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Degree

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, English, 2010.

Abstract

This dissertation examines Amy Lowell’s poetry, her use of allusion especially pertaining to her expression of Sapphic Modernism, and her significant contribution to a new, lyric tradition rooted in America. In this study, I define Sapphic Modernism as poetry that is written in a style similar to Sappho’s, and which alludes to and refigures the ideas, images, and motifs of Sappho’s work and of other poets in modern ways to gain new poetic perspective. By alluding to Sappho’s images and motifs, and internalizing Sappho’s poetic craft, Lowell empowered her lyric gift and shaped her expression of modernism. Lowell’s Sapphic Modernism activates the female body as a landscape of desire where the beloved is both a subject and object and elevates the act of writing about love into an epiphanic experience. As a woman and as a lesbian, she inherited a fragmented tradition that called upon her to reclaim what had not yet been publically spoken. Lesbian eroticism, the depiction of female desire and a gynocentric approach to literary history and form lay at the heart of this act of reclamation. Like Sappho, Lowell challenges and re-writes her poetic predecessors in order to create poetry that is inclusive of her unique experience as a woman and a lesbian. Lowell’s modernism celebrated the aesthetics of her own daily life while encouraging inclusivity within the poetic tradition in which she was writing. By close reading of Lowell’s poetry, looking at how she engaged her predecessors, and studying how her work influenced the poets who have written after her, this study illuminates the deep impact her work has had on subsequent generations of poets affected by her work. Lowell’s Sapphic Modernism created a revisionary call and response between the poetic voices of the past and the poets of the future, creating a foundational vision of an American/world poetry that is constantly challenging and refashioning its borders. If we shake the burning birch tree of Lowell’s invention, we can find, almost a century later, the falling fruit of multiple generations flourishing in the work of poets male and female, gay, bisexual and straight.

Subject Headings

American literature; Classical studies; Comparative literature; Gender; Literature; Womens studies

Keywords

Amy Lowell; Sappho; Sapphic Modernism; American Literature; Lyric poetry; Classics; allusion; poetry; feminist studies

Committee / Advisors

Judith Oster, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Mary Grimm (Committee Member)
Gary Stonum, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Martin Helzle, Ph.D. (Committee Member)

Document number: case1259612760
Permalink: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1259612760

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