The evolving art of Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, and Sterling Brown: Technique as process in early twentieth-century American poetry.

摘要

My thesis analyzes the influence of evolutionary theories of knowledge on the poetic techniques of Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, and Sterling Brown. Additionally, my concluding chapter moves beyond poetry writing to apply theories of evolutionary epistemology to reader response.;I chose these poets partly because each understood organic form in terms of natural selection. That is, each believed that poetic technique was a process of selecting and shaping literary materials in response to social and natural pressures.;Nevertheless, these poets developed strikingly different literary techniques: Moore experimented with syllabics and internal rhyme, Frost relied on accentual-syllabics, and Brown frequently used dipodics.;Each poet developed his or her own technique for varying reasons. Moore, for instance, believed that poetic technique should be comparable to scientific method. Using her knowledge of Darwinian biology and Jamesian psychology, she developed a technique that would challenge readers to reevaluate their assumptions about the text before them, and ultimately train them to challenge their own assumptions about the world around them.;Robert Frost was also influenced by the work of Darwin and the psychology of William James, but wanted to develop a technique that would help him write poems adapted simultaneously to personal use and the literary marketplace. Frost united "avocation and vocation" by using forms (such as blank verse or nonce forms) that relied on familiar conventions such as rhyme or meter, yet allowed him considerable structural and thematic flexibility.;Sterling Brown, however, was influenced by Southern regionalist portrayals of cultures as adaptations to particular social and natural environments. Ultimately, he used folk forms such as dipodics in an attempt to preserve and adapt folklore to the social and expressive needs of African-Americans in an urban age.;In the final chapter, I move from writing to reading poetry. Finding cultural-framework models of reading (such as Stanley Fish's) to be rigidly predictive and totalizing, I bring together pragmatism and cognitive psychology to model more flexibly readers' adaptive abilities simultaneously to construct texts and socially negotiate meaning.