A Comparative Analysis of the Poetry of Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas
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Impersonality and the Extinction of Self: a Comparative Analysis of the Poetry of Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas Peter Kerry Morgan A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Cardiff University July 2014 Declarations and Statements This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed ………………………………………… Date ………………............ This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. Signed ……………………………………….... Date ………………………. This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. Signed ………………………………………… Date ………………………. I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed ………………………………………… Date ……………………..... I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loans after expiry of a bar on access previously approved by the Graduate Development Committee. Signed ………………………………………... Date …………………… i Summary This thesis, comparative in method, examines a wide range of the poetry of Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis, and some of their prose writings. As Second World War poets, both sought a poetic register that voiced their testimony to changed realities, both internal and external. Degrees of commonality are traced between Douglas’s dominant impulse for ‘impersonality’ and Lewis’s increasing stylistic objectivity, alongside investigation of their shared underlying sense of loss, and of complicity as agents of war, even when their poetic voice is at its most impersonal. Diverse critical viewpoints are addressed, along with several psychoanalytical theories and relevant biographical commentary. Following an Introduction and Review of the Critical Field, each chapter is structured as a bipartite comparison, focusing first on Douglas, then on Lewis. Chapter 1 investigates Douglas’s impersonality as a controlled, ambivalently detached poetic register which, in its undertow and perceptual shifts, reveals the speaker’s submersed engagement and ethical complicity. Lewis’s poetry is seen to reveal a related impulse for increasingly subordinating the subjective voice in evocations of the painfully harsh realities he encountered. Chapter 2 explores the writers’ dialectical struggles to resolve or extinguish self- division, focusing particularly upon Douglas’s ‘bête noire’ and Lewis’s ‘enmity within’, configurations analysed as paradoxically creative/destructive ingredients of the poetic impulse. Chapter 3 then examines the poets’ epistemological and ontological preoccupations with death, ‘darkness’ and ‘being’, and their relevance to what is here termed ‘the extinction of Self’. Chapter 4 extends this enquiry to examine the poets’ representations of wartime separation and geographical dislocation as manifestations of ‘the exilic self’ and a mutual desire to extinguish internal crises. The conclusion drawn is that their shared, dual axis of ii poetic engagement and detachment reveals a deeply embedded, common impulse to voice and escape their burdens, both inherently personal, and as complicit agents of war. iv Acknowledgements In the course of researching and writing this thesis, I have benefited from the assistance received from a number of sources. Undoubtedly, the most significant of these has been the help and scrupulous attention to detail unstintingly given by my main supervisor, Professor Katie Gramich, under whose guidance it has been a privilege to have studied. Her expertise and encouragement have been invaluable throughout the whole process, and my debt and gratitude to her cannot be overstated. Thanks are also due to my second supervisor, Dr Irene Morra, and to Dr Heather Worthington for her advice and continuous interest in my progress. Others deserving of gratitude include Dr Carl Plasa and, not least, Dr Stephen Hendon who, from the outset, offered help and ready access to his own thesis which is, in part, germane to my own. I have also benefited from the generous provision of material from Dr Gareth Evans and Dr Kieron Smith of Swansea University. I extend my thanks to them. For the efficiency and unfailing services of the Arts and Social Studies Library, Cardiff University, I extend my gratitude, and to other institutions such as the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the British Library, London. In addition, I am grateful for the advice and access to material made available by the Leeds University Library, Keith Douglas Archive. Thanks are also expressed to the IT support staff and the Administrative staff at Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy for their help with the preparation of this thesis. Finally, I cannot ignore the debt and gratitude I owe to my wife who has offered her unconditional support and unwavering patience during the many hours I have dedicated to my research, often when we could have simply enjoyed time together during our mutual retirement. I