Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between sound and ecology in the work of three British poets writing in the last 50 years: Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove and Alice Oswald. Existing readings of sense perception in their work have either been celebratory or subsumed into broader enquiries. This study takes a more focused perspective, however, by relating their desire to connect the auditory and the ecological with phonocentrism. Promoted by the era’s media theory and the acoustic ecology movement, phonocentrism opposes ‘immersive’ hearing to ‘distancing’ vision, emphasising sound as a channel of connectedness.Drawing on this tradition in a time of growing ecological awareness, these poets foregrounded the o/aural aspects of their medium to counteract dualistic separations of human and nonhuman and to posit poetry’s role in their reintegration. However, close readings of their acoustic evocations with reference to sound studies, ecocriticism and environmental phenomenology reveal much more reflexive attitudes to poetry’s apparently mediating aspects – vision, text and conventional language – than their phonocentric statements might suggest.
Consequently, affirmative accounts of Timothy Morton’s notion of ‘ecomimesis’ – literature that evokes environmental immersion – are used to indicate how Hughes, Redgrove and Oswald draw attention to the audiovisual materiality of their verse in productive ways. Hughes’s interest in music and his sensitivity to acoustic space, Redgrove’s scientific engagement with phenomena such as resonance and transduction, and Oswald’s simultaneous explorations of orality and textuality all present environmental sensing as dynamic and nuanced rather than straightforwardly immersive. Suspended between ‘acoustic’ immediacy and ‘visual’ mediacy, these poets seek to generate complex forms of attention to their art, which, in turn, they emphasise as a form of perceptual engagement with the world.
| Date of Award | 9 Dec 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Sponsors | SWW Doctoral Training Partnership Panel |
| Supervisor | Michael Malay (Supervisor) & John Wedgwood Clarke (Supervisor) |