Reworking the garden: Revisions of the pastoral tradition in twentieth-century southern poetry

This dissertation illuminates how twentieth-century southern poetry revises the pastoral tradition. I argue that in its particular capacity to imagine a perfected world, the pastoral may delineate and advocate for our highest ideals---including genuine community, reverence for the land, and gender, racial, and socioeconomic equality. But the pastoral's idyllic world may also reinscribe the South's worst problems---including social injustice and exploitation of the natural world---by ignoring them altogether or by weaving them into a fabric of fictive nostalgia. These two possibilities create the central conflict that animates the pastoral, a conflict that the dissertation explores in the work of four twentieth-century southern poets---Anne Spencer, Jean Toomer, James Dickey, and Eleanor Ross Taylor. Each writer responds to specific historical iterations of the pastoral---including the potent southern myths of the plantation romance, the cult of the Lost Cause, and the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer---and each differentially transforms and revitalizes the pastoral tradition itself. Essentially, these poets create new pastoral works which fully countenance the South's often divisive and problematic history while simultaneously seeking out restoration and redemption for and within the South. Thus, I assert that the pastoral tradition in the South is neither outdated nor mired in "moonlight and magnolias" nostalgia; rather, it enables twentieth-century southern writers to explore both a fraught history in a racially and socioeconomically divided region and a complex relationship to the natural world. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).