Dissertation

After Impressionism : Poetry and Painting, 1874-1914

Harris, Rob

2022

Overview

This study explores English poetry after impressionism: 'after' in the sense of being written 'later in time'; but also 'in imitation of' and, more broadly, 'in response to', often in a corrective or revisionary spirit. Specifically, it considers how a number of Anglophone poets-namely, Arthur Symons, W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Hulme, Edward Storer, F. S. Flint, and Ezra Pound-reacted to (and often against) various forms of impressionism, and treats these responses as contexts for their poetry. Its approach to this subject takes two related courses. While its focus is not wholly confined to poetic responses to visual art, at various points this study pays close attention to the ways poets thought and wrote about impressionist painting. Beyond this, the dissertation is also concerned with how their writings respond to an older philosophical language of impressions which was formative of (and eventually formed by) impressionist art. Taking both into account, it addresses the various and often contradictory ways in which ideas about impressionism informed the writings of its central figures, drawing attention to how several important ideas in the history of modern poetry-ideas such as Decadence, Symbolism, vers libre, Imagism-were formulated as expressions of, or antidotes to, impressionist aesthetics. As it does so, the thesis mounts a broader argument, which is that impressionism was one of the crucial terms through and against which English verse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was defined.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Impressionism