This dissertation explores the poetry of Tom Raworth from his first collection, The Relation Ship (1966) to the publication of his long poem ‘West Wind’ in 1984. It investigates in particular the poetry’s embeddedness in the artistic, cultural and socio-political contexts of the sixties, seventies and eighties. The thesis has a dual impetus: to characterise the work more fully, reassessing its critical reception and periodisation, as well as to argue for its ongoing relevance to the fields of ‘late modernism’, twentieth-century leftist poetry and wider studies of the Anglo- American avant-garde after 1968. I find the work’s significance to be readable in its sheer singularity, its democratic spirit and anarchically surrealist outlook on the world it registers. These qualities, I argue, add up cumulatively to produce a sense of the poetry’s politics, what I call its minimally political poetics, which is read as the determining dynamic for the work at large. Nevertheless, the thesis notes that the poetry deliberately defies general characterisation and, indeed, defies generalisation as such. A singular resistance to traditional academic decryption - as ‘close-reading’ or ‘interpretation’ – is one central tenet, in other words, to a highly original poetics the dissertation is tasked with elucidating.

The first chapter provides a critical redescription of what counts as prose within Raworth’s work. This is achieved through renewed attention to his 1969 ‘novel’ and lesser-known poems in prose from the same period, filtered through the lens of his contemporary opinions (gleaned from extensive and unpublished correspondence) of what he regarded as authentic social realism in fiction. I argue his relationship to literary prose at this time was fundamental to his decision to write at all and lastingly influenced the style in which he began to do so. The second chapter maps the intellectual and artistic ‘scene’ Raworth emerged into as a writer and printer in the early sixties, reading his relation to certain subcultural formations as decisive for his later thinking. Some exemplary early poems are examined for their resistance to the category ‘poem’ in order to enlarge the range the generic tag is conventionally understood to include. The result sees many poems deliberately failing an ‘adequacy’ test they themselves set the terms of. The third chapter deals with Ace (1974) and its formal affiliation to New York School writing before instead interrogating South America as an unexplored line of influence on his work in the early 1970s. The fourth chapter takes in the 1980s, making legible Thatcherism’s hostilities in Raworth’s poems and noting how that climate influenced a move towards more explicitly politicised work: major pieces ‘West Wind’ and Writing are considered alongside comparable poems from the same era by John James, Barry MacSweeney and Bill Griffiths. The Coda provides a brief speculative note on, and historical grounding to, one of Raworth’s most elusive phrases about ‘never’ having ‘reached the centre, where art is pure politics.'