Sensory imagery and aesthetic affect in the poetry of Keats, Hopkins, and Eliot

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on applying a new method of analysis to selected works by three major poets, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. project considers their work in light of recent scholarship by Charles Altieri on the affects, such as emotion, feelings, passion, and mood; how these affects operate in artistic works; and, specifically, examines how these authors employ the affects in their poetry to express their own emotions and, in the creation of lyric poems, turn these emotions into works of art. In addition, the project strengthens the aesthetic readings with a study of the ways in which these poets employ sensory images to achieve a desired affect. The introduction presents the concepts of the various affects, as explained by literary critic, Charles Altieri. It argues that this framework of the affects can be valuable in poetic analysis, and is expandable to include other affects, and subcategories of the affects, as close reading of the poetry identifies new emotional vistas. I begin with the poetry and critical writing (mainly letters) of John Keats, whose philosophy of poetry was a harbinger of later writers including Eliot. Like Keats, Eliot will accentuate the detachment of the poet, and the difference between feelings and emotions. Like Keats, Hopkins will express a type of detachment - his, slightly different, as it is a separation from the worldly and an escape to the supernatural. Like Hopkins, Eliot will present poetry that is deeply religious, but will add an element of political comment not present in the earlier writers. Chapters on Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot follow the chapter on Keats, and in them I apply the methodology of sensory imagery and affect to poets of differing backgrounds. Each chapter will include a philosophical analysis followed by close reading of selected works. In Keats, I will locate a tension between the key concepts of fancy and imagination, remarking on Keats's separation from the wisdom of his contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on these interpretations of the two major processes of poetic creativity. Keats works analyzed include Sleep and Poetry, Endymion, and Ode to a Nightingale. In explicating the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I will establish how his conversion to Catholicism, and subsequent ordination as a Jesuit, affected his poetic style, in turn creating for him a new affective space, which I call religious fervor. Hopkins poetry analyzed includes God's Grandeur, The Windhover, and Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves. I will argue that, even in the so-called desolate sonnets of 1885, Hopkins remained a poet of religious fervor, not doubt. Reference will be made to J. Hillis Miller's synoptic survey of the place of religion in nineteenth century artistic works, Disappearance of God. poetry of T. S. Eliot will be analyzed in an in-depth consideration of the very late poem, Little Gidding, the final of the Four Quartets. dominant affect of that poem, composed during the Second World War, is mood, the…