Sarah Matthews

Summary Statement of Research Interests

My research interests focus broadly on Russian, English, and Polish poetry from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. When performing close readings of texts, I am interested in whether the form of a given text undercuts or supports its expressed ideas and themes. Ecopoetry and its relationship with religion is a consistent theme in my work. My dissertation explores the metaphysical materiality of Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot’s poetry in the context of European Modernism. On the surface, this pairing might seem illogical. After all, Eliot is considered one of the most important English poets, if not the most important English poet of his time, whereas Khodasevich is usually overshadowed by his Symbolist forebears or by his Russian contemporaries. Scholars of Khodasevich have occasionally referred to Eliot in their works, but there has been no serious study dedicated to this pairing. Through my research, I will attempt to fill this gap. But more than that, I will argue that in spite of a stance often characterized as metaphysical, both poets inhabited a world of undeniable and inescapable materiality.

Research Keywords

Modernism, ecopoetry, religion, formalism, structuralism, and comparative literature.