Between Tradition and the Avant-Garde: On the Intersection of Literary Self-Consciousness and Innovative Impulse in Postwar American Poetry
Author
Park, SeoyoungIssue Date
2022Keywords
Elizabeth BishopFrank O'Hara
Gwendolyn Brooks
John Ashbery
Middle tradition
Postwar American poetry
Advisor
Nathanson, Tenney
Metadata
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The University of Arizona.Rights
Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.Embargo
Release after 08/21/2025Abstract
The typical topography of twentieth-century American poetry tends to be built around several dualistic parameters: mainstream lyric/modernist experimentalism, tradition/the avant-garde, formalism/anti-formalism, closed form/open form, etc. This dissertation engages with an ongoing debate challenging the pervading tendencies among literary critics to describe and evaluate modern and contemporary poetry in such dichotomous and sometimes reductive terms, especially since the so-called anthology wars of the late fifties waged over these divisions along with the issue of canonicity. Focusing on the immediate postwar era when diverse poetic impulses coexisted in dynamic tension with the modernist inheritance as well as with the great Anglo-European poetic tradition, this dissertation examines poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop and investigates the ways in which they reclaim and reinvent traditional poetic forms and genres to their own innovative aesthetic or political ends and blur critical distinctions between the traditional and the subversive, the old and the new, the conservative and the radical. With a particular focus on problematizing the ideological assumptions grounded on the schematic relations between aesthetics and politics under the persistent influence of the historical avant-garde and its oppositional ethos, this dissertation will complicate bifurcated narratives that divide traditional lyric and experimental poetics in twentieth-century American poetry and contribute to bringing a broad range of unclassified poetic endeavors to the center that cross over limiting boundaries and defining categories.Type
textElectronic Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.Degree Level
doctoralDegree Program
Graduate CollegeEnglish