Abstract

This article gives an account of space and place in the early work of the twentieth-century American poet, Edward Dorn. Readings of these concepts are pursued in the context of Early Greek and Hellenic physics and natural philosophy in distinct opposition to Newtonian mechanics. Dorn's representations of space and place reveal both a tension between impulses towards the freedom of spatial extension and the coherent stability of place or the plenum of bounded space, and the poet's vexed recognition that place affects space, consumes or obscures it. This configuration is a crucial way of approaching Dorn's ambivalent response to the American Far West as a site both of seemingly endless spatial freedom and endless, rootless vagrancy.

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