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Durham E-Theses Poetic Individuality in Clare, Hopkins, and Edward Thomas HODGSON, ANDREW,JAMES How to cite: HODGSON, ANDREW,JAMES (2014) Poetic Individuality in Clare, Hopkins, and Edward Thomas, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10794/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Poetic Individuality in Clare, Hopkins, and Edward Thomas Andrew Hodgson PhD in English Studies Durham University 2014 Contents Declaration, Statement of Copyright, and Acknowledgements … 3 Abstract … 4 Note on Texts … 5 Introduction … 8 Chapter 1 – Clare I: ‘A Helplessness in the Language’ … 64 Chapter 2 – Clare II: ‘I Found the Poems in the Fields’ … 95 Chapter 3 – Clare III: ‘Poetical Prossing’ … 128 Chapter 4 – Hopkins I: ‘Unlike Itself’ … 158 Chapter 5 – Hopkins II: ‘A Really Beating Vein’ … 188 Chapter 6 – Hopkins III: ‘Oddity and Obscurity’ … 221 Chapter 7 – Thomas I: ‘Not Making a Song of It’ … 252 Chapter 8 – Thomas II: ‘Myriad-Minded Lyric’ … 286 Chapter 9 – Thomas III: ‘Intimate Speech’ … 313 Coda – ‘To Be, & Not To Be’ … 347 Bibliography … 362 2 Declaration, Statement of Copyright, and Acknowledgements The thesis is solely the work of the author, Andrew Hodgson, under the supervision of Professor Michael O‘Neill. Passages from Chapter 1, Chapter 3, and the Coda draw on material which appeared, in an earlier form, in an MA dissertation submitted to the University of Durham in 2010. A section from Chapter 2, also in an earlier guise, was published in ‘Form and Feeling in Clare’s Sonnets’, John Clare Society Journal 31 (2012): 51-66. * The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. * I would like to thank Professor Michael O’Neill for his guidance, commitment, and insight. I would also like to thank Professor Stephen Regan for his advice and encouragement. I am grateful to my parents for their kindness, support, and understanding. 3 Abstract Poetic Individuality in Clare, Hopkins, and Edward Thomas John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Edward Thomas form a trio of disparate yet tantalisingly related poets. What distinguishes them also conjoins them: the desire, in Hopkins’ words, to invest their poetry with ‘an individualising touch’. The poetic achievement of all three is animated by the effort to discover an idiom that answers to the pressure of a unique cast of mind, feeling, and vision of experience. All three poets stand consciously apart from their period. They articulate a recurrent counter-voice in English poetry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, grounded in an effort to imbue poetic language with an acutely personal bearing. The Introduction establishes the interrelation of their personal and poetic individuality, exploring the way their poems formulate and embody shared aims. Clare once enthused over Keats’s description in Isabella of an eye ‘Striving to be itself’. The phrase gets purchase on the spirit of embattled innovation that the three chapters on Clare’s poetry locate in his language. The first seeks to characterise the haphazard ingenuity of Clare’s style, pursuing his trust in a brand of seemingly improvisational inventiveness as a means of discovering new modes of expression. Chapter 2 concentrates on the more controlled aspects of Clare’s experimentalism, attending to his poems’ twinning of actual and literary discovery. Chapter 3 focuses more explicitly on the disarmingly personal nature of Clare’s poetry, thinking about its strange marriages of personal fervour and literary archetype. Hopkins insisted on ‘originality’ as a ‘condition of poetic genius’; but his poetry is alert to originality’s costs as well as its virtues. The concern of Chapter 4 is with how Hopkins’ valorisation of distinctiveness sits in tension with his wariness of ‘Parnassian’ – the quality of ‘being too so-and-so-all over-ish’; it contends that Hopkins is most himself at his most unpredictable. Chapter 5 extends an emphasis on Hopkins’ blend of craft and spontaneity, and the intricacy and fervour of his expression of feeling, into a consideration of the rich presence his poetry affords to the heart. Chapter 6 attends to the ways in which Hopkins’ nerviness about the potentially alienating qualities of his individual style feeds back into the distinctive tenor of his voice. Thomas thought that ‘nothing so well represents […] singularity as style’. The first chapter on his poems explores takes off from T. S. Eliot’s notion of the ‘auditory imagination’ to explore the fusion of poetic and personal ‘singularity’ in Thomas’s harnessing of the postures of speech, and experimentation with the forms and rhythms of folk song. A large part of the individuality of Thomas’s style owes to the intricacy and tenacity of his syntax, and Chapter 8 explores the way in which his poetry’s distinctive voice arises out of an effort to trace the contours of thought and feeling. A final chapter devotes itself to the way in which, for all his idiosyncrasy, Thomas, like Clare and Hopkins, strives to achieve intimacy with a reader, contending that his best poems often invite us into the confidence of a personality that remains finally elusive. A coda emphasises the inventiveness and personal candour that unites the three poets’ language. 4 Note on Texts Clare Poems are quoted from: The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804-1822, 2 vols., ed. and introd. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989). Hereafter Early Poems. Poems of the Middle Period, 1822-1837, 5 vols., ed. and introd. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996-2003). Hereafter Middle Period. The Later Poems of John Clare, 1837-1864, 2 vols., ed. and introd. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1984). Hereafter Later Poems. The particular volume and page reference of each of Clare’s poems is documented throughout in footnotes. Letters are quoted from The Letters of John Clare, ed. and introd. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Hereafter Clare’s Letters. Autobiographical writings are quoted from John Clare: By Himself, ed. and introd. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester: Fyfield-Carcanet 2002). Hereafter By Himself. Hopkins Poems are quoted from The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1990). Hereafter Poetical Works. Letters are quoted from The Complete Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Volumes I & II: Correspondence, ed. and introd. R. K. R. Thornton and Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013). Hereafter Correspondence. Journals are quoted from The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House, completed Graham Storey (London: Oxford UP, 1959). Hereafter Journals and Papers. 5 Sermons and meditation notes are quoted from Sermons and Devotional Writings, ed. Christopher Devlin (London: Oxford UP, 1959). Hereafter Sermons. Thomas Poems are quoted, unless otherwise stated, from The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. and introd. Edna Longley (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2008). Hereafter Annotated Collected Poems. Letters are quoted, unless otherwise stated, from Edward Thomas: Selected Letters, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995). Hereafter Selected Letters. Prose is quoted, wherever possible, from A Language not to be Betrayed: Selected Prose of Edward Thomas, selected and introd. Edna Longley (Manchester: Carcanet in association with Mid-Northumberland Arts Group, 1981). Hereafter Selected Prose. 6 I thought somtimes that I surely had a taste peculialy by myself and that nobody else thought or saw things as I did – John Clare ‘Sketches in the Life of John Clare’, By Himself 17. The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree. Perhaps then more reading would only refine my singularity, which is not what you want. – Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges 25 September 1888, Correspondence 963. Each great new writer is an astonishment to his own age, if it hears him, by the apparent shrillness and discordancy of the speech he has made in solitude. – Edward Thomas, Walter Pater in Selected Prose 159. 7 Introduction ‘The style is the man’, complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of what is really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions regarding style arising out of so many natural scruples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that. – Walter Pater, ‘Style’1 I Clare, Hopkins, and Thomas make for an odd trio, and part of my motivation in bringing them together here is their oddness. The thesis investigates their pursuit of a poetic style expressive of and attuned to their keen sense of individuality. The work of all three poets stands consciously askew from their contemporaries. Dissatisfaction pervades Clare’s relations with Romantic-period poetry, Hopkins’ with Victorian poetry, and Thomas’s with both Georgianism and modernism.