Interference and impress: Twentieth-century American poetry and the visual arts

Steven Craig Merriam, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the ways that visual arts, and the ideas and assumptions about cultural history that they represent, have "interfered" with modern American poetry, in particular how poets have confronted (primarily) painting and how they have accepted the underlying premises of artists' engagement with the world. In the first chapter, I explore Wallace Stevens' complex relationship with the visual arts by focusing on how the poet attenuated the intellectual issues underlying perception evident in the work of two artists: Paul Cezanne and Juan Gris, I believe Cezanne's most dedicated cubist pupil. During an important political moment in American history (the mid-thirties), Stevens invoked Cezanne as an imaginative hero, carrying, as Gris had done before him, Cezanne's realisation to its most radical and fundamental conclusions about the arcane that exists beneath perception. The middle chapter on the New York School poet Frank O'Hara explores the shift from abstract expressionism to pop art. I contextualize the "death of modernism," and discuss how the "end" of the modernist avant-garde at its American beginning both enlisted a type of O'Hara subjectivity used by other poets of the later New York School, and solidified the idiosyncratic forms of attention of that subjectivity into the person of Andy Warhol. In the last chapter, on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian, I explore how postmodern poetry itself returns to modernist issues such as the tactile nature of words and their page layouts, the iconic power of the written language over the spoken, and the implications of temporal arts like "happenings" on this iconicity. I discuss Howe and Hejinian in light of conceptual art, one of the most important "retrograde" phenomena in American art after pop. Howe and Hejinian in particular endeavor to create new personal and cultural histories, and are influenced by both the modernist aesthetic Duchamp effected in the readymades and by the "anti-aesthetic" aesthetic position of the postwar artist Ad Reinhardt. Each also updates traditional modernism by attempting to give marginalized voices speaking parts in what's left of the late twentieth-century's historical narrative.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Lein, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature|Fine Arts

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