Misreading England: Poetry and Nationhood Since the Second World WarRodopi, 2002 - 252 pages In Misreading England: Poetry and Nationhood Since the Second World War, Raphaël Ingelbien examines how issues of nationhood have affected the works and the reception of several English and Irish poets - Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. This study explores the interactions between post-war English poets and the ways in which they transformed or misread earlier poetic visions of England - Romantic, Georgian, Modernist. It also traces often neglected but crucial links between their troubled poetics of Englishness and Seamus Heaney's poetry of Irish nationhood. This radically intertextual approach takes issue with influential accounts of post-war poetry that have drawn on postcolonialism. Instead of being made to reflect contemporary agendas, the poetics of nationhood are here considered in all their textual and ideological complexity, and restored to the historical, intellectual and literary contexts which postcolonial emphases on identity often play down or simplify. Whereas critics in post-devolution Britain increasingly use texts to debunk or promote specific versions of national identity, this study interrogates the very terms in which the debate has been conducted. Its metacritical analyses expose the contradictions of identity politics, and its intertextual readings help re-draw the map of post-war poetry in Britain and Ireland. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Geoffrey Hill | 29 |
Ted Hughes | 73 |
Ted Hughess English Mythologies | 111 |
A Map of Misreadings | 145 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic alliteration alliterative ambiguous analyses Anglo-Saxon Auden Blake Morrison Britain British Poetry Canaan Catholicism Celtic Church Going consonants contemporary contrast critical Crow cultural dialect England English history English landscape English nationhood English poetry Essays exploration feminine Four Quartets Funeral Music Geoffrey Hill gutturals Haffenden Hardy Hawk Heaney's High Windows Hill's poetry Hopkins Hopkins's Hughes and Hill Hughes's Hughes's poetry Hughesian Hull Ibid ideological imagination Imperial Importance of Elsewhere Ireland Irish Larkin's poetry Laureate Less Deceived lines linguistic literary Little Gidding London Lupercal mediaeval Mercian Hymns metaphors Minotaur misreading modern Moortown Moortown Diary myth mythology nature poetry Nordic North Offa organicism pastoral patriotism Paulin Philip Larkin poetic poets political post-war postcolonial Preoccupations primitive Puritan radical reading religious remains Seamus Heaney Second World sense Shakespeare shows sonnet stanza suggests symbolism symbolist T.S. Eliot Ted Hughes Tom Paulin tradition violence vision vowels Whitsun Weddings Winter Pollen Wodwo words writes Yeats