| The enactment of attention in the work of certain postwar American poets is more than a poetic strategy--it entails a revisioning of experience itself. This dissertation explores the poetry of attention along two lines. It examines the poets' attention to whatever is at hand as a significant 'stance towards reality.' Further, it asserts that this stance of attention locates meaning and value in ways distinct from most Western world-views, in that it implies a nondualistic understanding of reality.;The dissertation begins with an Overture, a reading of one poem by James Schuyler demonstrating how attention functions as a stance towards reality. Part I consists of four chapters that relate the poetics of attention to the field of Religion and Literature and define its key terms. Chapter One proposes the consideration of stances as a method to reenergize the study of Religion and Literature. Chapter Two identifies the poets of attention, and their poetry's critique of dualistic poetic theories and worldviews. Chapters Three and Four define the terms in 'stance of attention,' and survey the role attention is accorded in the world's religions, notably Buddhism.;Part II examines key aspects of attention in the writing of three poets: Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, and Frank O'Hara. Chapter Five considers Snyder's youth in the American West, his formal training in Zen Buddhism, and his understanding of the Buddhist view of sunyata (emptiness) as grounds for a nondual experience of existence, as sources for his acute attention. In Chapter Six the more affirmative aspects of his outlook are explored through his explicitly religious insight into the metaphysics of empty as-it-isness (tathata), and interrelatedness, as informed by Zen and Kegon Buddhism, as well as Native American and ecological sources. The role of attention in the more secular but implicitly nondualistic poetry of Creeley and O'Hara is the subject of Chapter Seven, showing how Creeley's work manifests attention in terms analogous to empty as-it-isness, and O'Hara's in terms of interrelatedness.;The Coda projects certain possibilities for exploring further the poetic and religious stances emerging in the poetics of attention. |
