Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
The poems and translations in this thesis explore the "three strong voices" that poet Federico García Lorca believes the artist should heed: "the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art." The sequence of these poems is meant to reflect the poetic speaker's interactions with these voices. Three of the four sections are named after iconic paintings by Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, and the poems in each of these sections indirectly reflect the concepts these works present in an attempt to create a dialogue between the written and visual arts. The two works by Dali are The Persistence of Memory and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, and the development from the former, which is the second section, to the latter, which is the fourth, is supposed to suggest the interaction between a poet and his or her influences as they work to develop their own unique style, playing at the binary between originality and influence. The title section of the collection is an exploration into the search for truth and originality within this binary—the "irreconcilable feud" between a young artist and a poetic tradition that began thousands of years ago.