The Institute proudly announces the 29th in our Occasional Papers series. ‘Transgressing into poetry’: Nationality, Gender and Sexuality in Sonnets from Scotland by Edwin Morgan (1984) and The Price of Stone by Richard Murphy (1985) is written by Professor Tara Stubbs of the University of Oxford.
Prof. Stubbs was a Nominated Fellow at IASH in 2021. She is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education, and an Official Fellow of Kellogg College Oxford. Her two monographs to date are American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–1955: The Politics of Enchantment (2013) and The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion (2020). This short book was informed by her time at IASH, where she worked on Scottish poetry and poetics. Her new project, funded by a British Academy Innovation Fellowship, looks at poetry and the reading public, and will inform a website (entitled 'Demystifying Poetry'), a podcast, and a third monograph with the working title Poetry and Us: poetry and everyday life.
Both Scottish poet Edwin Morgan and (Anglo-)Irish poet Richard Murphy transgressed poetic norms: contradicting the self-declared ‘nationalist’ poets of their respective traditions, making playful use of English language, and treating gender and sexuality in daring ways. These topics (and more) are analysed creatively in their sonnet sequences Sonnets from Scotland (1984) and The Price of Stone (1985). In Sonnets from Scotland, Morgan uses the figure of the alien-as-narrator to comment on Scotland – past, present and future – as a national and even post-national entity. Meanwhile, Murphy’s The Price of Stone, published a year later, reveals the ambiguities and hypocrisies in Irish culture’s often monolithic focus on Catholicism, nationalism, and heterosexuality. In both sequences, the poets use ventriloquism to vocalize multiple perspectives: whereas Morgan channels the viewpoints of aliens newly arrived in Scotland, Murphy speaks ‘through’ the houses and structures of The Price of Stone. Although both sequences have received critical treatment, they have not been analysed in tandem. By pivoting away from dominant critical narratives that have tended to read their poetry according to their respective national identities, and by offering a comparative, transnational reading of the sequences instead, this paper offers fresh readings of the poems – and the poets – which open up the critical discourse.
Morgan and Murphy confront the challenges of national ideology, and their attendant political and cultural expectations, to create sonnet sequences that are both superficially conformist – in their use of traditional forms – and profoundly transgressive, undermining, questioning but also suggesting new ways of looking at their respective national traditions. Both poets advocate, through these sequences, a reconsideration of what ‘national’ poetics might mean, and therefore embrace the possibilities of the transnational and the international.
You can download the Open Access eBook as a PDF here: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Transgressing%20Into%20Poetry%202024%20for%20web.pdf
Image credit: Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland. Hexagonal basalts. Image by Chmee2 on Wikimedia Commons, available via CC BY 3.0 DEED.
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