DOCSLIB.ORG

The Dramatic Monologue, Polyvocality, and Agency in Robert Browning, Sarah Piatt, and T

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Dramatic Monologue, Polyvocality, and Agency in Robert Browning, Sarah Piatt, and T MARSH, CHERYL R., Ph.D. From the Madhouse to the Unreal City: The Dramatic Monologue, Polyvocality, and Agency in Robert Browning, Sarah Piatt, and T. S. Eliot. (2014). Directed by Dr. Karen Kilcup and Dr. Anthony Cuda. 163pp. This project examines the dramatic monologue and its subsequent variations in order to address philosophical questions about agency that implicitly derive from the genre. The intentional displacement of the Romantic lyric “I” into other personas questions the existence of an essential “speaking self.” Without a unified speaking self, agency becomes indeterminate. Where does the “self” begin and where does it end? What about the “self” is essentially esoteric and, alternatively, how does the “self” intervene in material reality? The poetic genre of the dramatic monologue and its subsequent polyvocal variations explore this set of questions inherently. Early Victorian dramatic monologues dramatized the poem through personas mediated by masks, which necessarily comprise at least two influences within the speaking persona. Critics such as Robert Langbaum, Herbert Tucker, Isobel Armstrong, and Glynnis Byron contend that 1830s and 1840s dramatic monologues must be read as a reaction against the intensely confessional Romantic lyrics of the early nineteenth century, where the poet and persona are generally viewed as unified. Because the dramatic monologues’ content creates a definitive break between the poet and the persona, the form operates in the mode of what Isobel Armstrong calls the “double poem.” Hence, a consideration of irony is paramount when interpreting this genre. Because there are always at least two (and often more) guiding influences within the construction of the dramatic monologue, this form inherently questions the idea of an essential “self.” Though we can argue that all poetic personas are constructed, the dramatic monologue calls attention to that construction through its experimentation with multiple “speaking” influences within the unified persona. Consequently, I consider polyvocal poems, with multiple and distinct speakers, to be the next variation or evolution of the dramatic monologue genre. With every addition of a new “voice” within a poem, the idea of an essential “self” becomes more tenuous. Tangential to this discussion of an evolving definition of selfhood through aesthetic methods, my project also explores the ramifications of personal agency within the divided self. I focus this study on three key poets: Robert Browning, Sarah Piatt, and T. S. Eliot. In the chapter on Browning, I demonstrate that his dramatic monologues explore a divided sense of self through an imagined communion with the divine. For these dual characters, Browning consistently questions their boundaries of personal agency and, ultimately, culpability for their actions. The chapter on Sarah Piatt examines her call-and-response lyrics, focusing on how a divided self lacks the agency to grieve within American consolation culture. The chapter on T. S. Eliot pairs his complex polyvocal aesthetic with some thematic figures in his early poetry; this comparison suggests that such a fractured sense of self renders a person impotent, lacking agency. For these three poets, the form and content of the dramatic monologue and its subsequent variations offer means to explore the connections between a divided sense of self and personal agency. FROM THE MADHOUSE TO THE UNREAL CITY: THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE, POLYVOCALITY, AND AGENCY IN ROBERT BROWNING, SARAH PIATT, AND T. S. ELIOT by Cheryl R. Marsh A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2014 Approved by __________________________________ Committee Co-Chair __________________________________ Committee Co-Chair To my parents: Rick, Renee, Machelle, and Jim, for your unwavering love and support. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Co-Chair__________________________________ Committee Co-Chair__________________________________ Committee Member__________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee __________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of many people in my life, both near and far. Professionally, I would like to thank my directors, Dr. Karen Kilcup and Dr. Anthony Cuda, for their insight and encouragement throughout this long process. I would also like to thank my committee member, Dr. Mary Ellis Gibson, especially for traveling so far to be present at my defense. Personally, I would like to thank my family for their continued support throughout my graduate studies. My successes are also your successes. And, for always being there, I would like to thank my people: Lesli, Rose, Sally, Lauren, Kt, Zach, Craig, Alan, Cindy F., Cindy W., Jacob, Niki, David, Aaron, Matt, and Jenny. