The last few decades have witnessed an immense resurgence in critical and academic interest in the lives and writings of nineteenth-century women poets, many of whom had been forgotten or ignored for the greater part of the twentieth century. From the 1970s onwards there has been a steady increase of articles, monographs and critical editions which have sought to reclaim and reinstate such seminal figures as Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew. Few would now deny that writers such as Barrett Browning and Rossetti are major figures of Victorian poetry, as integral to the canon as Robert Browning, Swinburne or Tennyson, but for nearly a century, despite their formidable reputation in their own time (both women were considered for the position of Poet Laureate), their work was dismissed as minor, inferior to their male peers, and they were allowed to fall from view. Their recovery ran parallel with the rise of feminist studies in the 1970s, which saw the resurrection and reappraisal of these forgotten, suppressed voices as being central to the intellectual cause. One of the more curious, idiosyncratic voices of women's poetry to re-emerge and take centre stage at the close of the nineteenth century and to be rediscovered at the fin de millennium was that of 'Michael Field'.

Philip Larkin used the image of Winston Smith's blank notebook in George Orwell's 1984 to illustrate the excitement experienced by the writer faced with an as yet unwritten text. He explains that: the books the past has given usare printed; they are magnificent, but they are finite. Only the blank book, the manuscript book, may be the book we shall give the future. Its potentialities are endless. This study of 'poetry in process' will compare the 'compositional practices' of three twentieth century poets in order to come closer to understanding the means by which poems are written. One conclusion which is perhaps inevitable from such a comparative study as this is that there is not a single approach to writing a poem. Each poet has idiosyncratic habits.

The proposition that ecological crisis can be ameliorated or even resolved if humans were to 'reconnect to the natural world', has been steadily gaining in popularity since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). In a collection of my own poems, Habitude, I unpack this idea, asking what 'connection to nature' might mean and exploring ways in which ecological poetry can be said to enact - thematically and formally - the kind of connection it seeks to encourage. I discuss the use of the poetic 'I' and its absence, scrupulous observation (of mindscape as much as landscape) and mythopoetic narrative, as poetic 'strategies of connection'. In this way, the poems invite the reader to (re)negotiate an emotional, intellectual and spiritual relationship between the human and nonhuman. Habitude suggests that 'connection to nature' is not 'shining union' (Tim Lilburn) but interrelationship, an interdependent co-existence of diverse and disparate species. With reference to both ecocritical texts, in particular the work of Timothy Morton, and contemporary ecopoetics (John Burnside, Robin Robertson, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, amongst others), I present a deliberately polyphonic thesis in an effort to formally embody the notion of interrelationship. Polyphony is represented not just in the different writing styles (academic/conversational/poetic/personal) and genres (poetry and prose), but also in the presence of three distinct voices: alongside the collection of poetry, I engage in two conversations with fellow ecological poets, Susan Richardson and David Troupes. The conversations focus on ecopoetic practice and 'strategies of connection'. In an essay which offers a personal take on 'ecopoetry' and its role in facilitating interrelationship, I explore the strengths of ecological poetry at this time of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss. I suggest that its value lies not so much in 'saving the earth' (Jonathan Bate), but in offering a covert politics of potential – a space to renegotiate human-nonhuman interrelationship, whilst resting in uncertainty.

