Poetry and the public sphere: Politics, participation, and uncommon speech (Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe)

While poetry has historically served a variety of cultural and political functions, from meditation to agitation, U.S. literary history and its academic exponents have, by and large, promoted an image for poetry (more than for other genres) that locates it outside the realm of politics. While the attempt to hermetically seal off poetry from ideology, politics, or the social, especially by the New Critics was itself ideological, its effects on the reading, teaching, and writing of poetry continue to be far-reaching. This dissertation draws on contemporary theories of the public sphere, to examine U.S. poetries at three historical and political locations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Emily Dickinson's engagements with the burgeoning public sphere and print culture of the nineteenth-century United States, to the Language writers' essays on poetics in the contexts of the Vietnam War and the hegemony of global corporate capital, to Susan Howe's revisionist reconstruction of received U.S. literary and social history—this study views these poetries as investigations of the liberal notion of a unitary public sphere and the production of common knowledge. Drawing on recent revisions to Habermas's classic description of the bourgeois public sphere in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the project examines the ways in which these poetries imagine, attempt to reconfigure, or enlarge concepts of belonging, citizenship, the public, and civic life.; Political and cultural theorists lamenting the “decline” of the “public sphere” often cite the inability of citizens to articulate their interests, to participate in public debate, or to act collectively to change hegemonic structures. The dissertation discusses how poetries fill real or imagined lacunae in public spheres, providing non-pragmatic, idiosyncratic ways of talking about those issues not given a hearing in the hegemonic public sphere. Seen in this light, the poetries under consideration contract and expand, respectively, the possibilities for democratic speech, as well as interpellating audiences as special reading “publics” (particularly in the case of “Language writing” and Susan Howe's work). These poetries critically engage contemporaneous popular or critical discourses, shifting the terms of political and cultural debates and tendering judgments on contemporaneous institutions.