DOCSLIB.ORG

Mother-Son Relationships in Confessional and Post-Confessional Lyric

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Mother-Son Relationships in Confessional and Post-Confessional Lyric "I AM MADE BY HER, AND UNDONE": MOTHER-SON RELATIONSHIPS IN CONFESSIONAL AND POST-CONFESSIONAL LYRIC HANNAH BAKER PHD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH FEBRUARY 2011 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments 111 Declaration v Abstract VI Abbreviations vii INTRODUCTION "When everything and anything suddenly 1 seemed material for poetry" CHAPTER 1 "and moreover my mother told me": Mother-son 26 Relationships in the Confessional Lyric I Introduction 27 11 On John Berryman's Song 14 31 111 On Robert Lowell's "Unwanted" 52 IV Conclusion 78 CHAPTER 2 "Freaked in the Moon Brain": Ginsberg and Bidart 84 Confessing Crazy Mothers I Introduction 85 11 On Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish" 93 111 On Frank Bidart's "Confessional" 114 IV Conclusion 140 CHAPTER 3 "That was what I craved, to tell on her": Mother-son 144 Relationships in the Post-confessional Lyric i Introduction 145 ii On C.K. Williams' "My Mother's Lips" and 149 "The Cup" 111 On Robert Hass' "My Mother's Nipples" 163 IV Conclusion 183 CHAPTER 4 "I am made by her, and undone": Thorn Gunn's 185 Transatlantic Response to Confessional Poetry I Introduction 186 11 On Thorn Gunn's "My Mother's Pride" 196 111 Coda: On Thorn Gunn's "The Gas-Poker" 217 IV Conclusion 227 BIBLIOGRAPHY 231 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing a dissertation would be grimly monastic if not for the support, generous feedback, and voices of my supervisors and thesis advisory panel. I can't thank enough Dr. Reena Sastri for guiding me from the beginning, providing thorough, rapid responses to my drafts, and modeling the rigor and precision the academic life requires of us. Reena made me feel like I was her only student. I am grateful to Hugh Haughton for my final two years of supervision during which he helped me cut 30,000 words from my loquacious dissertation. A special thanks to Adam Phillips for feedback on two chapters. I would also like to thank Dr. Trev Broughton for offering deft suggestions regarding the shape and scope of the dissertation. My admiration and thanks go to Dr. Julie Taylor for being a friend and colleague at York and beyond. When I returned to the States and continued my dissertation, many professors at my alma mater, the University of Maryland, supported me. I am indebted to Professor Joshua Weiner for reading my Gunn chapter and for making me want to chase after lucid critical prose. Grazie mile to Professor Michael Olmert, whose definition of writing stays with me: ''what you tell your grandma in the taxi on the way home from the airport." Thanks to Professors Michael Collier, Don Berger, Elizabeth Arnold, Sheila Jelen, and Stanley Plumly for teaching me their craft. I would like to give a shout-out to my students at the University of Maryland and at Xavier University of Louisiana; they have made scholarship interesting. There are many friends and poets, who have, by their very existence, let alone their loyalty, flair, and love, encouraged me; among them are Katherine DeB lassie, Lindsay Bernal, Sofi Hall, Gerald Maa, Meg Vesper, K.D. Doyle, Colleen Leary, Amber Vencion, Stacey Pyle, Bunni Warren, Mindy Rubinstein, Cocoa Williams, Biljana Obradovic, and Jules Chrzanowski. Finally, I have been inspired and sustained by the love of my family. I would never have completed this project without their confidence in me. Thank you to my parents, Phil and Mary Baker, for raising me and buying me plane tickets home. My father spent countless hours instilling in me a love for learning; from the time I started adding and writing, he was there correcting my math homework, typing up my final essays for me, and reading out loud to me Mark Twain's stories and the whole of Uncle Tom's Cabin. My mother, who went back to nursing school after having four children, and devoted her career to children and adolescents with psychiatric problems, has been an inspiration to me. My mother has always been my confidant, and has rescued me from despair many times! Thank you to my siblings and in-laws for supporting me: Lords Jason and Robbie Byron, Dave and Rae Baker, and Johnny Baker. Thanks to my two-year-old niece Maddy Baker for making me feel like a rock star whenever I visit. Appreciation goes out to my brother Dave for treating me to countless soy Chai Lattes over the course of my education. My grandparents, Jim and Betty Callen and Jane and K.J. Baker deserve recognition for their generosity, family pride, and breadth of experience. I am grateful as well to my second family: Linda Saltmarsh and Frank Jazab, Bill Saltmarsh and Nicky, Karen and Jeff LeBlanc, Kristin and Chris Pickett, Billy Saltmarsh, and Mary Douglas. I espec~ally wish to tJ:tank my fiance Jason Saltmarsh, whose enabling love, spirited support, SwedIsh-massage gIft card, and constructive criticism have made everything IV possible. He was there for me during those critical points when I needed a pusher, partner, lover, and colleague all in one! Jason's own work ethic, drive, intellectual prowess, voracious