Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

Reading a ghostly company of lyric and epic poetry, treatises on aesthetics and poetics, manuals of technical prosody, and works of occult speculation across one and a half centuries, "The Phantoms of a Thousand Hours" argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and poetic theorists seize on the ghost as the inchoate form of poetry itself. Beginning in the pious meditations of the eighteenth-century "Graveyard School," these writers spectralize the operations of the poem and fashion poetic structures into chambers of vigil where the ghost might be awaited and encountered. Alive to the recursive directions of contemporary historical poetics, this study challenges the emerging scholarly consensus on the ghost in the long nineteenth century as either a creature of fiction, born almost coeval with the novel in the work of Defoe, or a residual form, a remainder from folklore and oral balladry that glides uncertainly into Gothic's set dressing. Rather, just as poets envisioned their craft as instinct with ghostly measures, rhythms, and pauses, occult writers from antiquaries to Spiritualists substantialized and realized the ghost through the opaque lyricism and manifest technique of poetry. Accepting neoformalism's sound insistence on the historicity of form itself, my work nonetheless eschews New Formalism's frequent dismissal of the specter from the spectral: even the most evanescent, technical traces of the ghost in the poetry of the long nineteenth century recall and reflect living structures of preternatural belief and occult vision. Like Shelley in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," these poets "sought for ghosts," and, if they were "not heard" and "saw them not," they could yet take solace in "the phantoms of a thousand hours," of the myriad ideal visions of poetry's ghosts across a long Graveyard Century. Across the Graveyard Century spanning from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy, this study argues that the ghost haunts poetry's sense of its own form precisely (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jill Galvan (Committee Co-Chair); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Hannibal Hamlin (Committee Member); Jacob Risinger (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2007, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

By looking at the way therapists use poetry in their practices we can find new approaches to teaching and exploring poetry that will make literary study more valuable to students. Poetry therapists approach poetry by focusing on the reader's experience of a poem rather than on the poem's meaning per se. Using this approach to poetry in the classroom has a number of potential benefits for students. First, poetry offers students the opportunity to increase their self-awareness by helping them examine their experience in terms of emotions and images as well as language. Such a process can enable students to have new perceptions and emotional experiences that can benefit them greatly. The study of poetry can also validate students' emotional experiences, particularly painful ones that are often repressed. And poems can also serve as loving external objects that can help students repair their negative attitudes toward the external world. If we allow students to relate to poems emotionally and imaginatively, we can help them achieve the goals of personal renewal and a more positive relationship to the external world. The study begins by examining students' defense mechanisms that prevent them from experiencing the benefits of the study of poetry, and by considering how we can use poetry to relax these defenses. It moves on to consider how the regressive nature of poetry helps students to become more self-aware and integrated. The second part of the study presents specific classroom approaches and exercises that enable students to use poetry to achieve renewal, openness, deeper self awareness, reparation, empathy, and a positive yet realistic view of the world. Part two presents approaches based on brief poetry therapy, experiential therapy, and metaphor therapy. The final chapters deal with classroom approaches to three Pre-Raphaelite poets—Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris—whose work is particularly useful for this approach to poetry.

Committee: Mark Bracher (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2020, Theological Studies

The Poetics of Loss: A Theological Reading of Selected Works of Matthew Arnold is one Catholic theologian's attempt to make sense of the mysterious, and possibly troubling, claim that Arnold is “a serious theological thinker.” If the author finds this claim mysterious, it is not least because Arnold's poetry engages and relies on a `poetics of loss,' which the author defines as Arnold's felt sense of isolation, disintegration, and hopelessness as he observes the Sea of Faith retreating. Despite what must be to the Catholic theologian Arnold's troubling and troubled existential, religious, and socio-historical commitments, however, the author argues that Arnold's poetry is precisely where Arnold is most theologically significant, relevant, and compelling. This is in contradistinction to those critics who locate Arnold's theological significance in his religious prose writings. The author's theo-poetic retrieval of Arnold is aided by a close reading of Karl Rahner's “Poetry and the Christian” and “Priest and Poet,” which he then applies to Matthew Arnold's “The Buried Life.”

