The Enigmatic Self in Selected Poems of Alice Oswald and Brenda Shaughnessy

Mohammad Shahidul Islam Chowdhury

Department of English, East Delta University, Chattogram, Bangladesh. 

Email: chy.islam.shahidul@gmail.com

Abstract: This paper focuses on the theme of self in the poems of Alice Oswald and her contemporary Brenda Shaughnessy. An English poet Oswald is regarded as a nature poet, a revivalist of the English naturalness, and a Ted Hughesian by nature,
although she does not want to be labeled as a naturalist. Rather, she talks of human nature and explores the self in her poems in relation to its environs and history. Likewise, Shaughnessy, an American poet, considered the most prominent poet after
Sylvia Plath dealing with the self, depicts actuality and its relation to truth in her poems as a means of exploring the extent of that very self, which always proposes a binary determination for human beings. Both the poets, living in two different countries, use
the realm of poetry in the hope of comprehending human nature from variegated perspectives and thus upholding its true self. In doing so, they share their personal experiences and invest them into a broader arena of paradoxical construction of the
self. Thus, both the poets’ works become a tableaux vivant of individuality, society and connectivity. Though their countries have numerous political, economic, and socio-cultural challenges to overcome in the 21st century, these transatlantic poets
manifest the nature of rupture from the past and convergence to the present with an indomitable quest for individual identity, and fashion a quotidian surface. This paper aims to find how the self is searched for and constructed in the two poets’ creative
works despite their geo-political and cultural randomness

Keywords: Postmodern, self, individuality, identity, public/private binary

PDF

References 

Allan, K. (1997). The postmodern self: A theoretical consideration. Quarterly Journal of Ideology20(1), 324.

Armitstead, C. (2016, July 22). Alice Oswald: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/

Chiasson, D. (2012, May 1). The child in time: Brenda Shaughnessy’s our Andromeda. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/.

Dickinson, E. (1976). The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. (Thomas H. J., Ed.).   Faber and Faber.

Ewing, K. P. (1990). The illusion of wholeness: Culture, self, and the experience of inconsistency. Ethos, (18.3), 251–278. https://www.jstor.org/stable/640337/

Hughes, T. (2005). Collected Poems. (Paul Keegan, Ed.). Faber and Faber.

Illouz, E. (1997). Consuming the romantic utopia: Love and the cultural contradictions of capitalism. University of California Press.

Locke, J. (1995). An essay concerning human understanding. Prometheus.

Munck, V. D. (2000). Culture, self, and meaning. Waveland.

Oswald, A. (2016). Falling awake. Norton.

Porter, M. (2014, August). Interview with Alice Oswald. The White Review. https://www.thewhitereview.org/issue/issue-no-11/.

Runcie, C. (2016, July 3). Is Alice Oswald our greatest living poet? The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/.

Shaughnessy, B. (2012). Our Andromeda. Copper Carryon.

Shaughnessy, B. (2016). So much synth. Copper Carryon.

Shaughnessy, B. (2019). The Octopus Museum. Alfred A. Knopf.

Soto, C. (2016). Brenda Shaughnessy interview by Christopher Soto. https://lambdaliterary.org/2016/09/read-an-excerpt-from-nepantla-issue-3-brenda-shaughnessy-christopher-soto-in-conversation.


.