reading appetite, and marathon race times inspire me. I dedicate this work to him. v DECLARATION An adaption of the section on Allen Ginsberg in '''Freaked in the Moon Brain': Ginsberg and Bidart Confessing Crazy Mothers" was presented at two conferences: Pacific Ancient and Modem Language Association (PAMLA). Honolulu, Hawaii, November 2010; and Writings ofIntimacy in the 20th and 2 rt Centuries, Leistershire, England, Sept. 2010. Thorn Gunn's "My Mother's Pride" and "The Gas-poker" are reprinted from Boss Cupid by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Copyright © 2000 by Thorn Gunn. All rights reserved. John Berryman's "Song 14" is reprinted from The Dream Songs by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman, renewed 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. All rights reserved. VI ABSTRACT This dissertation offers close readings of a representative of poems by male confessional and post-confessional writers. I examine poems by men whose construction of the mother­ son relationship sheds light on the notions of confession and poetic identity. These readings are informed by psychoanalysis, primarily the work of Freud, D.W. Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, Jessica Benjamin, and Adam Phillips. I argue that the term "confessional poetry" although often critiqued is useful in highlighting the psychological dimensions of the mode and in locating the writers within a literary-historical period that begins with the publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) and marks a shift towards a colloquial, personal, and deviant poetics. By looking at one aspect of confessional poetry, the writer's fundamental relationship to his mother, I argue for a rethinking of the seemingly masculine poetics of Robert Lowell and John Berryman and the gay sensibility of Allen Ginsberg. I discuss the ways in which male poets collaborate with their mothers, represent motherhood as transcending gender and biology, and suggest that mothers and ideas about mothers play into poetic self-fashioning. Examining cross­ gender relationships and alliances as represented in a handful of poems has implications on theories of poetic influence, which tend to highlight either same-sex collaboration or, in Harold Bloom's conception, father-son rivalry. This dissertation contributes to an understanding of confessional writing as self-exploratory, uncertain of its own status, and mediated by analysts, parents, and texts, rather than as titillating self-disclosure. Chapter 1 examines two mother poems by first-generational confessional poets, John Berryman and Robert Lowell, and applies Jessica Benjamin's model of intersubjectivity to explore the poet's identification with and differentiation from the mother figure. I consider Lowell's acknowledgment of his mother's identity prior to his own existence; in contrast, Berryman asserts the poet's need to banter with the mother and so discover the writing self as paradoxically reactionary and autonomous. In Chapter 2, I suggest that Allen Ginsberg'S "Kaddish" and Frank Bidart's "Confessional" represent the poet-son's desire to cure the mother's madness; both writers depict soul-making and soul­ searching as essential to identity and autobiography. As I consider the literary-historical place of these two poets, who anticipate and respond to Life Studies, I highlight their shared preoccupations with madness, crisis, and intertextuality. Chapter 3 explores poems by two post-confessional writers, Robert Hass and C.K. Williams, which revise the literary mode, and bring to the forefront the fictionality of autobiography, the trope of the maternal body, and the limitations of the child-parent, confessor-confessant, and victim-perpetrator dichotomies. In Chapter 4 and the coda, I discuss Thorn Gunn's transatlantic response to confessional poetry, and examine how his poems about his mother are at odds with his critical rejection of American confessional verse. vii ABBREVIATIONS BC Boss Cupid by Thorn Gunn CPAG Collected Poems ofAllen Ginsberg: 1947-1997 CPCK Collected Poems of c.K. Williams CPR Collected Prose ofRobert Lowell CPRL Collected Poems ofRobert Lowell CPTG Collected Poems ofThom Gunn DS The Dream Songs by John Berryman IWN In the Western Night: Collected Poems: 1965-90 by Frank Bidart SUW Sun Under Wood by Robert Hass 1 INTRODUCTION "WHEN EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING SUDDENLY SEEMED MATERIAL FOR POETRY" In a letter to Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop remarks upon the major poetic shift seen in his "family group" of poems which would be published in Life Studies (1959): "They all also have that sure feeling, as if you'd been in a stretch... when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry-or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise" (Words 246).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Confession of Love, Loss and Anger in Sylvia Plath's Poetry
