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Abstract

Material is a collection of poems about sexuality’s relations with artifice, knowledge, history, and difference. Henri Cole has told us that the composition of poems comes out of the composition of lives. In the same way that James Merrill was once described as a poet who “became willing to grapple with things themselves, rather than the intellectualized or aestheticized symbols of things,” the arc of my book’s changing art reflects a changing life, as its youthful speaker moves from the abstract to the concrete, to the actual and real, the materiality of love and self-knowledge. Beginning with “self-portrait,” it ends with “myself.”

Table of Contents

I

The Art Historian 9

Terrarium 10

Royal Hunt 11

The End of Abstraction 12

Symmetry 14

First Apartment 15

II

America 17

Cliff House 18

Drawing with My Father 20

The Ersatz Parents 21

III

Sentimental Education 23

Germinal 24

Perception 25

A Day Before Leaving 27

Farewell Performance 29

Haussmann 30

Notes

About this Honors Thesis

Rights statement

• Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.

School	Emory College
Department	English and Creative Writing
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, English Literature, American History, European
Keyword	poetry french sexuality
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Jericho Brown, Emory University

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