Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Biographical poetry'

The axe of the house is a collection of poetry written and collated over three and a half years. The vast majority of the poems are about women: these are women’s voices usually recounting specifically female experiences. Many of these female poems were informed by the confessional mode, as appropriated and transmuted by the contemporary women writers I read and studied. The collection begins with confessions of my own in poems like “Anne Askew’s ashes” and “Jean,” and then moves on to include love poems like “Prayer” and “Gulls,” which are also at least partially autobiographical. Also confessional, but not autobiographical, are the poems at the centre of this collection. These are poems in which women from various different walks of life speak about their inner lives. Some of these women, like the speakers of “Hate mail” and “Silver Ghost,” are my own creation, while others, like “Mrs Rochester,” are borrowed from elsewhere. These poems examine intimate relationships from various angles: marriages, one night stands and vicious rivalries are all explored via a first person narrative. Body image is also a common theme. There are a few poems which are more overtly political, delivering feminist messages about the ways patriarchal society portrays and often ostracises women. “Harpies,” for example, looks at women who are seen to have no sexual worth, while “The picture in your mind when you speak of whores” concerns women whose only perceived worth is sexual, dismissing the various marginalising stereotypes that exist around sex workers. The collection moves farthest away from its examination of the female experience in the poems towards the end. However, these poems form a travelogue in which privilege of various kinds is examined and critiqued. Poems like “Witch” and “Belongings” are still concerned with the lives of women, while “Big heat” uses a female narrator to examine the more recognised privileges of wealth and mobility. These ideas recur in poems like “Barcelona diptych” and “Highway: Skagit County, WA,” but the poems that round off the collection are also attempts to capture a sense of place and space. Throughout this work, there are poems that are particularly interested in liminal space: several of the poems in the collection, including “Poltergeistrix” and “The women” look at the hours and days immediately after death. The space between travel destinations is also liminal, and these final poems attempt to make sense of it – finally succeeding with “Hydra,” which delivers a sense of acceptance and advocates living ‘in the moment’. The critical section, “Entangled in biographical circumstances,” looks afresh at the female confessional poem, most commonly associated with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich. With reference to the works of these literary foremothers, I focus on the ways in which a new generation of women poets has been inspired to adopt this mode. As well as noting the often hostile response of male critics to confessional work by female writers, I examine the very different ways in which Sharon Olds, Sapphire and Liz Lochhead work in the confessional tradition to produce poetry that speaks candidly about the inner lives of women. I also discuss the ways in which the work of these three poets has influenced and shaped my own poetry.

When Charles Brasch died, in 1973, he specified that his private papers - his diaries, letters, and many of his manuscripts - be placed under embargo for thirty years after his death. The external details of his life were, by this time, well-known. He had become a high-profile figure in the field of New Zealand literature, through his critical writings, his role as 'patron', and particularly his twenty- year editorship of the periodical Landfall. Yet his reputation as a poet, although established, was neglected both then and now. His poetry is one of central relevance to a contemporary scene; as clearly as any, it reveals the difficulty of writing for, and about, a society which still laboured under the weight of a 'colonial' stigma. By tracing the movement from his juvenilia to his mature poetry, from his teenage years to adulthood, this study examines the effect of Brasch's personal development on his writing. Partly because of the embargo on his papers, partly because of his secretive nature, his private life has remained a shadow behind poetry which is itself often ambiguous; yet his creative progression was largely determined by the events of this life, both external and internal. Previously, little has been known or written about the decade and a half he spent in Europe. These were crucial years, both in shaping his editorial vision, and in the discovery of his own poetic voice. By means of personal interviews, and recourse to letters in private collections, his story is told: from his arrival in Oxford in 1927, to his final acceptance of New Zealand as his home, in 1945. The first chapter outlines the three years he spent at St John's College, and the general literary context in which he began to write. Chapter Two covers his brief foray into archaeology, and the resultant poetry and unpublished fiction. The importance of German literature - particularly that of Rilke - to his work becomes the focus of Chapter Three. As a direct result of this influence, the second half of the 1930s was dominated by his search for a voice, and a subject, of his own. Chapter Four details this struggle, and the first tentative New Zealand element in his work. A teaching job at Great Missenden - the subject of Chapter Five - temporarily distracted Brasch from developing this theme, yet sources reveal that the country of his birth was never far from his mind. Chapters Six and Seven deal with the effect on his poetry of the growing unease in Europe, the difficult split of allegiances to two hemispheres, and his subsequent commitment to England for the duration of the war. Throughout 1944-5, he became involved in script-writing, and the eighth and final chapter examines the extent of his success in this new genre. His return to New Zealand, late in 1945, marked the apparent beginning of a career which, nonetheless, had its origins in experiences half a world away.

