Abstract:

In the majority of his works, the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has depicted the components of the simplicity surrounding his life, thus “zooming” in to the engaging perspectives of the otherwise unnoticed nuances. However, simply seeking nostalgic elements in descriptions that manifest Armitage’s experience through the representations of the physical environments he depicted would be a reductionist reading of a much more profound reservoir. Attempting to explore the underlying postmodern manifesto, this study provides a stylistic reading of Armitage’s early poetry, arguing that by beginning from familiarising toward a defamiliarisation, Armitage generates a definition of distance as a function and method, which dynamically changes in both spatial and semantic terms. The poet’s postmodern stance might appear controversial as the examples from his early works adopt his autobiographical environment as their setting in an attempt to delineate an organic affiliation with his poems. More notably, they draw direct associations that link particular meanings or historical significations to the locations cited in the poems. Regarding their construction as a postmodern manifesto, Armitage’s analysed poems include postmodern elements such as decentralisation and deconstruction. The poems illustrate that these elements both defamiliarise Armitage’s close environment appearing in his works and exemplify the construction of postmodern poetry. Following their representation accordingly, the study will particularly investigate Armitage’s definition of distance to provide a basis for comprehending the later semantic and stylistic alteration and will be limited to Armitage’s early works from 1980s to the millennium, with a close reading of the concept.