This thesis is the first study of the poetry of William Wordsworth and J.H. Prynne of its length. Its main argument is that Wordsworth, Prynne and their respective historical moments are joined by the conceptual frame of ‘the commons’, their enclosure, and representations of agrarian labour, especially in literary pastoral. While essay-length treatments of Wordsworth and Prynne exist, this thesis extends and broadens these beginnings by reading Wordsworth’s earlier work (c. 1793-1805) as it turns and returns throughout Prynne’s writing life, both in poetry and criticism, from the 1960s until the early years of the twenty-first century. In doing so it makes an intervention into the contested field of ‘the commons’, unearthing a buried history of ongoing accumulation, ‘new’ enclosure and dispossession from the parliamentary enclosures to the globalized present. The methodology of this thesis combines archival research in the fields of literary history and material and local histories of place, worked through theoretical thought and poetic practice localized around the commons, commoning and enclosure. I make extensive archival use of Prynne’s correspondence with the North-American poets Charles Olson and Edward Dorn and of the poetry ‘worksheet’ The English Intelligencer (1966-68), to demonstrate that Wordsworthian concerns with community and cultivation, and dwelling and vagrancy, are central and unacknowledged constituents of Prynne’s poetic working-through of the commons. I also employ archival material on Romantic enclosure and customary culture in Wordsworth’s Lake District, uncovering a textured understanding of ‘the common’ that complicates the idealizations of communitarian life in Wordsworthian pastoral. I demonstrate how Wordsworth’s common speech is taken into contemporary poetry by Prynne and, differently, by Lisa Robertson’s notion of the vernacular. This thesis argues throughout for a common poetics of agrarian labour linking Wordsworth and Prynne, and develops new conceptualizations of the temporality, space and poetics of commoning and enclosure.

This thesis offers a reassessment of the literary relationship and instances of creative collaboration between Percy Bysshe Shelley (PBS) and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (MWS). Rather than focusing on biography, I study the textual connections between the Shelleys’ works - though I have drawn on biographical information to put their collaboration into a historical context. I establish that their written works are profoundly influenced by and constructed through their intellectual exchange. Spoken discussions can never be recovered, but the evidence provided in the Shelleys’ writings, manuscripts, and non-fiction allows informed inferences to be made about how their compositions are interrelated. The study begins with the Shelleys’ meeting and their subsequent elopement in 1814, and continues on to PBS’s death in 1822, and beyond. It includes several case studies examined in detail. I give due attention to the work of existing scholars that have recognised the Shelleys’ collaboration, but emphasise that a comprehensive study of the Shelleys’ texts in light of their status as a literary couple has been lacking. More recent studies in Romanticism have shown a marked interest in the significance of collective creativity: PBS and MWS have the potential to provide one of the most intriguing examples of this paradigm, and critics have called for a ‘major study of this collaboration’ (Charles E. Robinson). I demonstrate MWS’s involvement in the production of PBS’s writings, and I identify shared working spaces. My analysis reveals the reciprocity of a relationship that in popular culture - including much of the discourse surrounding the Frankenstein manuscript - is often misrepresented as that of a patriarchal husband exerting intellectual dominance over his wife.

John Clare has sometime been regarded as a poet that demonstrates the characteristics of naïve poetry according to Schiller’s definition. This had led to ideas that Clare is resistant to philosophical readings and theories. Through careful consideration of the workings of his poetry, this thesis argues the reverse case. It asserts that Clare writes ontological poetry and poetry which ‘thinks.’ This thinking can be illuminated by the existential ontological concepts of Martin Heidegger, together with his later writings which interpret poetry as the language of Being. The chapters are organised to bring out the diverse and interconnected implications of these assertions. After the introduction which, among other things, defines key Heideggerian concepts, such as Dasein, Thrownness, Gelessenheit, The Open and ‘Thinging’, the initial chapter discusses Clare as a poet of Being according to Heidegger’s criteria and definitions. Clare is compared to Hölderlin, Heidegger’s ultimate philosophical poet. The chapter discusses Heidegger’s definition of essential poetry and subsequently emphasises its characteristics and traces them through Clare and Hölderlin. The next two chapters present Clare’s poetry as it conforms to Heidegger’s ideas of ‘pure poetry’ using the The Shepherd’s Calendar (1927) as exemplification. The first of these chapters uses the poems from ‘January’ to ‘June’ to reveal what Heidegger describes as the unconditionedness, or the unconditional and unconditioned intelligibility of Being’s essences. In chapter three the thesis demonstrates how Clare’s poetry, from ‘July’ to ‘December’, corresponds in its methods to the way in which Heidegger takes the noun ‘thing’ and transforms it into a verb. Chapter four addresses two treatments of Being within Clare’s nature poems. The first idea is that of nature as aletheia, a Greek word which Heidegger interprets as the disclosing of ‘truth.’ The second idea is that of Human Being. The ideas are linked in that nature as truth becomes a synonym for Clare’s own being. Chapter fives sees Clare as a poetic thinker, probing the existential significance of life. Chapter six discusses Clare’s writing about Being-in the world and Being-with others. The chapter highlights the irony of Clare as a poet of place who can find no sense of home. Clare uses poetry to alleviate his ontological homelessness. Clare’s later excursions into existential ontology lead to chapter seven and a discussion of the poet’s ontological shift to the Eternal. The final chapter compares Clare and Wordsworth as philosophical poets. An Appendix glosses key terms from Heidegger, in support of and cross-referenced to the expositions offered in the Introduction and elsewhere. Overall, the thesis explores and affirms the value of Clare’s work as an embodiment of ontology as a mode of thinking made possible by poetry.