F.W. Harvey’s poetry was more popular during the First World War than many – if not most – of those whom we celebrate as ‘the war poets’ today. He is unique among the poets of that war for his insight into the life of the British POW in Germany, and for the influence of his work in the first of the British trench journals, the 5th Gloucester Gazette. Yet, he has received little national attention since his death in 1957, and scholarly work on his life is lacking, largely owing to a deficit of publicly-available primary sources and original material regarding his life and works. This has resulted in a failure to place him properly within the literary canon of the First World War. The recent discovery of Harvey’s papers allows us to examine his life and his contemporary cultural impact, and more fully to evaluate the value of his work and what it tells us about the First World War experience. Using Harvey’s papers, this biographical study will reconstruct the historical details of his life as they relate to the First World War. Concurrently, it will develop our understanding of his war-related work. This will demonstrate Harvey’s influence during the war, first as a trench poet, then as the poetic voice of the British POW. It will also examine how Harvey’s work continued to be affected by the war in the years after the armistice. The result will be a greater appreciation of the life and importance of a First World War poet whose voice was in danger of being lost to time.

This thesis investigates a seventeenth-century manuscript archive, the Conway Papers, in order to explain the relationship between the archive’s owners and John Donne, the foremost manuscript poet of the century. An evaluation of Donne’s legacy as a writer and thinker requires an understanding of both his medium of publication and the collectors and agents who acquired and circulated his work. The Conway Papers were owned by Edward, first Viscount Conway, Secretary of State to James I and Charles I, and Conway’s son. Both men were also significant collectors of printed books. The archive as it survives, mainly in the British Library and National Archives, includes around 300 literary manuscripts ranging from court entertainments to bawdy ballads. This thesis fully evaluates the collection as a whole for the first time, including its complex history. I ask three principal questions: what the Conway Papers are and how they were amassed; how the archive came to contain poetry and drama by Donne, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton and others; and what the significance of this fact is, both in terms of seventeenth-century theories about politics, patronage and society, and modern critical and historical interpretations. These questions cast new light on the early transmission of Donne’s verse, especially his Satires and verse epistles. The Conway Papers emphasise the importance of Donne’s closest friends – such as Sir Henry Goodere, George Gerrard and Rowland Woodward – in the dissemination of his poetry. The manuscripts help define Donne’s earliest readership and establish why his writing was considered valuable cultural capital. Examining the transmission of these manuscripts from the poet to his readers, I present new arguments about Donne’s role in a gift economy, and demonstrate how his writings were exchanged as symbols of intellectual amity between patrons and clients.

