published_or_final_version / English Studies and Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Arts

Submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at the University of Zululand, 2001. / The impulse that prompted me to the writing of this thesis is a profound uneasiness about the way in which the Humanities are being undervalued in the eyes of the world today, and nowhere more so, it increasingly seems, than at educational institutions, especially South African universities. As mechanisation and commodification become more and more the order of the day, and as technology replaces human interchange, the passions and sympathies of man, so powerfully expressed in English literature, steadily become of secondary importance. My focus here, then, is on the vital importance of English literature in the affairs of human beings and their daily interactions with the world around them. My attention will be directed mainly towards poetry, for I believe that even amongst those who do read good books, a large proportion eschew poetry and, in a sense, fear it. My experience in teaching at secondary and tertiary levels of education has shown me that this is because students have not been given, or adequately instructed in the use of, the tools with which to understand or to appreciate poetry in more than a very superficial way, and that this lack leads to their not devoting much time or attention to it. Also, because they fail to understand more than simply the contents of a poem (and sometimes not even this), and because they are aware that there is a deeper significance to a good poem than what they perceive, students and other readers feel inadequate, and shy away from poetry altogether. Of course, I do not include amongst these readers those who daily concern themselves with Iitera-ture and who have made it one of the mainsprings of their lives. I am aware, too, that every generalisation has its exceptions and that there are people who at an instinctive, as well as a cognitive level, fully comprehend what the poet is saying.

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Call number: LD2668 .T4 1933 D62

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The thesis examines a series of nineteenth century poets whose poems are concerned with complex relations of looking and perception, and concentrates on Shelley and the poets he influenced: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy. It focusses on poems dealing with the visual arts and aesthetic modes of perception, and concludes with a study of Walter Pater - an unrecognised follower of Shelley - and his notions of artistic character. An emphasis on the way face and bodily form are scrutinised, in poems concerning painting, sculpture and portraiture, leads to the hypothesis that the way the poet pictures essence or character through corporeal form is correlative to the essence or character of his own poetry. The particular spatial relations and visual representations of the poetry provide an index to specific patterns of reading. At the heart of this examination is a Shelleyan conception of the "unsculptured image", the characterising force and pre-given perspective of a poet's poem, which has a primary shaping effect on his language and representations, and continues to exert itself in the poem's reading. As this "image" is an imaginative rather than purely linguistic force, the analyses of selected poems avoid reduction to considerations of language and rhetoric alone, seeking rather to engage with the question of what constitutes a writer's own essence or particularity and what gives a strong poem its compulsive power. The thesis draws on the work of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot to inform its ideas of poetic space and depth, and to produce an understanding of the poetic text very different from that given by a classical reading; and so alter the way one perceives the poem as literary object. In addition to this, certain nineteenth century and earlier aesthetic writings, and the prose works of the poets themselves, establish the critical basis of the arguments advanced. The thesis also endeavours to follow through the arguments of traditional scholarship in order to provide critique on distinctions or departures made. Chapter I examines Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery'; Chapter II deals with portraiture in Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Rossetti's The Portrait'; Chapter III turns to the sculpture of the hermaphrodite in Swinburne's early lyric 'Hermaphroditus'; Chapter IV looks at Thomas Hardy's poems about sketches and shades; Chapter V is an epilogue in which the work of Walter Pater draws together the ideas developed in the rest of the thesis.

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'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.

From the preface: Herrick was a prolific poet, and a remarkably consistent one. Hesperides encompasses a lifelong collection of poems on themes as diverse as serious reflections on life's brevity and the playful examination of the minutely imagined world of the fairies, yet his vision of life remains coherent. My purpose in this study is to try to see ·Herrick's secular work in its unity and as a whole, without claiming to consider every aspect of his secular poetry. (I have not attempted, for example, to consider his classical sources.) As my interest lies mainly in his values and vision, my emphasis is on theme and tone, and the way they indicate his conception of life. For this reason, I only occasionally consider Herrick's poetic techniques, such as his versification and language, and there are no detailed analyses of individual poems which examine them from every angle. In addition, I am almost entirely concerned here with Hesperides , the secular poetry, and not with Herrick's religious verse, which is collected under the title of His Noble Numbers. (Although Herrick calls his book Hesperides: or The Works both Humane and Divine, the arrangement within is clearly a division into Hesperides, the secular poetry, and His Noble Numbers, the religious verse.)

Poetry, like every other form of art, reflects the values of the artist himself as well as the values of the age in which he lives. "I would say that the poet may write about anything provided that the thing matters to him to start with, for then it will bring with it into the poem the intellectual or moral significance which it has for him in life". (Louis MacNeice). This thesis sets out to uncover some of the things which, in the long pageant of English poetry, have "mattered" to poets to such an extent that they have felt compelled to voice their protest against any violation of such things perceived by them in life around them. The basic study has been a search for the different kinds of values and codes of conduct, in social, political and moral spheres, which have been unacceptable to some of the major poets in English, and to examine particularly the manner and the tone of voice in which each one has expressed his disapproval. "Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society." (T.L.Peacock). English poets who have protested against whatever they regarded as worthy of protest have continued up to the maturity of civil society to be rattles (some soft and mellow, others loud and harsh), to awaken both the intellect and the conscience of their readers.