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This thesis is the is the first detailed study of the unpublished radio work of the poet, Louis MacNeice, who worked for BBe radio as a scriptwriter and producer from 1941 until his death in 1963. lts overall timeframe is from the early 1930s until the publication of his 1948 collection, Holes in the Sky, but its main focus is on the between his propagandising radio work and his poetry during the war and its aftermath. Historically situating scripts and poems enriches parallel readings of contemporaneous texts producing new interpretations and identifies areas cross-fertilisation between the gemes. Chapters One and Two draw on MacNeice's work of the 1930s to establish a fiitical context for explicating political aspects of his work ofthe 1940s. Tbey involve his sponses to political tension at borne and abroad and to the rise of mass culture, both of which complicated any idealistic notion of the individual and the exercise of free will. Four succeeding chapters uncover the modifications to his political view against the changing backdrop of the events of the war: Chapter Three focuses on 1941, the blitz and the urgent need to encourage America to join the allies; Chapter Four covers 1942, transatlantic convoys, opposed landings and MacNeice's reception of the Beveridge report; Chapter five concentrates on 1943-1944, with Greece as an abiding interest of Mac Neice's; and Chapter Six deals extensively with D-Day. Finally, Chapter Seven analyses his work in the few months of the peace, including his increasing interest in parable as a means of discussing the individual's place in a complex post-war world. Cumulatively, this thesis traces the evolution of Mac Neice's political views, and counters the tendency in influential criticism to posit MacNeice as politically detached. It concludes that MacNeice was a politically engaged 'Writer whose complicated views remained radically socialist throughout these years.

Barry MacSweeney was a prolific poet who embraced many poetic styles and forms. The defining characteristics of his work are its excess (for example, its depiction of extreme emotional states, its use of challenging forms, and the flagrancy with which it appropriates other writers and poems) and its quality of swerving (for example, the way it frustrates the reader's expectations, and its oppositional identification with literary antecedents and schools). I argue that MacSweeney's poetic development constitutes a series of reactions to a moment of trauma that occurred in 1968, when a crisis in his personal life coincided with a disastrous publicity stunt for his first book. I chart MacSweeney's progress from 1968 to 1997 in terms of five stages of trauma adjustment, which account for the stylistic changes his poetry underwent. In Chapter One I consider the ways in which the traumatic episode in 1968 led to MacSweeney embracing the underground poetry scene. In Chapter Two I examine the ways in which his 1970s poetry exhibits denial. In Chapter Three I look at Jury Vet and the other angry, alienated poetry he wrote in the early 1980s. In Chapter Four I look at 1984s Ranter, an example of poetic bargaining in which MacSweeney alludes to mainstream poetry in return for what he hopes will be a wider readership. In Chapter Five I consider Hellhound Memos, the collection that resulted from a period of depression MacSweeney suffered 1985- 1993. In Chapter Six I look at his most successful work, Pearl and The Book of Demons, in which he confronts and accepts the roots of his trauma. Using a combination of close reading, literary theory and biographical research, I explicate and evaluate MacSweeney's development in terms of his literary and cultural contexts. While accounting for the various styles and approaches MacSweeney undertook, this study shows his oeuvre to be remarkably consistent in its structure, imagery and poetic techniques.

