UC Irvine

This dissertation focuses on the work of three American poets – Walt Whitman, George Oppen, and Amiri Baraka – whose writing exemplifies the persistence of “seriality” in Modern poetry and poetics. Though “serial poetics” has long been invoked in making sense of a wide range of poetry and poets, there is little consensus on what, exactly, a “serial poem” is. My dissertation examines this oversight as a problem within the history of poetic formalism and connects the lack of recognition that serial poems are afforded within literary discourse to larger questions about the construction of identity within poetics and critical theory. In different yet always historically-situated ways, Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka all challenge critical commonplaces about the poet and the poem by adopting not so much a recognizable poetics as a contingent serial “stance.” This approach provides these poets with a powerful yet flexible resource for developing distinctive practices of artistic and social self-making – to find themselves, as Oppen puts it, by two. Each of my chapters examines one of these poets’ strategies of serial self-making, or “autopoetics,” as it manifests in his approach to poetic form. For instance, Whitman aspired to be both the quintessential American bard and a radical queer bohemian in a nineteenth-century America that was largely incapable of recognizing his performance of these identities. Oppen, who was Communist, Jewish, and a G.I. during World War II and McCarthyism, fought throughout his life to distance himself from the White Anglo-Saxon identity of his Modernist “fathers’” and the upper-class identity of his actual father. Baraka was born into the Black middle class but underwent regular ideological conversions, courting constant controversy in his commitment to social transgression and artistic transformation. The serial strategies that I identify in these three poets’ lives and work ultimately help to expose, clarify, and enrich problems of classification, continuity, and closure that have come to be inseparable from the history of Modern American poetry and poetics.