Post-Christian poetics: Five American poets

The poetry of Stephen Crane, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams reveals a progression from an initial rebellion against the Christian God, to a descent of the God-seat into the human psyche, and finally to a dismissal of the divine as part of the modern poetic identity.;Because religious skepticism sets the major trend of modern American poetry, the dissertation focuses on poets who are skeptical, sometimes openly hostile, to the Christian tradition. Yet all five poets of this study grapple with religious (or spiritual) questions. This shared aspect of their poetry provides one element of continuity between the spiritually oriented poetry of nineteenth century America, and the spiritually skeptical verse of modern America.;The oldest poets in this study--Robert Frost and Stephen Crane--are closely oriented to a Judeo-Christian point of view. Notwithstanding the fact that both rebelled against traditional conceptions of God the father, their poems are deeply informed by the Old and New Testaments.;The poetry of Wallace Stevens is more distantly related to Judeo-Christianity. But Stevens is never completely comfortable with any single understanding of man's relationship to God. Stevens adopts the role of a religious philosopher in his work, and encompasses more profoundly than any other American poet the full range of the modernist rebellion against Judeo-Christian monism.;The poetry of Ezra Pound represents the gods as interior states of mind. With fewer reservations than Wallace Stevens, Pound celebrates a truly immanentist understanding of religion.;Alone among the poets of this study, William Carlos Williams has little interest in addressing in his poetry the question of God's existence. Williams's poetry celebrates a temporal understanding of spirituality, in which the love of people, American history and culture, sexual energy and the celebration of the renewal of life in nature, replace both immanentist and transcendent religious belief. It is Williams, finally, through his refusal to address the question of God, who has the greatest influence on a purely secular, artist-centered vision of poetry in post-war and contemporary American verse.