This study is in two parts: a collection of poetrywith a commentary, followed by a critical dissertation. The dissertation examines how language can be used to represent our experience of the perceptions derived via our senses; how to ‘tell the truth about things’ (Randall Jarrell). This in turn forces the poet to identify what those ‘things’mean to the observer: the nature of our perceptions and the status of objects in the external world. My own poetry explores how I understand my own sense perceptions, what relation I find between my experience of those perceptions and the world from which they are derived, and how I can represent this knowledge in poetry.
This issue relates to the same concerns surrounding the dispute between the Movement andcounter-culture poets and the poetry wars of the 1970s. A brief survey of this period reveals an interesting paradox related to the notion of origins, authenticity and transcendence in the work of J. H. Prynne. I take this paradox as the starting point for my examination of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Roy Fisher and Paul Muldoon’s collection, Why Brownlee Left.
My study reveals the role that imagination plays, in combination with sense perceptions, in fashioning the worldview of these poets. Factual or scientific information alone will not provide the means to achieve this. Imagination, operating through the exercise of choice, creates meaning and presence in the poetic text, which is not a reflection of the world but a new object existing within it. This conclusion coincides very closely with William Carlos Williams’s observations on imagination and creativity. In addition, my
3examination reveals the extent to which ecocritical thinking regarding the inter-relatedness of human and non-human worlds is relevant to these issues. My findings apply to all three poets in this study, as well as to Prynne, but with differences in the form in which this imaginative exercise of choice is manifested.