Figures of Memory addresses the important, but neglected, link between poetry and memory. Through incisive readings of ten English and Irish poets from Romanticism to the present, it shows how poets have engaged imaginatively with both the possibilities and pitfalls of memory. Linking poets' uses of personal, aesthetic, and collective memory, as well as history, it provides a new critical template for understanding how literature engages with the past. Special emphasis is given to the use of figural language, and how poetry reaches into the past through use of concrete places and abstract, spatial models. Figures of Memory not only includes major contributions on how Victorian, Modernist and contemporary eras relate in complex ways to problems of memory, but also features original interpretations of both canonical and more recent texts by poets such as William Wordsworth, Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, J.H. Prynne, and Alice Oswald.