Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 74-11(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Langdon Hammer.

"The Versions of Modern Poetry" argues that the version is one of the central, defining formal features of modern poetry, generally unrecognized but equally as essential and innovative as more widely discussed attributes such as fragmentation, collage, and irony. Like those other features, the version implies much more than a formal development: it points to how the poem and the poet are imagined and created in the modernist period. Poets as diverse and influential as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and Robert Lowell all openly---and sometimes notoriously---altered their already-published poems, but critics typically treat their interventions as little more than local curiosities. I argue instead that these poets' widespread reuse of their past words challenges readers to reconceive the modernist lyric as a serial, networked event, not a lone, discrete object. Multiple versions dilate the space and time of interpretation as meaning migrates from a single location to the interstices of a dispersed, revisionary lattice of closely related texts. The existence of multiple versions therefore requires of critics a capacious reading practice that can discern, via the evolution of those versions, a retrospective narrative of authorial self-fashioning.

This project dwells at the intersection of distinct critical methodologies, profiting from textual studies' close attention to variants and rigorous interrogation of the concept of the text, as well as from book history's analysis of the material contexts of publication. Indeed, the burgeoning print culture of the modernist period afforded many of the poets I study the opportunity to publish multiple versions of their poems in quick succession, in both the "little magazines" and in books that ranged from the unauthorized to the comprehensive to the exquisitely collectible. Ultimately, however, the textual and material considerations of my dissertation always return my argument to a broader analysis of authorship: of the way authors' evolving understandings of themselves, their art, and their place in history get written, and rewritten, into their texts. In this way, my dissertation both advances new analyses of familiar poetic careers---from Eliot's spiritual conversion to Lowell's stylistic reinvention, from Pound's quest for a modern long form to Moore's slow rise to celebrity---and also proposes a model of continually-adaptive authorship with implications beyond any single career or even genre.