Former English professor Emily Taylor Merriman lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Adrian Grafe is a professor of English at Artois University in France. He was an associate professor at the Sorbonne for 10 years, has published broadly on poetry, and was named a Fellow of the English Association in 2011.

“recommended”—Choice.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgments     IntroductionAdrian Grafe and Emily Taylor Merriman      I. STATING THE CASE1. Poetry as “Open Diagnosis”Marc Porée      II. STRICTLY PUBLIC?2. Public Faces in Private Places: Messianic Privacy in Cambridge PoetryRobert Archambeau      3. Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate: The Beast and the SovereignLaurel Peacock      4. R.S. Thomas: Poet of the ThresholdDaniel Szabo      5. Performing, Transforming, and Changing the Question: Patience Agbabi—Poet Enough!Catherine Murphy      6. Strictly Private? Stephen Romer’s “Les Portes de la Nuit”Adrian Grafe      III. HEANEY AND THE PRIVATENESS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION7. Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney in the Birch Grove ofDaniella Jancsó      8. “We men ... must vanish”—Heaney’s Wordsworth: Toward the Configuration of an Event FormPascale Guibert      9. “Imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual”: The Fusion of the Private and the Public in Seamus Heaney’s PoeticsTorsten Caeners      IV. THE NORTH, THE NATION, AND THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE DIVIDE10. “Inwardness” and the “quest for a public poetry” in the works of Tony HarrisonCécile Marshall      11. Private Voice and Public Discourse: A Poetics of Northern DialectClaire Hélie      12. Public or Private Nation: Poetic Form and National Consciousness in the Poetry of Tony Harrison and Geoffrey HillCarole Birkan-Berz      13. Geoffrey Hill: “A public nuisance”Emily Taylor Merriman      V. TAKING STOCK : FROM PERSONAL ENCOUNTER TO RITUAL14. The Public Intimacy of the Poetry of SorrowCatherine Phillips      About the Contributors      Index