THE PLAIN SENSE OF THINGS: AN ANALYSIS OF MID-20TH-CENTURY DEPARTURES FROM MODERNISM A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY MELIH LEVI JUNE 2020 © 2020 by Melih Levi. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/ks665nr3451 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Roland Greene, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Peggy Phelan I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Charles F. Altieri, Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Stacey F. Bent, Vice Provost for Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii iv Abstract Starting with Symbolism, various modernist movements in the first half of the twentieth century privileged the work of direct perception, objective attitudes and concrete imagery over direct demonstrations of mental processes involving abstract ideation. Imagism, in particular, had and continues to have substantial impact on descriptive practices in Anglo- American poetry. By the middle of the century, however, the modernist engine was exhausted. Poets and literary critics started finding the modernist emphasis on objectivity and concrete imagery insufficient for engaging the mind’s more immediate and spontaneous modes of responsiveness. This dissertation studies how plain rhetoric and the concept of plainness enabled mid-twentieth-century poets to make meaningful departures from the stylistic orthodoxies of modernism. The four poets studied here – Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Thom Gunn and Eavan Boland – supplement the technical achievements of modernism with a plain rhetoric that tests the affordances of abstraction, generalization, and epigrammatic statement for modern poetry. The desire for plainspoken language challenges some cherished critical distinctions between poetic language and everyday language, calling attention to how communicative uses of language may in fact increase the resourcefulness of poetic expression. Accordingly, these poets foreground the gestural and referential strivings of their speakers to establish compelling continuities between the concrete elements of experience and the mind’s abstractive gestures. The project analyzes these literary developments within the larger context of intellectual thought to demonstrate how transformations in the history of philosophy and critical theory inform changes in literary style. More specifically, the project consults various accounts in the Philosophy of Language and Psychoanalysis to evaluate the challenges and importance of referential intention in fixing reference. Finally, this project also investigates the revival of the Renaissance plain style in the period by Yvor Winters, a prominent literary critic at Stanford University, whose work influenced many critics and poets. An analysis of Winters’s legacy and influence on his students like Thom Gunn shows how Renaissance conceptions of plainness offered generative stylistic models for modern poets and critics. v Acknowledgements I could not write this dissertation without the intellectual and emotional support so selflessly offered by my colleagues and professors. My special thanks to: The dissertation committee: My advisor Professor Roland Greene, for his generous attention and support, and helping me develop compelling comparative attitudes between the Renaissance and the modern period. My first reader Professor Peggy Phelan, for showing me the delights of semiotics; the theoretical backbone of this dissertation comes right out of her classes. My second reader, Professor Charles Altieri, whose classes and lecture notes were the most sublime gift that academic life offered me. Professor Burcu Karahan, the best mentor I could ask for, for selflessly guiding me through the history of Turkish literature, teaching me how to read novels anew, and above all for modeling the kind of scholar and teacher I shall strive one day to become. Professor Vered Shemtov, for teaching me how to teach and for our stimulating conversations on poetry. Professor Charlotte Fonrobert for her warm and continued support. Professor Rosie Lavan of Trinity College, Dublin, for arranging my visit to Trinity. Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Andrea Capra for our poetic voyages through German expressionism. Professors Nicholas Jenkins, Amir Eshel and John Ioannidis, for their generous support with various workshops and my exams. Professor Eavan Boland, for letting me teach with her and supporting my voyage through modern Irish poetry. Professor Kenneth Taylor, who offered me the most rigorous education in the Philosophy of Language. I was shaken by the deaths of Professors Boland and Taylor in the course of writing the dissertation, and feel deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to know them. I endeavored to continue our conversations in this work, as a first significant attempt at honoring their distinctive intellectual and pedagogical legacies. My most generous and supportive friends in the DLCL and other departments for your friendship, our collective nostalgia for other places, and constant invigorating discussions, and to Emir Aksüyek, for our journey together from Burgazada to Stanford. All the DLCL staff, in particular, Ezra González Méndez, who made the DLCL feel like home, and staff at the archives of the National Library Ireland, Special Collections at Stanford University, and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. My parents, brother and Leo, for always having my back. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements v Preface: Waking Up from Modernism 1 Introduction 18 Chapter 1: Wallace Stevens and the Grounds of Reference 64 The Lyric Self and Self-Consciousness 70 Denotation, Meaning and Reference 82 The the: Wallace Stevens and Imagism 90 We Return: Plain Sense, Repetition and Trauma 101 Chapter 2: Frank O’Hara and Cuts of Modernism 110 Modernist Imagery, Postmodern Anxiety 112 The Age of Anxiety: The Auden Factor 121 The Location of Anxiety 134 O’Hara’s Modernist Returns 144 Chapter 3: Syllabic Gestures: Thom Gunn and the Plain Style 154 Cambridge and the Movement 156 Embodiment and Gesture 168 Yvor Winters and the Plain Style 173 Syllabics and Gestures 182 Chapter 4: The Middle Voice: Eavan Boland and Irish Poetry in the 1960s 201 The Middle Voice in Boland’s Poetry 206 Whence, This Desire for Plainness? Influences of The Movement and W.B. Yeats 215 Yeats the Magician, and The Power of Ambivalence 224 Boland’s Early Poetry and the Emergence of the Middle Voice 234 Bibliography 247 1 Preface: Waking Up from Modernism our hearts divided between dream and report, we are ill-guided out of court; report and dream within our hearts are fed; but who will keep a roof over truth’s head? Blanaid Salkeld, The Engine Is Left Running Waking up is a serious business. As we go from dreaming to consciousness, we have a provisional relationship to our surroundings, moving from vague, blurry and unfocused perception towards more intentional modes of identification. Slowly, we take up those habitual tasks performed at the start of day, while also beginning to think about what the new day could bring. Sleep, of course, does not let us off the hook right away. Our dreams continue to haunt us. We may remember them vividly, partially, or not at all. Still, they persist and have an affective hold over us. If we wake up early, at dawn, the daybreak cooperates with this transition. The sun comes up, illuminating the neighborhood, bringing a bright spotlight on the theater of everyday and making the contents of our room sharper. Our anticipation for the sounds of the new day slowly grows: Soon shops will begin to raise their shutters, the elevator will begin to hiss, the buses will hit the road, and footsteps will grow louder. Waking up, in short, situates us on a threshold between ambiguity and clarity, fluidity and definition, and the unconscious and the conscious. In the middle of the twentieth century, waking up received particular attention as a compelling subject for poetry. Many poets experimented with the aubade, which is a poem about dawn and early morning with roots in the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Though aubades typically have romantic undertones with speakers anticipating an impending separation from their lovers, most modern aubades are devoted to exploring the individual experience of waking up and growing aware of one’s surroundings. We might crudely associate the rise of the aubade in the middle of the century with a metaphorical waking up from modernism. As the influence of modernism relaxes and poets develop more self- conscious attitudes towards the literary