Sizing up, scaling down: Dickinson, Moore, Bishop, Niedecker, Ryan

Thesis

This is a thesis about smallness and modern American poetry, as exemplified in and by the work of five poets: Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Lorine Niedecker, and Kay Ryan. I conceive smallness in two ways: first, the physical smallness of certain poems themselves; secondly, the way in which smallness is thematised, staged, and explored in poetry.

Being a suitably small-scale method of reading, close textual analysis is at the forefront of my approach. By building upon each poet’s particular version of smallness, I present a collective examination of the poetic stature that smallness can engender. In my first chapter, I explore Dickinson’s fascination with insects, and the ways in which these tiny creatures represent larger ideas in her writing. My second chapter examines the relationship between the part and the whole across various scales in Moore’s work. The private interior is the focus of my third chapter, where I consider the small, contained spaces of Bishop’s work. In my penultimate chapter, I unpack Niedecker’s description of a poet’s work as ‘condensery’. Finally, in my fifth chapter, I think about Ryan’s compact, comic poems in terms of motifs of survival.

Seen more generally within the framework of a modern preoccupation with smallness in its various manifestations, the work of these poets opens up different ways of thinking about the attendant ideas of size, scale, and perspective. In their work, nothing is too small: varieties of blue in an artichoke; a little granite pail; the octopus’s suction cups. Cumulatively, these details also amount to a defense against a certain large-scale way of reading poetry, in which the minutiae of individual perspective is at risk of being lost.

Authors: Chen, CY

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English