Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“While The Imagination Strains / After Deer”: William Carlos Williams’S Interrogations Of The American Transcendental Imagination And The Proto-Suburban Scene, Tyler Wagner

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Oftentimes the American suburbs are considered through the lens of architecture, economics, fiction, and visual media. And, typically, the conversation centers on their cultural zenith in the 1950s. One literary form is neglected in this conversation: poetry. This omission is peculiar, as a fascination with the vastness of the continent’s landscape—and its significance—pervades the history of the American verse. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the apparently endless expanses of space and rejuvenative qualities of the American landscape provide the poet’s ideal inspiration, and Walt Whitman, in perhaps the most important collection of poetry of the nineteenth century, Leaves of Grass, is …