Holding Up Sky: An Original Poetry Manuscript and Analysis of Pastoral and Frontier Tropes in Selected Kansas Poetry

Abstract

The thesis “Holding Up Sky: An Original Poetry Manuscript and Analysis of Pastoral and Frontier Tropes in Selected Kansas Poetry” seeks to show Kansas through a pastoral lens, incorporating frontier rhetoric and perspectives: as an idealized landscape and also as a place where humans can pit themselves against a world that is not always conducive to human success. The critical foreword provides a brief history of the literary pastoral tradition, and analyzes selected narrative poems by William Stafford, Steven Hind, and Harley Elliott, asserting that these poems reveal a common fear or overwhelming awe of nature. The foreword also asserts that these poems reject urban encroachment on a self-sustaining rural landscape, instead emphasizing that landscape’s beauty and its ability to function without urban, human influence. “Holding Up Sky,” the original poetry manuscript, explores rural Kansas life and upbringing, incorporating pastoral and frontier tropes.