thank her deeply. v Contents Summary i Acknowledgements iv Introduction 6 Review of the Critical Field 21 Part 1: Keith Douglas: Poetic Impersonality and New Registers 22 Part 2: Alun Lewis: The Divided Self and the Journey Outwards 44 Chapter 1: Impersonality and the Poetic Impulse: The Challenge of Truth 63 Part 1: Keith Douglas: The Distanced Voice 68 Part 2: Alun Lewis: Seeing Beyond the Self 95 Chapter 2 – Beasts and Burden: Voices of Conflict 129 Part 1: Keith Douglas and ‘The Beast on My Back’ 130 Part 2: Alun Lewis and ‘The Enmity Within’ 162 Chapter 3 – Death, Darkness and ‘That Which IS’ 192 Part 1: Keith Douglas’s Inseparable Modes of Being 194 Part 2: Alun Lewis: Death, Darkness, and the Frontiers Between 226 Chapter 4 – The Exilic Self and “What Survives” 262 Part 1: Keith Douglas and Changed Realities 265 Part 2: Alun Lewis: Border Crossings, Longings, Belonging and Un-belonging 295 Conclusion 331 Bibliography 339 6 Introduction The activity of a poet is the opposite of persuasion. His steps are very much those of a man under sentence of death. I do not mean that a poet should lose interest in the affairs of the world, or that, through being a poet, he loses access to the deepest joy accessible to man. Quite the contrary, I mean that, whatever his activity, a poet is never free, released from a bond. [...] A poet’s words should, I think, compel the attention of those who do not share his belief. [...] Yet even then the quarrel should be his own quarrel; [...] but he remains a man caught up in a dialogue which may then, or a century later, be heard by the rest of the world.1 Vernon Watkins’s words resonate with the rationale for this thesis. The decision to undertake a comparison of the poetry of Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis formed itself partly from the fact that there has been no sustained, book-length comparative examination of their writings, though separate, shorter studies of their work, and two authoritative biographies exist.2 This fact, coupled with an interest in the generic commonality of Douglas and Lewis as Second World War poets, might be considered justification enough to undertake this thesis. But there are also elements of Watkins’s statement that draw one to consider very specific connections in the personal and creative trajectories of these men, connections that are sufficiently significant to warrant comparison, framed within the overarching and interlinking themes of poetic impersonality and what I term ‘the extinction of Self’.3 The notion of poetic activity as being ‘opposite to persuasion’ yet still implicated in ‘the affairs of the world’, and of the poet, however bound in his own internal ‘quarrel’, as having an inescapable bond with humanity, seems to bear significantly on core concerns of this thesis. Neither Lewis nor Douglas is given to didactic ‘persuasion’, while each 1 Vernon Watkins, ‘For Whom Does a Poet Write’, in Vernon Watkins on Dylan Thomas and Other Poets & Poetry, selected and edited by Gwen Watkins and Jeff Towns (Cardigan: Parthian, 2013), pp. 136-140 (pp. 136- 137). 2 See Desmond Graham, Keith Douglas 1920-1944 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), and John Pikoulis, Alun Lewis: A Life (Bridgend: Seren Press, 1991). 3 The term, as quoted, derives from the title of this thesis, and is therefore shown here within quotation marks. However, throughout the thesis, the concepts of Self and of Otherness are key elements. Wherever Self, Other or Otherness are capitalized, this is to indicate my use of these terms in their more generalized and often pluralistic context. In those instances where these words are presented in lower case, they relate to a specific self, other or otherness identifiable as a specific persona or point of focus within the text under consideration. 7 articulates his ‘own quarrel’, deeply inflected with complex inner contestation and self- division. In this personal complexity they are similar, and in their creative impulse to give voice to disruptions felt within. They share, too, certain preoccupations, such as: a struggle to understand the correlation and ontological border between life and death; the conflict between notions of Self and Otherness; and the dislocations of estrangement and exile, all elements that will be addressed in the following chapters. As I propose to show, each demonstrated an avowed commitment to express artistic ‘Truth’, while also responding to the need to find a unique and new poetic register. However, in the context of Watkins’s remarks, these comparable preoccupations arise, not only from innate predispositions, but from tensions between the poets’ respective roles and complicity in ‘affairs of the world’, as agents of war and/or imperialist discourse. This thesis will therefore argue that the overarching concepts of ‘impersonality’ and ‘extinction of self’ that frame my study do not preclude the ‘bond’ that ties the poets to a wider vision of humanity.