The Burden and Promise of History: The post-War poetics of Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison Hannah Louise Copley Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English September 2015 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2015 The University of Leeds and Hannah Louise Copley iii Acknowledgements Thanks firstly go to the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK for providing the funding for this doctoral thesis. I am also grateful to the School of English at Leeds for a grant in the early stages of this project. My supervisors, John Whale and Simon Swift, have my gratitude for their continued guidance, positivity, and sound advice. Particular thanks go to John, whose support, both intellectual and collegial, has been invaluable at all stages of my time as a postgraduate student. This thesis – and my interest in poetry – largely stems from his tutelage, and for that – as well as the many other opportunities he has given me – I remain grateful. I am also indebted to other colleagues at the University of Leeds for their support and encouragement. Robert Jones for being a fantastic Personal Tutor, and Fiona Becket, Tracy Hargreaves, John McLeod, Sam Durrant, Matt Boswell, Vivien Jones, and Jay Prosser for their encouragement, advice, and example. Thanks go to the archival team in the Brotherton Library’s Special Collections, particularly to Sarah Prescott and Kathryn Jenner, and to Jeffrey Wainwright, for sharing his knowledge of Leeds poetry. Thanks also go to Rhiannon Moss, Helen Mort, and Paul Maddern for their friendship and encouragement. The postgraduate community both in and beyond the School of English has provided an important support network. I am particularly indebted to Emma Trott, Sophie Morley, Ragini Mohite, Georgina Binnie, Mick Wood, Mary Erica Zimmer, and Karl O’Hanlon for advising, distracting, consoling, and entertaining me over these last four years. I’m particularly grateful to Emma and Sophie, who have made the writing process (and life in general) infinitely better. Thanks are also due to my family: to my mother Fiona, for her love, encouragement, and pep talks; to my grandfather Malcolm, for his unfaltering belief in the merits of postgraduate study; and finally to my husband Nick, for his love, support, and proofreading skills, and for being a continual source of inspiration. Finally, special thanks go to two figures that have played an important role in shaping my time as a postgraduate at Leeds: Jon and Elaine Glover. Jon’s passion and knowledge about all things directly and indirectly related to my subject matter has infinitely enriched my studies. His kindness and generosity, as well as the generosity, support, and wisdom of Elaine, has been unwavering. Because of them (and the Stand office) I have received an education in literature and poetry as important as any degree. iv Abstract This thesis has two intersected lines of enquiry: it examines how Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison respond to the Second World War and the Holocaust in their published writing, and it considers – using each poet’s archived correspondence, notebooks, and drafts – how their creative process and self-representation was informed by their self-awareness of their historical and geographical position. Analysing their published and unpublished work, my study explores how each poet’s (self-asserted) place within the poetic tradition, their creative, national, international, and personal identity, and their understanding of history and poetry was inextricable from their particular position as post-War English poets. Focussing in the first chapter on how Silkin, Hill, and Harrison engage with a tradition of war poetry within their writing, and in the second on the ways that they consider place, Englishness, identity, and belonging, this thesis explores how each writer’s published poetry and unpublished correspondence and drafts continually negotiate with the geographical and historical circumstances that shaped both their survival and the position of their witness. It argues that the result of this sometimes difficult negotiation and self-reflection is a determinately cosmopolitan and outward-facing post-War poetic – a set of individual styles both symptomatic and responsive to the historical events that took place within and beyond their national borders, and to the ethical, aesthetic, and political questions that these events subsequently raised. v The Burden and Promise of History: The post-War poetics of Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Abstract iv Table of Contents v Abbreviations vi Introduction 1 i. ‘Gregarious’ witness 7 ii. A note on structure 21 Chapter One: ‘Their experiences will not forget easily …’ (Keith Douglas): The Influence and Legacy of War Writing in the Post-War Poetry of Jon Silkin, Tony Harrison, and Geoffrey Hill 25 i. Committed Individualism: Silkin, Douglas, Rosenberg, and