Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self And Poetry In The Major Works, Brent Steven Robida

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores Percy Shelley’s ethical commitments in several of his major works. Its primary claim is that Shelley’s poetry is involved in the regulation and education of desire. As a fundamentally antinomian poet, Shelley grapples time and again with how moral progress will be guided absent the regulatory influences of law and religion. My dissertation offers an answer to this central impasse affecting scholarship on the ethical world Shelley imagines and attempts to realize through poetry. It argues for a dialectical movement observable in Shelley’s work of the programmatic breakdown, rather than fulfillment, of hope. This study reconsiders the …

Mirror In The Dark: Poems, Carolyn Rose Stice

Doctoral Dissertations

Sentiment in verse has a long and complicated history throughout which it has fluctuated in and out of vogue depending upon the tastes of the time. A poem that is too “sentimental” is one in which the author relies too heavily on emotion to incite a stereotypical response in the reader. In this type of writing emotion is emphasized at the expense of craft. Conversely, when sentiment is consciously used as a tool it can help to infuse writing with active and genuine emotion which help to broaden a reader’s understanding of a poem. The emotion is an active and …

Poesía E Historicidad En Ernesto Cardenal Y Roberto Fernández Retamar, Alberto David Rivera Vaca

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the meta-poetic and historicist thought in Ernesto Cardenal and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s poetry. The concept these poets have poetry is closely related to the historical moment of their times. They ponder about poetry and its function, poetic thought that is nourished by a historical consciousness. This close relationship between poetry and history inevitably includes sensitivity to the social situation in their respective countries and in Latin America. These poets seek to understand the concrete reality thus coming closer to the truth of things. The study shows that these poets, based on history and poetic thought, assume their …

Pablo And Celia, Darren Sean Jackson

Doctoral Dissertations

Pablo and Celia, my collection of lyric poems, is composed in several voices, but the personae Pablo and Celia remain the focus. The collection is a sequence formed of both discrete, untitled fragments and more traditionally titled poems that follow the narrative arc of Pablo and Celia’s relationship as they think aloud or write one another. They speak directly and generally in their own syntax and forms, but this rule is violated when they “steal” one another’s voice, as in “Celia on Celia.” There is an element of chaos in terms of formal properties between poems and voices as …

The Genius Of A Crow: Poems, Michael Jon Levan Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

Every age has its troubles, and ours is no different. Military conflict, economic uncertainty, environmental threats, and other serious global concerns shape how many of us greet every new day. These issues, however, are unacknowledged in a growing segment of contemporary American poetry. Too often, some poets neglect what is outside them and instead turn to producing work that is so focused on the poet’s interior life that no one besides the poet him- or herself can possibly enter. But contemporary American poets can find an important influence in postwar Eastern European poets who have risen from one of the …

Invisible Mink, Jessie L Janeshek

Doctoral Dissertations

Emily Dickinson, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Sarah Piatt render the nineteenth-century “women’s sphere” ironically Unheimliche while simultaneously conveying it as the “home sweet home” the sentimental tradition prescribes it should be. These American women poets turn the domestic milieu into, as Paula Bennett phrases it, “the gothic mise en scene par excellence…the displacements, doublings, and anxieties characterizing gothic experience are the direct consequence of domestic ideology’s impact on the lives and psyches of ordinary bourgeois women (121-122).”

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath continue to represent the Unheimliche home in their poetry through the middle of the twentieth century, specifically by …