Cates, David Isaac (Author)
Yale University
Hammer, Langdon
Fry, Paul H.
Edition Details: Advisor: Hammer, Langdon; Fry, Paul H.
Physical Details: 286 pp.
Language: English
It has often been maintained that Darwinian science made nature poetry in the Wordsworthian mode impossible after 1859. In some ways, this truism is accurate: Darwin's materialism questioned any spiritual communion with nature, and the lessons of the struggle for existence cast a pall, certainly, over the conventions of the pathetic fallacy. To write about nature, poets in the twentieth-century therefore had to recuperate the poetic methods of the Romantic tradition, and to accommodate these techniques to distinctly unromantic scientific advances. Looking closely at the works of three pairs of poets, this dissertation describes the gradual reconciliation between Darwin and nature poetry, as a specific case of the tension between the fictive structures of poetry and the poet's factual knowledge of the world. The dissertation's first chapter clarifies the terms of this tension, ending with a reading of Bishop's Crusoe in England that shows it draws equally on Darwin and Wordsworth. The second chapter examines the differing descriptive techniques of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins as two responses to Darwin's atomist concept of the species: Hopkins replies with an intensely wrought neo-Platonism, while Hardy thwarts the threat of material heredity by focusing, in his poems, on the psychological individual. In the third chapter, I consider the prosodies of Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers as responses to another problem: the decreasing prominence of mankind in the modern biological (and astronomical) frame, and the parallel diminishment of poetry's place in modern culture. Both Jeffers and Frost saw poetry as a field for inquiry and experiment, but the results of their metrical proving are thoroughly distinct. The final chapter considers animal emblems in the work of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop as examples of the means by which the two poets construct symbolic value: I show that their modernist emblems draw on both Renaissance poetic models and the descriptive authority of popular natural-history prose. In a return to Bishop's Crusoe in England, the chapter offers suggestions as to the way meaning is conveyed and understood in descriptive poetry.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 63 (2003): 3541. UMI order no. 3068259.
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