Self-Referential Anxiety in the Romantic and Modern Long Poem

Many of the long poems on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are characterized by a pronounced self-referential anxiety on the part of their narrators; representatives of this group of poems are Wordsworth's Prelude, William Carlos Williams' Paterson, and Adrienne Rich's "From an Old House in America" and Sources, though much the same anxiety can be seen in long poems by such diverse poets as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. In works by each of these poets, the author's insecurities about the poem's form and subject matter and about the appropriate role of the poet are articulated through the character of the "poet-figure," the symbolic representation of the poetic self in the poem.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Daubs, James Daniel

• Literature, Modern
• Literature, American
• Literature, English

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8815333

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/69469