‘The poet’, Eliot wrote, ‘is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist’. This dissertation is an investigation into the ways in which four poets – Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – imagine what it might mean to labour in verse towards the ‘frontiers of consciousness’. This is an old question about the value of poetry, about the kinds of understanding, feeling, and participation that become uniquely available as we read (or write) verse. But it is also a question that becomes peculiarly pressing in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. In my introductory chapter, I sketch out some of the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic contexts in which this question about what poetry might do for us becomes particularly acute: each of these four poets, I suggest, invests in verse as a means of sustaining belief in those things that seem excluded, imperilled, or forfeited by what is felt to be a peculiarly modern or (to use a contested term) ‘secularized’ understanding of the world. To write poetry becomes a labour towards enabling or ratifying otherwise untenable experiences of belief. But while my broader concern is with what is at stake philosophically, theologically, and even aesthetically in this labour towards the frontiers of consciousness, my more particular concern is with the ways in which these poets think in verse about how the poetic organisation of language brings us to momentary consciousness of otherwise unavailable ‘meanings’. For each of these poets, it is as we begin to listen in to the paralinguistic sounds of verse that we become conscious of that which lies beyond the realms of the linguistic imagination. These poets develop figures within their verse in order to theorize the ways in which this peculiarly poetic ‘music’ brings us to consciousness of that which exceeds or transcends the limits of the world in which we think we live. These figures begin as images of the half-seen (glimmering, haunting, dappling, crossing) but become a way of imagining that which we might only half-hear or half-know. Chapter 2 deals with Tennyson’s figure of glimmering light that signals the presence, activity, or territory of the ‘higher poetic imagination’; In Memoriam, I argue, represents the development of this figure into a poetics of the ‘glimpse’, a poetry that repeatedly approaches the horizon of what might be seen or heard. Chapter 3 is concerned with Hardy’s figuring of the ‘hereto’ of verse as a haunted region, his ghostly figures and spectral presences becoming a way of thinking about the strange experiences of listening and encounter that verse affords. Chapter 4 attends to the dappled skins and skies of Hopkins’ verse and the ways in which ‘dapple’ becomes a theoretical framework for thinking about the nature and theological significance of prosodic experience. And Chapter 5 considers the visual and acoustic crossings of Eliot’s verse as a series of attempts to imagine and interrogate the proposition that the poetic organisation of language offers ‘hints and guesses’ of a reality that is both larger and more significant than our own.

Thesis called "The reception of poetry poetics of the year 1950 as an attempt of fulfilling Štoll`s ideologically-aesthetical conception" aims, baring in mind a wider cultural-political context, to trace back the extent of indentification of stalin literal critique with Štoll`s ideologically-aesthetical conception soon after its presentation on the business conference of the Czechoslovak Writers` Union in January 1950. Working with selected poetry poetics of that year it is trying to render the specifics of their reception after this speech had been accepted as a final methodological and value indicator of all contemporary literal-crtitic cretive activity. As an initial document for this thesis is therefore Ladislav Štoll`s book {\clqq}Thirty Years of Fight for the Czech Socialist Poetry`` (1950), the extended printed version of Štoll`s report which even contains parts of Jiří Taufer`s speech from the same conference. In three autonomous parts, for all that linked in a way, the thesis tries concretely bring into effect these requested intentions by focusing on books of poetry {\clqq}Zpěv míru`` by Vítězslav Nezval, {\clqq}Píseň o Viktorce`` by Jaroslav Seifert and {\clqq}Máj země`` by Ivan Skála. Being aware of the necessity of taking into account even the non-literal influences it looks into not only their contemporary reception itself but also aboriginal cultural-political circumstances and the poets` status in the hierarchical mosaic of cultural politics of that time. In the overall framework effort of creating complex view of the questions introduced, the thesis` subchapters offer attempts of own literal analysis of discussed poetry works.

The thesis focuses on texts written and translated by members of Group 42, Jiřina Hauková and Jiří Kolář, specifically. It begins with a description of 1940s' literary context, incorporating poetical principles stated by Jindřich Chalupecký, the leading theorist of the Group 42. The research section of the thesis begins with an analysis of Jiřina Hauková's Přísluní and Cizí pokoj and Jiřího Kolář's Křestný list, Ódy a variace and Limb a jiné básně, poetry collections directly influenced and heading towards the poetic principles of the Group 42. This is followed by an analysis of the translations of poems by Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandburg and T. S. Eliot, the key being a comparison of various published versions. In case of Thomas and Sandburg, these are versions by the same translator published in different selections; in case of Eliot, these are versions by different translators. The thesis is concluded by the answer to the question whether and to what extent Jiřina Hauková and Jiří Kolář fulfil the poetic requirements of the Group 42 and to what extent their own poetics are present in the translations.