Nature, Image, and American Modern Mystique: Gestural Forces in Visual Poems by Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings
| Autor: | Po-Ting Liu, 劉柏廷 |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2009 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 97 American visual poetry demonstrates not only certain Modernists’ inner “dance of intellect” but also a variety of acrobatics of its alphabetical writing; like a new mystique, it emerges as a new way of articulating the psychic experience about/from Nature. This transfiguration of American modern poetry benefits simultaneously from Continental avant-garde movements (the analytical Cubism, Imagism, Vorticism) and Oriental poetics (Haiku, Chinese Classical poetry). By connecting the East and West, poets in the United States, though caught in an uneasy era during the World Wars, take up, ruminate upon both invaluable cultural heritages and further reinvent other singular types of representational technique in poetry. This thesis follows a comparatist approach. It mainly focuses on the transport/ translation of nature force in American visual poetry, its transformation in form/ semiosis, and its adequate emulation of the East along with its breakthrough. Firstly, I single out the greatest mentor of American Modernism, Ezra Pound, tracing his discovery of a new vehicle for human sensibility and the trajectory of his various Vorticist practices leading to his most mystical “In a Station of the Metro.” Next, I dwell on one of the most pronounced yet at times notorious experimenter in Anglo-American visual poetry, E. E. Cummings. I highlight his new styles of verbal performance that are strikingly related to Pound’s or those in the Orient. This thesis starts with a brief introduction to earlier Modern mysticism and Pound’s proposal of how to transfer nature force into visual poetry in such a cultural milieu, followed by Cummings’ iconic way of translating nature into verbal art. The second chapter continues probing into the visual qualities and legacies of American modern poetry in order to find out the intrinsic connection between Pound and Cummings’ creative energy, Western visual art, and the Oriental aestheticism. The third chapter surveys Pound’s ideal of love, Imagism/Vorticism, Fenollosan influence, ideogrammic method, and how he attains speed in poetry through reduction and superposition. The fourth chapter examines Cummings’ magical iconism in his nature poems that bear certain qualities similar to Haiku and ideogrammic method and at the same time imply possible shortcoming of Western writing system, especially in his famous “grass- hopper” poem. As a Chinese/Taiwanese student, through this study, in Cummings’ words, I discover new feelings in language from “now/here:” I come to realize the early connection between Oriental poetics/modern poetry; more interestingly, it is also through this study that I understand better the East through the West, and vice versa. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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