Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet (Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Stephen Dunn)

Thesis advisor: Paul MarianiThe fireplace has long stood at the center of the American home, that hearth which requires work and duty and which offers warmth and transformation in return. Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet takes a look at three major twentieth-century men whose poetry manifests anxieties about staying home to "keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby's chariot turning," as Wallace Stevens described it (L 246), during a time of great literary change when their peers were widely expatriating to Europe. Fireplaces considers contemporary poet Stephen Dunn as an inheritor of this mottled Modernist lineage of male lyric domesticity in the Northeastern United States, a tradition rattled by the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 after which Dunn leaves his wife and family home to remarry, thus razing the longstanding domestic frame of his poems. Ultimately Fireplaces leaves us with a question for twenty-first century verse--can a male poet still write about home? Or has the local domestic voice been supplanted at last by a placeless strain of lyric.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: English