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The Barren Springs Songbook, Caroline Grace Sutphin

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The Barren Springs Songbook is a poetry collection exploring Appalachian themes through the lens of three representative characters and my own experience. The poems presented are in blank verse and lean heavily on musicality, as each poem features an epigraph from my own Great Uncle Henry’s song lyrics. The poetry explores themes of poverty, folklore, feminism, and Christianity within the context of Barren Springs, an insular Appalachian community. The characters of Henry, India, and Myrtle provide a glimpse into how things have been in my family history, and the more modern poems representing myself show the cultural shifts that are …

Interdependence Across Foreign Exchange Rate Markets- A Mixed Copula Approach, Richard Adjei-Boateng

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The purpose of this thesis is to study the dependence structure of exchange rate pairs using a mixture of copula as opposed to a single copula approach. Mixed copula models have the ability to generate dependence structures that do not belong to existing copula families. The flexibility in choosing component copulas in this mixture model aids the construction of a system that is simultaneously parsimonious and flexible enough to generate most dependence patterns in exchange rate data. Furthermore, the method of mixture copulas facilitates the separation of both the structure and degree of dependence, concepts that are respectively embodied in …

Mindfulness Of Minnows, Will Hollis

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Literature is a deeply personal and interpersonal act from the author to the reader. In some way the author is attempting to capture their interpretation of space and time inside the vehicle of language. Through metaphor and enjambment, syntax and imagery, this thesis attempts to render the contemporary experience of the artist as he is grounded in location and interpretation. The lens used in inspecting the world is biological and philosophical, seeking and hiding from the truth.

Nature and science are used as linking languages in the collections of poems, seeking to be united with emotion based in the bedrock …

You Don't Talk About It, Brittany Lee Cheak

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

I am a poet. As an undergraduate, I explored the other genres of writing—I wrote short stories, attempted a novel-length piece, and crafted essays. While I found plays interesting, I could not write one satisfactorily. But poetry fit like an extension of myself. I could fuse my voice and my ideas in stanzas and images, and I found myself weighing words and sounds as I constructed the lines. It was only natural that I pursue mastery in poetry when I returned for my Masters of Fine Arts.

The material presented in this document is the culmination of two years of …

Variation Within Uniformity: The English Romantic Sonnet, Thomas Hamilton Cherry

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century wrote numerous poems from genres and styles all across the poetic spectrum. From the epics of ancient origin concerning kings and fanciful settings to the political odes on fallen leaders and even the anthropological histories of what it meant to live in their time, these poets stretched their stylistic legs in many ways. One of the most interesting is their use of the short and rule-bound sonnet form that enjoyed a reemergence during their time. Though stylized throughout its existence, the sonnet most often falls into a specific form with guidelines …

Isaac Watts And The Culture Of Dissent, Andrew Eli M. Yeater

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Although Isaac Watts wrote hymns in the early eighteenth century, some of his hymns, such as “Joy to the World,” “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?,” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” survive today as well-known hymns. However, little has been written about the rhetorical effects of his hymns. This thesis demonstrates that, like any other literary work, Watts’ hymns can be analyzed rhetorically. This thesis analyzes Watts’ hymns with the aid of Louis Montrose’s New Historicism, showing how Watts’ hymns were impacted by the English culture in which he lived and how they impacted the religious culture to …

Boethian Colorings In Geoffrey Chaucer's Earlier Poetry: The Book Of The Duchess, The Parliament Of Fowls And The House Of Fame, Morgen Lamson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

There has been much written on Boethius and his impact on Chaucer's greater known works, such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, yet there has not been much light shone on his other works, namely The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame, which are a rich mix of medieval conventions and Boethian elements and themes. Such ideas have been explored through the lenses of his five, shorter "Boethian lyrics" - "The Former Age," "Fortune," "Truth," "Gentilesse," and "Lak of Stedfastnesse" - particularly because it is within these five poems that the …

Museum-Making In Women's Poetry: How Sylvia Plath And Emily Dickinson Confront The Time Of History, Margaret Brown

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement note that Michelet and Freud "both thought that the repressed past survives in woman; woman, more than anyone else, is dedicated to reminiscence" (5). Whether or not this is true of woman, that expectation of her—as keeper of the past—has perhaps subsisted in the deepest realms of the collective unconscious. From the work of Cixous and Clement, Julia Kristeva and Angela Leighton, I ultimately deduce that there are two perceptions of time: man's time has been associated with the straight, the linear, the historical, and the prosaic; woman's time has …

