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University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
2004
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Christopher Allen Green
University of Kentucky, [email protected]
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Green, Christopher Allen, "THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946"
(2004). University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations. 349.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_diss/349
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at UKnowledge. It has been
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ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION
Christopher Allen Green
The Graduate School
University of Kentucky
2004
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946
ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
College of Arts and Sciences
at the University of Kentucky
By
Christopher Allen Green
Lexington, Kentucky
Director: Dr. Dale Bauer, Professor of English
Lexington, Kentucky
2004
Copyright © Chris Green 2004
ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946
This dissertation demonstrates how poetry about Appalachia expanded American considerations of
democracy, ethnicity, and cultural values. I argue that poetry is profoundly communal in its construction
and investigate how the value of poetry changes based upon its transfer through varying networks of
production, circulation, and reception. Informed by theories of cultural capital and rhetoric, the chapters
trace three books of poetry from their composition and publication to their reception and influence, noting
how central political and social institutions and individuals shaped that process. The dissertation establishes
how the poets crafted their writing to sway specific interpretive communities’ attitudes on pluralism. In
Hounds on the Mountain (Viking, 1937), James Still sang about the erosion of the quiet earth for the liberal,
middleclass readers of The Atlantic. In U. S. 1 (Covici·Friede, 1938), Muriel Rukeyser wrote about the
deaths of migrant and African-American miners, the Spanish Civil War, and the threat of fascism for
popular-front readers of The New Republic, Poetry, and the New Masses. In Clods of Southern Earth
(Boni and Gaer, 1946), Don West catalyzed resistance in an interracial readership of southern (and
mountain) sharecroppers and factory workers. In each case, the complex interrelations between history,
authors, and readers show their mutually transformative effects on pluralism. Within American pluralism
from1900 to 1948, my work reveals the vital relations between established ethnicities—African-
American, Jewish, Anglo, American Indian, and Southern—and Appalachia. My account follows
the concrete connections of pluralism from Plessy vs. Ferguson’s judicial theory of racial purity, through a
cultural pluralism based on national origins during WWI, to the Harlem Renaissance, and ends with an
examination of regional pluralism in the 1930s. Appalachia was then often understood as preserving
remnants of a premodern America, and the authors about whom I write used it to authenticate the values of
community, which they felt to be endangered by the threats of modern dissociation, industrial exploitation,
and fascist culture. Through close readings of poems in the three books, I establish Appalachia’s role in the
discourse of modern American pluralism—the poetics of region and race.
KEYWORDS: American Poetry, Cultural Studies, Reader-response Criticism,
Multiculturalism, Appalachian Region
Christopher A. Green
April 20, 2004
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946
By
Christopher Allen Green
Dale M. Bauer
Director of Dissertation
Dale M. Bauer
Director of Graduate Studies
April 20, 2004
RULES FOR USE OF DISSERTATIONS
Unpublished dissertations submitted for the Doctor’s degree and deposited in the University of
Kentucky Library are as a rule open for inspection, but are to be used only with due regard to the
rights of the authors. Bibliographical references may be noted, but quotations or summaries of
part may be published only with the permission of the author, and with the usual scholarly
acknowledgments.
Extensive copying for publication of the dissertation in whole or in part also requires the consent
of the Dean of the Graduate School of the University of Kentucky.
DISSERTATION
Christopher Allen Green
The Graduate School
University of Kentucky
2004
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946
DISSERTATION
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
College of Arts and Sciences
at the University of Kentucky
By
Christopher Allen Green
Lexington, Kentucky
Director: Dr. Dale Bauer, Professor of English
Lexington, Kentucky
2004
Copyright © Chris Green 2004
For Jenny
Description:Green, Christopher Allen, "THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946" (2004). University of . I also bow to Clara Keyes, Special Collections Librarian, .. Appendix I: Horace Gregory in the 1930s .
