The end of the mind: The edge of the intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Gluck (Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Louise Glueck)

This dissertation is about the uses to which, in modern poetry, forms of unintelligibility can be put. By unintelligibility I mean to describe a class of literary phenomena which defeat, undermine, efface, or damage the effect of representational transparency, or fluency, between poem and reader. (The unintelligible is distinct from the familiar category of high-modernist difficulty because difficulty by definition implies the possibility, even if only in an ideal realm, of eventual comprehension.) My contention, elaborated in the introduction, is that such effects bear a special, intrinsic relation to poetic form, but have assumed a fully realized and consciously avowed role only in the poetry of the past one hundred years. The poets I discuss to illustrate this argument are Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Glück. For Hardy, the unintelligible makes itself known in the famous impediments or “infelicities” in his style, impediments indispensable to a poet preoccupied thematically with the limits inherent in speech. The form of the unintelligible that interests Stevens most is the resistance with which the world, or reality, confronts the assimilating, integrating, and synthesizing mind; his late work in particular seeks to include these resistances within the precinct of his poems. Larkin concerns himself explicitly with forms and topoi of damage; he explores the ways in which his poems can be made to bear marks of effacement or disfigurement. For Plath, the act of representation itself entails for the speaking subject the danger of disintegration; the unintelligible takes its place in her work at that border where speech threatens to destroy (rather than to reflect or preserve) the human form. Louise Glück interrogates the limits of the self's intelligibility or knowability to itself; because for her the self is by definition a convergence of discordant agencies, the category of the unintelligible in her work includes those relations through which subjectivity itself is constituted.