The ground of our beseeching [electronic resource] : the guiding sense of place in German and English elegiac poetry.

9780493438559

2001

1 online resource (336 p.)

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This dissertation examines German and English elegies that enact a vital dynamic between mind, place, and history. It examines the particularly elegiac tendency to use natural settings as a means of measuring the progression of human consciousness from a sense of mournful alienation to the conviction of (triumphant or tragic) independence. Readings of pivotal elegies by Schiller, Goethe, and Holderlin trace the reception and development of the programmatic theory of elegy Schiller offered in Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. In dramatizing the trajectory from the loss of ostensible unity with nature on the one hand to a celebration of the mind's sovereignty over the phenomenal world on the other, Schiller's and Holderlin's elegiac settings reveal the often precarious balance between mental supremacy and dismal isolation. While at once lending form to history and resisting the shocks of contingency, elegies frequently burden places with human significance, ultimately inviting either celebrations of the mind's sublime power over the natural world or, more ominously, almost paranoid interpretations of natural phenomena. As a reading of Wordsworth's elegies for his brother reveals, even the most tranquil places can seem to forebode human calamity as well as security. The settings of Romantic elegies threaten in fact to become mere simulacra of the poetic consciousness, to present images of a mind unable to press beyond its own boundaries. The dissertation proceeds by exploring the work of modernist elegists who share with their Romantic precursors this fear of conscious petrifaction with their Romantic precursors. As a means of avoiding the spectacle of intellectual impasse, Rilke's Duineser Elegien and Eliot's Four Quartets engage unconscious, subterranean energies while plotting a trajectory towards expanded consciousness, creating settings that mediate between primitive forces on the one hand and the progressive movement of culture on the other. The creation of these settings demands a degree of intellectual intensity which enables poets to sublimate potentially violent and regressive powers and press them into the service of art. Elegies use depictions of place both to liberate the poetic consciousness from isolation in its own processes and to protect it from the archaic urges that threaten to debase it.

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English

July 12, 2011

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2001.

Yale University.