Yorkshire Poetry, 1954-2019: Language, Identity, Crisis
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YORKSHIRE POETRY, 1954-2019: LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, CRISIS Kyra Leigh Piperides Jaques, BA (Hons) and MA, (Hull) PhD University of York English & Related Literature October 2019 ABSTRACT This thesis explores the writing of a large selection of twentieth- and twenty-first- century East and West Yorkshire poets, making a case for Yorkshire as a poetic place. The study begins with Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, and concludes with Simon Armitage, Sean O’Brien and Matt Abbott’s contemporary responses to the EU Referendum. Aside from arguing the significance of Yorkshire poetry within the British literary landscape, it presents poetry as a central form for the region’s writers to represent their place, with a particular focus on Yorkshire’s languages, its identities and its crises. Among its original points of analysis, this thesis redefines the narrative position of Larkin and scrutinizes the linguistic choices of Hughes; at the same time, it identifies and explains the roots and parameters of a fascinating new subgenre that is emerging in contemporary West Yorkshire poetry. This study situates its poems in place whilst identifying the distinct physical and social geographies that exist, in different ways, throughout East and West Yorkshire poetry. Of course, it interrogates the overarching themes that unite the two regions too, with emphasis on the political and historic events that affected the region and its poets, alongside the recurring insistence of social class throughout many of the poems studied here. Moreover, this study reflects on contemporary Yorkshire poetry alongside the rhetoric surrounding Britain’s decision to Leave the European Union in June 2016. It comprises the first substantial study of several contemporary poets, whilst conducting the first detailed literary and sociolinguistic examination of poetic responses to the Brexit crisis, as ongoing in 2019. Ultimately, this thesis concludes with substantial in-depth evidence to argue not only Yorkshire’s validity as a poetic place, but that East and West Yorkshire (historically the places of Larkin and Hughes) are, to this day, poetic in their own right. 2 CONTENTS Dedication 4 Acknowledgements 5 Author’s Declaration 6 Introduction: 7 ‘True grit and Yorkshire? We’ve heard it all before.’ Section I: The East 29 Chapter 1: 31 ‘Here is unfenced existence’: Philip Larkin and Hull. Chapter 2: 69 ‘Round here we can make bones speak’: Contemporary poems of the East Riding. Section II: The West 115 Chapter 3: 117 ‘Darker with the whole view North’: Poetry in the rural West Riding. Chapter 4: 158 ‘This one thread in the great weave of history’: Industrial landscapes in West Riding poetry. Section III: Brexit 195 Chapter 5: 197 ‘We’ve taken back control’: Post-referendum Poetry in East and West Yorkshire. Conclusions: 246 ‘The North – The North is Poetry.’ Bibliography 254 This work was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/L503848/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. 3 Dedication This thesis is dedicated to the memory of two incredible people - the former a personal loss, the latter a public one - who left this world during a particularly dark year as this research project was in its infancy. Their love and values remain. Colin Burroughes 1945-2016 Jo Cox 1974-2016 4 Acknowledgements The PhD is often lambasted as an exercise in loneliness; I am overwhelmingly grateful to the people mentioned here for never allowing me to feel that way: My partner Nat deserves a world of thanks for supporting me enduringly, with incredible patience, humour and love. So too, to my brilliant parents, who have always encouraged me to be anything and everything that I want to be, and to be it to the absolute best of my ability. Massive kudos to my mum, who has read (almost) every word I’ve ever written and accompanied me to some of the most peculiar places in the name of research. My brothers and wider family too are incredibly supportive, and I cannot thank them enough for being so. Special thanks to my hairy babies Cosmo and Luna, Pixie and Naboo for lifting my spirits and being (quite literally) by my side even during the most trying of moments. I had long dreamed of studying at York, and am very appreciative of the incredible knowledge, support and expertise I found there. Enormous thanks are of course due to my supervisor, Matt Campbell, for his patient advice, support and encouragement, from the moment I approached him with research ideas. Thank you also to Hugh Haughton, who provided valuable insight on my Thesis Advisory Panel and helped to clarify many ideas in my head. Thank you to Chloe Wigston-Smith for chairing my confirmation panel, and of course to Jonathan Ellis and J.T. Welsch for generously