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This thesis engages with the usc of traditional forms, and the role of the lyric subject, in contemporary poetry. It carries out close readings on the work of five contemporary poets (Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Don Paterson and Simon Armitage) and highlights points of intersection and influence between their various oeuvres. The thesis also challenges critical readings which suggest the existence of significant 'generational' differences in Northern Irish poetry from the 1960s onwards, and reveals, by dose attention to the poems themselves, that the critical perception of a clear barrier existing between the formal 'conservatism' of one generation and the 'experimentalism' of the next is unfounded and incorrect. By linking the formal procedures of Paul Muldoon to pre-existing strategies perceptible in the work of two earlier poets, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, it reveals a more fruitful pattern of exchange and influence, and highlights ways in which the two earlier writers, via their manipulation of form and subject, may be seen to engage with 'radical' concepts habitually perceived to be beyond their purview. To this end, the thesis also interacts with theories of form, language and subjectivity. Finally, by extending its reach beyond Northern Ireland to include the work of two emergent British poets, Don Paterson and Simon Armitage, the thesis argues that the formal approaches of Northern Irish poetry continue to exert visible intluence on new writing, thus challenging arguments which suggest these techniques to be redundant, retrograde or site-specific. Using the figure of Paul Muldoon as intermediary, it asserts the significance of Muldoon's formal inheritance to his influence on younger writers, and argues for recognition of the means by which Armitage and Paterson straddle the conventional binaries of labels like 'mainstream' and 'experimental.'

'The Domestication of Wolves' is a collection of poems written, revised, and assembled during the four-year period of my PhD. My writing has been informed and guided by the work of the Confessional poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman, particularly by their construction and deployment of richly figurative language to characterise their inner psyches and intense emotional extremes. By drawing on the knowledge and vocabulary gained from my early career as a neuroscientist specialising in psychiatry within the pharmaceutical industry, I attempt to construct new metaphors and reshape other, more established, metaphors to explore the subjective and intangible qualities of human relationships and psychology. I also employ the Confessional lyric 'I' in my exploration of distance, displacement, rootedness, masculinity, blue-collar work, and class - themes to which I have found myself repeatedly drawn. Additionally, I have included a long poem, 'Three Journeys to Harris', which I wrote while writer-in-residence at the Isle of Harris Distillery. The poem is built by layering metaphors depicting the maturation process of whisky and setting them against images of Harris's unique landscape and culture. While individual poems wrestle with a wide variety of subjects - from a fictional disease that turns limbs to spiders to the contemplation of what it means to be a good son - I hope that the collection as a whole offers the reader a satisfying balance between inner and outer worlds, joy and solemnity, and absence and embodied physicality. In the accompanying critical essay, '"Intimate with Madness": Metaphors for the Mind and Mental Illness in Confessional Poetry', I perform close readings, predominantly of the poetry of Anne Sexton but also of the work of her fellow Confessional poets Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. In reading the work of these poets, I argue that their mental illness is often framed in terms of the conceptual metaphors of 'madness as destination' and 'madness as possession'. I explore how each poet negotiates these two conceptual metaphors in different ways, sometimes adhering to the established connotations and sometimes dissenting from them to create distinct literary effects that convey novel insight into evasive, individual pathologies.