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Qualifiée de « confessionnelle », la poésie de Robert Lowell et d’Anne Sexton peut être redéfinie comme testimoniale, en tant que discours sur soi « hanté » par la fiction. C’est ce que permet d’établir, d’une part, l’étude de la relation entre confession littéraire, fiction et poéticité puis, d’autre part, l’analyse du rapport à la vérité fondé sur une motivation autobiographique et sur l’opération poétique comme vérité « s’avérant dans une structure de fiction ». Fictions de soi aspirant à un discours de vérité sur soi, les œuvres poétiques de Lowell et Sexton sont des témoignages tentés par la confession, ainsi que l’illustre la recherche surréaliste de Sexton. Par ailleurs, l’expression de la folie opère un lien avec la confession religieuse, issue d’Augustin, et avec la définition initiale de la poésie confessionnelle par M.L. Rosenthal qui souligne l’importance de la culpabilité dans l’écriture de Lowell. Mais la représentation du déterminisme de la souffrance psychique, à la fois en termes psychanalytiques et en termes religieux, réduit l’accomplissement de la confession à une fiction de soi. Contrairement à une confession aboutie, le témoignage hybride sur soi peut alors s’avérer déstabilisant : échec de la confession, le témoignage prend acte de l’affaiblissement du « je » dont la vulnérabilité semble incarnée par le sort tragique de Sexton. Une analyse des ressorts de cette fragilité du « je » permet de comprendre les conséquences de la confrontation des auteurs avec leurs poèmes testimoniaux et avec les lecteurs. Elle révèle également l’impasse où mène le poème testimonial. / Although the poetical works of Robert Lowell and of Anne Sexton have been called “confessional”, they may rather be defined as testimonial insofar as they are discourse “haunted” by fiction. This will be shown through the analysis of the relation between literary confession, fiction and poeticity. It will also appear in the study of the poems’ relation to truth, both poets’ conceptions of truth relying on autobiographical motivations and on artistic considerations about poetical achievement viewed as truth emerging from “the structure of fiction”. Eventually, the poems of Lowell and Sexton are fictions of the self aiming at speaking the truth and, as such, they might be redefined as testimonies tempted by confession, which is exemplified in Sexton’s surrealistic search. Besides, the poetic representation of madness provides a link with, on the one hand, Augustine’s religious confession and, on the other hand, M.L. Rosenthal’s initial definition emphasizing the importance of guilt in Lowell’s “confessional” writing. But expressing determined psychological suffering in both psychoanalytical and religious terms reduces the accomplishment of confession to mere fiction of the self. Contrary to fully achieved confession, hybrid self-testifying may then prove destabilizing: it bears witness to the failure of confession and therefore to the weakening of the “I”, whose vulnerability Sexton’s tragic fate may embody. Analyzing the poetical workings of the speaker’s fragility allows to understand the consequences of the poets’ confrontation with their testimonial poems and with the reader. It also reveals to what extent testimonial poetical writing is bound to lead to an impasse.

And the Word Was Made Flesh: Anthropomorphism in the poetry of WH Auden examines the reasons for the neglect of Auden’s prolific deployment of anthropomorphism by examining the poetry’s critical reception with a view to understanding what larger purpose, what ‘strategy of discourse’ (Ricoeur 2003, The Rule of Metaphor: 5-9), Auden may have had in mind when he revived a trope traditionally regarded as retrograde. Anxious not to be mistaken for a Modern, yet unable to find a social rhetoric to suit his purposes, Auden elected upon a new style of poetry which questioned the very foundations of language by placing anthropomorphism, the ascription of agency and sentience to voiceless entities, at its centre. The study explores anthropomorphism from historical and theoretical perspectives in an attempt to explain the reasons for its demise, at least, within the academy. This study emphasises the importance Auden placed on the everyday activity of reading, the principal focus for the poet’s ‘cultural theory’ (Boly 1991 and 2004: 138). Auden, 'eager to create a tradition of its own' (Emig 2000: 1), abjuring propaganda, hoped to educate the reader to resist the different ideologies which were vying for ascendency during the 1930s. This study will demonstrate that anthropomorphism, with its capacity to suggest alternative words to ‘re-describe reality’ (Ricoeur 2003: 5), played a pivotal role in Auden’s project for cultural renewal. This study demonstrates that the lasting benefit of Auden’s use of anthropomorphism is to have recognised with prescience what critics now recognise as a 'revolutionary and potently counter-cultural tactic of cultural appropriation' (Paxson 1994: 173), a trope that 'engenders within its semiotic structure a hidden critique of Western culture' (Paxson: 50). Evidence from recent linguistic theory is marshalled in support of the trope’s rehabilitation. This study examines a selection of Auden’s four hundred published poems, and it also offers a provisional taxonomy to initiate the complex process of classifying instances of personification and its co-ordinate tropes in poetry. