This thesis reads Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath for their poetic engagement psychoanalysis. This reading nuances their relation to confessional poetry. By 'confessional' I mean the term first used to describe Robert Lowell's 'Life Studies' (1959), and later to describe the poets that were influenced by him. My main intervention is that what makes Bishop and Plath's poetry appear confessional owes to their engagement with psychoanalysis. Confessional poetry provokes psychoanalytic interpretation, but these two poets are not the passive object of psychoanalytic interpretation. Instead they used poetic form to motivate a transference with psychoanalysis. Plath and Bishop's poetry often diverges from or produces a critique of psychoanalysis where it is most compromising for women. I focus on Freud and Lacan as two of the most difficult yet influential figures in the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism. Plath's poetry is not pathological and inevitably suicidal, and Bishop develops a more problematic relationship with the other than is sometimes suggested. Both poets also give form to a maternal relation of the kind that Freud and Lacan's work suppresses. The confessional poem is also read as a formation of the ego. Although Bishop is not normally included under the term confessional poetry, she influenced Lowell, and when the confessional poem is read as an ego, rather than centred on the 'I', her writing can be seen to share some of the most essential features of confessional poetry. The main difference is her use of secretive tactics very different from the deliberate self-centredness of confessional poetry proper. Whereas the archconfessional Plath made the 'I' the centre of her poetry and her gender overt, Bishop hid both of these behind various surfaces. The parallels I draw between these two poets reveal the different ways that as writers they brought women's writing and feminine subjectivity on the literary scene.

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The thesis comprises a collection of poems, a dissertation and a linking piece. Birdhouse is a portfolio of poems concerned with themes of sex, the body and private and public loss. It also experiments with the first person voice of its own speaker. Birdhouse includes familial elegies, amatory poems and commissioned work. The dissertation represents the first study of length of the father in the American poet Sharon Olds's work. Olds's oeuvre from 1980 to 2004 is examined through close-reading of the poems. It is argued that a reflective reading reveals the intentional subjectivity of the speaker, but should not discount the na'ive reading the poems prompt which is part of their aesthetic experience. The centrality of the father is challenged, and it is argued that it is the daughter-speaker of the poems who is their hidden subject. The speaker asserts her happiness but uses ambiguity and suggestion to invite a reader to condemn the father. The father is an archetype, as are Olds's other familial characters, and a literary descendant of fathers in the poetry of confessional predecessors, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The lack of specificity surrounding the father's crimes is used to demonstrate his archetypal depiction, and the speaker's focus on her survival narrative. The dissertation contends that the latent subject of Olds's book of elegies The Father is the speaker's prolonging of her father's suffering in poems which enact a literary killing, The dissertation concludes that the poems present a version of a family history spoken by a daughter who survives her archetypal presentation and valorises the role of poetic speaker. It is argued the relationship between the speaker and the reader is more significant than the filial relationship depicted throughout. The linking piece explores Olds's influence on my poetry, which prompted the research.

This thesis investigates how the language of written texts of a personal nature (especially diaries/journals) can convey the writer's mental states. Sylvia Plath's so-called Smith Journal, as published in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (Kukil, 2000), is examined as a special case-study. A better understanding of the link between language use and various mental states may be useful in developing more sophisticated automated analytical tools and, on a more practical level, in the timely recognition of mental health issues. Mental state, for the purposes of this thesis, refers to those aspects of cognition that are intrinsically valenced, i.e. can be placed on a cline of positive - negative. The focus is on self-descriptions, direct and metaphorical references to mental states, self- references, especially the use of personal pronouns. In conjunction, temporal orientation and negation are also explored. Halliday's (1994) notion of transitivity, as well as literature on the communication of emotions in linguistics and psychology, is drawn on in the process of these analyses. This involves both automated corpus analyses of the whole text and manual intensive investigations of sample sections. A corpus comparison between the Smith Journal and an autobiography corpus reveals the key characteristics of the data. Those relevant for the investigation of mental states are selected and investigated further later in the thesis. In this process, the author proposes a model of temporal orientation for the differentiation of types of second-person narration. Overall the thesis suggests strong evidence for a negative self-image and extreme self-focus in the Smith Journal. There is also evidence of a general lack of agency and that the negative mental states are not within the experiencer's control. They also seem to be experienced intensely and painfully - sometime suggesting a sense of inner split.

