| Jeanne Robert Foster (1879–1971) was an American poet and journalist of the late-nineteenth and the first two-thirds of the twentieth centuries, whose work glosses both positive and negative aspects of America's shift from a nation of small, rural communities to one of urban development. Her poetry, set in the Adirondack communities in which she grew up, contrasts the importance of individuality and the value of the natural world to the devaluation of human life and the exploitation of nature inherent in what the twentieth century came to define as cultural, social, and economic progress. Immersed in the modernist movement as an author and editor, Foster responded to her encounters with modernity by turning to her mountain heritage for ways to cope with the demands of a new world. While she is a regionalist poet, Foster embodies a modernist trend toward understatement, iconic use of images, and introspection apparent in the art of such poets as Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, her friend and mentor. Although her early poetry depended on end-rhyme and iambic pentameter, Foster adopted the natural rhythms of Adirondack speech, as well as the lilt of the psalms to create the texts which best reflect her vision of a modern world informed by the experience of past generations.; This dissertation, the first scholarship to evaluate and analyze Foster's work in a full-length study, locates her texts in a juncture of regionalism and modernism. The importance of Foster's work lies in her reconstruction of site/sight through which the reader may encounter authentic sentiment, and construct/deconstruct influences of race, class, and gender in the context of modernity. By confronting both the intellect and the emotion divided by a modernist aesthetic theory of fragmentation and alienation, Foster extends her poetic vision “beyond the mountain,” transforming her traditional, regional texts into strategies for evaluating and interpreting the modern world. Her art offers the contemporary reader a version of reality through which to re-vise modernist textual interpretation according to a plurality of meanings contextualized by the quotidian, not based on any political or academic agenda. |
