"Amid gloomy forecasts of the decline of the humanities and the death of poetry, Angus Fletcher, a wise and dedicated literary voice, sounds a note of powerful, tempered optimism. He lays out a fresh approach to American poetry at large, the first in several decades, expounding …
Rather than treating American poets as the happy or rebellious children of European romanticism, Fletcher uncovers a distinct lineage for American poetry. His point of departure is the English writer John Clare - he then centres on the radically American vision expressed by Emer…
This dissertation focuses on the work of three American poets – Walt Whitman, George Oppen, and Amiri Baraka – whose writing exemplifies the persistence of “seriality” in Modern poetry and poetics. Though “serial poetics” has long been invoked in making sense of a wide range of …
Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth
As the first full treatment of Walt Whitman's French sources and his later impact on French writers, this book revises our image of the poet and challenges many critical assumptions.Originally published in 1980.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technol…
Ancient Egyptian culture has been a powerful influence on a major tradition of English literature that runs from Edmund Spenser‘s The Faerie Queene (1596), one of whose major iconographic centers is the temple of Isis, to John Crowley‘s four-volume novel Ægypt (2007). My dissert…
Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 at the age of thirty-six. The twelve unnamed poems that comprise the book address nature, life, time, love, simplicity, home, country, and more. The volume encapsulates an overwhelming optimism that Whitman believed …
In the last three decades, critical attention to the major work of H.D. has placed her in the Anglo-American canon as a significant modernist; however, some critics have recently questioned her power to remain there. The feminist and psychoanalytic frameworks that moved H.D. fro…
This dissertation explores how a number of romantic writers, Wordsworth and Whitman especially, presented themselves as prophets, claiming to speak for nature. Like biblical prophets narrating prophetic calls, these writers relate how nature called them to poetry, which raises k…
