The Poetics of the Archive: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Poems Containing History

This dissertation explores changing conceptions of the historical archive as they emerge in exemplary "poems containing history" from Ezra Pound to Susan Howe, particularly around issues of access, power, and preservation. Following what cultural historian Ann Stoler has termed "the archival turn," this study marks changes in interdisciplinary notions of the archive from a physical repository for objective historical records to a locus of power that, in its selective and ordering capacities, reveals itself as an agent in shaping human history. Exploring variations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I consider "poems containing history" as "poem-archives" of re-collected material, chosen from the historical archive and given new arrangement by the poet, who assumes the role of "poet-archivist," renegotiating the telling of history through the continuing tradition of verse epic. Through performative means these poets acknowledge the material complexities of writing history, allowing for a reconsideration of archival-historical practices along with the democratic possibility that, like the historical archive, these poems will continue to open new avenues of participation and awareness.;Chapter 1 examines Ezra Pound's interactions with the archives he consulted in Italy during his research into the Malatesta cantos (1923), exploring the ways in which "ideogrammic reading" functions as a means for everyday readers to access his poem-archive. Chapter 2 identifies two competing systems for recording human memory in book I of Charles Olson's Maximus Poems (1957): the archive of written history, following Jacques Derrida, and the repertoire of skill and knowledge that is handed down generationally, following Diana Taylor. Chapter 3 traces the history of textual transmission in Susan Howe's That This (2010), allowing the poet to address questions regarding the persistence of the individual after death, including the value of the original versus copies and the possibility for archival fragments to carry the aura of the human. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which post-Language poet Jena Osman and conceptual poet Robert Fitterman use appropriative techniques in their respective works, The Network (2010) and Rob the Plagiarist (2009), to interrogate the history of ownership and human agency in late capitalist culture in which the digital present functions as an "archive of everything.".