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The Poetics Of Open And Closed Forms, Tyrone Williams

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is an investigation into the "origins" and developments of the concepts of open and closed forms in American poetics and poetry. After a brief overview of the form these concepts take in the poetics of Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth, I trace the development of these concepts through the critical work of Charles Olson, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Joseph Frank and William Spanos. My argument is twofold: (1) that the concepts of open and closed forms are predicated on philosophical notions concerning form, image, space and time, and (2) these concepts are all interrelated, i.e., open forms are closed in …