Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
English
Advisor
Joan Richardson
Committee Members
John Brenkman
Wayne Koestenbaum
Subject Categories
American Literature | Literature in English, North America | Modern Literature | Poetry
Keywords
Poetry
Abstract
In the study of poetry, measure traditionally refers to the meter in which a poem is written. This understanding of measure is in keeping with its sense as a standard according to which the size, amount, or degree of something can be classified—itself the standard for what is usually meant by measure. The Myth of Measure in American Poetry explores the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams, and Nathaniel Mackey, three American poets and thinkers of poetry who have complicated the term measure, not so much arguing against its correlation with meter in poetry as wanting to show that the choice and discovery of particular poetic meters are implicated in questions exceeding prosodical classification alone. In the three chapters, I explore the particular ways in which each of these three figures have sought to think in a more expansive sense about the concept of measure in their essays and how their poems reflect, and contribute to, their discoveries in that quest. This dissertation seeks to understand how thinking in this more expansive sense about the concept of measure has not only motivated these poets to make changes to poetic form commensurate with the time and occasion in which they found (and find) themselves but, furthermore, to question poetry’s power to affect reality itself.
Recommended Citation
Barber, Joshua M., "The Myth of Measure in American Poetry" (2023). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5279
Included in
American Literature Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Poetry Commons