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My thesis examines social observation in the poetry of John Clare, focusing on his work in the years before he was committed to an asylum in 1837. The project illuminates a plurality of perspectives in his poetry that has not been fully recognized in previous critical studies. It resituates the conventional scholarly approach to Clare, which has been preoccupied by an overly oppositional conception of the ‘two cultures’ that he inhabited: the oral and the literary. My thesis positions him as an intellectually curious seeker whose poetry is invigorated by his experience of different value systems in both the country and the city. Each chapter considers how Clare develops different strategies of social observation in the context of different discourses, and how he unsettles the validity of various attitudes to human behaviour. Chapter One, ‘Naturalizing Perspectives’, offers a new approach to Clare’s interest in natural history, by examining its influence on his portrayal of human behaviour, when he adopts the detailed observational habits of the naturalist. Chapter Two, ‘Refined Perspectives’, shows how he negotiates the influences of poets who represented the social structure of rural life, and poets who were interested in rural subjectivity, in order to identify the distinctiveness of his presentation of customary culture in ‘The Village Minstrel’. Chapter Three, ‘Female Perspectives’, considers his interest in his female readership, and examines how his courtship tales – which have generally been neglected by critics – engage with the concerns about conduct and social elevation that occupied the literature aimed for this audience. Chapter Four, ‘National Perspectives’, examines how he responds to the ferment of political ideas in his time through his representations of the nation – another area that has been little served in critical studies. My Conclusion considers Clare’s later poetry in the asylum and his developing self-consciousness as a social observer.

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This thesis explores the network of relationships among health and healing, the natural environment, and poetry during the Romantic period in Britain, and thus offers a new perspective on the Romantic relation to Nature. The context for this study is both the long and varied history that links literature to ideas of health and disease, and the intersection of the late 18th- and early 19th-century discourses of holistic science and healing that emphasize the synergy between self and world and recognize that our living environments can be either hostile or congenial to body and spirit. For many Romantic poets, illness was a painful reality that became vital to their thoughts about poetry and creativity in general. Through Wordsworth's partnership with Coleridge, a vocabulary of health and disease emerges in relation to poetic production and reception that has influenced critics of the period. It constructs the "natural" as a source of health, and establishes Wordsworth and his poetic celebrations of the therapeutic potential of nature as the often problematic legacy both for Coleridge and for second generation poets like Byron and Shelley. While composing Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III, Byron tests Wordsworth's notion that immersion in the natural world can be spiritually therapeutic from the point of view of poetic production. The intensity of Byron's bodily existence, however, prevents him from fully experiencing the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Wordsworthian nature. As his attempts to disengage the spirit from the body by meditating on nature actually have the reverse effect of bringing him more in touch with his physical identity, he must reject Wordsworth's methodology as a possible vehicle for healing. In refiguring Wordsworth's ideas about "taste," Shelley conceives of his poetry as healthy food for thought. His frequently used metaphors of "literature as food" have their source in his attitudes towards intake first exp

This text recontextualizes Wordsworth's writings by showing the ways in which they question the assumptions about "philosophy" and "poetry" that have been constructed within the field of Cartesian dualisms. It employs the ideas of classical rhetoricians, particularly Isocrates and Quintilian, contemporary rhetorical thinkers such as Kenneth Burke, and twentieth-century scientists, particularly Gregory Bateson, David Bohm, and Antonio Damasio, to show that Wordsworth's efforts to establish connections between mind and body, mind and world, and feeling and thinking were coherent and highly relevant rather than simply paradoxical. And it argues that Wordsworth's writings embody his effort to develop a "rhetorical epistemology" or an "epistemic rhetoric" that could counterbalance the dangers of the reductive scientific epistemology of his time.Employing his knowledge of classical rhetoric, particularly Quintilian, and his own sense of the complexities of perception and representation, Wordsworth developed a model of knowing founded on personal experience, representation, relationship, and revision rather than on the establishment of "demonstrable" or "objective" knowledge. His model, like Gregory Bateson's "ecology of mind," was built on an integrated view of mind and world. He believed that perception, feeling, thinking and acting were related in a continuum of mental process (rather than being separate categories), and that individual minds had a mutually-shaping, integrative relationship with what he saw as larger mindlike processes (particularly "Nature").Within this ecology of mind, Wordsworth positioned poetry as a mental process which completed science by providing the means for joining fact and value, "objective knowledge" and personal meaning, reflection and participation. In his construction, poetry was to be an accessible, experience-based discourse of learning and knowing. He aimed to return poetry to its origins, not in "primitive utterance of feelings" but in "poesis" or meaning-making.By countering the assumptions of scientific epistemology, and offering a vital alternative, he sought to reshape and revalue poetry, to broaden his society's narrowing view of knowledge, and to reconstitute moral vision and belief in a society on its way to terminal doubt. His model of knowing is worth considering as we reshape our own views of knowing in the late twentieth century. / Department of English

