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A Literary Life: Poems

Clemens, Will
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1022195935

Abstract Details

2002, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature.
This dissertation consists of two parts: a scholarly essay and a book-length collection of poems. The essay proposes that Rainer Maria Rilke published the first serious poem about photography, “Jugend-Bildnis meines Vaters,” in 1907. Such a poem follows in the long-established tradition of ekphrasis and poems about paintings. Yet where these poems almost always focus on paintings and sculptures in public venues like museums, “Jugend-Bildnis meines Vaters” focuses on a daguerreotype of Rilke’s father going off to war several years before Rainer Maria was born. Accordingly, the essay discusses how Roland Barthes’ theories of public and private photography are used in Mark Strand’s essay on Rilke’s autobiographical and emotional poem. The essay goes on to argue that Rilke has an early photography theory of his own, which can be observed in Rilke’s poem as well as in one of his letters. Rilke’s theory is related to his early twentieth-century ideas about the abstract and the concrete, absence and presence, aesthetics and culture, the experimental and the traditional, and feeling and seeing. Formal analyses and comparisons of the original sonnet in German to four English translations (one by Robert Lowell) and one imitation, David Wojahn’s “Military Portrait of My Father” (1994), illuminate these ideas for a broader understanding of the poem and the theory in its early twentieth-century context, when photography was a new thing influencing and changing art. This illumination also provides a basis for understanding the importance of Rilke’s poem in the context of World War II, one of the settings of Wojahn’s imitation, and today, in an age of digitally enhanced photography. Imitation as it applies to the art of poetry and translation is just one of the themes of the creative part of the dissertation, which includes a rhymed version of Lowell’s blank verse sonnet about photography, “The Literary Life, A Scrapbook” (1967). Other themes, such as family, identity, and masculinity, seem less overtly literary. The poems are organized into three sections: poems about family, place, and emerging sense of self; imitations, translations, and other literary poems; and lyrical poems that tell new stories in old forms.
Dr. John Drury (Advisor)
1 p.
literary; Rilke; Wojahn; photography

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Clemens, W. (2002). A Literary Life: Poems [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1022195935

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Clemens, Will. A Literary Life: Poems. 2002. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1022195935.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Clemens, Will. "A Literary Life: Poems." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1022195935

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1022195935
© 2002, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.