The Poetry of Witness in 21st Century British Literature

Abstract

This thesis has two aims: to present an artistic response to the Hillsborough disaster; and to engage in the debate concerning how public trauma is best depicted in verse. The critical component explores how twenty-first century British poets negotiate the ethical and aesthetic challenges of representing atrocities and generational trauma, considering their writing in relation to Theodor Adorno’s statement that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Drawing on the work of Wilfred Owen, Theodor Adorno, Czeslaw Milosz, Carolyn Forché, Nadine Gordimer and Susan Gubar, it examines the ethical questions raised when poets represent traumatic events and what strategies are open to them when engaging in the poetry of witness. While each approach has its own issues, this thesis argues that a direct representation of the traumatic event with minimal reference to the poet’s own selfhood is the approach most likely to avoid, in the words of Susan Gubar, ‘indulging in self-serving forms of recollection’. The critical element concludes by demonstrating how the research undertaken influenced the composition of this thesis’s creative element: a poetry collection with the Hillsborough disaster as its central subject.
The creative element is split into two parts. In ‘After Clare’, the speaker of the poems is often extremely close, if not interchangeable, with myself and explores how a contemporary poet might compose poems about a landscape that has already been portrayed in memorable fashion. In the ‘Hillsborough’ sequence, on the other hand, the poet’s own selfhood is disguised as far as possible. These stylistic choices respond to the conviction – based on the analysis carried out in the preceding chapters – that a focus on the victims of the tragedy is preferable to foregrounding what Wilfred Owen refers to as the poet’s own ‘tearful fooling’.

Date of Award	4 Feb 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	William G Wootten (Supervisor) & Lesel D Dawson (Supervisor)