Prop rockery

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Prop Rockery is a collection of poems in three sections. This collection is interested in two modes of poetic voice - a more brazen, maximalist mode and a more subdued, speculative mode. Overall, these poems attempt to stretch the "I" of the lyric by indulging in persona and performance and by drawing attention to the artifice and construct of a poem's rhetorical language. Offering renovations of conventional lyric forms and modes, such as the pastoral, complaint, sonnet, monologue, ballad, and song, these poems are invested in English Renaissance texts, in particular Shakespeare's dramatic works, and in the often conflicting ideas of nature that emerge in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries' New Science.