Semester
Summer
Date of Graduation
2000
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
MA
College
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department
English
Committee Chair
Brian McHale
Committee Co-Chair
Patrica DeMarco
Committee Member
James Harms
Abstract
As a decidedly American tradition, the long poem has become the premier literary endeavor for poets in the twentieth-century. Writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams have pursued the long poem, but under the auspices of the "modern epic." Three postmodern long poems---Kenneth Koch's Seasons on Earth, Edward Dom's Gunslinger, and James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover---illustrate a dramatic rupture with the texts of modernism by introducing comic situations and multi-voiced narration---situations described by Mikhail Bakhtin as "dialogism" and "carnival," receptively---into the canon of American long poems. These innovations allow the postmodern long poem to evolve past the thematic and aesthetic strictures imposed by the texts of modernism.
Recommended Citation
Moffett, Joe Wade, "Carnivalized narratives in the postmodern long poem" (2000). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 743.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/743