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: DIVDED SELF AND AGENCY .........................................1 II. “THOU MADEST ME A MADMAN”: AGENCY, CULPABILITY, AND THE DIVIDED SELF IN ROBERT BROWNING..................................................................................19 III. “WE CHANGE ITS NAME TO HEAVEN. THAT MAKES IT TRUE”: THE AGENCY TO GRIEVE IN SARAH PIATT’S POLYVOCAL LYRICS ..................................................54 IV. “NEITHER LIVING NOR DEAD”: POLYVOCALITY, AGENCY, AND IMPOTENCE IN T. S. ELIOT’S EARLY POETRY ..........................................................................................90 V. CONCLUSION: “A COUNTRYMAN OF ALL THE BONES IN THE WORLD” ..........................................................................140 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................148 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: DIVIDED SELF AND AGENCY I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from the sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. --T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (lines 218-223) In the famous passage above from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Tiresias, arguably one of most unified personas of the entire poem, claims a divided identity that crosses gender, temporal, spatial, and chronological boundaries. Vividly describing events that, ostensibly, he should not be able to see, Tiresias exemplifies a fragmented sense of “self.” Though he can observe these circumstances, and though he claims to feel the typist’s experiences, he seems unable to intervene within the scene. After the “unreproved, if undesired” union between the typist and “the young man carbuncular,” Tiresias states: “And I Tiresias have foresuffered all / Enacted on this same divan or bed; / I who have sat by Thebes below the wall / And walked among the lowest of the dead” (lines 243-46). From this subjective stance, Tiresias claims allegiance with the typist and the young man on a physical level, while maintaining the ability to foretell the future and travel between the living and the dead. His sense of self encompasses many disparate contexts, and yet, he lacks the agency to participate. This persona characterizes a 1 particular paradigm that I trace in this project. His sense of self is diffuse, shared between and among many bodies, and his ability to interact in the world around him is limited. Like many of the impotent characters in The Waste Land, he seems to be “neither living nor dead,” though he retains the ability to narrate the events he sees and feels. He represents a speaking persona with a fractured identity that lacks any agency to affect the world around him. Personas such as Tiresias inspired me to begin examining with a closer eye the speaking narrators of poems, especially the personas who dramatize events through a first-person perspective. Like others before me, I noticed that the “I” in many post- Romantic poems represented an entirely separate identity than that of the poet, which signaled an important shift in poetic expression. This separation between the poet’s personal voice and the persona’s speaking voice seemed to offer an experimental space where poets could explore perspectives outside of their own while simultaneously critiquing those perspectives through ironic treatment. The aesthetic approach itself provided a structure for rendering a divided identity. I knew that early Victorian dramatic monologues were often studied for this very reason, but when I was first introduced to Sarah Piatt’s poetry, I began to see connections between her dialogue poems and earlier incarnations of the dramatic monologue. Her poems explicitly juxtaposed the “I” of the dramatic monologues with a different speaking ironic voice, conveyed through two separate personas in conversation. From my perspective, Piatt’s polyvocal poems made visible the divided identity inherent to the dramatic monologue. I therefore began to read Piatt’s polyvocal lyrics as a subsequent incarnation of the 2 dramatic monologue. Knowing that the early twentieth century would usher in a new model of a fractured identity through Eliot, Pound, and others, I hypothesized that Piatt’s polyvocal lyrics could
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Robert Browning: a Dramatic Monologue Marvel Moulavi Nafchi, Asghar; Sobhani Zadeh, Morteza; Mirzayee, Mitra
    www.ssoar.info Robert Browning: a dramatic monologue Marvel Moulavi Nafchi, Asghar; Sobhani Zadeh, Morteza; Mirzayee, Mitra Veröffentlichungsversion / Published Version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Moulavi Nafchi, A., Sobhani Zadeh, M., & Mirzayee, M. (2015). Robert Browning: a dramatic monologue Marvel. International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, 63, 225-232. https://doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ ILSHS.63.225 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY Lizenz (Namensnennung) zur This document is made available under a CC BY Licence Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden (Attribution). For more Information see: Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Online: 2015-11-30 ISSN: 2300-2697, Vol. 63, pp 225-232 doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.63.225 © 2015 SciPress Ltd., Switzerland Robert Browning: A Dramatic Monologue Marvel Asghar Moulavi Nafchi*, Mitra Mirzayee, Morteza Sobhani Zadeh Senior Lecturer, Hakim Sabzevari University, Iran, *E-mail address: [email protected]. MA Students of English Language and Literature, Semnan University, Iran. Keywords: Dramatic monologue, Emotion, Psychoanalytic view, Robert Browning, Victorian poetry. ABSTRACT. One of the most effective literary devices within different didactic and aesthetic forms is the dramatic monologue. The dramatic monologue distinguishes the speaker’s character from that of the poet’s. The double meaning that lies at the heart of the dramatic monologue, conveys the speaker’s version or variety of meaning and intentions. The Dramatic monologue has been practiced for a very long time, but it was Robert browning who invested it with a deeper level of meaning giving it frequency in an attempt to support preexisting aesthetic values in favor of a poem that valued form over content.
