The idea of a colony: Primitivism and exoticism in modern poetry

This dissertation takes as its subject the discursive strategies of primitivism and exoticism in early twentieth-century English-language poetry. Focusing on both Western and non-Western poets, I identify and analyze the cross-cultural interests of modern English-language poets and their audiences, drawing on a wide range of discursive backgrounds--"discourses of otherness," whose genealogies I trace back through their prominent nineteenth-century forms to their origins in an earlier moment of intercultural contact in the "age of exploration." By reading these poetries against such discursive histories as are found in discovery narratives, Indo-European philology, anthropological writing, travel writing, and the literature of spiritualism, and by situating these poetries and discourses within the institutions and practices of British and American intercultural relations--with particular reference to the coincidence of "high" imperialism with early modernism--I demonstrate a variety of forms of interaction between early twentieth-century poetry and what has been broadly referred to as "colonial discourse." Revising the paradigm of colonial discourse analysis developed by Edward Said, my analysis hinges on an alternative approach to the discursive historiography of Foucault which reads primitivism and exoticism as iterable strategies adaptable to a wide variety of discursive locations and functions. My readings thus link together, and differentiate, the aims and interests of a wide range of poets including canonical modernists--T. S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound--writers of the Harlem Renaissance, lesser-known British and American poets such as Vachel Lindsay and Laurence Hope, and non-Western poets writing in English, including Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, and Yone Noguchi.