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. By focusing, specifically, on the subject’s relationship to the object, I explore how things reveal the poet’s process of constituting a poetic self by shedding particular anxieties over poetic function and projecting a voice of authority. By bringing poets as diverse and Frost and Oppen into critical conversations about modernism, this study broadens understanding of a uniquely American strain of modernist poetry. American modernists were deeply conscious of the cultural authority inherent in the poetic act, as they sought formal and vocal innovations that could grant the poet a linguistic means to resolve feelings of fragmentation and alienation in the creation of poetic things. MODERNIST AMERICAN POETRY AS A STUDY OF OBJECTS by Kathleen D’Angelo Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2011 Advisory Committee: Professor Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, Chair Professor Michael Collier Professor Peter Mallios Professor Sheri Parks Professor David Wyatt ©Copyright by Kathleen D’Angelo 2011 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my dissertation committee, Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, David Wyatt, Peter Mallios, and Michael Collier, for their insight and thoughtful critiques, as well as Judith Harris, who has been an astute reader from the beginning. I would also like to thank my writing group, a collection of brilliant woman whose feedback and support were essential: Jennifer Wellman, Mary Frances Jiminez, Schuyler Esprit, Heather Brown, and Nina Candia. To my family: I could not have done this without each and every one of you; I will forever be grateful for everyone’s part in getting me here. I offer special thanks to John Denver, without whose Rocky Mountain Collection this dissertation would never have been completed. And, finally, to my husband and my girls, who have born this burden the most, I love you. I did it. ii Table of Contents Introduction: Modernist American Poetry as a Study of Objects…..……………………………1 Chapter One: “But I Was Going to Say When Truth Broke In”: Robert Frost and the Self-Projected Thing………………………………………40 Chapter Two: Marianne Moore’s Observations and Imaginary Possession of the Thing…………………………………….……88 Chapter Three: “THE WORLD IS NEW”: William Carlos Williams’s Imagination and the Renewal of Things………...……………………………...134 Chapter Four: “The Sequence of Disclosure”: The Truth Hidden in Things in George Oppen’s Discrete Series......………………………………176 Chapter Five: “the tipping of an object toward the light”: Modernism and the Possession of Things.……………………………………..217 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………….231 iii Introduction: Modernist American Poetry as a Study of Objects The birches are mad with green points the wood’s edge is burning with their green, burning, seething—No, no, no. The birches are opening their leaves one by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold and separate, one by one. Slender tassels hang swaying from the delicate branch tips— Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word. Black is split at once into flowers. In Every bog and ditch, flares of small fire, white flowers!—Agh, the birches are mad, mad with their green. The world is gone, torn into shreds with this blessing. What have I left undone that I should have undertaken? (CPI 172-173) From “Portrait of the Author,” William Carlos Williams The above poem is the only one from William Carlos Williams’s nearly 50-year collection that he titles “Portrait of the Author.” And yet, without this claim prompting readers to consider the author’s personal connection to the material, the poem’s opening could be read as another impersonal modernist meditation upon an object, with the speaker employing detailed descriptions to probe the birch’s nature. What stands out in Williams’s attempt, however, is his personification of the object, as well as his exploration of it through its transformation into an aesthetic “thing.” The speaker laments the inadequacies of language, even as he must rely upon it to gain access to the object. As Williams describes the birch leaves unfolding, his characterization settles on a single personified quality: madness. And the repeated description of the trees as “mad, mad with their green,” particularly following the vocal gesture of screaming, suggests some element of the speaker’s experience reflected by the object. This green madness, signaling vitality as much as it does disturbance, represents a state of being both agitated 1 and alive; it becomes a “blessing” for its power to destroy prior perception and make the world disappear (“the world is gone, torn into shreds”).1 “Madness”, then, propels an intense, searching gaze upon the object world as the speaker’s layered descriptions betray more about his own conception of poetic self than they do about the birches. Through the object, the speaker negotiates personal preoccupations and conditions. I begin with Williams’s “Portrait of the Author” because it encapsulates the topic of this dissertation, the tensions between subjects and objects in modernist poetry. The poem illustrates a speaker distinctly apart from the object he gazes upon, but one who nonetheless identifies aspects of himself through it; a speaker attempting an impersonal object representation, but one who, in the process, reveals deeply personal aspects of his experience. It also presents a speaker who initially recognizes a whole object—the birch trees, characterized by some essential quality of madness—but one who gradually re- assesses his ability to know such “wholeness,” instead pursuing knowledge by cataloging the object’s parts. In these respects, this poem reveals a particularly “modern” relationship between subjects and objects and illustrates a story of modernism that has not yet been fully told. This dissertation argues that the objects in modernist poetry stand to tell us more about the subjects enacting their aesthetic representation than those subjects’ grasp of fixed external things. As these poets present objects in ways that challenge conventional associations and meanings, they also take up issues of poetic mastery and authority. This modernist fascination with objects, and the effort to transform them in the poetic space, 1 As one of the final poems of Sour Grapes (1921), “Portrait of the Artist” also serves as an important precursor to the explosive opening prose of Spring and All (1923), in which Williams demands complete destruction of the material world so that, through the imagination, he can create the world anew. In my chapter on Williams, I focus on Spring and All as the collection in which he most explicitly demonstrates tensions in the subject’s representation of objects. 2 reflects a desire to assert authority over meaning and claim knowledge of the “thing”; yet, simultaneously, the thinking subject recognizes the limitations of knowing objects outside of the self. As the poet looks upon the object world, what looks back is the subject’s own reflection, even as the poet seeks empowered perception that will resolve and suppress anxieties, stabilize fluctuations, and foster poetic authority. The “thing,” in turn, preserves the preoccupation that results from this conflict—the poet’s desire to project meaning through the act of naming, as well as his or her recognition of the impossibility of this task. In the poems I explore, objects mark particular concerns with which the poet is grappling as he or she strives for poetic mastery. The specific preoccupations for each poet—whether over gender, technology, or creative labor itself— all relate to the poet’s larger consideration about his or her function in the modern moment. Interaction with the object world raises, first, questions about the subject’s identity and emotional state: the self