Fields of verse: Science, technology and the poetry of Hart Crane and Robinson Jeffers

This dissertation examines the responses of two radically different poets--Hart Crane and Robinson Jeffers--to a common experience, the revolution in physics and simultaneous technological advances beginning around the turn of the century, and the transformative effect these developments had on the American intellectual landscape, specifically their effect on poetry. I argue that Crane and Jeffers' responses both arose out of a Romantic world view, Crane's via Coleridge and Jeffers' via Wordsworth, and that these responses were further refracted through the prism of American Romanticism as articulated by Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.;As a corollary focus, I explore each poet's relationship to Modernism: Crane's attempts to place himself in the center of the movement, and Jeffers' conscious rejection of it. I show that for each poet, the decision to make science and technology a focal point of their art was costly: in Crane's case, it provided his critics with fodder for denigrating his education and intellectual rigor, allowing him finally to be labeled a grand failure; in the case of Jeffers, it enabled detractors to brand him a nihilistic pessimist and misanthrope, effectively excluding him from the canon. Against these generally accepted critical conclusions, I demonstrate that much of the evocative power of Crane and Jeffers is a product of their concern with science. Central to Crane's effort to reconcile a romantic pursuit of beauty with modern industrial reality is the metaphorical act of bridging, a gesture manifested in the Brooklyn Bridge. For Jeffers, the revolutionary discoveries of the New Physics dictated a radical new perspective from which to view humanity, a perspective he named Inhumanism. In both cases, science and technology played a crucial role in the production of their poetry. I emphasize, then, the positive value of that which most critics have seen as Crane's and Jeffers' greatest liability--their reliance on late nineteenth and early twentieth science and technology for much of the substance and aesthetics of their poetry. The broad subject of this dissertation is therefore a twofold analysis focusing on the ability of Crane and Jeffers to express scientific facts and their implications in poetic, figurative, and emotional terms which render those facts not only humanly relevant but aesthetically compelling, and the relationship between this ability and the critical reputation of Crane and Jeffers.