Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …