'Being there together': Representations of community in the poetry of Eric Roach, Derek Walcott, Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop

This dissertation examines representations of community in the poetry of four twentieth-century poets: Eric Roach, Derek Walcott, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop. These poets, two West Indian and two American, not only responded to community as it is conventionally delimited by nation, class, race, or region, but also explored ideas of community from a perspective encouraged by economic and cultural globalization. In doing so, they modeled new ways of thinking about community in a genre that has been dominated by concerns with subjectivity since the advent of European Romanticism. Chapter One focuses on the Tobagonian poet Eric Roach, whose evocations of village life are complicated by concomitant meditations on a poet's relationship to community. A Christological conception of sacrificial love undergirds Roach's hopes for a federated regional community and then, recast in darker terms, drives his laments over its failure. Chapter Two reads Derek Walcott's Omeros, written long after federation, as an exploration of the declining sufficiency of the local as a source of belonging for the cosmopolitan artist from a small society. In transgressing geographic and historical boundaries, the poem describes a flexible and inclusive community structured on the human capacity for sympathy. Chapter Three considers a subtler transgression of geographic boundaries, reading Wallace Stevens's longing for foreign things as a part of his search for a "supreme fiction," for a unifying object of belief. Through his foreign correspondence and collection of exotic objects, the poet found a way to order and control the pressures of an increasingly interconnected world, a way not dependent on the premise of a center. Chapter Four turns to Elizabeth Bishop and her more immediate experience of interconnected worlds. A concern with the ethical and epistemological implications of national borders features in Bishop's Brazil poems. In her last volume, however, she focuses on borderless experiences of community. The common experiences and coincidences of vision in these later poems convey potential unities that disregard, without rejecting, the criteria for traditional forms of community The conclusion argues that these four poets imagined community as something intimately constituted even while responding to its potential for enlarged form.