http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/496294541

The ground of our beseeching metaphor and the poetics of meditation

The dissertation is a study of contemporary metaphor theory and several meditative poets: Eliot, Stevens, Roethke, with some attention given to Bishop and Ammons. Against the reductive bias of deconstructive critics, this study advances an integrating, heuristic version of metaphor and its semantic context as a 'performative' trope. The intent is to describe a meditative poetics in which poets of marked inwardness circulate endlessly through propositions, entertaining reality in the subjunctive and optative moods. Eliot is shown as the only meditative poet of the group whose figuration escalates toward totalizing, orthodox 'master' tropes such as 'incarnation' and 'redemption'; figuration in Eliot is subsumed within a formalized pattern and assumes a hierarchical dispensation. The meditative poiesis of Stevens and those who follow is more improvisational, the figuration assuming no a priori destination. The task of these meditative poets is then to conceive of metaphor as a secular analogue of the operations and postulates of religious faith. The meditative poet in contemporary verse thus explores the ontological and cognitive status of metaphor as a spiritual endeavor which discovers and preserves the alterity of the empirical world. The project of the meditative poet today is to continue to figure the plural incarnations of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, the Emersonian 'Man Thinking', the Stevensean 'major man'. The poetry of the observed mind, looking for "what will suffice", in Stevens' phrase, would reclaim the language of kerygma, the being-language of existential possibility and ontological verification; the poet's meditations are thus singularly attuned to the hermeneutic poise, the 'listening in' for whatever message entity may bear for us.

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