| This dissertation studies the relationship of the poet to poetry, using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, seen as an outgrowth of Romantic thought, to explore the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England and Pedro Salinas in Spain. Modern poetry is commonly considered to begin with Baudelaire, who identifies modern art with Romanticism. Concomitant with the belief that "the universe exists through the poet," Romantic thinkers began to see the artist's individuality as having a layer beyond the conscious inaccessible to the poet himself, a dialectical conception of the self which partakes of Romanticism's privileging of dialectical thought. These are among the ideas which Freud, and later Lacan, developed; the poetry of Coleridge, as a Romantic, and of Salinas, writing in the immediately post-Freudian years, share these assumptions.;My thesis assumes that the emerging poet has a consciousness which develops very much like that of the human self, as described by Lacan, but which grows dialectically toward "poethood," rather than selfhood. With Coleridge, I explore the split between the conscious and unconscious poetic selves as they are revealed in his "conversation poems." Because these poems were intended to flow as spontaneous discourse, I see them as analogous to Lacan's description of the psychoanalytic model in which the speaking subject reveals not only his ego but his unconscious attachments and conflicts as well. In the case of Salinas, I examine his opus chronologically and identify the stages of his individuation as a poet: the assumption (based on the implicit belief in a symbiotic relationship with the poetic canon) that he can indeed "render the world" through his language and imagination, and the "Oedipal" conflict with a specific precursor whom he attempts to supersede in order to find his own poetic voice.;Behind the belief in the fiction of a symbiotic wholeness lies the fear of death, which language--by substituting words for real presences--functions symbolically to defer. Thus with both writers, I also highlight their recognition of the ontological fact of death, and its implications for them as poets, to show how their poetry functions as a strategy for struggle against and, ultimately, acceptance of it. |
