The thesis comprises a collection of poems and a dissertation. Chasing the Ivy is a collection of poems inspired by Horace and his belief (expressed in the Ars Poetica) that the highest form of poetry combines usefulness and beauty. The collection is not a translation but a recontextualisation of the thirty eight odes which comprise Horace Odes I. The collection also includes eleven poems written in the voices of those women who frequently appear in the poems of Horace. Chasing the Ivy addresses the contemporary poetic career, the difficulties involved in publication and the establishment of a literary career. It uses a variety of voices both male and female; the poems invariably have addressees and in order to replicate Horace’s approach use, irony, comedy and self-deprecation. The poems also contain the recurring Horatian themes of impotence, death, relationships and the simple life. The dissertation represents a study of the attitude towards the combination of usefulness and beauty in poetry today as compared with the views expressed by the Roman poet, Horace (see Chapter One). In Chapter Two some major defences and views about poetry and the role of the poet in Britain from the time of Sir Philip Sidney to modern times is examined, concentrating most specifically on usefulness and beauty. The Romantic approach to poetry as an art for its own sake is challenged and it is argued that the proponents of that approach had still to acknowledge its usefulness. Chapter Three, the largest section of the dissertation concerns my personal practice, how I interpret usefulness and beauty, how I use it for educational, social and political reasons as well as for literary ones, I recount how and in what ways my practical poetry residencies have been used by individuals and communities to broaden, educate and enlighten whilst at the same time providing enjoyment and I comment on the use of my poetry by academics and classical scholars. I also reflect on the ways in which my approach to poetry mirrors that of Horace, thereby prompting this research. My conclusions following this research are contained in Chapter Four.

Even those well acquainted with Ted Hughes’s poetry may be unaware of the impact that his work in translation had on his creative practice. Particularly relevant is Hughes’s enthusiasm for what he referred to as ‘the literal,’ a rough text used as a mid-way stage in the co-translation process by poets who have no knowledge of the original language. At one point, Hughes’s co-translator János Csokits advised him: “I think one thing you should explain is your concept of literals which is rather personal and has to be grasped by the ordinary reader – even some of the literary gentlemen may misunderstand what happened to the poems.”1 In Chapter One of this thesis I examine this concept, concentrating on Hughes’s attraction to the broken, slightly foreign sound of translated texts. In Chapter Two, I show how literalness had become a standard by which Hughes was judging the work of a wide range of writers, and suggest that this can be seen as part of a wider literary tradition of seeking an authentic sounding voice. In Chapter Three, I look at the working process of Hughes’s translations of Pilinszky, outlining the similarities between his metaphorical interpretation of literalness, and the poetic stance originally taken by the Hungarian poet – what Pilinszky called his “linguistic poverty.” Finally, in Chapter Four, I argue that Crow serves as a prime example of Hughes’s interest in the literal as a poetic ideal, and discuss the ways in which it can be seen to engage with the stylistic effects of poetry in translation. Using Crow and his translations of János Pilinszky as key sources of data, this thesis illustrates how Hughes’s approach to translation corresponds to his desire, as a poet, to write the “songs of a crow” – in other words, “songs with no music whatsoever.”

Ulster-Scots studies and ecocriticism are two areas of literary criticism that have burgeoned in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This thesis provides an original contribution to knowledge by employing ecocritical methodologies to analyse UlsterScots poetry published between 1790 and 1850. This thesis adds to the awareness of UlsterScots literature as a transcultural form ofIrish and Scottish writing. It also demonstrates that interd iscipl inary ecocritical approaches successfully enlighten the engagement of U IsterScots poetry, as a unique from of cultural expression, with the natural world. This thesis provides a study of poetry from six of the foremost Ulster-Scots poets of the Romantic and early Victorian eras. A range of poems that engage with nature and environment are analysed in this thesis using applicable methodologies from ecocriticism. The primary aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between Ulster-Scots poetry and nature, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Representations of human ecology, natural phenomena and the physical environment are analysed in the poems studied in this thesis, in particular to establish how they are mediated by literary, linguistic and cultural traditions. This thesis reveals that Scottish and eighteenth-century neoclassical genres form a major basis for the Ulster-Scots poetic engagement with nature and the environment, ofthis era. The pastoral genre is also particularly prevalent in Ulster-Scots poetry and reflects both a literary-cultural preference, and the rural, agricultural habitat that is a genuine everyday experience for many of these poets in Ulster. As a consequence the complex social and environmental impact of agricultural improvement, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and the advance of urbanisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth century, in the north of ireland; are major themes in Ulster-Scots poetry of this era.

