Sibylline and Other Poems

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Authors

Renne, Benjamin

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Abstract

Sibylline and Other Poems explores the nature of the visionary and prophetic, as pertaining to the Poet’s unique role in literature as the conduit of certain transcendent experiences. In Part I, the speaker grapples with prophecy in terms of the immediacy of the body and its relation to distortions of time, reality, and memory. Through a combination of lyric and prose forms, these poems reveal the speaker’s consciousness to be intimately tied to that of the Sibyl’s. Memories of the past and intimations of the future fuse together in a strange continuum of the transcendent. In Part II, themes of homecoming, nostalgia, movement, and bodies (in various forms, both physical and abstract), join the amalgam of visionary motifs. The long poem, “Nostos”, seeks to reckon with a fragmented and circuitous history, in which philosophy, religion, politics, and the human body become intertwined expressions of the future, past, and present.

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This thesis has been embargoed for 5 years and will not be available until May 2022 at the earliest.

Keywords

Sibyl, Visionary, Prophetic, Poetics, Home, Nostos

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