Abstract
The poetry of David Harsent, a contemporary English poet, navigates a difficult territory of violence, grief, and memories. Yet these themes, which at least since T. S. Eliot's Waste Land have often been rendered by a multiplicity of faltering voices, take on a rather traditional form in Harsent's writing. Ever since the collection A Violent Country (1969), through the books News From The Front (1993) or Legion (2005) to the Fire Songs (2014), Harsent has been developing uncomplicated narratives and using regular meters and bold rhyme patterns, creating a conspicuous contrast between the disturbing topics and musical beauty of his poems.
Many Harsent's poems can be roughly categorised as elegies or ballads (one being simply called Ballad). This is not surprising, since throughout different interviews, Harsent gives hints on the reasons behind this inclination towards what I call-for the lack of a better term-traditional lyricism. He regularly mentions The Oxford Book of Ballads by Arthur Quiller-Couche he was given by his grandmother and read when he was injured as child, creating a myth about himself as an author. In my analysis, I would also like to clarify to what degree can this collection of works be treated as an actual formal influence.
Apart from the lyric genres, Harsent widely draws on the prose genres of legends and folktales. Their most important property is that they feature a memorable character whose fate is supposed to teach the readers a lesson, be it a simplification of a theological truth or a piece of advice for their everyday lives. An excellent example of such a text is the rhymed modern legend Fire: a song for Mistress Askew from the Fire Songs, about the martyr and one of the earliest English female poets Anne Askew, which depicts the last moments of her suffering that are interwoven with unedited quotations in Early Modern English by the bishop John Bale. All the above genres share heightened emotionality and formal clarity. I read Harsent's use of traditional poetic devices and rhetorical strategies as an early example of metamodernism with an ironic twist. Using the central term of Shklovsky's formalism, ostranenie (defamiliarization), I aim to show that Harsent's revival of premodernist forms and their imposition on serious topics as those of war or any form of everyday suffering can be as violent and defamiliarizing as their very destruction once was.