In “the American Strain”: The Hybrid Poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Chin, and Sherman Alexie

The history of twentieth-century American poetry is characterised by boundaries, binaries, divides, and factionalism. The critical separation of the social and political from the aesthetic, the “ethnicity/poetry binary” described by Alan Golding, and the evolution of cultural studies departments are a few examples. However, most prominent is the division of dominant American poetry into two exclusionary factions. One is associated with refashioning traditional lyric forms, the other with formal invention and experimentation. While both are considered the founders of American poetry, Emily Dickinson has been placed in the former camp and Walt Whitman the latter. This thesis contests their opposition and asserts that both are poetic revolutionaries who initiated a poetic lineage characterised by its democratic orientation, hybridity, formal experimentation, and its challenge to the Eurocentric canon that has long dominated American poetry. Their poetic progeny include William Carlos Williams, who advocated for socio-cultural hybridity by name and developed a “local” and American hybrid poetics distinctive from his modernist counterparts and Adrienne Rich, who initiated her revolution through a feminist poetics, which she later located within emergent nationalism. The poetic revolutions of these predecessors contributed to the upsurge of emergent poetries and poets in the 1980s and 1990s and the arrival of the contemporary poets of the American Strain, Chinese American poet, Marilyn Chin, and Native American poet, Sherman Alexie. Chin describes her cultural position and poetics as hybrid, and Alexie’s poetry explores and formally reflects the “in-between”, a liminal position between the American and Indian components of his identity. This lineage, like the hybrid poetics of its participants, challenges the boundaries and divides of American poetry. In the process, it reveals a history of hybrid and democratic poetry running through the centre of the American canon and American culture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Parmar, Nissa

Contributors dc:contributor

• Goody, Alex
• White, Eric

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/765r-6d67

OAI identifier oai:identifier

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