THE POETICS OF IMMANENCE AND EXPERIENCE: ROBERT LOWELL, JAMES WRIGHT, RICHARD HUGO, JORIE GRAHAM Lidija Davidovska, M.A. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of East Anglia School of American Studies February 2013 © This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognize that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 2 ABSTRACT This thesis defines the poetics of a strand within contemporary American poetry, generally described as “mainstream” by literary critics that I define as “the poetics of immanence and experience”. I delineate the genealogy of this poetics from the late 1950s to the end of the 1990s, focusing on four poets who, I contend, best represent “the situation of poetry” in each of the decades during this period. Each of these poets will be shown to sustain and extend this vibrant, and according to literary scholarship, still dominant tradition in American poetry. Robert Lowell, James Wright, Richard Hugo and Jorie Graham are analyzed in the literary context of a particular decade as the most representative poet of this strand of poetry. Defining and tracing a stable poetic model within the vast poetic, aesthetic and cultural input and output in America during the second half of the twentieth century, contributes to a better understanding of American culture as susceptible to generating experiential types of poetry. Drawing from Altieri’s concept of immanence, I define the poem as immanent when it reveals a presence/immanence of a human consciousness as an individuated and particularized agent/protagonist who narrates his/her personal story in a primarily causal, narrative language generated by the structures of the depicted story. The result is the realistic illusion that the poem captures the experience as “it happened”, which is then only transferred to the poem-world from the Object-world. Altieri’s idea about the general turn in American poetry towards the Wordsworthian Order of Nature and my argument about experience as value-generating principles for the poets, are manifested in Lowell’s photographically “objective” surface descriptions and narrations, Wright’s transcendental moments inspired by numinous nature, Hugo’s projections of the human self upon the Object-towns and Graham’s experiential frames of reference filled with the meditations and speculations of her discursive voice. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER I .................................................................................................................................. 23 ROBERT LOWELL: CONFESSING THE SHIFT ...................................................................... 23 The Poetics of Immanence and Experience .......................................................................... 26 Confessional Poetry ................................................................................................................. 34 Narrative Poetry ...................................................................................................................... 37 Descriptive Poetry ................................................................................................................... 44 Culturally Coded Lexis ........................................................................................................... 55 CHAPTER II ................................................................................................................................. 68 JAMES WRIGHT: DEEP PRESENCE IN THE IMAGE ............................................................ 68 James Wright’s Poetry in the 1950s ...................................................................................... 72 James Wright’s Poetry in the 1960s ...................................................................................... 84 CHAPTER III ............................................................................................................................. 113 RICHARD HUGO: THE TRIGGERING CHRONOTOPE ....................................................... 113 Phenomenological Themes ................................................................................................... 119 Language in Support of Phenomenological Themes .......................................................... 138 Personification ....................................................................................................................... 153 CHAPTER IV ............................................................................................................................. 160 JORIE GRAHAM: PRESENT IN THE DISCOURSE .............................................................. 160 Discursiveness ........................................................................................................................ 165 Types of Discourses ............................................................................................................... 179 Experiential poetry ................................................................................................................ 192 Metonymic/Metaphoric ........................................................................................................ 210 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 232 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 240 4 INTRODUCTION This thesis seeks to define the poetics of a strand of American contemporary poetry which literary criticism has often described as “mainstream”. Although I agree with this description generally, I view this type of poetry only as a tributary stream (one of many) of the general American mainstream in the second half of the century. I follow the evolution of this poetics from the late 1950s to the 1990s, focusing on four poets (Lowell, Wright, Hugo and Graham) who, I believe, best represent “the situation of [this strand] of poetry”1 in each of these decades, sustaining and extending this vibrant, and according to literary scholarship, still dominant tradition in American poetry. As I hope to show, their poetry exhibits a specific quality in each decade, whilst still retaining (the structure of) a shared poetic model. Each poet, Lowell, Wright, Hugo and Graham is analyzed in a literary context of a particular decade as the most representative poet of this strand of poetry in that decade. Although some of these poets are often placed by literary criticism in different literary schools or movements (e.g. Lowell, Confessional poetry in the late 1950s; Wright, Deep Image, in the 1960s), my intent is to identify the key, shared, general characteristics in their poetry which produce a poetic model discernible as such in a larger body of poetry in America written in the second half of the century. Although this thesis is interested in a type of poetry strongly aligned with the mainstream, as the literature review will show, I do not attempt to provide definitions of American mainstream poetry, since it would require a very different, broader, and much more comprehensive study of the whole poetic culture in the given period. Basically, this project focuses on a compendium of shared characteristics among the selected poets and argues that they are indicative of a distinctive poetics which in the course of the thesis is defined as “the poetics of immanence and experience”. I believe this broad definition (“poetics of immanence and experience”) can be applied as an umbrella term to a large body of poetry which, after gaining its momentum in the late 1950s 1 Reference to the title of Robert Pinsky’s book, The Situation of Poetry. 5 and 1960s, has marked American contemporary poetry as a dominant presence. My assumption is that, notwithstanding the vastness of poetic, aesthetic, cultural input and output in this period —the second half of the twentieth century—one can still trace a poetic model emerging and reemerging throughout the decades and evolving as a result of interrelations with cultural discourses in these decades. My interest in charting a common, general aesthetics that is “visible” behind this particular mainstream strand of American contemporary poetry was triggered by some initial assumptions about, and observations of, a dominant mode of American poetry which typifies it and makes it different. This thesis demonstrates how, and why, a poetics of “immanence and experience” can be seen as one of the dominant modes of American poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century, and its focus upon these four poets is an attempt to argue for their status as “exemplary” poets of this strand of American poetry. This becomes clear not just in the close readings of these poets in subsequent chapters, but in the ways in which this thesis situates itself within various critical traditions that have sought to define an American mainstream poetry and poetics. Another equally generative reason for the particular focus of the thesis is the great shift of direction American poetry took after Modernism. Just looking at tables of contents of critical and historical surveys