This thesis examines place in the poetry of Derek Walcott. Through the close reading of a number of key topoi in Walcott's poetry, this thesis investigates the meanings that Walcott associates with different places. Threaded through these investigations, and forming the main argument, this thesis asserts that Walcott privileges place over space. Walcott rejects 'space' as an invention and abstract 'design' associated with colonial dominion and with neocolonial practices. For Walcott, space, as an abstraction, disavows local experience. Because of this, privileging space knowingly or unknowingly attempts to rid marginalised or oppressed people of their agency. In his poetry, Walcott consistently emphasises embodied ways of knowing, and draws upon human experience as an appropriate, and often counterhegemonic, form of knowledge. Walcott has consistently shown that one person's space is in fact another person's place, and suggests that, because of this, space is imagined over place. Drawing on the works of Edward Casey and phenomenology, this thesis argues that the idea that place precedes space goes against many academic discourses that assume the contrary. Walcott consistently draws his reader's attention to plant and animal life in association with place, and in doing so counteracts anthropocentric definitions of place. Reading Derek Walcott's poetry with an emphasis on place and experiential or a posteriori knowledge creates room for new critical readings of Walcott's work. Specifically, emphasis on place helps to contextualise Walcott's emphasis on the Caribbean as 'nothing' and of the Caribbean people's Adamic relationship with the landscape. This thesis argues that Walcott's notion of place is inherently political: most obviously, the poet's ideas concerning place form part of his arsenal in the very real fight against the multinational hotel/tourist industry's incursion on, and appropriation of, Caribbean sites. This thesis shows that Walcott's project of investing uninhabited landscapes with a sense of place, and blurring the delineations between privileged sites such as churches and "open space/' Walcott challenges the forces that operate within the Caribbean as a consumable, commodified space.

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This thesis constitutes the first sustained attempt to situate the poetry of Anne Sexton in relation to postwar. American' politics. While there has been a recent resurgence of academic interest in the politics of mid-century confessional literature, the current crop of poetry scholarship throws focus on the work of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath, and has hitherto neglected to examine the ways in which Sexton's creative praxis might be productively re-examined alongside contemporary critical theory and postwar political history. In the following chapters, I interrogate the received status of Sexton's poetry as psychic theatre and, demonstrate the terms-of its political engagement through a detailed analysis of its referential framework, which is, I argue, structured around key crises in postwar American history: the legacy of the Holocaust; the Cold War; the Vietnam conflict, and the rise of feminism. More explicitly, I explain how these historical paroxysms are registered in the metrical arrangements of Sexton's poems. Through reference to the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Cathy Caruth, I locate her writing within the psychoanalytic discourse of trauma, in which the traumatic event - though not perceived fully at the time of its occurrence - is unconsciously re-experienced, or `acted-out', through the repetitive, compulsive, and automatic mechanisms of the subject's speech and behaviour. My thesis thus positions Sexton's poetry as a mode of acting-out, in which the socio-political upheavals of the twentieth century are not only expressed in directly referential terms, but are also woven into the formal fabric of the poetry itself. In addition, the following chapters show how the political lineaments of Sexton's poetry might be usefully illuminated through reference to the Cold War ideology of `containment' and the interlocking, if vexed, economies of privacy, conformity, and contamination.

This thesis discusses the poetry published by contemporary American poet Susan Howe over a period of almost two decades. The dissertation is chiefly concerned with articulating the relationship between poetic form, history, and authority in this body of' work. Howe's poetry dredges the past for the linguistic effects of patriarchy, colonialism and war. My reading of the work is an exploration of the ways in which a disjunctive poetics can address such historical trauma. The poems, rather than attempting to reinstate voices lifted from what Howe has called "the dark side of history", are a means of reflecting the resistance that the past offers to contemporary investigation. It is the effacement, and not the recovery, of history's victims, that is discernible in the contours of these highly opaque texts. Notions of authority are most often addressed in the poetry through the figure of paternal absence, which has a threefold function in the work, serving to represent social authority, an aporetic conception of divinity and an autobiographical narrative. Alongside the antiauthoritarian currents in the writing - critiques, for example, of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny or of scapegoating versions of femininity - my thesis stresses Howe's engagement with negative theology and with a strain of American Protestant enthusiasm that has its roots in 17th century New England. The dissertation explores the dissonance caused by the co-existence in the poetry of elements of political dissent and religious mysticism. Finally, I consider Howe's engagement with literary history and authors such as Shakespeare, Swift, Thoreau and Melville. The manner in which Howe deploys the words of others in her work, I argue, allows for a mixture of textual polyphony and a more conventional notion of authorial 'voice'.