Are you content: Interrogating the past in Browning and Yeats.

This thesis examines poetry by Robert Browning and William Butler Yeats that foregrounds an interaction between an individual and a cultural artifact. These artifacts take many forms: poems, paintings, sculptures, buildings, musical scores, documents, manuscripts and histories. In the work of both poets, artifacts serve a crucial and paradoxical function. They appeal to Browning and Yeats as emblems of broken relationships to cultural history, but at the same time provide an opportunity for creatively broaching such estrangements. Chapter One briefly introduces my approach to examining this theme. Chapter Two deals with Sordello and argues that the poem's hero and title character fails to participate in the reinvention of his cultural tradition because he assumes a subservient and self-effacing posture toward an unknown artifact of the past. Chapter Three argues that in the wake of the critical failure of Sordello and later collections of poetry, Browning argued for and invented a private tradition of little known and lightly esteemed artifacts that reached culmination in his Men and Women volume. Chapter Four examines Browning's exploration in The Ring and the Book of the creative challenges of gathering lost works into this tradition. My final chapters turn to Yeats's poetry. Chapter Five focuses on poetry that responds to the Dublin Municipal Art Gallery in order to evaluate and renovate Ireland's cultural tradition. Chapter Six examines Yeats's valorization of the literal and imaginative acts of renovating ruin in poems about Thoor Ballylee and Coole Park.PhDEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130669/2/9811041.pd