This thesis investigates the representation of labour in the poetry of Basil Bunting, an aspect of his oeuvre hitherto critically overlooked, partly because of his avowed wish to keep politics out of poetry. Bunting constantly regarded the composing of poetry as work, and related the work of the poet to that of the traditional craftsman or skilled manual labourer. This conviction that poetry is work undermines his claim that his writing is apolitical, for work inevitably involves politics. Thus this thesis aims to demonstrate that political notions of work inform the form and prosodic techniques of Bunting’s poetry as well as its thematic content. While his subject matter ranges from mining disasters, money and music hall, through to Persian myths, the universalising theme of work is present throughout. His presentations of artisanal, agricultural, industrial and artistic forms of work and, significantly, his gendered treatment of domestic labour, are all addressed in this thesis. Looking at the poet in this new light entails a study of the background to his views about labour. The first part reads his early and later work alongside theories of labour by Marx and William Morris, and also investigates his correspondence with the leftist activist Objectivist poets. The second part frames Bunting’s ‘alternative’ labour-focused modernism within the wider literary culture of the 1930s, with chapters on Bunting and Bloomsbury, on Bunting and Lorine Niedecker, and on his poetic portrayals of social inequality during the Depression era. The final part examines Bunting’s role as a master-craftsman: it considers, firstly, his, and Pound’s, anti-institutional models for poetic schooling, and, secondly, the work of one of his most important ‘apprentices’, Tom Pickard.

The aim of my thesis is to identify the cosmopolitanism of Arthur Symons (1865-1945) for the re-evaluation of his works, including travel essays, fiction writing, and his editorship of The Savoy magazine. As one of the crucial leaders of the Victorian fin-de-siècle literary scene, Symons has been discussed in various contexts, such as decadence, impressionism, symbolism, and modernism. From these approaches, I focus on the ‘cosmopolitan’ aspect in him that is consistently found throughout his career. Chapter 1 explores the background of Symons’s borderless travelling style, and argues the series of travel essays on Venice that reveal his awareness of the fictitious nature of Western Orientalism. The favourable descriptions of the multicultural sphere as mosaics of different pieces are surely linkable to the current discussion on globalization. Chapter 2 discusses ‘flâneur poet’ Symons’s ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’, focusing on his description of the metropolitan, hybrid view of London with an anonymous crowd. Chapter 3 re-evaluates his 8 editorship of The Savoy (Jan-Dec 1896), because this periodical venture is an important example of Symons putting his cosmopolitan ideals into practice as an editorial policy. He made every effort to offer an international literary intersection on the pages of the magazine, and this experience later brought the publication of The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), his most internationally successful work. Chapter 4 analyses Spiritual Adventures (1905) as an example of the ambivalence of the cosmopolitanism Symons notices, which appears as the symbolism of water in Spiritual Adventures (1905). Finally, Symons’s cosmopolitanism is not a forceful persuasion to seek monotonous unity like a ‘cosmopolitan law’. Rather, it is a voice to invite us to see the world from a new perspective, one where every individual can coexist, side by side, without losing her/his own identity. Such a humble cosmopolitanism cannot bring dramatic, rapid change to the world-view. However, in a longer span, it will not be powerless. We can surely find this sincere hope in Symons. He exhibits the possibility of aesthetic cosmopolitanism to the future, rewriting the stereotypical impression of Victorian literature as the representation of Western Imperialism.

