Internal differences: Secularism, religion, and poetic form in nineteenth-century American poetry

Accounts of the origins of literary modernism typically point back to Walt Whitman's and Emily Dickinson's break with the received conventions of meter and rhyme. These accounts present the perceived break with tradition as authorizing a variety of practices, notably the privileging of innovation in poetic form as indicative of a work's sincerity and authenticity. The dissertation seeks to revisit the break from conventional form, not in terms of modernism, but in terms of the cultural significance of poetic form in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly given the impact of secularism on the preconceptions and critical conventions governing the role of the poet and the formation of the lyrical subject. An important vein of scholarship connecting literature with modern secularism - going back to M. H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism and beyond - posits post-Enlightenment literary works as emerging out of the secularization of previously religious tropes and themes. Recent studies of secularism as a historical movement, however, present a more complicated account than the oft-told tale of the inevitable triumph of humanism over religion. In reading the formal choices that Dickinson's and Whitman's works display, I reveal the authors' complex engagement with vital changes not only within contemporary accounts of inspiration, identity, and publication, but also with the modes of spirituality that secularism paradoxically made available as part of its reconfiguration of religiosity on a personal, intimate scale.