THE WILL OF THE POEM: Religio-Imaginative Variations in the Poetry of James McAuley, Francis Webb, and Vincent Buckley

Abstract

While considering the work of James McAuley, Francis Webb and Vincent Buckley, this thesis concentrates on the religious character of their poetry. Since it assumes that religious language is primarily metaphorical (as distinct from dogmatic), the thesis describes the poetry by way of its religio-imaginative relationships and structures. James McAuley's poetry is religious, not so much because it is Catholic, as because it voyages between despair and hope, believing always in the reasoned will. Francis Webb's poetry, continually discovering glory in dereliction, dramatises the revelatory and redeeming power of the rejected ones - and so works within the 'Suffering Servant' model of 'Isaiah'. While Vincent Buckley's poetry gradually abandons Catholic language in favour of its own 'idiom of sensation', the religious quality of that sensation is discovered more in liminal than in paradisal possibilities - in the way 'holy spaces' are always in some sense expatriate ones. Since each of these poets belongs in the period of Vatican II Catholicism, the thesis next relates their work to that context. Here, however, it searches for imaginative connections and disconnections by setting up its comparison on the basis, not of dogmas, but of models. Finally, the thesis interprets Webb's 'Eyre All Alone' as a search for renewed religious language, returning to its opening assumption that religious language is primarily metaphorical.