This thesis questions the traditional dichotomy between the satires of Horace and Juvenal, a binary satiric theory that has strongly influenced twentieth-century readings of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. It is argued that the works of both Horace and Juvenal are too complex to be reduced to a single well-defined ‘type’ of satire. Hence, the popular labelling of Pope as a ‘Horatian’ satirist and Swift as a ‘Juvenalian’ satirist is shown to be as synthetic as the duality between Horace and Juvenal itself. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the Restoration theory of satire as a background for the study of Pope and Swift. Chapter 2 is a close reading of Juvenal, which questions the conventional portrayal of him as ‘the angry satirist’. Chapter 3 challenges the widespread characterisation of Pope as a Horatian satirist, and argues that even in his Horatian poems he has as much in common with Juvenal. Chapter 4 offers a close reading of Horace, which disputes the popular portrayal of him as ‘the smiling satirist’. Finally, Chapter 5 debunks the exclusive reading of Swift as a Juvenalian satirist, demonstrating his frequent use of Horace’s own satiric tactics. The aim throughout the thesis is to establish a less polarised and more nuanced understanding of the relationship between Juvenal and Horace, which can encourage a subtler appreciation of Pope and Swift as satirists.

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This is a creative response to the poetry of Keith Douglas (1920-44), focusing particularly on what he described as his ‘extrospective (if the word exists) poetry’.1 My work takes the form of sixty-four of my original poems, plus a thesis of 40,000 words. In my poems Douglas’s extrospective approach is reinterpreted and re-applied to my life, interests, and experiences, including that of being paralysed from the shoulders down and left dependent on a ventilator to breathe, following a spinal injury in 1987. The poems are selected from over 1,000 written during my six years of research and they look at different aspects of what Douglas was doing in his poetry, as well as his ideas about poetry. My 40,000 word thesis was written alongside my selection of poems and it includes three chapters. The first constitutes an examination of Douglas’s use of the term ‘extrospective’ and what his poetry reveals about this definition. Chapter Two explores a selection of poems and publications written since Douglas’s death in order to shed more light on aspects of extrospection. Finally, Chapter Three builds on the previous two chapters to provide an account of my own extrospective poems, on the understanding that these poems are the main focus of the thesis. My work is important because although Douglas’s life and poetry has attracted the attention of poets and critics such as Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Desmond Graham, William Scammell, Roger Bowen, Jonathan Bolton, Adam Piette, Neil Corcoran, and Jon Glover, extrospection has not previously been considered in its own right in great depth.

This thesis investigates Simon Armitage’s claim that his poetry inherits from Tony Harrison’s work an interest in the politics of form and language, and argues that both poets, although rarely compared, produce work which is conceptually and ideologically interrelated: principally by their adoption of an ‘un-poetic’, deliberately antagonistic language which is used to invade historically validated and culturally prestigious lyric forms as part of a critique of canons of taste and normative concepts of poetic register which I call barbarian masquerade. Harrison’s first collection The Loiners is analysed alongside Armitage’s debut Zoom! in order to demonstrate a shared antipathy towards traditional form and language, and this poetics of dissent is traced across a range of collections, showing that although Harrison’s writing is more obviously class-conscious or Marxist than Armitage’s ludic and ironic output, both poets’ deployment of masquerade reveals a range of shared aesthetic, poetic and political concerns. The final chapters of the thesis demonstrate the complexity of the two poets’ barbarian poetics by analysing Harrison’s militant secularism and Armitage’s denunciations of state violence, hate crime and social exclusion, and by showing that their masquerade writing transcends simple renegotiations of language, structure and style in its search for a public poetry defined by its engagement with, rather than withdrawal from, social, moral and political debate. The thesis ends by suggesting that Harrison’s influence on Armitage might apply to other New Generation poets and to more recent writers, whose work is invoked in order to suggest a continuity of politicised, barbaric writing.

This thesis examines the interaction between human and nonhuman from an ecologically oriented perspective. It reads Anglo-Saxon poetic texts, particularly the Anglo-Latin and Exeter Book riddles, the Old English elegies, and Beowulf alongside a selection of British postwar poetry. Reading these bodies of work in dialogue with one another reveals models of knowledge encoded by these poetic texts, which challenges how we think about human and nonhuman interaction, regarding both Anglo-Saxon culture and our culture today. Beginning with an examination of technology in the thinking of Martin Heidegger and in Anglo-Saxon culture (ch. 1), I examine the process of writing, considering how poems engage with the materiality of the writing process and how interactions between human and nonhuman are explored both within poetic texts and through poetry itself, with reference to Anglo-Saxon riddles (ch. 2); the rhizomatic assemblages that constitute the ground both in riddles and in the work of Seamus Heaney, Basil Bunting, and Geoffrey Hill (ch. 3); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Simon Armitage’s translation, alongside Hill’s Mercian Hymns (ch. 4); and the use of inscribed stones by Armitage, alongside the Exeter Book elegies (ch. 5). This thesis demonstrates that Anglo-Saxon poetry engages with environment more dynamically than has previously been suggested, creating its own series of literary ecologies. It also argues that the style and form of Anglo-Saxon poetry can influence the poetic construction of human and nonhuman interaction today. Engaging with ecomaterialism, including ideas of Actor-Network Theory, object-oriented ontology, and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic model, I interrogate the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, which have held a problematic place in ecocritical thinking and discussion. The interactions within and between Old English and British postwar poetry can provide alternative models of human and nonhuman interaction which speak with rather than for nonhumans, opening insights into the place of poetry in a time of anthropogenic crisis.

