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This thesis takes as its subject the points of connections and comparison that exist between five African American and Black British women poets, whose writings range from 1942 to the present day. It concentrates on the interconnection and reconstruction of their spatio-temporal geographies and their utilisation of musical traditions and historical narratives and ideas of location-dependent selfhood to articulate identity. Whilst previous scholarship tends to focus on the confines of a nation-state modality, with specifically American or British interpretations of African heritage, the methodology here is centred on the importance of a transatlantic poetic discourse to identify how literary and cultural exchanges transcend these borders. The first chapter examines the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, whose ability to combine traditional forms and African American vernacular, especially in what I identify as her ‘blues sonnets’, contextualises the voice of the marginalised in segregated Chicago within post-War US culture. The following chapter then shows that Brooks’s near-contemporary, Margaret Walker, often also follows the formal conventions of the English poetic tradition yet does so to represent the ordeal of Jim Crow segregation, while also harnessing what I will show is a mythopoeic ‘I’, which allows her to inhabit traumatic histories of slavery and its long US aftermath. The public, political grounding established by these poets is adopted by Nikki Giovanni, whose categorical voice before and after the Black Arts Movement constructs an historically minded identification for African Americans, with respect to the relationship between a prejudiced society and recognition of African origins, particularly through the musical and oral traditions that predicated the trajectory of African American cultural productions. In the fourth chapter, I then show that the work of Grace Nichols develops this invocation of an African ‘source’ and that her lyrical aesthetic, likewise, makes use of her journeys across the Atlantic and of a perpetual reconstruction of her Afro-Caribbean and Black British identities; she articulates these through her under-examined tributes to American literary influences. This sense of an Atlantic triangulation then provides the thesis with the locus through which it approaches Jackie Kay’s oeuvre. In the final chapter, I show that Kay regularly examines her complex Scottish-Nigerian heritage through the animating lens of African American blues. As such, this thesis assembles together a new and transnational group of poets, examining the intersections of their work and illuminating the shared motifs of home, origins, transformative self-identity, musicality, historical consciousness, and racial and sexual politics.

The human body occupies a central place in Rukeyser’s poetry. Her characters’ physical experiences inspire their search for an artistic form and a holistic vision that reconciles the corporeal and conceptual aspects of their life. My thesis deals with Rukeyser’s reconciliation of disparate aspects of existence through the image of the human body and the practical experiences she underwent in her personal life and incorporated in her poetry. I discuss her poetry of the 1940s, where a tension is observed between the artist’s personal life and her art, which she attempts to resolve by adopting an artistic form that accommodates her quotidian experiences. I study, mainly through her poetry of the 1950s, Rukeyser’s poetic technique in the light of her organicist poetics and the combination of tendencies to coercion and suggestiveness distinguishing her style. I examine her portrayal of the suffering body in her poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. By means of their physical experiences, the ill, her despised and the imprisoned protagonists undergo a process of development whereby they perceive the different aspects of their identity and attempt to broaden perspectives on their situation by reconciling them. I argue that Rukeyser’s engagement with physical encounters and with the poem as an inclusive, organic body enables her to reconcile disparate elements in her poetry, such as her personal life and her art, her individual existence and the public world, as well as the distinct aspects of her characters’ identity. Her vatic outlook, which integrates distinct aspects of experience, is consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of human perception as characterised by the two interdependent positions of immanence and transcendence. Rukeyser’s poetry depicts her physical engagement with quotidian events of her life as a factor of artistic inspiration. These situations constitute shared human experiences that enable her to imagine the links binding her to other people and the world at large. The poet’s personal experiences inspire her search for an artistic form that accommodates them. Her perception of the concrete aspect of her individual existence gains significance when it is linked to social and political issues. Both the private and public are thus seen as interconnected, and they affect the existence of each other while retaining their distinctness.

Each of three parts examines the complex rhythmic and drama-means by which Berryman's poetry became a single drive towards life and a sense of wholeness. Part I explains Berryman's notion of "living poetry," using the concept of rhythm, not simply metrics, and analyzes four exemplary poems which span the thirty-five years of his career. Part II places Berryman in the English Romantic tradition of the poetry of experience with special reference to Keats's notion of the "chameleon poet" and Wordsworth's and Yeats's poetry of the central self. Much of the argument of Part II is based on Berryman's unpublished notes on Keats's Letters. Part III examines in detail, in light of the first two parts, the three major phases of Berryman's poetry and focuses primarily on The Dispossessed (1948), The Dream Songs (I967), and Love and Fame (1971) each of which are representative of each phase. In the first phase, Berryman carefully polishes his verse, arid he takes as his models Yeats and Auden. But during his long apprenticeship (ca, 1935-45), he begins to find his own voice through his strong sense of being a chameleon poet (i.e. dramatic monologue) and by concentrating mainly upon characters who are under stress -- thus, the beginning of his disrupted syntax which continues in his Sonnets, written in 1947, and in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. But not until The Dream Songs does Berryman's twisted syntax seem functional. The Dream Songs is Berryman's greatest work not only artistically, but also in the penetration of its thought, the subtlety of its feeling, and the sense of wholeness it suggests. In the third phase (Love and Fame) Berryman sets out to do something he had not done before. His style becames simple, but explosive, and his voice speaks directly and autobiographically. But his poetry is still no less subtle and complex in his exploration of the nature of his relation to past and future experience.

