A Modernist Menagerie: Representations of Animals in the Work of Five North American Poets

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
A Modernist Menagerie: Representations of Animals in the Work of Five North American Poets
Abstract
The author considers the representation of animals in Canadian and American modernist poetry. In investigating the relationship between the proliferation of animal tropes and imagery and experimental poetics, she argues that modernism is fundamentally concerned with reconsidering human nature and humanity's place in the modern world. The author considers impersonality and animality in the work of British poet T.S. Eliot and P.K. Page (1916-2010), one of the Montreal Group of poets. Like the concept of impersonality, Eliot's influence on Page is often taken for granted in the critical literature; it argues that impersonality (in Eliot's formulation) relies upon embodied personal experience, and on that basis offers an account of Eliot's anxieties about embodiment and Page's lapsus. The author also investigates American poet Marianne Moore's and Montreal poet Irving Layton's (1912-2006) representation of animals to communicate indirectly their responses to global crises. The author argues that both poets felt a strong compulsion to comment on social and moral issues, but found it difficult to do so directly; images and tropes of animals enabled Moore to produce modernist allegories, and assisted Layton in depicting human ferity.
Type
PhD dissertation
University
McGill University
Place
Montreal
Date
2012
# of Pages
iv-332p.
Language
en
URL
Citation
Essert, Emily Margaret. “A Modernist Menagerie: Representations of Animals in the Work of Five North American Poets.” PhD dissertation, McGill University, 2012. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/-?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=114133&silo_library=GEN01.
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