THE CONTEXTUALIST METAPHYSIC OF AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY: WILLIAM JAMES' INFLUENCE ON ROBERT FROST, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, WALLACE STEVENS & CO

Is there a distinctively American modernism? Usually modernism is thought of as a phenomenon that by its very nature was international in its scope and expression, as well as so various in its manifestations as virtually to defy definition. Even mentioning in the same breath the five major American modernists--Eliot, Pound, Frost, Williams, and Stevens--might by many be deemed absurd. But when we examine their achievement against the background history of ideas, a significant and fundamental similarity emerges.;After introducing the contextualist metaphysic in Chapter 1 and surveying the plentiful historical evidence of influence in Chapter 2, I try in Chapters 3-5 to demonstrate the power of the contextualist root metaphor as an enabling idea in the poetry of Frost, Williams and Stevens. I also try to show that our recognizing contextualism as the key to American modernism and its distinctive aesthetic aims provides us with a deeper understanding of the poetry.;In Chapter 3 the focus is on Frost's theory of the "sentence sound" and "Synecdochism" as the pioneering formulation of a contextualist poetic (which takes Jamesian psychology as its starting point). In Chapter 4, Williams' Kora in Hell and Spring and All are reconsidered as central contextualist works. In Chapter 5 I present the case for Stevens as a contextualist, focusing particularly on Chocorua to Its Neighbor.;Using Stephen Pepper's root-metaphor theory of metaphysics as a heuristic device and drawing upon all the available evidence, I show that the metaphysical assumptions of contextualism (more commonly known as pragmatism) are inextricably bound up with the origins and early development of modernism in its distinctively American variety. As contextualists, Frost, Williams and Stevens derive their metaphysic from the event in its context (their root metaphor) and are pluralists, radical empiricists, and pragmatists. Eliot and Pound, whose development is more complex and only touched upon in this study, were also exposed to and influenced by contextualism.