REGISTRATION NO. 3604276 Historiography in Modern Poetry: Text, Imagination and Authority in the work of David Jones, Geoffrey Hill and Ian Duhig And King Harold A long poem in three parts Author: Meirion Owen Jordan 8/1/2012 Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Creative and Critical Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there-from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 2 Author Name: Meirion Owen Jordan Year of Submission: 2012 Thesis Title: Historiography in Modern Poetry: Text, Imagination and Authority in the work of David Jones, Geoffrey Hill & Ian Duhig ABSTRACT This thesis explores how modern poetry is shaped by its relationships with academic and historical texts. Occasioned by creative writers’ increasing involvement in the academy, it considers the consequences of this relationship for contemporary poetry praxis. Through close readings of David Jones’ Anathemata, Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and Ian Duhig’s The Speed of Dark, it explores how imaginative conceptions of poems relate to and are affected by their material presentations as texts. In so doing, there is a particular focus on how paratexts translate academic models of authoritative writing into their poems. This thesis addresses a number of key questions: how do modern poets express ideas about the past? How do their borrowings from academic and scholarly texts shape this expression? Do readers’ past experiences have an impact? Taking the work of critics Jerome J. McGann and Linda Hutcheon as its starting point, it develops new approaches to these questions through a synthesis of their ideas and applying these issues to the particulars of poetry composition. It opens new avenues of relevance to modern poets, connecting contemporary poetry criticism with textual studies. The creative component of this thesis makes a parallel treatment of these critical issues in King Harold, a long poem on the multiple literary lives of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king. My poem dramatises the tensions explored in the critical component, creating an exciting and original bricolage of academic and historical paratexts. Both the critical component and the creative writing element of this thesis illustrate the impact of academic textual production on modern poetry. 3 Contents Critical Component: Introduction 4 Chapter 1 – Intertext: the Speed of Dark and BnFr. 146 12 Chapter 2 – Paratext: Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and the Waltham Traditions 39 Chapter 3 – David Jones’ Anathemata, the Mabinogi and the Anamnesis of Identity 69 Chapter 4 – Conclusion 99 Appendix A1 121 Appendix A2 135 Appendix A3 141 Appendix B1 147 Appendix C1 151 Appendix C2 164 Bibliography 165 Creative Component: Prefatory note on the layout of the poem 175 King Harold (title page) 176 Prologue 177 Harold’s Chronicle 178 Harold’s History 207 Harold’s Tapestry 239 4 Introduction 0.0 Outline What versions of the past do poets attempt to convey in their poems? How do modern poets write about the past? What impact do readers have on such versions? Moreover, what does the process of transmission from poet to reader introduce into these versions of the past? Poets’ ideas of the past are naturally shaped and delineated by the conventions of historical writing. Poems about the past exist within a nexus of scholarly and popular historical thought. However, modern developments in the relationship between academic writing and contemporary poetry have brought them into ever closer contact. How has this affected the transmission of historical ideas between poet and reader, and what critical perspectives might we need to understand that transmission better? Creative writers have become increasingly prevalent within academic institutions over the past two decades: even the existence of this critical-creative thesis points towards a developing interaction between academic writing and poetry. This is an opportune moment to re-examine that interaction, and ask how it manifests itself in the work of poets writing about the past. In order to shed further light on these central questions, this thesis explores work by David Jones (1895-1974), Geoffrey Hill (b. 1932) and Ian Duhig (b. 1954). It focuses on the poets’ creative processes of imagining the past through a literary analysis of the poems themselves. It also examines how their ideas come into tension with conceptions of authoritative historical writing, and how the published texts of their poetry enact these tensions. This enactment of tensions makes studying the published texts of poetry central to this thesis. However, this centrality of published texts also demands a theoretical clarification: how do we understand the differences between ‘text’ and ‘poem’? As a means of approaching this question, I explore how the term ‘poem’ (in common parlance) contains many of our uses of the critical term ‘text’. Building upon this, I aim to address the tendency in contemporary poetry criticism to ascribe effects that specifically derive from a text of a poem to the ‘poem’ in general. In particular, I wish to emphasise the importance of the paratexts of poetry, such as Jones’ preface and footnotes to the Anathemata, the ‘acknowledgements’ to Hill’s Mercian Hymns, and Duhig’s ‘notes’ on The Speed of Dark. These paratexts are an integral part of the processes of composition and genesis for individual 5 texts. Other critics have considered them in this light, particularly in the case of Jones. However, where previous critics have used paratexts to supplement their interpretations of particular poems, they have often failed to highlight the role of paratexts in shaping our imaginative responses as a whole. In order to redress this oversight, I aim to draw attention to these features as an integral part of how texts convey poems to their readers. This approach centres on the following question: how do the texts of Jones, Hill and Duhig’s work shape how we imagine the past when we read their poems? Each of these three poets expresses a distinct conception of imagining the past within their work. Moreover, these ideas take shape within the texts of their poetry in different ways, as the distinctive paratexts to Jones, Hill and Duhig’s work show. In order to understand how their texts shape our imaginations, we must also understand how these texts express the poets’ underlying conceptions of the past. Hence, I address questions of our ability to reconstruct the poets’ views on imagining the past through tracing their borrowings from different historical and academic texts. As with my emphasis upon the significance of paratexts, my aim is to show that these connections between poems and historical or academic texts can have profound consequences for how we imagine the past through reading or writing poetry. This focus on paratext also drives the creative portion of this thesis, my long poem King Harold. Indeed, the critical component is an important paratext to King Harold: it reflects upon the poem’s influences, preoccupations, and connections with historical and academic texts. King Harold is a historical poem detailing the life of Harold Godwinson (c. 1022-1066). Its premise is that the poem is a composition by Harold Godwinson in his later mythical personification as a medieval ecclesiastic. Harold utilises historical sources, both mundane and fictional, to recall the details of his own life and the events surrounding the years 1022-1066. Intended to be readable as a history in itself, the poem follows Harold’s life in a narrative, chronological fashion. However, the poem also addresses the same problems of the interplay between text, imagination, and authority in historical writing that the critical component considers. This combination of creative and critical strands has particular relevance for an audience of poets: this thesis is an exploration of how poets view their own engagement with historical and academic texts. I aim to emphasise how wide and deep the chains of connections between texts can 6 be, and how the fine details of these connections can have profound impacts upon the shaping of entire volumes of poetry. Moreover, my focus on paratexts offers to heighten poets’ awareness of the importance of these features for a reader’s imaginative engagement with the past. However, this thesis is not simply an attempt to begin a critical conversation with other poets. It engages with the work of the textual critic Jerome J. McGann, as a means of teasing out and refining what we understand by a text: separating out the ‘text’ from the ‘poem’ highlights the exciting mutability of poems across different media, whether through print or performance. Such a separation underlines the different effects a poem can have on different audiences across multiple texts and performances. This separation also suggests a significant development of Linda Hutcheon and Jerome de Groot’s work on historical fiction. By exploring works of poetry rather than literary fiction, this thesis refines Hutcheon and de Groot’s work in ways that point towards a more precise understanding of how we can imagine the past through poems. This begs a further key question: why consider poetry in this thesis? A printed poem is a visual representation of a verbal utterance. Its lines and verses correspond closely with the shaping of that utterance into meaningful phrases. Hence, a poem’s organisation into lines, verses, versets (and so on) requires precise representation in a printed text. This dependence heightens a reader’s awareness of the text as a material object, making the effects of paratexts and other features of the material text more pronounced. Poetry’s increased sensitivity to its media of representation emphasises aporias that critics, such as Hutcheon and de Groot, locate in the relationship between texts and imaginative representations of the past.