Episode 1268: Draft Abandoned...

Got to 500+ words on my draft, before giving up and sending my supervisor an e-mail, explaining that basically I felt like I'd written myself into a rut and needed to rethink the structure of my three chapters. I suspect that Harold Bloom's The Anxiety Of Influence isn't the best piece of criticism to use to guide my own close readings, although I'm not sure what alternative critical vocabulary I could employ. I've read a paper that employs Gérard Genette's ideas about hypertexts and hypotexts, but I can't very well do that as well or my first chapter would just be retreading ground, and ground that'd been explored by an undergraduate no less! I think that I can find a way out of this impasse by focusing on the specific idea that Thumboo's poem and its message haven't so much been misread as ignored entirely, at least by a certain group of poets. That undergraduate paper is very keen on seeing the poems as existing in some sort of historical progression that mirrors the Western canon's evolution from Romanticism to postmodernism, but I don't buy that argument, simply because it's the arrangement within the anthology that allows for it to be made. Rearranging the poems chronologically, it doesn't quite hold up.