| The surrealist movement, begun in the 1920s and developed and articulated most visibly and forcefully by Andre Breton, has unequivocally changed American poetry, yet the nature and history of its impact until recently has not been thoroughly and consistently recounted. The panoramic range of its influence has been implicitly understood but difficult to identify partly because of the ambivalence with which it has been received by American writers and audiences. Surrealism's call to a "systematic derangement of all the senses" has rarely existed comfortably alongside other modern poetic approaches. Nevertheless, some poets have successfully negotiated this tension and extended surrealism to the context of postmodern American culture.;A critical history of surrealism's influence on American poetry is quickly gaining momentum through the work of scholars, including Andrew Joron, Michael Skau, Charles Borkuis, David Arnold and Garrett Caples. This dissertation joins these scholars by investigating how selected American poets and poetic schools received, transformed, and transmitted surrealism in the second half of the twentieth century, especially during the mid-'50s through the early '80s, when the movement's influence in the States was rapid and most definitive.;First, I summarize the impact of the surrealist movement on American poets through World War II, including Charles Henri Ford, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Philip Lamantia, and briefly examine Julian Levy's anthology, Surrealism (1936). Next, I investigate how surrealism was transmitted to the Beats and elucidate surrealist elements in the work of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman. Then I analyze the deep image poets (especially Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, Robert Bly, and James Wright) and how their attempt to combine surrealism with imagism and Jungian depth psychology framed the discourse about surrealism during the '60s and '70s. The implications of this assimilation are explored further in a study of George Hitchcock and Kayak magazine. Finally, I consider the complicated relationship between the language poets and surrealism, and how the complementarity of the two movements is worked out in the writing of Clark Coolidge. |
