Writing
Speaking with the dead
In Say Something Back, her 2016 collection of poems written after the death of her adult son, Denise Riley writes that ‘The souls of the dead are the spirit of language: / you hear them alight inside that spoken thought’. These lines encapsulate this project’s major objective, to explore how the language of poetry transcribes the voices of the dead, as they ‘alight inside that spoken thought’ of the inner voice. Poems written in periods of grief and mourning display sets of feelings and experiences that are difficult for historians to capture in their full intensity. Poetry has provided a permissible way for grievers to reproduce conversations with those who cannot ‘say something back’ or do so only as internal (or, in some cases, hallucinated) voices. As such, these poems of loss and mourning give privileged access to how people have thought, felt and written about experiences of bereavement from the early eighteenth century to the present. I have written on the personal reasons for embarking on this research topic in the European Journal for Life Writing.
Solitude and medicine
As part of the Solitudes, Past and Present project, I am writing a monograph on the cultural connection between solitude and medicine in the eighteenth century. Solitude has always been considered problematic, and is especially prescient given the current pandemic sending people into various forms of forced isolation. In this project I seek to answer the question: what do we think about when we’re alone? In eighteenth-century poetry, solitude became a means for poets to rise up to the heights of the universe or dive deep into the workings of their own bodies. My project focuses on the figure of the physician, looking at how eighteenth-century physicians turned their thoughts inwards to their own bodies to teach us all about the benefits and perils of being solitary.
To study alone was often the life of the physician in the eighteenth century and solitude led these physicians to turn their eyes inwards and consider the inner mysteries of their bodies. The body was represented as different architectural forms where one could withdraw from society and explore: a church, a labyrinth, a garden. Poetry gave them a means to reconstruct these spaces and unravel the workings of the body for their patients. I look closely at eighteenth-century poems to trace what their rhymes and rhythms can tell us about larger medical questions about what being alone does to our bodies. With concerns rife today about solitariness and its interconnected relationship with health, my research considers the role that poetry and physicians of the past play in our understanding of solitude, and how it can lead to feelings of connectedness.
Poetic pathologies
After being diagnosed with a chronic illness during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, I became increasingly interested in how my research on medical poetry had helped me make sense of diagnoses that have been delivered via letters and phone calls rather than in person. This project looks at the history of diagnosing from a distance, specifically through the depiction of symptoms in poetry to look at the place poetry could hold in our contemporary experiences of medical diagnoses.
Combining personal experience with the history of medicine and literature, it traces how contemporary diagnostic language has distinct parallels with medicine’s poetic past. Through the project I aim to encourage people to consider the history of the language they are presented with in reference to their own health, especially in a time when medical correspondence has become more distanced.