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JESSE STUART: 'S CHRONICLER-POET

Jimmie Ray LeMaster

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

June 1970

Approved by Doctoral Committee I 0»

Copyright (c)

by

JIMMIE RAY LEMASTER

1970 ABSTRACT

Although Jesse Stuart has been writing for forty years, there has been relatively little scholarship devoted to his work- He has published five volumes of poetry and literally hundreds of single poems in journals and magazines of various kinds. This study was an attempt to get Stuart's poetry be­ fore the reader and to say something meaningful about it.

This dissertation attempted to establish some critical precedents for further study of Stuart's poetry. Three volumes of his poems were used extensively to demonstrate that there is a consistency in his work which is related to the develop­ ment of his stories, novels, and biographical writings.

Stuart's literary theory rests on the Romantic assump­ tion that poetry exists somewhere in nature, beyond words or language, and that it comes to the individual intuitively. He sees the poet as a highly sensitive medium through which the poetic experience is translated for the reader. The formula by which he claims to write is that there must be a particular incident in conjunction with a particular mood. Given this combination, the poem merely comes or happens.

In his poetry Stuart has attempted to define man's place in the universe. His ontological view, worked out in great detail, shows remarkable influence by Whitman and the Transcendentalists. He ultimately came to accept Whitman's ideas about influx and efflux, ideas in which there is no waste or death but rather only change.

Stuart's concept of the image has always been ambiguous. He sees the image as something wild in nature, something that cannot be captured and tamed. In practice, however, he has once again followed Whitman. He names objects, and he com­ piles lists of the names, creating a panoramic effect. Such a practice led him to develop a pictorial method much like that of Whitman. The things named are limited to Stuart's milieu, for he believes that poetry comes from a unique interreliance of man, nature, and thing. The result is that he paints pictures of his eastern Kentucky milieu and hangs them in a gallery to be viewed by his readers.

In spite of his insistence that poetry "just comes," Stuart has been more than a little concerned with craftsmanship. He early experimented with both traditional versification and free-verse prosody. In his mature work he brought the results of his experiments together and imposed techniques of the free- verse prosodist over a traditional sonnet form. The result was a form peculiarly his own. In his most successful work, he

ii adopted the parallel as foremost prosodic principle.

This dissertation did not attempt to defend Stuart as a major American poet. He obviously is not one. It did in­ sist, nevertheless, that Stuart's poetry needs serious critical attention. Adverse criticism has not been the problem, but rather there remains a need for someone to look at the texts of the poems. There can be no criticism without that.

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For help in conducting this study, I first express my gratitude to Jesse Stuart himself. He and Mrs. Stuart have opened their home to my wife and me, and have engaged with us in long discussions about Mr. Stuart's work and the work of others. Because of his personal acquaintances with such people as Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Thomas Wolfe, and

Edgar Lee Masters, Mr. Stuart has been an invaluable source of information about these and other writers from the Twenties to the present. Over the years Mr. Stuart has answered my endless questions. Correspondence has been generous and frequent. The debt can only be acknowledged; it can