A LOCAL HABITATION: THE SENSE OF PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH POETRY

The sense of place is essentially a post-Romantic phenomenon. Wordsworth, in particular, emphasized specific locality and the use of observed detail, and developed the meditative lyric, with its characteristic tension between observer and landscape. Later, Hardy's invention of Wessex, an imagined place grounded in reality, brought historical depth and continuity to the sense of place. In the early twentieth century, Pound's development of Modernist techniques--imagism, omission, allusion and juxtaposition--introduced the idea of a landscape constructed from fragments of history, literature, geography and archaeology. The six poets discussed in this dissertation--Charles Tomlinson, Philip Larkin, Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill--illustrate how these themes and techniques have become an essential part of the contemporary sense of place.;Tomlinson is often Wordsworthian in his approach to perception, but, like Bunting, he is one of the few British poets to have learned a great deal from recent American poetics. Philip Larkin, on the other hand, is more rigidly English in outlook, and the differences between the two show quite clearly when the poets confront modern, urban England. Bunting and Hughes are both fiercely Northern in temperament, a loyalty evident in their attitudes towards topography, local history and dialect-derived language. Heaney and Hill can be regarded as poetic archaeologists of place: they dig both into the roots of language and into the literal roots of landscape, piecing together a sense of place from scattered fragments.;The poets chosen demonstrate not only that a post-Romantic sense of place is central to contemporary British poetry, but that it can take many forms. The place has suffered a greal deal during the past two hundred years, and many poets feel that it is their job to reconstruct a sense of wholeness from loss and fragmentation.