The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner’, says Socrates in Phaedo, ‘is to practice for dying and death’. From its earliest beginnings, philosophy has sought to illuminate the phenomenon of death, and there is a rich body of writing on the subject. William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley are, I posit, the most death-facing of the Romantics, and that both expressed a desire to write ‘philosophical poetry’ at various stages in their poetic careers sets them somewhat apart from their peers. Fundamentally, this thesis explores Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s rich and varied philosophical thinking on the common subject of death over the period 1798-1821. More theoretically, and advancing the view that reading poetry and philosophy in parallel is of mutually illuminating benefit, it makes new cross-connections between traditionally separate categories (death in poetry, and death in philosophy), and thus attests to an often underappreciated commonality of traditions. In Chapters 1 and 2, on Wordsworth, I trace a death-focused intellectual trajectory from Lyrical Ballads (1798-1800) to The Excursion (1814), and find the progression, from typically ‘earlier’ to ‘later’ thinking, to be both distinct and fairly linear. In Chapters 3 and 4, I read Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: with Notes (1813), Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (1816), and Adonais (1821), and show Shelley’s always-impassioned attitudes towards death to be in a state of marked flux over the course of eight highly productive years. I identify a hitherto overlooked circularity in Shelley’s thinking on death which is not present in Wordsworth’s, and conclude by stressing, in light of my readings of the poems, the particular appropriateness of the poetic form as a means of exploring the phenomenon of death.

This thesis takes a contextual approach to the poetry of John Clare from his earliest attempts at publication in 1817 until his completion of The Midsummer Cushion in 1832. This reading discovers a complex, multi-voiced Clare that is opposed to the essential Clare found in the majority of studies. It widens our knowledge of Clare by investigating texts that are usually considered marginal to the canon. Chapter One examines the early manuscripts, which reveal a complex amalgam of voices. It considers the voice of alienated labour in detail. The study of 'Helpstone' reveals Clare's ability to use this voice in his published texts, and the centrality of loss and destruction to his work. Chapter Two considers the different voices of authorship created as Clare establishes himself as a published author. It examines the carnival scenes of 'The Village Minstrel', demonstrating that the division between author and community is never secure. It notes that the voice of loss in the poem is used to attack enclosure, but is ideologically different from that found in other pastoral texts. Chapter Three discusses the enclosure elegies and The Shepherd's Calendar in the context of Clare's support for open field, re-opening the debate over the historical effects of enclosure and demonstrating that he produces differing voices of protest and loss in different contexts. Chapter Four considers the different voices and versions of pastoral in The Midsummer Cushion, and concludes that control of the production of the volume allows the combination of a playful approach to pastoral with the creation of poems which question the content of the tradition. Conclusion: Clare's mode of access to the literary world is pastoral and these texts return to the destruction of the idyll so that he can voice a sense of loss that he shared with a class.

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