Tapinosis in the poetry of Frank O'Hara and Philip Levine

This dissertation constructs a serviceable theory of tapinosis, a form of understatement in which serious things are conveyed in a poetry of informal language and everyday situation. It addresses the use of tapinosis in the work of two contemporary American poets, Frank O'Hara and Philip Levine, who use familiar language to create a sense of intimacy for their readers. O'Hara and Levine often incorporate the details of ordinary life in their poems, but tapinosis is not simply the rhetorical use of detail; it is a complex intermingling of detail and generalizations. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on the establishment of intimacy through the colloquial text. The next chapter contextualizes contemporary tapinosis, suggesting that the figure offers a comforting textual response to the alienated twentieth-century reader. In the third chapter, Levine's attempts to reach such a reader is analyzed, with particular focus on his rhetoric of subtlety: Levine makes striking use of the indirect referent, the conditional tense and negative affirmation. The fourth chapter speaks to the similarities and differences between O'Hara's poetry of everyday life and his daily existence as an art administrator. Throughout, the work of other understated poets such as John Ashbery and Rita Dove extends the figure of tapinosis. In conclusion, the dissertation revisits the definition of tapinosis Richard Sherry offered in 1550, "when the dignity of the thing is diminished by baseness of the word," and offers a contemporary interpretation: "when the baseness of the thing restores dignity to the word.".