FORM, CYCLE, INFINITY: LANDSCAPE IMAGERY IN THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST AND GEORGE SEFERIS

The dissertation examines selected landscape images in the work of two important poets of this century, Robert Frost and George Seferis. Three recurrent images in Frost are walls, growing things, and stars; with like pertinacity, Seferis returns again and again to stones, the sea, and light. I trace similarities between the two poets' respective triple image groups--similarities which have determined the organization of this study.;Chapter I explores Frost's walls and Seferis's stones, first as local facts, than as emblems of both temporal/historical awareness and of poetic craft. Chapter II discusses Frost's gardens and Seferis's seas, treating their connotations of seasonal cycle, metamorphosis, and artistic renewal. Chapter III finds in the otherness of stars and light not only extratemporality but also a late acknowledgement on the part of both poets of ineffability.;Although ignorant of one another's work, Frost and Seferis put closely related images to even more closely related uses. Both create landscapes which are open-ended, enticingly unfinished as all synecdoches must be, yet which are possessed of enough continuity and internal consistency to contrast strongly with the fragmentation of imagery and even of syntax preferred by many of their contemporaries.;This thesis can be read as any or all of the following: a comparative examination of how two poets use landscape imagery, or of two artists' coming to terms with their literary lineage; as an extended meditation on imagery, particularly synecdoche; and as an essay in painstaking reading. Whatever the study's primary goal, the images which are its chief focus are not only topics in themselves but assuredly also pegs on which to hang recurring concerns with the modes of poetic thought and the capabilities and restrictions of language.;First, the Introduction furnishes background material on each poet's relation to his literary heritage; it also attempts to place both men's work in the context of the prevalent poetics of the twentieth century. Then the argument is divided into three chapters, each of which summarizes the kinds of meaning these poets extract from their favorite images. For both, meaning radiates outward from local to cosmic.