This thesis originates in the lack of studies comparing poetry by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Walter Scott (1771–1832). Living in the north of Britain, the two writers not only knew each other’s works, but also enjoyed a friendship spanning three decades. My study places together texts by the two writers which invite comparison and showcase their attitudes toward issues pertinent to their lives and society. A driving principle behind my thesis is the role nature and the poets’ native regions–the Lake District and the Scottish Borders–play in their poetry. With the exception of ‘Yarrow Revisited’ my project covers poems composed up to 1814. The Introduction compares the education and early writing of the two poets, outlines the thematic and theoretical concerns of the thesis, and gives brief accounts of relevant historical contexts. Four chapters explore Wordsworth’s and Scott’s approaches to the self, its representation and examination, and to society, its problems and inevitable evolution. The first considers Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) and ‘Tintern Abbey,’ and Scott’s Memoir and the epistles to Marmion. It traces the influence the two writers attribute to nature in their own development as revealed in their autobiographical writings. The second chapter tackles Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, reading it as an invitation to society to look on the past for warnings and examples of how to best withstand today’s challenges. The third studies the social themes in Wordsworth’s The Excursion and ‘Michael,’ placing a particular emphasis on the portrayal of Grasmere as an ideal community. The fourth and final chapter brings the two men-of-letters together in a reading of Scott’s role, and that of the ballad tradition, in Wordsworth’s Yarrow poems. It is followed by a short Conclusion.

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This thesis aims to formulate a critical methodology and a poetics that engage with climate change. It critiques the Romantic and social justice premises of literary ecocriticism, arguing that a modernist poetics more capably articulates the complexities exacerbated in anthropogenic climate change. Analysing the form of a range of modernist work, I assess its expression of the human–climate relations at the root of the planet's present state, and trace this work's influence on contemporary climate change poetry. Ecocriticism's topical approaches to nature and the environment have been constitutively unable to grapple with climate change until the discipline's recent synthesis of literary theory, and the emergence of a 'material ecocriticism' informed by developments in environmental sociology, ethics and philosophy. Modernist aesthetics has an array of concerns in common with this critical thinking on climate change, and the reciprocity of the two prompts my rereading here of key modernist texts. T. S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' is seen to reveal civilisation's inability to suppress or surpass its environment; Wallace Stevens's opus exposes the necessarily fictive quality of our relations with nature; Basil Bunting extends Stevens's reconsideration of Romanticism with the diminishment of selfhood and breakdown of order in his poetry; while David Jones's 'The Anathemata' employs the scope of modernist poetics to understand the prehistoric climate change that enabled the emergence of civilisation. By being conscious of modernist traditions, new work – as exemplified here by Jorie Graham's 'Sea Change' – acknowledges the role of human culture in creating the world imaginatively and phenomenally. As contemporary climate change poetry moves away from using culturally familiar elegiac modes, it benefits from a fuller range of resources to articulate the entanglement and hybridity of nature and culture in the twenty-first century.

This thesis examines the relationship between modernist poetry and nature, place and the environment. Challenging reductive notions of modernism as predominantly anthropocentric in character and urban in focus, it argues that within British modernist poetry there is a clear and sustained interest in the natural world and environmental issues. The poets studied in this thesis were writing during a period of significant changes in human/nature relations following the disruptive experience of war and modernity. This thesis considers how each poet responds to these changes and examines the various poetic techniques and approaches employed in order to achieve physical, psychological and artistic reconnection with the non-human world. An ecocritical approach is used to show the importance of nature in the work of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew. This approach focuses on the poetic treatment of nature and involves: examining representations of non-human life in both rural and urban environments, identifying the poetic techniques and approaches used to modernise poetic descriptions of the natural world, and charting the growth of an environmental consciousness in each poet. This thesis reveals the importance of nature, place and the environment to British modernist poetry and in doing so contributes to knowledge of an under-examined aspect of the movement. It shows the ability of ecocriticism to provide valuable insights into areas of literature not immediately associated with environmental issues and produces original readings of each poet’s work.

