Poetry In Britain Research Articles

‘More than mortal fervour’: Patriotism and Democracy in John Thelwall's Epic The Hope of Albion

John Thelwall published extracts from his epic fragment The Hope of Albion (1801) during an unprecedented revival of epic poetry in Britain. The revival saw writers from across the political spectrum promoting various ideas of national identity and examining Britain's developing role as an imperial power. This article positions Thelwall's fragment alongside poems of his contemporaries, including epics by Joseph Cottle and Henry James Pye (both titled Alfred and published in 1800 and 1801). Examining how Thelwall differently revises tropes from classical and Miltonic poems, I argue that he uses the epic genre to explore how the nation could be transformed as an answer to tyranny and oppression. At the same time, formal tensions in the poem suggest the limitations of the very hope that comprises Thelwall's subject.

Late Holocene Poetics: Genre and Geohistory in Beachy Head

ABSTRACT Might we read the changing work of literary genre as a signature of the Holocene–Anthropocene transition, a symbolic parallel to the lithostratigraphic markers sought by geologists? I argue that the rise and fall of rural descriptive poetry in Britain may index an early but formative phase of this epochal transition. Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head” (1807) is my example of a late Holocene poetics closely attuned to the planetary forces energizing capitalism as a world ecology but largely unable to represent, except in the negative, the emergence of fossil capitalism. Internalized in the form of “Beachy Head,” I suggest, is a pre-thermodynamic conception of the intertwinement of planetary and socio-historical forces, a model of energy exchange that takes as its paradigmatic object not the steam engine but the climate system, and which takes as its source of input not the stock of subterranean coal but the flow of solar radiance. By recovering this late Holocene imaginary, we gain a different vantage on the Anthropocene, as an epoch in which climatological exigency has been not transcended but intensified by the fossil energy regime.

Contemporary Innovative Poetry by Women in the United Kingdom: Revoicing in the Work of Holly Pester, SL Mendoza, and Sophie Robinson

Until recently women’s position on the British innovative poetry scene has been difficult to say the least, often risking being “doubly excluded,” as an anonymous writer is quoted in the introduction to Maggie O’Sullivan’s crucial 1996 anthology Out of Everywhere. Thankfully, women’s experimental writing now seems to be in a healthier state than ever, although the refusal of key figures Geraldine Monk and Maggie O’Sullivan to be included in Carrie Etter’s 2010 anthology: Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, reveals the need to be cautious about the gender label. As Monk and O’Sullivan declared as far back as 1984: ‘the most effective chance any woman has of dismantling the fallacy of male creative supremacy is simply by writing poetry of a kind which is liberating by the breadth of its range and innovation . . . to exploit and realise the full potential and importance of language.’ This article reflects on the risks entailed by identifying poets as ‘women’ poets in its examination of the work of three younger British writers working in the innovative ‘tradition’: Holly Pester, Sophie Robinson and SL Mendoza. The article uses a theoretical approach adapted from David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy’s recent study Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970-2010 (2013), proposing a modification of their key terms ‘voicing and unvoicing’ to ‘revoicing’.

Women's Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970-2010: Body, Time and Locale

Women's Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970-2010: Body, Time and Locale

Towards a Diasporic Poetics: The Case of British Jewish Poetry

This article discusses a corpus of work which constitutes British Jewish poetry and stands as a paradigm of diasporic poetry. It focuses in particular on the work of Isaac Rosenberg and Jon Silkin, but also introduces my anthology of British Jewish poetry, Passionate Renewal: Jewish Poetry in Britain since 1945 (2001). Further, the article theorizes the components of diasporic poetry, comprising in effect a diasporic poetics. It shows how British Jewish diasporic poetry and diasporic poetics together suggest a diasporic poetic praxis. A poem entitled 'Another Expulsion of European Jews', which appeared in my collection Senseless Hours (2009), concludes the article as an example of such synthesizing praxis.

Evoking the Local: Wordsworth, Martineau and Early Victorian Fiction

Scholars have often recognized the 1830s and 1840s as the decades in which Wordsworth first achieved significant commercial success as a poet. Yet, during these same years the market for poetry in Britain was in decline. The present article attends to these two seemingly contradictory developments, arguing that Wordsworth's success in this period can be linked to a broader shift in literary tastes towards fictional works representative of human life in its most particularized and locally distinctive forms. After examining Wordsworth's sales figures and his relationship with the publisher Edward Moxon, the article proceeds to situate Wordsworth within this shift by combining close readings of his pastoral poem 'Michael' (1800) and Harriet Martineau's precedent-setting novel Deerbrook (1839). Long regarded as the first Victorian novel of provincial life and manners, Deerbrook is shown not only to anticipate the kind of locally distinctive qualities that distinguish the works of novelists ranging from the Brontes to Thomas Hardy, but also to embody the kind of literary sensibilities that made contemporary readers receptive to Wordsworth's verse.

