DEATH MATTERS: LYRIC, AFFECT, AND ETHICS IN BRITISH AND IRISH ELEGY, 1960-2012 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Nathaniel Myers _________________________________ Romana Huk, Director Graduate Program in English Notre Dame, Indiana July 2015 © Copyright by NATHANIEL MYERS 2015 All rights reserved DEATH MATTERS: LYRIC, AFFECT, AND ETHICS IN BRITISH AND IRISH ELEGY, 1960-2012 Abstract by Nathaniel Myers The elegy is a poetic genre situated between personal and public spheres. The critical literature of the genre often privileges one sphere over the other, whether it be the personal work of mourning undertaken by the elegist in writing the poem, or the public and cultural work of memorialization that is fundamental to the genre. My project examines the work of five poets – Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Denise Riley – whose elegies require a distinct critical apparatus, one that considers the personal and the public jointly because these poets’ elegies trouble the very distinction between the two. In the ethical concerns voiced by the poets – which range from the aestheticization of death and violence to the potential profit motives (artistic, commercial) of writing elegy – as well as in the formal techniques that can either mitigate these ethical concerns or, in some cases, generate them, these elegies betray the inextricability of private and cultural modes of grief. Nathaniel Myers In order to bring disparate parts together – the personal and the private, the ethical and the aesthetic – I implement a critical methodology that uses as its central tool the notion of “linguistic affect,” which I define (slightly modifying Riley’s own definition) as “the force of language on the body,” a force made possible through language’s historically rich materiality. The scholarly turn to affect has begun to collapse distinctions between cultural networks of affect and the human bodies they influence; my analysis focuses on the lyric as one particular linguistic site in which to discern this intersection of the cultural and the somatic, attending specifically to what Mutlu Konuk Blasing refers to as the “affective materials of language”: its affectively charged sounds and rhythms, and the poetic techniques that harness these affective charges through prosody, form, and poetic convention. The ethical dilemmas conveyed in the work of these five elegists are thus symptomatic of the challenge of articulating a private grief that always speaks beyond itself. To my parents ii CONTENTS Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iv Introduction: On Lyric, Affect, and the Ethics of Elegy ......................................................1 1.1 Elegy’s Ethics ...................................................................................................1 1.2 Elegy Studies: Certain Limitations in the Critical Literature ...........................5 1.3 Affect and the Affective Turn .........................................................................16 1.4 Language, Lyric, and Affect ...........................................................................33 Chapter 1: “Documented and safe”: Geoffrey Hill’s Responsible Elegies ........................46 Chapter 2: “Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable”: Seamus Heaney’s Material Loss ......78 Chapter 3: End Rhymes and End-Rhymes: Paul Muldoon’s Echoic Elegies ..................129 Chapter 4: “If the cap fits, wear it”: Medbh McGuckian’s Impersonal Grief .................164 Chapter 5: “She do the bereaved in different voices”: Denise Riley’s Part Song ...........201 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................238 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A project such as this was bound to be rewarding in multiple ways, but among the most enjoyable and fulfilling was the time spent with the members of my dissertation committee. I never made a wiser decision than in asking Romana Huk to direct my project; she has been a thoughtful, discerning reader of my work, generous as a scholar and as a mentor, and demanding more of me when it clearly was required. On most occasions, I am certain she knew what I was doing before I did. I am hugely thankful. Susan Harris was my brilliant teacher before she became an incisive reader of my dissertation; in both capacities, she has been profoundly influential in ways she may not even know. Declan Kiberd has been known to use the phrase “You’re a saint,” but he may be the only real saint I have ever met; for someone in demand by so many people, the attention he gives to his students is remarkable, and for this reason he has been a model academic, and a friend. Bríona Nic Dhiarmada is as smart and savvy about poetry and film as I aspire to be; and she, along with the members of her family I have met, are among the kindest people I know. Altogether, the committee has been a patient, insightful, and giving one. I look forward to my future interactions with them. The University of Notre Dame has been humblingly generous throughout my career here. The English department has been my primary source of support, most recently through the Gerald Bruns Dissertation Fellowship that allowed me to complete iv this project over the last year. I am grateful to both the department’s faculty and staff. The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, under the directorship of Chris Fox, has time and again made it possible for me to undertake research, attend conferences and summer seminars, and build formative relationships with scholars across Irish Studies. The faculty members associated with the Institute are, aside from being top scholars in their respective fields, a lively and encouraging set of people, and I am grateful to be counted among them. The Nanovic Institute for European Studies, together with Keough- Naughton, funded my travel to Manchester and London to conduct interviews with Paul Muldoon and Denise Riley. Both poets were incredibly gracious; I only grew to appreciate their work more after having spoken with them. And finally, I received a Krause Fellowship from the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) which allowed me to undertake archival research at Emory University’s MARBL library; I am thankful for the support of both ACIS and the excellent staff at the MARBL. Numerous academics and friends have shared their wisdom and knowledge in ways that are directly and indirectly reflected in this dissertation. Jim Smith, Joe Nugent, and Marjorie Howes at Boston College were formative influences with regard to my professional and intellectual pursuits; and before them, at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, Shane Alcobia-Murphy and Alison Lumsden first taught me what it meant to do scholarship. Elliott Visconsi and Patrick Griffin led a workshop of one of my chapters during Notre Dame’s Global Dome program which ultimately proved invaluable to thinking about the dissertation as a whole. Along the way, Clair Wills, Eric Falci, Guinn Batten, Ailbhe Darcy, Kara Donnelly, and Brian O’Conchubhair have been advisors of the academic, intellectual, and spiritual kind. Lindsay Haney, Robinson Murphy, and v John Dillon have walked the streets of Dublin and South Bend with me, but the sensitive reader will detect their footprints in the pages ahead. My mother taught me to hear music, and my father taught me to love language. After thirty-some years of education, they were the first of my teachers, and they continue to be the most important. I hope I engage most things – from poetry to the classroom to my loved ones – with sensitivity, compassion, and generosity; these are the qualities with which my parents raised me, qualities which have ultimately made any and all of this possible. I dedicate this, and everything, to them. And finally, halfway through this whole Ph.D. thing, Frenchtown, New Jersey’s own Caroline Maloney came into the picture. She reaffirmed why this project was so very important and revealed how it could be so utterly unimportant. Her greatest gifts she gives to everyone, but for some reason I have been given more. This dissertation is small repayment, but when she came along, it was clear I had always been writing it for her. vi INTRODUCTION ON LYRIC, AFFECT, AND THE ETHICS OF ELEGY 1.1 Elegy’s Ethics The elegy is a poetic genre with dual obligations. On the one hand, it is tasked with the personal work of mourning, with responding to the grief of the elegist who writes his or her poem as a means of coming to terms with loss. On the other hand, it is tasked with the public work of memorialization, with the act of preserving in cultural memory whomever or whatever it elegizes, whether it be a person, a group of people, or some abstract concept like “civilization,” as is the case with a poem like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.1 In the field of elegy studies, scholars often tend to privilege one of these sides of elegy over the other, with an eye either to the dynamics of consolation and literary mourning that have as their basis various tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis, or to the public dynamics of death and memorial that often tap into larger issues surrounding the representation of gender, race, disease, and a slew of other important cultural debates.2 My project begins, in part, by posing a relatively simple question: what happens