The purpose of this study is to explore the function and significance of the various representations and manifestations of silence in the poetry of Shelley, Browning, Yeats and Eliot. Attention ranges from specific allusions to the absence of speech and sound, to the role played by punctuation and poetic form. The choice of these poets stems from Shelley’s function as an acknowledged, influential precursor to both Browning and Yeats and, as an un-acknowledged, though arguably no less essential, influence on Eliot. The aim is to establish to what extent poetic interaction with silence alters and shifts in the period under study, and to make coherent the development from Shelley to Eliot in their fascination with silence, and its centrality to poetic expression. The approach primarily involves close textual analysis of the poetry itself, the objective being to access a new angle of consideration by focusing on each poet’s particular relationship with silence, and the extent to which this cumulatively expands into either a coherent philosophy, or a series of recurring themes on the part of the poet. The thesis is also concerned with poetic influence. Theorists who have previously written on silence, such as Steiner and Wagner-Lawlor, are also engaged with, as are critics concerned with the specific poets and epochs addressed (e.g Bloom, Ricks, Keach, O’Neill, and Perry). Chapters look in turn at Shelley’s Mont Blanc, considering the role played by silence in the poem’s consideration of the relationship between imagination and nature (1); at the same poet’s treatment of the relationship between poetry and death (2); at Browning’s relationship with the unrealized objective, especially in relation to love (3); at the role of the silent auditor in Browning’s dramatic monologues (4); at the relationship between silence and the unknown in Yeats’s poetry, and the extent to which he substituted an aesthetic approach for Browning’s preoccupation with justice and pragmatism (5); at silence and the fertile nature of the contradictory in Yeats (6); at modernity and language’s simultaneous pursuit of, and resistance to, silence in the poetry of Eliot (7). Overall, the thesis demonstrates that to discuss the silence of poetry should be as natural, and as necessary, as to discuss the language of it.

The idea that, in John Felsteiner's words, 'poems live on the sensory shock of things', is one which I see as vital to an authentic poetics of nature. This project seeks to explore, partly through research and scholarship but mainly through creative practice, ways of expressing and understanding a poetics of nature that is not just relevant and 'alive' in a twenty-first-century context but which is also rooted in the kind of nature writing that has made my own journey possible. Chapter one considers the relevance of 'nature' in contemporary poetry in light of our current ecological crisis and in particular explores Alice Oswald's unease with the more 'imprisoning' aspects of William Wordsworth's poetry and with nature poetry in general. The second chapter attempts to address the question of how one can engage in language with 'self-organising' nature. It explores the liminal metaphorical spaces and thresholds where language and nature come together and where a strong poetry of wilderness can exist. It takes as its touchstones the work of Nan Shepherd, Gary Snyder and Kathleen Jamie. Chapter three explores notions of habitation and 'thingliness' in the context of the contemporary garden poetry of Oswald and Gillian Clarke. It takes the garden as a 'threshold' and 'habitation' in phenomenological terms: an example of a natural space which encourages the reciprocity and attentiveness important not just for making sense of our relation to wilderness, but also to our relationship with cultivated nature. The final chapter begins with a discussion of language as aperture with particular focus on Oswald's long poem Dart and reflects on some of the practical challenges faced when attempting to write a reciprocal and attentive poetry of nature. Finally, and most importantly, 'Northerlies' is a collection of poems inspired by the Scottish Highlands and draws on, but is not tied exclusively to, the ideas summarised above. The central sequence of poems is based on experiences during my time walking and camping in the Rothiemurchus forest in the heart of the Cairngorms.

This thesis has two intersected lines of enquiry: it examines how Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison respond to the Second World War and the Holocaust in their published writing, and it considers – using each poet’s archived correspondence, notebooks, and drafts – how their creative process and self-representation was informed by their self-awareness of their historical and geographical position. Analysing their published and unpublished work, my study explores how each poet’s (self-asserted) place within the poetic tradition, their creative, national, international, and personal identity, and their understanding of history and poetry was inextricable from their particular position as post-War English poets. Focussing in the first chapter on how Silkin, Hill, and Harrison engage with a tradition of war poetry within their writing, and in the second on the ways that they consider place, Englishness, identity, and belonging, this thesis explores how each writer’s published poetry and unpublished correspondence and drafts continually negotiate with the geographical and historical circumstances that shaped both their survival and the position of their witness. It argues that the result of this sometimes difficult negotiation and self-reflection is a determinately cosmopolitan and outward-facing post-War poetic – a set of individual styles both symptomatic and responsive to the historical events that took place within and beyond their national borders, and to the ethical, aesthetic, and political questions that these events subsequently raised.