In my own shire: region and belonging in British writing, 1840-1970

Introduction The Inheritance: Past and Present Place and People Revealed 1840-1860 Countries of the Mind: From Wessex to the Kailyard Fin de Siecle Renaissance: Inventing Celts, Cities, and Folk Displacement to Documentary Imagining Wales: James Hanley, The Welsh Sonata and the Anglo-Welsh Debate The New Northerners: Studies of Provincial Life Beyond London: Poetry in Britain from the Periphery 1945-1970 Conclusions Bibliography Index

Defining the Century

Keith Tuma, ed, Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 941 pp. Edna Longley, ed, The Bloodaxe Book of Twentieth Century Poetry. Tarset, Northumberland, U.K.: Bloodaxe Books, 2000. 368 pp. The anthology wars are breaking out in Britain again. The U.S. had them in the 1960s; Britain had a mild skirmish in the same decade, and Australia suffered in the 1970s and early 1980s. The first shots in the latest conflict have come from unexpected positions, and the conflict can be expected to widen as more observers try to sum up the century that has recently come to an end. Anthologies are invariably more about exclusion than they are about inclusion. They are often about political positions. Very few are evenhanded and honest enough to include material that is of doubtful value to the anthologist but which is nonetheless representative of significant developments or strands of opinion that require the serious reader's attention. Most postwar British and Irish anthologies have by and large tended to concentrate their surveys upon those strands of development associated with The Movement, The Group, Hughes, Heaney, Hill, the post-- Heaney Northern Irish poets, and all their various descendants. The keynote anthologies of the past half-century (in other words, all of those published during that period by Faber, Oxford, or Penguin, with the sole exception of the Lucie-Smith volume mentioned below), are irritatingly blinkered, are uniformly poor at spotting rising young talent, and are overindulgent towards powerful reputations or FotAs-- Friends of the Anthologist. There have also been some corrective anthologies that have sought to survey alternative traditions and, now that the twentieth century has passed into history, the first steps are being taken to sum up the whole of that period's poetic endeavors. Since the first edition of Edward Lucie-Smith's British Poetry Since 1945 (Penguin, 1970), no editor has tried to survey the whole spectrum of verse in Ireland and the U.K., regardless of which creative wing the poets inhabit, and even that book's 1985 second edition neglected to update the selection of innovative/experimental/avantgarde poets (choose your preferred terminology) on the curious-- and incorrect-grounds that nothing of interest had happened in the intervening fifteen years to necessitate such an update. This selective blindness suffered by the majority of anthologists over the past few decades has not just affected the wild avant-garde; there have been a number of fine poets working in more mainstream styles who have also been ignored by most standard anthologies, for no obvious reason other than that of fashion: Harry Guest, Penelope Shuttle, Jonathan Griffin, F.T. Prince, Michael Hamburger, Karen Gershon, Rosemary Tonks, Francis Berry, David Wevill, to name but a few. As the last century drew to a close, a number of attempts at mapping the poetic territory began to appear. Some of these were no more than the usual periodic updates on contemporary activity, such as we can expect from the major publishers every twenty years or so; thus, Sean O'Brien's rather predictable The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland After 1945 (Picador, 1998) and Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford's startlingly narrow-minded Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (Penguin, 1998). More ambitious, and ranging over the whole century are Edna Longley's The Bloodaxe Book of Twentieth Century Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and Michael Schmidt's The Harvill Book of Twentieth Century Poetry in English (Harvill, 1999). Although the latter volume tries to cover the whole Anglophone universe, it devotes a page-count to the U.K. and Ireland similar to that afforded Professor Longley by Bloodaxe. (Despite the inclusive title of the Longley book, it contains only British and Irish writers). And although the Schmidt volume is as unpredictable as one would expect from the publisher of Carcanet Press (which carries a number of fine non-mainstream poets), its analysis of Britain and Ireland is still rooted in the postwar mainstream consensus. …

Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry

Wordsworth's account in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads of the groundbreaking nature of his rustic poetics has long served as foundational to our understanding of Romanticism. Yet his representation of "the public taste in this country" in 1800 elided the presence of a decades-long tradition of "peasant" and "working-class" poetry in Britain. Figures like Stephen Duck ("The Thresher Poet"), Robert Burns, and Ann Yearsley ("The Bristol Milkwoman") had been the focus of fashionable critical interest because they were seen as embodying the very values of simplicity and rustic authenticity that Wordsworth claimed were absent from the contemporary scene. Though a review of this context exposes Wordsworth to charges of solipsism and historical repression, it also helps us to imagine how the pervasiveness of peasant verse complicated his efforts to establish himself as a legitimate conduit for rusticism and "the real language of men." While Wordsworth did not have to create a taste for rural subjects and pseudo-humble diction, he faced the more difficult task of creating a vital rustic verse that was distinct from peasant poetry. In staging confrontations between educated narrators and uneducated subjects, several poems of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, including "The Thorn" and "Simon Lee," dramatize Wordsworth's historical dilemma as a gentlemanly chronicler of "low and rustic life." Through these experiments in narratorial perspective, class identification, and social sympathy, Wordsworth establishes both the contemporaneity and the innovation of his poetic project.

