'Father-stem and mother-root': Genealogy, memory, and the poetics of origins in Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, and Li-Young Lee

This project concerns itself with the work of three poets deeply invested in a poetics of origins arising out of the confluence of post-romantic preoccupations with familial memory, childhood, and youth initiated by William Wordsworth as it intersects with a twentieth-century American fascination with psychology. Following Charles Taylor's perception that self-discovery requires invention, I claim Roethke, Bishop, and Lee negotiate a poetic space in which “inheritance” signifies aesthetic debts to past and contemporary writers, as well as “the little that we get for free/the little of our earthly trust” (Bishop), the ethnically and geographically situated family legacies that have contributed to their individual poetic accomplishments. Aware to a degree Wordsworth was not, perhaps, of the manner in which any life story mediated through language generates an alternate entity that lives and breathes primarily in the cry of its own occasion, these poets create masks that both show forth and occlude the biographical circumstances of their literal, historical lives.; Drawing upon Pierre Nora's conception of “realms of memory” (lieux de mémoire) as a theoretical backdrop, I devote considerable attention to memoir, autobiographical fiction, and occasional writings as a means of gaining greater purchase on each poet's larger artistic aims. In Chapter One, “‘I Am Nothing But What I Remember’: Theodore Roethke and the Recursive Poetics of Origin,” I approach Roethke's poetry as the outgrowth of an obsession with a missing father to whom the Roethkean persona functions as a Lost Son. Chapter Two, “Questions of Memory, Geographies of Self: Elizabeth Bishop in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts” explores Bishop's reliance on poetry and prose to reconstruct a house of family memory and occluded personal history out of the substance of her own life. “‘Memory Revises Me’: Memory, Genealogy, and the Quest for Self in the Writings of Li-Young Lee” (Chapter Three), opens up the ways Lee, through such poems as “Furious Versions” and his memoir The Winged Seed, engages with the dynamics of his personal family legacy as a means of discovering his own poetic idiom, thus highlighting postmodern American poetry's potentially unlimited range in this mode.