Shades of Authority

What is the relationship between poetry and power? Should poetry be considered a mode of authority or an impotent medium? And why is it that the modern poets most commonly regarded as authoritative are precisely those whose works wrestle with a sense of artistic inadequacy? Such questions lie at the heart of this study, prompting fresh insights into three of the most significant poets of recent decades: Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. Through attentive close reading and the tracing of dominant motifs in each writerOCOs works, James shows how their responsiveness to matters of political and cultural import lends weight to the idea of poetry as authoritative utterance, as a means for speaking of and to the world in a persuasive, impressive manner. And yet, as James demonstrates, each poet is exercised by an awareness of his own cultural marginality, even by a sense of the limitations and liabilities of language itself. While extending our understanding of the distinctive achievements of Lowell, Hill and Heaney, Shades of Authority also investigates their shared concerns and characteristics. This is the first major critical study to attend in detail to the relations between the three poets. And here, too, questions of authority are fundamental: by exploring the ambivalent regard with which Hill has responded to Lowell's poetic practice and by investigating Heaney's literary debt to both Lowell and Hill, this book aims to provoke further thought as to how the shades of literary exemplars can be at once oppressive and empowering."