Kicked Around Anew: twentieth-century poetry and the battle over syntax

My thesis is a critical history of transatlantic poetry and its evolving engagements with syntax over the century from modernism to the present day. It presents the first comprehensive syntactical study of this period, building chronologically on William E. Baker’s The Syntax of English Poetry: 1870 – 1930. Charting the next great paradigm shift in literary history – that of modernism into postmodernism – my study looks at a period in which no grammatically ‘new’ options were available to poets. Rather than prove the predominance of one syntactical mode over another, I construct a historical account of how a variety of literary actors – predominantly poets, but critics and linguists too – debated, codified and enacted various competing theories of syntax that were designed to survive the upheavals of modernism. Often a fugitive subject, the battle over syntax emerges in letters, manuscripts, manifestos and essays as much as in poetry itself, and my study tracks the key aesthetic disputes of the age. Throughout, I supplement the historical argument with close readings of poetry that displays a self-reflexive and illuminating engagement with syntax at key junctures in the narrative. At the heart of the thesis is a trilogy of single-author focus chapters, in which I provide original syntactical studies of three poets who together form a ‘trilemma’ of postmodern approaches to syntax: Robert Lowell, Charles Olson and John Ashbery. These focus chapters contain primary research drawn from the respective poets’ archives, as I analyse how they worked through their theories of syntax in drafting their poetry. Framing them are three chapters of synoptic literary history, charting respective movements and their relationship with syntax: modernism, conservative formalism, and the postmodern avant-garde