    Plath Profiles 329 The Confession of Love, Loss and Anger in Sylvia Plath's Poetry Cristina Pipoș The term "confessional poetry" was coined in 1959 when Robert Lowell published the highly acclaimed volume of poetry Life Studies. Following this new path in poetry writing, many poets of the time became confessional in their works: Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke or John Berryman, just to name some of those that broke Eliot's subjective correlative rule in poetic creation. Through her confessional poems, Plath breaks taboos that women were not supposed to break in the 50's, and this is the reason why my research focuses very much on the confessional tone in her poetry as through confession, that is the most intimate type of communication, a poet succeeds in creating a strong empathy with the reader. Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, in an interview for The Paris Review, discusses confessional poetry, his theory highly reflecting the general guidelines confessional poets took: Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don't have that secret confession, you don't have a poem—don't even have a story. Don't have a writer. If most poetry doesn't seem to be in any sense con- fessional, it's because the strategy of concealment, of obliquity, can be so compulsive that it's almost entirely successful. The smuggling analogy is loaded with interesting cargo that seems to be there for its own sake— subject matter of general interest […]. The novelty of some of Robert Lowell's most affecting pieces in Life Studies, some of Anne Sexton's poems, and some of Sylvia's was the way they tried to throw off that luggage, the deliberate way they stripped off the veiling analogies.
    [Show full text]
  • The Confessional Purgation of the Soul in the Poetry of Robert Lowell
    Department of English The Flamekeeper: The Confessional Purgation of the Soul in the Poetry of Robert Lowell Ryan Jurison Degree of Bachelor, 15 points Literature Spring Term, 2020 Supervisor: Claudia Egerer Abstract This essay is a critical textual analysis of the poetry of Robert Lowell with focus on religious symbolism used in his work, and the Catholic theology which informed it. This results in a new, contrasting interpretation to the conventional view that he had abandoned his religious focus by mid-career, while accounting for his own assessment that he had not. Insights gained through this analysis, combined with those relating to Lowell’s personal history, reframe his confessional poetry while bolstering this claim. Through this study, poems selected from Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies and For the Union Dead are reinterpreted in order to explore the consequences of what Lowell could have intended with this stylistic modification, and discover the religiosity that he claimed was hidden. Lowell’s confessional poetry up until 1964 is examined and recast as the anguished wails of a Catholic soul in Purgatory. This fresh approach to one of America’s finest twentieth-century poets provides a novel foundation for the reinterpretation of the entirety of Lowell’s professional oeuvre. Keywords: Robert Lowell; American poetry; Catholic Theology; Religious Symbolism; Purgation; Purgatory; Land of Unlikeness; Lord Weary’s Castle; The Mills of the Kavanaughs; Life Studies; For the Union Dead Jurison 1 What soul is lost that does not think itself irrevocably so? When examining the poetry of Robert Lowell, and more specifically the equally lauded but outwardly contrasting work done from the beginning of his career to the middle, one cannot help but consider this question.
    [Show full text]
  • ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: MODERNIST AMERICAN POETRY
    ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: MODERNIST AMERICAN POETRY AS A STUDY OF OBJECTS Kathleen D’Angelo, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Dissertation directed by: Professor Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux Department of English In “Modernist American Poetry as a Study of Objects,” I focus on a group of modernist American poets—Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and George Oppen—who demonstrate an interest in objects and their transformation into aesthetic things. To distinguish between “objects” and “things,” I use “thing theory,” which grew out of the work of Bill Brown and, to date, has not been adequately applied to lyric poetry. While the object represents an entity one encounters in the world, the thing contains diverse associations and meanings that exceed its material function. Among modernist poets, it is essential to study this point of transformation, from object into thing, to examine the “ideas in things” that get invested in this process. Such a study proves necessary in light of the significant role we understand things to play in modernist literature and in the modern era, when subjects were beginning to negotiate selfhood through and against a world of material things. Further, “things” are commonly recognized as a particular focus of modernist poets, thanks in part to Williams’s famous dictate in Paterson, “no ideas but in things.” Poets ranging from Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, in addition to those in my study, all present poems in which things serve as a rhetorical focus. While several critics have acknowledged this modernist fascination, no study has addressed how modernist poets use the thing to resolve personal and poetic preoccupations.