This thesis has two connected aims. Firstly, it claims that it is meaningful to describe Wordsworth's aesthetic, and his beliefs about the subject-object relationship, as substantially empiricist. However, it is not claimed that Wordsworth is consistently empiricist in the way that a philosopher might aspire to be: indeed, there is a place to be found within this argument for the recognition of his transcendentalism. While it is granted that the word 'empiricist' is not always used in the most rigorous philosophical sense, the influence of philosophical empiricism on Wordsworth naturally figures in the argument. Secondly, the thesis demonstrates that the continued influence of Wordsworth in the twentieth century has to be understood primarily as the influence of his empiricist aesthetic. The thesis concludes by suggesting that there are wider possibilities for poetry than are encouraged by this aesthetic. The importance of undertaking this project does not lie only in objections to Wordsworth's theory or practice, but arises also from a consideration of his continuing influence. Chapter One argues that on the basis of his poetry and criticism of the period 1787 to 1805, the description 'The Empirical Wordsworth' is a meaningful one. This is established through an examination of Wordsworth's writings, his sister's journal entries, his correspondence, his poetry and contemporaneous literary reviews of The Prelude. Chapter Two, in order to demonstrate the antecedents of Wordsworth's empiricist beliefs, is a study of his philosophical development from the influences of Hartley, Burke and Berkeley. Chapter Three examines the influence of Coleridge on Wordsworth. This is predominantly an empiricist one contrary to received notions of it being transcendentalist. Chapter Four reviews the reading of Wordsworth in the twentieth century. This has to be understood in terms of the reaction to Romanticism in the twentieth century. Finally, Chapter Five looks at twentieth-century poetry that largely avoids the empiricist influence of Wordsworth. It also introduces the concept of 'Empirical Identifiers': an analytic tool for literary criticism.

This thesis considers the ways in which poets writing in English in Bombay have represented the city and negotiated its particular challenges, focusing in particular on poets starting to publish during the 1950s and 1960s. Examining in detail work by poets whom Bruce King refers to as constituting a “Bombay circle”, this project examines how Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar in particular have represented the modernity of the city (Modern Indian Poetry in English 45). Despite Bombay’s significance in postcolonial studies, this highly mediated city has been disassociated from its material histories by recent critical and imaginative portrayals. The over-determination of Bombay is countered and nuanced, this thesis suggests, by examining the ways in which poets have represented the city. Evaluating Bombay poetry closely, and considering the relationship between poetic form and language and the articulation of space, this project asks how poetry written in the city contributes to, intervenes in or disarticulates dominant readings of Bombay. The material contexts in which poetry was written and circulated provide further significant and under-researched sites of engagement with this postcolonial city. This thesis thus turns to a period in the city’s cultural and literary history that has not been extensively documented: to the emergence of its poetry scene from the 1950s onwards. This project combines close, poetic analyses with archival research, examining Bombay’s little magazines and small press publishers, and tracing the various local and international affiliations evidenced in this body of work. In doing so, its aim is to historicize and contextualize the city and the work of its poets, enriching a critical and materialist understanding of this paradigmatic city.

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This thesis examines nineteenth century writing that linked poetry and poets to madness, including journalism, criticism, biography, medical literature, and poetry itself. Its purpose, more specifically, is to offer an account of the development and dissemination of the idea of ‘the mad poet of genius’, and how this idea interacted with the varying fortunes in reception and reputation of some British poets, their works, and conceptions of Romanticism generally. The first part provides an account of the most important contexts for the subject, including: the currency of popular myths on the topic, the relevance (or otherwise) of later study on madness and creativity, and the existing critical and scholarly literature in English studies, which lacks a historical account of the sort provided here. The next part deals with reception, broadly conceived, discussing the Romantic conversation with classical and early modern ideas about poetic madness, attitudes towards the creative and literary mind in the mental medicine of the period, then contemporary reviews of new poets and the hostile rhetoric of insanity they deployed, showing how this both increased the popularity of and stigmatized the mad poet. It then analyses madness in life writing, moving from early brief lives and popular anthologies of the ‘infirmities of genius’ to the larger narratives of irrationality in Victorian literary biography. In conclusion, the thesis briefly returns to three poets and their poetry in particular: William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It discusses how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own life and art, new and rediscovered mythologies of poetic madness; anticipating and resisting the public images of journalism or biography described previously. Finally, the ‘mad poet of genius’ is considered in relation to the position of canonical Romanticism in English literature, and the idea’s cultural trajectory and afterlife is suggested.