Recreation and William Alexander’s Doomes-day (1637)

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC

'Under a shower of bird-notes': R. S. Thomas's elegiac poems for Elsi

It has been customary to see elegies by male poets as exceptional rather than typical poems. W. H. Auden wrote that ‘Poets seem to be more generally successful at writing elegies than at any other literary genre’. Peter Sacks reads Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ as a combination of a career move to secure immortality and a deliberate exploitation of ‘the pastoral elegy’s potential for theological criticism or political satire’. The poetry of R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) contains a body of love poems to his first wife Mildred (Elsi(e)) Eldridge (1909–91), which culminate in a number of elegiac poems published in Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995), and the posthumous Residues (2002) assembled by Thomas’s literary executor M. Wynn Thomas. Thomas’s elegiac poems for Elsi challenge critical assumptions about the exceptionality and separability of elegy outlined above. The relative informality of Thomas’s poems in terms of the subgenre’s conventions is, then, one interest of this article. My discussion will also focus briefly on Welsh aspects of the poems and how Thomas’s late poems for Elsi do not stand apart from his other poetry but are of a piece with it. It will also become apparent that many of Thomas’s poems are interested in commemorating a continuing shared subjectivity as opposed to describing a process of moving on from grief

'The Statuette'

This is one of several contributory articles to the volume: 'Nicholas Lanier, 1588–1666. A Portrait Revealed'. It examines the statuette of Antinous which is shown within portrait, arguing that is more than a decorative feature, rather, that it carried much of the portrait's meaning. It is speculated that for early Jacobean viewers Antinous brought to mind the character of that name in Homer's Odyssey (and in derivative works) and not the Emperor Hadrian's Antinous

Recovering the lost Moravian history of William Blake's family

This paper seeks to amend and extend Keri Davies’s essay on Blake’s mother published in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly in 1999. There, he established that Blake’s mother Catherine’s true maiden name was Wright, and that Thomas Armitage, her first husband, was born in Royston, Yorkshire in 1722, the son of Richard Armitage of Cudworth. Davies also produced evidence that contradicted E.P. Thompson’s Muggletonian hypothesis, and speculated upon the identity of Blake’s maternal grandparents. We now link Blake’s mother to a very different religious community, providing further evidence about her first marriage, and correcting the assumptions Davies made in identifying Blake’s grandparents. These latest discoveries about Blake’s mother disclose her place of birth (Walkeringham, Nottinghamshire), the names of her parents and siblings, and her association with the Moravian sect. Documentary and autographic records in the archive of the distinctive and exceptional eighteenth-century Moravian church, some dating from many years before the poet was born, are a vivid indicator of how much of our thinking about Blake’s life and early influences might need to be revised and rewritten in the future

‘“I should want nothing more”: Edward Thomas and simplicity’

In the years before the First World War, the ‘Simple Life’ became somewhat fashionable, and Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was one of those Edwardians who were attracted to simplicity, both as a way of life and as a way of writing. As a book reviewer and biographer, he greatly admired simplicity in literature (as seen in, among others, William Cobbett, W. H. Davies, J. M. Synge and Robert Frost). His prose moved towards plainness, and his poetry is beautifully simple. This simplicity has been problematic, however. His poetry is unsuited to the decoding and exegesis (which might be suited to Modernism) that universities seek to conduct. Academics studying his poetry have allowed themselves to believe that they have found complexity, hidden beneath super cial simplicity, whereas in fact Thomas is a poet of genuine bareness, clear-as-glass honesty, magical brevity and childlike simplicity. His simplicity has been popular, and seems to suit some 21st-century fashions

Subjugating the Beast and the Angel: Suggestions of Dante's Inferno in "Altarwise by owl-light"

‘Altarwise by owl-light’ is one of Thomas’s most intransigent poems, an intricately woven text of images and symbols. It has generated, over the years, a great variety of interpretations ranging from the astrological, to the Freudian to the Surrealistic . The reading of this poem often involves a search for sources, the unravelling of references and allusions. For instance, in some of the sonnets’ most seemingly surreal lines , at the end of Sonnet V, an unexpected source has been discovered by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud. In - Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw. - the image of the ‘waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil’ originates in an allegorical text by Anatole France entitled L’île des pingouins . There now remains the problem of finding out who the ‘frozen angel’ and the ‘black medusa’ are, and of piecing together the elements. This paper will offer suggestions regarding these and other images, by concentrating on allusions, in the poem, to Dante’s Inferno. In the process, it will raise a previously unrecognised possibility in the core interpretation of the poem

British literature since World War II : a selected bibliography of secondary sources with special reference to drama/theatre and narrative prose (period covered : mid-1940 to 2000)

British literature since world war II : a selected bibliography of secundary sources with special reference to drama/theatre and narrative prose (period covered : mid-1940 to 2000). Part I: Integrated alphabetical index. Part II: Specific bibliographies (as to author and subject