| This dissertation is a study of how three major twentieth-century poets explore the concept of time through a distinct poetic form, the modern sequence poem. In each of the three poems, attempts to understand and express the concept of time interact with the sequence form and result in highly complex and unique works that cannot be easily classified within the categories commonly relied on to describe twentieth-century poetry, such as lyrical, modernist, or postmodernist. Each of these sequences participates in and challenges notions of temporality and linearity, and reveals ideas and values that were crucial to each author in the second half of his life. I examine Yeats' "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" (1921), T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1944), and W. H. Auden's "Horae Canonicae" (1955). |
