YORKSHIRE POETRY, 1954-2019: LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, CRISIS

This thesis explores the writing of a large selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century East and West Yorkshire poets, making a case for Yorkshire as a poetic place. The study begins with Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, and concludes with Simon Armitage, Sean O’Brien and Matt Abbott’s contemporary responses to the EU Referendum. Aside from arguing the significance of Yorkshire poetry within the British literary landscape, it presents poetry as a central form for the region’s writers to represent their place, with a particular focus on Yorkshire’s languages, its identities and its crises. Among its original points of analysis, this thesis redefines the narrative position of Larkin and scrutinizes the linguistic choices of Hughes; at the same time, it identifies and explains the roots and parameters of a fascinating new subgenre that is emerging in contemporary West Yorkshire poetry. This study situates its poems in place whilst identifying the distinct physical and social geographies that exist, in different ways, throughout East and West Yorkshire poetry. Of course, it interrogates the overarching themes that unite the two regions too, with emphasis on the political and historic events that affected the region and its poets, alongside the recurring insistence of social class throughout many of the poems studied here. Moreover, this study reflects on contemporary Yorkshire poetry alongside the rhetoric surrounding Britain’s decision to Leave the European Union in June 2016. It comprises the first substantial study of several contemporary poets, whilst conducting the first detailed literary and sociolinguistic examination of poetic responses to the Brexit crisis, as ongoing in 2019. Ultimately, this thesis concludes with substantial in-depth evidence to argue not only Yorkshire’s validity as a poetic place, but that East and West Yorkshire (historically the places of Larkin and Hughes) are, to this day, poetic in their own right.