Poetics of self -love: Autoerotic desire in American verse

"Poetics of Self-Love: Autoerotic Desire in American Verse" confronts a constitutive paradox of consciousness. In it, I provide close-readings of how the figuration of autoerotic impulses in American poetry is both threatening to and constitutive of the self. Offering a chronological study of American verse from the modernist poetics of H.D. and Mina Loy to the confessional poems of Anne Sexton and contemporary poetry of Robert Hass, I argue that poetry's verbal resources uniquely witness the linguistic "slipperiness" between creation and destruction in the makeup of the self. In particular, I examine poetry's formal reliance on figurative language, as well as hyphens, ellipses, line breaks, and meter as symbolically approximating psychoanalytic models of the dynamic exchange between the conscious and unconscious self as theorized by Sigmund Freud, Jean Laplanche and Leo Bersani's readings of Freud, and Jacques Lacan. In psychoanalytic theory, autoeroticism breaches the self-possession of desire with a shattering otherness. Similarly, American poetry, as I demonstrate, performs an unstable and somewhat unlocatable boundary between the imagined "you" and "I" of autoerotic lyric utterance. Thus, my dissertation investigates how the encounter with highly stylized forms, particularly lyric poetry, describes a "shattering of the self" that paradoxically becomes the precondition for full self-knowledge.