This thesis will examine the problem of alterity that presents itself for being in relation to language in James Joyce‘s Dubliners, Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses and Finnegan‟s Wake. I will argue that being in relation to language manifests itself into an ethical problem that can be traced back to the subject‘s search for an origin. Blanchot‘s writings on the limit-experience will be used as a methodological approach to the problem of being in relation to language. The theme of death and dying will be explored in each chapter through the dialectic of negativity. The dialectic of negativity arises from the problem of separation that comes between being and language. As being faces the limit to language, the subject faces the limits to being seen as another negative presence. Thus, once the subject‘s negative thought doubles into the negation of absence, being becomes infinitely estranged by language. Here, the subject‘s experience of separation manifests itself into signs of affliction that resembles a state of dying as being faces absence. Moreover, the dialogic of negativity opens up a dialogue between the subject‘s relation to language and the subject that is questioned within the narrative. Therefore, Blanchot‘s notion of the neuter will be used to explore the critical character of the narrator that questions the subject within the narrative from the exterior God like position, also linked to Blanchot‘s notion of the Outside. The Outside space demands an ethical response from each subject called into question and afflicted with the haunting nature of being a double. This doubling space of alterity will be traced in this thesis in order to reveal a crisis for the subject in the irreducible state for being-in-itself that is locked in the sacred space of literature and present at the final experience of the limit to the Outside.

Critics usually see Robert Graves as a writer concerned with personal and private themes. Yet Goodbye to All That reflects what amounts to an experience of `modernity' in the early Twentieth Century. Graves' early life, characterised by separation, deracination, injury, guilt and fragmentation, culminated in the First World War with severe wounds. Though Graves is rarely considered to be a modernist, these traumatic experiences inculcate characteristics exemplified by modernist writers such as Eliot. Left with a need to trace his origins, Graves recapitulates, striving for integration and reconciliation through the writing of Goodbye to All That. This attempt was unsuccessful because Graves repressed memories and feelings that were too painful to address. However, in a number of important poems written between the years 1916 and 1951 Graves repeatedly reverts to certain themes and images as a mode of meditating, in a recuperative way, upon the painful wounds, horror, separation, and fragmentation of his early years. Through this process, Graves sees a developing and pragmatic relationship between nature, love and poetry. This relationship culminates in The White Goddess, which takes the reader on a difficult journey through fragmented material leading to poetic synthesis and integration. Through this oblique text, analysed here in terms of its modernist structure, Graves fully incorporates his emotional and physical wounds into a meaningful and reparative framework. Graves achieves a sense of homecoming and a regeneration of poetic impetus that allows him to transcend both the disruptions of his personal life and those of modernism

Many of the most enduring and influential elegies are those written in memory of other poets. Elegies for poets have always served a fascinating range of both private and public functions. This thesis establishes some of the forms taken and functions served by elegies for poets since W. H. Auden's landmark elegy "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1939) to the present day. Such poems are Janus-faced, simultaneously casting back into the past and projecting into the future. Although often radical in form and critical in tone, twentieth-century elegies for poets are also deeply concerned with tradition, and frequently seem to act as a synecdoche of the entire poetic canon, transmitting the legacy of the dead poet to a new generation of poets. This thesis examines the figuration of the dead poet in relation to the literary and political contexts of both elegist and elegized, defines the extent to which elegies for poets crystallize the processes of poetic inheritance, and tests how the elegiac relationship between a precursor and their successor (as in the case of W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden) differs from the dynamic which may exist between contemporaries (as in the case of John Berryman and Robert Lowell). Such poems form a chain of commemoration and inheritance. Each link is independent and can be taken in isolation, but when seen as part of the chain, it signifies a larger purpose and has a correspondingly greater strength. Finally, by focusing on these elegies as crucial moments of both celebration and usurpation, this thesis demonstrates that one can trace a kind of genealogy of poetry through what Helen Vendler has described as the "golden links of elegy.".

