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This thesis examines asceticism in T. S. Eliot's poetry by recapitulating his education in mysticism and theology then applying both the texts and doctrines to Eliot's poetry. Harvard's Houghton Library contains a record of approximately thirty books that he read during his graduate study, and a partial list appeared in Lyndall Gordon's 1977 biography T. S. Eliot's Early Years. Yet, these works have received little critical attention, and this is the first study to examine these works significantly. Intense reading of these neglected sources composes a large portion of the research for this thesis and offers original insight into the theme of asceticism. Eliot's poetry frequently displays broad ideals of asceticism—often in the form of discipline and purgation, but the nature of the asceticism is not consistent. In the poems before his conversion, Eliot engages significantly with his education by portraying ascetic failures and their consequences. After Eliot's conversion, the asceticism becomes more orthodox in nature, and the doctrines encountered early in life are openly espoused.

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This thesis considers Eliot's critical writing from the late 1910s till the mid-1930s, in the light of his PhD thesis - Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley - and a range of unpublished material: T S. Eliot's Philosophical Essays and Notes (1913- 4) in the Hayward Bequest (King's College, Cambridge University); T. S. Eliot's Family Papers in the T. S. Eliot Collection at the Houghton Library (Harvard University); and items from the Harvard University Archives at the Pusey Library. 'Me thesis offers a comprehensive view of Eliot's critical development throughout this important period. It starts by considering The Sacred Wood's ambivalence towards the metaphysical philosophy of F. H. Bradley and Eliot's apparent adoption of a scientific method, under the influence of Bertrand Russell. It will be argued that Eliot uses rhetorical strategies which simultaneously subvert the method he is propounding, and which set the tone for an assessment of his criticism throughout the 1920s. His indecision, in this period, about the label 'Metaphysical' for some poets of the seventeenth century, reveals the persistence of the philosophical thought he apparently rejects in 1916, when he chooses not to pursue a career in philosophy in Harvard. This rhetorical tactic achieves its fulfilment in Dante (1929), where Eliot finds a model in the medieval allegorical method and 'philosophical' poetry. Allegory is also examined in connection with the evaluation of Eliot's critical writings themselves to determine, for instance, the figurative dimension of his early scientific vocabulary and uncover metaphysical residues he had explicitly disowned but would later embrace. Finally, it is suggested that, the hermeneutics of allegory are historical and it is used here to test the relationship between Eliot's early and later critical writings, that is the early physics and the later metaphysics.

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This thesis examines the use of collage as a form of autobiography in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Lucky Poet (1943). It traces the development of the use of autobiographical detail and the use of collage in MacDiarmid’s work from To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930) to Lucky Poet. It aims to show that though there is a clear precedent for both these elements in the earliest of MacDiarmid’s work, To Circumjack Cencrastus represented a turning point in MacDiarmid’s progression towards the use of collage as an autobiographical form, and the subsequent development of his interest in autobiography can be traced through the Clann Albann project (1931-1933) and Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934) to Lucky Poet. It examines the difference between autobiographical memory, as developed in the Clann Albann poems, and the representation of immediate experience in poems written while MacDiarmid was on Whalsay, particularly those included in Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934). Its analysis of Lucky Poet, and of the earlier works, focuses on the ideological and artistic use to which MacDiarmid puts autobiography. It includes a brief account of the place of Lucky Poet within recent critical debate regarding the autobiographical genre, but centres on a detailed analysis of MacDiarmid’s reference to Søren Kierkegaard and Lev Shestov. It shows how he developed, through reference to Shestov’s In Job’s Balances and Walter Lowrie’s biography of Kierkegaard, a concept of the suffering and self-sacrifice of the artist, and a related belief in the need to embrace – as an artist – both the danger and the freedom of Shestov’s abyss. It demonstrates how this freedom is realized in the rejection of social conventions and in the publication of unpalatable or provocative material. The thesis concludes by comparing MacDiarmid’s autobiographical writing to that of Edwin Muir and Sir Thomas Urquhart, arguing that Muir rejects the notions of self-sacrifice and rebellion developed by MacDiarmid while Urquhart, despite his distance from MacDiarmid in historical period and social class, ultimately stood for the same principles.

