Durham E-Theses The aesthetics of history in the modern English long poem: David Jones's the anathemata. Basil bunting's briggatts, Georey Hill's Mercian hymns and Roy sher's a furnace Wootten, William George How to cite: Wootten, William George (1998) The aesthetics of history in the modern English long poem: David Jones's the anathemata. Basil bunting's briggatts, Georey Hill's Mercian hymns and Roy sher's a furnace, Durham theses, Durham University. 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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 THE AESTHETICS OF HISTORY IN THE MODERN ENGLISH LONG POEM: DAVID JONES'S THE ANATHEMATA, BASDL BUNTING'S BRIGGFLATTS, GEOFFREY HILL'S MERCIAN HYMNS AND ROY FISHER'S A FURNACE William George Wootten Submitted for the degree of Ph.D. Department of English Studies University of Durham June 1998 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the written consent of the author and information derived from it should be acknowledged. i 3 JAW 1999 The Aesthetics of History in the Modern English Long Poem: David Jones's The Anathemata, Basil Bunting's Brieeflatts, Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns and Roy Fisher's A Furnace ABSTRACT David Jones, Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill and Roy Fisher are major poets in the modernist tradition who have written long poems which incorporate and interrogate history. The Anathemata. Briggflatts. Mercian Hvmns and A Furnace all explore the poet's sense of identity and his relationship to the present by attempting to give order to the past. This thesis examines how this attempt, and the various ideologies, philosophies and aesthetics that have accompanied it, are given form in these poems. It relates detailed readings of the poems to their intellectual and historical contexts. The Introduction outlines the typical features of die modernist long poem and suggests that they are peculiarly suited to expressions of both history and nationalism. Chapter I is a critical assessment of the aesthetics of Wilhelm Worringer and Herbert Read. Chapter II shows how David Jones endeavours to give form to the various histories of The Anathemata by using these aesthetics in conjunction with the historical philosophy of Oswald Spengler, the analysis of myth and ritual of J.G. Frazer and Jessie Weston, and his own nationalism and Roman Catholicism. This chapter accounts for the poem's obscurity by investigating its conflicting ideas of form, and locating it in the context of the Second World War. Chapter III, on Briggflatts. argues that Basil Bunting combines the ideas of Worringer and Read with an autobiographical narrative and a structure derived from music, in order to give the poem a form mirroring both his melancholia and the harmony he perceived in nature. It contends that the histories in the poem are best read as relating to autobiography and not Northumbrian nationalism. Chapter IV shows how Geoffrey Hill refashions the English long poem in a manner close to that of the lyric sequence. It explores notions of empathy and historical continuity in Mercian Hvmns. and analyses Hill's ambiguous evocation of his Anglo-Saxon roots in the context of contemporary political discourse. Chapter V discusses the ways in which Roy Fisher enacts different apprehensions of time and history in the dialectical structure of A Furnace, and relates them to the thought of John Cowper Powys. The Conclusion draws together the recurrent themes of the thesis: change and continuity, history and identity, time and timelessness. CONTENTS i. Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 12. Worringer, Read and the Aesthetics of Northern Line 27. The Interlace of History: David Jones's The Anathemata 95. Briggflatts 156. Double Lyric as Long Poem: Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns 200. A Furnace 297. Conclusion 300. Bibliography ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to give especial thanks to Gareth Reeves who supervised this thesis with dedication, friendliness and patience. Thanks are also due to Diana Collecott and Anthony Mellors for supervising the first year of research and to Richard Caddel who has been a constant source of enlightening conversation. I am grateful to Dick Davis for taking the time to answer my enquiries on Persian poetry and to Roy Fisher who was helpful and encouraging in answering questions about his own work. Fiona Price kindly took the time to proof-read this thesis. Simon Cattle, Brendan MacGurk and Tanja Rahneburg were unfailingly hospitable during my stays in Edinburgh. The Basil Bunting Poetry Centre and Durham University helped fund this research. Staff at The National Library of Scotland, The National Poetry Library and Durham University Library, especially The Basil Bunting Archive, were unfailingly courteous and efficient. Lastly, I should like to thank my family, particularly Richard Wootten, for their continued support during the writing of this thesis. INTRODUCTION David Jones's The Anathemata. Basil Bunting's Briggflatts. Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns and Roy Fisher's A Furnace are four of the most ambitious poetic works by English writers since the Second World War.1 They belong in the modernist tradition of the long poem and endeavour to give form to various histories. Though the similarities between them have often been noted in passing by critics, they have never been studied in a single work which would make clear just what the similarities and differences between them are. Whilst the modernist long poem in America has received a certain amount of attention, there has never been a study of either the British or English tradition of the modernist long poem. This thesis will attempt to repair this oversight by making detailed studies of four works that may be seen, despite their large debt to a cosmopolitan, and especially American, modernism, to form a particular tradition. This tradition is not an exclusive one and the individual long poems that form it also belong to other traditions. A Furnace, for example, could usefully be studied as a partial heir to William Carlos Williams's Paterson. But it is this tradition of a certain type of modern long poem which has developed in England, rather than the correspondences between these works and other modernist long poems, that will be the main focus of this thesis. The poems in this study are accounts or stocktakings of a poet's inheritance, a shoring up of what is valuable and a mourning for, or retrieval of, what has been lost. They all reflect upon the poet's roots, his local and family history and wider histories of race, nation or humanity. This stocktaking may also include the poet's own life: Briggflatts, Mercian Hymns and A Furnace all contain substantial elements of autobiography. All four poems in this study, partly as a result of such concerns, also reflect on, and incorporate into their form, particular ideas of time and temporal and historical processes. They also examine what may be thought of as either durable or timeless and so resistant to such processes. They reflect on the nature of the creative act, not just in poetry but in the arts in general, and in turn reflect upon their own status. These poems, then, have important antecedents 1 By no means all the writers in this study would consider themselves chiefly English. David Jones thought of himself as British, and is generally regarded as being Anglo-Welsh. Basil Bunting thought of himself principally as a Northumbrian. Nevertheless, the writers in this study were born and raised in England. This study does not claim to be representative of the long poem throughout the British Isles, though it will, at times, make points about British Modernism when they are tenable. 1 with similar ambitions. In the modernist tradition, perhaps the most notable is T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. But earlier works, especially William Wordsworth's The Prelude, have many of these aims in common, and this thesis will attempt to show how the modernist long poem in England has, at times, had much in common with Romanticism. Poetry published in England since the last war is not generally labelled modernist. This is perhaps to do with the common view which sees modernism as not so much an ongoing tradition as an era or generation. In English literature this is typically seen as what Hugh Kenner has termed The Pound Era, or more narrowly still, a movement that started around the beginning of the century and which, in poetry at least, was effectively over in England by the second half of the nineteen-thirties. Such a view is obviously mistaken, not only because of the continued activity of the first generation of modernist writers, but also because, at least as far as the modernist long poem is concerned, the major achievements of modernism by native English poets were not written until later in this century. In Scotland, Hugh MacDiarmid had written A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle as early as 1926.