Lyric Thought in J.H. Prynne

Kurian, Abjy P and Ramesh Sankar, Nandini (2017) Lyric Thought in J.H. Prynne. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the dimensions of lyric poetry in the works of the British avant - garde poet J. H. Prynne. In Chapter 1, I elaborate on the difficulty of arriving at a pr ecise definition of the lyric. I review some of the important theoretical discourses surrounding the lyric, but refrain from imposing a generalised and capacious definition. Chapter 2 studies the poetry of J.H. Prynne, focussing on his collection Sub Songs (2010). Through close readings of “As Mouth Blindness” and other poems, I outline an aberrant lyric in the poems: this lyric of indeterminable boundaries takes full advantage of its own malleability to critique its history and putative conventions. It ass imilates and undercuts a lyric historicity to disregard standardised notions of subjectivity, and remains as nonstandard and unresolved a semblance of the lyric as possible. In Chapter 3, I argue that a chronological study of Prynne’s critical prose writin gs beginning with his first and earliest essay “Resistance and Difficulty” (1961) to the more recent book Concepts and Conception in Poetry (2014) will not only help trace the continuing evolution of Prynne’s notion of poetic thought and imagination, but w ill also inform us of a crucial conceptual shift in Prynne’s poetics. This chapter claims that Prynne’s viewpoint proceeds from a dualistic understanding of the world to a more idealistic outlook: he shifts from a vehement insistence on the material priori ty of the objective world (as seen in “Resistance and Difficulty”) to a reconfiguration of thought as a species of abstraction grounded in fictiveness (found in Concepts and Conception ). I undertake an enquiry into the concept of ‘poetic thought’ with an e mphasis on Prynne’s conception of the creative imagination. I argue that, although the fundamental ideas in Concepts and Conceptions are prefigured in “Resistance and Difficulty,” it is in the later texts that Prynne’s utopian vision of the ima gination is entirely develop ed

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