Landscape, space and place in English- and German- language poetry 1960-1975 Nicola omas esis submied to the University of Noingham for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2017 Abstract is thesis examines representations of space, place and landscape in English- and German-language poetry of the period 1960-1975, a key transitional phase between modernity and postmodernity. It proposes that the impact certain transnational spatial revolutions had on contemporary poetry can only be fully grasped with recourse to comparative methodologies which look across national borders. is is demonstrated by a series of paired case studies which examine the work of J. H. Prynne and Paul Celan, Sarah Kirsch and Derek Mahon, and Ernst Jandl and Edwin Morgan. Prynne and Celan’s Sprachskepsis is the starting point for a post-structuralist analysis of meta-textual space in their work, including how poetry’s complex tectonics addresses multifaceted crises of representation. Mahon and Kirsch’s work is read in the context of spatial division, and it is argued that both use representations of landscape, space and place to express political engagement, and to negotiate fraught ideas of home, community and world. Jandl and Morgan’s representations of space and place, which oen depend on experimental lyric subjectivity, are examined: it is argued that poetic subject(s) which speak from multiple perspectives (or none) serve as a means of reconguring poetry’s relationship to space at a time when social, literary and political boundaries were being redened. e thesis thus highlights hitherto underexplored connections between a range of poets working across the two language areas, making clear that space and place is a vital critical category for understanding poetry of this period, including both experimental and non-experimental work. It reveals weaknesses in existing critical taxonomies, arguing for the use of ‘late modernist’ as category with cross-cultural relevance, and promotes methodological exchange between the Anglophone and German traditions of landscape, space and place-oriented poetry scholarship, to the benet of both. i Acknowledgements Writing this thesis was a pleasure thanks to the support I received from colleagues, friends and family. I am grateful to my excellent supervisory team, each of whom brought dierent qualities to our lively meetings. Many thanks to Heike Bartel, who was always so generous with both her encouragement and her ideas; to Andrew Harrison, for his insight and unparalleled aention to detail; and to Dirk Gosche,¨ from whose experienced guidance I have beneted greatly throughout my training as a researcher. I am indebted to academic, administrative and postgraduate colleagues in the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies (CLAS) and the School of English at the University of Noingham, who have been extremely helpful at every stage of this research project, in too many ways to mention. I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the studentship which funded this research, and the Renate Gunn Fund, Yuill Memorial Fund and CLAS Research Fund for supporting various research trips. anks are also due to the archivists and sta of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, the British Library and the University of Glasgow Special Collections – to the laer, in particular, for granting permission to reproduce a short unpublished excerpt from Morgan and Jandl’s leers. I am grateful to sta and students at the Westfalische¨ Wilhelms-Universitat¨ in Munster¨ for making me feel very welcome as a visiting scholar. Articles based on the research presented here have appeared in the journals Tropos and German Life and Leers. Finally, above all, to my friends and family for their love, patience, and support: thank you. ii Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Contents iii List of gures v Abbreviations vi 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Historical and literary contexts . 5 1.2 Intellectual contexts and theoretical framework . 19 1.3 Recent research . 24 1.4 Approach and key ndings . 37 2 Language as landscape in J. H. Prynne and Paul Celan 44 2.1 A shared ‘textual landscape’ . 44 2.2 Language and space: the meridian . 62 2.3 Language and place: huts, graves, crypts . 67 2.4 Language and landscape: geology and excavation . 74 2.5 Linking and dividing lines: ‘In der Lu’ and ‘From End to End’ 81 iii 2.6 Excavation, expansion and enclosure: ‘Engfuhrung’¨ and ‘e Glacial estion, Unsolved’ . 100 2.7 Conclusion . 126 3 Negotiating home in Derek Mahon and Sarah Kirsch 130 3.1 World, community, home . 130 3.2 Negotiating world . 134 3.3 Negotiating community . 149 3.4 Negotiating ‘home’ . 163 3.5 Form and community: ‘Beyond Howth Head’ and the ‘Wiepersdorf’ cycle . 179 3.6 Conclusion . 214 4 Remapping space and place in Edwin Morgan and Ernst Jandl 219 4.1 Why is remapping needed? . 