Carol Ann Duffy was born in the Gorbals, Glasgow on 23 December 1955. This was considered an especially impoverished area of the city at this time. She was raised as part of the Roman Catholic faith. Her father worked as an electrician and was a trade unionist who stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate in 1983 for the Labour Party. While Duffy is Scottish, her parents and grandparents were Irish or of Irish heritage, and she grew up in England, where she continues to live. Her family moved to Staffordshire when Duffy was six years old, where she attended Saint Austin’s RC Primary School (1962–1967), St. Joseph’s Convent School (1967–1970), and Stafford Girls’ High School (1970–1974). Her literary talent was encouraged by two English teachers: June Scriven at St Joseph’s, and Jim Walker at Stafford Girls’ High. She studied philosophy at Liverpool University, graduating in 1977. She also holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Hull, Dundee, and Warwick, and she is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Duffy was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009 and held the post until her resignation in 2019. She was the first woman, as well as the first Scottish poet and the first openly-gay poet, to hold the post. Duffy was almost appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1999 after the death of Ted Hughes, but the position was instead awarded to Andrew Motion. Duffy has said she would not have accepted the position at that time, because she was in a relationship with Scottish-Nigerian novelist and poet Jackie Kay, with whom she had recently had a daughter. Duffy and Kay were in a relationship for 15 years; Duffy gave birth to their daughter Ella, whose biological father is the poet Peter Benson.
Duffy was first published in Outposts in 1970 and, during her degree, she had two plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse. She won the National Poetry Competition in 1983; she wrote for The Guardian as a poetry critic from 1988-89, as well as editing the poetry magazine, Ambit. Duffy’s early, formative anthologies include Fleshweathercock (1974), Beauty and the Beast (1977), and Fifth Last Song (1982). Beauty and the Beast was co-authored with her romantic partner and “Liverpool Poets” member Adrian Henri. It is a celebration of their relationship, and it is noteworthy for its anticipation of themes that continue throughout Duffy’s oeuvre: gender and the retelling of myths and fairytales. In Beauty and the Beast, the fairytale is retold with a view to destabilise patriarchy, gender norms, personal relationships and public politics, and traditional storytelling. Instead of the Beast transforming into a handsome prince, Beauty fails to transform into a beautiful princess. Fifth Last Song includes the themes of sex, animal/human binaries, and dreams, which continue through Duffy’s work. It is considered Duffy’s first foray into Surrealist humour, particularly as it can be used to elucidate the human psyche and critique conservative politics. This is also when her ironic twists of established poetic forms begins, something that later becomes typical of Duffy anthologies, which are often peppered with mock-epics and pseudo-sonnets and other such formal subversions.
Standing Female Nude (1985) is widely considered Duffy’s first main poetry collection, and her first contribution to the contemporary British poetry scene. Nye’s review of Standing Female Nude is often cited to indicate the popularity with which she was met: “A clarity, a mixture of charm and truthfulness which breaks the windows of perception in new ways altogether ... a book that marks the debut of a genuine and original poet” (Nye 1986 in Dowson 2016: 9). The fresh take on the dramatic monologue as a form was particularly applauded, as was her thematic focus on the female perspective and capitalism in Thatcher’s Britain. The eponymous poem features a working-class female persona posing for an artist, and it includes many formal and thematic attributes that become typical of Duffy’s style. These include free verse and enjambment, idiomatic language, a command of voice, mockery of the male ego (“He tells me he’s a genius. [...] When it’s finished / he shows me proudly, [...] It does not look like me.” [SFN, l.15, 26-28]). The persona’s starvation and lack of money is due to poverty, while the artist’s is self-imposed and performative. The anthology invites the reader to empathise with the marginalised, in both the poems from the perspectives of the disenfranchised (such as an abused child, a would-be murderer, and an indebted man), and the women’s dramatic monologues (“Girl Talking” and “Comprehensive”), which also function as a challenge to the male domination of the poetic voice.
