Date of Award

1-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Content Description

1 online resource (iv, 54 pages)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Eric Keenaghan

Committee Members

Paul Stasi

Keywords

American Poetry, Ecocriticism, Ecopoetics, Modern Poetry, Modernism, Poetry, American poetry, Ecology in literature, Nature in literature

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities

Abstract

This project examines ecopoetics as a means of decentering the industrial and urban tropes so heavily focused on in modernist studies. Through the ecopoetics of Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) and H.D. (1886-1961), the natural world and its influence on human subjects prove to be as emblematic of modern literature as artificial places and spaces are. While ecocritical theorists like Scott Knickerbocker and Andreas Weber point to the natural world as a paramount guide to navigating social and cultural dynamics, the presence of ecopoetics in modernism is a particularly significant field. Rukeyser’s long poem, The Book of the Dead (1936) puts ecopoetics in conversation with politics as she depicts the harm done to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia by industrialization. H.D.’s poetry collection Sea Garden (1916) homes in on the individual, and she addresses the natural world as a catalytic entity - one that deeply influences human identity - through the poetry's natural places that focus on the natural objects that compose the whole. How does an entity as aged and ubiquitous as the natural world fit into modern poetry? How is the relationship between humanity and ecology impacted by artificial entities? How is the human subject influenced by their relationship to the natural world? These are but a few questions that my project addresses.

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