This side of despair: Forms of hopelessness in modern poetry

The sense of meaninglessness, the idea that the world has no intrinsic purpose or value, has been a defining characteristic of modern existence. As the twentieth century advanced, more and more individuals found that they could not believe in the principles given to them by religion and culture. Modern poetry has naturally reflected this thinking; however, criticism tends to concentrate on the ways modern poets overcome meaninglessness and move "beyond nihilism" rather than the ways they accept it as an inherent condition of reality. Moreover, because such critics only examine how poetry can solve (or attempt to solve) the problem of meaninglessness, they often emphasize thematic and philosophical issues over figurative and formal ones. They are, in other words, more interested in the poets' ideas about meaninglessness than their representations of it.;This dissertation focuses on poets who recognize meaninglessness as an inescapable problem of existence and who, instead of attempting to solve that problem, contain it within their work through formal and figurative representation. Wilfred Owen, Robert Penn Warren, Philip Larkin, and Sylvia Plath address meaninglessness not as a vague abstraction but as a permanent, obvious factor of existence, and, hence, their poetry gives it the image and shape of an observable object. Each chapter asks two primary questions: (1) how does a particular poet make meaninglessness a "thing," giving it both a formal and figurative presence? (2) how does that poet manage this presence within the poem, making sense of the world while still confronting what threatens to make everything senseless? Though these poets respond to nihilism in individual ways, they all find themselves in the same struggle between their knowledge of an inherently meaningless world and their desire for a meaningful one. Consequently, their poetry is a continuous effort at balancing this knowledge and desire against one another, never resolving nihilism but never acquiescing to it either. Such a perpetual struggle demonstrates not only how poets cope with existential despair but, more importantly, the ways poetry attempts, even if it fails, to create a sense of purpose and value to the world.