Abstract

This dissertation argues that American poets after 1945 have competitively engaged with the work of historians in an attempt to transcend history, to correct its gaps, or to change its course. Though literary scholars routinely historicize poetry, and though the last ten years have seen an outpouring of interdisciplinary scholarship on American poetics, we have not considered how the seismic changes in academic historiography after World War II affected the American poets who closely followed those developments. In literary theory, lyric has long been a lightning rod for debates between historicists and formalists because it can signify either a universal poetic impulse as old as human language or a critical fiction that provides aesthetic cover for white supremacy and dubious liberal autonomy. Examining a diverse archive of poets from 1945 until 2020, I offer a counterintuitive thesis: since World War II, historiography has consistently been a whetstone against which poets sharpen their sense of lyric distinctiveness. Poets Against History shows that midcentury confessional poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman read deeply in the philosophy of history and Puritan historiography, these intertexts serving as foils to the transcendent aspirations of their lyric art. In the 1970s and ’80s, as American academics increasingly leveraged the tools of social science to write histories from the perspectives of enslaved African Americans and of Native Americans, poets such as Robert Hayden and Joy Harjo used the lyric to imagine voices silenced by the archive and to rehearse timeless myths, defying traditional historical epistemology in the process. For Terrance Hayes, Claudia Rankine, and other contemporary poets, lyric’s taste for solipsism duels with the political imperative to alter the course of history by reckoning with America’s racial past. Ultimately, I argue that to understand the changing principles of American poetry, we must trace changing ideas about American history, and vice versa.

Committee Chair

William Maxwell

Committee Members

Abram Van Engen; Peter Kastor; Stephanie Li; Vincent Sherry

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

English and American Literature

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

5-22-2025

Language

English (en)

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