| This dissertation analyzes the poems of fourteen poets writing primarily between Romanticism and the present day by focusing on their defensive qualities---when the lyric voice suddenly changes in character or tone, or when the poem's grammar, syntax, language, or way of depicting images denies or sets aside temporarily its main subject matter. I argue that the formal strategies lyric poets use when writing their poems often correspond to the intrapsychic phenomena, including projection, introjection, displacement, repression, and others, that encompass people's inner lives. As such, these psychoanalytic concepts represent the closest possible models for understanding how many of lyric poetry's rhetorical and imaginative processes work. Clarifying this relation between lyric form and intrapsychic defense not only sheds light on how poets compose but also goes some way towards providing a theory for what gives certain poems urgency and broad appeal.;My introduction describes the context for my considering poetic craft transhistorically in terms of mechanisms of defense. In the opening pages, I situate my argument among the works of other critics who relate poetry and defense as well as those who represent what has been called the "New Lyric Studies"; I also provide a working definition for "lyric." Each of my four subsequent chapters draws on psychoanalytic ideas in considering poems by three or four authors whose individual poetics share particular modes of defense.;Chapter one considers poems by George Herbert, Thomas Hardy, James Wright and Frank Bidart, whose formal strategies, akin to defensive mechanisms such as projection and introjection, figure a lyric speaker temporarily assuming somebody else's voice. In chapter two, I address poems by Edward Thomas, Anthony Hecht, and Elizabeth Bishop that withhold or repress their primary subject matter, either by poetically framing it within a less important narrative or by briefly obscuring the images they claim to prioritize. My third chapter searches the poems of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, James Merrill, and Paul Muldoon for jokes, slips, puns, and other psychologically- informed verbal strategies of remove---when a word or a phrase is used unexpectedly or even secretly in a way that may seem to undermine the poem's truth-telling but that actually gives it extra depth and authenticity Chapter four investigates the work of John Keats, John Clare, and Yusef Komunyakaa---three poets who attempt to recast the world around them in purely textual, and therefore aesthetic, terms. I formulate their poetics vis-a-vis certain unconscious and adaptive defensive maneuvers---including what Sigmund Freud terms "phantasying" and what D. W. Winnicott refers to as "transitional phenomena"---that allow for the safe-enough expression of conflictual wishes and forbidden desires.;Together these chapters describe a phenomenon that I call "lyric elsewhere," when a poem, like a mind, denies or escapes its own scenario and enters a realm beyond itself. Implicit in this study is my belief that lyric elsewhere, as a poetic mode that seconds a universal component of human experience, represents a crucial element in the making of certain poems---and is one of the main reasons why we like them. |
