Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1972

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

B. J. Leggett

Committee Members

Richard Kelly, James Falen, F. DeWolfe Miller

Abstract

The poetry of Kenneth Flexner Fearing (1902-1961) has received little critical attention because his subject matter, his style, his diction, and his tone are intentionally 11 unpoetic 11 and may be unacceptable to critics whose experience has been with the romantic agrarian mainstream of American poetry. Most of the critics who have dealt with it have classified Fearing as a Proletarian poet or as a Communist poet. A complete analysis of his poetry suggests that such classification is simplistic. Fearing’s early poems, those he wrote in college, are highly imagistic and imitative. Beginning with the poems in Angel Arms (1929), Fearing's work is dominated by the sights and sounds of New York City. His second book, Poems (193.5), contains most of the poems cited by critics who class him as a Communist, and it was written while Fearing was closely associated with the New Masses, Partisan Review and the John Reed Club of New York. Fearing's third volume, Dead Reckoning (1938), and his fourth, Collected Poems (1940), expose his search for poetic direction following the collapse of the leftist dream. Collected Poems contains the poetic credo which was the result of Fearing’s search. This credo emphasizes excitement and clarity in poetry and suggests that to achieve these ends, Fearing discarded "the entire bag of conventions and codes usually associated with poetry 11 and created 11 instead more exciting forms ... based on the :material being written about." Fearing' s fifth volume, Afternoon of a Pawnbroker (1943), and his sixth, Stranger at Coney Island (1948), were written in a period when the author was drifting away from poetry and beginning to write novels, and these volumes are dominated both in theme and technique by the style of The New Yorker which after 1940 was Fearing' s chief magazine outlet for verse. His last volume, New and Selected Poems (1956), contains only four new poems (written at the request of Indiana University Press) which are outcries against the McCarthy era and suggest a return to the militantly optimistic attitude of Poems. Considered as a whole, the poems of Kenneth Fearing comprise a great American Rhapsody, one man's enthusiastic, if sometimes highly critical, utterance about the America he knew. Although the voice of Kenneth Fearing is outside the romantic-agrarian mainstream of American poetry, he has created an alternative poetic vision which may be able to provide a light along the endless urban hallway that is modern America.

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