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"The Fact of God": Form and Belief in British Modernist Poetry

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University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 9-1-2015 "The aF ct of God": Form and Belief in British Modernist Poetry Annarose Fitzgerald Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Fitzgerald, Annarose. ""The aF ct of God": Form and Belief in British Modernist Poetry." (2015). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ engl_etds/37 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Annarose Fitzgerald Candidate English Language and Literature Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Matthew Hofer, Chairperson Gary Harrison Aeron Hunt David Chinitz ii "THE FACT OF GOD": FORM AND BELIEF IN BRITISH MODERNIST POETRY by ANNAROSE FITZGERALD B.A., English, Barnard College, 2004 M.A., English, University of Connecticut, 2006 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2015 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I am indebted to my advisor, Matthew Hofer, for his care and attention to this project. His guidance has taken my writing and critical thinking skills to new heights, and shaped my transition from graduate student to professional scholar. I thank my committee members, Gary Harrison, Aeron Hunt, and David Chinitz, whose challenging questions, research recommendations, and phrasing suggestions helped me to contextualize the contributions of my work within modernist studies and recent literary scholarship at large. For her feedback on some of my earliest formations of these chapters, I would also like to thank Stephanie Spong, as well as Genesea Carter for her encouragement through the arduous stages of completing first drafts. My parents, Daria and Robert Fitzgerald, instilled in me a love for literature and a drive for intellectual pursuits that motivated me throughout my graduate career. My sisters, Maria and Daria Fitzgerald, kept me in good spirits when health issues made writing even more of a challenging feat. Last, but certainly not least, I am deeply indebted to my husband, Christopher Steinke, whose constant and boundless supply of love and patience continues to inspire my life and work. iv “THE FACT OF GOD”: FORM AND BELIEF IN BRITISH MODERNIST POETRY by Annarose Fitzgerald B.A., English, Barnard College M.A., English, University of Connecticut Ph.D., English, University of New Mexico ABSTRACT My dissertation analyzes the relationship between the concept of metaphysical belief and the poetic innovations enlisted to articulate this belief in the works of British modernist poets W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot, Basil Bunting, Philip Larkin, and Thom Gunn. Moving from Celtic mythos to Buddhist philosophy, Anglo-Catholic prayer to ancient Greek burial rites, I argue that spirituality and poetic experimentation were reciprocal influences: modernist experimentations in poetic form had a direct impact on how poets represented and articulated metaphysical beliefs and practices, and these metaphysical concepts themselves significantly affected these poets’ development of their craft, prompting consideration of what makes poetry itself believable for modern readers. v While several studies analyze the religious and spiritual interests of modernist writers, demonstrating that secularization does not accurately categorize English literature of the early twentieth century, my project moves beyond proving that modernists were believers and instead employs belief as an active critical term for literary analysis. Each chapter examines how a particular British modernist poet employs belief as a condition that allows poetic form and metaphysical concepts to intersect in productive ways. Rather than merely dismissing or advocating for belief in certain metaphysical concepts, these poets scrutinize, re-conceptualize, and re-imagine poetic forms, spiritual ideologies, and religious structures so as to render belief in the metaphysical, and in poetry as a conduit for the metaphysical, to become relevant and necessary possibilities in the twentieth century. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Modernism, Poetic Form, and the Metaphysical .................................1 1. From the “Proud Rose” to the “Empty Sea-Shell”: Yeats’s Modernizing of the Symbol ..........................................................................37 2. “Parsimonious Presentations”: Mina Loy and the Necessity of the Material ..............................................................98 3. “At Most but Painting, Yet Most Like the Life”: Mimesis and Homer in Ezra Pound’s Cantos ............................................................157 4. “What You Thought You Came For”: The Poetics of Distraction in Eliot’s Christian Modernist Poetry .............................210 5. “Laying the Tune on the Air”: The Transient Endurance of Sound in the Poetry of Basil Bunting ...........................266 Conclusion: “(I Know It and Do Not Know It)”: The Potency of Knowledge in the Poetry of Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn ............325 References ..................................................................................................................355 1 Introduction: Modernism, Poetic Form, and the Metaphysical “(You shall not look upon the fact of God and live!)”1 Whether the substitution of “fact” for “face” represents a deliberate choice on the part of poet Mina Loy or a typographical error from her original manuscript, it nevertheless illuminates the compelling presence of the metaphysical themes in her work and that of other British modernist poets at the start of the twentieth century. Although they challenged and doubted the validity of particular religious frameworks to bring about apprehension of the divine, these poets never ceased to work under the assumption of the metaphysical as “fact” toward which their poems might aim readers. In spite of what J. Hillis Miller describes as the “gradual withdrawal of God from the world” and into remote abstraction that developed steadily through the early modern period, not even the manmade devastation of the Great War deterred pursuits to make belief a direct and meaningful presence in modernity.2 Moreover, the desire for the population to look upon God as “fact” extended beyond contemporary religious ideologies. Political and economic lessons of historical eras and civilizations long gone, understandings of the human condition derived from ancient mythologies, and archaic forms of languages and dialects no longer in use all became central in the modernist project to see what language could do to adjust modern perceptions and values. Whether seeking a return to specific ritualistic practices and doctrines that had been cast off as irrelevant in the new century or a more general adoption of certain ideologies they deemed vital to the economic, political, or social health of British culture, British modernist 1 Mina Loy, Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1982), 175. 2 J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963; Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 1. 2 poets seriously considered how poetry might restore belief in certain concepts as “fact”—or at least establish the aesthetic conditions under which belief would become possible. My dissertation argues that British modernist poetry, in particular, provided a means to make belief, if not affirmable by “fact,” at least a relevant possibility for a world that could never again sustain ignorance of the actual, scientifically viable causes of floods and lightning bolts. In it, I analyze the relationship between the concept of belief and the poetic innovations enlisted to articulate this belief in the poems and poetic statements of modernists W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, T. S. Eliot, and Basil Bunting. Moving from Celtic mythology to Buddhist philosophy, Anglo-Catholic prayer to ancient Greek burial rites, I argue that metaphysical issues and poetic experimentation were reciprocal influences: modernist experimentations in poetic form had a direct impact on how poets represented and articulated metaphysical beliefs and practices, and, in turn, these concepts themselves significantly affected these poets’ development of their craft. In this explicit exchange between poetic form and metaphysical concepts, modernist poets not only prompted consideration of what makes poetry itself “believable” for readers, but also introduced “believability” as an important category for the history and criticism of poetry. These poets did not engage certain ideologies merely to advocate for or dismantle them. Rather, their poetry’s engagement with metaphysical concepts and discourses facilitated these poets’ critical investigations of the types of thought and affect that could enable linguistic and aesthetic representation to carry precision, meaning, and, ultimately, truth. From Yeats’s proffering of the conventional lyric form to render the extraordinary and ethereal in modernity, to Bunting’s lauding of a
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