Voices I Have Heard, Rosemarie Wurth-Grise

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The poems in this thesis are an exploration of how two worlds can exist at once. The first world is the physical world as we perceive it through our senses and experience it through living. It is a cyclical world that begins with childhood, and moves toward adulthood, parenthood and death. In this world we go about the act of living. Yet it is in the second world, a more metaphysical one, that we are most alive. We often gain our knowledge of this world through observing and experiencing the natural world. It is a place in which we discover …

Word And Song: The Paradox Of Romanticism, Catherine Ingram

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Among the various outcomes of the Romantic period, an interest in the relationship of the arts remains a widely recognized yet rarely examined field of study. Music and literature seemed to develop a particular kinship, yet to identify the exact relationship is as difficult as defining Romanticism itself. In this study, I attempt to do both. In exploring the concept of Romanticism, its paradoxical development from Classicism is examined through the comparison of six great composers and poets of the period. By tracing the similarities and differences in style of Beethoven/Wordsworth, Schumann/Keats, and Brahms/Tennyson, hopefully a clearer understanding of the …

An Exploration Of Sound & Sense In Poetry, Stephen Carden

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Various theorists have treated the problem of sound and sense in poetry. The influence of sound in poetry can be found both in the overall musical structure of a poem and in the internal sounds of rhythm and diction. Plato suggests that rhythm and harmony have a direct effect on man, and can establish either balance or disproportion within the soul. The debate whether sound determines sense or sense determines sound is rejected in favor of a third possibility: an interdependent relationship between sound and sense, an intrinsic formal structure, as the ideal governing the creation of poetry. Further, Aristotle …

Superior Instants: Religious Concerns In The Poetry Of Emily Dickinson, Elisabeth Buckner

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

When I decided to write a thesis on Emily Dickinson's poetry, my intention was to show that she did, indeed, implement a concrete philosophy into her poetry. However, after several months of research, I realized that this poet's philosophy was ongoing and sometimes inconsistent. Emily Dickinson never discovered the answers to all of her religious and spiritual questions although she devoted her entire life to that pursuit. What Dickinson did discover was that orthodox religion had no place in her heart or mind and she must make her own choices where God was concerned. Immortality was an intense fascination to …

In Search Of The Grail: The Poetic Development Of T.S. Eliot, William Bell

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In Poets of Reality, Joseph Hillis Miller seeks to establish T.S. Eliot as a precursor of the modern movement towards romantic. subjectivism. By applying his phenomenological critique, Miller claims that several major modern writers, including Eliot, adopt aesthetics based on various forms of philosophical monism.

The point underlying this thesis is that Eliot stands opposed to any such position and, until 1930, breaks with philosophy, monistic or otherwise. His art from this period is instead characterized by a search for solution in poetic artifice, a pure art. However, with "Ash Wednesday," the poet once again enters fully into the …

The Poetic Theory Of T.S. Eliot: An Investigation, Jane Cooksey

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Few critics have had a greater impact upon the theory of poetry than T.S. Eliot. His critical works, spanning the decades of his literary career, embody a theory of poetry and by a careful scrutiny of his many essays, reviews and interviews, it is possible to formulate definite requirements for works in the genre of poetry. Beginning with the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919, Eliot stresses certain aspects of poetry that must be carefully considered by the poet, and Eliot does not radically alter his attitudes throughout his career.

Eliot insists in his earliest essays that the …

Metodes Meahta In Six Old English Poems, Mary Relihan

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis, then, will attempt to show that the achievement of unity was the primary concern of the Old English poets, who aimed to use the power of poetry to teach their people how their hope for immortality might be realized under Christianity. Their concern is evident from their poetic diction and themes that have an origin in common values of mankind, from their demonstration of unity within the poems by deliberately chosen connotative language and by forms which represent a progression of thought, and from their objective presentations in dramatic and imaginative settings. Therefore, the poetry is a fusion …

William Cowper’S The Task: A Study In Transition, Roy Leo Crady Jr.

