Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Hard poems'

Poems Easily Written in a Hard Life is an English-language translation of Yun Dongju’s 40 poems. This work of literary translation is proceeded by a translator’s preface which seeks to situate the work in its specific social and linguistic context and to render the translator’s work visible.

Playing Jonah's Hand: Poems is a collection of poems with a critical introduction. The introduction consists of two independent essays, both of which examine intersections between poetry and Christian theology. In the first essay I identify the imaginative faculty as the primary source of agency for the speaker in John Donne's "Holy Sonnets." Working upon Barbara Lewalski's assertion that these sonnets represent "the Protestant paradigm of salvation in its stark, dramatic, Pauline terms," I consider the role of the imagination in the spiritual transformation represented within the sequence. Donne foregrounds a Calvinistic theology that posits both humanity's total depravity and God's grace and mercy as the only avenue of transcendence. Whatever agency the speaker exhibits is generated by the exercise of his imagination, which leads him to a recognition of his sinfulness and the necessity of God's grace. In the second essay I investigate the presence of a negative theology within "Lachrimae, or Seven Tears Figured in Seven Passionate Pavans," a sonnet sequence by Geoffrey Hill. In this sequence, Hill demonstrates the possibilities that surface through an integration of negative theology with postmodern theories of language, both of which have been influenced by the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger. The two inform and transform each other while producing a tension that is productive ground for poetry. The main body of the manuscript includes a collection of poems built upon thematic parallels with the Biblical account of Jonah, acknowledging the character's continued frustration with God in Chapter Four of Jonah, which is commonly forgotten in popular and religious representations of the story. The four sections in the manuscript include poems that struggle to negotiate the tensions between the will of a compelling God and the will of the individual.

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1996.
Title from title page screen, viewed May 30, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Ronald Fortune, William W. Morgan (co-chairs), Janice Neuleib. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-159) and abstract. Also available in print.

This essay stresses the importance of the visual and material aspects of these manuscripts. By examining her work in relation to collage practices, it highlights Dickinson's role as an avant-garde figure in both American poetry and material culture. Rather than write interlocking theses that connect each reading, I aim to demonstrate the ways in which an art historical consideration of Dickinson's envelope manuscripts complicates the already open-ended nature of her poetry through associating the texts with the cultural phenomena of the scrapbook. Additionally, I will foreground the importance of the materiality of these works through emphasizing the role of correspondence in Dickinson's life.

This thesis explores the work and lives of composers who set Hardy's verse to music during his lifetime and seeks to identify the place of Hardy song settings in English musical history and in the personal history of their composers. It also gives evidence that Hardy possessed an extraordinary musical memory, and that, to an extent that has not been appreciated, he consciously wrote various poems for musical settings.

The aim of this thesis is to re-evaluate the poetry of Thomas Hardy from an ecocritical perspective, and in so doing, show how and in what ways Hardy's poetic oeuvre represents a revealing response to the environment, and an important and still relevant comment on humankind's relationship to it. As the Introduction explains in more detail, the thesis concentrates on the verse drama and verse collections published between 1898 and 1909. However, Chapter 1 opens with an eco-critical analysis of Hardy's earliest surviving poem, 'Domicilium', written 1857-60; the Chapter develops into a discussion of the origins of eco-criticism as a theoretical approach with a political edge. Chapter 2 discusses the complex Victorian concept of 'Nature', which shaped Hardy's own response to the environment. Chapter 3 engages with Hardy's career as a novel writer, and notes the way in which it informs his later poetry. Chapter 4 extends the eco-critical analysis to Hardy's poetry, focusing on Wessex Poems, his first verse collection. Although short, the collection shows how Hardy was already shaping his own poetic sense of the natural world. This theme is developed in Chapter 5, on Poems of the Past and Present, a collection notable for a series of poems with a bio-centric focus on the natural world in general and bird life in particular. Chapter 6 deals with The Dynasts, a retelling of the Napoleonic Wars through which Hardy dramatized his belief that all life on earth is connected by the workings of the 'Immanent Will'. Chapter 7 discusses Time's Laughingstocks, Hardy's bleakest reading of the human condition. The Conclusion analyses another individual poem, 'The Convergence of the Twain', written following the loss of the Titanic in 1912, and summarises Hardy's distinctive contribution to our emerging sense of what might constitute a meaningful 'eco-poetic'.