In Selling Manhattan (1987), Duffy further developed her use of idioms and dramatic monologues with a view to diversifying the voices we hear in popular poetry. The collection is a response to Thatcher’s Britain, and the increasing wealth and quality-of-life disparities between the working classes and the upper classes. For this, she has been labelled the natural successor to Philip Larkin, taking up his reputation as the voice of the people in post-war Britain (Dowson 2016: 5). Duffy later opined that “Poetry has changed since the days of Larkin— he’s a good poet, but poetry has changed for the better. It’s not a bunch of similarly educated men—it’s many voices, many styles. The edge has become the centre” (qtd in Winterson 2009). It is clear, however, that Duffy’s influence is one of the key factors for the changing times and diversified voices in the British poetic scenes. In a review for Selling Manhattan, Scannell noted the stylistic range, from the tenderness of “Warming Her Pearls”, to the disturbing “Psychopath”, calling it “one of the most satisfying new volumes of poetry [...] in the past couple of years [...] The world that is reflected and explored in these poems is almost entirely urban and more or less darkened by poverty, violence, fear, resentment and frustration. [...] [Duffy’s] intelligence, wit and verbal resourcefulness treat these realities in ways that are not depressing” (Scannell 1987/8 in Dowson 2016: 9). The tone of most of the poems in Selling Manhattan can be characterised as ironic and irreverent, although some are more contemplative and quiet.
Selling Manhattan was followed by The Other Country (1990), which is one of Duffy’s most political volumes. The poems within this collection deal with identity and culture, including issues of gender, race, class, and migration. The first poem in the collection, “Originally”, foregrounds an immigrant persona who faces normalised xenophobia in Britain: “Where do you come from / strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate” (TOC, 1). Here, the italics for the Brit and the romanised typeface for the persona’s inner monologue demonstrates the cultural divide between them. The line break between the first part of the stranger’s question and the second part effectively indicates an indelicate pause, which is at once a key part of British cadence and an ironic allusion to British politeness, since the Brit is manifestly rude. The italics of the Brit’s dialogue recalls earlier in the poem, where “Home” is repeated, and “I want our own country” is also italicised – the Brit’s xenophobia has a formal connection to the persona’s homesickness, demonstrating the inexorable connection between the two. British politics and news are also a focus in The Other Country, such as in the parodic “Poet for Our Times” which is a monologue from the voice of a tabloid journalist. Instead of readers, the “Daily Paper” has “punters”, indicating that the journalist’s job is not in journalism, but in sales. Poor journalistic ethics is evident in the headlines, such as “TOP MP PANTIE ROMP INCREASES TENSION” and “DIPLOMAT IN BED WITH SERBO-CROAT. / EASTENDERS’ BONKING SHOCK IS WELL-OBSCENE” (TOC, l.11; 17-18), in which the adage “sex sells” becomes the editorial practice, and the focus is on sex and soap operas, instead of the implied political turbulence. The journalist’s closing ethos “stuff ‘em! Gotcha!” (l.23) is a direct reference to journalism during Thatcherite Britain: The Sun ran the headline “GOTCHA” when the government declared war on the Falklands (4 May 1982). Dowson notes that “Poet for Our Times” is characteristic of Duffy, since it is both specific and enduringly relevant: while Duffy may have been directly critiquing media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s news monopoly (he purchased the broadsheet The Times in 1981 following his ownership of the tabloid papers News of the World and The Sun since 1969), she could not have anticipated the enduring relevance of her poem in light of the 2011 Murdoch phone-hacking scandal (Dowson 2016: 20). Furthermore, the poem anticipates the increasingly sensationalised news practices in the present era of social media and poor digital journalistic ethics. While Duffy typically prefers free verse unless she is subverting a poetic convention, “Poet for Our Time” has a strict structure of five sestets and an ABABAB rhyme scheme. This systematic form suggests that the journalist’s practices are part of a wider systemic issue, and that these practices are supported by the structures in Britain.
