Seculum, an epic trilogy in verse by Peter Dale Scott : the poem as structure for a new dawn

Abstract

This dissertation reads the three books of Canadian-American poet and scholar Peter Dale Scott's epic poem Seculum. Scott identifies as a practising Buddhist with a strong interest in Catholic theology and his poetry explores key ideas associated with both systems of belief. I argue that Scott formally employs the number three in diverse ways within the trilogy and that this formula (as in the poetic tercet form) constructs a poesis that is structured on the ruins of a type of Dantean Hell. Similarly, that this repetition gradually replaces the characteristics of Hell "" such as darkness and feelings of despair and faithlessness "" with a Purgatorian stillness and quietude, and then, a Paradisiacal mood of acceptance, harmony and clear thinking. In its gradual 'presencing' of hope, redemption and peace, Seculum's poetic structure is acoustically tuned to its past (by way of quotation, evocation and influence) and religiously engaged with the present. In its complex evolution out of a psychological darkness to a spiritual lightness it excavates, empties out and builds an artifice from which the poet and reader can participate in the genesis of a new dawn. I maintain that Seculum is an epic poem in keeping with examples of quest poetry from Homer through to the twenty-first century. As a formula for completing the mission "" to re-imagine the world as a better place "" Seculum explores dichotomous relationships between religious and secular ideas related to selfhood and progressive ecology. In Seculum Scott's poetic consciousness matures in its understanding of a balance between individual desires and communal responsibilities and his theological position, as explored in the trilogy, can best be understood "" after Thomas Merton and in the context of recent eco-critical thinking by Jonathan Bate, Stuart Cooke and Kate Rigby "" as a kind of "sacramental ecology". Seculum moves beyond the horror of terror, as epitomised in the first volume, Coming to Jakarta, to a place of dwelling on earth that in the third volume recognises the sacredness of earth and the value of eco-critical living. The success of the narrative arc in Seculum relies heavily upon the employment of poetic and philosophic guides who include Wordsworth, Eliot and Pound and, to varying degrees, Heidegger and Hölderlin. The sense of an eco-critical livelihood in Seculum becomes, then, a prototype of an idyll, giving contemporary presence to the past with a view to discovering future providence. In Seculum this is developed by a coalescing of poetic and cultural memory from different literary epochs, beginning with classical antiquity. In the manner Book 3 of the trilogy achieves a synthetic resolution of the thesis posed in Book 1 and the anti-thesis that follows in Book 2, Seculum emerges as a built "structure" in which can be housed a new dawn of possibility.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English