    [Show full text]
  • The Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetic Speaker in the Works of Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, and George Oppen
    “THE OCCASION OF THESE RUSES”: THE MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETIC SPEAKER IN THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOWELL, FRANK O’HARA, AND GEORGE OPPEN A dissertation submitted by Matthew C. Nelson In partial fulfillment for the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English TUFTS UNIVERSITY May 2016 ADVISER: VIRGINIA JACKSON Abstract This dissertation argues for a new history of mid-twentieth-century American poetry shaped by the emergence of the figure of the poetic speaker as a default mode of reading. Now a central fiction of lyric reading, the figure of the poetic speaker developed gradually and unevenly over the course of the twentieth century. While the field of historical poetics draws attention to alternative, non-lyric modes of address, this dissertation examines how three poets writing in this period adapted the normative fiction of the poetic speaker in order to explore new modes of address. By choosing three mid-century poets who are rarely studied beside one another, this dissertation resists the aesthetic factionalism that structures most historical models of this period. My first chapter, “Robert Lowell’s Crisis of Reading: The Confessional Subject as the Culmination of the Romantic Tradition of Poetry,” examines the origins of M.L. Rosenthal’s phrase “confessional poetry” and analyzes how that the autobiographical effect of Robert Lowell’s poetry emerges from a strange, collage-like construction of multiple texts and non- autobiographical subjects. My second chapter reads Frank O’Hara’s poetry as a form of intentionally averted communication that treats the act of writing as a surrogate for the poet’s true object of desire.
    [Show full text]
  • The Beats and the Confessional Poets As Influential Harbingers of the Truths in Contemporary Literature B
    VEDA’S JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE (JOELL) Vol.5 Issue 4 An International Peer Reviewed Journal 2018 http://www.joell.in RESEARCH ARTICLE THE BEATS AND THE CONFESSIONAL POETS AS INFLUENTIAL HARBINGERS OF THE TRUTHS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE B. Josephine Mercy (Research Scholar, Madras Christian College, Chennai.) ABSTRACT The phase of war has etched itself as an unforgettable era in history. The devastation that was caused spreads to the realms of the physical, material, intellectual and even the spiritual. The dry and truth-seeking hearts poured out their anguish in literature. The latter has, henceforth, become a true and credible refuge for such souls and for those who experience internal wars in the contemporary world. This paper aims to bring out the cries of the poets who lived after massacres and freed their souls either by not confining themselves to the society, committing suicide or by a change in their view point. Contemporary literature focuses on deep, intriguing and resourceful topics that are being widely studied even today. “The Beats” and “Confessional Poets” are very different yet similar in many ways. Their experiences are strikingly contrasting to each other but the source of their pain revolves around many common grounds. Poets like Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath awaken our senses by their soul-stirring expressions of woe and explicit manifestation of things that bothered their inward beings. These two movements have brought contemporary literature a long way and its influence is still seen, felt and acknowledged as we apply its aspects to our daily lives.
    [Show full text]
  • The Politics of Space: Student Communes, Political Counterculture, and the Columbia University Protest of 1968
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository THE POLITICS OF SPACE: STUDENT COMMUNES, POLITICAL COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PROTEST OF 1968 Blake Slonecker A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by Advisor: Peter Filene Reader: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Reader: Jerma Jackson © 2006 Blake Slonecker ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT BLAKE SLONECKER: The Politics of Space: Student Communes, Political Counterculture, and the Columbia University Protest of 1968 (Under the direction of Peter Filene) This thesis examines the Columbia University protest of April 1968 through the lens of space. It concludes that the student communes established in occupied campus buildings were free spaces that facilitated the protestors’ reconciliation of political and social difference, and introduced Columbia students to the practical possibilities of democratic participation and student autonomy. This thesis begins by analyzing the roots of the disparate organizations and issues involved in the protest, including SDS, SAS, and the Columbia School of Architecture. Next it argues that the practice of participatory democracy and maintenance of student autonomy within the political counterculture of the communes awakened new political sensibilities among Columbia students. Finally, this thesis illustrates the simultaneous growth and factionalization of the protest community following the police raid on the communes and argues that these developments support the overall claim that the free space of the communes was of fundamental importance to the protest.
