20th-century and Contemporary Literature

This book studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet‐critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Beginning with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas, the book situates these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, though in another sense drastically other, an otherness bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career‐long contemplation of the ideal of poetic ‘integrity’, and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.

This book conducts readings of four contemporary British poets whose work differently probes the politics of intimate speech and space: Geoffrey Hill, W. S. Graham, Don Paterson, and C. H. Sisson. The book explores the ways in which these poets, and their peers, have used address to perform public, political, and economic (as well as personal) work. In speaking to a changing succession of yous (readers and critics, purchasers and fellow writers, friends and adversaries), contemporary poetry repeatedly probes address’s powerfully public remit. The book opens up new ways into thinking about poetry’s civic clout: in Modernist and contemporary writing; in classical, early modern, and Romantic periods; in aesthetic and commercial spheres. To say you today is to perform historical work, and to rethink national, regional, and personal identities. The book engages an interplay of contemporary, Modernist, Movement, and theoretical voices, and also provides a literary history of address’s public intimacies, reading the contemporary poet as responsive to classical, medieval, early modern, and Romantic traditions. Part I, on W. S. Graham, is attentive to the public nature of the apparently private uses of addresses to known recipients. Part II, on C. H. Sisson, focuses on the use of the lyric you for national and historical negotiations. Part III turns to the late work of Geoffrey Hill, scrutinizing the addresses of the public intellectual, who hails an audience, a body of critics and reviewers, and a book-buying public. A final fourth part brings together these ideas in Don Paterson, whose historically minded addresses repeatedly depict poets provokingly compromised by their manoeuvres in the contemporary poetry industry, and demand you attend to literature’s commercial production, circulation, and reception.

This book, for the first time, considers the full imaginative and moral engagement of one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot, with the Early Modern period of literature in English (1580–1630). This engagement haunted Eliot’s poetry and critical writing across his career, and would have a profound impact on subsequent poetry across the world, as well as upon academic literary criticism and wider cultural perceptions. To this end, the book elucidates and contextualizes several facets of Eliot’s thinking and its impact: through establishment of his original and eclectic understanding of the Early Modern period in relation to the literary and critical source materials available to him; through consideration of uncollected and archival materials, which suggest a need to reassess established readings of the poet’s career; and through attention to Eliot’s resonant formulations about the period in consequent literary, critical, and artistic arenas. To the end of his life, Eliot had to fend off the presumption that he had, in some way, ‘invented’ the Early Modern period for the modern age. Yet the presumption holds some force—it is famously and influentially an implication running through Eliot’s essays on that earlier period, and through his many references to its writings in his poetry, that the Early Modern period formed the most exact historical analogy for the apocalyptic events (and consequent social, cultural, and literary turmoil) of the first half of the twentieth century. ‘T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature’ gives a comprehensive sense of the vital engagement of this self-consciously modern poet with the earlier period he always declared to be his favourite.

This book explores how nine fascinating women inspired some of W.B. Yeats's most memorable poetry. Yeats's beliefs about poetic inspiration were remarkably akin to the Greek notion that a great poet is inspired and possessed by the feminine voices of the Muses, daughters of all powerful Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Influenced by the Pre‐Raphaelite idea of woman as ‘romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her shrine,’ Yeats found his Muses in living women. The book examines the poetry inspired by these women in the context of the two principal Muse traditions, the Gnostic Wisdom tradition and the courtly love tradition of the troubadours, both of which can be understood as variants of the White Goddess theory propounded by Robert Graves. Given Yeats's belief that lyric poetry ‘is no rootless flower, but the speech of a man,’ exploring the relationship between poem and Muse brings new coherence to the poetry, illuminates the process of its creation, and unlocks the ‘second beauty’ to which Yeats referred when he said that ‘works of lyric genius, when the circumstances of their origin is known, gain a second a beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life.’ As life emerges from the literature, the Muses are shown to be vibrant, accomplished personalities who shatter the stereotype of the Muse as a passive construct, and take their proper place as begetters of timeless poetry.