This is a presentation delifrast ructure poet vered at the conference by focusing on the “infrastructure poetics” of the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University. This presentation explores its origin and its connections with “the New American Poetry,” and illuminates its mission, poetic ideas and practices, performative tradition, and political commitment.

This essay explores the use of dreams in Langston Hughes’s poetry. The dream, for Hughes, represents a wide array of psychic phenomena ranging from wishes to utopian visions. By analyzing Hughes’s poems “Lament for Dark People,” “Hope,” “Freedom’s Plow,” and “Dream” the essay seeks to demonstrate Hughes’ concern with the capacity of dreaming and the imaginations of race and class oppression to overturn structures of race and class oppression. The essay compares Hughes’ utopian perspective on the power and potential of dreams to the tragic perspective of Freud. It suggests that Hughes, while skeptical of the more self‑serving aspects of traditional American dream interpretation, sought to combine the best of these African American folk methodologies with elements of the philosophical materialism of Marx and Freud. The result is a kind of oneiric materialism that views dreams as immanent, material objects that embody utopian possibilities.

Through his walks and encounters with the landscape and the weather, The Scottish poet Thomar A. Clark meditates on the ways in which art gives form to our active, perceptual engagement with the world. This article sets out to examine some of these themes and concerns in the poetry of Thomas A. Clark in the light of Tim Ingold’s anthropological explorations of the relativity and embodied skill. Particular attention will be given to Ingold’s concept of “sentient ecology” as the kind of knowledge based on intuition and responsiveness, consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations developed through long experience of conducting one’s life in a particular environment. It will be argued that Clark’s poetry, through an emphasis on the skilled, everyday practice of walking, contributes to a symbiosis between art and ecology and challenges thereby the hierarchichal ranking of humanity over nature that has dominated the Western imagination.

I first argue that what a generation of scholarship has disinterred as moral “disturbances” in Jarrell’s poetry are not. Rather, Jarrell’s disturbances offer evidence for a functional reading of allegory as being and becoming otherwise than human. Typically, analyses of Jarrell’s allegory remain confined by an ontological circularity; moving beyond humanist poesis as both pretext and culmination, however, creates productive disturbances often and correctly associated with Ovid’s own. While affirming a formalist departure for poetry—changes in being tethered to changes in form—Jarrell’s use of allegory presents, I argue, an even more dynamic and functional model for an antinominalist poetry: the formlessness of primary being as proper, even necessary, to the arrived at (secondary) human event. Militating against this tendency to prefer human outcomes—as against processes of being—Jarrell’s mechanics recognize in formlessness the pleasures of nothingness out of which human subjectivity, the power to shape our own being, arises. A theory of accidents driving poetic change allows me in turn to invoke, and in part to challenge, the premise posed by Martin Heidegger that animal being is subordinated to the human. My analysis of Jarrell’s mechanics concludes with the suggestion that his poetry effectively subverts its own poetic inheritances, including the nineteenth‑century premise that poetry, like biological necessity itself, is positive and positively human.

T. S. Eliot as literary criticism most famous for his theories about literary tradition and individual talent, which, however, have been seriously misunderstood by some of his own critics. This paper is an attempt to prove, by focusing on the concept of time in Four Quartets and with supportive evidence from Eliot’s critical essays, that Eliot is actually proposing a balance between individuality and tradition in poetic creation and that his sense of responsibility towards life has never died.

This essay makes an exploration into the evolution of the Imagist Poetic Movement, believing that both of Ezra Pound and the Imagist Movement followed the logic of the market of consumer society and were driven by the waves of commercialization. The traits of the commercial world and the sensual satisfaction-oriented aeshetic in vogue are embodied in Pound’s imagist principles and the creations of the imagist poets.

The essay analyses the nature images in Merwin’s poems, and points out that the images, though similar to the traditional symbolism and metaphor, places more emphasis on the level of juxtaposition and misplacement of images, with ingredients of unconsciousness. Nevertheless, with the presence of many images, the poetic narrator’s subjective identity and subjective awareness become ambiguous. This phenomenon is actually related with Merwin’s pursuit of harmony between man and nature. On the one hand, the nature image is an abbreviated hint, which is involved in the existential experience of human being by means of “alienation” and “vacancy.” On the other hand, this phenomenon is caused by the unconsciousness of natural images. Merwin tries to convey the communication and recognition of nature images and human’s “deep inwardness” in the realm of unconsciousness, and thus pulls the human subject hidden behing the natural images and makes the human images absent thoroughly or partially.

