British national identity, topicality and tradition in the poetry of Simon Armitage

Abstract

This paper explores the treatment of British national identity, topicality and tradition in the work of Simon Armitage, alongside broader issues concerning contemporary public poetry in Britain. Armitage, with Carol Ann Duffy, is a major candidate for the position of Poet Laureate in 2009. Both poets have explored constructions of national identity in their work, but it is Armitage who has located himself more assertively within the arena of public, national poetry. Despite his focus on modern life-styles and discourses, and deployment of the mass media to disseminate his poetry into non-literary public spaces, Armitage is particularly sensitive to literary and cultural tradition. Within his work, which is deliberately accessible and contemporary, tradition is always at play in terms of allusion, response and interrogation. In this sense, his poetry both occupies and challenges notions of canonicity and traditional conceptions of British national identity. His recent focus on the theme of conflict also works to expose the inadequacy of mainstream assertions of continuity and meaning when constructing national identity. Armitage places Britishness and British literature within a broader ‘Millennial’ schema of eclipse, destruction and regeneration. For Armitage the recurrence of the theme of conflict throughout literary history both connects the literature of the present day with that of the past and emphasises the future’s instability and eternal lack of resolution. Therefore, Armitage’s modern translations of canonical texts like the Odyssey and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight foreground the fact that disharmony and conflict are, and have always been, national preoccupations