| In Pursuit of the Real examines the influence of skeptical and idealist philosophies on three modern poets, each with strong, though often conflicted, affinities to Shelley, and discusses the different poetic strategies used by each to counter the anxieties these philosophies generated. The concern of poetry is always meaning, that its words will make a difference to the life of the reader, and radical skepticism's assertion, as Shelley put it, "that nothing exists but as it is perceived" therefore challenges poetry's very reason for being, since it denies we can know an ultimate, external reality. T. S. Eliot's turn to religion, Thomas Hardy's cultivation of heuristic belief, and Wallace Stevens' search for a supreme fiction are all attempts to reply to this challenge. The dissertation is divided into three chapters. The first establishes the depth of Shelley's influence on Eliot by comparing passages involving meetings with selves that speak from a condition of greater knowledge or meaning than the human, such as the "familiar compound ghost" in "Little Gidding" and Rousseau in The Triumph of Life. The second follows Hardy's attempt in many of his lyric poems to enact the efforts of a speaker to discover a source of significance within our impressions of the world. It is this location of meaning within our relationship to perception--rejecting both the points of view that meaning is out there in the world and that it exists merely as the projection of our own desires--that often empowers his greatest poems, including the Poems of 1912-13. The third chapter is a sustained close reading of Steven's Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, perhaps the most direct attempt so far to reconcile poetry and a skeptical vision of reality, the imagination and fact. |
