| dc.description.abstract | This thesis and poetry collection investigates midlife poetics and offers a critical framework for reading middle style, a hitherto overlooked corollary to late style. Informed by debates in midlife studies, I propose a reading of the middle style of three post-1945 British poets through the lens of the Odyssey Complex, a hermeneutic characterised by close readings informed by historicism and psychoanalytic theory. In Chapter One, I examine Philip Larkin’s self- identification with middle age and his neurotic anxiety about having crossed life’s notional midpoint. Informed by Jungian ideas about midlife such as enantiodromia – a heightened sense of having passed into the second half of life which, for Jung, requires a reversal of the values of youth – the chapter highlights an unresolved tension in Larkin’s poetry about what midlife ought to be like. I argue that it is Larkin’s attempt to navigate inherent contradictions in his attitudes that gives rise to a performative and polyphonic style, and I propose another ancient Greek term, the polyprosopic voice, to identify this idea of speaking through masks and of manifesting unresolved aspects of personhood.
By way of comparison, Chapter Two provides a reading of the middle style of Northern Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey, initially through the lens of enantiodromia, but also incorporating further aspects of the Odyssey Complex: storge, a term denoting familial love and domestic duty; and katabasis and nekyia, terms I use to discuss writing with an increased proximity to mortality and bereavement. I propose that Morrissey’s middle style includes intimations of a Bloomian anxiety of influence, specifically in relation to Larkin, and that it aspires to a balance between the demands of making art and the call of the domestic. Notably, Morrissey adopts a contrasting attitude to Larkin in relation to Yeats’s famous choice and Connolly’s inimical pram in the hall.
In Chapter Three, I provide further comparisons by reading W.H. Auden’s midlife poetics through the Homeric concepts of nostos (the pull towards homecoming and retreat) on the one hand, and xenia (the code of guest friendship and of social commitment) on the other. Focusing primarily on “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”, the sequence of poems Auden wrote in celebration of his Austrian farmhouse, I illustrate how Auden’s employment of a polyprosopic voice – simultaneously wry yet earnest, both ludic and sincerely meant – functions to enable his expression of paradoxical and competing elements in his personality. I conclude the thesis by outlining the variegated character of middle style and propose further applications for the Odyssey Complex as a critical tool. Finally, in a collection of poetry – The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems – and in the chapter titled “A Middle Method: Between Research and Poetic Practice”, I reveal how my own midlife poetics navigate the turbulent seas of midlife. | en_GB |
