"I am made by her, and undone" : mother-son relationships in confessional and post-confessional lyric

This dissertation argues that the state is the silent center of poetic production in the United States after WWII. “State Verse Culture” is the first history of the national poet, the Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress, whose office sits at the nexus of institutional actors of postwar poetry. Drawing on archival research at the Library of Congress and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, it traces the collusion of 1) federal bodies (The Library of Congress, The State Department, National Endowment for the Arts) with 2) literaryprofessional organizations (Poetry Society of America, Poetry magazine/The Poetry Foundation) and 3) private patrons (Paul Mellon, Ruth Lilly). The cooperation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of what I call state verse culture—recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, and dominant following the end of the Cold War in the 1990s-2000s. Chapter 1, “State Verse Scandals: Views from Yaddo, St Elizabeths, and the Library of Congress, 1945-1956” narrates the Bollingen Prize controversy of 1949 and the arbitration of literary capital between the Library, Poetry magazine and the university system. Chapter 2, “Inaugurating National Poetry: Robert Frost and Cold War Arts, 1956-1965” argues that the Frost-Kennedy years transformed the function of poetry in national culture. The phonocentric narrative poem provided the expressive agency of artist-citizens as ideological weaponry in the global Cold War, and a blueprint for national poets in the longer project of neoliberal identity formation. Chapter 3, “The Politics of Voice: The Workshop Poet and Poet Laureate as the Expressive Subject, 1965-1993” describes the rise of the creative writing program industry, and argues that the recentralization of poetic production in the academy after WWII is a twofold legacy: the MFA workshop poet and the poet-critic of the English Department constitute distinct cultural roles in postwar America. Chapter 4, “Civil versus Civic Verse: National Projects of U.S. Poets Laureate, 1991-2015,” examines Poets Laureate initiatives (Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and Billy Collins’s Poetry 180) funded through the state verse culture nexus. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor Robert Perelman

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State verse culture: American poets laureate, 1945-2015

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Paths of most resistance: navigating the culture industry in William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty

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Feeling With Imagination: Sympathy and Postwar American Poetry

This year's bibliography continues the survey of dissertations, periodicals, reviews, articles, and books dealing with the many aspects of life-writing that have appeared in previous fall issues of Biography from 1985 through 1988. It includes works written from 1986 through 1989, including studies of the theory and practice of biography and autobiography, as well as reports of conferences and special issues of periodicals devoted to life-writing. Works by and about women continue to be significant, as well as oral histories and ethical issues connected with biographers' work.

Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing for the Latter-1980s

The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell.@@@Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom.

Poetic Development@@@The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell@@@Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom@@@The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination

Bruce Bawer

Papers

The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell.@@@Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom.

Poetic Development@@@The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell@@@Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom@@@The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination