Output details

The Illuminated Dreamer

Much of Professor Paul Hardwick's published research is concerned with interpretations and appropriations of the past, as applied to questions of cultural and individual identity, whether this be regional identity, spiritual identity or political identity. 'The Illuminated Dreamer' (published under the pen name Oz Hardwick) approaches these subjects through a series of mainly lyric poems which address individual identity through appropriations of ‘the mythic’ – in its most nebulous form – in contemporary culture.

Informed by medieval and medievalist themes and forms, the collection is bracketed by poems on the creative act, the first of which draws on the erotic tropes of the mystical tradition, the second on the elegiac mode of The Exeter Book, with particular reference to The Seafarer. In between, the past and present are in constant dialogue, whether through the direct utterance of the fourteenth-century panel in ‘Wood Fox’ or the silent, chained ape which surveys the fallen world from ‘Oude Kerk, Amsterdam'.

The cumulative effect of the collection echoes the allegorical pilgrimage – Piers Plowman remains an implicit presence – through a landscape which is both geographical, as sites of medieval significance bleed into the allusive terrain of an imagined New World, and symbolic. Inhabited by iconic figures from folklore and popular culture, the poems ultimately speak to the possibility of creative renewal for, as Chaucer noted, ‘out of the old fieldes, as men saithe, / Cometh al this new corne fro yere to yere; / And out of old bookes, in good faithe, / Cometh al this new science that men lere.’ The poems thereby offer a creative interrogation of tropes of cultural identity refashioned for the 21st century.