    [Show full text]
  • The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
    The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms CHRIS BALDICK OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD PAPERBACK REFERENCE The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Chris Baldick is Professor of English at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. He edited The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (1992), and is the author of In Frankenstein's Shadow (1987), Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present (1996), and other works of literary history. He has edited, with Rob Morrison, Tales of Terror from Blackwood's Magazine, and The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, and has written an introduction to Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (all available in the Oxford World's Classics series). The most authoritative and up-to-date reference books for both students and the general reader. Abbreviations Literary Terms Oxford ABC of Music Local and Family History Paperback Accounting London Place Names* Archaeology* Mathematics Reference Architecture Medical Art and Artists Medicines Art Terms* Modern Design* Astronomy Modern Quotations Better Wordpower Modern Slang Bible Music Biology Nursing Buddhism* Opera Business Paperback Encyclopedia Card Games Philosophy Chemistry Physics Christian Church Plant-Lore Classical Literature Plant Sciences Classical Mythology* Political Biography Colour Medical Political Quotations Computing Politics Dance* Popes Dates Proverbs Earth Sciences Psychology* Ecology Quotations Economics Sailing Terms Engineering* Saints English Etymology Science English Folklore* Scientists English Grammar Shakespeare English
    [Show full text]
  • My Last Duchess Porphyria's Lover Robert Browning 1812–1889
    The Influence of Romanticism My Last Duchess RL 1 Cite strong and thorough Porphyria’s Lover textual evidence to support inferences drawn from the Poetry by Robert Browning text. RL 5 Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts KEYWORD: HML12-944A of a text contribute to its overall VIDEO TRAILER structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact. RL 10 Read and comprehend literature, Meet the Author including poems. SL 1 Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions. Robert Browning 1812–1889 “A minute’s success,” remarked the poet character in an emotionally charged situation. Robert Browning, “pays for the failure of While critics attacked his early dramatic years.” Browning spoke from experience: poems, finding them difficult to understand, did you know? for years, critics either ignored or belittled Browning did not allow the reviews to keep his poetry. Then, when he was nearly 60, him from continuing to develop this form. Robert Browning . he became an object of near-worship. • became an ardent Secret Love In 1845, Browning met the admirer of Percy Bysshe Precocious Child An exceptionally bright poet Elizabeth Barrett and began a famous Shelley at age 12. child, Browning learned to read and write romance that has been memorialized in both • achieved fluency in by the time he was 5 and composed his film and literature. Against the wishes of Latin, Greek, Italian, and first, unpublished volume of poetry at Barrett’s overbearing father, the two poets French by age 14. 12. At the age of 21 he published his first married in secret in 1846 and eloped to • wrote the children’s book, Pauline (1833), to negative reviews.
