Witnessing and Memorialising the Holocaust in the Poetry of Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison

This thesis interprets poetry written by those who did not experience events of the Holocaust first-hand, by using cultural theory to show how poets respond to the ethical demands of Holocaust representation. My methodology brings together critical analysis of poetry and theoretical methods of understanding Holocaust memory. My poetic corpus is comprised of Holocaust poems by Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison. Analysing these poems enables me to test the boundaries, clashes, and compatibilities of theoretical frameworks. These include ideas about visual forms of memory from James Young, Marianne Hirsch, Alison Landsberg, and Georges Didi-Huberman, ideas about the communication of Holocaust trauma by Dominick LaCapra, Jean Améry, and Max Silverman, and ideas about the role of poetry in Holocaust commemoration by Jahan Ramazani and Susan Gubar. I tease out the different representational techniques employed by the poets through this hybrid interest in Holocaust theory and poetic form.

In the individual chapters, I investigate the largely unstudied work of Silkin, considering the centrality of empathy in his Holocaust poems. I examine depictions of plants which act as carriers of Holocaust memory and the Jewish characters of ‘The People’ who bear witness to their trauma. I analyse Hill’s elegiac mode of Holocaust commemoration. I argue that he depicts photographs from the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in The Triumph of Love, and interpret the reimagining of perpetrator images in his attempt at ethical memorialisation. I explore Harrison’s film/poem The Gaze of the Gorgon as a palimpsestic form engaged in a rewriting of traumatic pasts. I analyse his use of archival sources and objects of cultural memory in the destabilising of historical narratives. My theoretical method brings to light the centrality of artefacts and remnants to the poetic practices of Silkin, Hill, and Harrison, in their creation of hybrid forms of Holocaust representation.