Aesthetics and modern poetry: Mood, musicality, and imagery in the poems of Dickinson, Hopkins, Trakl, and Christine Lavant

The philosophical study of aesthetics traditionally explores the relationship between the senses and cognition, whereby "aesthetic experience" refers to a sensuous impression characterized by minimal intervention of the intellect and its concepts. This dissertation explores the extent to which one may rigorously mobilize aesthetic theory in the study of modern poetry, with "modern poetry" understood as verse written from the time of Charles Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson to that of such "late modernists" as Dylan Thomas and Christine Lavant. In contrast to approaches that emphasize the interpretive translation of poetry into prose meaning, this study argues that poetic language is constituted by sensuous, material, and corporeal elements of verse that resist such translation. Furthermore, in contrast to formalist methods that tend to objectivize poetic language, this dissertation insists on the crucial role played by reader-subjectivity in actualizing the text of a poem.;This study explores the aesthetics of modern poetry especially through a re-conceptualization of traditional literary categories: mood and tone; sound and rhythm; imagery and metaphor. In particular, it examines three poets---Gerard Manley Hopkins, Georg Trakl, and Christine Lavant---who place extraordinary emphasis on one such element, thereby providing special insight into the material, aesthetic character of language, including the reader's complex interaction therewith. Through the development of new aesthetic concepts and close readings of individual poems, this dissertation demonstrates that modern poetry consists not merely of a set of linguistic signs but also of a dynamic array of sounds, atmospheres, and mental images that produce a sensuous-material encounter between poem and reader. Such an aesthetic encounter, inasmuch as it refuses translation and representation, entails the paradox that it does not constitute the repeatable, communicable experience of a subject but rather a singular, incommunicable event. Nevertheless, by mobilizing rigorous analogies to music and other non-verbal arts, literature scholars can productively describe and theorize the elements of poetic language that give rise to such inarticulable encounters.