Date of Award
Fall 12-2015
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
School
Humanities
Committee Chair
Jonathan Barron
Committee Chair Department
English
Committee Member 2
Rebecca Frank
Committee Member 2 Department
English
Committee Member 3
Monika Gehlawat
Committee Member 3 Department
English
Committee Member 4
Charles Sumner
Committee Member 4 Department
English
Abstract
In Anglo-American Modernist poetry, place is reduced to an analogue for the cultural degradation brought forth by the disruptive experience of modernity. This demotion stands in sharp contrast to the representation of place as a center of value in the poetry of Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. In this dissertation, I shall explain this value in terms of its connection to a particular cultural substance which Frost, Larkin, and Heaney deem foundational for their non-ideological terms of belonging to place. Frost embraces New England vernacularism first as the basis for his egalitarianism and second as the core substance for his democratic poetics. Larkin evades the nationalist rhetoric of Englishness in the postwar era and attends instead to a sense of place rooted in a rural English tradition. Heaney as well dismisses radical notions of allegiance to place and promotes through his localism a universal message of inclusiveness and tolerance. Frost’s New England Derry, Larkin’s Hull, and Heaney’s Derry are shaped by the political/cultural ruptures and transitions of the twentieth-century. Instead of reducing these three American, English, and Irish places to symbols of modern decline and fragmentation, Frost, Larkin, and Heaney, I argue, represent them as loci of substantial experience and of enduring vernacular, rural, and local virtues.
Copyright
2015, Faisal I. Rawashdeh
Recommended Citation
Rawashdeh, Faisal I., "Robert Frost’s New Hampshire, Philip Larkin’s England, and Seamus Heaney’s Ireland: Non-Urban Place and Democratic Poetry" (2015). Dissertations. 180.
https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/180
Included in
American Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Modern Literature Commons