Forms of perception in late modernist British poetry, 1966-2020

Abstract

This thesis examines the forms of perception explored in the work of four late modernist British poets writing between 1966 and 2020. By analysing the poetry of Peter Riley, R. F. Langley, Colin Simms and J. H. Prynne, it argues that British poetry in this period negotiates a fundamental tension between perceptual contact—the possibility of a direct, unmediated engagement with the world—and its mediation, the abstraction of perception through linguistic, epistemological and literary frameworks. While American modernists like Charles Olson and Ed Dorn celebrated the ethical, phenomenological valences of perception, their British successors grappled with how modernist perceptual forms conflicted with, or were refracted through, a nexus of British linguistic, prosodic and epistemological traditions. Drawing on hitherto-unstudied correspondence and archival sources, I demonstrate how my chosen poets exposed the paradoxes in the forms of perception celebrated by their modernist precursors, revealing how attempts to sustain an ethical perceptual mode risked either instrumentalising the external world or becoming totalising and assimilative. Building on existing accounts of British late modernism, such as Mellors (2005), Latter (2015), and Rowland (2022), I argue that British poets reconceptualised mediation as a force that either exposed the ethical constraints of perception or properly situated the perceiving subject within language, culture and history. Chapter One traces Riley’s work in The English Intelligencer, from an early embrace of Olsonian perceptual immediacy to a growing scepticism about its assimilative tendencies. Chapter Two examines Langley’s negotiation of perception and knowledge, culminating in his later turn to English lyric and dramatic monologue as vehicles for intersubjectivity. Chapter Three explores Simms’s engagement with landscapes and animals, revealing how they are always-already disclosed through ecological and colonial frameworks. Chapter Four considers J. H. Prynne’s late poetry, where lyricism emerges as an intrinsically mediated process, embedded within historical and linguistic structures.