Dr. Jim Persoon 

Eng 651: Modern British Poetry—the Laureateship

This summer we will be reading three quite engaging popular poets who have given new life in the last thirty years to the institution of the Poet Laureate, which before them was often a haven for safe, sometimes silly, second-rate talents. The first is Philip Larkin, often known as “the people’s laureate.” His great topic was losing, and his typical stance was that of the loser. He turned down the Laureateship in 1984 because of ill health, though I think the real reason is that it would have made him a winner, depriving him of his poetic inspiration—as he said, “deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” He is most famous, I’m afraid, for a ditty every British school boy knows: 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad, 

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had,

And add some extra, just for you.

The second is Ted Hughes, who on his death in 1998 published Birthday Letters, poems written over a period of 35 years to his wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath, which showed how she had haunted him since her suicide in 1963 (a death which helped to make her a feminist cultural icon): 

You told me

Everything but the fairy tale. Step for step 

I walked in the sleep 

You tried to wake from.

The third is the current laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, the first woman laureate in its 400-year history. Her work is witty, sometimes snarky, always thought-provoking, as in her poem “Valentine”:  “Not a red rose or a satin heart/I give you an onion.”

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,

possessive and faithful

as we are,

for as long as we are. . . .

Take it.

Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,

if you like.

Lethal.

Its scent will cling to your fingers,

cling to your knife. 

We’ll also look at some of the influences on these poets, writers such as Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. [Incidentally, the English department now has in place a 4-week study abroad program each May that is open to graduate students. This course would be a nice preparation for such a visit.]