The World You Save: Poems in diverse forms (Translation, with Original writing, Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Emile Nelligan, Mei Sheng, France, China).

摘要

This creative dissertation contains 132 original poems, including fourteen translations of works by three French poets, one French-Canadian poet, and one ancient Chinese poet. The poems and translations were written during the period from 1989 to 2003, and reflect the author's intentions to acquire and refine traditional poetic skills, to master a variety of forms and prosodies, to experiment with a range of poetic sensibilities, and to develop a personal style.; The collection is divided into eight parts, with poems written at certain times and places grouped together in approximate chronological order. Some effort has been made to arrange the poems within sections according to thematic or associational sequences, but there is no single theme informing the collection, other than the formal project itself. Thus, it may be inferred from the collection's title that the “world” the author wishes to “save” extends beyond the concerns of the particular poem of that name (in the eponymous part seven) to the province of the poetic Tradition as practiced for centuries in English and for millenia in Western Europe and in other world cultures.; The project of the dissertation, then, is culturally conservative in its attempt to forge continuity with the poetical past. All but two of the poems are metrical in some sense—accentual, accentual-alliterative, syllabic, or accentual-syllabic—and several stanzaic and fixed-forms are represented, including the sonnet, villanelle, sestina, terza rima, Sapphic stanza, pantoum, blank verse, heroic couplets, quatrains, and various nonce-forms. Despite the fundamentally traditional disposition of the poems, innovation and evolution have not been altogether neglected, and many forms are subjected to an “orthodox” treatment in one poem and a “heretical” (if not avant-garde) modification or expansion in another. As for content—the expressed attitudes and themes traverse a contemporary spectrum, and are conveyed (except when clearly mock-archaic) in various registers of contemporary diction.; The author sees himself here as working within (not breaking with) the tradition of English and European verse, balancing the twin goals of preservation and innovation, and seeking to re-vitalize in some individual way, as good poets have always done, the transcendent art of poetry.