Christopher Eldrett Defends Dissertation
Christopher Eldrett, a doctoral candidate in our Hispanic Language & Literatures program, has successfully defended his dissertation. Congratulations, Christopher!
Christopher’s dissertation is titled Walt Whitman’s Prophetic Voioce in Hispanic Lyric Poetry: León Felipe, Federico García Lorca, and César Vallejo.
From Christopher’s Abstract:
“This dissertation explores the prophetic tradition in lyric poetry, focusing on the example set by Walt Whitman and carried forth in Hispanic letters most notably by León Felipe, Federico García Lorca, and César Vallejo. By “prophetic” I do not wish to suggest a “predictive” voice but rather one that, like the words of the biblical prophets, speaks to an entire community at large, by turns profoundly critical, but also appealing to human dignity. In the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman explains the public value of poetry: “[F]olks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects …. they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls […] The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight.” (621) These roots of Whitman’s lyric song would grow deep in these three contemporary Hispanic poets, the focus of my dissertation, during times of grave social and political crisis.”