This thesis contains a creative and critical component. Written at the intersection of two poetics forms, elegy and poetry of witness, the creative piece, a book-length poem titled 'Pain Body', weaves together personal writing based on my experience with chronic pain, 'found' poetry that grounds my experience in larger conversations about the body and illness, and mythically-minded writing about the ash tree. In the critical component, I identify the intersection of elegy and poetry of witness as having four defining characteristics: it is situated in what Carolyn Forche terms the 'social' sphere, it is firmly located in the body, it refuses consolation, and it demonstrates a fragmented and wounded language. I then discuss the poets Paul Monette and Audre Lorde as exemplars of writing at this intersection, as they elegize a loved one (Monette) and their own body (Lorde) while bearing witness to the AIDS epidemic (Monette) and growing cancer epidemic (Lorde). Finally, I examine the ways in which my writing in 'Pain Body' also exemplifies this intersection. My critical research thus shapes my creative writing, while extending and refining current scholarly conversations about elegy and witness.

Calliope was the muse of epic poetry, and this thesis could be described as an epic poem in the sense that the protagonists, my chosen poets, have their entrances and exits, along with my odyssey of creative development. The creative writing component is embedded within the prose, and the aims are symbiotic. The prose element seeks to determine whether there are similarities between the ways in which male and female writers utilize poetic forms in each chosen period from the Renaissance to the present day, (e.g. whether male poets are more or less assertive than women poets). The concept of ‘self-fashioning’ over-arches the thesis, with underlying issues of gender, class and race, and inherent connotations of ‘owned language’ and outsider status. Ekphrastic poetry is integral to the text. This chronologically constructed thesis begins by briefly exploring ways in which Italian Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa subverted the sonnet form for self-promotional purposes. Chapter 1 considers how iconic male poets, Shakespeare, Wyatt and Donne, and lesser-known female poets Mary Wroth and Isabella Whitney, writing in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, used metaphorical comparisons as a means of self-fashioning. Eighteenth-century poetry by Anne Finch and Alexander Pope is then compared in terms of metaphorically antithetical Classicism (Chapter 2). ‘Factory poetry’ from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hood, and ‘art-versus-life’ poetry are nineteenth-century considerations (Chapter 3). The visual theme continues with Hilda Doolittle’s deviation from Ezra Pound’s Imagist ‘rules’, and moves organically towards ekphrastic poetry from Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin (Chapters 4 and 5). Ekphrasis is the starting-point for a study of poetry from twentieth-century American female New Formalists, in which issues of class, race and, particularly ‘owned language’ are addressed. Class and ‘owned language’ is crucial to the final chapter, surrounding contending voices in sonnets by Tony Harrison and the present poet (Chapters 6 and 7). The present poet’s own self-fashioning in her creative odyssey is inextricable from the text.

The aim of this research is to investigate and analyse how narrative poems and sonnets, two types of traditional poetry, have been handled in books, in England, in terms of typographic presentation. It focuses on how far the earliest printed editions of a poem establish a pattern for its subsequent presentation, and how far other influences might determine the typographic form. The main focus of the analysis is segmentation, the visible division of the text into units which, to a greater or lesser extent, reflect its underlying structure. This division is seen through methods of segmentation in the opening and closing of the poem and, within the poem itself, through typographic features such as indentation, capitalization, line spaces and the placing of each poetic line on a new typographic line. These methods are related to the poetic whole, stanzas. rhyme scheme units, verse paragraphs and line.

The focus of this thesis is the supernatural ballads of northern Europe and, in particular, how we can understand a society through its literature. I take as my initial focus the ballads of Denmark (Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6), where supernatural beings of the elf-type are common, before proceeding to the wider northern-European context of Sweden (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6), Iceland (Chapter 3 and 6), Germany (Chapter 3) and Scotland (Chapters 3 and 7), ranging from the earliest extant text of 1550 through to the nineteenth century to examine synchronic and diachronic changes and what they reveal of the cultures which produced them. This study considers the ballad as pleasing and satisfying literature which does not exist in a cultural or historical vacuum. Close, comparative reading of the texts moves us towards an understanding of how the supernatural was used as a vehicle for considering identity and man’s place in the world. The study analyses the recurring use of the supernatural ballads to establish social and national identities and to express ideologies concerned with gender and patriarchy. The supernatural ballads demand that we look critically at our attitudes, perspectives, and assumptions. As well as examining the main concerns and motifs of the ballad versions, the thesis seeks to problematize our initial assumptions by re-examining the traditional readings and by looking at examples of non-traditional versions. Responses to the ballad stories from both high and low culture serve as a lens through which to analyse the ballads, so Virgil’s consideration of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is examined along with Ibsen’s own dramatic version of the Agnete story, and Matthew Arnold’s poem on the same text. This thesis also seeks to examine in what ways women are characterized in terms of their relation to men in a genre largely transmitted by women, in the early ballad and in the nineteenth century, to examine tentatively if there is evidence of women seizing the narrative in order to disrupt the dominant discourse.