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Hidden deep in the shelves of most libraries in England and America is an obscure, dusty volume of poetry containing one of the minor classics in the English language, a poem entitled The Task. Written by the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper, this very long and loosely structured poem won widespread recognition and acclaim in its day, only to gradually fade into a premature oblivion. Today The Task is known primarily to a handful of literary scholars whose arcane and esoteric business it is to go beyond the turnpikes of literary history into the labyrinthine lanes and paths of our literary …

Doubt And Faith In Tennyson's Poetry, Martha Wright

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Alfred Tennyson, the nineteenth century poetic giant of Victorian England, who served as poet laureate for forty-two years, is best known for his elegy, In Memoriam, The Idylls of the King, and such short poems as "Ulysses," "The Lotos Eaters," "Flower in the Crannied Wall," and "Crossing the Bar." But few readers of his poetry are aware of the frequent use of the words "doubt" and "faith" in these poems, as well as in a number of his other poems. A realization of the extensive use of these words presented the challenge for a study to determine how frequently these …

Symbolism In The Poetry Of William Butler Yeats, Alana White

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis is a study of the development of the symbolic system formulated by William Butler Yeats and his subsequent application of this system to his poetry, with special attention to the rose and the stone. To comprehend and thereby fully appreciate Yeats's poetry requires some knowledge of the forces working together to form the basis of his philosophy and symbolic system. These forces and the system form the subject of the first chapter. Foremost among the many influences are his Irish birth, his associates (among them his father, John Yeats; his uncle, George Pollexfen; John O'Leary; and Madame Helena …

A Great Debate In Poetic Theory: Brooks, Wheelwright, Crane & Olson, Janice Carrell

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Elder Olson has said that at the Biblical Tower of Babel the people did not begin to talk nonsense but only what seemed like nonsense. This paper concerns an intellectual tower where important debates are held, but unfortunately the language is not a universal one; therefor, because all too often terms have evolved without adequate definition, disagreement occurs where reconciliation appears impossible.

The very title of this thesis could be misleading to the reader if he considers debate in its formal sense. What is here intended is the controversy in the efforts of respected scholars to understand and establish the …

Critical Issues In The Religious Content Of The Poetry Of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Problems & Resolutions, Jo Anne Gabbard

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The purpose of this study is to investigate a limited number of the most influential and interesting studies dealing in depth with the question of Hopkins' religion and its resultant influence on his poetic talent, and to attempt to resolve some of the points of dispute. some of the studies investigated argue that Hopkins was hindered in his poetic endeavors by his religion, while others attempt to prove that his religion enhanced his poetry. The present study is not intended as an evaluation of individual works; its purpose is rather to present the pertinent and relevant ideas projected in each …

Imagery In Meredith's Modern Love, Beverly Belden

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

George Meredith's Modern Love deals with a formula for achieving happiness in life by a man whose marriage has failed. His marital breakup serves as a catalyst for the husband's internal journey which, through intense self questionings, leads him to a fuller understanding of himself and his purpose within the harmony of nature. Definite overt action and external events are secondary in the sonnet sequence. Indeed, the major portion of the work is conveyed by images which reveal the husband's developing psychological states. As Lionel Stevenson says of Modern Love in the standard biography of Meredith,

. . . the …

Domestic Imagery In Tennyson's In Memoriam, Ruth Clark

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The vehicle Tennyson uses to explore the thematic ambiguities of love/indifference; faith/doubt; hope/despair; and life/death is domestic imagery, specifically images which involve the home or house and those images of personal relationships which move the poet from despair to a tentative faith.

The initial chapter of this work will present a general view of Tennyson and In Memoriam by which the subsequent study of the elegy's domestic imagery may be brought into focus. In addition to a discussion of the occasion of the poem, pertinent critical material will be evaluated in terms of value to this discussion of imagery. After …

Richard Lovelace A Study In Poetic Design, James Flynn

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The purpose of this study is to evaluate, and hopefully, to elevate the literary "currency" of Richard Lovelace. To this end, various methods and approaches will be utilized in order to capture a comprehensive, yet coherent view of Lovelace and his poetry. Specifically, these methods and approaches will include: a survey of Lovelace's biography, including clarification of discrepancies among authorities concerning pertinent details of his life; a location of Lovelace in the primary social, philosophical, and poetical movements of the early seventeenth century; an identification of Lovelace as a Cavalier poet, differentiating him from other Cavaliers; an analysis of representative …

Samuel Daniel: His Importance As A Literary Figure, Ronald Gaffney

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

An investigation of the literary conventions and an evaluation of the way they are employed by Daniel will help to provide some indication of his literary importance. To examine the traditional conventions he uses will, to some degree, indicate where Daniel fits into the literary society of the Elizabethan Age. A study of some of his innovations and a few of his distinctive ways of using traditional motifs will help to demonstrate his overall importance to literature.