This thesis examines the influence of Arabic learning, in Latin translations, on Chaucer’s oeuvre. That Chaucer drew on Arabic sources has long been acknowledged by Chaucerians, but there has been little scholarly engagement with them, particularly in relation to his highly technical, diagnostic concept of fin’ amors. This study demonstrates Chaucer’s portrayal of fin’ amors is informed by Arabic learning in the related fields of medicine, natural philosophy, astrology and alchemy, disseminated through Latin translations from the Iberian Peninsula in particular. This study demonstrates that whilst Chaucer has the utmost respect for the scholarly achievements of the Islamic world, he adopts a condemnatory attitude toward the religious milieu that gave birth to these achievements, grounded in the contemporary context of the later crusades. Chapter One considers the influence of Arabic medical texts on Chaucer’s diagnosis of amor hereos, love as a life-threatening illness, in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale. Chapter Two examines Aristotelian natural philosophy and the effect of the 1277 Condemnations at the University of Paris on the genesis of love as a cerebral illness. Chapter Three turns to the diagnostic aspect of Arabic astronomy evinced in the Treatise on the Astrolabe, focusing on judicial astrology and saturnine melancholia in the Knight’s Tale. Chapter Four concentrates on the technical transmission of Arabic alchemical sources in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, which act as a metaphor for fin’ amors. Chapter Five examines Chaucer’s dichotomous attitude toward Arabic learning and Islam as a religion.

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This study examines the importance of literary communities in the works of a number of key English poets: Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400), Thomas Hoccleve (c. 13671426), John Lydgate (c. 1370-1449), John Skelton (c. 1460-1529), Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). It focuses on 'horizontal' peer-based literary communities and the support and literary friendships that such groups might provide, rather than 'vertical' patronage networks, and discusses ways in which these poets envisaged themselves as part of a community or communities of writers and/or literati, both actual and ideal, and what this contributed to their imagined identity as writers and the kind of poetry they produced. The Introduction analyses some of the critical terms and frameworks from within which a discussion of literary communities may take place. Chapter One provides a survey of some of the forms, functions and practices of literary communities in Europe from antiquity to the early modern period. The remaining chapters examine English literary communities chronologically, focussing on the above poets as individuals and their identification of particular receptive audiences for their work from within their own social milieu. Chapter Two discusses the extent to which the group of men Paul Strohm identifies as Chaucer's circle may be viewed as a literary community, and the difference such communal contexts make to our reading of Chaucer's poetry. Chapter Three looks at Hoccleve and Lydgate as Chaucer's immediate successors in the fifteenth century. It concludes that a significant proportion of Hoccleve' s poetic output is shaped by his place within the community of the Privy Seal Office and that this community offered him opportunities to write on its behalf. It also considers Lydgate's interaction with a wide range of receptive communities, and examines his success in inspiring idealised authorial communities (Chaucerian and Parnassian) as a governing ideal for his readers, and the authors who followed him. Chapter Four focuses on Skelton's negotiation between different literary communities (academic, courtly and urban) and re-examines his agonistic and antagonistic attitudes to contemporary writers, focussing particularly on The Garlande ofLaurel!. Chapter Five offers a brief analysis of Wyatt and Surrey and the 'new' company of gentlemen poets they represented by way of conclusion, looking particularly at Wyatt's epistolary satires to friends. Although England may not have developed formal literary societies equivalent to those on the continent in the late medieval to early renaissance periods, in the case of each of the poets examined in this study the informal literary communities they did associate with, both actual and imagined, were influential in shaping their poetry and offering them encouragement to write.