    [Show full text]
  • Dramatic Monologue: Defining the Genre
    Abstract THROWN VOICES: A SERIES OF DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES, WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE GENRE by Matt Finch June 2010 Director: John Hoppenthaler Department of English This thesis examines the complex nature of the poetic genre of the dramatic monologue by providing multiple perspectives on the genre—namely, those of the literary critic and the creative writer. This thesis provides a selection of original dramatic monologues in various styles and featuring characters ranging from the prophet Jeremiah to a modern-day plastic surgeon, tied together by the theme of imaginatively filling in historical gaps and erasures with speakers in times of great political or cultural upheaval. Prefacing this collection of poems is a discussion of the genre of dramatic monologue, beginning with a general overview of the development and features of the genre, followed by a discussion of specific issues involved in writing this collection. ©Copyright 2010 Matt Finch A Thesis Presented To The Faculty of the Department of ENGLISH East Carolina University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by Matt Finch June 2010 THROWN VOICES: A SERIES OF DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES, WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE GENRE by Matt Finch APPROVED BY: DIRECTOR of THESIS: ________________________________________ John Hoppenthaler, MFA COMMITTEE MEMBER: ____________________________________________________ E. Thomson Shields, PhD COMMITTEE MEMBER: ____________________________________________________ Anne Mallory, PhD CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH: ________________________________________________
    [Show full text]
  • The Transformation of the Dramatic Monologue Across the Works Of
    Modifying the Mask: The Transformation of the Dramatic Monologue Across the Works of Robert Browning, Norman Dubie, and Frank Bidart Kristin Gulotta A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts University of Washington 2016 Committee: Andrew Feld Linda Bierds Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Creative Writing Gulotta 1 ©Copyright 2016 Kristin Gulotta Gulotta 2 University of Washington Abstract Modifying the Mask: the Transformation of the Dramatic Monologue Across the Works of Robert Browning, Norman Dubie, and Frank Bidart Kristin L Gulotta Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Director Andrew Feld Creative Writing A look at how the dramatic monologue as a poetic form has transformed since the 19th century by examining representative works from poets Robert Browning, Norman Dubie, and Frank Bidart. Gulotta 3 In the mid-twentieth century, the New Critics championed a novel way of examining and critiquing literature: instead of considering the artist’s life a necessary component for understanding and appreciating his or her writing, the New Critics believed in examining a work’s strengths as a “self-contained, self-referential object” (Abrams). Although the movement itself was fairly short-lived, to me there still seems merit in the ideas, especially when I consider how I create my own poetry. I am most often drawn to writing in voices that are not my own, and instead of highlighting myself, I prefer to write from the perspectives of others, in dramatic monologues. Consequently, my personal biography would not seem to give any insights into my work or to determine whether or not a reader should like or dislike it.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Browning: a Dramatic Monologue Marvel
    International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Online: 2015-11-30 ISSN: 2300-2697, Vol. 63, pp 225-232 doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.63.225 CC BY 4.0. Published by SciPress Ltd, Switzerland, 2015 Robert Browning: A Dramatic Monologue Marvel Asghar Moulavi Nafchi*, Mitra Mirzayee, Morteza Sobhani Zadeh Senior Lecturer, Hakim Sabzevari University, Iran, *E-mail address: [email protected]. MA Students of English Language and Literature, Semnan University, Iran. Keywords: Dramatic monologue, Emotion, Psychoanalytic view, Robert Browning, Victorian poetry. ABSTRACT. One of the most effective literary devices within different didactic and aesthetic forms is the dramatic monologue. The dramatic monologue distinguishes the speaker’s character from that of the poet’s. The double meaning that lies at the heart of the dramatic monologue, conveys the speaker’s version or variety of meaning and intentions. The Dramatic monologue has been practiced for a very long time, but it was Robert browning who invested it with a deeper level of meaning giving it frequency in an attempt to support preexisting aesthetic values in favor of a poem that valued form over content. Although such a dialogue is called dramatic, it is not a theatrical device, proper. The speaker of the poem delivers such comments on the slice of life at disposal that would leave us with a deep emotional experience. By listening to the words pouring out of the speaker’s mind, the reader/listener obtains a psychoanalytic view of the speaker. The current article aims to study Robert browning, the prominent Victorian poet, by putting on the pedestal his essential role in investing the dramatic monologue in English literature with an essential poetic significance and role by reviewing a number of his major poems.
