A British poet's discovery of modern American poetry: The poetry and poetic criticism of Theodore Maynard

Background. Theodore Maynard (1890-1956), best known today as a popular Catholic historian and biographer, was also, during his lifetime, a well-known poet and literary critic. Maynard began his literary career in London, shortly after his conversion to Catholicism in 1913, and came to the United States in 1920, where he remained for the rest of his life. The development of Maynard's poetry and criticism after he arrived in this country shows how a British author who knew very little about American writing before he came here reacted to American poetry at a time of significant change and innovation.;Method and sources. There is no biography of Maynard or critical study of his writing. This dissertation is a close reading and analysis of Maynard's poetry and criticism of poetry. His most important books of poems and criticism are discussed in chronological order. The first chapter is devoted to Maynard's conversion to Catholicism and the importance of Catholicism to his early work. The succeeding chapters discuss his assessments of contemporary American poetry and its influence on his own work. This study relies on Maynard's published writings, his letters, which are unpublished, and various literary histories, biographies, and memoirs.;Conclusions. This study shows that Maynard's encounter with American poetry had a profound impact on both his critical thinking and his poetic technique. Maynard believed that Catholicism was the only humanistic alternative to modern skepticism and that poetry was the affirmation of the spiritual and transcendent. In his early criticism, Maynard argued that Catholicism was the source of the salient qualities of the finest British poetry, lyricism, patriotism, and traditionalism. However, Maynard discovered that American poetry lacked the grounding in religious faith and communal identity that he believed was the source of British poetry. Nevertheless, he discovered in the work of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson a greater depth of human feeling than he found in contemporary British poetry. But when Maynard tried to use the techniques of American poets in his own work, he found he could not do so without approaching the very skepticism he had become a Catholic to avoid.