“When I’m 73 and in Constant Good Tumour”: Poetic Responses to Ageing from Jenny Joseph to Fleur Adcock

Abstract

Modern poetry frequently challenges conventional narratives of ageing as uneventful and conformist through temporalities that undercut familiar archetypes, reject expected performativities, and upend canonical chronotopes, thereby questioning reductive chronological prisms through which ageing is commonly defined. Comical carnivalesque visions by Jenny Joseph (“Warning” (1961)) and Roger McGough (“Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death” (1967)) celebrate ageing as a liberation from oppressive social norms, presenting the ageing body as the ultimate counterculture fetish that eludes social control. Wistful vignettes by Ted Hughes (“Old Age Gets Up” (1979)) and Margaret Atwood (“A Visit” (1995)) foreground the difficulties of narrating ageing from an outward perspective, and experiment with nonconformist chronotopes to give ageing a voice. Confessional poems like Fleur Adcock’s “Mrs Baldwin” (2013) invite the reader to experience ageing vicariously by creating a collage-like fragment whose circularities align ageist signification with human signification at large. Collectively, these poems underscore the importance of moving beyond reductive lenses on ageing, and highlight the difficulties of narrativizing a process which by its very nature upends conventional modes of representation.

Keywords

• jenny joseph
• roger mcgough
• ted hughes
• margaret atwood
• fleur adcock