    [Show full text]
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Secular Aesthetics
    1 ‘Life as the End of Life’: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Secular Aesthetics Sara Lyons Submitted for Ph.D. Examination 2 ABSTRACT This thesis elucidates the relationship between the emergence of literary aestheticism and ambiguities in the status and meaning of religious doubt in late Victorian Britain. Aestheticism has often been understood as a branch of a larger, epochal crisis of religious faith: a creed of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ and a cult of beauty are thought to have emerged to occupy the vacuum created by the departure of God, or at least by the attenuation of traditional forms of belief. However, the model of secularisation implicit in this account is now often challenged by historians, sociologists, and literary critics, and it fails to capture what was at stake in Swinburne and Pater’s efforts to reconceptualise aesthetic experience. I suggest affinities between their shared insistence that art be understood as an independent, disinterested realm, a creed beyond creeds, and secularisation understood as the emptying of religion from political and social spheres. Secondly, I analyse how Swinburne and Pater use the apparently neutral space created by their relegation of religion to imagine the secular in far more radical terms than conventional Victorian models of religious doubt allowed. Their varieties of aestheticism often posit secularism not as a disillusioning effect of modern rationality but as a primordial enchantment with the sensuous and earthly, prior to a ‘fall’ into religious transcendence. I explore their tendency to identify this ideal of the secular with aesthetic value, as well as the paradoxes produced by their efforts to efface the distinctions between the religious and the aesthetic.
    [Show full text]
  • 19 -Century Women Poets and the Dramatic Monologue
    “IMPOSSIBLE SPEECH”: 19TH-CENTURY WOMEN POETS AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE by Helen Luu A thesis submitted to the Department of English in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada June 2008 Copyright © Helen Luu, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-494-44330-9 Abstract This study seeks to redress the continued exclusion of women poets from the theorization of the dramatic monologue. I argue that an unacknowledged consensus on the definition of the dramatic monologue exists, in spite of the oft-proclaimed absence of one, and that it is the failure to recognize this consensus which has in part debarred women poets from the theorization of the form. In particular, the failure to acknowledge this consensus has led recent feminist critics attempting to “rethink” the dramatic monologue, such as Cynthia Scheinberg and Glennis Byron, to reinscribe the very model they are attempting to rewrite by admitting into their analysis only those poems which already conform to the existing model. In consequence, these critics inadvertently repeat the exclusion they are attempting to redress by reinscribing a model which is predicated—as both Scheinberg and Byron acknowledge—on the exclusion of women poets. In order to end this cycle of exclusion, my project begins from a different beginning, with Hemans instead of Browning, and traces her innovations and influence across the dramatic monologues of two key dramatic monologists of the 19th-century, Augusta Webster and Amy Levy. In the hands of all three women poets, the dramatic monologue develops into a form which calls into question not only the nature of the self, as is characteristic of Browning’s model, but more crucially, the possibility of the subject.
    [Show full text]
  • Exam List: Dramatic Monologue in English Brian Brodeur
    Exam List: Dramatic Monologue in English Brian Brodeur Primary: 1. William Shakespeare, selections from Richard III (1592), Merchant of Venice (1598), Henry V (1599), Hamlet (1599?), and Tempest (1611) 2. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1801) 3. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1833-42), “Saint Simeon Stylites” (1833), “Tithonus” (1833), “Tithon” (1833), and “Tiresias” (1833-5) 4. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) 5. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1865) and “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (?) 6. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (1869) and Robert Browning’s Poetry (Norton Critical) 7. Augusta Webster “The Castaway” (1870) 8. Edgar Lee Masters, selections from The Spoon River Anthology (1915) 9. Murial Rukeyser, U.S. 1 (1938) 10. Ezra Pound, Personae (1926) 11. Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) 12. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Riverman” (1965), “From Trollope’s Journal” (1965), and “Crusoe in England” (1976) 13. Randall Jarrell, selections from The Complete Poems (1969) and Poetry and the Age (1955) 14. Richard Howard, selections from Untitled Subjects (1969), Inner Voices: Selected Poems 1963-2003 (2004), and Without Saying (2008) 15. Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1969) 16. Frank Bidart, “Herbert White” (1973), “Golden State” (1973), “The Arc” (1977), “Ellen West” (1977), and “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky” (1983) 17. W. D. Snodgrass, The Fuehrer Bunker (1977, 1995) 1. Hayden Carruth, Asphalt Georgics (1983) 18. Charles Martin, Passages from Friday (1983) 19. Dana Gioia, “The Room Upstairs” (1986), “Counting the Children” (1991), “The Homecoming” (1991), “Juno Plots Her Revenge” (2001), “The Angel with the Broken Wing” (2012), and “Haunted” (2012) 20.