This thesis considers the nature and significance of perceived blasphemy in the literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and in the 'Romantic' period more widely. The central concern of this study is the consideration of Shelley's perception of the collusion of political and religious tyranny in relation to the increasing conflation of political with religious discourse throughout the Long Eighteenth Century. Alongside this, this inquiry has several further interrelated and overlapping strands. I consider the significance of perceived blasphemy in influencing the print history and 'bibliographical codes' of both Shelley's works and other Romantic period texts. I argue that not only were blasphemous or 'injurious' texts, due to the lack of copyright protection, those most widely read and disseminated - thus substantially shaping the Romantic reading public - they also served to enfranchise a readership. As a result, not only did the 'blasphemous' content or themes of a particular work influence the public perception of the author, the fact that such works were pirated by less 'respectable' publishers alongside pornographic or more ostensibly politically radical texts further inflected an author's reception. This was certainly the case with Shelley, who became most commonly associated with his most ostensibly antireligious poem Queen Mab. This was despite its exclusion from Mary Shelley's Posthumous Poems of Percy 8ysshe Shelley {1824}. Shelley's works are therefore considered in relation to the publishing realities and literary historical context of his age.

Poetic expertise represents a unique area of artistic creativity that can inform our theoretical understanding of the creative process. Studies of poetic expertise also shed new light on the similarities and differences that exist between innovative concept exploration and evaluation processes that arise in artistic pursuits and those that take place in more technology-oriented design practices. Most of the current knowledge in the area of poetry writing derives from autobiographical accounts from expert poets (Curtis, 1996) or from studies of novice poets (Groenendijk et al., 2008). Although such evidence is useful in identifying issues that may be associated with poetic expertise, it nevertheless remains critical to pursue in-depth empirical work focusing on the activities of expert poets themselves. To achieve such an empirical understanding I have conducted a programme of research to examine poetic expertise with a close eye on exploring the parallels between creative processes in the poetry domain and those in the design domain. My research methodology is threefold. First, I conducted interviews with poets to gather some reflective data on their creative processes and professional practice. Second, I conducted a laboratory-based study of expert poets undertaking writing tasks while verbally reporting their thoughts using a 'think aloud' technique. These data replicated and extended the findings from the interview study. Third, I conducted a final interview based study with highly-respected, award-winning UK poets who were considered to be exceptional within their field given their major international standing. The focus of the thesis was on reporting key elements of design thinking that may well be generic aspects of creative endeavour aimed at producing novel and valued outputs, rather than being restricted to core design disciplines. Finally, I developed a model of poetic composition that was informed by a theoretical understanding of design thinking.

The 'chameleon poet' is a phrase immediately associated with Keats. Although he only used it once in a letter written early in his poetic career, the phrase has since gained currency in literary criticism and it now invokes a familiar set of assumptions about Keats and his works. My thesis offers a recontextualized understanding of the idea of the chameleon poet by showing how the phrase, rather than being a whimsical and idiosyncratic idea of Keats's own coinage, was in common currency during the nineteenth century, and how the seemingly unlikely analogy between a poet and a chameleon has several antecedents in earlier works. Not only has the chameleon been compared to poets, playwrights and actors, but the creature has been used in a figurative sense to describe a form of self endowed with . the ability to change. By tracing Itne literary heritage of the chameleon, I show how the model of self Keats embraces for the poet has more negative and troubling associations than Keats' s letter acknowledges. While a chameleon-like model of self offers positive attributes of responsiveness and changeability, more commonly the creature is referred to in a pejorative sense to register anxieties about the instability of identity, lack of integrity, capriciousness and duplicity. Having traced the literary context of the chameleon poet, I outline how Keats' s particular use of the phrase has been interpreted in literary criticism. I identify a tendency in scholarly responses to criticise the chameleon poet for its implicit amorality or apathy, or to explain away the idea on the basis that Keats in his poetry does not exemplify the model he set out for himself. However, as I aim to make 'clear in my discussion of Keats's poetry, by exploring ideas about transformation and disguise, sympathetic responsiveness, hypocrisy and the stability of selfhood, Keats's works reveal him engaging in a self-reflective manner with implications directly relevant to a chameleon-like model of .poetic self. By first identifying how Keats differs from the usually negative' interpretation of chameleon changefulness, I show that while Keats embraces the idea of a chameleon-like poet in his letter, his poetry reveals a more circumspective approach in which he registers the consequences that such a model entails.