This thesis is a study of themes and genre in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. I have not attempted to present a survey of the body of critisicm on the cycle, nor have I attempted a comprehensive comparison of the poem with any of Tennyson's sources. The first chapter is based on A. Fowler's study of genres and I follow the implications of his work in my reading of the Idylls. Tennyson blends various generic strands in his cycle, in particular allegory, epic, dramatic monologue and the Alexandrian idyll, to create a complex psychological allegory of epic scope which both draws on traditional genres and extends them. I believe the Idylls should be read as a cycle and in the order in which Tennyson finally presented them; the ordering process is as much part of the creative process as the actual act of composition. I have adopted Priestley's sensible division of the twelve poems which he says "falls naturally into three groups of four, corresponding closely to the three acts of modern drama" (1960, p.252-254)" The second chapter begins the sequential examination of the first four "spring" and "summer" poems beginning with the symbolic The Coming of Arthur. This idyll begins Tennyson's Arthurian mythopoeia, creating a poetic kingdom of the mind. The "act" closes with the Geraint and Enid idylls, all four works in this section ending happily. The third chapter deals with the idylls which plot the corrupting and ever-widening influence of the adulterous relationship of Lancelot and Guinevere, one cause of the destruction of the institution of the Round Table. Other causes of the demise of Arthur's order are the pernicious influences of the evil Vivien and Modred and the meaningless and sterile spirituality that prompts the quest of The Holy Grail. The last four idylls chart the final collapse of Arthur's realm, the utter disillusionment of individual idealism - personified by Pelleas, an anachronistic spring figure who appears in Camelot's bleak and hostile winter - and the complete social decay which is demonstrated by the fiasco of The Last Tournament. The tragic denouement of the cycle, on both individual and social levels, is evident in Guinevere, in which Arthur's wretched and traitorous queen understands Arthur's vision, but too late to save Camelot from ruin. In the final framing idyll, The Passing of Arthur, Tennyson's myth is elevated to the level of universal significance, the Idylls of the King becoming "not the history of one man or one generation but of a whole cycle of generations" (Memoir, ii, p.127).

From Preface: A reader looking to this study for a charting of the diverse religious views held by Tennyson at different periods in his life may be disappointed. My primary concern has been not with religious forms, but with the numinous impulse. However, though I approached the topic with a completely open mind, I find my own Christian convictions have been strengthened through the study of Tennyson's poetry. As the title indicates, I have not attempted to deal with the plays. To explore both the poetry and the plays in a study of this length would have been impossible. I have perhaps been somewhat unorthodox in attempting to combine several disciplines, especially since I cannot claim to be a specialist in the areas concerned. However, I felt it necessary to approach the subject from a number of points of view, and to see to what extent the results could be said to converge on some sort of central "truth". When I have despaired of being able to do justice to a particular aspect within the imposed limits, I have sometimes found comfort in the words of Alan Sinfield (The Language of Tennyson's "In Memoriam", p.211): "We can only endeavour continually to approach a little closer to the central mystery; the ma j or advances will be infrequent, but most attempts should furnish one or two hints which others will develop. "

The aim of this thesis is twofold: To examine Hopkins's writings on poetics and to relate these to modern theories of poetic stylistics; and to show, through an examination of two sets of Hopkins sonnets, the ways in which Hopkins's writings on language and poetics are reflected in his verse (Introductory outline, p. 5)