Mary Price’s Renaissances in John Fuller’s Work

Abstract

This article looks at the various forms of renaissance related to Mary Price, John Fuller’s enigmatic Welsh muse. This ungraspable peasant has indeed haunted the contemporary British writer’s poetry and prose for more than forty years. Not only does he resort to a number of ploys like metonymy or prosopopeia to stage her rebirths, but he also revives classical forms and genres like the pastoral, the elegy or the ekphrasis while challenging their codes. Nevertheless, this gives rise to flawed lacunary portraits giving little information about Mary Price who becomes a spectre of herself. Fuller’s poetics of renaissance is uncannily based on a sense of loss and failure highlighting and strengthening other connections between the living and the dead, men and matter. The more the poet endeavours to capture his muse, the more she escapes him—even when he fictionalises her—, until she imposes herself as his double. Whenever Mary Price is given a voice, the ventriloquism effects are all the more forceful as they evidence an ecopoetic approach to the world replacing man at the heart of natural cycles of death and rebirth characterising his habitat.