Mean Time (1993) marks a shift away from Duffy’s typical ventriloquistic command of voice. Instead, the poems are organised around the central concerns of time, memory, and nostalgia. These themes are crystallised in the titular poem “Mean Time”, which depicts a persona walking in dreary weather, mourning for their lost love. The title is a polyseme, as it refers to both Greenwich Mean Time, which is the centre for the world’s times, and the colloquialism “in the meantime”, to mean the period spent waiting for something. There is also an accusatory tone, as though time is mean, as in cruel – given the mourning in the poem’s content, the title could refer to the cruelty of personified time for passing, which widens the gap between the persona and their lost love. The poem opens with a reference to Daylight Savings Time (DST), while the “unmendable rain”, “bleak streets”, “darkening sky” work as pathetic fallacy to symbolise the persona’s grief (MT, l. 5,6, 9). If DST “could lift / more than one hour from this day” (l. 9-10), the persona would travel back in time to unspeak regretted words and unhear hurtful words. The poem ends with the “shortened days” of DST and the “endless nights” of grief (l. 15-16). Not all of the poems are so emotive in their reflections on the past: “Nostalgia” is concerned with the coining of the word nostalgia by 17th Century Swiss mercenaries, and “Litany” reflects on the insidious and dangerous nature of romanticising the past. The first stanza of “Litany” includes iconic 1950s aesthetics, such as “stiff-haired wives” with “red smiles”, Pyrex, catalogues, and stockings (MT, l. 3-4). This evocation of a romanticised past is immediately critiqued by showing the society’s dangerous attitudes towards women. The wives are in “terrible marriages” and there is a pervasive culture of silence, which means that the women cannot rely on the support of their community – namely, other women in similar situations. The persona calls the whisper network amongst women “the code I learnt at my mother’s knee” (l.14), as these oppressive ideologies are passed down to the younger generation of women. The poem ends with “The taste of soap” (l. 24) as the persona is punished for repeating the swear word that a boy in the playground says to her, functioning as a microcosm for women being punished for speaking out against the men who harm them.
The World’s Wife (1999) and Feminine Gospels (2002) are often coupled together in considerations of Duffy’s oeuvre. This is because they deal with gender relations using Duffy’s trademark ventriloquism, often using famous women from myth and history to give voice to women’s experiences of gender-based oppression. The World’s Wife is generally accepted as Duffy’s magnum opus, in which “wives” (or sisters or female accomplices) of famous men, both historical and cultural, tell their version of the stories. Women from myth include Thetis, Mrs. Icarus, and Mrs. Midas; historical figures (both real and fictitious) include the Kray sisters, Myra Hindley, and Frau Freud; literary women include Mrs. Faust, Mrs. Beast, and Anne Hathaway. These poems unite to demonstrate how women’s histories have been elided from the cultural consciousness, as well as to mock the dominant male ego. It is Duffy’s command of humour and derision in these poems that is especially commended, such as “Mrs. Icarus”:
I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute, grade-A pillock. (WW: l.1-5)
Equally, “Frau Freud” is comprised almost entirely of synonyms for penises, including “ding-a-ling, member, and jock”, “willy and winky”, and “the rammer, the slammer, the rupert” (WW l.2; 4; 9). The poem is a mock-sonnet, deviating from the typical 14 lines with the single word of the fifteenth line “pity …”. This encapsulates the humour and sabotage of the male ego in the anthology. Dowson draws a line from Freud’s infamous question “What does a woman want?” to “Wannabe” by Spice Girls, since a part of 90s Girl Power was characterised by the “brazen female ‘I’” (Dowson 2016: 135-6). In The World’s Wife, women “declare that they do and do not want a man”, but mostly they want to “overturn the atavistic concept of woman as man’s accessory” (Ibid., 136).
Feminine Gospels turns its attention from the relationships between men and women to the relationships between women and other women, and women and the world. The collection encapsulates many of the key concerns that are recurrent throughout Duffy’s works, including: ventriloquistic command of voice; women’s experiences; contemporary culture; the contrast between the mythical/fantastic and the everyday. These themes are exaggerated in the anthology; the title plays upon the idea of “the gospel truth” and in the collection absolute or universal truths become subjective and personal (Judge 2021). The anthology includes some continuations of Duffy’s adaptive concerns in The World’s Wife, such as in “Beautiful”, where the focus is on the legends of women who were deemed to be beautiful by their patriarchal society, specifically Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana. In each of the four sections of the poem, Duffy begins by outlining the mythos surrounding their iconic beauty and ends with their downfall. Similarly, “Work” commands the voice of Mother Earth. Duffy continues to play with established poetic forms in this anthology, including sonnets and mock-epics, although she often returns to free verse as part of her dedication to ventriloquistic command of human speech.
