A poetics of the elemental imagination: Anne Wilkinson's poetry and autobiographical writings

Abstract

By envisioning a manifold image-theory in Anne Wilkinson's poetry and autobiographical writings in light of Metaphysical, Romantic, Symbolist, and Modernist poetics, and archetypal and phenomenological psychology, this thesis imagines a revisionist theory of Wilkinson' s poetics. From an historical perspective, the revisionist project reviews a genealogy of Wilkinson's poetics through the lenses of her reviewers and critics, focussing on the field of Canadian Modernism. In specific application to Wilkinson's poetry and autobiographical writings, the revisionist project attends to her prolific '"elemental images" of earth, air, water, and fire, and so develops an image-theory - a poetics of the elemental imagination. Because Wilkinson herself also acts as a revisionist mythmaker, myths not only structure the imaginal matrices of her poetics, but also lend their archetypal structure to a theory of the elemental image and imagination in her poetry, journals, and autobiography.