The thesis has two objectives. The first is to examine the Italian aspects of Second Generation Romantic verse. Through close readings of works by Byron, Shelley, and Hunt the thesis shows the importance of Italy and its traditions to these poets. The second objective is to reveal the ambassadorial role of Italians in London for their literature and homeland. Exiles such as Augustus Bozzi and Ugo Foscolo used a growing cosmopolitan press to educate Britons about Italy. I pay particular attention to the public reception of these writers and their works, across a range of forms such as pamphlets, songs, and periodicals. The interaction of British poets with Italy and the activities of Italian exiles in London are closely related phenomena. Both groups communicated with and were influenced by one another: viewing these two groups in one analysis, rather than as contrapuntal phenomena, is therefore crucial. The thesis proceeds chronologically from 1815–1823 with each chapter examining an Anglo-Italian cultural interaction in London or Italy. The title refers to a 'Radical’ culture using the term for its early-nineteenth-century associations with political reform, and with reference to poetry characterised by independence from the traditional. After Waterloo, the British state actively attempted to maintain cultural hegemony by legislating against the threat of immigrants and the dangers of a radical press. One of my concerns is therefore with the relationship between culture and the 'public mind', particularly as exemplified in contemporary periodical reviews. I examine this material to see how far Regency mores were troubled by alien people, ideas, and culture. The thesis combines these discussions of societal trends with personal accounts of life in a foreign country. The primary materials examined to capture this experience are correspondence and manuscript diaries of both exiles and English travellers.

As the title indicates, the basis of the thesis is to set John Clare’s life and work within the context of the social and political history of his time. It is a study that is long overdue. The manner in which topical and political matters were mediated to him and were reflected in his work are analysed. His introduction to the literary and social worlds of Stamford and London is evaluated, and the advantages and disadvantages of patronage assessed. The active and complex political culture of Stamford has been taken into account as this may have affected his later political statements and a growing awareness of his audience. His antagonism to enclosure and the social changes that it engendered are considered. Three major questions that arise from this are addressed. The two local newspapers that Clare is known to have read are used throughout. His correspondence with friends, colleagues and casual correspondents has provided valuable insights as have his poetry and prose writings. Research in the Northamptonshire Record Office has revealed important new information in the form of one book of Enclosure Commissioners’ Minutes dated 1809-14, the first five years of the enclosure of Helpstone, Clare’s native village.

This dissertation offers a series of exegetical readings of short and long poems by Anthony Burgess, with the aim of establishing the extent to which this poetry participates in Modernist and Postmodernist traditions. Beginning with Burgess's poems of the 1930s, the thesis discusses all of his major poetic works until 1993. Making extensive use of unpublished manuscript material, this is the first thesis to treat poetry and verse drama (including translations) as a discrete area of Burgess's literary production. As such, the thesis significantly extends the critical enquiries of previous scholars. Having identified specific poetic influences, the thesis addresses the poetic effects of the intertextual techniques used by Burgess. His poetry and writing about poetry are accounted for chronologically, and a selection of longer texts are discussed in detail. Influential Modernist poets are found to practice a range of techniques which Burgess parodies and pastiches with serious intent. Burgess is found to use Modernist techniques throughout his literary career, and to apprehend tradition through a conservative version of Modernism. Burgess's later poetry is shown to be self-reflexive and formalist in ways which are identifiably Postmodern. In texts such as Byrne, St. Winefred's Well and The End of Things, Burgess reassesses his relationship with Modernism, and intertextuality itself becomes a key preoccupation. Arguing the case for Burgess as a transitional late Modernist poet, the thesis charts the development of Burgess's engagement with Modernism and Postmodernism, and proposes that the two are interdependent rather than antithetical.

The Distracted Globe is a project in the writing of poetry. It is an example of research conducted through creative practice and comprises a collection of original poetry, The Silent Book, and an accompanying reflective commentary. Thematically, the poems deal with adolescence, education, the English Language, mental health, death and loss, gender representation, sexuality and polarisation. Significant subject matter includes: the English Language, English Literature, places, in particular Blackpool, London and Nottingham, madness, with specific reference to Bipolar Affective Disorder. The poetry explores the recreation and transformation of literary texts and the manipulation of fairy tale conventions. The poems are a mixture of free verse and traditional forms. The reflective commentary objectively discusses the writing processes and complimentary creative processes involved in the production of The Silent Book and significant developments in the work of the poet. It also contextualises the poetry through reference to the work of other poets, historical and contemporary and to poetic traditions. The potentially conflicting roles of teacher and poet are explored as is the need for a context for poetry, with particular emphasis on audience and purpose. The multimodal nature of poetry in terms of reading and listening audiences and written and spoken modes of production is also considered. As a doctoral project, The Distracted Globe makes an original contribution to the academic fields of Creative Writing and English in Education.

