The new thinking about loss: Language, history and landscape in poetry after Modernism (Seamus Heaney, Ireland, Derek Walcott, St. Lucia, Paul Muldoon, Northern Ireland, Robert Hass)

Poets who developed their craft in the wake of the Modernist movement inherited from their predecessors an anxiety about the relationship between the subjectivity of language and individual experience, on the one hand, and social and historical reality, on the other. This study examines the language and form of lyric poetry after Modernism in order to reconsider the function of poetry in a culture grown acutely conscious that language is not transparent in its representation of natural and social phenomena. I argue that contemporary poets' preoccupation with etymology and the polarity of words and things, far from signaling poetry's turn away from history, gives voice to otherwise unexpressed aspects of personal, social and political life.; Chapter 1 examines the questions of poetic and linguistic purity that were at the heart of Modernist debates on the function of poetry. Reviewing the pure poetry debate in a series of literary dialogues—Yeats and Pound, Eliot and Valéry, Stevens and Stanley Burnshaw—this chapter contends that Modernism as a movement was internally conflicted on the question of how, and whether, poetry should respond to historical events. The subsequent chapters argue that later poets have avoided the impasse of that debate by bringing to the surface of poetry an awareness of linguistic impurity that was already latent within Modernism, and that the history of poetry after Modernism is defined by a pattern of increasing comfort with a view of language as arbitrary, yet alloyed with history to such a degree that apparently aesthetic attention to issues of poetic language and form necessarily constitutes engagement with historical reality.; To build this case and test its implications, I read the work of four key contemporary poets, writing in a variety of political and linguistic contexts. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, two very different post-colonial poets both exploiting the equivocations of language to make room within English traditions for alternate national histories, poetic landscapes and idioms. Chapter 4 argues that Paul Muldoon represents the absolute degree of poetic acceptance of the contingent nature of language. No more interested in the world outside language than in the contextual dialogue of words with words and meanings with meanings, Muldoon's poetry suggests that what is discoverable about human nature and human history is already resident in language; poetry is a way of remembering the public and private histories that language already knows. In the final chapter, Robert Hass, writing in an environment less troubled by immediate political pressure, provides a contrast in which the American poet's longing for the kind of relevance Hass attributes to Eastern European poetry finds its corollary in the longing inherent in language that continually reaches for, but never reaches, the world it describes.