219 4.2 Subjectivity, perspective, and polyvocality . 233 4.3 Polyphony and asperspectivity in sound and concrete poems . 245 4.4 Interplanetary space . 262 4.5 ‘kleine erdkunde’ . 266 4.6 Public space and power: ‘e Starlings in George Square’ and ‘wien: heldenplatz’ . 269 4.7 Conclusion . 292 5 Conclusion 294 Bibliography 310 iv List of Figures 4.1 Edwin Morgan, ‘e Chanch Map of Scotland’ (CP 179) . 250 4.2 Edwin Morgan, ‘Construction for I. K. Brunel’, (CP 190) . 257 4.3 Edwin Morgan, ‘e Tower of Pisa’ (CP 192-93, arranged to show layout across two pages) . 257 4.4 Ernst Jandl, ‘karwoche: ein turm’, (W 179) . 261 4.5 Edwin Morgan, ‘Unscrambling the Waves at Goonhilly’, (CP 191) 264 v Abbreviations Abbreviations are used for primary texts by the six authors discussed in detail in this thesis, as follows. Citations, aer the rst instance, are given in abbreviated form in the text. G Paul Celan, Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe ed. by Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003) SG Sarah Kirsch, Samtliche¨ Gedichte (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2013) NC Derek Mahon, Night-Crossing (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) L Derek Mahon, Lives (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) SP Derek Mahon, e Snow Party (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) CP Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006) WI/II Ernst Jandl, Werke in Sechs Banden¨ , ed. by Klaus Siblewski, 6 vols (Munich: Luchterhand, 2016), I/II P J. H. Prynne, Poems (Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press: South Fremantle, WA; Bloodaxe: Newcastle upon Tyne; Dufour Editions; Chester Springs, PA, 1999) vi 1. Introduction On 12 September 1962, in a speech which was widely reported around the world, President John F. Kennedy explained his ambition to land a man safely on the moon before the end of the decade. We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained[.] […] ere is no strife, no prejudice, no national conict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, y the Atlantic? […] We choose to go to the Moon!1 is speech marked a key moment in the Space Race and, indeed, in the cultural history of space more broadly. Although the rhetoric of his speech suggested continuity with the daring spatial explorations of the past, the introduction of extraterrestrial space as a potential realm of human conquest demanded a radical expansion of people’s understanding of the spaces which surrounded them. e US’s technological ambition was informed by changing geopolitical contexts much closer to home, which also exerted signicant inuence over 1 John F. Kennedy, quoted in Arlin Cros, e New Moon: Water, Exploration, and Future Habitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 68. 1 1. Introduction 2 contemporary understandings of global space. e speech’s allusions to the threat of intergalactic conict were a reminder of the military need for new space technology. A month aer Kennedy’s speech, the Cuban Missile Crisis began, ushering in a new phase of the Cold War. Such was the impact of the Cold War on global spatial consciousness that by 1967 commentators had begun to speak of the world itself not as one contiguous domain, but rather as divided into ‘First’, ‘Second’ and ‘ird World’ countries, as if the three geopolitical groupings belonged on dierent planets entirely.2 ese terms form part of a new vocabulary of space which emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s. e OED records the rst use of the term ‘space race’ as occurring in 1955.3 Google’s Ngram viewer, which charts the frequency of chosen terms in a large corpus of published texts over time, can be used to assess the extent to which the public discourse shied throughout the twentieth century.4 e phrase ‘outer space’, rst recorded in the mid-nineteenth century, also entered the public consciousness at this time: instances of its use rose over 600% between 1950 and 1960.5 An Ngram of the most common adjectives associated with the noun ‘space’ between 1930 and 1980 shows that ‘outer space’ even overtook ‘open space’ in terms of frequency 2 e terms themselves originated in an article by the French anthropologist Alfred Sauvy, rst published in 1952. See Alfred Sauvy, ‘Trois Mondes, Une Planete’,` L’Observateur, 14 August 1952, p. 14; ‘First World, n. and adj.’, OED Online (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) <hp://www.oed.com/view/Entry/249401> [accessed 24 August 2016]; ‘ird World, n. and adj.’, OED Online (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) <hp://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200854> [accessed 24 August 2016]. 3 See ‘Space, n.1’, OED Online (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) <hp://www.oed.com/view/Entry/185414> [accessed 24 August 2016].