The Jewish Quarterly 35 ii. ‘On Not Being Milton’: the Front-Line Position of Tony Harrison 66 iii. ‘Why do I write of War? Simply because I have not been there’ Geoffrey Hill and the Figure of the Civilian War Poet. 87 Chapter Two: Mapping History and Atrocity in the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, and Jon Silkin 109 i. England as ‘Any Worldly Place’: Geoffrey Hill’s Post-War cartography 113 ii. ‘Newcastle is Peru’ and Beeston is Buchenwald: ‘Facing North’ in the Poetry of Tony Harrison 155 iii. ‘Spading Over’ England: Decomposing and Re-composing History in the Poetry of Jon Silkin 207 Afterword 245 Bibliography 247 vi Abbreviations Geoffrey Hill: BH - Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). FtU- For the Unfallen (1959) KL – King Log (1968) MH – Mercian Hymns (1971) TEN – Tenebrae (1978) TMCCP –The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983) TToL – The Triumph of Love (1998) CCW - Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). TLoL – The Lords of Limit TEC – The Enemy’s Country SaF- Style and Faith IoV- Inventions of Value AM- Alienated Majesty Jon Silkin CP – Jon Silkin, Complete Poems, ed. Jon Glover and Kathryn Jenner (Manchester: Carcanet, Northern House, 2015). TPK-The Peaceable Kingdom TTF- The Two Freedoms TRotS- The Re-ordering of the Stones NwM- Nature with Man AG- Amana Grass TPoW- The Principle of Water TLT-K- The Little Time-Keeper TPwtS- The Psalms with their Spoils TSP- The Ship’s Pasture TL-B- The Lens Breakers MAR- Making a Republic PCI - Jon Silkin, Poetry of the Committed Individual (London: Penguin Books, 1973). Tony Harrison CdP - Tony Harrison, Collected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2007). L- The Loiners P: P – Palladas: Poems USM- US Martial SoE- The School of Eloquence 1 Introduction This thesis has two intersected lines of enquiry: it examines how Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison respond to the Second World War and the Holocaust in their published writing, and it considers – using each poet’s archived correspondence, notebooks, and drafts – how their creative process and self-representation was informed by their self-awareness of their historical and geographical position. Analysing their published and unpublished work, my study explores how each poet’s (self-asserted) place within the poetic tradition, their creative, national, international, and personal identity, and their understanding of history and poetry was inextricable from their particular position as post-War English poets. Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, Silkin, Hill, and Harrison all belonged – as Christopher Ricks observes – to the generation ‘whose awakening to the atrocity of adult life was an awakening to this unparalleled atrocity’.1 Despite the variation in their ages, region, and resulting style, in all of their work there is a reflection of this symbiosis between selfhood, imagination, and historical witness. Across their collections and prose – and in their archived correspondence and notebooks – Silkin, Hill, and Harrison each undertake a sustained and often self-critical examination of the presence – and pressure – of history and human violence upon the role and creative process of the poet. These issues bring them into dialogue with each other, their contemporaries, and with the generations of poets before them – English and international – that have also considered what it means to write a socially and historically engaged form of poetry. Taken by all as an ‘index’ of the strength and weakness of poetry, the Holocaust in particular informs each poet’s vision of the world around them, and their own place and responsibility within it.2 As Hill notes in his 1998 collection The Triumph of Love: Corner to corner, the careful fabric of our lives ripped through by the steel claws of contingency. We are made to make ourselves instruments of violence and cunning. There is no 1 Christopher Ricks, Geoffrey Hill and “The Tongue’s Atrocities”: The W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture Delivered at the College on February 15th 1978 (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1978), p. 5. 2 John Bayley, ‘The Tongue’s Satisfaction’, Agenda: Geoffrey Hill Sixtieth Birthday Issue, vol. 30, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1992), p. 9. 2 hook on which we are not caught except, by lot, those of thorns and nails.3 From ‘Corner to corner’, the Holocaust and the Second World War rips through the ‘careful fabric’ of each writer’s public and private life. In their work they all explore the extent of this damage, and the ways it might be addressed and repaired. The particular historical position of Silkin, Hill, and Harrison ‘hook[s]’ their negotiation with poetic tradition, creativity, nationalism, home and belonging, and shapes their understanding of their place and responsibility as poets in post-1945 Europe.