'Whatever': God as absent presence in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, and Charles Wright

This study analyzes how poets Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, and Charles Wright address aspects of religion, especially the twentieth-century conflict between Christianity and secularism and the idea that God is absent or "dead." I demonstrate that Hill, Walcott, and Wright find different but related solutions to their common artistic problem: how to write great poetry despite the literary, religious, and social divisions that characterize Western society during the shift from the modern to the postmodern era. I argue that these three poets employ the special resources of verse form to make creative contributions to debates about the nature of truth and authority. My approach is interdisciplinary: in combination with a study of poetic technique, I look at religious history and recent Western theology, especially as the latter relates to Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction.;The opening three chapters introduce the literary and religious ideas that Hill, Walcott, and Wright have absorbed, or resisted, and which their poems have embodied and reworked. I also identify some of the particular features of their different national and geographical situations. They were all born into Christian households (Anglican, Methodist, and Episcopalian), but in very different cultures (the Midlands of England, the Caribbean, and the American South). Chapter Two surveys the theological history of the absent God in the twentieth century. Chapter Three reviews previous critical treatment of the concept of God in twentieth-century poetry and describes my own methodology, which demonstrates how linguistic details, especially matters of word choice and verse form, relate to overarching questions in the humanities. The following three chapters are each devoted to one of the poets and his use of a particular poetic resource in a representative publication: Hill and rhythm in The Triumph of Love (1998), Walcott and rhyme in Omeros (1990), and Wright and the poetic line in The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990). I conclude by studying how the poets, as they engage with contemporary society and with religious and literary traditions, make use of the postmodern as well as apophatic connotations of the currently popular word "whatever.".