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The Concept Of The Local In Williams' Developing Poetics: The Poet's Perception And Representation Of The Poor, Jon Montgomery

Masters Theses

The present study serves as a thematic, critical perspective on William Carlos Williams' poetry on the poor; specifically, I address his representation of the poor in his poetry and his attitude towards them. From 1914-38, his attitude towards the poor goes through three significant stages of change. Roughly, the stage boundaries can be marked by decade: the 1910s, the 1920s and the 1930s.

In the first stage, Williams recognizes his empathetic and aesthetic distance from the poor, since his aesthetics rest primarily on his youthful fascination with Keats. The poet desires to reflect properly the lives of the poor. The …

Robert Frost And Maya Angelou: Poet-As-Rhetor In The Presidential Inauguration: Textual Symbols And The Symbol Of Enactment, Donna M. Witmer

Masters Theses

This criticism uses an organic approach to examine the rhetorical properties of Frost's and Angelou's inaugural poems and their individual enactments respective of the constraints and exigencies in the Presidential inaugurations of Kennedy and Clinton. Apparently responding to the constraints of television's sound bite as well as to exigencies of the traditional inauguration and the need to serve a new generation and a culturally diverse population, the Clinton Administration combined the poetic form, used to heighten an emotional response, with an enactment as a synecdochic symbol, used to assert sociopolitical ideology.