9. UA Fanthorpe – A Minor Role

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we read through UA Fanthorpe’s ‘A Minor Role’, focusing in particular on: (i) the kind of poetry that UA Fanthorpe writes, and a recommendation of another poem you might like to read; (ii) the echoes of T. S. Eliot in this poem, especially ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (“I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be”); (iii) what is happening in the poem – the speaker’s (unspecified) illness; (iv) more echoes of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ – “Sustaining the background music of civility” (Fanthorpe), “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” (Eliot); (v) Fanthorpe’s expressive use of vocabulary – “lassitude” (also seen in Ros Barber’s ‘Material’), “torpor”, “ceremonial” delays; and (vi) the moralising line from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex – and Fanthorpe’s emphatic rejection of it (“No it wouldn’t!”).

Course

In this course, John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores the twenty poems that make up the ‘Poems of the Decade’ cluster for A Level English Literature (Edexcel). Each poem is read in detail, with a short commentary highlighting aspects of language, style, themes, motifs, and so on. In the case of Patience Agbabi’s ‘Eat Me’, for example, we think about the extent to which we can identify the speaker of the poem with the author herself, the question of whether the couple of the poem can be decribed as happy, and the influence of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (1836) and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865). When we come to Simon Armitage’s ‘Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass’, we think about the theme of man versus nature, the concept of ‘anthropomorphisation’, and the final lines of the poem in which it has become clear that the pampas grass has beaten the chainsaw. And so on for the whole selection.

The poems discussed in this course are:
1. Patience Agbabi – Eat Me
2. Simon Armitage – Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass
3. Ros Barber – Material
4. John Burnside – History
5. Julia Copus – An Easy Passage
6. Tishani Doshi – The Deliverer
7. Ian Duhig – The Lammas Hireling
8. Helen Dunmore – To My Nine-Year-Old Self
9. UA Fanthorpe – A Minor Role
10. Vicki Feaver – The Gun
11. Leontia Flynn – The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled
12. Roderick Ford – Giuseppe
13. Seamus Heaney – Out of the Bag
14. Alan Jenkins – Effects
15. Sinéad Morrissey – Genetics
16. Andrew Motion – From the Journal of a Disappointed Man
17. Ciaran O’Driscoll – Please Hold
18. Adam Thorpe – On Her Blindness
19. Tim Turnbull – Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn

Lecturer

John McRae is Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies and Teaching Associate in the School of English at Nottingham University, and holds Visiting Professorships in China, Malaysia, Spain and the USA. He is co-author of The Routledge History of Literature in English with Ron Carter, and also wrote The Language of Poetry, Literature with a Small 'l' and the first critical edition of Teleny by Oscar Wilde and others.