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.

James Joyce and T. S. Eliot advanced a ‘double consciousness’ in their approach to myth that pervades Tony Harrison’s Metamorpheus(2000) and Sandeep Parmar’s Eidolon(2015). This double consciousness is not unique to modernism, but it intensifies in early twentieth-century literature, inscribing modernists’ desire to explore what Michael Bell describes as ‘the problematics of history under the sign of myth’. The mythic counterpointing that underpins Harrison’s work indicates that his modernist influences have been neglected by critics and poets such as Simon Armitage, eager to position his poetry as eschewing unnecessary complexity. However, whereas Metamorpheus and Eidolon would both be symptomatic of metamodernist literature in Andre Furlani’s understanding of the term, it is only in Eidolon that the legacies of ‘fractured’ writing allow for an enigmatical account of Helen, one of the most elusive figures in Greek myth.