This PhD consists of a novel entitled Shooting the Albatross and a thesis entitled 'All This ‘Pother About a Bird': Consciousness and Conscience in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner by S.T.Coleridge. The novel is an interpretation of The Rime of The Ancient Mariner in the context of the poem’s forerunner The Wanderings Of Cain. The thesis is a discussion of my interpretation, in the context of a range of academic readings of the poem. In Part One of my thesis I discuss how the albatross came to be incorporated into the poem, what the albatross has signified to various critics in the last two hundred years, and what range of explanations have been given for the shooting of the bird. I then offer my own examination of the shooting of the albatross, as a conscious act of the diseased will, discussing how and why I have incorporated this interpretation into Part One of my novel. In Part Two of my thesis I discuss Part Two of my novel with reference to Coleridge’s poem as a journey from a state of the ‘impure will,’ or a diseased consciousness and disconnection from God, towards temporary reconnection and increased consciousness through the act of blessing the snakes. Part Three of the novel is discussed in the third part of the thesis, where I examine critical reactions to the message in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner ‘to love all creatures great and small’. I discuss my interpretation of the message in relation to the novel, and in the context of twenty-first century environmental concerns.

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In his 1879 preface, Matthew Arnold made the flamboyant claim that Wordsworth’s best poetry ‘is as inevitable as Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him. He has no style.’ Critics have commonly judged this proclamation either ludicrous or reductive. But this thesis argues that a comment such as this demands a different kind of attention, one which conceives of it not as abstract flummery but as diagnosing rather a fundamental impulse in Wordsworth’s poetry: the desire to absorb nature’s ‘own naked work / Self-wrought, unaided by the human mind’, to defy words, to relinquish ‘style’ itself in favour of a stylelessness that constitutes an ‘unachievable style’. According to the most dominant schools of criticism, Wordsworth’s ‘nature’ is either surmounted by the autonomous ‘Imagination’ (Hartman), elevated into an ahistorical and idealistic ‘Nature’ (McGann), or made a site of ecological worship (Bate). But I seize upon a question that cuts to the heart of what being a ‘Poet of Nature’ means: how can poetry apprehend a world that defies words? This thesis does not offer any easy answer to that question. It shows, rather, how Wordsworth’s poetry obstinately asks that question of itself, doing so with a sense of humility that recalls Thomson’s lines from The Seasons: ‘But who can paint / Like Nature? […] If fancy then / Unequal fails beneath the pleasing task, / Ah, what shall language do?’ My concern is with poetry whose ‘awareness of itself as poetry’ (O’Neill) serves to bring about a heightened appreciation of a world outside of poetry. This idea is pursued through seven chapters. Chapter I shows how Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ put self-consciously on display language’s struggles to represent nature ‘inevitably’. Chapter II aligns issues of poetry and architecture by arguing that Wordsworth’s ‘ventriloquizing’ frees him to embark upon a stylistic journey from artifice towards naturalness. Chapter III considers the significance of mists and winds in 'Michael' as entities set in motion by verbs whose ‘indifference’ yields to what is untrackable in nature. In Chapter IV I show how shadows serve to analogise language’s imperfect relationship with nature in 'The Ruined Cottage'. My next chapter (VI) celebrates the formal artistry of Wordsworth’s 1802 lyrics, albeit an artistry wary of artistry. I delineate how, by enforcing and then unweaving their designs, the lyrics finally avow nature’s freedom. Chapter VI brings into focus what I term Wordsworth’s ‘anti-onomatopoeic’ technique, a technique whose achievement by way of negation epitomises Wordsworth’s modes of tribute to 'an art that nature makes'. My final chapter (VII) reads Wordsworth’s ‘Great Ode’ as a poem that laments, interrogates, and finally learns to live without a ‘forgotten style’ (a sort of pre-poetic absorption) that equates to the ‘unachievable style’.

