A Mind Habitually Oblique: the Poetry of M. K. Joseph

Abstract

This is a reading of the poetry of M.K. Joseph, about which little has been written, although commentators have acknowledged the erudition and technical accomplishment of the poems. Joseph’s poetry reflects his scholarly interest in various literatures, an abiding concern with moral philosophy, and his religious beliefs, but in a way that is speculative, and accommodating rather than doctrinaire; and often with a result that eludes explication, although the language of the poems is apparently plain and direct. The philosophical underpinnings of the poetry are examined, and the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism is used to analyse Joseph's habit of thought as it is exhibited in the poems, and the way he typically reconciles or accommodates divergent perspectives, values and systems of thought, working towards compromise or reconciliation. The same framework is applied also to the technical features of the poetry, and the rhetorical means by which Joseph constructs the diversity of voices that can be heard among the poems. The idea of dialogism is used to explore the interactions among these voices, and also the way superficially singular voices prove to have been compounded or synthesised out of diverse elements. Particular attention is given to the expressive manipulation of metre. The opening chapter demonstrates the approach to be taken, using a group of typical poems. chapter 2 turns to Joseph's framework of though, surveying his critical writing about The arts, and poetry in particular, and also his religious beliefs. The rest of the thesis examines roughly chronological groupings of thematically related poems: wartime poems, poems about literature and painting poems about belief, and poems dealing with post-war and Cold-War anxieties. The last two chapters are devoted to a detailed reading of the poem sequence "The Lovers and the City", incorporating the several strands of thematic interpretation and technical analysis that are developed in the earlier chapters.