Double Lyric

Divisiveness and Communal Creativity in Recent English Poetry

Merle E. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040381120
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published posthumously in 1980, this book centres on 5 British poets – Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, Jon Silkin, Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson – and on the emergence in postwar British poetry of 'double-lyrics', poems which have, according to the author 'become two persons, two ways of expressing and attending critically in dramatic divisive conflict.' The nature and significance of the double lyric is first demonstrated by close readings of Silkin's Defence, Tomlinson's Prometheus and Hill's In Piam Memoriam. Further chapters focus on the impressive poems which have arisen out of the stress between ideological commitment and imaginative realization in Silkin's work, the conflict between intuition and perception in the poetry of Tomlinson, and the split between the texture of Gunn's language and the non-verbal experience evoked in his poems. Finally, Merle Brown presents the last phase of F. R. Leavis' collaborative literary and cultural criticism as strikingly close to the poetic achievements of Hill, Silkin, Tomlinson and Gunn.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Original Half Title
• Chapter One Divisiveness in Recent English Poetry
• Chapter Two Flesh of Abnegation: The Poems of Geoffrey Hill
• Chapter Three Geoffrey Hill’s “Funeral Music”
• Chapter Four Poetic Omissions in Geoffrey Hill’s Most Recent Sequences
• Chapter Five Larkin and His Audience
• Chapter Six Stress in Silkin’s Poetry and the Healing Emptiness of America
• Chapter Seven Inner Community in Thom Gunn’s “Misanthropes”
• Chapter Eight Intuition vs. Perception: On Charles Tomlinson’s “Under the Moon’s Reign”
• Chapter Nine The Authentic Duplicity of Thom Gunn’s Recent Poetry
• Chapter Ten The Idea of Communal Creativity in F. R. Leavis’ Recent Criticism
• Notes
• Index