agreeing to examine this thesis. During my time at York I have been very lucky to be supported by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council; among other benefits, this allowed access to the incredible breadth of knowledge, expertise and support of Caryn Douglas and Clare Meadley, to whom I am incredibly thankful. Of course, the support I have found and relied on throughout my thesis has extended far beyond York: I will be forever grateful to James Underwood for his advice from the very beginning of this process; so too, to Rebecca Devine, Felicity Powell and Vic Clarke for the camaraderie, shared enthusiasm and moral support, and to the Philip Larkin Society committee, particularly Graham Chesters and Philip Pullen for their constant encouragement and limitless knowledge. Last, but by no means least, thank you to my friends, with a special mention to Laura, Holly, Steph, Catherine, Heather, Louise and Eleanor. You have each supported me uniquely, constantly and immeasurably. To everyone else in this list, and to many, many more besides, I will forever be thankful. 5 Author’s Declaration I declare that this thesis is a presentation of original work and I am the sole author. This work has not previously been presented for an award at this University or any other. Parts of Chapter Three have been published in the Ted Hughes Society Journal 7, no. 1 (2018), pp. 49-66, under the title ‘From Remains to Elmet: a lexical study of Hughes’s West Yorkshire texts.’ All sources are acknowledged as references in the footnotes and bibliographies. Kyra Piperides Jaques October 2019 6 ‘TRUE GRIT AND YORKSHIRE? WE’VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE’: INTRODUCTION Philip Larkin’s ‘Going, Going’ (1972) depicts a version of England that is in a state of unthinkable decline; the poem seems to be poised on the brink of disaster: And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, The guildhalls, the carved choirs. There’ll be books; it will linger on In galleries; but all that remains For us will be concrete and tyres.1 The commissioned piece recalls the poet’s descriptions of Hull – the East Yorkshire city that he moved to in 1955 – from the poem ‘Here’, which was published just over a decade before ‘Going, Going’, in 1961. ‘Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster/ Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water’, ‘And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges,/ Fast-shadowed wheat- fields, running high as hedges’.2 This traditional idyll is increasingly being replaced by ‘concrete and tyres’. In 1961, Larkin’s England was a place of progress, Hull was in a state of rebuild after the destruction of the Blitz. The expansion of the city into its hinterlands (or ‘mortgaged half-built edges’) in ‘Here’ is positive, despite the poet’s scepticism regarding the consumerist culture that is emerging in the city centre, as ‘residents from raw estates’ ‘Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires’.3 However, by the time ‘Going, Going’ was commissioned, this post-war culture of capitalist materialism had developed to the point of regression, with ‘kids screaming for more -/ More houses, more parking allowed,/ More caravan sites, more pay.’4 Economic progression has become a threat to English tradition, which 1 Philip Larkin, ‘Going, Going’, in The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 83. 2 Philip Larkin, ‘Here’, in The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 49. 3 Ibid. 4 Larkin, ‘Going, Going’, 83. 7 has been consigned to the history books and ‘galleries’, as well as to the environment, with the country devolving into a kind of wasteland: ‘but greeds/ And garbage are too thick-strewn/ To be swept up now’.5 The UK, here, was on the brink of joining the European Economic Community – the country would ultimately join in 1973 – and Larkin envisions his country becoming the ‘First slum of Europe: a role/ It won’t be so hard to win,/ With a cast of crooks and tarts’.6 Whilst Larkin could be criticising Ted Heath’s early-1970s Conservative government here, it seems more likely that he is taking issue with the Labour government of Harold Wilson, which governed either side of Heath’s tenure; Wilson was responsible, through his ‘white heat’ rhetoric, for the advances in technology and the modernisation that led to many of the changes that the poet derides.7 Despite Larkin living in the relatively remote East Yorkshire city, this wasteland is still encroaching on Yorkshire’s rural and coastal beauty spots, the ‘unfenced existence’ to which the narrator in ‘Here’ escapes:8 […] move Your works to the unspoilt dales (Grey area grants)! And when You try to get near the sea In summer...9 This feeling of impending doom and living within the ‘remains’ of a soon-to-be forgotten past will be recurrent within the Yorkshire poetry studied within this thesis.