‘Older Sisters Are Very Sobering Things’: Contemporary Women Poets and the Female Affiliation Complex

If, as history indicates, the directions of poetry are determined by its inheritance — that is, its perception of its past — in looking at literary records such as poems, reviews and other critical texts, it is possible to anticipate how twentieth-century women's poetry will come to be defined and the extent to which it will have value and authority. This in its turn will formulate the nature and status of women's poetry in the twenty-first century. In surveying twentieth-century poetry in Britain, the signs are that just as the label ‘poetess’ was a handicap to the self-perception of a woman at the beginning of this century, so the label ‘woman poet’ will shackle her in the next, largely because her end-of-the-twentieth-century predecessors will have become mythologized as a literary underclass, undermined and overlooked. One reason for the pattern of the last three hundred years, where women publish and then slip from literary histories, is that they do not receive proper attention from male-dominated literary criticism. Although women now seem to be sufficiently published to make segregation unnecessary, there is still a case for positive discrimination or their names will disappear from the records. Positive discrimination in the form of gendered segregation is, however, opposed by poets because of their uneasy relationship with one another. Women poets need an alternative line of development to the ‘masculinity complex’ whereby they unsuccessfully seek recognition within the male traditions, or the ‘female affiliation complex’ which prevents them from identifying themselves with one another. It will be argued that there is an emerging tendency in recent poets to plunder and appropriate the associations of the male tradition and that feminist critics need to theorize this aesthetic and make connections between poets so that they become positive role models for poets of the future.

New British poetries: the scope of the possible

Introduction - The scope of the possible. Part 1 Mapping the field: The British poetry revival, 1960-75, Eric Motram have you been here long? - black poetry in Britain, Fred D'Aguiar mapping the UK little magazine field, Roger Ellis. Part 2 Poetics - politics - procedures: Who am I to speak? - the politics of subjectivity in recent British poetry, Peter Middleton producing the unknown - language and ideology in contemporary poetry, Robert Hampson the paper city - women, writing and experience, Helen Kidd. Part 3 Case studies: the heart of saying - the poetry of Gael Turnbull, David Miller Allen Fisher and content-specific poetry, Peter Barry Lee Harwood and the poetics of the open work, Robert Sheppard.

The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796.

The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796.

The muses of resistance: laboring-class women's poetry in Britain, 1739-1796

Acknowledgements Preface 1. Sensibility and slavery: the discourse of working women's verse 2. The resignation of Mary Collier: some problems in feminist literary history 3. An English Sappho brilliant, young and dead? Mary Leapor laughs at the fathers 4. The complex contradictions of Ann Yearsley: working-class writer, bourgeois subject? 5. Laboring in pastures new: the two Elizabeths 6. Other others: the marginality of cultural difference 7. The 1790s and after: 'Revolutions that as yet have no model'.

Panjabi poetry in Britain

Panjabi poetry in Britain

W. H. Auden in the 1930's: The Problem of Individual Commitment to Political Action

In an age as confusing and volatile as the interwar period, it was perhaps to be expected that the main theme in literature among younger writers and poets particularly would be the social, political, and economic malaise of the time. Indeed, it was the delineation and analysis of this malaise and its relationship to individual life that set the tone of the so-called thirties poetry in Britain and which provided the focal point of W. H. Auden, the most distinguished and versatile English poet of the 1930's. Auden's work in the thirties was characterized by persistent intellectual effort and endurance. For as his contemporary John Lehmann pointed out, W. H. Auden was “the spiritual physician of his generation.” And he was the spiritual physician because more than any other prestigious English litterateur of the interwar years, Auden sought to resolve what seemed to be the most critical problem of the time: how the individual might take effective political action without losing his moral integrity. Or as Auden put the problem as early as 1930: Here am I, Here are you,But what does it meanAnd what are we going to do?I should like, therefore, to examine two of W. H. Auden's works which most directly confront the problem of individual commitment to collective political action: “Spain,” and Journey to a War.The famous poem “Spain,” written in April 1937 and published in May of that year, seemed to announce that at last Auden offered unequivocal endorsement of politicial action. The poem further develops a theme set forth in his celebrated Look Stranger (1935) — the moral responsibility of carefully considered choice and action. The Spanish Civil War, to Auden, is the clear opportunity of an individual to make a decision and to act. A person could either do nothing, which in the face of the Fascist threat is virtually to commit moral suicide, or he could act in unison with other individuals against Fascism. In Auden's view, not only does the Spanish Civil War represent a crisis situation in the history of his generation, it represents also a pivotal point in the intellectual history of the Western World. Accordingly Auden places himself and his generation in a profoundly meaningful historical context. The first stanzas of the poem summarize the ingredients of the Weltanschauung which culminated in twentieth-century liberalism, with its political manifestation in Western parliamentary democracy. The poet also sketches the history of the application of science to conquer the natural world and the gradual victory of scientific method over the ages in which religious faith explained the whole of the world as but a symbol of a transcendental order.