@article{THESIS,
      recid = {1835},
      author = {Simmons, Joseph Edward},
      title = {Irenic Modernism: The Early Work of David Jones and W. H.  Auden},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2019-06},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {309},
      abstract = {My dissertation examines how Jones and Auden, two late  modernist poets, woke up from the high modernist dream of  poetic autonomy. Contemporaries like James Joyce, Wilfred  Owen, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot tended either to revolt  against the public status quo or to turn aside in private  rebellion. Resisting this poetic “ire,” Jones and Auden  wrote what I call an “irenic” poetry, one which peacefully  coexists with the outside world.

My first chapter traces  the mature expression of this idea in these poets’ later  reflections on art, religion, and the idea of a poetic  vocation. The next two chapters look at how these poets  tried to bring poetic landscape and ritual theater back to  earth and to secular community. The fourth and fifth  chapters consider these authors’ midcareer masterpieces,  Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937) and Auden’s “The Sea and the  Mirror” (1944): though radically different in form and  subject matter, both works address the danger of poetic  violence by exploring the myriad varieties of poetic  experience and their deeper unity in our common human  nature. A final chapter compares the poetics traced in the  preceding chapters to works by the most germane of these  poets’ contemporaries.

In addition to analyzing two major  modernist poets in light of one another, this project  develops a philosophical aesthetics, implicit in these  poets’ work, concerned with what it means to understand two  authors in each other’s light. Poetic affinities, I  suggest, do not allegorize shared institutional or  ideological backgrounds, but rather register a shared  solution to an historically particular poetic problem, in  this case, a problem about how a poem can acknowledge the  existence of other poems, other persons, and other  authorities. This account contributes to two important  critical conversations, one about poetry, personhood, and  human community, another about how modernist poets’  theoretical commitments and formal innovations shape and  structure one another.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1835},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1835},
}