Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-2001

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Marilyn Kallet

Committee Members

Allen Dunn, Jan Allen, B. J. Leggett

Abstract

The poetry of Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, Raymond Carver, and Tess Gallagher is examined in light of shared aspects of these poets' lives and work with a focus on the effects of romantic and professional partnership on poetry and, most importantly, the effects of long-term illness and the loss of a life partner on the poetry of both the dying member of the partnership and the surviving widowed poet. Kenyon and Hall were married for twenty-three years prior to Kenyon's death in 1995 from leukemia, and Carver and Gallagher were involved in a romantic partnership for ten years prior to Carver's death in 1988 from lung cancer. This project reads the most recent poetry of these writers in light of their shared experience with long-term illness and loss, using biographical detail as a backdrop for studying their poetry but focusing particularly on the conventions of elegy and recent breaks with those conventions in order to examine the poetic strategies employed by each writer to cope with illness and the loss of a life/writing partner.

A crucial organizing principle of these writers' poetry was their use of paradox, the juxtaposition of opposites developing from the simultaneous absence and presence of the dying individual, a phenomenon generated by the dying's gradual physical decline and the grief processes of survivors. Paradox also refers to the complex processes of the need to express inexpressible emotions related to loss and grief through the written word. Tension develops in these writers' poems between the verbal statement and the nonverbal gesture as the best means of expressing painful loss. All of the writers employ methods to ensure the survival of the dying partner's voice within the poetic utterances of the survivor. Also, several organizing myths outlined in recent studies of pathography, life writings focusing on the illness and death of the writer or a loved one, also apply to the poetry under consideration here, including vegetation myths, journey/quest myths, and battle myths. Ultimately, all four poets question the efficacy of poetic language in the wake of traumatic lived experience to communicate that experience and provide healing. Nevertheless, all four writers ultimately conclude that the poetic statement, however flawed, is for them the most effective means of verbally communicating the experience of terminal illness and death.

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