This is a cross-disciplinary investigation that seeks to read some of the representative works of Eliot and of Lawrence as viewed through the critical lens of Soren Kierkegaard's authorship, its strategies and preoccupations. The third arrival in the earlier development of my theoretical project of cross-reading, and not an ascertainably direct influence, Kierkegaard soon became the dominant maieutic presence in my thesis, a fact that is deliberately signalled by the explicit reference to his Life Stages that my title makes. Some of SK's major concerns were indeed shared, idiosyncratically, by the two later writers, each in his distinct biographical, cultural and historical context. There is little undisputed and ascertainable evidence for any conscious direct influence of Kierkegaard on Eliot and still less so of Kierkegaard on Lawrence, but there are thematic, literary and, I will argue, significant diagnostic points of contact and mutual illumination. As Michael Bell did with Lawrence and Heidegger, beginning with Cassirer (Bell 1991: 3-4,6-10), in the same manner I read Kierkegaard as an 'explicatory parallel' to Lawrence and Eliot, as an aid to clarify and to 'bring out the internal complexity and cogency of ... [each man's] ... conception.' I believe this to be an academically valid and illuminative approach to themes of continuing significance. Biographical research and speculation, which continues to be intense in the case of each of these publicly enigmatic men, is largely eschewed in this literary-critical dissertation except where pertinent. However the issue of 'existence-statement', under the mutually modifying criteria of aestheticism and apostolicity, is at one and the same time a decisive and an elusive concern and how it may be both is a peculiarly Kierkegaardian kind of 'truth'. 'Lives' may not therefore be totally excluded from the perimeters of my discussion but must be discerningly considered, where this is germane, and with no rush to judgement. In his remarkable but flawed major study of Kierkegaard (1993), the late Dr. Roger Poole addressed this issue, perhaps too boldly in the context of a purportedly aesthetic reading, but I follow him to the extent that I have included some of my own very different and tentative researches in these areas largely in the Appendices to my main arguments. I define the twinned issues of aestheticism and apostolicity here as, respectively, projected modes of artistic/imaginative pattern making, and the self-perceived status of one commissioned with a message to proclaim. Between these them comes a second-level Kierkegaardian Stage of awareness, the Ethical, that is transitional, explicitly purposeful but still fundamentally truncated and incomplete. These categories, themselves in constant transition, are central to my cross-comparison because in his distinctive way each writer occupied this thematically complex terrain or, put differently, his work can be profitably read through this theoretical 'grid'. Even a superficial consideration of pseudonymous Kierkegaard, 'doctrinal' Lawrence and 'invisible' Eliot indicates this. Similarly Kierkegaard's deliberate employment of the indirect as a mode of communication sheds real and variegated light on the related practices of the twentieth century authors. In Chapter One, Kierkegaardian diagnostic preoccupations and authorial strategies are presented and contextualised, with emphases on the 'Individual', the 'Stages' and Indirection of Discourse. In Chapter Two Lawrence and Eliot are introduced in their wider cultural setting and Chapters Three and Four develop a relevant Kierkegaardian methodology-in-practice for reading some of Eliot's poetry. Chapter Five scrutinises passages from Burnt Norton as a text of progression-through retrieval. Chapter Six addresses the task of refining a method to engage with Lawrence through a Kierkegaardian approach to a quite different generic type of writer. Chapter Seven exploits the Kierkegaardian concepts of Repetition and his three Stages to inform a reading of Lawrence's most original novel, Women in Love. Chapter Eight reads late Lawrence, sometimes against Eliot, with a view to establishing the nature of Lawrence's final attempts to forge a religious discourse, paying attention again to Kierkegaardian insights. I conclude that through ingenious and dynamic strategies, within formidable constraints and limitations Lawrence attains a fitfully remarkable and, at best, strikingly original achievement of modern religious discourse. In Chapter Nine I draw my generalised conclusions about the value of Lawrence's and Eliot's work in the wider area of religion, language and meaning.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) was equally gifted as a poet and a composer. While a very small number of pieces of juvenilia survive, arising from his passion for and immersion in literature, he began to write poetry following his enlistment as a soldier in the First World War. In this thesis I have prepared an edition of all of Gurney’s poetry from its beginnings until the Armistice on 11 November 1918. The edition of over two hundred poems incorporates 59 poems and fragments that have not previously been published. I have sought to present this body of poetry in chronological order, and with extensive textual notes and commentary, to chart the development of poems through all stages of draft to fnal poem. This has been made possible by an unprecedented detailed analysis of all Gurney’s manuscripts and a wholesale reorganisation of that extensive collection.

This thesis muddies the idea of singular being, tracing the footprints of nature writer and poet Edward Thomas, from the beginning of his epically creative final four years, to the site where he died in 1917, during the Battle of Arras. It is presented as a series of engagements with landscape, writing, and poetry; affective mapping, chasing memory-prompts, bookmarks and the shock of the poetic. The journeys seek to return to an ‘open’ idea of the geographical imagination, negating a negative, reductionist form of geography; shifting the focus away from sociologically determined notions of mobility. A resident of England for all his life, but with Welsh heritage, Edward Thomas believed he belonged nowhere. His texts: little time capsules, admixtures of social commentary, environmental action, and personal musings, are archaeological exercises, presenting a complicated picture of loss, demonstrating the value of artistic imagination. Loss - and subsequent estrangement from the world - would become his poetic source. This thesis is about trying to understand the relationship between poetry - indeed all ‘land writing’ - and place. How it affects in-place, what it does in-place? To understand this relationship properly it was necessary to consider why, as humans, we write? To find out what the subjective condition of the poet, or writer, emerges out of - in order to relay the experience of meeting poetry in-place. Edward Thomas began as a nature writer and became a poet after much agonizing. This made him a useful subject (object) (neither). Furthermore he suffered a long period of introspection and had a knowledge of Freud and psychoanalysis - which he underwent in 1912. This was played out in what Edna Longley (2008) terms; ‘poetic psychodrama.’ His poems often feature a split self or switch between patient and analyst (Longley, 2008). The Other Man, is his doppelganger, who he plays himself off against: the poems are, as such, multi-voiced, counterpointed, intersubjective. Deleuze and Guattari wrote in A Thousand Plateaus (1988: 3): ‘since each of us was already several, there was already quite a crowd.’ Edward Thomas knew this all too well. From the beginning of this ambulatory homage my psyche became inextricably linked with his.