This thesis examines the representations of Hinduism in Romantic poetry from 1784 to 1812, using as case studies the poetry of Sir William Jones, William Blake, Robert Southey and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The study argues that Jones’ sympathetic and syncretic representations of Hinduism in his nine ‘Hymns’ to Hindu deities (1784-1789) influenced the use of Hinduism within the works of these later Romantic poets. It is interested in the way in which Blake, Southey, and Shelley use Hinduism, by way of Jones, to represent, react to, and recontextualise geopolitical and religious issues relative to the French Revolution and the expansion of the British Empire, as well as the rise of an evangelical, missionary, and dissenting culture highly influential to the period. By examining these four poets, the study traces the representation of Hinduism in relation to the shifting geopolitical and religious debates occurring throughout the period – and the way in which such representations subsequently contribute to the emergence of what we now call Romantic literature.

This thesis addresses the issue of the changing experience of warfare in the 1630s and 1640s, and how these changes are reflected in the Royalist poetry of the period. It is a central argument that English responses to war in this period must be understood within the context of central Europe's experience of the Thirty Years' War. The introduction examines the most influential sources of ideas about warfare in the early seventeenth century, and considers the importance of translation of classical epic, the proliferation of books of military theory, and the rise of the newsbook in creating an understanding of warfare. The thesis adopts a chronological approach in order to explain how attitudes changed as Britain moved from being a nation at peace to civil war. The first chapter begins with an examination of English responses to the death of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, and contrasts the pacific stance of these responses with the more bellicose writings produced later in the same decade in response to the Bishops' Wars and armed risings on behalf of the king. The second chapter constructs a chronology of the opening year of the English Civil War, based on Cowley's The Civill Warre. and through comparison with the longer prose histories by Clarendon and Thomas May, demonstrates how the attitudes towards the war changed with the flow of events. The third chapter considers how poets wrote about soldiers, and in particular examines the changes in the genre of elegy from the beginning of the First Civil War to the conclusion of the Second Civil War. The study concludes by suggesting how some of the issues raised may inform a reading of canonical text, Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwel's Return From Ireland'.

Early modern machine culture bridges a gap between mechanical and rhetorical forms of wit – between technē and poiēsis or the sciences and the arts – and as such constitutes an important repository for our understanding of the period’s polysemous forms of literary production. This thesis uncovers and investigates some of the as-yet little examined textual lives of an eclectic array of instruments, engines, machines, and mechanisms in the works of Spenser, Jonson, Milton and their contemporaries, exploring the literary, political, and religious implications of mathematical instrument-making, the rise of the new science, and the advent of the mechanist philosophy. Both as metaphors and as rhetorical strategies, machines – and the narratives of cultural authority attaching to them – offer writers and inventors a means not only of intervening in public controversy, but also and especially of creating new and various forms of political agency. Mathematical instruments exert a particularly powerful influence on the political imagination of Tudor England, I argue in my first chapter. Throughout the period, the elaborate iconographies of globe and astrolabe in particular speak to us of the making – and expose the limits – of contemporary political fictions, surviving as extravagant records of personal and national ambition. For Edmund Spenser, contemporary machines and engines hold important potential as metapoetic devices. In The Faerie Queene, a number of ‘subtile engins’ closely allied with interrelated notions of linguistic and spiritual artifice serve to distance the poem’s moral allegory from the mechanisms of its own production, enabling Spenser to reflect upon and mediate the vexed politics of literary invention in post-Reformation England. Ben Jonson, meanwhile, conceives of machines as rhetorical strategies for 3 socio-political commentary. His unique and lasting interest in – and hostility towards – Cornelis Drebbel and the magico-mechanical marvels he introduced at the Jacobean court represents primarily a response to changing attitudes towards cultural authority during the early Stuart reign, precipitated by new technologies and ideas about the nature of invention on the one hand, and by the advent of Galilean astronomy and a number of spectacular visual technologies on the other. Early modern prosthetics and emergent visions of the Cartesian body-machine inaugurate surrogate kinds of textual agency in the political and religious polemics of the Civil War. In Royalist invective, historical, medical and proverbial attitudes towards prosthetic hands in particular serve to restore broken Royalist identities, sustain textual critiques of Parliamentarian rebellion, and ultimately enable the post-Restoration rewriting of the Interregnum as an artificial graft upon the nation’s body politic. At the same time, various existing and emergent notions of the early modern automaton give rise to a polemical counter-narrative in the political and religious prose of John Milton, who seeks to exert authorial control over the monarchy’s self-validating rhetorical mechanisms by implicating the Caroline state in the machine’s ontological determinacy. For him, as for the other writers I study, to uncover the rhetorical potential of machines is to (re)discover the animating power of the written word.