This thesis explores the significance of John Keats's medical Notebook, and his time at Guy's Hospital (October 1815 – March 1817), for the poet's career. As a primary contribution, it offers a new transcription of Keats's medical Notebook (Appendix 1). The transcription reproduces Keats's text and indicates the layout of his notes, but is neither a facsimile, nor a new edition: the visual form of Keats's notes is not reproduced, nor do I offer critical annotations; commentary follows in subsequent chapters. The achievements, limitations and influence of the only edition of Keats's medical Notebook — Maurice Buxton Forman's from 1934 — are the subject of the first chapter, which also considers accounts of Keats's medical career in Keats biography and criticism. Chapter two focuses on the poems Keats wrote while at Guy's to show that the two aspects of his life — medicine and poetry — were mutually influential. Chapter three considers Keats's medical notes in comparison to a fellow-student's, indicating how some characteristics of Keats's note-taking prefigure aspects of his mature poetry. Chapter four finds Endymion suffused with medical knowledge and imagery, and argues that this was a vital aspect of the poem's depiction of passion. Chapter five suggests that the publication of Keats's 1820 volume was greatly influenced by questions of health, medicine, and disease; concerns reflected by the poems in it, which also reveal the extent of Keats's continued awareness of, and interest in, contemporary medical thought. In sum, the thesis argues that the origins of Keats's poetic achievement can be traced in his medical Notebook and ‘hospital' poems, and that the ability to infuse his poetry with medical knowledge was a vital component of Keats's poetic power and achievement.

Le premier conflit mondial qui met fin à l’après-midi doré de l’époque édouardienne signe l’entrée du Royaume-Uni dans le XXe siècle politique et esthétique. La place unique qu’occupe la Grande Guerre dans l’imaginaire collectif britannique participe de l’engouement populaire que suscite encore aujourd’hui la war poetry, devenue un véritable « lieu de mémoire » textuel. Son importance dans le paysage culturel britannique paraît dès lors démesurée par rapport à la place qu’elle occupe dans le canon poétique du XXe siècle. À la fois conservatrice et innovante, respectueuse des formes mais sujette à l’expérimentation, l’œuvre des war poets, souvent confondue avec celle des Georgian poets, se range du côté des modernes plutôt que des modernistes. Poésie de circonstance définie par le moment et le lieu d’écriture, elle est jugée à l’aune de la problématique moderne de l’œuvre « impure », poésie tournée vers la révélation de l’événement plutôt que vers l’acte de création. C’est cette tension entre l’appel du monde et l’appel du texte qui fonde la définition générique, esthétique et éthique de la war poetry. Son intérêt critique réside dans sa double finalité, son hybridité tonale, générique et formelle, sa nature composite et polymorphe qui l’inscrivent de plain-pied dans le registre de la dissonance, propre à la poésie moderne
By putting an end to the golden Edwardian afternoon, the First World War propelled Britain into the political and aesthetic twentieth century. Owing to the unique place occupied by the Great War in the collective British mind, war poetry represents today a highly popular textual “realm of memory”. However, its relevance in Britain’s cultural landscape does not correspond to its status within the poetic canon of the twentieth century. Both conservative and innovative, intent on codified forms yet experimental in nature, often confused with Georgian Poetry, war poetry leans towards the modern rather than the modernist definition of poetry. As a form of occasional writing, determined by the place and time from which it sprung, war poetry is judged according to the modern standards of “impure poetry”, more focused on the revelation of the event than on the act of creation itself. It is the contradictory claims of world and text that found the generic, aesthetic and ethical definition of war poetry. Its critical interest resides in its dual purpose, its tonal, generic and formal hybridity, its complex and changing nature, which firmly inscribe it within the modern poetics