This article addresses the issue of recollection and location in the modern American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III. Focusing on “In the Waiting Room,” “Crusoe in England,” “The Moose” and “One Art,” it argues that Bishop’s curiosity about the specificities of time and place manifests her interest in how the experiences are transformed through the process of describing them; in other words, how perspective of observation changes with time and place.

Langston Hughes, like other American black intellectuals in the Harlem Renaissance period, holds an ideal for democracy and racial equality, but, unlike others, he places an obvious emphasis on morality as an approach to this dream. In the realization of the ideal, as reveal African American people din his early poetry, the self‑consummation of African American people and the conscience of American society will play a vital role. The former means a stronger conviction in the black race and an expectation of African American people’s elimination of their defect and shortcomings, while the latter demonstrates a stubborn conviction in humanity. This idea, to a great extent, sets a keynote of his life‑long literary creation.

The English Romantics poet John Keats was led to his artistic consummation by “The three Odes,” among which “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is the one that aroused endless discussions and interpretations for the abundant and opaque meanings of “beauty” and “truth” in the poem. The poet’s intuitive and physical awareness of the relationship between man and nature and the revelation of the “environmental unconsciousness” have left upon the readers a lasting impression of returning the harmonious ecological system and nature. This paper therefore will tentatively interpret “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” in the poem from the perspective of constructing the natural ecology with the basis of Keats’ three composition principles, and the further discussion will be made on the poetic construction of the ecological ethics in the poem.

The exemplary poem of Ezra Pound’s imagism—“In a Station of the Metro”—is embodied with his environmental concern. The writing background, his then emotion and the status quo in a station of the metro at that time in Paris taken into count, it is discovered that Pound showed his melancholy towards the industrialized environment and his appreciation of flowers and men living in the hard environment. The conclusion reaches that this short poem verifies Pound’s care for all kinds of life, including the flowers in nature and men in society.

Robinson Jeffers is a unique poet in modern American poetry both in the thoughts and the style of his poetry. So far as the thoughts of his poetry are concerned, his uniqueness mainly lies in the fact that his poetry ref and criticism of modern civilization. However, his criticism reveals from one aspect his ecological thoughts. While criticizing modern civilization, his poetry also manifests eulogy of nature, his advocacy of human beings’ fusion and harmony with nature, his emphasis on ecological holism and his appeal to human beings for their ecological obligations. Therefore, the ecological thoughts in his poetry are not only conscious but also systematic.

A number of Philip Larkin’s poems are a little blue. He is nostalgic natural beautiful scenery and depicts the exploitation and poisoning of landscapes by industry in order to remind people of the special dignity and sanctity of nature. He sings highly of the inherent value of animals’ lives, coupled with their suffering life. Material worship has made a lot of young and beautiful girls into material ones whose spirit is broken and empty. Natural scenery, free animals and beautiful girls are the making of Larkin’s dreamy Eden which is lost. Larkin calmly and honestly records the changeable history of landscapes of England to tell his full understanding of life.

From 1930s to 1940s, a group of seemingly idiosyncratic and different literary team emerged in London in Britain. Critics coined the word “intermodernism” to define this group of writers and labeled them with “radical eccentrics”. Stevie Smith is just one representative figure, an unique influential poetess in the mid‑20th century history of English poetry. From the perspective of intermodernism, this tries to take its features, such as the perfect combination between professional work and amateur literary creation of the middle social strata, coexistence of life and death as a theme of the works, the use of collage with texts and paintings in the poems and the indeterminacy of the contents as case study in order to analyze and present the continuity of British literary tradition and the transcendence of modernism in Stevie Smith.

Charles Reznikoff, the “test of (Jewish American) poetry,” had been struggling bitterly all his life between Poundian Modernism and holy Hermeneutics of Jewish Messianism, which endowed an ambiguous hesitation, a contradictory coherence, an instable différance as well as an ethical value beyond his era. And these poetic features which frustrated his age are gleamingly charmingly from the multi-perspective of globalization and post-colonization. The cultural sins of Diaspora in Reznikoff’s drifting and hybrid poetic text poetic tenets. From the perspective of Diasporism, this paper, based on a careful reading of Reznikoff’s poems, attempts to explore the unique dynamic forces of his poems he composed when he transcended the geographic limits, unbound the confinement of the text and ruptured historical constraints. A special attention is given to the poet’s complex attitude towards the Zionist Movement.

