BOTANIC MODERNISMS: PRIVATE GARDEN SPACES IN MODERNIST AMERICAN POETRY.

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This project explores the relationship between botanical spaces, focusing on the private garden, and American modernism. By contextualising and examining the works of five American modernist poets (H.D., Wallace Stevens, Amy Lowell, Edna St Vincent Millay, Mina Loy) it will challenge the dominant critical paradigm which treats modernism as a product of industrial and urban modernity, reorienting it toward "a consciousness of the earth as a planet... encompassing both the human and non-human" (Friedman). By considering key spaces - the scientific, urban, oriental, ancient garden and the garden as art - I will investigate how gardens are used to explore sexuality and femininity, the imagination, nationalism, and modernity in American modernist poetry. This project aims to address the following questions:-Why was the garden a central ecological space for modernists?-How does the implementation of floral symbolism reflect early twentieth century anxieties?-How is the garden space implemented as a tool of deconstruction?-How do modernists adapt poetic form to capture the nature of the botanical?-How can an eco-critical approach challenge previous urban readings of American modernist poetry.This thesis will develop an interdisciplinary framework, drawing on recent developments in eco-criticism, while undertaking extensive historical contextualisation. The thesis will examine modernists' understanding of the term "nature", questioning the thematic, historical or ideological functions of their depictions of nature. The period I am examining witnessed the development of the garden space from communal commodity to solitary art. Communal American green spaces were a symbol of community affluence, from the earliest plantations to the Gilded Age when parks and gardens were designed to replicate those of the British bourgeoisie, showcased in Henderson and Co's Manual of Everything for the Garden. Later, the community garden became a symbol of patriotism in the case of World War I "victory gardens" and 5,500 community relief gardens in New York City to combat hunger and poverty during the great depression (Warner). Yet, the development of the Garden Club of America, with its emphasis on gardening as creative and emotionally nurturing, was symbolic of the movement away from the community "kitchen garden" to the esoteric, solitary botanical space of the imagination. This thesis argues that American modernism invested in the private, solitary garden as a reaction to capitalism, violence and heteronomy, seeing it as a sanctuary of the personal imagination.Chapter 1 will investigate the relationship between garden spaces, femininity and sexuality in the poetry of H.D., particularly her collection Sea Garden (1916). Chapter 2 considers the role of the garden as art in Wallace Stevens's poetry, particularly Harmonium (1923), which presents flowers as symbols of the imagination, exploring how the botanic was inextricably linked to modernist ideas of personality flux and individualism. Chapter 3 explores the oriental garden in Amy Lowell's work, particularly Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914). Popular publications on Japanese gardens, such as Du Cane's Flowers of Japan (1908) and Lowell's brother's The Soul of the Far East (1888) demonstrate how oriental gardening was guided by the principles of individual autonomy and spiritual peace. Chapter 4 examines Edna St. Vincent Millay's work, specifically Second April (1921), and how her urban green spaces showcase the changing relationship between human and non-human in the rapidly evolving landscape of New York City. Chapter 5 examines ancient gardens in Mina Loy's Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose and Lunar Baedeker (1923), demonstrating her understandings of the modern "crisis in consciousness" ("Aphorisms on Futurism"), satirising dandies, aesthetes, traditional courtship and marriage rituals and patriarchal prejudice.