Between Tradition and the Avant-Garde: On the Intersection of Literary Self-Consciousness and Innovative Impulse in Postwar American Poetry

Abstract

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.