Transcending boundaries : modern poetic responses to the city

This thesis examines poetic representations of the city in the works of T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Roy Fisher, Iain Sinclair, and Aidan Andrew Dun. Chapter One discusses Eliot's vision of the city, arguing that Eliot was always seeking new ways for forming urban imagery. Concentrating on the relation between poetic form and urban images, I look at Eliot's poetry including his unpublished poems to highlight how modernism, form, and the city inform one another. Chapter Two examines briefly Williams's response to Eliot's vision of London in The Waste Land, highlighting the contrast between Eliot's cosmopolitanism and Williams's localism/ provincialism. Exploring the relation between Williams's representation of Paterson in Pater son and Roy Fisher's poetic representation of Birmingham in City and A Furnace, I reveal that Fisher adopts Williams's approach to the city but subsequently diverges from it thus creating a new urban poetics. Chapter Three investigates Iain Sinclair's visionary representation of London in Lud Heat in conjunction with Lights Out for the Territory, and I examine Sinclair's notion of the city as a text. I argue that Sinclair's textual representation of London gives a new meaning to the relation between poetry and the city. I also look at Sinclair's rewriting of the flaneur as a strategy to elide the boundaries between real and imagined spaces. Chapter Four concentrates on Aidan Andrew Dun's representation of London in his long poem Vale Royal, and I look at Dun's use of the two romantic poets (William Blake and Thomas Chatterton) as a strategy to revive the city's metropolitan history. I compare Dun's vision of London with that of Sinclair and Eliot, stressing how Dun engages in rewriting modernism's definitive view of the city.