    [Show full text]
  • The Outlooks on Confessional Poetry
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Croatian Digital Thesis Repository UNIVERSITY OF RIJEKA FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Karla-Tea Komar THE OUTLOOKS ON CONFESSIONAL POETRY Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the B.A. in English Language and Literature and Croatian Language and Literature at the University of Rijeka Supervisor: Sintija Čuljat PhD Rijeka, September 2017 ABSTRACT The main aim of this thesis is to present the Confessional school of poetry starting by introducing its historical and social background of the late 1950s and 1960s Cold-War America and continuing with the development of the Confessional mode in the literary history. Hence, it will be necessary to define the term and point out its central features. Apart from the theoretical part I will examine the four most prominent poets – Robert Lowell, Jon Berryman, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. What is more, their best-known collections will be used to demonstrate and analyze the outlooks on Confessional poetry discussed in the first section. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1. The outlooks on Confessional poetry…………………………………….……..2 1.1. The sociopolitical context……………………………………....……….……...2 1.2. Development of Confessional poetry…………………………….………….….4 1.3. Definition of Confessional poetry……………………………….……………...6 1.4. Features of Confessional poetry………………………………….……………..8 2. Confessional poets and collections……………………………………………..11 2.1.Robert Lowell: Life Studies……………………………………………………..13 2.2. John Berryman: 77 Dream Songs………………………………………......…..16 2.3. Anne Sexton: To Bedlam and Part Way Back and All My Pretty Ones………..18 2.4. Sylvia Plath: Ariel………………………………………………………………21 Conclusion Bibliography INTRODUCTION This thesis will cover the development and features of Confessional poetry as a distinguished poetic movement of postmodernist literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Critical Survey of Poetry: Topical Essays
    More Critical Survey of Poetry: Topical Essays English and American Poetry in the Twentieth Century by Thomas C. Foster Introduction Twentieth century poetry has been variously characterized as romantic, antiromantic, impersonal, highly personal, chaotic, orderly, classical, TABLE OF symbolist, wholly untraditional, reasoned and measured, or incomprehensible CONTENTS Introduction —depending on the critic whom one reads. This radical diversity suggests a The rise of modernism fundamental problem with poetry in the twentieth century: It has no clear path The end of Victorianism to follow. Finding previous poetry inadequate to deal with the situation in which Cultural breakdown they find themselves, modern poets must create anew, must, in Wallace Decadence Stevens’s phrase, “find out what will suffice.” The modern poem is an act of Early modern movements exploration. In the absence of givens, it must carve out its own niche, make its Imagism own raison d’être. Symbolism William Carlos Williams The Metaphysical influence Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy After World War II Surrealism Renewed Romanticism Eastern, mythic, and archetypal influences Moral ambivalence New Criticism Disjuncture and discontinuity The poem sequence The Bridge Paterson The Maximus Poems Personal sequences English and Irish poem sequences Crow Mercian Hymns The Triumph of Love North Renga Confessional poetry Beat and Movement poetry Whither? Language poets Martian poets Wit and humor Voices of diversity Irish poetry Women’s poetry Postcolonial poets Bibliography Not surprisingly, then, twentieth century poetry is marked by astonishing variety. What logic could successfully yoke together Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg, Philip Larkin and William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath and Ezra Pound? None, so long as the category of modern poetry is understood to be a fixed entity; such definitions always aim at closure and exclusion.
