Forms of Memory: The Sonnet in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry Stephen William Grace PhD University of York English and Related Literature September 2019 Abstract This thesis explores the extraordinary profusion of the sonnet in contemporary British and Irish poetry, focussing in particular on the work of Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Don Paterson and Alice Oswald. Drawing on critical interventions by Steph Burt, who characterises the sonnet in terms of its longevity rather than any technical feature, and situating the contemporary form within the long durée of its late-eighteenth century revival (especially in Wordsworth’s work), I argue that contemporary poets have taken the sonnet up as a way of writing the past. Chapter one explores the sonnet’s fraught commemorative role in the work of Hill in the 1960s and 1970s in particular in which the form becomes a type of ‘belated witness’ to violent historical traumas. Chapter two considers Heaney, whose early sonnets are also commemorative and historical, but also increasingly, under Wordsworth’s influence, frame their commemorations in more personal, private terms, a shift that culminates in the more spiritual outlook of Heaney’s later sonnets. Chapter three focuses on Muldoon, whose relentless experiments with the sonnet mark him out as perhaps the most significant sonnet writer of the second half of the twentieth century. I read his mix of invention and obsession in relation to the form as an instance of Freudian repetition in which the past is both omnipresent and elusive. Chapter four examines Paterson, and tracks his sometimes contradictory investments in Scottish history alongside his more speculative metaphysical interests, partially derived from his translations of two crucial twentieth-century European sonneteers, Rainer Maria Rilke and Antonio Machado. The fifth and final chapter explores Oswald’s ecological commitments in sonnets marked by the influence of John Clare and Sir Thomas Wyatt. As these disparate examples indicate, the sonnet does not articulate just one past, but multiple overlapping and sometimes competing pasts. 2 List of Contents Abstract - page 2 Table of Contents - page 3 Acknowledgements - page 4 Declaration - page 5 Introduction - History, Form, Memory: Tracking the Contemporary Sonnet. - page 6 Chapter One – ‘ec - / centric as a prophet’: Geoffrey Hill - page 26 Chapter Two – ‘a rustling and twig-combing breeze’: Seamus Heaney - page 56 Chapter Three – ‘a compulsion to repeat’: Paul Muldoon - page 81 Chapter Four – ‘absence and aftermath’: Don Paterson - page 112 Chapter Five – ‘the river’s cord unravelled by the tide’: Alice Oswald - page 141 Bibliography - page 168 3 Acknowledgements In spite of the often solitary nature of the work involved, this thesis has been the work of many hands. First and foremost, I owe an enormous debt to Professor Hugh Haughton for his perceptive, challenging, supportive supervision over a long period of research. Not only has his insightful commentary on the subject matter opened up new and important lines of thinking, but his patience and enthusiasm helped me keep going through the many unproductive, distracted periods that part-time study inevitably brings. I would also like to acknowledge Professor Matthew Campbell’s engaging and challenging contributions to the project as TAP member, and both his encouragement of outside projects such as conferences and reading groups. Indeed, I would like to thank the entire Department of English and Related Literature for the welcoming and supportive environment they have continually provided over the years. To those members of the postgraduate community at York, past and present, who I now count as friends as well as colleagues, I owe endless thanks for personal and professional kindnesses too many to mention: Marie Allit, Alex Alonso, Laura Blomvall, Karl O’Hanlon, Madeline Potter, Jack Quin, Anna Reynolds, Carla Suthren, and many others whose company has brightened the experience of the last seven years. Much of the work from that time has been shaped by the informal discussion within the postgraduate community, and I would like to pay especial thanks to Marie, Alex, and Madeline for proofreading this thesis. Beyond friends and colleagues within the Department, I would also like to thank my family and friends, especially my mother Penny and sister Katherine, whose unfailing support has been essential not only during this PhD, but for as long as I can remember. Most importantly, I would like to thank my wife Steph: without her love and encouragement I never would have began this project, or had the resilience to see it to the end. This is for her. I would also like to acknowledge one other very special person, whose arrival blessed the last days of writing up: Spencer Andrew Grace, born on 11/9/19. This is for him, too. Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin and the true path was as lost to me as ever when you cut in front and lit it as you ran. See how the true gift never leaves the giver: returned and redelivered, it rolled on until the smile poured through us like a river. How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men! I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever. 4 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, or any other, University. All sources are acknowledged as References. 5 Introduction History, Form, and Memory: Tracking the Contemporary Sonnet. This thesis examines the place of the sonnet in contemporary British and Irish poetry, and especially in the work of five contemporary poets: Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Don Paterson and Alice Oswald. That the sonnet is in vogue, few critics seem to do doubt. ‘There are more kinds of beetles than kinds of sonnets’, Steph Burt assures us, at the start of her essay on ‘The contemporary sonnet’, and ‘more beetles on earth than sonnets by living authors, but sometimes it seems a close call’ (2011: 245); ‘“I’m up to my bollox in sonnets”’ (2012: 567), Alan Gillis declares, ventriloquizing Brendan Kennelly ventriloquizing Edmund Spenser; while Don Paterson, a little more prosaically, says simply that ‘the sonnet is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. The form has diversified to the point where its definitive boundaries are so blurred that it has effectively ceased to exist’ (1999: xi). Burt samples a few of the many extravagant contemporary incarnations of the form, from ‘sonnets spoken by Bruce Wayne as Batman’ to ‘sonnets called “Sonnet” in demotic, unrhymed free verse’ to ‘a crown of fifteen sonnets about e-Bay’ (2011: 245), but her opening remark articulates something of the weariness – and wariness – that the form can induce in twenty-first century readers. There are simply too many types, too many examples and counter-examples of sonnets, and an excess of innovation and experiment that threatens to overwhelm whatever excitement we may feel in seeing the form get stretched into new shapes. Sheer numbers creates a sense of weight, and even inertia, with the quantity of the experiments seeming to deaden their quality, so that at a critical and conceptual level at least, it becomes virtually impossible to think about the contemporary sonnet as whole. Indeed, Paterson disparages even the effort to do so, adding a tired musical analogy to go with Gillis’s bollocks and Burt’s beetles: ‘Amongst people who have time for such things, the “is-it-a- sonnet?” debate can rage on with all the fervour and pointlessness of country-and-western music fans trying to decide whether a record is truly “country” or not’ (1999: xi). Given this extreme diversity, it is perhaps not surprising that critics have largely shrugged their shoulders. Burt notes that whilst ‘A list of contemporary sonnets would be its own book...a list of critical writings on the contemporary sonnet in general might be surprisingly short’ (2011: 245). Generally speaking, such critical writing has tended to take a particular aspect of the contemporary sonnet, such as Gillis on ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, or to come as part of an anthology on the sonnet, such as Eavan Boland’s and Edward Hirsch’s The Making of a Sonnet (2007), or Don Paterson’s 101 6 Sonnets (1999), or Jeff Hilson’s avant-garde Reality Street Book of Sonnets (2008). Two 2011 publications are more comprehensive, but consider the sonnet as a whole: The Art of the Sonnet (2011) collects essays by Burt and David Mikics on 100 English language sonnets from its sixteenth- century origins with Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey to the present. The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (2011), which includes Burt’s essay on the contemporary sonnet and other valuable work on the form, takes a longer historical perspective and splits its focus across the sonnet’s multiple periods. Stephen Regan’s comprehensive historical study The Sonnet (2019) unfortunately appeared too recently to be taken into account in this thesis. So whilst there has been critical interest in, and engagement with, the contemporary sonnet, it has to an extent been scattered and ad-hoc, or framed within the context of larger historical enquiry. Introducing his miniature anthology, Don Paterson does go on to work up a theory of sorts for the sonnet, relating its off-centre box-like structure to the golden mean, but also later converts these ideas into a theory of the lyric as a whole, and I consider this move in more detail later in the thesis. It is in the work of Burt herself that the contemporary sonnet finds its most pertinent definitions. Rather than sort through the different shapes and sizes of the contemporary sonnet, whittling them down to some essential kernel of sonnet-ness, Burt suggests the form is now characterised largely by the sheer fact of its longevity.