Abstract

The purpose of this project is to elaborate a literary hermeneutics that is equal to the demands of certain poems by Robert Frost. One chapter of the dissertation is devoted to each of the three existential hermeneutic philosophers whose work pertains most closely to literature, namely Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur; but I will argue that Ricoeur's dialectical approach proves most useful for a hermeneutics of poetry. ;Heidegger's later writings furnish a model for reading the sonnet "Mowing"; his terms "earth" and "world" sustain this reading, and eventually prove to be a touchstone for the whole inquiry. Gadamer's concept of "play" as the key to the ontology of the work of art promises a general hermeneutic theory, but its oversights--principally of the negativity imposed by temporality and will--cannot be ignored. Correctives are offered, and then demonstrated in a reading of Frost's "Birches." ;The need for a hermeneutics that responds to contemporary language theory and preserves the negative moment of reading, now appears. Ricoeur's theory--which distinguishes between two directions that hermeneutics may take, one of "suspicion" and the other of "recovery"--provides a dialectical approach to the problem of poetic reference. Norman Holland's psychoanalytic reading of "Once by the Pacific" is compared with a "teleological" reading of the same poem to illustrate this dialectic. ;Chapter five addresses the challenge to the hermeneutic tradition posed by Paul de Man, and his warnings against a premature determination of meaning that neglects the disruption of "grammar" by "rhetoric." De Man's notion of "reading," articulated in essays on Hegel and Jauss, levels new suspicion against Ricoeur's strategy, but ultimately, Ricoeur's dialectic withstands de Man's critique. This discussion issues in a close reading of Frost's "After Apple-Picking." A deconstructive reading leaves clues to a further exegesis that recovers a dimension of the poem that deconstruction itself excluded. A last chapter illustrates the hermeneutics developed so far by reading poems from New Hampshire, culminating in a close reading of "Two Look at Two."