    [Show full text]
  • Allen Young Papers
    http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt1x0nd0v5 No online items Finding aid of the Allen Young Papers Loni Shibuyama ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives 909 West Adams Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90007 Phone: (213) 741-0094 Fax: (213) 741-0220 Email: [email protected] URL: http://www.onearchives.org © 2008 ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. All rights reserved. Finding aid of the Allen Young Coll2008-004 1 Papers Finding aid of the Allen Young Papers Collection number: Coll2008-004 ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives Los Angeles, California Processed by: Loni Shibuyama Date Completed: March 13, 2008 Encoded by: Loni Shibuyama © 2008 ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. All rights reserved. Processing this collection has been funded by a generous grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Descriptive Summary Title: Allen Young papers Dates: 1975 - 1987 Bulk Dates: 1977 - 1979 Collection number: Coll2008-004 Creator: Young, Allen, 1941- Collection Size: 3 archive boxes + 3 archive cartons + 2 oversize flat boxes(6.2 linear feet). Repository: ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. Los Angeles, California 90007 Abstract: Manuscripts, survey responses, correspondence, galley proofs, notes, and miscellaneous typescripts created and collected by writer, journalist and activist Allen Young. The bulk of the collection consists of materials relating to the gay male portion of The Gay Report: Lesbians and Gay Men Speak Out About Sexual Experiences & Lifestyles (1979), the first comprehensive survey of the homosexual community, which Young co-authored with writer Karla Jay. The collection also includes materials relating to the article, "The Gay Report on Sexually Transmitted Diseases," published in the American Journal of Public Health (1981), on which Young collaborated with Karla Jay, Don Barrett and William W.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Lowell and the Religious Sublime
    HenryHart RobertLowell and the ReligiousSublime A J^JLs a student in his last year at St. Mark's, Robert Lowell published an interpre- tation of an allegorical drawing by his friend, Francis Parker, which reveals an early enchantment with religious sublimity. Although the piece in Vindex is characterized more by youthful idealism than hermeneutic skill, it is prophetic of the sort of poetry he would soon be writing. Lowell's explication begins with a grand moral pronounce- ment intended to separate the saints from the fools: 'The idea that we wish to make clear is that tremendous labor and great intelligence, if applied toward the advance- ment of evil or petty ends, are of no avail." He then proceeds to excoriate fourteen types of misguided intellectuals who surround the central figure of "St. Simon, the Stylite, a symbol of true knowledge." The fools are generally pedants and scientists, "men of authority who misuse their power" (129), and no doubt modelled with in- subordinate glee after Lowell's teachers. The young Lowell, full of sanctimonious ambitions, has his eye on the sublime "St. Simon [who] is elevated high above everyone else by comprehension of the true light. The book and the pen symbolize real intellectual attainment, while the plumb line signifies a quite natural feeling of superiority; but more important, his insecurity. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step." The sublime from Longinus and Burke to Kant and Harold Bloom has always been a measure of power and has always involved ranking that power according to a hierarchy of values.
    [Show full text]
  • The Human Body As Metaphor in Robert Lowell's Poetry: "Lord Weary's Castle" to "For the Union Dead"
    W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1984 The Human Body as Metaphor in Robert Lowell's Poetry: "Lord Weary's Castle" to "For the Union Dead" Claudia Maria Bischoff College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Bischoff, Claudia Maria, "The Human Body as Metaphor in Robert Lowell's Poetry: "Lord Weary's Castle" to "For the Union Dead"" (1984). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625261. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-9zg3-ph40 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE HUMAN BODY AS METAPHOR IN ROBERT LOWELL1S POETRY: LORD WEARY1S CASTLE TO FOR THE UNION DEAD A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Claudia Bischoff 1984 APPROVAL SHEET This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Author Approved, August 1984 : Scott Donaldson / Robert D. Newman QiW, I dJj Q Michael A. North (Chair) ABSTRACT The purpose of tnis analysis is to closely ex­ amine the human body as metaphor in Robert Lowell's poetry: Lord Weary1s Castle to For the Union Dead.
    [Show full text]
  • Living the Movement: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the New Left, 1967-1981
    LIVING THE MOVEMENT: LIBERATION NEWS SERVICE, MONTAGUE FARM, AND THE NEW LEFT, 1967-1981 Blake Slonecker A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by Advisor: Peter G. Filene Reader: Robert Cantwell Reader: William H. Chafe Reader: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Reader: Jerma A. Jackson © 2009 Blake Slonecker ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii Abstract BLAKE SLONECKER: Living the Movement: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the New Left, 1967-1981 (Under the direction of Professor Peter G. Filene) This dissertation uses the Liberation News Service (LNS)—the Associated Press of New Left underground media—and Montague Farm—a commune created by former LNS staffers—as a lens through which to trace the evolution of the American New Left after 1968. The establishments of underground newspapers—often organized as work collectives—and communes were two of the most ubiquitous and emblematic gestures of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For this reason, LNS and Montague Farm serve as ideal subjects to reveal how institutions founded on the ideals of late-1960s activism adapted their politics to survive in the adverse political culture of the 1970s. By tracking these two groups, this dissertation grounds the events of the 1970s in the legacies of the 1960s. Along the way it explores the divergent aspirations of the communal counterculture, the evolution and demise of the New Left, and the quotidian challenges of living the Movement. Both groups drew from their political worldviews in order to shape their daily lives, creating new divisions of labor, new social arrangements, and new personal politics.
    [Show full text]