ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out Gillian Clarke’s post-Romantic aesthetics as a palimpsest-like practice of layering. Layered textures – of landscapes, experiences, language, and allusion – form a key principle of Clarke’s poetry, which displays inheritances from Welsh poets but also reacts to English Romanticism – including English poets’ perspectives on Wales – in its meditations on selfhood, place, nation, and nature. The chapter first introduces Clarke’s position in Welsh creative communities and outlines her account of the workings of the imagination in her essay volume At the Source (2008). It then turns to poems from Letter from a Far Country (1982), Selected Poems (1985), Letting in the Rumour (1989), and The King of Britain’s Daughter (1993), covering a period when Clarke’s writing frequently addressed women’s roles in the context of Welsh cultural and regional identities while reflecting on its own poetic lineage. Close readings illuminate the various strata of Clarke’s relationship with the past. They demonstrate her scepticism towards a perceived Anglocentric and masculine Romantic ideology of lyric expression but equally reveal allusions and affinities that connect Clarke’s lyricism with works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, and other Romantic poets.