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The central argument of this thesis is that Percy Bysshe Shelley perceived modern relevance in the experience of the ancient Greeks. While their art, architecture, literature, philosophy and mythology were a constant inspiration for his thought and writing, a knowledge of their moral values, religious beliefs, social customs, political institutions and historical events provided him with clues to ideal society. Three chief factors are identified that determined the ways in which Shelley formed an idea of Greek antiquity: rationalism, idealism and historicism. Rationalism was an intellectual legacy from the Enlightenment of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It played a principal role in his evaluation of the Greek achievement. Its central criteria were reason, wisdom and benevolence. These qualities were polemically opposed to tyranny and superstition. Greek philosophy, literature and morality were celebrated for their power of reason, as a source of wisdom, and as exemplifying the spirit of benevolence. While rationalism concerned value judgment, idealism was a form of poetic representation. It found expression in Shelley's tendency to present Greece as perfection, often as more perfect than his actual historical perception would have allowed it to be. In his poetic imagination Greece figured either as a metaphor for ideal qualities or as a land where great bards and sages had once lived and bequeathed examples of excellence. Historicism was a habit of mind that became prominent in Shelley's commentary on the Greeks later than the other two elements, namely in the Italian period between 1818 and 1822. The historicist approach -- an approach in which cultural particularities are examined in the light of contextual factors -- led him to conceive the character of the ancients in contradistinction to that of modern Europeans. His exploration of the Greek character was based on the principles of Enlightenment historiography including the spirit of systematisation and the consideration of causality and environmental influence; among notable historians of the eighteenth century were Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon. The cultural dualism between ancient Greece and modern Europe had its immediate sources and specific intellectual context in the historicist discourse of German Hellenists in the latter half of the century, especially Winckelmann and August Schlegel.

This dissertation argues that George Herbert's poetry explores the theme of the Christian's distance from God and evaluates different paths that might overcome that distance. Herbert's explorations are informed by their historical context in which emerging secular learning and the post-Reformation culture unsettled traditional ideas about sacredness and access to the divine. A range of contemporaneous theological and spiritual discourses (especially those of Calvin and Perkins) that attempt to understand the Christian's dealing with God are analysed in the first chapter, where I contextualise Herbert's writing in relation to other Protestant articulations of religious experience - notably the experience of the Holy Spirit. I show how Herbert privileges the rite of the eucharist as an experiential path to God rather than the experience of the Holy Spirit in preaching celebrated by other Protestants. Chapter 2 examines the conceptual basis of God's remoteness: the metaphysical distinction between the material and the immaterial modes of being which underlies Herbert's vision of man composed of body and soul. Herbert's exploration of human agency reveals an ontological dualism under strain in his culture which was questioning its rational basis. Herbert does not seek rational solutions to these difficulties but literary resolutions. Chapter 3 highlights the manner in which Herbert's work evinces fears that Renaissance reason was too worldly in its orientation. By way of reaction, he attempts, not without ambivalence, to affirm the primacy of Christian faith as a path to God. I examine Herbert's use of Bible typology to reach God in Chapter 4. Despite typology's fruitful spiritual potential, it does not always bring sacred meaning or solace to The Temple's speakers. This failure is explained with reference, on the one hand, to the contemporaneous critical intellectual culture (particularly regarding Renaissance intellectuals' understanding of Scripture; an understanding that could challenge basic Christian teaching) and, on the other hand, to an underlying anxiety about the loss of certain features of pre-Reformation spirituality that formerly provided a sense of the proximity of the sacred. Herbert celebrates Scripture as a quasi-mystical means of approaching God but, again, not unambiguously. Chapter 5 discusses Herbert's language of rebellious complaints "about God's distance. Here I show how this language encroaches upon controversies about the sacred symbol of the cross, highlights the naivety of the worldview of the book of Job and spills over into the speaker's vociferous blaming of God for cruelly distancing Himself from pious Christians. The idea that Herbert's technique of writing God a voice is blasphemous (as maintained by some critics) is discussed in Chapter 6. I argue that this fictional device, which effectively brings God onto the page, does not constitute an offence to orthodoxy since Herbert's skilful use of divine speech often leads the speaker towards doctrinal correction rather than doctrinal deviation. Chapter 7 argues that Herbert's idea of the Church (a motif profoundly embedded in his poetic project)holds out the firmest promise for attaining divine proximity. For the Church to fulfil such a role it must be consensual and Conformist. But Herbert's consensualism does not exclude muted attacks on radical Protestants. His evocation of divine presence in the material church building feeds into his literary Temple which celebrates sacred space, sacred rites and sacred time. Yet even that Church-related access to God is has its limits.