The scope of this dissertation embraces two elements. It sets out to be a chronological account of the life of the poet and also to offer an evaluative, critical account and Judgement of each of his publications. By blending these two elements in each chapter I have tried to demonstrate my introductory view that the poet's autobiography is to be read both in the life story and in the poems. The method of investigation of the life has depended almost entirely on the examination of primary sources. All of Gibson's own papers were destroyed by the time of his death and it seemed as though there was no material from which to build a biography. Gibson, however, was a prolific correspondent and by careful study of his letters, well saved by their recipients, I found the story of his life unfolding. The critical Judgements are largely my own but I investigated some scant secondary material which included chapters in books, review articles, references in literary histories and other people's biographies which helped me to shape my opinions. The ordering of the dissertation is entirely chronological, divided into chapters marking major or significant changes or moments in the poet's life and work. As a larger, simplifying and clarifying form of division I have distinguished three phases that mark off Gibson's periods of Romantic, Realist and finally Dialect and Lyric Poet. I have concluded that Gibson, though now almost entirely neglected, deserves credit as a minor poet, much more than he has so far received: for being the first Edwardian poet who pared his language of all postromantic excess and wrote plainly; for being the instigator of the Realism in poetry which was proclaimed by the Georgian Realistic Revolt and for being the first poet of the Great War who wrote from the viewpoint of the common soldier, in plain language, and so being an important influence on the major war poets Sassoon, Rosenberg and Owen, who read him and who wrote after him. His clear, distinctive voice makes for a poetry of intrinsic merit and broad appeal.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-257). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This thesis is a critical biography of Robert Tannahill (1774-1810). As a work of recovery its aim is to lay out the details of the life and in so doing to make the case for Tannahill as a distinctive figure in Scottish literary history. Part One covers the main events in Tannahill’s life, and analyses his poetry, songs and play, The Soldier’s Return, drawing heavily on his extant correspondence throughout. Part Two of the thesis gives all of Tannahill’s extant correspondence. The received critical opinion of Tannahill in the nineteenth century was that his true talent lay in the writing of Scottish pastoral songs. In accordance with this perception the other aspects of his work have, generally, been treated as marginal by previous critics. This thesis aims to broaden the critical understanding of Tannahill as a writer working in the first decade of the 1800s by taking into consideration his social and political milieu, the writers he was influenced by and his response to particular events in his life and in the world. I argue that Tannahill was not party political, but had sympathy for Whig causes such as abolition of the death penalty and of slavery. He also opposed cock-fighting and animal cruelty. Key to understanding much of Tannahill’s output was his attitude to the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793-1815). Fear of French invasion of the British Isles was something that exercised Tannahill a good deal. His attitude to war was that it was pointless human folly, but his dislike of all imperialism, including British and French, makes his position complex and the complexity of his response to war is a recurring theme throughout. Tannahill’s upbringing in Paisley and his position as an artisan weaver had a profound effect on his writing, as did the influence of Robert Burns. Tannahill was fiercely independent, despised literary patronage and inherited wealth and power. There is an attempt to explain and understand how and why Tannahill came to hold these points of view and to point out where they find expression in his work. Chapter 1 looks at Tannahill’s upbringing and life in Paisley. Chapter 2 deals with the ‘Critical Reception’ of his work from 1815 to the present. Chapter 3 looks in depth at his attitudes to war and the threat of French invasion. Chapter 4 concentrates on Tannahill’s play The Soldier’s Return and considers how it fits into the pastoral tradition. Chapter 5 looks at the content and some formal aspects of his poetry and Chapter 6 deals with the range of his lyrics and songs. Part Two is a project of retrieval, sub-titled The Letters of Robert Tannahill, it presents in chronological order eighty-two letters, the vast majority of which were written by Tannahill to friends and acquaintances between the years 1802 and 1810. It has been compiled from holograph manuscript sources found in the University of Glasgow Library, the National Library of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Library and Paisley Central Library. In addition, letters previously published in the David Semple edition of Tannhill’s Poems, Songs and Correspondence (1876) have been inserted to give the most comprehensive collection of Tannahill correspondence to date. These letters give a fascinating insight into Tannahill’s life and work. The guiding editorial principle for transcription from holograph has been: to provide as accurately as possible a text free from editorial interference.

