'the place of language': Donald Hall's Poetics of Process

This thesis is the first study of Donald Hall’s contribution to literary studies. It examines the relationship between place and language in his writing. Through close readings of primary texts and archival material, I investigate language’s function in making and sustaining place and consider writing as a place in which to reflect on the material world. My analysis addresses the autobiographical strain of Hall’s oeuvre alongside language’s role in the historical and political construction of a regional and national identity. This work centres on the lived, remembered, and imagined topography of Hall’s ancestral New Hampshire farmhouse, Eagle Pond, where he moved to live and write in 1975. The farm provides a microcosm of New England’s constitutive relationship with language, as well as a broader one between agrarian life and culture in the U.S. These histories, I argue, are revisited and revised by Hall’s sense of belonging to local and literary communities in the present.
Eagle Pond expressed a nexus between writing and place, being what he called ‘the place of language’. In his work, however, the farm is not a metaphor for writing or living; it is a form that supports the sustained evaluation of differences and continuities. Hall’s various kinds of writing, especially his poetry, I argue, reflect this form with their own. Through the process of transformation and perpetuation that defines this writing, it intervenes in place’s narratives of origin, genealogy, and work with material and conceptual architectures of modernity. While renewing a dialogue between the past and the present, in which loss is creation and separation is opportunity, this intervention embodies a creative process and philosophy of language that are embedded in an enduring drive to communicate, and which extend to and rely on the differential, conversational, and collaborative capacities of human sociality.