Singing inside the gap : the orphic motif in Don Paterson's poetry

Abstract

The figure of Orpheus—the mythical poet and musician who descends into the underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice—has long served as an archetype for literary and artistic figures in their engagement with mortality and existence. Orpheus’s journey comes to represent the poet’s attempt to transcend the boundaries of life and death, to articulate the ineffable, and to cultivate existential meaning. In contemporary poetry, few writers engage with the Orphic myth as profoundly as Scottish poet Don Paterson, whose work concerns the existential anxieties, limitations of humanity, and the potential of poetry and music to reconcile these issues. This dissertation examines this potential of poetry to reconcile the overarching tensions between the infinite and finite, absence and presence, and death and life. This work demonstrates how Paterson’s oeuvre transforms the Orphic myth into a framework for confronting the modern existential condition, where the poem becomes both a failed redemption [the lost Eurydice] and a fleeting consoling act. This dissertation also explores how Paterson’s engagement with the Orphic myth addresses the most pressing existential anxieties of contemporary times and offers ways of coming to terms with them.