Double Lyric: Divisiveness and Communal Creativity in Recent English Poetry

Originally published posthumously in 1980, this book centres on 5 British poets – Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, Jon Silkin, Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson – and on the emergence in postwar British poetry of ‘double-lyrics’, poems which have, according to the author ‘become two persons, two ways of expressing and attending critically in dramatic divisive conflict.’ The nature and significance of the double lyric is first demonstrated by close readings of Silkin’s Defence, Tomlinson’s Prometheus and Hill’s In Piam Memoriam. Further chapters focus on the impressive poems which have arisen out of the stress between ideological commitment and imaginative realization in Silkin’s work, the conflict between intuition and perception in the poetry of Tomlinson, and the split between the texture of Gunn’s language and the non-verbal experience evoked in his poems. Finally, Merle Brown presents the last phase of F. R. Leavis’ collaborative literary and cultural criticism as strikingly close to the poetic achievements of Hill, Silkin, Tomlinson and Gunn.

Merle E. Brown who died in 1978 was Professor of English at Denison University and the University of Iowa.