Art and daily life in James Schuyler's poetry.
Item
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Title
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Art and daily life in James Schuyler's poetry.
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Identifier
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AAI9808014
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identifier
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9808014
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Creator
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Thompson, Robert Eduard.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Mary Ann Caws
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Literature, Modern | Art History
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Abstract
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"In New York the art world is a painters' world. Writers and musicians are in the boat, but they don't steer." While taking seriously this assertion by James Schuyler (1923-1991), this dissertation investigates how art, in Schuyler's engagement of the Wordsworthian orientation, is never just Art.;Chapter one considers Schuyler's pre-1960 work composed before and during his time as art critic at Art News. In those early poems are "promissory notes" for the poetry he was to later take up. The Action Painters decisively affected him at this time as they did the entire cultural scene in New York. The question is how Schuyler adapted Action Painting methods and ideas in his poetry, and why he found Harold Rosenberg's distinctly Romantic Existentialist account of the endeavor so definitive.;The second chapter treats poems written through the late 1960's, a period when Schuyler lived with the figurative painter Fairfield Porter. In applying painterly realist qualities to his poetry, Schuyler ignores categories that set Action Painters and the figurative artists at odds with each other, as the critic Clement Greenberg was intent on doing. Although these diverse styles seem unrelated, the common basis Schuyler saw and integrated in his poetry was in the painters' views of the artist, the process of doing art, and the status of the art object itself.;Chapter three takes up the presence of conceptual artists such as Duchamp, Cage, Rauschenberg and Joe Brainard in Schuyler's poetry of the late 60's and early 70's. These artists and their anti-art views, or their ideas about the blurring of art and life, follow the spirit of Wordsworth's imperative in "The Tables Turned" that one "leave behind art" and "come forth into the light of things.".;Chapter four applies ideas in the previous chapters to a reading of "The Morning of the Poem," Schuyler's 66 page anti-masterpiece masterpiece. While the poem confirms Schuyler's Wordsworthian inclinations and art influences, this chapter departs from the earlier focus to address why "writing like painting" is not Schuyler's ultimate aim, and how language and poetry figure in Schuyler's "produce of the common day.".
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