This thesis argues for a new understanding of Aestheticism in nineteenth-century literature and culture through a line of transmission between Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, and Aestheticism. It examines the complex intertextual relations among works by Aesthetic writers and their Romantic precursors, particularly Keats. This thesis aims to deepen awareness of one specific mode of aesthetic vision in Victorian poetry and painting, which is informed by a gendered concept of the female passionate body. This concept has ancient historical roots, which cannot be fully explored within the bounds of this thesis; the focus is on what Victorian poets and painters inherited from the Romantic tradition, taking Keats's 'Lamia' as an exemplary figure. The argument follows the engagement of artists and writers including William Morris, D. G. Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, J. M. Whistler, Walter Pater, and Michael Field, with figures, real or imagined, of female passion - Mona Lisa, Guenevere, Sappho, and others. Chapter 1 discusses Aestheticism's relationship to Keats, considering the way Aestheticism reconfigures or re-reads Romanticism. It focuses on the parallels and analogies between Keats and Pater, tracing the significance of Keats's 'Lamia' alongside other essays by Pater. Chapter 2 considers Aestheticism via its Pre-Raphaelite precursors; the aim is to interpret the threshold between lyric and lyre, and to introduce the symbolic images of narcissism and passionate suffering in Aesthetic poetry. Chapter 3 discusses two themes of the thesis, narcissism and passionate suffering, considering the ways Rossetti and Swinburne bring together the realms of the visual and the verbal in their poetry. Chapter 4 draws attention to Michael Field (Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley), affirming their contribution to Aesthetic poetry.

No description available.

Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844-1881) was the author of four collections of poetry published between 1870 and 1881, as well as a naturalist in the British Museum from the age of nineteen until his death. The volumes of poetry attracted critical attention at their publication, but his enduring legacy has been restricted to a small number of anthologised poems. If remembered today, it is as the author of the ’Ode’ which begins ’We Are the Music Makers’, the iconographic ’minor poet’ thus named by T.S. Eliot in ’What is Minor Poetry?’, a weak follower of poetic trends, or a shadowy bit player in a Pre-Raphaelite drama. This thesis argues that O’Shaughnessy’s life and work are of greater significance than has yet been acknowledged. My readings of his work suggest that rather than being an imitator of literary giants, O’Shaughnessy was an innovator in several avant-garde literary movements, developing a distinctive poetic voice of his own. I also argue that his life is of greater significance than previously adjudged for its transitions between the scientific cultures of the museum and the poetic circles which he was more eager to inhabit. In this thesis I argue that O’Shaughnessy’s life enables us to establish the relationship and barriers between the ’two cultures’ of science and literature during this period. As a frequently anthologized, selected, and excerpted poet, the picture that has been created of O’Shaughnessy over the years is fragmented and uncontextualised. Through analysing O’Shaughnessy’s published writings, including a series of scientific papers that he authored, and his unpublished writings, including correspondence, poetic manuscripts, and scientific notebooks, I seek to establish the patterns of influence within his own life and works, and to recontextualise him as a innovator of the ’poetics of the everyday.’ This work reads O’O’Shaughnessy as an ideal representative of the culture of the period in which he wrote.

This thesis, argues for the theological viability of Coleridge’s ontological insight into artworks and natural phenomena as aesthetically intimative of transcendence. However this finding is dependent on a critical analysis of Coleridge’s work, separating poetical insights from a systematic context which works against their theological promise. This Coleridgean analysis is in turn dependent, philosophically, upon a critical examination of a variety of Kantian and post-Kantian texts, through which is derived an account of pre-conceptual imaginative process, as related to a Bergsonian account of time considered as an organically non-calculable structure, in light of a Kierkegaardian theological norm. I discern a tension running through Coleridge’s work between the insights of the poet and the ambitions of the post-Kantian metaphysician. I argue that this tension is subversive of Coleridge’s underlying religious and poetic motivations. Through an analysis of Coleridge’s thought in both its systematic and less formal, aesthetic tendencies, I extricate his claim for the aesthetic intimation of transcendence through nature and art from the post-Kantian systematic conceptuality through which Coleridge is often led to distort it, in a countervailing drive towards systematically complete explanation. The thought of Kierkegaard will serve to illumine the ethico-aesthetic dynamics of Coleridge’s account of the appropriation of transcendent insight, conceived as an event of the dawning of religious truth as a conceptually indeterminate imaginative process, which as such, is only accessible to an imaginative and participative receptivity on the part of the aesthetic subject. A similar, imaginative ethos is discerned in the aesthetic positions of Coleridge and Kierkegaard; an attentive humility in openness to the potential manifestation of genuinely creative alterity. Through this thesis, the theological claim is advanced, in a new way, that in the eyes of Christian faith, an intimation of transcendence can be interpreted as a glimpse of the everyday world as created, an encounter with the familiar in its own ecstatic otherness.