'Paleontological Institute at The University of Kansas'
Abstract
The stylistic variety of Edward Dorn's poetic career, from the 1950s through the 1990s, has been criticized as lacking cohesion, and deemed his work's fundamental shortcoming. The earlier poetry's somber lyricism has been pitted against the caustic epigrams of the later writing, and these modes are set on either side of Gunslinger, Dorn's mock-epic of the "sicksties," which has received disproportionate scholarly attention, to the detriment of Dorn's manifold, contemporaneous work. While formal experimentation and the development of a multi-voiced perspective might provide a context for approaching Dorn's stylistic diversity, instead those objectives have been critically cemented to an embittered tendentiousness, a resistance, insufficient to address either the biography or the writing. Due to the fragmentary displacements of these assumptions, this thesis seeks an integrated reading that celebrates, rather than condemns, discrepancies in Dorn's unmoored political/poetic identity. Through unpublished archival materials, it reexamines the Gunslinger era--part of which Dorn spent among the countercultural tumult in Lawrence, Kansas--when Dorn's interest in geography expanded to address both "the landscape of the imagination," and the inevitable constraints of an ideologically-infused language
