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

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. \nThis 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. \nThe 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.