This thesis attempts to define a tradition of post-mythic literature. It aims to demonstrate that Nietzsche's claim that in a secular world God is dead, yet we continue to live under the shadow of myth. Each chapter is a detailed analysis of a key writer's ambivalent attitude towards the poetics and metaphysics of myth. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus demonstrates how two methods of reading a violent Ovidian tale anticipates a progressive or regressive use of myth in the twentieth century. This can be seen in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra which reveals a need to overcome myth as a dogmatic metaphor. On the other hand, T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' expresses the nihilistic despair of an age severed from the symbolic roots of traditional mythology. In the twentieth century the notion of myth is bound up with contrary forces, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness helped to establish a myth of the divided self to metaphorically displace the horror of human violence within a civilizing system. Against a context of systematic or over-transcribing rationality, Kafka's work returns to a mythic use of animals to preserve a sense of the scared within the existential self. Wallace Stevens and Bob Dylan, demonstrate how a return to faith is linked to an aesthetic that is deeply embedded within the metaphysics of God.

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This thesis bases its argument on the notion that Philip Larkin’s poetry addresses intellectual and philosophical issues in a way that reflects a profound engagement of the poet’s mind with the world around him. His poetry is often described as direct, transparent, and lucid, but it also harbours esoteric areas and obscurities of thought. The thesis argues that Larkin’s work is preoccupied with fathoming out mental and psychological profundities, and that it tends to philosophise and theorise its own intellectual procedures as it handles and sifts the seemingly everyday commonalities. The poems do not confine themselves to the literality and immediacy of a particular theme, but strive to capture unanticipated contours of thought and contemplation. Larkin’s poetry invokes and triggers a pursuit of underlying perception, enlightenment, and knowledge, and aspires to go beyond that to achieve a sense of wonder and discovery. Hence, a Larkin poem cannot be read linearly without sacrificing what stirs deep in the chosen vocabulary and in the rhetorical and syntactical twists and contortions through which the poems attain their intellectual and meditative impact. Logic and rationality are sometimes enlisted to aid the intellectual quests that Larkin’s poetical personae find themselves engaged in. Imagination, dream, and speculation prevail throughout poems in which the poet seeks to develop an awareness of and understanding of our existential predicament. The study traces the various elements and aspects of this involvement in thought and introspection in Larkin’s poetry from the very early juvenilia through his first published collection The North Ship (1945), all the way across his mature collections, The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1965), and High Windows (1974), to his later and posthumous poems. Each of the above collections is researched in depth across six chapters. The thesis includes an introduction in which the notion of the poetry of the mind is profiled, and the ways it applies to Larkin’s poetry are delineated. It concludes with a coda which reflects upon the main findings of the study.

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This collection of lyrical poetry is significantly inspired by personal experiences, particularly a diagnosis of Ankylosing Spondylitis, a chronic inflammatory arthritis and autoimmune condition. Issues such as hospitalisation, the power dynamics between doctors and patients, and managing both physical and emotional pain inform the writing. Highly specified form in the poetry serves to contain and organise powerful emotions using simple, epigrammatic language. The layout of the research mirrors the layout of the poetry. The researcher’s own experiences of finding therapeutic value in her own poetry writing led to the research element which explores how and why poetry writing works therapeutically and whether poetry is more effective than other forms of therapeutic writing. The specific benefits of poetry writing as therapy for those who have experienced emotional distress are explored in depth. The difference between poetry as therapy and poetry as art is also considered. A small scale research study was undertaken with service users at a local charity, who have experienced emotional distress. A qualitative, semi-structured interview design was used, which was then analysed using Interpretational Phenomenological Analysis. The findings suggest that poetry is a particularly useful form of therapeutic writing as poetry promotes successful processing of a traumatic event through the use of image and metaphor. The participants retained the distinction between their priority of expressing themselves honestly and a preoccupation with artistic endeavour. Stevie Smith and Julia Darling provide examples of poets who found therapeutic elements in the writing process. Some of their poems are analysed in depth and their views on poetry’s therapeutic effects are considered. Alongside this, the difference between poetry as therapy and poetry as art is explored. Research reveals that poetry as therapy prioritises self-expression and poetry as art prioritises artfulness, but the two are not completely distinct; rather, they lie on a spectrum.

