School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemR.S. Thomas: poetic horizons( 2014)This thesis engages with the poetry of R.S. Thomas. Surprisingly enough, although acclaim for Thomas as a major figure on the twentieth century’s literary scene has been growing perceptibly, academic scholarship has not as yet produced a full-scale study devoted specifically to the poetic character of Thomas’s writings. This thesis aims to fill that gap. Instead of mining the poetry for psychological, social, or political insights into Thomas himself, I take the verse itself as the main object of investigation. My concern is with the poetic text as an artefact. The main assumption here is that a literary work conveys its meaning not only via particular words and sentences, governed by the grammar of a given language, but also through additional artistic patterning. Creating a new set of multi-sided relations within the text, this “supercode” leads to semantic enrichment. Accordingly, my goal is to scrutinize a given poem’s artistic organization by analysing its component elements as they come together and function in a whole text. Interpretations of particular poems form the basis for conclusions about Thomas’s poetics more generally. Strategies governing his poetic expression are explored in relation to four types of experience which are prominent in his verse: the experience of faith, of the natural world, of another human being, and of art. In the process, the horizons of Thomas’s poetic style are sketched, encompassing a lyrical verse which is also a verse given over to reflection. In this study, his poetry emerges as personal and based on individual experience; however, that experience is at the same time accorded a more universal dimension. By way of conclusion, the present thesis sets Thomas’s writing within the context of literary tradition, highlighting his connections with Romanticism, seventeenth-century poetry, Modernist verse, and other literary movements. This study highlights the fact that Thomas’s literary models are still poorly understood. Examinations of his poetics are important for a fuller understanding of the poet’s achievement in literary history. In offering the first overview of Thomas’s poetic strategies, this thesis lays the groundwork for such future explorations.
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ItemPrick'd by charm: the pursuit of myth in Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes( 2014)This thesis asserts that poetry offers the most persuasive and complex medium for exercising what Stephen Jaeger has termed “enchantment.” While Jaeger covers a range of artistic practices within the Western canon, this thesis focuses on the power of the poem as charm (latin carmen: song) and of the poet (first emblematised in Orpheus) as a figure that productively confuses the relationship between life, art and death. Developing Agamben’s concept of the co-incidence of “life and its poeticisation,” I argue that there is a paradigmatic remastering and troubling of poetic vocation in the twentieth century, whereby the lyric becomes a specular techne through which to negotiate the constitution of self and state at a time when the grand narratives of subject, nation, and community are quickly eroding. Its transmission subsequently informs a sharing or correspondence of affect and, often, a creative response that is mythically informed. Successfully deploying mythos and charm in their writing and life, this thesis considers Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes as a significant trefoil in twentieth-century English language poetry. All three had untimely deaths, excited a collective homage, and developed cult followings that reverberate today. The earliest, Frank O’Hara, exercised an erotics of influence that both endears and pricks. His compositional method foregrounds a polyvocality of the lyric subject, courting others to feel they could possess or touch O’Hara the poet. I analyse this corporeal hauntologue through his Collected Poems before turning to how he complicated this in a daemonic doubling with Larry Rivers. I then investigate how it extended to a larger social configuration. Learning from O’Hara’s example but differentiating himself from it, Berrigan fashions an alternative figuration as poet: the uncouth, the erroneous, the cowboy, and prankster. Through reading The Sonnets, I demonstrate how the mythology of “Ted Berrigan” is that of the “cosmophage,” or one who ingests everything, while playfully and sacrificially dispersing distinctions between life and literature. I further analyse how Berrigan’s mythos shapes subsequent poetic practice and sharing of charmed relics. Analysing how Berrigan and O’Hara negotiate self-constitution in terms of a broader constitution of the United States of America, I then investigate how John Forbes takes up the self-mythologising techniques of both from a position of “coming after” but also from being “on the edge” culturally and geographically as an Australian poet. Enervating the figure of the troubadour, Forbes offers an ironic, parodic, but moving alternative in his modelling of poet and citizen.