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Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry

Part of the Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Book Series

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45958-5

ISBN: 978-3-319-45957-8

Publisher: Springer International Publishing - Springer Journals

Mar 21, 2017

Available

Introduction: ‘Here We All Are to Greet You’

Roberts, Luke

Pages: 1 –16

[This introductory chapter begins by describing the controversy surrounding MacSweeney’s death in May 2000, played out in an obituary, an article, and the letters pages of The Guardian. It goes on to discuss the contestation of MacSweeney’s legacy in criticism, before outlining the methodology of...
Available

Books, Devices, Verbal Chicanery, and Cosmological Range

Roberts, Luke

Pages: 17 –49

[This chapter is structured around close readings of three early poems and sequences. First, ‘Dr Zhivago, Love Poem’ (1966), which shows the thematic interest in law, authority, and fantasy which would prove fundamental to his later writing. Second, a sequence written at the Sparty Lea Poetry...
Available

Strikers with Poems: From Green Cabaret to Black Torch

Roberts, Luke

Pages: 51 –82

[This chapter begins with a description of the strike undertaken by dockworkers and seamen in the summer of 1966 and goes on to discuss MacSweeney’s first sequence ‘The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother’, privately circulated in 1967. These poems were republished in 1968 by the major...
Available

Seeing and Being Seen: Serial Poetry and Surveillance, 1970–75

Roberts, Luke

Pages: 83 –109

[Chapter 3 reads across seven sequences MacSweeney wrote between 1970 and 1975, detailing his formal experiments and literary allusions to English Romanticism and the New American Poetry. Through an extended interpretation of Brother Wolf (1972), this chapter considers MacSweeney’s portrayal of...
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Into the Dangerous Decade: 1979–82

Roberts, Luke

Pages: 111 –137

[This chapter analyses the obscene and controversial depictions of Margaret Thatcher in MacSweeney’s three major sequences Colonel B, Jury Vet, and Liz Hard. It begins by examining manuscript material and goes on to elaborate the political context of the turn of the decade. Colonel B takes as one...
Available

Class and Representation: From Wild Knitting to Hellhound Memos

Roberts, Luke

Pages: 139 –170

[Looking at three sequences—Wild Knitting, Ranter, and Hellhound Memos—this chapter is about what happened to MacSweeney during the long crisis of the 1980s. The reading of Wild Knitting focuses on MacSweeney’s ambivalent depiction of the unemployed, with reference to Marx’s famous description of...
Available

Pearl on the Law

Roberts, Luke

Pages: 171 –199

[This chapter looks at the poetry MacSweeney wrote during the 1990s, including the highly acclaimed Pearl and The Book of Demons along with the controversial and unpublished Blood Money. The chapter argues that Pearl should be viewed as the culmination of a sequence of writing begun with Black...
Available

Conclusion: Nostalgia for the Future

Roberts, Luke

Pages: 201 –212

[The conclusion begins by discussing the modernist and socialist architect Berthold Lubetkin’s post-war plans for the Peterlee New Town Project, a projected miners’ utopia in County Durham. It goes on to discuss The Book of Demons as a work bruised by decades of political defeat, invested in...

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