This thesis examines the semantics and pragmatics of nouns that denote gender and social status in Chaucer’s literature e.g. ‘knyght’, ‘lady’, ‘leche’, ‘wyf’. It argues that a comparative analysis of these words across Chaucer’s corpus may challenge the traditional perceptions of Chaucer’s characters and their social roles, and clarify the supposed ambiguity assigned to these characters in modern criticism. Previous literary analyses of the language have been open to the charge of being unsystematic in their choice of the lexis examined. This thesis addresses this issue by taking a corpus-based approach to identify patterns of language and idiomatic phraseology for discussion, with the aim of discovering if this method can inform new interpretations of Chaucer’s works. With the aid of lexicographical resources (i.e. MED, OED, HTOED), the words are examined with consideration given to their immediate lexical and greater textual contexts, as well as medieval socio-cultural sources that may have informed Chaucer’s use. Although the study takes into consideration Chaucer’s whole body of work, the thesis is structured into three chapters that focus on individual texts of 'The Canterbury Tales', including ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ and ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, the short poem 'An ABC', and finally 'Troilus and Criseyde'. These texts are chosen due to their frequencies and range of the selected social status terms, as well as the fact that they span the entire period of Chaucer’s career, allowing for discussion on how the words develop over the course of his lifetime. The study presents how these terms are utilised for varying literary effect (i.e. simple reflection, critique, comic inversion), and if they confirm or refute previous analyses on Chaucer’s presentations of gender and social roles. In doing so, the thesis offers insights to the historical basis for how these words may have developed in Middle English, and how Chaucer’s language reflects, interprets and challenges fourteenth-century cultural attitudes towards social status.

The multidisciplinary approach I’ve adopted looks to use both critical and practice-led research in order to open up new space between the broader literary and cultural registers of the Great War alongside those of the 21st century. At its core is a desire to exert some pressure upon notions of an “appropriate” linguistic register for the imaginative commemoration of a century-old war that has grown to represent a core mythology for subsequent poetic constructions of modern warfare. The resulting poetry collection, Ghosts of the Vortex, seeks then, to create a transitional idiolect of commemoration more suited to our times. In order to achieve this, I adopt a number of approaches that might be characterized as manifestations of a “neo-modernism”. These include self-translation/ transposition, palimpsest, the use of reconfigured quotation, the poetic re-writing of literary criticism and an extension of the license for a self-conscious use of anachronism suggested by Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns. Alongside this, the critical chapters reflect some of the key concerns of the poetry and share its desire to find new ways of scrutinising Great War poetry in the light of all that has already been written. Chapter 1 revisits a foundational critical text – Jon Silkin’s Out of Battle – and mimics his close reading style to examine a compositional tic identified by him as being typical of much trench poetry. Chapter 2 revisits the Great War canon on the basis of the atypical circumstantial nature of its composition, using the theoretical model of Bakhtin’s chronotope to do so. The third chapter is an exercise in reception studies, examining noteworthy poetic responses to the fiftieth anniversary of the Great War and the final chapter examines the contested nature of Irish involvement in the conflict through its nuanced manifestations in the work of Seamus Heaney.

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I survey Cobbing’s considerable and varied output, placing it initially into approximate chronological phases. I discern formal and aesthetic traits and their development over time. I attempt to place the work within wider poetic and artistic traditions, namely avant-gardism, the British Poetry Revival, sound and visual poetry, and the exploration of artistic form. I propose an understanding of flow as an intersection of two axes: linear temporality (flow time) which exists outside of social time, and multidimensional or constellatory spatiality which is generated by certain artistic works. The body bridges social time and flow time through creative gestures and by unifying temporal elements. I trace the features of abstraction as they emerged throughout roughly the first half of the twentieth century in visual art, sound poetry and lexical poetry. I define poetic and artistic form, noting that radical works explore traditional boundaries of space, and discusses the politics of form. I examine theories of perception to arrive at a synthesis of form and perception in what I term the Event, where the engaged perceiver participates with the radical work in what constitutes a revolutionary activity. I include close readings of Cobbing’s Jade-Sound Poems, Domestic Ambient Noise and a sound performance of Container Leaks, applying my findings with regard to flow, abstraction, the politics of form, perception and space. The thesis concludes that Cobbing’s work, which constitutes a new poetics and exemplifies avant-gardist practice as a breaking out of old forms, can inspire radical modes of living if we engage creatively with the world. I believe this work provides a comprehensive exegesis for understanding Cobbing’s challenging work in relation to addresses to form and perception, an interpretation which is currently missing from the critical field.

This work explores the relationship between the environment of the linguistically and politically conflicted island of Ireland and the possibility of the creation of poetry which acknowledges such social realities as part of its remit. A collection of poems presents the lyric as formed by various aspects of witness and a critical study of the work of Padraic Fiacc and Eavan Boland addresses the political poem as well as the poem which arises from the differing forms of aesthetics which arise within a violently contested State. As Auden said of Yeats, ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’ and there’s a sense that poets have fallen into identifiable sections – those who visited the historical and present-day loci of identity issues and various other forms of conflict within their work and those who have appeared not to do so. This thesis presents the debates contextualising the many cross-currents and inter-dependencies within these apparently binary arguments.