Reflective Nostalgia in the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney

Abstract

This thesis examines the presence of nostalgia in the poetry that Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney wrote about their native landscapes during the late 1960s and 1970s. While critical opinion is broadly divided between readings of these poets as either nostalgic or anti-nostalgic, I argue that nostalgia is more a consciously negotiated subject in their work than an unconscious impulse or a pitfall to be avoided. To do this, I use Svetlana Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia, one which takes as its foundation the idea ‘that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another’, to interpret the work of these poets as representations of the often complicated nature of nostalgic feeling.
The first chapter analyses Hill’s Mercian Hymns and his sonnet sequence ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’, both of which are shown to reveal Hill’s troubled response to personal, local and national nostalgias. The next chapter considers Remains of Elmet, Hughes’s long sequence of poems about the Calder Valley, which I read as an attempt by Hughes to reconcile, however partially, the contradictory senses of his ancestors’ lives, industrial and pre-industrial, as both heroic and afflicted. I then look at Heaney’s writing about his south Derry homeland in his first three volumes, and in particular the place name poems contained in Wintering Out, reading these poems as early examples of Heaney’s attempt to express but also question nostalgia for his rural childhood by contextualising it within the long, fraught political history of Northern Ireland.

By focusing on these poets’ native landscape writing, I show that a previously under-examined thread linking them is their interest in nostalgia as an expression of both individual and collective memory and in the inextricable connection between nostalgia for childhood and ideas of lost nationhood.

Date of Award	6 Dec 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Stephen James (Supervisor) & Ralph R G Pite (Supervisor)