Intimate Exposure : Essays on the Public-Private Divide in British Poetry Since 1950

by Merriman, Emily Taylor

• ISBN13: 9780786442218
• ISBN10: 0786442212
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-05-30
• Publisher: McFarland & Co Inc Pub

Summary

The ever-shifting parameters of the public and private spheres have exerted strong, though often subtle, pressures on modern life. This collection of 14 critical essays analyzes how British poetry has interacted with the public/private divide since the middle of the twentieth century. It investigates how British poets have consciously, or even self-consciously, addressed the current split between private and public spheres often taken for granted in contemporary society. In its approach to this central but contested aspect of modern life, this book suggests not only new ways of approaching a poem, but of thinking about what gives a poem its linguistic, textual, and performative singularity.

Author Biography

Emily Taylor Merriman is an assistant professor of English at San Francisco State University, where she teaches 20th century poetry. Adrian Grafe is a professor of English at Artois University in France. He was an associate professor at the Sorbonne for 10 years and has published broadly on poetry.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. v
Introduction	p. 1
Stating the Case
Poetry as "Open Diagnosis"	p. 13
Strictly Public?
Public Faces in Private Places: Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry	p. 31
Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate: The Beast and the Sovereign	p. 43
R.S.Thomas: Poet of the Threshold
Performing, Transforming, and Changing the Question: Patience Agbabi-Poet Enough!	p. 67
Strictly Private? Stephen Romer's "Les Portes de la Nuit"	p. 85
Heaney and the Privateness of the Human Condition
Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney in the Birch Grove of Art	p. 101
"We men ... must Vanish"-Heaney's Wordsworth: Toward the Configuration of an Event Form	p. 112
"Imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual": The Fusion of the Private and the Public in Seamus Heaney's Poetics	p. 130
The North, The Nation, and The Public-Private Divide
"Inwardness" and the "quest for a public poetry" in the works of Tony Harrison	p. 147
Private Voice and Public Discourse: A Poetics of Northern Dialect	p. 160
Public or Private Nation: Poetic Form and National Consciousness in the Poetry of Tony Harrison and Geoffrey Hill	p. 174
Geoffrey Hill: "A public nuisance"	p. 191
Taking Stock: From Personal Encounter to Ritual
The Public Intimacy of the Poetry of Sorrow	p. 209
About the Contributors	p. 221
Index	p. 225
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