The thesis focuses on the Merseybeat movement and its manifestations in Liverpool in the 19605, with particular emphasis on the work of Adrian Henri. The Merseybeat movement - centred upon Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten - was a site-specific confluence of the alternative avant-garde and the British populist tradition of art, and deserves exploration as both a literary and a cultural phenomenon. The thesis argues that the dismissal of Merseybeat as 'pop poetry' has come from using the wrong critical tools: it is better viewed as a 'total art' movement, encompassing not only poetry but also visual art, music, comedy, happenings, and other forms of artistic expression. The thesis is primarily concerned with the performative and collaborative aspects of Merseybeat. As well as considering this particular movement in terms of oral performance and audience communication, this research also contributes to our understanding of the dissemination of this poetry - particularly how its audiences experienced live poetry alongside other artforms and media. I have used the term 'crossmedia' to refer to the way in which a piece can blend media and to explore how a piece can be performed in different ways to suit different occasions, appropriating elements from various artforms to create a unique performance instance. The thesis has been divided into five chapters in order to consider, first, the movement's origins (in the city of Liverpool) and suggested antecedents (in the American Beat scene), and second, its three most important facets: live readings, performances with music, and visual art practices. The work draws on literary geography, performance studies, and visual art theories, and I have also undertaken much new archival research and interviews with both performers and audience members in order to present a 'thick description' of not only the events but also the context in which they arose.

Seamus Heaney's poetry is characterized by a friction between the poet's ideas and his formal medium. Few studies, however, have interrogated the extent to which much of the meaning of Heaney's poetry resides in the negotiation between form and content. This thesis examines Heaney's preoccupation with traditional metre and verse form, hoping to demonstrate the necessity of formal analysis as a way of accessing meaning in Heaney's poetry. 2 One function of my thesis is to discover what can be gained from an explication of the formal features of Heaney's poetry. However, I have not adopted a rigidly formalist approach. My reading of the form of Heaney's verse recognizes that a poem has its genesis in an historical moment, that it may 'mean' differently at different times and that locating meaning requires an examination of verse form and its function in the process of ideological signification. With these aims in mind, I endeavour to explicate the formal mechanisms that themselves generate meaning while devoting attention to the exchange between the aesthetic object and its ideological bearings. As a result of this dual obligation, I pay particular attention to the interplay between convergent discourses. Poetry in traditional forms adheres to certain codes, and these codes are at once formal--quantifiable, mechanical, technical, mathematical, universally applicable and available-while at the same time they are ideological-historical, confrontational, (un)avoidable, deconstructible, sometimes objectionable. Much of the meaning of Heaney's poetry resides at the intersection of these codes. The text of the thesis comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to an examination of the poetry Heaney composed as a student at Queen's University; chapter 2 examines Heaney's involvement with the Belfast Group; chapter 3 explores Heaney's experimentation with unconventional verse forms; chapter 4 offers an analysis of Heaney's management of a particular fixed form, the sonnet. The thesis concludes with a postscript that looks at negative assessments of Heaney's formalism and ponders the role of traditional verse forms in a postmodernist poetics.

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