This thesis investigates some developments in English poetry brought about by the rapid influx of translated work from Eastern and Central Europe (especially Poland, Hungary and former Yugoslavia) in the period following the Second World War. As well as providing models for many English poets at the level of technique and motif, this work served as catalyst in wider poetical and political debates, especially concerning literalism in translation, issues of persona arising from psuedo-translation, and propriety of response when dealing with atrocity. ‘How dare we now be anything but numb?’, asks Donald Davie in his ‘Rejoinder to a Critic’; examples from Eastern European poetry in translation have been one of the means through which certain modern poets have negotiated a tentative response to that question. The individual chapters of this thesis offer close readings of poets including Ted Hughes, Charles Simic, Tom Paulin, Donald Davie, and Patrick McGuinness, as well as in-depth analyses of two long poems, Ken Smith's Fox Running and Richard Berengarten's In a Time of Drought. The work of each poet is contextualised, drawing out latent Eastern European connotations and connections. Each close reading illuminates a particular broader issue: the turn to folklore and myth (in Smith and Berengarten), contested definitions of the surreal (in Simic), and the ‘right to speak’ on behalf of (or in the voice of) certain groups or on certain occasions (in Davie). Propriety of response and poetic responsibility are examined in a discussion of several English poets' treatment of the Bosnian war, while the chapter on Hughes explores literal translation and the mechanics of influence. Considering these poems in this context expands our sense of the period and of the poems themselves, as well as allowing us to posit a common source for several distinct features of postwar poetry.

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This thesis assesses the extent to which fourteenth-century Middle English poets were interested in, and influenced by, traditions of thinking about logic and mathematics. It attempts to demonstrate the imaginative appeal of the logical problems called sophismata, which postulate absurd situations while making use of a stable but evolving, and distinctly recognisable, pool of examples. Logic and mathematics were linked. The ‘puzzle-based’ approach of late-medieval logic stemmed in part from earlier arithmetical puzzle collections. The fourteenth-century application of the ‘sophismatic’ method to problems concerned with what might now be called ‘Physics’ or ‘Mechanics’ sustained the symbiotic relationship of the two disciplines. An awareness of the importance of this tradition is perhaps indicated by the prominence of logical and mathematical tropes and scenarios in the works of three authors in particular: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and the Gawain-poet. It is argued that, in the poetry of all three, what may loosely be called ‘sophismatic tropes’ are used to present concerns that the poets share with the logical and mathematical thought of their time. Certain themes recur, including the following: problematic promises; problematic reference to non-existent things; problems associated with divisibility, limits and the idea of a continuum; and, most importantly, problems focused on the contingency, or otherwise, of the future. The debate over future contingency was one of the fiercest scholastic controversies of the fourteenth century, with profound implications for both logical and theological thought. It is suggested here that the scholastic debate about future contingency has a visible impact on Chauntecleer’s prophetic dream in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Troilus’s apparent determinism in Troilus and Criseyde, Gower’s presentation of causation in the Confessio Amantis, and the Gawain-poet’s treatment of covenants. The conclusion reached is that fourteenth-century logical and mathematical texts had a significantly wider cultural effect than is generally recognised.

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The following research involves an engagement with what will become known as ‘the problem of the city’ as it pertains to twentieth century British and American poetics. What this amounts to is an analysis of how the extremely palpable ‘occlusion’ of the city in contemporary poetry is necessarily premised on various socio-political factors rooted in inadequate conceptions of a ‘common identity’ that have undergirded urban social being since the foundation of Aristotle’s polis. Isolating the root cause of this situation in romantic and modernist aesthetic practice seen as promoting a desire for ‘closure’ in the poem, the research goes on to examine a variety of approaches that tackle this situation in terms of its opposite. The end of the research pitches writing on the city as a ‘perilous’ undertaking skirting a fine line between the demands for authorial control of the materials, and the necessity to engender a more ‘open’ poetics independent of the writing itself. The introduction acquaints the reader with the concept of urban anxieties, as well as the key terms ‘urbicide’, ‘necropolis’ and ‘melee’ in relation to Jean Luc Nancy’s text Being Singular Plural (1996) and Bill Griffiths’ A Book of Spilt Cities (1999). Following on from this chapter one looks, briefly, at the roots of the problem of the city in both romantic and modernist writers, ending with an exposition of George Oppen’s work as a different approach stemming from his engagement with objectivism in the thirties. Chapters three, four and five will branch out to incorporate various postwar understandings of the city that promote aesthetic strategies most able to counter this dilemma in the light of work like Oppen’s. The third chapter sees the boldest attempt in Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, specifically as they continue in that tradition of objectivism. Olson’s ‘root city’ is juxtaposed with Walt Whitman’s New York, Susan Howe’s text Singularities (1990) and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson sequence, in order to see how effectively the desire for closure was surmounted from within the bounds of a conservative poetic tradition founded on ‘cratylism’. It is in chapters four and five, however, that the conclusions of the thesis really begin to take shape. By examining the influence of Olson and Williams on the English writers Roy Fisher, Iain Sinclair and Allen Fisher, a way forward is determined for the city and poetry albeit perched between a the desire for hope and a profound despair. Allen Fisher’s Place (2005) and his later Gravity as a Consequence of Shape (2004) project are positioned as fundamental to this approach particularly in how they work towards an interruption of linguistic closure enshrined in the very materials themselves. In chapter five romantic aesthetic ideals are firmly questioned in line with the innovations made by Lisa Robertson in both The Weather (2001) and her longer project on the city Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture (2003). Her impulse to see social space in terms of noise or ‘cacophony’ – that is, not the place of a single interpretation of urbanity as much as a residue of different voices – sets the standard by which an open poetics becomes possible. The conclusion and appendix aim to situate this ‘delusional’ poetics within the context of a city that is both ‘panicked’ and subject to ever-greater interference by state historical versions of urban space. Francis Crot’s text Hax (2011) remains fundamental in this climate specifically in how it seeks to disrupt notions of linguistic closure through a determined focus on harnessing the tensions manifest in the city itself.