This thesis, comparative in method, examines a wide range of the poetry of Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis, and some of their prose writings. As Second World War poets, both sought a poetic register that voiced their testimony to changed realities, both internal and external. Degrees of commonality are traced between Douglas’s dominant impulse for ‘impersonality’ and Lewis’s increasing stylistic objectivity, alongside investigation of their shared underlying sense of loss, and of complicity as agents of war, even when their poetic voice is at its most impersonal. Diverse critical viewpoints are addressed, along with several psychoanalytical theories and relevant biographical commentary. Following an Introduction and Review of the Critical Field, each chapter is structured as a bipartite comparison, focusing first on Douglas, then on Lewis. Chapter 1 investigates Douglas’s impersonality as a controlled, ambivalently detached poetic register which, in its undertow and perceptual shifts, reveals the speaker’s submersed engagement and ethical complicity. Lewis’s poetry is seen to reveal a related impulse for increasingly subordinating the subjective voice in evocations of the painfully harsh realities he encountered. Chapter 2 explores the writers’ dialectical struggles to resolve or extinguish self-division, focusing particularly upon Douglas’s ‘bête noire’ and Lewis’s ‘enmity within’, configurations analysed as paradoxically creative/destructive ingredients of the poetic impulse. Chapter 3 then examines the poets’ epistemological and ontological preoccupations with death, ‘darkness’ and ‘being’, and their relevance to what is here termed ‘the extinction of Self’. Chapter 4 extends this enquiry to examine the poets’ representations of wartime separation and geographical dislocation as manifestations of ‘the exilic self’ and a mutual desire to extinguish internal crises. The conclusion drawn is that their shared, dual axis of poetic engagement and detachment reveals a deeply embedded, common impulse to voice and escape their burdens, both inherently personal, and as complicit agents of war.

My thesis examines Kipling and Yeats within the structure of a ‘comparative biography’. My premise is that reading these two near-exact contemporaries alongside one another yields remarkable discursive echoes. My method consists in identifying these mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric, and charting them against synchronicities in their lives. By reading one author against another in a fashion that might be considered canonically incongruous, I seek to throw light on unacknowledged links running across the cultural nexus of the period. I find these echoes particularly intriguing since Kipling and Yeats were for most of their careers irreconcilable political enemies. Yeats in his political ascendance frequently played to the gallery by denouncing Kipling, while the latter hardly varnished his opinion of Irish poetry and Irish nationalism. However, a cross-reading of the two poets’ bardic ambitions, heroic tropes and interpretations of history reveals that they frequently partake of a common discourse to achieve their opposed political ends. After supplementing this analysis with a biographical perspective, we can perceive that these discourses originate in their late 19th century artistic upbringing, and in the closely linked social circles which they inhabited in fin-de-siècle London. It is their very mutuality during the 1890s which imparts rancour to their twentieth-century attitudes, after the Boer War had ideologically sundered them. Throughout, the thesis conceives them as figures transiting through both space and period. They had to reject but also adapt their Victorian inheritance in order to carry forward the Romantic poetic. Simultaneously, they undertook a physical transition between the colonial or semi-colonial societies of their birth and the metropolitan arena of their celebrity and influence. I see them as hybrid personalities and as romantic intellects, bringing imaginative fire from the colonial margins to satisfy the orientalist curiosity, and to soothe the fin-de-siècle anxieties, of the imperial centre. Although these peregrinations lead to a juggling of identities and poetic masks, in this dynamic lay both their success as authors and their influence as political and prophetic figures.

Part I of the thesis considers the nature and function of metaphor in the articulation of both poetic theme and of poetic self. Using close analysis of texts by Ovid, Shakespeare, George Herbert and a number of contemporary poets, and drawing on material from both published and unpublished interviews which I undertook with Alice Oswald, Glyn Maxwell and Andrew Motion, (the transcripts of which are included in the appendices), this thesis uses metaphor theory, literary criticism and cognitive poetic criticism to argue that the assuaging role of metaphor is fundamental at critical junctures of poetic composition. Chapter One provides a historical survey of metaphor theory. Chapter Two, in order to determine the best methodology for my analysis of the key thesis texts, contrasts three different readings of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Chapter Three suggests the model of Ovidian metamorphosis as a means to examine the assuaging role of metaphor in crisis of consciousness and utterance. The dialectic of sameness and difference, a key property of metaphor, is shown to be intimately connected with the imperative for assuagement in the modern lyric poet. Chapter Four explores a number of ways in which metaphor is deployed by George Herbert to overcome the personal and poetic inhibitions he experiences as a result of his intimate awareness of a listening God. Chapter Five examines Andrew Motion's movement away from the metonymic towards the metaphoric mode in The Customs House. Chapter Six analyses how Alice Oswald, by creating a radically innovative metaphoric mapping between biography and simile pairs assuages the long litany of violent deaths drawn from Homer's Iliad. Chapter Seven examines the way Glyn Maxwell in The Sugar Mile, embraces dramatic analogue and metaphor as a means to address the horror of 9/11. All of the poets examined in the thesis are using metaphor to render the incomprehensible comprehensible. Part II of the thesis consists of my own poems.

