The inhuman imagination in twentieth-century poetry: From Robinson Jeffers and D. H. Lawrence to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

An outgrowth of and alternative to poetic modernism, the inhuman imagination bridges the biocentrism of the early twentieth century and the ecocentrism of the latter half of the century to critique (on psychoanalytical, ecological, and ethical grounds) the anthropocentrism at the heart of humanism. Although Robinson Jeffers first described inhumanism as a philosophical attitude, this study proposes that the inhuman imagination characterizes a more widespread poetic response to the atrocities of the twentieth century, a response heavily influenced by Darwin, Freud, and Nietszche. The inhuman imagination takes as its poetic theme humanity's technological capacity to destroy itself, and takes as its poetic practice the problem of finding a language to express the inexpressibly inhuman. As an act of imagination, it confronts the extinction of the human species, the lack of any teleological purpose for humanity, and the bankruptcy of humanism. It reckons with the nonhuman, the inhumane, and the anti-human to decenter human significance.; This dissertation also examines how inhumanism undermines itself through its own paradoxes and its problematic intertwining of the feminine and the animal. The inhuman imagination praises the spontaneous violence of animals and rejects the premeditated violence of humans, but it also reveals the problem of representing animals through the medium of language, which violates animality via the trap of figuration. However, in eroticizing the relationship between women and animals, Jeffers, D. H. Lawrence, and Ted Hughes appropriate the imagined vitality of animals to re-engender a masculine sense of self. Sylvia Plath's poetry responds to the ways in which Hughes and Lawrence construct modern masculine selfhood in relation to an eroticized natural world. In Ariel, she shifts her central metaphor from biocentric femininity to the horror of the real that strips away the fabrications of selfhood and identity.