‘Scottish’, ‘woman’, ‘lesbian’; these words are markers of identity and a starting point in my attempt to place myself within a poetic tradition. This study towards a statement of poetics considers ideas of identity and tradition as they relate to the public and private spheres. The first chapter considers how traditions are built and the external factors which impact upon them by looking at both physical and more ideological notions of place and space as they relate to nationhood and a sense of belonging. The focus then narrows to consider the situation of female poets as marginal. There is an interrogation of whether female poets are marginalised by the predominantly patriarchal literary canon or if they seek out these liminal borders and hinterlands. This is considered in the context of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘forced exile’ and the more voluntary travels of Kathleen Jamie. The study then turns to consider the theoretical history behind women’s writing and how this impacts upon their varied ways of ‘reading the map of tradition’. In considering the private, or personal, sphere there is a discussion of the internal impulses which the poet acts upon in order to look at the nature of poetic imperative. This section begins with the statement that ‘every poem breaks a silence which had to be overcome’, and this in turn opens up questions of how external silencing might affect the internal impulse to assert and/or disclose. With specific focus on mid-twentieth century American Confessional poetry, further questions are asked regarding the ‘worth of art’ and the poet’s decoding and self-censorship of their own work in order to both hide and break taboos surrounding sexuality and privacy. The study then becomes more specifically personal in the reflective chapter which deals thematically with a selection of my own poems from the folio. This is in order to chart not only the evolution of my work but also the evolution of my own poetic imperatives. The final chapter reflects upon my use of free verse, looking briefly at the history of the form from the early twentieth-century onwards before going on to consider how the various theories and poetics which have grown out of the broadly vernacular, ‘free verse revolution’ have impacted formally upon my own work.

Kyoto University (京都大学)
0048
新制・課程博士
博士(人間・環境学)
甲第22131号
人博第914号
新制||人||218(附属図書館)
2019||人博||914(吉田南総合図書館)
京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生文明学専攻
(主査)教授 水野 眞理, 教授 桂山 康司, 准教授 池田 寛子, 教授 金子 幸男
学位規則第4条第1項該当

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008.
Title from screen (viewed on June 2, 2009). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Karen Kovacik, Jane E. Schultz, Thomas F. Marvin. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61).

Poetry can sometimes be seen as a difficult art form available or of interest only to those who are willing to understand complex illusions and arcane language. However there are poems, that I call easy, that offer themselves to prospective readers in simple and straightforward language. I argue that while easy poems offer little resistance to the reader’s initial engagement with the text, they are as multi-layered and complex as ‘hard’ poems. This exegesis explores how a poem can be hard or easy and how easy poems can be explored seeking richness and manifold experience.
Thesis (MPhil) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2019

This study consists of two volumes. Volume II contains the analysis of fifty-one songs by Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) to poems by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). The analysis is based on a preconceived model which focuses on a critical examination of the texts and considers the basic elements of music in each song. Certain stylistic features are apparent from this study and are reflected in Volume I. After a biographical sketch of each artist and a discussion of the texts, a sample of the analysis is presented. The basic elements of music are then discussed: timbre, duration, pitch organization, dynamics, texture, structure, mood and atmosphere. Volume I concludes with a general statement on the stylistic features of the composer and considers the artists' genius in the light of the study. Finzi's setting of such a comparatively large number of Hardy poems is a result of the former's intense interest in English literature and sympathy with much of Hardy's personal philosophies such as the uselessness of suffering which fills an indifferent world. Finzi's settings are firmly embedded in tonal traditions but he explores a great variety of subtle atmospheres within the confines of tonality. The declamation of the texts is of superior quality and the composer achieves an individual language of expression unparalleled in the song-writing of the first half of the twentieth century in England
Hierdie studie beslaan twee volumes. Volume II behels die analise van een-en-vyftig liedere van Gerald Finzi ( 1901-1956) na tekste van Thomas Hardy ( 1840-1928). Die analises is gebaseer op 'n vooraf ontwrepte model op grond waarvan die tekste krities geevalueer, en die basiese musikale elemente bestudeer is. Sekere stilistiese tendense wat uit hierdie studie blyk, word in Volume I weergegee. Na 'n kort biografiese skets van beide kunstenaars en 'n bespreking van die tekste, word 'n uittreksel van die analise aangebied. Hiema volg 'n ondersoek na die basiese elemente van musiek: toonkleur, toonduur, toonhoogte, toonstrekte, tekstuur, struktuur en die skep van atmosfeer. Volume I sluit af met 'n samevatting van die stylkenmerke en 'n slotbeskouing van beide kunstenaars se geniale bydrae. Finzi se toonsetting van 'n relatief groot aantal gedigte van Hardy spruit uit sy intense belangstelling in die Engelse letterkunde en sy vereenselwiging met die persoonlike filosofee van Hardy - veral die gedagte van onnodige lyding in 'n apatiese wereld. Finzi toonset hoofsaaklik in 'n tonale styl, maar ondersoek 'n groot verskeidenheid delikate atmosfeerskeppinge binne die tonale raamwerk. Sy deklamering van tekste is van hoogstaande gehalte en die komponis bring 'n pesoonlike uitdrukkingsvorm, ongeewenaar in die liederkuns van die eerste helfte van die twintigste eeu in Engeland, tot stand
D.Mus. (Musicology)

