Lochie Springett

Thesis title: Life Work: Lateness and the Long Poem after Whitman

Supervisor: Hannah Sullivan

Most of my research centres around questions of literary form, with a particular focus on the relationship between writing and ageing. At its core, my DPhil considers a series of poets, from Walt Whitman to Jorie Graham, who each investigate what it might entail for a poem to be life-long. Underpinning these concerns is an abiding interest in the overdetermined category of 'the long poem', and the ways that a renewed focus on temporal length – both at the scale of the line, and the composition as a whole – might offer a more useful framework. Alongside Whitman and Graham, some other writers of particular interest include Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Jay Wright, Bernadette Mayer, and Nathaniel Mackey. 

Relatedly, I also research the poetry of Mackey's sometime collaborator, Kamau Brathwaite. To this end, I am currently working on an article that investigates Brathwaite's life-long tendency to revisit the poems he wrote as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early 1950s.

In addition to my work on poetry and poetics, I maintain a broader interest in all things long-form, from Dorothy Richardson’s novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967) to the distended timeframes involved in letter-writing.  

Research interests: Book history, genetic criticism, 'late style', life writing, modernism, poetics, prosody, senescence and ageing, serial forms.