From the perspective of ecocricitism, this article analyses the intertextual themes about the creeks and the rivers in classical American literary works, such as Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleep Hollow, The Scarlet Letter, Old Times on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, and The Negro Speaks of Rivers. This article separately analyses the “primeval” creeks and rivers, the “maturity” ones and the “spirit” ones in American literary works. This article concludes that the attitudes toward the creeks and the rivers of different writers in deifferent periods reflect the different stages of the relationship between man and nature which also have spontaneuosly enriched the intension of literary trend of thoughts in different literary periods.

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad arranges distinctive female characters in the story in symmetry in the panorama of the colonial movement, in the position as outsider, insider and doorkeeper, i.e. Marlow’s aunt and Kurtz’s fiancée as the outsiders, the black woman and the woman in painting as the insiders, and the two women knitting black wool as the doorkeepers. Among them, the outsiders are cheated victims of the colonial movement; the insiders are the predictors and the witnesses of the failure of colonialism; the doorkeepers can see the panorama of colonialism thanks to their transitional function in the whole process. With the balanced arrangement of the female characters in the story, Conrad turns out to be a cool justifiable looker‑on through the eyes of the indifferent knitting women.

Joseph Conrad’s novels cannot be referred to as ecological novels in the strict sense, but his marine and jungle novels imply some ecological ideas criticism of industrial civilization and advocate of primitivism. Therefore, ecocriticism provides us a vet to Conrad’s novels. Taking An Outcast of the Island and Heart of Darkness for example, the author of the paper attempts to examine Conrad’s crit of the mechanical civilization, lash at the materialism of modern humans and advocate of the relatively primitive state of being, from which we can further interpret Conrad’s concern of the moral crisis in modern society.

Don DeLillo’s White Noise portrays the ecocrisis caused by the misused hi‑ tech in the consumer society. Auschwitz Camp and Hitler’s gas chambers had been condemned by people around the world, however, I wonder, whether people have realized that the destruction of the ecological environment will be likely to bring about enormous “gas chambers” in the world. The reader of the novel is expected to associate Hitler’s gas chambers with the “Airborne Toxic Event“ takes place in the story, and juxtaposes historical events with imaginary ecocrisis, so that greedy material demands would be overpowered by ecological conscience, and the issue of environmental ethics would be seriously considered and mankind’s future and fate would be paid more attention to.

Presently critical reviews of The Bell Jar by the contemporary American woman writer Sylvia Plath have mainly centered around the book as a woman’s initiation novel, the images of death, rebirth or divided selves and Esther the heroine’s lunacy. However, this essay attempts to prove that this novel reveals some idea which can be regarded in line with the later ecofeminist thoughts. A thorough analysis of the nature images existing in the narrative and description of Esther helps to disclose the affinity between women and nature, and how Esther have used it to defy the patriarchal society. Besides, Esther’s instinctive dependence on intuition and insistence on variety also demonstrates her condemnation of the so called reason which gives power to ruling male and the modern scientific development.

Gertrude Stein is regarded as an avant‑garde writ er in modern literary history, not only because of her innovative writing styles but also because of her aesthetic, philosophical and ethical thoughts beneath the surface of her works. From the narration—“It was a very happy family there all together in the kitchen, the good Anna and Sally and old Baby and young Peter and jolly little Rags”, in Three Lives, Gertrude Stein combined these factors perfectly. From the equal perspective narration, Stein displays that one human being is as important as an‑other human being, and that animals have the same intrinsic, real dignity as human beings do so that they deserve the same moral consideration as “subject‑of‑a‑life”.

This paper examines two narrative modes in Don DeLillo’s early novels, the quest, and withdrawal and reappearance of the characters, the former reflects the quest for self‑identity in the postmodern image‑consumer culture and the latter reflects the permanent paradox of construction of subjectivity. The fruitless quest represents the uncertainty and incompletion of self‑knowledge and social identity. By close‑reading the texts, I discuss how filmic self‑consciousness exerts great influence upon individual’s structure of feeling and spiritual experience. I argue that “third person consciousness” is an index of the characters in DeLillo’s novels and the American image-consumer culture.