The first part of the present study begins with an attempt to investigate the impact of Wordsworth's poetry on his contemporaries, particularly on Keats at the beginning of his poetical career, seen mainly through the critical works of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. Then it proceeds with a survey of the extent to which Wordsworth's poetry may have affected Keats' 1817 Poems. The story of Endymion is found to move in a spiritual framework borrowed from The Excursion. The epistle To J.H. Reynolds is examined as a document indicating the subsequent course of Keats' poetry in favour of the Wordsworthian mode of writing, in spite of a temporary reaction. Then, Wordsworth's influence on Keats' odes is discovered to be both subtle and pervasive; and an interpretation of the Ode on Melancholy in relation to Wordsworth is offered. Finally an attempt is made to estimate how far the two versions of Hyperion epitomize Keats' ambition to go out of the 'Chamber of Maiden-Thought' as he follows in the footsteps of Wordsworth in exploring some dark passages of human nature and in his search for wisdom and for an answer to the question, 'What is poetry?' The second part consists of three chapters. Chapter one is an effort to take leave of the symbolist or Freudian approach to Coleridge of the twentieth century for the moment in order to put him back in his period, to see how his poetry, excelling in its dreamlike quality, may have affected Keats' works. Chapter two is mainly an attempt to demonstrate Keats' increasing awareness of the importance of local truth of colouring as seen in Endymion, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia, Scott being found to be an influence in this aspect. It is also hoped that some light will be shed on Keats' treatment of nature as discussed in relation to that of Scott. In chapter three a re-appraisal of Keats' attitude to Byron is attempted and the extent of Byron's influence on Keats is demonstrated, particularly in Lamia, where Keats tries his hand at providing the public with 'a sensation of some sort' in the style of Don Juan; in The Cap and Bells, which is found to be a truly Byronic imitation; and in The Fall of Hyperion, where the influence of Childe Harold can be discerned.

This thesis investigates—and seeks to address—the excision, marginalization and sequestering of female work within the elegiac tradition. Beginning with an analysis of key texts in elegy scholarship from the last thirty years, and the ways in which they participate in—and perpetuate—this marginalization, the thesis develops a transhistorical sketch of the elegiac tradition. This sketch examines the evolution of elegy as a genre, outlining Western cultural frameworks for understanding mourning, and historical perspectives which consider grief expression as a threat requiring constraint; as well as significant shifts in medical, theological and philosophical conceptions of melancholy—in order to delineate how and why women’s elegiac work has been marginalized within the traditional canon. This includes an in-depth critique and analysis of Freud’s 1917 paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ upon which much of current elegy scholarship depends, approaching both the gendered binary within Freud’s model, and the framework of economics which he uses to illustrate this model. This analysis is then extended through the post-Freudian work of Irigaray and Kristeva, as well as subsequent feminist thinkers, in order to question how we might begin to rectify the marginalization of female work without effacing the contexts within which it has been marginalized. These ideas are then extended and developed through the close reading of contemporary elegies by Susan Howe, Kristin Prevallet, Anne Carson, Maggie O’Sullivan and Claudia Rankine, investigating, among other things, erasure; resistance to closure; error and failure; disruption of reading practices; lyric instability and possibilities of shared grief. The length of the critical section of the thesis and extensive use of footnotes have both been agreed with my supervisory team on account of the scope of the project, and the examples required to demonstrate its argument. The critical section is followed by a collection of poetry made up of four interrelated sequences. These sequences seek to continue the arguments raised in the thesis, and reflect on the research demonstrated therein, specifically interrogating master narratives such as language, myth and history, in order to question notions of lament and pastoral; exploring the limits of the lyric and the possibility of speaking with, rather than speaking for an other; and the poential for harm within processes of textual recovery and memorialization.

