• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • University Colleges
    • SUNY Brockport
    • Theses
    • English Master’s Theses
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • University Colleges
    • SUNY Brockport
    • Theses
    • English Master’s Theses
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of SUNY Open Access RepositoryCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartmentThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartmentAuthor ProfilesView

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Campus Communities in SOAR

    Alfred State CollegeBrockportBroomeCantonDownstateEmpireFredoniaMaritimeNew PaltzOneontaOptometryOswegoPlattsburghSUNY Polytechnic InstituteSUNY Office of Community Colleges and the Education PipelineSUNY PressUpstate Medical

    Statistics

    Most Popular ItemsStatistics by CountryMost Popular Authors

    The Railroad in American Poetry

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    eng_theses/120/fulltext (1).pdf
    Size:
    2.055Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Average rating
     
       votes
    Cast your vote
    You can rate an item by clicking the amount of stars they wish to award to this item. When enough users have cast their vote on this item, the average rating will also be shown.
    Star rating
     
    Your vote was cast
    Thank you for your feedback
    Author
    Bodenstedt, James C.
    Keyword
    Poetry
    Railroads
    Date Published
    1992-01-01
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/6267
    Abstract
    In many ways travel by train is a speeded-up version of what we are all doing – a here and now experience of what it's like to be human. Trains tend to make us reflective and introspective. For over 150 years poets have used railroad imagery in an attempt to enter into the universal experience of trains. This thesis will examine the remarkably strong hold the railroad image has had on the consciousness of poets, ranging from the Transcendentalists to contemporary American poets. For many of the nineteenth-century poets, the image of the railroad expresses the promise and the danger of technology in modern industrial society, while the contemporary poets do not generally write poems “about” the railroad, but use train imagery to journey through the psychic landscape of the country and one's own mind and being. Today's train poems reveal why they must take a journey through the landscape of the self in order to be fully awake in the world. There are hundreds of railroad poems out there that reveal poets' psychic journeys. Almost every major and minor American poet since Emerson has either written a train poem or has used railroad imagery in their poems. Trains continue to fascinate our poets' imaginations despite the railroad's demise, because they still represent profound metaphors in American consciousness- symbols of speed and power personifying industrial society itself; yet at the same time trains remain a symbol of time's passage upon our' scarred, native soil. In examining railroad verse, we will look at how the consciousness of the poet explores what trains are, because like any good poem, railroad poems also probe into the language depths of the unconscious mind, which is the repository of primal, sensory images, and reach forth toward a harmony or wholeness with the rational, ordering, conscious mind. The first four chapters of the thesis invite us to travel along the nineteenth-century railroad of Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman. On their trains we find that the image of the railroad is incorporated harmoniously into the landscape. Succeeding chapters examine the poetry of the twentieth-century. I separated the chapters into the following themes to represent the diversity of the railroad in American poetry: "Come Serve the Muse,Again;” "Arrivals and Departures at the Station;" "Sketches of American People and American Landscapes;" "Troop Trains and Holocaust Trains;” and "Journeying Through the Landscape of Consciousness." In these chapters the image of the train will take us on an inward journey of personal and spiritual freedom.
    Description
    Abstract adapted from thesis introduction to aid in discovery.
    Collections
    English Master’s Theses

    entitlement

     

    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2023)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.