The Modernist Quoting Poem

262 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987.Moving beyond the traditional possibilities of allusion, Modernist poets directly quoted other texts in their poetry and founded the "quoting poem," a technical innovation that helped characterize the Modernist revolution. Through its appropriating another texture, quoting introduces doubleness into the quoting poem. Understood as textural doubleness, quotation modifies many definitions of Modernism: while creating a difficult reading experience, quotation subverts the allegedly Modernist conception of the poem as a static object, creates a new type of poetic voice which depends on this non-stasis, places the quoting poem in the tradition of American natural language while exploiting the aesthetics of awkwardness, and gives a new focus to what it means for a poem to be original and to be personal expression. Quotations are a way to avoid personal responsibility for rhetoric while at the same time maintaining the quoting poet's control over the poem. The dissertation uses Wolfgang Iser's hermeneutic criticism to articulate the problems and solutions that quotations bring to a text. The concluding chapter considers the Postmodern appropriation of quotations, and analyzes how this appropriation both extends and breaks away from the Modernist tradition.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD