This poem of Maud or the Madness is a little Hamlet, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age. He is the heir of madness, an egoist with the makings of a cynic, raised to a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature, passing from the height of triumph to the lowest depth of misery, driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has loved, and, when he has at length passed through the fiery furnace, and has recovered his reason, giving himself up to work for the good of mankind through the unselfishness born of a great passion. The peculiarity of this poem is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters.(1)
Reading in 1964 to the ‘teenagers and [..] miscellaneous provincials’ who composed Morden Tower’s debut audiences, Basil Bunting was struck by their (in)capacity to pay attention. These youngsters, he found, ‘were not hindered by the difficulties that annoy their elders’. Instead, ‘they took poetry as poetry – a nice noise – without questions about its “meaning”’. Placing the poem into its first reception contexts – Morden Tower on 22 December 1965 – this article traces how Briggflatts forms a larger experiment with such poetic (in)attention, consciously complicating the attentional and meaning-making processes of its listening audiences.
This essay examines the engagement of the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen with the works of Jane Austen. Through a reading of Bowen’s extensive critical writing on Austen as well as of her second novel, The Last September (1929), the essay demonstrates how Bowen’s engagement with Austen shaped her own writing and conception of the novel, particularly with regard to the use of dialogue and the depiction of Englishness. The essay also briefly considers the ways in which this process is exemplary of broader developments in the period.