碩士
國立臺灣師範大學
英語研究所
91
Between 1959 and 1961, Frank O''Hara wrote a sequence of love poems to Vincent Warren. When O''Hara was in love with Warren, his love poems were hemmed around by anxieties: anxiety about the oppression of homosexuality, anxiety about the lapse of the fleeting moments, and anxiety about the end of the relationship. Revolving around three interconnecting topics─the esoteric, ephemeral and erotic─in O''Hara''s love poems, this thesis investigates these three detailed elements as a way of re-creating and re-conceptualizing a model of O''Hara''s gay life in mid-twentieth-century America. This thesis discusses, at a time when gay men were marginalized and treated as sexual perverts by the homophobic society, how and why O''Hara reveals his love to Vincent Warren in an esoteric way, how O''Hara re-creates the fleeting moments of love, happiness and sex and transforms the motif of "Seize the day!" into "seizing the day" in his gay carpe diem poetry, and finally focuses on the erotic moment and sees how O''Hara uses sexuality to transcend to another world. Introduction presents the background of O''Hara''s love poems to Vincent Warren, historicizing the homosexual oppression in the 1950s and 1960s. Living at a time of inescapable anxiety, O''Hara senses the hostility against homosexuality and depicts the pain of gay men''s wearing the masks in New York in "Homosexuality," in which his 1954 love manifesto that "I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world" not only voices his pain of being gay in search of a lover but also pre-dates his relationship with Warren between 1959 and 1961 (Collected Poems 182). Chapter One discusses why and how O''Hara expresses his love to Vincent Warren in a secret way. When facing a homophobic society and culture, O''Hara does not choose to daringly confront the public; instead, he manages to survive in that homophobic society. In order to survive, O''Hara is aware that he needs to be careful and hide his love. Thus, in almost all of O''Hara''s love poems to Vincent Warren, the poet uses an esoteric language of camp to reveal his intense feelings to Vincent Warren and conceal the homosexual content from the heterosexual majority as we can see in "Having a Coke with You," "Poem V (F) W," and "St. Paul and All That." Chapter Two demonstrates how O''Hara deals with the fleeting moments of love and happiness and transforms the traditional carpe diem motif in his love poems to Vincent Warren. Facing polymorphous oppression in real life, O''Hara writes gay carpe diem poetry to stand against the flow of time; in a way, O''Hara is enacting the carpe diem spirit in the love poems. I use traditional carpe diem poetry as examples of antithesis to O''Hara''s gay carpe diem poetry. Instead of saying, "Let’s seize the day," O''Hara is already celebrating the immediate present as we can see in "Personal Poem," "Steps," and "Sudden Snow." Chapter Three extracts the erotic moment from the ephemeral moments of pleasures. I use Whitman''s Section 11 of "Song of Myself" as an example of antithesis to O''Hara''s erotic poems and demonstrate that while Whitman celebrates the male body and sexuality in part to fulfill his erotic imagination, O''Hara uses the body as a sexual diving board to jump to a spiritual world. I argue that O''Hara attempts to capture and re-create the erotic moment of his jumping to the spiritual world and the subsequent falling back to the earth in the erotic love poems to Vincent Warren as we can see in "Poem [Twin spheres full of fur and noise]," "Poem ''À la recherché d'' Gertrude Stein,''" "You Are Gorgeous and I''m Coming," and "To You." Conclusion summarizes the previous discussion and examines the three elements again in the final break-up poem; indeed, "Poem [lost lost]," a poem written after the end of the relationship, is less esoteric, less ephemeral and less erotic. After the relationship ends, O''Hara, though free from certain anxieties, suffers from an immense sense of loss; his love poems lack the nourishment of love. O''Hara no longer feels the "anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxiety" when the relationship comes to an end (Collected Poems 406).

