Universite d'Ottawa • University of Ottawa FACULTE DES ETUDES SUPERIEURES FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND ET POSTDOCTORALES POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES RICHARDSON, Scott AUTEUR DE LA THESE - AUTHOR OF THESIS Ph.D.(English Literature) GRADE - DEGREE ENGLISH FACULTE, ECOLE, DEPARTEMENT - FACULTY, SCHOOL, DEPARTMENT TITRE DE LA THESE - TITLE OF THE THESIS TAKING THE REPEATS: MODERN AMERICAN POETRY IN IMITATION OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MUSICAL FORMS David Rampton DIRECTEUR DE LA THESE - THESIS SUPERVISOR *S£2*e EXAMINATEURS DE LA THESE - THESIS EXAMINERS D. Childs T. Dilworth D. Jarraway D. Manganiello J.-M. De Koninck, Ph.D. M QftejA^UA LE DOYEN DE LA FACULTE DES ETUDES SIGNATURE DB/N OF THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE SUPERIEURES ET POSTDOCTORALES AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES UMI Number: DC53498 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. 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Wallace Stevens ("Mozart, 1935") Abstract This dissertation surveys the various efforts by modern American poets to imitate the repetitive structures of eighteenth-century instrumental music, setting in a wider historical context some of the central achievements of the twentieth-century long poem, as well as offering readings of some lesser-known but interesting works that draw on musical structures and processes as their formal models. The introduction examines why such disparate poets have wished to organize their work through some analogue to musical form. Taking their cues from western instrumental composition, writers have let the shapes of their poems be determined not by the demands of narrative for succession or the demands of discursive argument for progressive development but instead by music's repetitive imperative. In musical structures such as the variation set, the fugue, and the sonata, poets found constructive techniques congenial to the twentieth-century mind. Eighteenth-century musical genres can be seen as anticipating in a remarkable manner modern ideas concerning the circular patterns of thought and experience. The first chapter examines poetry modeled on the variation set, surveying works by Randall Jarrell, Wallace Stevens, Harry Mathews, Charles Olson, and Frank O'Hara. The second chapter deals with poetic fugues, including works by May Sarton, William Bronk, Weldon Kees, Delmore Schwartz, and Sylvia Plath. It also examines the validity of fugal analogies at both the macro- and micro-level of analysis in two key modern long poems, Ezra Pound's Cantos and Louis Zukofsky's "A ". The final chapter examines poetic versions of sonata forms, including the sonata-based genres of symphony and quartet. It deals with works by Donald Justice, Conrad Aiken, John Gould Fletcher, Stevens, W.C. Williams, and John Ashbery. T.S. Eliot is central to iii the discussion: the chapter reexamines the validity of musical analogy in relation to Four Quartets and places Eliot's achievement in historical context, as a culmination of earlier currents and as a dominant presence in later musically-patterned poetry. IV Acknowledgements I would like to thank the readers of this dissertation for undertaking a task that, given the wide scope of this survey and the interdisciplinary nature of the project, undoubtedly involved a larger-than-usual investment of time and energy. Thank you also to the faculty and students of the University of Ottawa English Department, especially those colleagues who read and critiqued a draft of several pages from the initial chapter. In particular, I would like to thank Angela Woollam for her help and friendship: she sets an example of consistent dedication to scholarship that necessarily inspires those around her to greater efforts. Professor Paul Merkley of the U. of O. Music Department helped shape the initial plan for the dissertation with some timely warnings and suggestions, as did Professor David Jarraway of the English Department. I owe a great debt to Professor David Rampton for his supervision over the past few years. His enthusiasm for the task was unfailing. I thank him for his generosity, for the latitude he allowed me to develop and focus my own ideas, and for his editorial precision and thoroughness. I especially appreciated his frequent expressions of faith both in the validity of the work and in my capacity to carry through a project that, in its scope, was fraught with unforeseen pitfalls. Finally, for reading 120 pages of uneven drafts while heroically ignoring the sights of Tuscany, Prof. Rampton deserves a special thank you. I owe a great deal to my grandfather, Fred MacKinnon, for his generosity over the past years, which helped make our family balancing act