This thesis proposes that nineteen forties Northern Ireland was not a cultural desert, as has often been assumed. It draws on an extensive range of neglected archival and published sources to argue that a diverse and vibrant community of poets, united by shared political and aesthetic interests, formed in Belfast during the Second World War. As the conflict encroached on individual imaginations and on Northern Ireland, these poets became concerned with establishing an enduring body of imaginative literature which was appropriate to their region. To date, this thesis provides the most comprehensive assessment of poetry written in Northern Ireland during this decade and is, therefore, a significant contribution to assessments of post-partition culture. The thesis follows a chronological trajectory, beginning by tracing the roots of this poetic community to the legacy of the preceding generation of poets. Then, John Hewitt and W.R. Rodgers’s regional and political commitments of the immediate pre-war period are examined. Their shared interest in regional poetics was in creative tension with Louis MacNeice’s cosmopolitan aesthetic. Patrick Maybin’s pacifist protest poetry reveals the group’s anti-establishment bias. A survey of the publishing opportunities available to these poets is followed by an evaluation of Robert Greacen’s anthologies, which were designed to promote a local literary revival. Analysis of poetry by May Morton and Freda Laughton demonstrates the key roles played by women in this milieu. Finally, Roy McFadden’s attempt to connect pacifist, neo-romantic, and regional ideas is discussed, leading to a consideration of his post-war poetry and the links between these writers and the Ulster Renaissance of the nineteen sixties. Close analysis of the work of these poets uncovers a varied and energetic literary milieu which formed the foundations of the subsequent flowering of poetry in Northern Ireland.

This thesis investigates a seventeenth-century manuscript archive, the Conway Papers, in order to explain the relationship between the archive’s owners and John Donne, the foremost manuscript poet of the century. An evaluation of Donne’s legacy as a writer and thinker requires an understanding of both his medium of publication and the collectors and agents who acquired and circulated his work. The Conway Papers were owned by Edward, first Viscount Conway, Secretary of State to James I and Charles I, and Conway’s son. Both men were also significant collectors of printed books. The archive as it survives, mainly in the British Library and National Archives, includes around 300 literary manuscripts ranging from court entertainments to bawdy ballads. This thesis fully evaluates the collection as a whole for the first time, including its complex history. I ask three principal questions: what the Conway Papers are and how they were amassed; how the archive came to contain poetry and drama by Donne, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton and others; and what the significance of this fact is, both in terms of seventeenth-century theories about politics, patronage and society, and modern critical and historical interpretations. These questions cast new light on the early transmission of Donne’s verse, especially his Satires and verse epistles. The Conway Papers emphasise the importance of Donne’s closest friends – such as Sir Henry Goodere, George Gerrard and Rowland Woodward – in the dissemination of his poetry. The manuscripts help define Donne’s earliest readership and establish why his writing was considered valuable cultural capital. Examining the transmission of these manuscripts from the poet to his readers, I present new arguments about Donne’s role in a gift economy, and demonstrate how his writings were exchanged as symbols of intellectual amity between patrons and clients.

The thesis examines the relationship of Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and Arthur Clough with their audiences. The intersection between readers conceived by addresses within poetic texts and historical readers who reviewed and commented on these works is, I argue, fundamental to an understanding of the literary climate of the nineteenth century. Using techniques associated with new formalism, the thesis seeks to expand our understanding of the relationship between aesthetic impulses and historical and social pressures. It examines the poetry’s self-consciousness towards its readers, and uses the responses of historical readers to situate patterns within Victorian poetry in a literary historical context. The introduction provides a background to the literary historical context within which my thesis operates, and sets out the content of each chapter. The first two chapters explore the early poetry of Tennyson and Robert Browning alongside their reviews and contemporary essays on poetic theory, arguing that their singular poetic voices develop through their conception and depiction of a readership. The next two chapters, on Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Browning’s Men and Women, continue to explore an often conflicted relationship between these two poets and their readership. A chapter on Arnold and Clough presents a counterpoint to Tennyson and Browning, focusing on the 1850s. I finish with two chapters on Tennyson’s Maud and Browning’s The Ring and the Book, exploring how Tennyson and Browning re-negotiate relationships with their readers through the dramatic medium. In my discussion of each poet, I examine the mixture of reciprocity and resistance towards their reviewers. The tension between the poets’ sense of responsibility towards their audience and their own aesthetic desires is a source of creativity: even through their resistance to the demands of their audience, their poetry is unavoidably shaped by those readers.