My thesis explores the potential and the peril of Romantic literature's increasingly complex forms through a close comparative study of the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. These writers exemplify the Romantic predicament of how to make vision manifest – how to communicate one's imaginative and intellectual expansiveness without diminishing it. They sought different strategies for increasing the capacity of literary form, ostensibly in the hope of communicating more: clarifying meaning, increasing accessibility and intensifying original experience. But textual expansion – materially, stylistically and intellectually – often threatens more opportunities for confused and partial meanings to proliferate, overwhelming the reader by dividing texts and undermining attempts at coherent thought. Expansion thus becomes excess, with all its worrying associations of superfluity. To further complicate matters, Burke's influential tenet of the Sublime makes a virtue out of excess and obscurity, raising the problematic spectre of deliberately confused/confusing texts that embody an aesthetic of incomprehension. I explore these paradoxes through four types of 'textual excess' demonstrated by the writers under discussion: firstly, the tension between poetry and prose adjuncts, such as prefaces and notes, in Wordsworth and Coleridge; secondly, De Quincey's indulgent verbosity and struggle to control the freeing shapelessness of prose; thirdly, Wordsworth's and De Quincey's parallel experiences of revision as both uncontrollably diffusive and statically concentrated; and lastly, Blake's more deliberate, systematic attempt to enact a literary Sublime in which the reader is forced out of passivity by the competing demands of verbal and visual media. All are motivated and thwarted in varying degrees by their anxious preoccupation with saying "Enough", and the difficulty of determining when this becomes “Too much”. These authorial dilemmas also incorporate larger concerns with man's (over)ambition at a time of rapid and unprecedented economic, social and intellectual acceleration from the Enlightenment to industrialism. The fear that the concept and process of 'progress', or 'improvement', marks deficiency rather than fulfilment haunts Romantic writers.

Ma thèse traite d’un aspect de la critique sartrienne : la critique poétique. Elle se présente sous forme de triptyque. En effet, chaque partie traite de la figure d’un poète. Dans les deux premières parties de ma thèse, j’aborde deux poètes du XIXème siècle : Baudelaire et Mallarmé. Les deux livres qui m’ont servi de support pour étudier cette critique poétique sont le Baudelaire de Sartre et Mallarmé, La lucidité et sa face d’ombre. Ces deux essais ont radicalement bouleversé la manière avec laquelle on appréhendait jusqu’à là la figure de ces deux poètes. Si le XIXème siècle en a fait des monstres sacrés qui ont apporté la nouveauté dans le genre poétique, Sartre quant à lui, sape certaines idées reçues. Baudelaire est le premier à qui il s’attaque en dénonçant son désengagement. Il critique son dandysme outrancier qui en a fait selon lui un poète stérile. Cet essai est aussi l’occasion pour Sartre d’exposer sa théorie de l’existentialisme et de montrer que l’Engagement et la Littérature vont de pair et illustrent la liberté de l’Homme. Dans la seconde partie qui traite de Mallarmé, la lucidité et sa face d’ombre, la critique poétique se mêle à la critique historique. Sartre commence par brosser un tableau de la société du XIXème siècle en mettant l’accent sur le désœuvrement de ce siècle. Mallarmé semble comme Baudelaire illustrer une certaine forme de désengagement. Pourtant Sartre semble omettre un élément essentiel, c’est que ces poètes de la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle font partie de ce que l’on appelle « Les Héritiers de l’athéisme ». Mallarmé dévoile l’absence d’un Dieu en caressant l’idée du suicide. Celui-ci apparaît dans ses poèmes puisque le poète expérimente sa propre mort comme pour réaffirmer l’absence de Dieu. En conséquence, il existe une liberté inhérente à ces deux poètes que sont Baudelaire et Mallarmé, mais cette liberté est bien différente de la liberté sartrienne qui se conçoit comme un absolu. Enfin dans la troisième partie de la thèse, c’est Genet qui est à l’honneur. Sartre manifeste là toute son admiration pour ce génie créateur qui a su assumer pleinement ses choix et qui n’a cessé de revendiquer la singularité de son être. La conception que se fait Genet de l’existence se situe aux antipodes de l’attitude baudelairienne. Chez Genet, la poésie s’est imposée comme un acte libérateur. Sartre n’hésite pas à comparer parfois indirectement les poètes. En effet, à ses yeux Baudelaire ne s’est aucunement illustré dans le mal. Genet, lui, par contre a fait de ce mal une véritable splendeur. Il l’a célébré et a fini par l’incarner. En abordant la destinée singulière de trois poètes, Sartre illustre en même temps sa propre philosophie existentielle. Il démontre l’absence d’un Inconscient qui expliquerait toutes nos actions et réaffirme la liberté absolue de l’Homme
My thesis deals with one aspect of Sartre's critic: the poetic criticism. It has three major parts. The first and the second parts of my thesis discuss two poets of the nineteenth century: Baudelaire and Mallarmé.Baudelaire and Mallarmé, La lucidité et sa face d’ombre represent two principals books which have been support my study. Both essays play a great role to change the way in which we thought about them before Sartre’s studies.The nineteenth century has made Baudelaire and Mallarmé as two most important poets, however Sartre brought innovation and tried to broke our popular belief. In the first part, Sartre has been denouncing Baudelaire’s disengagement.In the second part which deals with Mallarmé, la lucidité et sa face d’ombre,, Sartre describe the poets of second half of the nineteenth century as “The heirs of Atheism” . As a result, Sartre creates a new notion of freedom which is totally different from those of Mallarmé and Baudelaire. Finally, in the third part Sartre chose to express his admiration for Genet because he assumed his responsibility for his choice of being. Genet’s conception of existence is contradicted with that of Baudelaire.To crown it all, Sartre show his existential philosophy throughout these three poets of XIX and XX centuries. In relation to Sartre there is no Unconscious that would explain our actions. Consequently, he confirms the absolute freedom of Man