less difficult. Thank you to Kelly for her patience with a project that involved countless small beginnings and endings and therefore no end of attendant turmoil. As for turmoil: thank you, Ian, for setting me your own strict deadlines. Now that it is all done, you can go ahead and walk. v Contents Page A note on method: some problems of musical/poetic criticism 1 The scope of this survey 9 Introduction: hearing the rhythms of contemporary thought in music's monuments 12 Reiteration: the variation set 18 Recurrence: the fugue 24 Recapitulation: the sonata 29 The imperative to pattern: "first of all, music... after that, many things" 33 Chapter I: the variation set 40 The appeal of the variation set for modern poets 41 About musical variation structures 45 Rhythm as ground in a modern context: Randall Jarrell's "Variations" 50 The variation set as evolving perception: Wallace Stevens's "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" 57 Trial by variation: Harry Mathews's Trial Impressions 66 The variation as simultaneous translation: Charles Olson's double variation form 83 Coaxing variety out of monotony: Frank O'Hara's landscape variations 91 Variation as recurring dream: Randall Jarrell's "Hohensalzburg" 118 Chapter II: the fugue 124 The impossible project of the poetic fugue 125 An exposition of fugue 128 Musical metaphor as structure: May Sarton's "A Fugue of Wings" 133 William Bronk's "The Arts and Death": "life has always required to be stated again" 136 The single-mindedness of fugal process: Weldon Kees's "Fugue" 141 Fugue as essay: Delmore Schwartz's The Repetitive Heart 146 Sylvia Plath's "Little Fugue": spinning memory out of vacancy 159 Plath's "Three Women": a three-part invention on common experience 168 In search of fugue in the Cantos: Ezra Pound's musical critics 172 Pound's forced return to the subject in the Pisan Cantos 175 Life as fugue: Louis Zukofsky's "A " 185 Conclusion: a pedal point 196 VI Chapter III: the sonata 199 The poetic sonata: an illusion of dialectic 200 First-movement form superimposed on the multi-movement sonata 202 "It seemed to me that you might wish to start modestly": Donald Justice's "Sonatinas" 205 'Symphonists' and 'imagists': complementary poetics 221 (Conrad Aiken and John Gould Fletcher) Classical balance: Wallace Stevens's "Peter Quince at the Clavier" 234 Fighting form: T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets 246 Eliot's quartet "genre': a whole both more and less than the sum of its parts 256 "Burnt Norton": "the detail of the pattern" 260 Symphony without harmony: William Carlos Williams's "The Clouds" 275 "We could re-imagine the other half: John Ashbery's "Blue Sonata" 284 Conclusion: impure contraptions 294 Works cited 305 vn A note on method: some problems of musical/poetic criticism In reaction against the excesses of the preceding age, musical/literary criticism in our time has become a remarkably sober enterprise. Those engaged in such projects almost invariably begin by sounding a cautionary note concerning the need to respect the differences between musical and literary forms of expression, to avoid pushing analogies between the arts too far. Criticism remains on a strict diet after a nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century binge of inter-art comparisons. Although thinkers of the late nineteenth century frequently described poetry and music as incommensurate forms of expression, they nevertheless united them in a single aesthetic order, with poetry as mere mimesis aspiring toward those spiritual realms touched solely by music. Sidney Lanier, the author of what is probably the first poetic "Symphony," could write in 1876 that "as Shakspere is, so far, our king of conventional tones, so is Beethoven our king of unconventional tones. And as music takes up the thread which language drops, so it is where Shakspere ends that Beethoven begins" (290). For Lanier and his contemporaries, poetry and music may be at different points on a continuum, but their very presence together on that continuum makes them liable to comparison. The early twentieth century, having largely absorbed such thinking, saw a flourishing of casual inter-art analogies, stretching far beyond the proverbial and quite innocuous use of such phrases as the 'music of poetry." In a 1931 article on Pound's XXX Cantos, for instance (reprinted in Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage), Dudley Fitts could confidently refer to a concept of the "harmony of the image" in Pound's work, wherein "the poet uses each image, or each detail of the image, precisely as the musician employs a note, 1 Steven Scher suggests, however, that such commonplace phrases are far from innocuous, lending "a deceptively axiomatic aura of legitimacy to comparisons of the two arts.