“A viable breathing substance”: the poetics of atmosphere in the work of Barbara Guest

This dissertation presents the concept of a poetics of atmosphere, one affected by and affecting modernism, through readings of the work of Barbara Guest (1920–2006), from her earliest writings of the 1950s to the late works of the 2000s. Guest’s poetry has often been read via a series of paradigmatic oppositions derived from mid-century formalist interpretations of modernist aesthetics: surface and depth; abstraction and figuration; the domestic and the ecstatic. These paradigmatic oppositions tend to focus critical attention on the mimetic capacity of art, on the lyric expressivity of poetry, and on the separateness of the art work or the poem from reality. I argue that the phenomenological complexities and formal restlessness of Guest’s works challenge each of these formalist assumptions and invite us to imagine the poem as an atmosphere: a field of interactivity within which signification is subordinated to sensation and meaning is given as a mobile and relational event.