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The primary element of my thesis is the sequence of poems, which engages with the theme of memory in regard to the way remembering and forgetting offers both linguistic possibility and limitation; a sequence focusing on a woman's experience of dementia, and informed by a professional background in social work as well as my reading of H.D.'s major works. In the latter, I trace the significance of memory and its relationship to poetic creativity. Consideration of this relationship is explored in the secondary, critical component with regard to the influence of Sigmund Freud's theories on H.D.'s poetry. In Chapter One I refer to his dream techniques, condensation and displacement, and probe the way in which an understanding of Freud's methodology in relation to the reading of the dream-text also illuminates the reading of H.D.'s imagist poetry in terms of both being condensed versions of something that grows in size when analysed. Thus, I show that H.D.'s poetic practice requires her reader to make associations as well as connections between inner and outer realities as a means of revealing what is concealed. The focus on Freud's influence continues in Chapter Two with reference to H.D.'s long poem, Helen in Egypt, especially in relation to the examination of the way in which the poet engages with his psychoanalytic theories on the recovery of memories. Furthermore, H.D.'s revision of the Helen of Troy myth provides a means of exploring feminine subjectivity as Helen seeks self-knowledge through the discovery of her different selves; her quest, moreover, reflects the gradual process of remembering what had hitherto been forgotten. This paradox is also important to my own creative work and H.D.'s elucidation of the unconscious has informed my sequence of poems, Returns of the Past. In Chapter Three, I trace my own poetic development and practice with regard to inhabiting poetry for many years.

Building on recent studies of twentieth-century elegy, this thesis examines the re-working of elegiac tropes in the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell - four writers among the Middle Generation of American poets who share a persistent preoccupation with loss. As personal and national disappointments and bereavements are reflected in their distinctly elegiac poetics, their work overtly questions not only the possibility of finding consolation, but also the worth of their subject and the ability of language to express, with any conviction or accuracy, what has been lost. Highly conscious of the elegiac tradition, their work collectively distorts this genre, moulding it into a flexible mode which is more readily able to reflect the historical and cultural developments of the mid-twentieth century. Countering the still-prevalent view of these poets as “confessional” writers, this thesis’ focus on elegy challenges critics who have dismissed these four as solipsistic or narcissistic. Instead, they emerge as a group who were deeply invested in understanding their contemporary scene and whose most significant relationships were textual, rather than biographical. Their writing reveals an ongoing and serious engagement with one another’s work, as they built on each other’s poetic experiments. The thesis complicates the canonical divide which has entrenched these poets as the mainstream establishment, pitted against a more radical “postmodern” avant-garde, which includes the Beats, Black Mountain and the New York School. Through close textual analysis and an exploration of their links with Elizabeth Bishop, Schwartz, Jarrell, Berryman and Lowell are posited as poets whose engagement with the elegy has significantly altered the post-World War II poetic landscape.

‘Scottish’, ‘woman’, ‘lesbian’; these words are markers of identity and a starting point in my attempt to place myself within a poetic tradition. This study towards a statement of poetics considers ideas of identity and tradition as they relate to the public and private spheres. The first chapter considers how traditions are built and the external factors which impact upon them by looking at both physical and more ideological notions of place and space as they relate to nationhood and a sense of belonging. The focus then narrows to consider the situation of female poets as marginal. There is an interrogation of whether female poets are marginalised by the predominantly patriarchal literary canon or if they seek out these liminal borders and hinterlands. This is considered in the context of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘forced exile’ and the more voluntary travels of Kathleen Jamie. The study then turns to consider the theoretical history behind women’s writing and how this impacts upon their varied ways of ‘reading the map of tradition’. In considering the private, or personal, sphere there is a discussion of the internal impulses which the poet acts upon in order to look at the nature of poetic imperative. This section begins with the statement that ‘every poem breaks a silence which had to be overcome’, and this in turn opens up questions of how external silencing might affect the internal impulse to assert and/or disclose. With specific focus on mid-twentieth century American Confessional poetry, further questions are asked regarding the ‘worth of art’ and the poet’s decoding and self-censorship of their own work in order to both hide and break taboos surrounding sexuality and privacy. The study then becomes more specifically personal in the reflective chapter which deals thematically with a selection of my own poems from the folio. This is in order to chart not only the evolution of my work but also the evolution of my own poetic imperatives. The final chapter reflects upon my use of free verse, looking briefly at the history of the form from the early twentieth-century onwards before going on to consider how the various theories and poetics which have grown out of the broadly vernacular, ‘free verse revolution’ have impacted formally upon my own work.