Committee: William Portier PhD (Committee Chair); Dennis Doyle PhD (Committee Member); Mark Ryan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Religion; Theology

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2016, English

Literary scholars question if Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese should be read as a biographical map of the Browning's courtship, or as more recent scholarship suggests, as a literary performance. While biographical references can be traced throughout the sequence, scholars fail to notice the ways in which Barrett Browning highlight the artificial nature of the sonnets, reminding readers that the feelings expressed within the sequence depend on her skill and power as a poet. I suggest that over the course of the sequence, she increasingly incorporates the highly intimate, personal, spontaneous language of the love letter into her sonnets in order to achieve the illusion of absolute sincerity, an illusion that is so successful, subsequent readers interpreted the sequence as pure biography. She refers to two kinds of love letters in the sonnets and calls attention to the parts of the love letter that contrast and parallel with her sonnets. By comparing the poetry and love letters, Barrett Browning tells the readers she is about to put on a performance, and in the penultimate sonnet she does put on a performance, no longer self-reflexively commenting. She controls the degree of sincerity intended in the sonnets to show her skill at creating sincere poetry, but this often becomes overlooked by the critic's stories attached to the publication, which disrupt the intended author/speaker relationship and cause the sequence to lose the potency that should exemplify Barrett Browning's careful construction of sonnets.

Committee: Melissa Gregory Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2010, English (Arts and Sciences)

The Arthurian myth is a complex system of tales, each of which focuses on some aspect of the legendary King Arthur, his Knights of the Round Table, or the royal court at Camelot. The power of the myth is that it is mutable, recyclable, and recursive. The purpose of this thesis is to examine and evaluates these elements of the myth and how they have evolved from the medieval era to the Victorian era. The inquiry will focus primarily on Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King and the ways in which he implemented recursive circles and cycles stylistically, structurally, and narratively throughout his individual idylls and the complete poem to wholly express the self-reflexive, appropriative, and contemporary natures of the Arthurian myth. Finally, the investigation moves toward Tennyson's contributions to the myth and the ways authors continued to experiment artistically with the myth into the twenty-first century.

Committee: Dutton Marsha (Advisor); Matthew VanWinkle (Committee Member); Janis Holm (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature; Folklore; History; Literature

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2012, English

During the mid to late Victorian period, Euripides' tale of Medea was given new life by the suffragette movement. As Victorians began to question women's rights and capabilities, Medea's story resurfaced as a cautionary tale showing the damage that occurs when women repress and shape their identities to fit uncompromising social expectations for their gender. In this thesis, I examine two Victorian women poets who interpreted Medea as a feminist statement: Augusta Webster, whose “Medea in Athens” (1870) was featured as the lead dramatic monologue in her collection Portraits, and Amy Levy whose closet drama “Medea: A Dramatic Fragment” (1881) was published as a part of her collection A Minor Poet and Other Verse. Both these writers examine Medea's psychology and the context in which she lives. Through their use of poetic conventions, Webster and Levy are able to suggest ways in which Medea's autonomy and identity are co-opted by a patriarchal society. I argue that Webster uses the tactics of the dramatic monologue to explore Medea's disintegrated sense of self, depicting her as a woman whose identity has been usurped by her husband's view of her. Levy appropriates the techniques of closet drama to focus on the voice of a patriarchal culture that excludes Medea long before her act of filicide. Through close readings of these two poems, I show the cultural impact and relevancy of Webster and Levy as female voices in the Victorian literary tradition.

Committee: Melissa Valiska Gregory PhD (Advisor); Matthew Wikander PhD (Committee Chair); Christina Fitzgerald PhD (Committee Chair) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Gender; Womens Studies