| In this work I contend that American nature poetry changed significantly after the Modernist period. I argue that certain poets, in their reaction to and use of Modernist poetics, wrote nature poetry in two distinct modes. For my argument, I use the distinction between Postmodernist and Neoromantic modes as a model for categorizing and analyzing the nature poetry written by these poets.;In the introduction I provide an overview of the nature lyric's Romantic origins, and a brief discussion of the status of nature as a subject in twentieth-century poetry. Close readings of poems by W. S. Merwin and George Oppen, and poems by Denise Levertov and Charles Wright, serve respectively as preliminary definitions of the Postmodernist and the Neoromantic. Chapters on Lorine Niedecker and Kenneth Rexroth stand as detailed examinations of these two poetic modes. Specifically, it is my contention that these two poets, as second generation Modernists, are the pivots between Modernist poetics and the Postmodernist and Neoromantic movements. The Postmodernist nature lyric, found in the work of Niedecker, continues Modernism's experiments with language, and reflects its preference for an impersonalism that effaces the lyric subject. The Neoromantic nature lyric, developed in the work of Rexroth, reestablishes the Romantic belief in the presence of the lyric subject, and asserts the connection between language and nature.;In the next chapter, I examine the sacramental relationship to nature developed by Rexroth and Robinson Jeffers in their long poems written during World War Two. I then turn to William Everson and discuss how his extension of this sacramental stance adopts the rhetoric of crisis from the environmentalist movement. The final chapter considers the work of Charles Olson and Larry Eigner as indicative of Postmodernist nature poetry. The crux of Postmodernism is the materiality of the signifier, and both poets experiment with poetic methods that use words as things. The Postmodernist chapter serves as the conclusion, in which I hope to have introduced ecologically oriented readers and critics to poets who work outside of the more familiar Neoromantic mode, and thereby to have expanded the canon of American nature poetry. |
