Disenchanted georgics: The aesthetics of labor in American poetry

Disenchanted Georgics examines a little-known poetic genre in American critical traditions. One of the predominant forms of poetry in eighteenth-century Britain, the georgic is generally assumed to have fallen into desuetude with the emergence of Romanticism and historical transformations such as urbanization and the rise of industrial capital. On the American scene, the georgic's absence appears even more complete.;My study begins not with an attempt to recover this genre as a central organizing principle in American poetry, but instead with an investigation of the recalcitrance of the georgic to post-Romantic literary classification. The genre's preoccupations---its didactic rather than lyrical disposition and its charting of the material processes of labor---are difficult to assimilate into an American poetic canon principally composed of examinations of lyric subjectivity. Yet the georgic's resistance to taxonomy is also a result of the internal shifts this genre, which centers on the phenomenological experience and social value of agrarian labor, undergoes in its encounter with capitalist accumulation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. I borrow Weber's term (via Adorno) of "disenchantment" to describe the ways these poems respond to these changes in labor's forms and meanings.;My first chapter examines Whitman's project, in Leaves of Grass , of tallying labor's value in light of its changing composition, and his employment of georgic form as a means for resolving newfound social contradictions generated by these developments. I then turn to African-American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Jean Toomer, who write georgic poems that expose the persistence of racial divisions engendered in slavery, focusing on agrarian labor as a tool of continuing inequality in postbellum America. My third chapter investigates the "residual georgics" of Robert Frost and Lorine Niedecker, exploring forms of outmoded labor that remain peripheral to the dominant productive sphere. By contrast, Muriel Rukeyser's 1938 The Book of the Dead, the subject of my final chapter, returns to the realm of industrial production that Whitman navigates, documenting the antagonism between labor and capital as the foundation of social life, and arguing for the uniquely unalienated status of poetic labor in contrast to the "death-work" of industry.