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Roy Campbell (1901-1957), who ranks among South Africa's leading poets, was also a gifted and skilled translator. Shortly after the Second World War he was commissioned by the Spanish scholar Rafael Martinez Nadal to supply the English translations for a planned edition of the complete works of the Spanish poet and dramatist, Federico Garcia Lorca, to be published by Faber and Faber, London. However, most of these translations remained unpublished until 1985, when the poetry translations (but not the translations of the plays) were included in Volume II of a four-volume edition entitled Campbell: Collected Works, edited by Alexander, Chapman and Leveson, and published in South Africa. In 198617, Eisenberg published a collection of letters from the archives of the Spanish poet and publisher Guillermo de Torre in a Spanish journal, Ana/es de Literatura Espanola, Alicante, which revealed that the politically-motivated intervention in 1946 of Arturo and Ilsa Barea, Republican supporters who were living in exile in London, prevented the publication of Campbell's Lorca translations. These poetry translations are studied here and compared with the work of other translators of Lorca, ranging from Lloyd (1937) to Havard (1990), and including some Afrikaans versions by Uys Krige (1987). For the analysis an eclectic framework is used that incorporates ideas from work on the relevance theory of communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986) as applied to translation theory by Gutt (1990, 1991) and Bell (1991), among others, together with Eco's (1979, 1990) semiotic-interpretive approach. The analysis shows that although Campbell's translating is constrained by its purpose of forming part of a Lorca edition, his versions of Lorca' s poetry are nevertheless predominantly oriented towards the target-language reader. In striving to communicate Lorca's poetry to an English audience, Campbell demonstrates his skill and creativity at all levels of language. Campbell's translations that were published during his lifetime earned him a place among the best poetry translators of this century. The Lorca translations, posthumously added to the corpus of his published work, enhance an already established reputation as a fine translator of poetry. / Classics & Modern European Languages / D. Lit. et Phil. (Spanish)

Roy Campbell (1901-1957), who ranks among South Africa's leading poets, was also a gifted and skilled translator. Shortly after the Second World War he was commissioned by the Spanish scholar Rafael Martinez Nadal to supply the English translations for a planned edition of the complete works of the Spanish poet and dramatist, Federico Garcia Lorca, to be published by Faber and Faber, London. However, most of these translations remained unpublished until 1985, when the poetry translations (but not the translations of the plays) were included in Volume II of a four-volume edition entitled Campbell: Collected Works, edited by Alexander, Chapman and Leveson, and published in South Africa. In 198617, Eisenberg published a collection of letters from the archives of the Spanish poet and publisher Guillermo de Torre in a Spanish journal, Ana/es de Literatura Espanola, Alicante, which revealed that the politically-motivated intervention in 1946 of Arturo and Ilsa Barea, Republican supporters who were living in exile in London, prevented the publication of Campbell's Lorca translations. These poetry translations are studied here and compared with the work of other translators of Lorca, ranging from Lloyd (1937) to Havard (1990), and including some Afrikaans versions by Uys Krige (1987). For the analysis an eclectic framework is used that incorporates ideas from work on the relevance theory of communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986) as applied to translation theory by Gutt (1990, 1991) and Bell (1991), among others, together with Eco's (1979, 1990) semiotic-interpretive approach. The analysis shows that although Campbell's translating is constrained by its purpose of forming part of a Lorca edition, his versions of Lorca' s poetry are nevertheless predominantly oriented towards the target-language reader. In striving to communicate Lorca's poetry to an English audience, Campbell demonstrates his skill and creativity at all levels of language. Campbell's translations that were published during his lifetime earned him a place among the best poetry translators of this century. The Lorca translations, posthumously added to the corpus of his published work, enhance an already established reputation as a fine translator of poetry. / Classics and Modern European Languages / D. Lit. et Phil. (Spanish)