own work improved through their astute observations and profound contributions. My parents Linda and Bryant—both great readers and great teachers—supported my education from the beginning to the very end. They kept a book in my hand, food in my mouth, and a dog at my foot. I am incredibly fortunate to have their love and support. iv Finally, I must express deep gratitude for my dear and loving husband Coleman. He has been truly patient with my many personae that emerged during these last years— his affection and attention know no bounds. I am so blessed to share this life with him. This dissertation is dedicated to Orson and to the memory of Arthur. v In Different Voices: Form, Identity, and the Twentieth-Century American Persona Poem Elizabeth Bradford Frye, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: Brian Bremen In arguing for the persona poem as a viable tradition in American literature, Elizabeth Frye reconstructs a lineage of dramatic poetry that spans the entire twentieth century. Through comparative studies of canonical poets predominately working in the aftermath of high modernism, she examines several significant performances and contends that the genre persists as a site of necessary and complicated cross- identifications. Chapter One elucidates the profound connection between Langston Hughes’s and Gwendolyn Brooks’s use of the persona poem and the Great Migration. Frye understands the blues-inflected utterances of Hughes’s collection Fine Clothes to the Jew as deeply invested in formal itinerancy and geographic indeterminacy. Similarly, she suggests that Brooks’s dramatic projections of American soldiers in the aftermath of World War II betray the poets’ dual obsessions with large-scale migration and polyvocality. Chapter Two continues to treat the persona poem as a socially invested phenomenon. Frye reads the gendered vulnerability in scenes of nascent national development in John Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” and Robert Hayden’s vi “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley” as a response to the horrors of World War II and the transatlantic slave trade. Chapter Three scrutinizes the “confessional” paradigm by revisiting the other voices and other selves that recurrently interrupt Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. By insisting on the importance of dramatic poetry in these collections, Frye further complicates the frequently invoked conflict between impersonality and personality. Finally, a coda recognizes the work of Natasha Trethewey and Elizabeth Alexander as indicative of the contemporary gravitation toward the persona poem. She positions Trethewey and Alexander as the heirs to several poets whose poems are discussed in this study. In detecting a sense of bereavement in these poets’ willfully incomplete projects of recovery, Frye proposes that the persona poem is not only a powerful tool of historical engagement, but a means of critically examining the limits of both literary community and communion with the past. vii Table of Contents List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………...vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: Bound Elsewhere: The Mobilized Personae of Langston Hughes’s and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Early Poems ……………………………………………………………………38 Chapter Two: “Crossing back but not back”: The Vulnerable Personae of John Berryman and Robert Hayden………………………………………………………………………………….105 Chapter Three: Dramatic Breakthroughs: Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel……...167 Coda: Going Far, Further: Troubling the Diverse Masks of Contemporary African American Poets…………………………………………………………………………………….234 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………270 viii List of Figures Figure 1: Storyville Portrait, ca. 1912....………………………………………………………….240 Figure 2: Untitled, ca. 1912……………………………………………………………………….242 ix Introduction For the “Love of Dramatic Contrasts”: A Prelude In June of 1896, the eminent man-of-letters William Dean Howells, writing in Harper’s weekly magazine, famously introduced American readers to a new poet he had just discovered, the then-little-known Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar had just self- published his second book of poems, Majors and Minors, and Howells happened upon the collection unexpectedly: “There has come to me from the hand of a friend, very unofficially, a little book of verse, dateless, placeless, without a publisher […].” Confessing that he is always moved by the “forlornness” of such volumes and hoping that his “love of dramatic contrasts” does not cloud his critical approach, Howells tells his large swath of readers that he “felt a heightened pathos in the appeal from the fact that the face which confronted me when I opened the volume was the face of a young negro, with the race traits strangely accented: the black skin, the wooly hair, the thick, outrolling lips, and the mild, soft eyes of the pure African type.” What Dunbar “calls his little book” is unknown; here Howells gives it a familiar face. In this notorious launch of Dunbar’s career, an American reading public is instructed to read Dunbar not as Dunbar’s poems but in this visual representation of Dunbar’s physical, racialized phenotype. Howells’s anecdote foregrounds the poet’s blackness as a quality that masks his talent. As Howells notes, “a generation ago [the poet] would have been worth, apart from his literary gift, twelve or fifteen hundred dollars, under the hammer” of slavery (630). 1 Gradually, Howells’s review argues that Dunbar’s greatness lies in his authenticity. The key to this authenticity is, of course, Dunbar’s textual reproduction of “the pure African type” in dialect form. And, indeed, the blackness of Dunbar’s physical image works as evidence to corroborate the authority of the poems Howells so admires. Although Majors and Minors also includes non-dialect, classically styled lyrics, Howells equates Dunbar’s true self with the linguistic reproductions of Southern black speech offered in what he deems to be the “Minors” section.1 Arguing that “Mr. Dunbar writes literary English when he is least himself” [emphasis mine], Howells contradicts one definition of the lyric as the poem of personal expression. He suggests that Dunbar’s lyric pieces are more ostensibly performative than those written in dialect. Equating the dialect poems with the kind of authenticity often given to lyric performance, Howells claims that the former cements Dunbar’s position as “the first man of color to study his race objectively, to analyze it to himself, and then to represent it in art as he felt it and found it to be; to represent it humorously, yet tenderly, and above all so faithfully that we know the portrait to be undeniably like.” Howells’s failure as a reader was not that he was unable to recognize Dunbar’s talent—the exact opposite in fact—but that he was unable to avoid collapsing lyric and dramatic forms. Because Howells contends that to represent one’s race is to represent one’s true self, he deliberately disguises the gap between Dunbar’s dramatized characters and the poet. Those pieces that reflect what mainstream 1 Dunbar divides the book into two sections. The initial section opens with a heading that matches the title: “Majors and Minors.” The second is titled “Humor and Dialect.” Howells, in rushing to read the dialect poems as a low, popular and thus “minor” form, willingly misreads Dunbar’s principles of organization. The pronouncement obscures Dunbar’s writerly direction to read the lyric verses bearing the book’s title as being more significant. Further absent in this assessment are the musical connotations of “Majors and Minors.” 2 society believes about its black citizens are—paradoxically—Dunbar’s poems of personal expression.
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