This chapter provides an account of the georgic in modern and contemporary poetry. It begins by illuminating the georgic qualities, however implicit or accidental, in Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary, and proceeds to trace the influence of Hughes’s farming poems on the work of his literary contemporaries and successors, including poets such as Geoffrey Hill, Alice Oswald and Sean Borodale. Locating the georgic in the margins and tattered edges of poems – and the working landscapes they describe – it argues that the agricultural and horticultural poetry of these writers represents if not a georgic revival then at least evidence of its survival in the wake of profound changes in agriculture and the British countryside. The particular strain of the georgic that is sustained by these poets is characterised by a documentary style which remains alive to the haphazard circumstances of outdoor work – a style which is as adaptable as it is enduring.

Chapter 3 proceeds to investigate the concept of enigmatical poetry in the wider context of autonomous art. In ‘Commitment’, an essay written seven years before Aesthetic Theory, Adorno contrasts ‘committed’ literature that perceives art in an ‘extra-aesthetic’ fashion, with ‘drossless works’ that resist the ’spell’ of empirical reality. I therefore engage first with two ‘committed’ works, Tony Harrison’s verse plays THE KAISERS OF CARNUNTUM (1996) and THE LABOURERS OF HERAKLES (1996), in order to focalise Hill’s ruminations over elusive moments of awe and grace in his collection THE ORCHARDS OF SYON (2002). As Hill’s workbooks held in the Brotherton Library indicate, his enigmatical poetry partly responds to Paul Celan’s Atemwende(1967), transforming the Holocaust poet’s later minimalism into Hill’s loquacious assimilation of, and departure from, the modernist antecedent.

Any engagement with David James’s sense of the ‘recrudescence’ of modernism in contemporary literature as a whole must confront the legacies of the so-called ‘poetry wars’ in the 1970s. In this chapter I turn to the repercussions of the ‘poetry wars’ more widely, and their impact on the concept of enigmatical poetry. Sustaining a wariness towards what David Caplan terms these ‘simple oppositions’, I nevertheless register their critical efficacy in distinguishing between enigmatical ‘clowning’ and Don Paterson’s refutation of lyrical indulgence. Rather than vying to register the obsoleteness of these terms, I argue that the persistence of allusive and ellusive poetry in both ‘camps’ indicates that the poetry wars are continuing in a modulated form. The terms require recalibration: Geoffrey Hill’s poetry, like Carol Ann Duffy’s, would normally be described as ‘mainstream’, yet Hill rails against the latter’s version of democratic poetry in his fourth lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Whereas Paterson’s default position is of aesthetic conciliation, Hill’s enigmatical poetry allows our understanding to be challenged and, sometimes, to be defeated.