| dc.description.abstract | This thesis is an account of how the poetry of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) offered a horizon for
very different post-war English poets working in, through and after explicitly modernist poetic traditions.
It aims to reorient our understanding of twentieth century British poetry by exploring Wordsworth’s
importance for a triumvirate of highly original readings of history, place, politics, and social life. The three
poets whose work this thesis attends to in detail are Basil Bunting (1900-1985), Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016),
and J.H. Prynne (1936—), because these late modernists have all become, in turn, influential figures, each
attracting a gathering critical literature though my specific subject remains under-examined. These poets
are of particular interest because Bunting, Hill, and Prynne have also all been involved in reading and
responding to the American high modernists T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972),
significant poets who themselves largely criticised and repudiated Wordsworth’s work as part of a broader
Anglophone modernist avant-garde front which railed against romanticism and its legacy as understood
through the work of conservative Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian poets. The three figures whom I
spend the bulk of this dissertation reading recognise in distinct and sometimes contradictory ways that
the examples of Pound and Eliot were unavoidable if one wanted to write an ambitious poetry advanced
enough to think through the century of world wars, American imperialism, global capitalism, and
communist revolution. At the same time, for these poets the principled objection to the reactionary and
fascist politics and tastes of their modernist antecedents licensed a concerted return to certain poets
Pound and Eliot had rejected, with Wordsworth foremost among them. The first chapter presents an
appraisal of Bunting’s masterpiece, Briggflatts (1965), arguing that this long poem of personal history
constitutes a serious, Poundian attempt to reengage and rethink Wordsworth’s poetry and especially The
Prelude of 1805. I argue that Briggflatts recalibrates The Prelude’s traumatological concept of the ‘spots of
time’, in which a memory of formative love is painful, abortive, and malfunctioning. Developing this
argument, the second chapter turns to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) and its considerably divergent
engagement with The Prelude, reading in that sequence a dazzling tussle between the poetic examples of
T.S. Eliot and Wordsworth. I argue that Hill’s characteristically elegiac, oblique poetic autobiography uses
Wordsworth to think through the dialectic of personality and impersonality in a melancholically
conservative reading of English history. The third and final chapter locates its most forceful and complex
interpretation of Wordsworth’s poetry in the work of J.H. Prynne, reading in ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy
Court Uniform’ and the dialectical lyrics of The White Stones (1969) a passionate critique of late capitalist
modernity, founded on Prynne’s deep engagement with poems by Wordsworth including ‘The Solitary
Reaper’, The Prelude, and ‘Tintern Abbey’. | en |
