The Museum of Coming Apart Page: I
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Lee, Bethany Tyler. The Museum of Coming Apart. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May
2009, 88 pp., works cited, 11 titles.
This dissertation comprises two parts: Part I, which discusses use of second person
pronoun in contemporary American poetry; and Part II, The Museum of Coming Apart, which is
a collection of poems.
As confessional verse became a dominant mode in American poetry in the late 1950s
and early 60s, so too did the use of the first-person pronoun. Due in part to the excesses of
later confessionalism, however, many contemporary poets hesitate to use first person for fear
that their work might be read as autobiography. The poetry of the 1990s and early 2000s has
thus been characterized by distance, dissociation, and fracture as poets attempt to remove
themselves from the overtly emotional and intimate style of the confessionals. However, other
contemporary poets have sought to straddle the line between the earnestness and linearity of
confessionalism and the intellectually playful yet emotionally detached poetry of the moment.
One method for striking this balance is to employ the second person pronoun. Because "you" in
English is ambiguous, it allows the poet to toy with the level of distance in a poem and create
evolving relationships between the speaker and reader. Through the analysis of poems by C.
Dale Young, Paul Guest, Richard Hugo, Nick Flynn, Carrie St. George Comer, and Moira Egan,
this essay examines five common ways second person is employed in contemporary American
poetry-the use of "you" in reference to a specific individual, the epistolary form, the direct
address to the reader, the imperative voice, and the use of "you" as a substitute for "l"-and
the ways that the second-person pronoun allows these poems to take the best of both the
confessional and dissociative modes.
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Lee, Bethany Tyler. The Museum of Coming Apart, dissertation, May 2009; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc11000/m1/2/: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .