This book conducts readings of four contemporary British poets whose work differently probes the politics of intimate speech and space: Geoffrey Hill, W. S. Graham, Don Paterson, and C. H. Sisson. The book explores the ways in which these poets, and their peers, have used address to perform public, political, and economic (as well as personal) work. In speaking to a changing succession of yous (readers and critics, purchasers and fellow writers, friends and adversaries), contemporary poetry repeatedly probes address’s powerfully public remit. The book opens up new ways into thinking about poet ... More

This book conducts readings of four contemporary British poets whose work differently probes the politics of intimate speech and space: Geoffrey Hill, W. S. Graham, Don Paterson, and C. H. Sisson. The book explores the ways in which these poets, and their peers, have used address to perform public, political, and economic (as well as personal) work. In speaking to a changing succession of yous (readers and critics, purchasers and fellow writers, friends and adversaries), contemporary poetry repeatedly probes address’s powerfully public remit. The book opens up new ways into thinking about poetry’s civic clout: in Modernist and contemporary writing; in classical, early modern, and Romantic periods; in aesthetic and commercial spheres. To say you today is to perform historical work, and to rethink national, regional, and personal identities. The book engages an interplay of contemporary, Modernist, Movement, and theoretical voices, and also provides a literary history of address’s public intimacies, reading the contemporary poet as responsive to classical, medieval, early modern, and Romantic traditions. Part I, on W. S. Graham, is attentive to the public nature of the apparently private uses of addresses to known recipients. Part II, on C. H. Sisson, focuses on the use of the lyric you for national and historical negotiations. Part III turns to the late work of Geoffrey Hill, scrutinizing the addresses of the public intellectual, who hails an audience, a body of critics and reviewers, and a book-buying public. A final fourth part brings together these ideas in Don Paterson, whose historically minded addresses repeatedly depict poets provokingly compromised by their manoeuvres in the contemporary poetry industry, and demand you attend to literature’s commercial production, circulation, and reception.