    [Show full text]
  • The Seafaring Narrator: Romanticism’S Storyteller
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Trinity College Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Trinity Publications (Newspapers, Yearbooks, The rT inity Papers (2011 - present) Catalogs, etc.) 2017 The eS afaring Narrator: Romanticism’s Storyteller Emily Turner Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/trinitypapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Turner, Emily, "The eS afaring Narrator: Romanticism’s Storyteller". The Trinity Papers (2011 - present) (2017). Trinity College Digital Repository, Hartford, CT. https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/trinitypapers/62 1 The Seafaring Narrator: Romanticism’s Storyteller Regarding his narrator in “The Thorn,” William Wordsworth writes, “The Reader will perhaps have a general notion of it, if he has ever known a man, a Captain of a small trading vessel for example (“Note” 425). “The Thorn” was originally printed in Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth published in partnership with Samuel T. Coleridge in 1800. Wordsworth is not wrong about his readership’s familiarity with his narrator. Even today, though modern readers are less likely to be acquainted with captains of trading vessels than those of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the chances are high that any reader of “The Thorn” will be familiar with the type of character Wordsworth employs as his narrator—the ambitious, superstitious, seafaring man. This character would have been familiar to Wordsworth’s audience because he is not the only author from this era who makes use of a seafaring narrator. Samuel Coleridge employs a strikingly similar voice in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” another poem from Lyrical Ballads, as does Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein.1 From the similarities between these three seafaring narrators, one can piece together a trope of the seafaring man—he is a storyteller who earns recognition, explores the unknown, and dabbles in the supernatural.
    [Show full text]
  • Dramatic Poetics and American Poetic Culture, 1865-1904
    DRAMATIC POETICS AND AMERICAN POETIC CULTURE, 1865-1904 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Matthew Giordano, M.A. The Ohio State University 2004 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Elizabeth Renker, Adviser Professor Steven Fink Professor Elizabeth Hewitt _____________________________ Adviser Department of English ABSTRACT This dissertation offers a reassessment of American poetic culture from 1865 to 1904. Beginning with E. C. Stedman in 1885 and extending throughout the twentieth century, critics of American poetry have considered this period a poetic wasteland, and thus have almost totally neglected it. In recent years, however, there has been an increased scholarly interest in improving current formulations of nineteenth-century poetic history. To that end, I illuminate the function of meaning of poetry in the late nineteenth century, and particularly the range of ways poets conceptualized their roles in American culture. I uncover a tradition of late-nineteenth-century poetry steeped in dramatic forms and techniques, including dialogue, characterization, and the dramatic monologue. I use the term “dramatic poetics” to refer to this pervasive aesthetic, and I demonstrate how it intersects with performative culture more broadly. Most specifically, I argue that a range of poets used this aesthetic to perform the terms of their authorship. These performances make legible the professional and cultural roles these poets assumed, the audiences they wrote for, and the political and cultural work they pursued. The Introduction explains the dramatic poetic tradition and diagnoses the reasons why scholarship has overlooked it.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Sublimity in the Poetry of William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe
    1 Sublimity in the poetry of William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley Notoriously difficult to define though it may be, the “sublime” features prominently in Romantic era writing. We can see in the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth two contrasting approaches to sublimity: whereas the former views poets as interpreters of the sublime, the latter views them as experiencers of it. While for Shelley sublime knowledge is that which comes from above and which must be conveyed, sublimity for Wordsworth is already present within himself and needs only to be discovered. Nevertheless, both poets rely on figurative language to help them articulate the paradoxes and circularities of sublimity. As a result, the language of sublimity itself becomes a kind of sublime rhetoric. In Shelley’s “To a Skylark”, the sublime is portrayed as being external to the lyric subject. If we consider the skylark as a symbol for the sublime (as Shelley encourages us to in line 2: “Bird thou never wert”), we can see that the sublime is not only external to the speaker, but also far beyond his reach. The poem spells this contrast out in spatial terms: the bird soars high above the uninitiated speaker (3), who must look up towards it for instruction. He yearns to know what the bird knows, for it to “teach [him] half the gladness / That [its] brain must know” (101-2). The speaker is thus a passive observer, hoping to gain knowledge which is outside his reach. This epistemological stance is one which Immanuel Kant critically called Transcendental Realism, characterized by a disjunction between world and subject—we are mere passive observers of the world, and rely upon the world for our knowledge of it (Cohen).
    [Show full text]