Lyric poetry is frequently viewed by critics as distinct from narrative poetry and prose. This distinction rests largely on the positioning of the lyric speaker vis-à-vis the poet author. Part of any definition of the lyric is the understanding that the lyric speaker is identical to the poet and therefore the poem is the unmediated direct expression of the poet’s thoughts and experiences. These assumptions which are endemic to literary and sometimes linguistic criticism have led to restricted critical studies and a preponderance of inappropriate biographical criticism. This thesis examines how the speakers in certain types of lyric poetry are positioned, and identifies where conceptions of lyric speakers may be causing the problem of the biographical fallacy. The central questions that structure this thesis are: • Why is the lyric speaker so often considered by critics to be identical to the poet and therefore an unmediated direct expression of the poet’s thoughts and experiences? • Can lyric poetry instead make use of the same complexity of perspectives, voices and mediation that narrative prose does? • What linguistic and narratological features in poetry deemed ‘personal’ to the poet might be creating the illusion of personalness, causing us to reduce this potential complexity to unmediated and monologic autobiography? I argue that the assumption that lyric poetry represents the monologic and unmediated voice of the poet is endemic in criticism and without a more precise examination of what lyric speakers do, poetic criticism will continue to fall back on biographical criticism despite the many theoretical attempts to leave it behind. By demonstrating that there is narrativity present in lyric poetry, I argue that narratological concepts can and should be applied to lyric poetry, and therefore I join a growing discussion about how theoretical approaches to poetry can be improved by using the tools that are used to analyse narrative. Overall, my thesis is an application of narrative theory to three distinct types of lyric poetry that best demonstrate the multiperspectivism of the lyric, but are at the same time central examples of the genre: lyric poetry which uses a turn or volta to encode multiple viewpoints, poetry which appears extremely personal and connected to its poet, and poetry based on experiences of real conflict. By using narrative theory (and where necessary drawing on literary linguistic models, such as text world theory, relevance theory and transitivity) , I analyse the point(s) of view expressed in poems considered quintessentially lyric and the positions and levels of mediation that the lyric speaker can adopt, thus demonstrating not only that lyric poetry can make use of the same complexity of perspectives, voices and mediation that narrative prose does, but that the poetic speaker operates in much the same way as that of a prose narrator. I argue that this should cause us to rethink how the speaker in lyric poetry is approached. In addition, I argue that by examining poetry in this way, we can move on from making assumptions about the biographical links between poetry and poets, and instead identify the linguistic features which cause us to assume that such a link is present.

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MAAS / M. E. R. Mathivha Centre for African Languages, Arts and Culture

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Beginning with Plato's expulsion of the poets in the Republic, this dissertation looks at the often hostile, yet also symbiotic, relationship between poetry and philosophy. Aristotle's 'response' to Plato is regarded as a significant origin of literary theory. Nietzsche's critique of Western philosophy as being an attempt to suppress its own metaphoricity, leads to a revaluation of truth and consequently of the privileging of philosophy over poetry. Post-structuralism sometimes overemphasizes this constitutive force of metaphoricity, at the expense of conceptual modes. However, Derrida's notion of philosophy as play retains a balance between concept and metaphor: there is no attempt to transcendentally ground philosophy, but neither is it reduced to a merely metaphorical discourse. Finally, Wittgenstein's notion of meaning as determined by use can help us distinguish pragmatically between poetry and philosophy by looking at the contexts in which they function. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Le rapprochement du Waste Land de T. S. Eliot et de la Kasidah de R. F. Burton produit une théorie littéraire. Cette théorie est fondée sur le principe de l'Unité de la Conscience (Wahdat al Wayy) d'après l'exégèse d'Ibn Arabi (Wahdat al Wujud et Wahdat al Adyân). Elle postule également que toute vie n'est qu'un courant de conscience. L'action est une forme d'écriture de la conscience dans le monde, et l'expérience vécue est une forme d'écriture du monde dans la conscience. Or l'expression de la conscience en perspective est un invariant profond des littératures, qui relie The Waste Land et The Kasidah mais également Al Aaraaf de Poe, le Voyage de Baudelaire, le Testament de Villon ou encore le Canto Notturno de Leopardi. Un autre invariant, fondé par le précédent, est l'invariant de la gâtine, que l'on peut résumer par le mythe de l'Ortolano Eterno : Homo : locatus est, damnatus est, humatus est, renatus est : in Horto. Or la Septième sourate du Coran est une expression notable de l'invariant de la gâtine. Ainsi comme il existe une cartographie dynamique des connexions cérébrales, la connectomique, il existe une connectomique des littératures et une biologie des littératures. Une partie du corps calleux des littératures, le faisceau de connexions directes entre Orient et Occident, est la "chaîne de la gâtine", un linéament de textes qui se fascinent pour l'interaction entre le monde et la conscience. Concernant Eliot, ses influences soufies directes vont de Omar Khayyam à Guénon ou Schuon, et ses influences indirectes relèvent de l'influence soufie sur les troubadours. Eliot influence lui-même la poésie de l'aire musulmane depuis au moins 1950. / Connecting T. S. Eliot's Waste Land to R. F. Burton's Kasidah produces a literary theory. The founding principle of this theory is the Unity of Consciousness (Wahdat al Wayy), after the exegesis of Ibn Arabi (Wahdat al Wujud and Wahdat al Adyan). It also postulates that any life is but a stream of consciousness. Action is thus the way by which consciousness writes in the world, and experience is the way the world writes in consciousness. The expression of consciousness in perspective is in turn a profound literary invariant, connecting The Waste Land and The Kasidah but also Poe's Al Aaraaf, Baudelaire's Voyage, Villon's Testament or Leopardi's Canto Notturno. Another invariant, based on the precedent, is the invariant of the wasteland, which can be summed up by the myth of the Ortolano Eterno : Homo : locatus est, damnatus est, humatus est, renatus est : in Horto. Now the seventh surah of the Quran is a notable expression of the invariant of the wasteland. In the same way that there is a connectomics of the human brain, there is a connectomics and also a biology of literatures. A sample of its corpus callosum, connecting the Western and Eastern literatures, is the "chain of the wasteland", a lineament of texts which leitmotiv is the interaction between consciousness and the world. Regarding Eliot his direct sufi influences range from Omar Khayyam to Guénon and Schuon, and his indirect ones regard the known sufi influence over the troubadours. In turn Eliot has been influencing the contemporary poetry of the muslim area since at least 1950.