This is a hybrid thesis in two parts, one critical and one creative. The first chapter of the critical part examines selected poems from Clemo’s first five collections, beginning with The Map of Clay (1961), containing three series of poems written over twenty years, followed by Cactus on Carmel (1967), written after he became deafblind. After marriage at fifty-two he wrote The Echoing Tip (1971), Broad Autumn (1975), and A Different Drummer, (1986). The chapter examines the impact of his mother’s religion, his environment and limited education, his attacks of childhood blindness, and the onset of deafness at nineteen on the development of his poetry. It traces his internalised conflicts, and projection of emotions in relation to disability, onto some subjects, and explores the way Clemo’s poetry widens in scope after marriage, moving away from a harsh, narrow religious perspective, to a more tolerant and ecumenical outlook. Chapter Two concentrates on Clemo’s penultimate collection, Approach to Murano (1993). It follows the further development of his thought after he moved to Weymouth in 1984, and visited new places, including Venice. It looks at how he met the challenge of writing descriptive poetry about places never previously seen, and his dependency on his wife to interpret his surroundings. Chapter Three is concerned with his final collection, The Cured Arno, posthumously published in 1995. This includes poems written about his second visit to Italy in 1993. It examines his need to resolve life-long conflicts, and to confirm the validity of his religious and aesthetic ideas. There is an introductory chapter linking the critical section with the collection of poems. Part One of the collection, Stripping the Cadaver, engages with Clemo and with deafblindness. Part Two is a more personal body of work exploring the same themes.

This thesis will explore the historical inheritance and use of adaptation and ekphrasis in the poetry of Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon. Both poets include other texts in their work to perpetuate dialogues on history, aesthetics and poetic form, using images, symbols and formal structures to question what poetry can or should do. Looking at the revisionary power of language this thesis will turn to examples of adaptation and revision in the work of each poet. In the poetry of Mahon, it will show how ekphrasis engages with questions of history and aesthetics through the relationship between visual and verbal forms. The result is a poetry that develops temporal and spatial qualities connected to the poet's sense of self and to his philosophical and intellectual concerns for poetry. In his later collections, ekphrasis contributes to Mahon' s metaphysical landscapes as they resist the symbolic or unified vision of cultural archetypes to focus on the 'harsh realities' of a contemporary world at war. In the poetry of Muldoon, the visual and verbal components of language develop a conscious boundary between the image and the ideological and historical dialogues that surround it. Muldoon develops stories out of objects that establish a dialogue on the formal qualities of language and of the poet's relation to it. His poetry self-consciously engages with the structural and conceptual problems of representation, adapting the ideas of philosophers, writers and poets to develop a poetry that expresses what it cannot state. His resistant form demonstrates a responsibility to both himself and the present time in which he is writing.

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This study explores the concept of the posttext through the work of Ciaran Carson, as well as proposing, by argument and demonstration, methods suited to critical interpretation of posttextual writing. An important element of the dissertation is the definition of the term posttext, which refers to the ways in which we write in the digital age, where texts are networked, layered, and inhabit spaces between genre, and where boundaries between texts are fluid and sometimes difficult to define. The form of the posttext includes elements of mediation, translation, and participation in systems or ecologies. The first part of this study reads Carson's work for these qualities, and posits relationships between Carson's work and contemporary literature and culture more broadly, largely within a traditional critical framework. But criticism, the study argues, must respond to changes in textuality with changes of its own, becoming more dialogic with the (post)text and adopting fluid boundaries. The second part of the study attempts to illustrate how this might be done, by proposing three original critical frameworks. Each of these experiments intends to illuminate Carson's text in a meaningful, if unconventional, way, with emphasis on the integration of diverse methods, including the practical, into the critical project.

My project aims to examine the multilingual intertextuality of Geoffrey Hill's poetry, in order to demonstrate the Europeanness of that body of work. It argues that multilingual intertextual dialogues constitute an extensive European dimension, and are an integral part of Hill's oeuvre. In the first place, these European dialogues are key elements in developing the themes and the forms that define individual poems. At the same time, they are instrumental in furthering what I argue are the core aspects of his poetics: his commitment to creating poetry as a public act with ethical and political value, and the correlative engagement with the position and significance of a subjective 'I' in poetry. Furthermore, this study asserts that the European dimension of Hill's work closely connects it to the rise of internationalism in post-war English poetry, and, therefore, allows a closer understanding of its relationship with the later twentieth century. Drawing on the theories of intertextuality articulated by Bakhtin and Kristeva, my project defines intertextual relations as metaphorical dialogues between different texts, which have both constructive and disruptive effects on the poems and the discourses they are part of. This distinction between constructive and disruptive intertextuality provides the framework for a discussion of the intertextual dialogues in relation to each other as well as a series of individual, separate cases. My study will engage exclusively with metaphorical dialogues involving texts from different European languages and literatures, and therefore with an intertextuality that is specifically multilingual.

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