This study is concerned with exploring the notion that there is a special relationship between animal life and the 'poetic'. It provides close readings of modern and contemporary poetry with the aim of testing, refining and drawing out the implications of this claim. The introductory chapter briefly examines the history of the animal in Western philosophy and literature. It charts this history in order to contextualize one of the gUiding questions of this study: how have animals been seen by philosophers and poets, and what differences exist between their different 'modes' or 'disciplines'? These questions lead to a discussion of J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (1997), which dramatizes these issues in fiction. The text explores a notion central to this study - namely, that poetry has a special capacity for relating to animal others. The thesis examines the implications of this idea, asking if there is something peculiar about 'poetic' thought that enables it to cultivate connections with animal life that distinguishes it from other forms of language. The thesis pursues then these questions in relation to four poets: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Les Murray and Ted Hughes. It provides a formal analysis of recurring literary strategies in each poet's work - such as metaphor and similebut also offers a broader consideration of the cultural factors informing each writer's oeuvre. It asks the same question in many different guises: how do poets use language in such a way that faithfully responds to the singularity of animal life?

The influence of Faust on Tennyson begins around 1824, reaches a remarkable level of intensity in 1833-34, and continues, intermittently, until 1855. This can be demonstrated by drawing attention to the numerous verbal echoes of Goethe's drama - and the close thematic links to it - that are discernible in at least two dozen of Tennyson's poems, including several of the greatest. The 'Introduction' argues that in nineteenth-century Britain, Faust was a central text, which influenced dozens of authors from Shelley to Wilde. However, the widespread perception of Goethe's drama as immoral and irreligious fostered a deep-seated desire to modify or re-interpret it. This twofold response is also broadly characteristic of Tennyson's engagement with Faust, so my six chapters fall into two contrasting groups of three. Chapters One to Three are concerned with the ways in which his deep admiration for Goethe's drama shaped many of his poetic responses to the death of Hallam. Chapter One examines the link in Tennyson's mind between the loss of his friend and the Gretchen tragedy in Faust: Part One. Chapter Two deals with 'Ulysses', which expresses a Faustian need for forward movement. Chapter Three considers the influence on Tennyson of Part Two (most notably, in The Princess). The remaining chapters are concerned with the more negative side of Tennyson's response to Faust. An increasing ambivalence towards Goethe's drama can be detected in his three major poems on religious doubt (which provide the subject of Chapter Four), as well as in some of his Nature poetry (Chapter Five). And in a small group of works about saints and sinners, his attitude towards Faust is overtly antagonistic (Chapter Six). The 'Conclusion' notes that Goethe's drama was a source for at least three of Tennyson's long poems, and that it also left its mark on all four of his earliest dramatic monologues. Faust can be said, therefore, to have exercised a far-reaching influence on Tennyson's achievement.

This thesis explores the implications of creative labour in Blake's use of the term 'self-annihilation'. It finds that the critical consensus of self-annihilation as forgiveness is insufficient, and argues that the figure of Los, through his continual building of Golgonooza, is central to the annihilation of selfhood. In Blake, creative labour is effected through the interdependence of inspiration and composition, and is evoked in Los's presence in the scenes of self-annihilation. Although inspiration is largely conceived of as a passive experience, foregrounded in Blake's statement in a,letter to Thomas Butts that the 'Authors' of Jerusalem 'are in Eternity', it operates as a necessary counterpart to the act of composition. Focusing mainly on The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem, the thesis foregrounds the activity of creative labour through a contrast with various analogues of the passive self. Whilst the thrust of this thesis is upon creative labour, I also show how far the annihilation of selfhood occurs in Blake through prophecy, sex, and - to some extent - motherhood. These states or experiences are found to share similar imagery and concerns with creative self-annihilation: inspiration, rapture, possession and sacrifice all figure in analogous, albeit problematic ways.