Sexualité et religion dans l’œuvre de Peter Redgrove

Abstract

A friend and unjustly overshadowed rival of Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove composed a vast body of novels and poems that have recently become the subject of critical attention in Britain. His novels have just been published again and the critic Neil Roberts is currently completing a biography of the writer. Criticism of Redgrove’s poetry has focused on his paeans to femininity and maternity, his championing of eccentricity, his melding of poetry and science, his exploration of taboos, his mythologizing of olfaction. Tribute has also been paid to his inordinate recourse to defamilarisation techniques. This article explores a critically neglected aspect of Redgrove’s poetry: the importance of the father figure in his psycho-sexual dramatisation of the numinous, and the sacramental hyperbolic language that accompanies it.

Keywords

• P. Redgrove
• defamiliarisation
• eccentricity
• femininity
• hyperbole
• maternity