
Contents
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1. The Claim 1. The Claim
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2. ‘Dover Beach’ 2. ‘Dover Beach’
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3. Purity of Diction in English Verse 3. Purity of Diction in English Verse
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4. Europe 4. Europe
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5. A Various Art 5. A Various Art
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6. False Memory 6. False Memory
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7. From Dover out 7. From Dover out
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Select Bibligraphy Select Bibligraphy
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26 Dislocating Country: Post-War English Poetry and The Politics of Movement
Get accessDAVID HERD is the author of two critical works, John Ashbery and American Poetry and Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature. His collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet Press, 2012) and Outwith (BookThug, 2012). His recent writings on poetry and politics have appeared in PN Review, Parallax and Almost Island. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent, where he directs the Centre for Modern Poetry.
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Published:16 December 2013
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Abstract
This essay argues that since the Second World War, poetry written in England has gradually ceased to define itself in terms of country. In the post-war period, the idea of an English poetry was given fullest expression by Donald Davie. In both Purity of Diction in English Verse and Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, Davie identified a specificity in poetry (whether of diction or topography) with a sense of the poet’s responsibility toward his or her community. In both works that community was characterized, in part, in terms of the poet’s country. The essay sets Davie’s discussions alongside Hannah Arendt’s contemporary arguments for an idea of responsibility that takes into account the post-war reality of statelessness, and which thus extends beyond a given geopolitical space. Arendt’s argument is towards a decoupling of thought and language from the categories of nation and country. One finds such a decoupling in Andrew Crozier’s introduction to the 1987 anthology A Various Art, in which Crozier argues that the poets represented in the anthology ‘did not belong to the general category of their national poetry’. The essay considers the implications of such a position and concludes with a discussion of Tony Lopez’s False Memory, a poem which looks to find forms of understanding that are not underpinned by geographical specificity.
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