This dissertation aims at contributing to the emerging ecocritical scholarship in the field of Irish studies by undertaking an environmental study of the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice. Ecocriticism, the study of literary texts in relation to their interconnectedness with the environment, has often been limited to the analysis of more 'natural' landscapes and the genre of nature writing. This thesis, however, problematises the common association of the term 'environment' as 'nature' and includes a study of wild, semi-urban, and urban landscapes in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of environment and environmental awareness. The study of the nature-culture interactions in Irish literature offers a renegotiation of the complex and intricate relationship between place and identity as well as allowing for a consideration of the current state of ecological crisis in Ireland from a cultural perspective. The first chapter starts with the history of deforestation in Ireland from an ecophilosophical perspective and continues with an analysis of W. B. Yeats's sense of place in relation to natural/supernatural landscapes. The second chapter moves from wilderness to the country, where a romanticised idea of a primeval Irish culture was believed to be existent among the insular communities of rural West. This chapter entails a close reading of Patrick Kavanagh's rural aesthetics in comparison with W. B. Yeats's image of Ireland as a 'countrified' landscape of myth and heroism. The third chapter moves to the city as the less 'natural' but more frequently experienced form of environment. The relative peripheralisation of cities in narratives of Irish identity during the Irish Literary Revival corresponds to the overly 'pastoralised' domain of ecocriticism. I will consider Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice's urban poetics in relation to the modern Irish land/cityscape and the formation of new identity patterns. The philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Tim Ingold on environment and dwelling as well as Waiter Benjamin's work on modernity, flanerie, and metropolis provide the theoretical framework for this study.

The Other City The poems in this collection chart a journey through several cities, some of which may well be imaginary. Touching upon themes of otherness, nationality and the process of growing old, they explore the poetry of the between space and the process of transformation brought about by contact with the creative process itself. Strange Cartographies This accompanying reflective thesis seeks to contextualise the collection and explore its creative genesis. The thesis explores the ways in which the creative process can be mapped with reference to notions of otherness, and asserts that the creative process can be viewed as a foreign space to which the poet is granted access via a process of selfmythologisation. With reference to my own creative process, I will explore how the language of undoing places the poet within the space of the poem, and how the I/you binary is subverted by the presence of this third, more elusive, element.

This essay explores the writing of "Woodblock Sonnets," a poem composed of fifty-six sonnet stanzas. The essay represents a sustained enquiry into this poem's development, from its first inchoate sources and urges, to realization through shape, structure, and artifice. The development of the poem is tracked in five central writing concerns: content, language, form, time, and universality. In each concern, "Woodblock Sonnets" is observed to evolve, over the course of the writing, from more latent and intuitive versions into more manifest and deliberated ones. The poem emerges as creation of inspiration and labor, as both a spontaneously occurring phenomenon and a crafted object. In order to explore the reason of poetry, the accounts of this evolving search for significances are extended into consideration of the advantages which specific poetic practices - image, ekphrasis, rhyme, the sonnet form, and so on - provide a poem. "Woodblock Sonnets" possesses a cross-cultural nature, and the essay explores the poem's unusual fusing of Eastern and Western idioms and sensibilities, as well. "Woodblock Sonnets," the conclusion suggests, takes up the intrinsic interconnectedness of lives - natural and human, past and present, and especially our own lives and those of others, in dimensions that range from the personal to the cultural. The poem demonstrates a primary interest in revealing and interpreting relationships. Poetry, in general, is conceived as an opportunity for fusing the figurative and literal.

This is a new collection of poems that fonns an original contribution to knowledge and 80% of my Ph.D. Themes that have arisen during the writing of this material are: time and place, placement and displacement, inner and outer landscapes and an analysis of my creative process, exploring and questioning my use of free verse, the lyrical 'I' and inherited voices. Both collection and thesis are an exploration of identity and environment through the medium of poetry. Reflective Thesis: The thesis grew out of a dialogue between the reflective process and the poems and comprises research into the above themes. Drawing on reading of the works of literary critics such as David Lodge and Terry Eagleton, but also of work by new geographers, sociologists, linguistic anthropologists and philosophers (for example, Doreen Massey, Stuart Hall, Paul du Gay and Noel G. Charlton), the thesis and poems tightened into an ever closer dialogue. It also explores my own creative process, how I write my poetry and why, as well as placing it in a wider context of poets, past and present. (e.g. William Wordsworth, Federico Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz, Phi lip Levine, Joy Harjo and Louise Erdrich). Underpinning the thesis and collection are questions of identity, culture and place and of how a poetry collection can be a place in which such questions are explored. It was written to illuminate where my poetry comes from, where it is taking me and what can be discovered from the poetry.