碩士
東吳大學
英文學系
103
Yuan Zhen and Thomas Hardy, for their deceased wives, composed the finest mourning poems in Chinese and English literatures. Their poems demonstrate that remembrance and the scene-feeling relationship are two of the most essential devices for such lyrics. Remembrance serves to induce the poet back to the past and make a parallel between the past and the present, but there is always a gap of experience, memory, and time. Therefore, the remembrance is incomplete in itself. Consequently, the two poets have to resort to the act of remembering continuously for the expression of the feelings and the recapture of the past as a lost fullness. On the other hand, the scene-feeling relationship, a classical Chinese poetic notion, vitally and covertly reiterates the core emotions of the mourning poems of Yuan Zhen and Hardy. Within the description of the present scenes and the depiction of the past, the poet’s grief and mourning are recurrently conveyed, but without dull repetitiveness. Albeit Hardy’s mourning poems follows the Western poetic tradition, this thesis tries to affirm that the remembrance and the scene-feeling relationship provide common basis for comparison and interpretation of the mourning poems of Yuan Zhen and Hardy, as well as to offer a new perspective to read the English mourning poems.

I denna studie undersöks gymnasielärares attityder om lyrikämnet i den svenska skolan. För att inhämta kunskap om lyrikens möjliga funktion i skolundervisningen genomförs kvalitativa ostrukturerade intervjuer med sex verksamma lärare. Lärarnas svar analyseras med perspektiv om poetiskt tänkande och undervisningsdimensioner för att undersöka vilken funktion lyriken har. Studiens resultat visar att lärare uppfattar att elever finner lyrik tråkigt och svårt. Med särskilda strategier och uppgifter går det att motivera eleverna till kreativt skrivande som även kan förändra deras fördomar om lyrik. Nästan alla av lärarnas lyrikundervisning uppfyller de tre målen inom undervisningsdimensionerna: kvalifikationer, socialisationen och subjektiveringen. Uppgifterna lärarna utformar visar på att eleverna kan utveckla ett poetiskt tänkande. Lyriken öppnar upp till en ny språklig värld för eleverna som kan anpassa sitt skrivande, då kreativt skrivande leder till behärskning att växla mellan olika texttyper.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Although many of Lola Ridge's poems champion the causes of minorities and the disenfranchised, it is too easy to state that politics were the sole reason for her neglect. A simple look at well-known female poets who often wrote about social or political issues during Ridge's lifetime, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Muriel Rukeyser, weakens such a claim. Furthermore, Ridge's five books of poetry illustrate that many of her poems focused on themes beyond the political or social. The decisions by critics to focus on selections of Ridge's poems that do not display her ability to employ multiple aesthetics in her poetry have caused them to present her work one-dimensionally. Likewise, politically motivated critics often overlook aesthetic experiments that poets like Ridge employ in their poetry. Few poets during Ridge's time made use of such drastically varied styles, and because her work resists easy categorization (as either traditional or avant-garde), her poetry has largely gone unnoticed by modern scholars. Chapter two of my thesis focuses on a selection Ridge's social and political poems and highlights how Ridge's social poetry coupled with the multiple aesthetics she employed has played a part in her critical neglect. My findings will open up the discussion of Ridge's poetry and situate her work both politically and aesthetically, something no critic has yet attempted. Chapter three examines Ridge’s role as editor of Modern School, Others and Broom. Ridge's work for these magazines, particularly Others and Broom, places her at the center of American modernism. My examination of Ridge's social poetry and her role as editor for two leading literary magazines, in conjunction with her use of multiple aesthetics, will build a strong case for why her work deserves to be recovered.