Proving poetry: Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, now

This dissertation situates the work of two major British writers at the intersection of competing cultural fields. Traditionally locked in an antithetical binary, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin have undergone similar reception histories of scandal and subsequent "rescuing," in which their existence as popular icons and cultural signifiers threatens their identities as poets and the autonomy of their work. This dissertation examines the exchanges between poetic texts and other genres, disciplines, and cultural practices, paying special attention to how the poetry negotiates an increasingly interdependent relationship (i.e. an "economics of linguistic capital") between "high art" and popular culture. This approach allows one to get beyond the traditional understanding of Larkin and Hughes as polar opposites and see them instead as writers produced by, and producing within, a shared moment of cultural anxiety, in which the elusive and ever-thinning line between genuine artistic production and literary posturing is rigorously tended to. This dissertation therefore seeks out the strategies by which poetry attempts to prove itself authentic as a site of knowledge and identity production. Coupling Foucault's approach to authorship as a discursive function with Bourdieu's social critique of aesthetic judgment, this dissertation addresses the processes of categorization to which Hughes and Larkin are bound, as well as the role such classifications play in the "game" of social distinction.;Chapter 1 of this dissertation---"The Hughes/Larkin Phenomenon"---argues the existence of a Hughes/Larkin binary as a discursive function used to facilitate aesthetic judgment and, in a limited way, stabilize a relatively unstable practice. This chapter reveals in the textual origins of the Hughes/Larkin binary a response to an increasing anxiety concerning poetic authenticity, and shows through a variety of sources the mutually defining function performed by Hughes and Larkin. Chapters 2 and 3, grouped under the heading "Non-Poetics," focus specifically on the poetic texts as sites of cultural negotiation, which manifest a "non-poetic" language or presence in order to realize and revalidate its poetic other; Chapter 2---"Authoring the Ordinary"---examines a dialectic of poetic language and "ordinary" speech, and its function in organizing social relations and identities, in three Philip Larkin poems; Chapter 3---"Private Letters for the Public"---examines Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters as a poetic accommodation of popular discourse, a textual site in which a private and public sense of authorship meet head to head. Chapters 4 and 5, grouped as "Reauthorizations," consider Hughes and Larkin as they are currently being negotiated within a flurry of posthumous publications: Chapter 4---"The Symbolic Work of Hughes's Collected Poems"---locates within Hughes's Collected Poems and its reception an attempt to deflect biographical interest and resurrect a lineage of English "greats"; Chapter five---"Larkin Reproduced"---argues the existence of a specialized discourse surrounding Larkin that attempts to reauthorize him as an autonomous creator of meaning.