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This thesis argues that Stevie Smith's poetic style can be attributed to her gender. It shows that the dominant status of masculine poetry and poetics, and the prejudice against women poets, affected Smith's poetic style and led to her search for the source ofa feminine poetic voice. The prevailing circumstances when Smith began to publish poetry are examined in order to establish Smith's socially appropriate poetics. The thesis offers detailed textual analyses, informed by feminist theories. Chapters one and two take a socio-historic materialist approach to examine the problems confronting Smith as a woman poet. This includes considering Smith's categorisation as a poet of the suburbs, and the dominance of the Auden group. Chapters three to five look at Smith's use of children's literature and the influence of Blake and Wordsworth. Judith Butler's ideas ofperformativity, and Carolyn Steedman's of interiority, are used to propose that both are relevant to Smith's preoccupation with childhood. Smith's engagement with, and subversion of, the male poetic tradition and the idea of the muse are also considered. The last two chapters on the themes of birth and death draw on the ideas of Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva in order to argue that Smith's longing for death is a wish for rebirth, therefore a return to the maternal semiotic source which facilitates poetry. In this way death does not withhold language, but enables linguistic acquisition. This thesis adds to existing knowledge about Smith, and extends debates surrounding women and poetry. It contributes to feminist analyses of fairy tales, the poetic tradition, and the idea of the muse, and expands psycholinguistic theory to propose the relevance of death as well as infancy, and to suggest that Smith's preoccupations with the source of feminine poetry anticipates some fundamental theories of the 'French' feminists.

In my thesis I consider the relationship between David Jones's poetry and visual art, with reference to his critical writings. My aim is to integrate these in a chronological study, tracing his comparable experiments in word and image, and referring these to a broader contemporary context. I demonstrate that Jones was at the heart of debates in the British art world of the 1920s-1950s, correcting a prevailing belief that he was a solitary figure. Current assessments of Jones's neglect in modern scholarship focus on the problems caused by his literary allusions and self-annotation. I argue that we ought instead to focus on his use of visual allusion and exposition of aesthetic theories through his poetry; his adoption of tropes from Modernist visual art, and his overlaps with broader movements in the art world (for example, neo-romantic concerns in the I 940s which find a central place in Jones's art and literature). I focus primarily on three poems, In Parenthesis (1937), 'The Book of Balaam's Ass' (c. 1938), and The Anathemata (1952). Jones's art and literature articulate the same problematic relationship between modern civilization and past cultures, and the role of the artist within them. Jones's approach is not static, but responsive to changing, contemporary assessments of the artist's status and role. By tracing Jones's complex use of art citation and development of an aesthetic theory through In Parenthesis, I point towards a modern crisis of representation. I argue that Jones's anti- mechanistic approach in 'The Book of Balaam's Ass' forms a carefully constructed response to art critic Herbert Read's acceptance of machine art as a form of abstract art. The last two chapters consider Jones's approach to ancient artefacts in The Anathemata and his use of painted inscriptions to illustrate this work, as part of a successful cultural conservatism.

This thesis draws on a wealth of Parisian dailies and little magazines as well as institutional and literary archives in France, England, and America to reconstruct the intellectual milieu ofT. S. Eliot's student year in France (1910-11). It argues that the French cultural controversies he witnessed that year significantly changed his mind on literary, artistic, spiritual, and political matters. In addition to bringing much needed context to figures already acknowledged as central to Eliot's intellectual development-including Henri Bergson and Charles Maurras-this dissertation offers the first account of his studies at the Sorbonne and of his little-known visit to Henri Matisse's art studio. It makes the case that Eliot left France having reached a remarkable poetic maturity and with many of his critical formulations in place. It contends, moreover, that throughout his life, with each phase of his intellectual development, convictions of literary theorists, philosophers, and cultural commentators from his student-year abroad provided him with significant points of departure. In restoring the framework through which he saw the main figures of his transformative year in France, this dissertation refocuses existing views of Eliot.

It would only be reasonable for Modernists to invest in ideas of losing, leaving or escaping, as they really did with their own countries. The actual experience of emigration reinforced in them the necessity of distance in order to write. T. S. Eliot dwelled on the idea of distance to form his poetic and critical works. Modern poetry was frequently poetry about poetry. As, in psychoanalysis, the child-mother separation antedates speaking and language, so in Modernism did the necessity of distance facilitate self-referentiality in poetics. Language, as a system, employs the idea of separation betv.-een signifier and signified and presupposes the absence of the thing it refers to. Modern poetry speaks of language, which speaks of desire, which signifies loss, which is the subject's lot in postmodern times. The thesis reads Modernism as a major consequence of large-scale homeleaving and as a tradition of exile. Exile was necessitated by actual circumstances and was replayed in the language of poetry, whenever form was exiled from the traditional artistic conventions. If twentieth century art reached self-referentiality, this was not irrelevant of the fact that twentieth century art was formed mainly by dislocated artists. By thematizing the medium, or language, Modernism showed that loss and the necessity of distance is behind artistic creation

This thesis challenges T.S. Eliot’s claim of 1919 that his ‘impersonal’ theory of poetry is based purely on aesthetic criteria, arguing that it has a metaphysical dimension too. The difficulty of locating its philosophical aspect arises in part from Eliot’s indecision with regard to the idea of the Absolute, which he logically rejected but continued to yearn for, both in his early critical writings and especially his poetry. The thesis identifies the sources of Eliot’s theory of impersonality, and his departures from them. Chapter 1 examines aesthetic sources including the Romantics, the Symbolists, Arnold, Pater, Henry James and Ezra Pound. Chapter 2 explores his philosophical sources, focusing on F.H. Bradley’s theory of point of view and Eliot’s relationship with Middleton Murry. Eliot’s interest in the Absolute had positive effects on his poetry, inspiring relentless technical experiment. Halting at the frontier of metaphysics, he nonetheless sought to realise in his poetic practice an ideal he recognised to be unattainable in the realms of theory. Eclectic and innovative, his poetry became a site for his quest for the divine and for an impersonal transcendence of the self. Chapter 3 analyses the dramatic method of <i>Prufrock and Other Observations</i> (1917), focusing on Eliot’s development of dramatic monologue and point of view. Chapter 4 examines the linguistic method of <i>Prufrock </i>and <i>Poems (</i>1920), concentrating on Eliot’s tactical use of pronouns and tenses as manipulators of viewpoint and voice. Chapter 5 explores the Symbolist/Imagist method of ‘Gerontion’ and <i>The Waste Land </i>(1922), highlighting the art of juxtaposition and paradox. The chapters show the evolving relationship between Eliot’s poetry and metaphysics, and his search for a more inclusive and ‘impersonal’ mode of expression.

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