Transatlanticism: Animosity and Affiliation in Postwar British Poetry

Abstract

This dissertation asks What happened to poetry in England when English literature was no longer synonymous with English culture and nation? After the upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century, American culture and literature relegated English poets to an uncomfortably marginal position in the Anglophone literary world. As a result, poets coming of age in postwar England looked inward and backward toward their native literary traditions and national history. Paradoxically, however, this insular project relied on American models and took shape through encounters with American culture and American poets. At the same time, Black poets on both sides of the Atlantic took advantage of the Anglo-American relationship to reshape their respective national literary cultures. Transatlanticism begins and ends by describing transatlantic publication networks that shaped the landscape of postwar poetry. Within these bookends, I offer three chapter-length case studies of poets, Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Derek Walcott, renowned for their rootedness in England or its former imperial possessions in the West Indies. My first chapter, “The Fantasy Poets in the Postwar Moment,” demonstrates that wartime paper rationing exerted a hitherto unrecognized effect on 20th century British poetry: it retarded the normal development of poets’ careers and made them especially receptive to American influence. I show that postwar English poetry’s claims to cultural autonomy are belied by interwoven patterns of transatlantic mutual influence. My second chapter “Philip Larkin’s American Elsewhere,” traces the American entanglements of a poet who pointedly refused to visit the United States. While many critics have taken his rejection of America at face value, Larkin’s longing for the nonactual—what I call his optative mood—motivates and sustains a career-spanning investigation of authenticity in American terms. In “Geoffrey Hill’s American Lost Cause,” my third chapter, I trace the origins of this major English poet’s distinctive way of writing about the English past to what I call the Lost Cause Tradition in American Modernism. This pro-Confederate vision of modernism against modernity, which descends from TS Eliot through Allen Tate and Robert Lowell, helped Hill find renewed potential in cultural loss. In my fourth chapter, “Derek Walcott’s American Life Studies,” I turn to the generative relationship between Derek Walcott and the American poet Robert Lowell who first met in Trinidad in 1962. In this chapter, I argue that Derek Walcott’s pivotal autobiographical poetry is American in the sense that it draws on an American poetics of house and home. My conclusion, “The Heritage Press Poets in the Black Atlantic,” traces the way transatlantic publication networks shaped the careers of Black poets on both sides of the Atlantic.