A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/95178 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications Resistances in Bodily Form: Post-1945 American Poetry and D.H. Lawrence Joseph R. Shafer A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies January 2017 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter I: The Sensible Body of Charles Olson's Textual Space 29 The Prospective Body of Textual Space in Call Me Ishmael: 1945-1948 30 Saturating 'Projective Verse' in a Body of Space: 1949-1950 61 'Between Things' in The Escaped Cock: 1950-1952 91 Chapter II: To Touch Robert Duncan's Queer Undying 124 The Resurrecting Fairy Tale and Wounds 125 of 'the man who died' in 'Toward the Shaman': 1935-1941 The Fleshly Microcosm of Apocalypse 154 and Heavenly City, Earthly City: 1944-1947 The Queer Space of Edenic Touch in 'The Torso': 1960-1968 189 Chapter III: 'between those black lines of print': 220 the Polarised Body in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar Mourning Plath's Lawrence 221 The Voiceless Cries of Rabbit and Child 229 Plath's Polarisation 237 'Sitting in the Crotch' of The Bell Jar 251 Conclusion 265 Bibliography 274 Acknowledgements The supportive environment created by my family, friends and colleagues over these years has again made life's work quite pleasurable. I'd also like to acknowledge the assistance I received from the staff at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, Archive & Special Collections, at the University of Connecticut, who accommodated my short stay by quickly shelving-out Olson's manuscripts. The staff at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, gave direction regarding Duncan, and the staff at SUNY Buffalo's Poetry Collection introduced me to their rich material, insight and company. My thanks goes to Daniel Katz, my supervisor. I hope others find such guidance. Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and has not previously been submitted for a degree at another institution. Abstract This project alters the field of American Studies and Modern American Poetry. For after Cold War critics of America's Myth and Symbol School had employed D.H. Lawrence for an American exceptionalism, and after Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) had disapproved of Lawrence, the British author has been marginalised by scholars of American Studies and American Poetry. As a result, Lawrence's foundational role within America's countercultural poetry has been overlooked. Robert Duncan, who led the Berkeley & San Francisco Renaissance, has repeatedly testified that Lawrence remains the 'hidden integer' within the poetics of Donald Allen's groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. This research project asks: how does the transatlantic reception of Lawrence change the tradition of post-1945 American poetry? Within the so- called 'New American Poetry,' queer, black, feminist, and non-academic voices emerged, yet their poetry defined itself by resisting the structures of 'closed-verse' as well. The break into 'open form' had renounced much of the American poetry tradition, especially the intellectualism of high-modernists. In this generational gap, Lawrence's banned writing on the sexual, sensual and political body becomes privileged by countercultural poets, and integrated into open-forms of poetry. Therefore this project also asks: how does the physical body, as found in Lawrence, surface within the disparate literary forms of leading poets and their coteries? Each chapter introduces an undocumented reception of Lawrence within a social network of post-WWII poets and follows a poet's reading of Lawrence's bodily form throughout their formative years. Featured poets include Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Sylvia Plath. The poets are chosen for their reliance upon Lawrence, but each poet also represents a wider social scene. As a new transatlantic and American literary history is charted, new readings emerge in new American poets and in Lawrence alike. In reinterpreting well-known and unknown poems though this lens, a new hermeneutic is explored wherein a bodily form surfaces within the spatial formations working upon the page. Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. ~Thoreau, Walking Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing ~Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium' No way seeing is-ness no way saying it-ness except resistance. ~DuPlessis, 'Draft 39: Split' These essays for the shape and current of them. Not yet extravagant; not yet care-free so that all cares could exfoliate into an orchestration. But even shame, and, of course, the fact that one does marvelously but not very well at writing. ~Duncan, 'From a Notebook' Introduction I know, Columbia, dear Libertas, you'll take my posy and put your carrot aside for a minute, and smile, and say: 'I'm sure, Mr Lawrence, it's a long time since I had such a perfectly beautiful bunch of ideas brought me.' And I shall blush and look sheepish and say: 'So glad you think so. I believe you'll find they'll keep fresh quite a long time, if you put them in water.' Whereupon you, Columbia, with real American gallantry: 'Oh, they'll keep for ever, Mr Lawrence. They couldn't be so cruel as to go and die, such perfectly lovely-coloured ideas. Lovely! Thank you ever, ever so much.' ~ Epilogue, Fantasia of the Unconscious D.H. Lawrence has stood at the door of American poetry criticism, acknowledged but not adopted, and yet he seems more inclined to just keep knocking. His attraction for America remained tangled up in his repudiation of it, and without irony his work is kept at a safe distance in American poetry criticism, where he resides in occasional listings of those who have influenced certain aspects of modern or new American literature. In regards to 'new American poetry,' these seldom references to Lawrence should no longer ignore their histories. Before Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder read Lawrence together at Big Sur, and before Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes would celebrate and fight each other through Lawrence, there was already a Lawrentian foundation laid for America's countercultural poetics. In the mid-1940s, Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson and Robert Duncan joined in edifying San Francisco through readings of Lawrence. At a time when Rexroth stood as the West Coast doyen, he had been writing poetry and essays about Lawrence, was lecturing on Lawrence, and edited Lawrence's Selected Poems (1947). On the east coast, Charles Olson, in his own right, would write several essays on Lawrence, finding him to be the exceptional 'post-modern' poet during the '40s and early '50s. In 1950 Olson had also sought to edit Lawrence's Selected Poems, which Olson described as a 'labor of love'. While intimately sharing Lawrence with Frances Boldereff and Robert Creeley during these formative years, Olson repeatedly confirmed Creeley's statement 1 that 'DHL is worth 1000 [Ezra] Pounds'.1 Duncan would in fact identify himself, Olson, Creeley, and Levertov through their relation to Lawrence, for 'Charles and I' were 'post- Poundians' who shared a similar Lawrence, while Creeley and Levertov each had 'another one'.2 Creeley too began emulating Lawrence in his own poetry and prose, placing Lawrence as the epigraph for his Collected Poems: 1945-1975,3 and later stating, 'D.H. Lawrence was the hero of these years'.4 Aware of Lawrence's significance in such circles, but also aware of criticism's continuous marginalisation of Lawrence, Duncan observed that Lawrence remains the 'hidden integer' within Donald Allen's The New American Poetry: 1945-1960.5 But even this tallying of references is another example of evading well-mapped histories and developed readings of underground Lawrentian poetics. For within the interconnected web of post-1945 American poetry, Lawrence is closely held as a most familiar foreigner from the previous generation, whose early death allowed younger poets to situate him within the arising gaps of America's high-modernists and among themselves. Once admitted, Lawrence offers a pivotal point for the open forms of new American poetry. Unearthing such a history nevertheless comes with an academic burden. If indeed an unknown Lawrence proves to be fundamental for poets whose poetics are by now well-established, then I already run the risk of contesting long assumed dicta in American poetry scholarship. For example, Charles Olson is traditionally introduced as constituting a 'new American poetry' out of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. And though Christopher Beach argued that Olson contested Pound more than he admired him,6 Beach does so when reaffirming Olson's Poundian heritage. But Olson wrote: '[I'm] so sick of 1 Charles Olson, Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, Volume 3 (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), p. 63. 2 Robert Duncan, 'The Spectrum Interviews, 1982, Part I: "Out from Under 'Olson's Push,"' in A Poet's Mind: Collected Interviews With Robert Duncan, 1960-1985, ed. by Christopher Wagstaff (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012), p. 257. 3 Robert Creeley, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975, Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).