This thesis is the first full-length study of the English clergyman and historian William Cave (1637-1713). As one of a number of Restoration divines invested in exploring the lives and writings of the early Christians, Cave has nonetheless won only meagre interest from early-modernists in the past decade. Among his contemporaries and well into the nineteenth century Cave’s vernacular biographies of the Apostles and Church Fathers were widely read, but it was with the two volumes of his Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688 and 1698), his life’s work, that he made his most important and lasting contribution to scholarship. The first aim of the thesis is therefore to build on a recent quickening of research into the innovative early-modern genre of historia literaria by exploring how, why, and with what help, in the context of late seventeenth-century European intellectual culture, Cave decided to write a work of literary history. To do so it makes extensive use of the handwritten drafts, annotations, notebooks, and letters that he left behind, giving a comprehensive account of his reading and scholarly practices from his student-days in 1650s Cambridge and then as a young clergyman in the 1660s to his final, unsuccessful attempts to publish a revised edition of his book at the end of his life. Cave’s motives, it finds, were multiple, complex, and sometimes conflicting: they developed in response to the immediate practical concerns of the post-Restoration Church of England even as they reflected some of the deeper-lying tensions of late humanist scholarship. The second reason for writing a thesis about Cave is that it makes it possible to reconsider an influential historiographical narrative about the origins of the ‘modern’ disciplinary category of literature. Since the 1970s the consensus among scholars has been that the nineteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative fictions in verse and prose – in other words literature as it is now taught in schools and universities – more or less completely replaced the early-modern notion of literature, literae, as learned books of all kinds. This view is challenged in the final section of this thesis, which traces the influence of Cave’s work on some of the canonical authors of the English literary tradition, including Johnson and Coleridge. Coleridge’s example, in particular, helps us to see why Cave and scholars like him were excluded lastingly from genealogies of English studies in the twentieth century, despite having given the discipline many of its characteristic concerns and aversions.

The tensions between ethical practice and aesthetic freedom in documentary film are particularly magnified in auto/biographical films that involve representations of family members or participants from a different cultural background to the artist, both contexts that demand a greater awareness of self and other. In this doctoral thesis I use 'auto/biographical' in its most expansive sense to signify the blurring of autobiographical stories with biographical material - the impossibility of telling the self's story without implicating others and vice-versa. Also accompanying this thesis is a booklet of poems, titles "Porous", which is held in the Victoria University Library. The related URL links to the catalogue entry for this booklet.