Vitalism and Abstraction in Modern Poetry

FAIN: FR-10294-78

Jon M. Rosenblatt
Rhode Island College (Providence, RI 02908-1940)

Study will concentrate on three central issues: (1) the nature of a "vitalist aesthetics" as embodied in the thinking of Nietzche, Bergson, Freud and D. H. Lawrence and in the poetry of Whitman, Dylan Thomas and Lawrence, as well as other modern poets; the opposition between formalist and vitalist values, especially in relation to such key terms as "free verse," "irony," and "tradition"; and the continuities and discontinuities between Romanticism and modernism.