"So I changed tack…all an act": Subversive gender representations in Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife (1999) and Rapture (2005)

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2015
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Award
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eng
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Abstract
The poetry of Britain’s present Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has been described by her critics as admiringly accessible yet lacking in complexity. Most notably, Simon Britton and Geoffrey Hill posit that Duffy’s form is careless—that her diction is too casual, her syntax, riddled with clichés. However, where Britton and Hill take issue, other critics, such as Deryn Reese Jones, find value, praising the comprehensibility of Duffy’s common language for opening her poetry to a wide audience. In building upon the current conversation surrounding her work, this essay aims to expose how Duffy empowers the female voice through use of techniques that, ironically, stem from a tradition that historically hindered female narrative authority. This essay draws upon sources that are concerned with such poetics of the past, thereby allowing for intertextual analyses of Duffy’s The World’s Wife (1999) and Rapture (2005). Discussion of common language in the romantic lyric, the importance of performing hermeneutic readings, as well as floral imagery and the bawdy in Shakespeare’s works, all promote comparisons between Duffy’s contemporary work and that of her predecessors, contributing to the essay’s conclusion, that her clichés and easy reading are, in fact, part of a deceivingly simple, subversive strategy. Duffy’s ability to simultaneously situate herself in, and twist, the techniques of her male predecessors, promotes the agency of her female narrators, thereby demonstrating her own claim to poetic authority.
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