Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The “Man Walks Outside Time Now”: Verbal Representations Of Photographic Images In The Poems Of Larry Levis, Lauren Miner

Theses and Dissertations

The poet Larry Levis often employed ekphrasis as an elegiac device—particularly with his verbal descriptions of photographic images—to explore human suffering and reconcile feelings of loss. Through the ekphrastic mode, Levis could juxtapose otherwise disparate images, manipulating their temporal and spatial relationships, to achieve what he conceived an authentic portrait of the human experience. The poet, through his verbal descriptions of photographic images, does not try to evade the pain or joy of being human; instead, he confronts his grief directly and, in so doing, transcends that suffering to better understand himself and his own human position. This thesis analyzes …

Dante Gabriel Rossetti And The Romance Of Loss, Jane N. Cooper

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Through paired poems and paintings, Dante Gabriel Rossetti explored the nature of Love—both physical and spiritual—as made evident by distance or absence. Influenced early by his familiarity with Dante Alighieri and a confluence of changing social and artistic attitudes, Rossetti transformed the dialogue around him to a more personal internal conversation, revealed by pen and brush. This paper examines the dynamic of that pervasive thread in Rossetti’s work through a discussion of the influences upon the artist, the artist’s effect upon important figures of mid- to late nineteenth century England, and the important relationships that shaped his discourse. In addition, …

About A Yellow Ball, Shannon Alice Salter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These are poems made from many things: color, eggs, oranges, many kinds of seeds, leaves, wind, California, the desert, birds. They are things alive in the world and alive in my heart. I cannot take them out of the world, but from my heart I can have whatever appears on its surface. The language of steam.

They are poems that like to be at home.

California is my home and so is the Mojave (and so is every desert). I live in a valley about four hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, in the city of Las Vegas. What better …

Heathens And How They're Made, Garret Crowe

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis contains 23 poems with an introduction in which I explain how I craft my poetry. In the introduction, I use examples from both critical and creative sources to identify tools I utilize during the craft process of a poem. The subject matter of the poems within this thesis ranges from speakers pondering childhood moments to mature voices examining domestic relationships. Some of the poems may be considered confessional poetry as the works are immensely personal and the speaker is I, the writer. Other poems apply literary styles that are commonly associated with Dirty Realism and Southern Gothic.

The Dark Is Melting: Narrative Persona, Trauma And Communication In Sylvia Plath's Poetry, Jessica J. Feuerstein

ETD Archive

This thesis examines the poetry of Sylvia Plath to identify a new perspective that looks at the function of narrative voice in her poetry. This perspective identifies the ways Plath's narrator is given a distinct voice, separate from that of the poet herself. The narrative voice interacts with a listener, the audience, to express a traumatic experience and explores how Plath's narrators share their horrific internal worlds with the audience to make a direct connection to the audience. In past scholarship, Plath is figured as a confessional poet, and the speaker in her poems are treated as the personal confessions …

Book Of Rooms, Miranda Arocha Smith

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This book of poems is a meandering journey through various rooms, temporary residences. Lyric poems alternate with prose-poems. In sections such as "Body Orbit" and "Exits and Edges," the poet probes artifacts of memory and culture, investigates her relationship to a variety of places (a monastery, a used bookstore, Taco Bell, a website), and explores silence and the sacred. Of central concern is impermanence and the nature of awareness itself. Grounded in autobiography, the poems reflect time spent in a Buddhist monastery and the city of El Paso, TX.

My Higher Self: Elizabeth Bishop And The Endurance Of Emerson, Joshua Andrew Mayo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While there exists some scholarship affirming the aesthetic and intellectual connections between transcendentalism and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, there is to date no substantial study of what role Ralph Waldo Emerson singularly played in the inheritance of that tradition. This essay seeks to validate Emerson as Bishop's literary parentage, an influence that, though not immediately identifiable, greatly shaped her creative process. In so doing, it addresses the critical mistakes which have prevented a thorough discussion of Emerson's relevance and, moreover, negatively dominated the imagination of Bishop scholarship. As an exploration of the writers' shared iconography, their mutual metaphors, the …

Star Lake, Arda Collins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Star Lake is a collection of poems.

A Poetics Of Space: Opening Up A World Through Vessel Metaphors In Modern And Contemporary Poetry, Lili Pariser

Honors Papers

This project follows the strangely consistent fascination in modern and contemporary poetry with vessel objects. From Wallace Stevens' "jar [placed] in Tennessee," to "That vase" of Philip Larkin or James Merrill's "clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on," even so far back in literary history as the shapely "Grecian Urn" of John Keats' famous ode among numerous others, the genre is teeming with vessels. I argue that these kinds of objects open up distinctive possibilities for poetic exploration because of the unique way that they engage with space. Consequently, by using these objects as metaphors, poets are able …