Critics have long acknowledged the allusive effect of William Wordsworth’s language in the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This thesis abjures allusive influence to focus on the intertextual presence of Wordsworth in poems by each of these authors. Its methodology hinges on a separation between an intentional authorial allusivity and an involuntary, or unbidden, intertextuality. As a result of this heuristic, the poets are seen to be caught within a Wordsworthian web, which complicates the way in which their poetry functions. The authorial entrapment that results is anxiety-generating, but the thesis does not place this anxiety within a Bloomian paradigm. Its concentration on male, canonical authors is Bloomian, however, as is its acceptance that the meaning of the texts by Tennyson, Browning and Hopkins discussed is a Wordsworthian poem. Chapter One investigates the intertextual strategies of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ (1842), which work to expose the loss attendant upon the Wordsworthian transcendent moment. The poem’s recasting of Arthur Henry Hallam’s own unconscious Wordsworthian allegiance in ‘Timbuctoo’ (1829) leads into the analysis, in Chapter Two, of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) and its implicit reliance on the language of Wordsworthian transcendence as a means by which both to assuage the poet’s grief at the death of Hallam and his dissatisfaction with contemporary scientific and theological discourse. Chapter Three develops the previous chapters’ findings by tracing how Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ (1860) rewrites Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798). Chapter Four examines Wordsworth’s presence in two Browning monologues, ‘Saul’ (1855) and ‘A Death in the Desert’ (1864), demonstrating how the poems find a new use for the language of lyrical interiority. Chapter Five considers Hopkins’ unconscious inscription of Wordsworth’s poetry and the threat it poses to his Incarnationalism and linguistic practice alike. The thesis finds its conclusion in the literary-historical effects that the after-presence of Wordsworth’s language engenders, which become an embodiment of legacy. The depth of each poet’s literary dependency on Wordsworth is also brought into focus, allowing the thesis to claim the earlier poet as a primary influence upon the trinity of later figures it addresses.

Telling the Bees: A Collection of Poems with a Critical Preface is an anthology of fifty poems with an introductory preface. The poems represent an individual journey in writing poetry. The preface examines closely the sustained process of writing the poems. It offers a phenomenological account of an apprenticeship as a developing poet, taking into account the many and varied sources of inspiration, as well as exploring the specific role of memory as a catalyst for the poetic imagination. In the first chapter, divided into three parts, I examine the creative process in relation to the poems in the anthology, with a focus on the development of a poetic voice and personal sources of inspiration. Chapters Two and Three consider in detail the specific influence of Seamus Heaney and Virginia Woolf, both of whom have deepened my understanding of the transformation of everyday experience into poetic language. Their respective critical and autobiographical writing provides an important insight into the mind of the writer, and a further illumination of the creative process. I do not attempt to make explicit links between their works, except loosely in the context of imagist theory and fictionalisation of memory. In the final chapter, I reflect on what I have learnt during my long journey towards becoming a poet, drawing together the common threads that best illustrate the various complexities of writing poetry, including the craftsmanship it requires. The collection of poems is divided into four sections with separate themes that sometimes overlap and engage with each other on different levels. The first section, Observations, centres on Virginia Woolf and traces key events in her life based on her letters and diaries. The second section, Telling the Bees, is an experiment in writing poetry with an autobiographical focus on family relationships, memories, loss and reconciliation. The third section, A Moon Calendar, is a sequence of twelve poems that chart the changing nature of the seasons through the archaic names for each full moon, taken from different cultures. Some of these poems also have an autobiographical reference. The final section, An Indifferent Camera, looks at our transitory relationships with the natural world, and concludes with a short series of poems inspired by photographs, paintings and artefacts.