If The World’s Wife is Duffy’s magnum opus and Feminine Gospels is a further development upon it, Rapture (2005) is a turning point in Duffy’s poetics. The collection follows a singular persona as she falls in love and then has her heart broken. Duffy departs from the specifically feminist and female-centred concerns of her previous two anthologies to deal with the universalities of love and loss. While some would contend that, since Sappho, the topics of intimacy and female desire are part of a female poetic tradition, Duffy instead advocates for the universality of Rapture: “I hope that these poems deal with matters common to us all and that they transcend the particulars of any individual life” (PBS Bulletin 2005). Campbell notes “the strange absence of the beloved from this book of love poems” (Campbell 2006: 87). The object of love is not named or given any specific individuality. This choice helps to achieve the above-mentioned universality, but it also speaks to “the poems’ insistence on interrogating their own project” (Campbell 2006: 87) – the anthology is at once a collection of love poems and a meditation upon the nature of love poems. Rapture achieves what the collaborative juvenalia of Beauty and the Beast (1977), co-authored with Adrian Henri, anticipates – an anthology that tells a singular love story from beginning to end, where the end of a love story necessitates that love coming to an end. Rapture is noteworthy for its shift into the 21st century, such as in “Texts”, where the speaker “tend[s] the mobile now / like an injured bird”, “look[ing] for your small xx” (R l.1-2; 7) – the poem’s content, along with its minimal form that recalls SMS messages, firmly places the love in the modern day.
While Rapture is a love story in poetic form, the anthology Love Poems (2009) is dedicated to the tired phrases, cliches, and tropes of love poetry. In “syntax”, for example, the persona avoids saying “I love you” by instead quoting the words of Renaissance poets “I want to say / thee, I adore, I adore thee” (LP l.9). Many poems in the anthology feature ordinary phrases that are used to communicate love or summarise the content of many love poems. Duffy’s language is “often close to the sentences and phrases that we ordinarily use and that we wear thin. This fact can be felt as hampering, for, whether enraptured or disappointed, a lover traditionally yearns for poetic phrasing” (Mullan 2013). As Mullan notes, the line “I want you and you are not here” summarises “baldly” in an “uninteresting sentence” an entire sub-genre of romantic poetry: “Duffy gives a new twist to the poetic lover’s eloquent declaration that words are not up to the job of representing passion” (ibid.). She does this by using sparse, plain language rather than reaching for an eloquence that will inevitably fail to represent love. Love, Love Poems suggests, is the most ordinary human experience.
Of The Bees (2011), Duffy’s contemporary Liz Lochhead writes, “Here are the willed, the skilled, the passionate ecological pleas and exhortations, the other voices – though less frequent than before – the lists and litanies, and, above all, the lovely lyrics of longing and loneliness and sorrow laced with ephemeral moments of almost-acceptance, lightness and grace” (Lochhead 2011). It is the first anthology published by Duffy since her appointment as Poet Laureate, as well as the first written since the death of Duffy’s mother. It is an elegy for the disappearing natural world which we all mourn, as well as the individual losses that affect one’s personal psyche. In the titular poem “Bees”, bees symbolise the act of authorial creation, and extensive alliteration is used to create an onomatopoeia that recalls both the buzzing of bees and the clacking of computer keys: “Here are my bees, / brazen, blurs on paper, / besotted; buzzwords” (Bees l.1-3). Duffy struggled with writing after the loss of her mother, stating that she could only write literature for children for the longest time (Lochhead 2011); the bees in the poem also denote Duffy’s return to writing after the loss of her mother: “Been deep, my poet bees” (Bees l.5). Bees have long been associated with death, with some cultures believing that they carry messages between the living and the dead; in The Bees, Duffy’s bees carry messages of environmentalism (“Parliament” is about the government’s lack of action regarding the climate crisis), personal loss, Greek myth and English folklore (including a revisitation of the environmentalist folkloric icon “John Barleycorn”), and the act of writing poetry.
Those themes of loss are continued in Duffy’s final anthology as Poet Laureate, Sincerity (2018). The themes of parentlessness are married with the feeling of childlessness once a child leaves home, to create an all-encompassing sense of loneliness and isolation. “Everyone not here missed, released, soft hours [...] table for one. [...] someone childless; footloose” (“Dining Alone in Orta” l.1; 4; 10); “Dear child, the house pines when you leave. / I research whether there is any bird who grieves / over its empty nest” (“Empty Nest” l. 1-3). The anthology also appears to be a reflection on Duffy’s poetic career, which is appropriate given its publication immediately before her resignation as Poet Laureate. This is clear in the poems that revisit historical figures, including William Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, Queen Victoria, and Richard III. This anthology, and Duffy’s role as the official poet of the United Kingdom, is thus placed in a long line of British history, which is traced all the way back to the signing of the Magna Carta in one of the poems.
During her tenure as Poet Laureate, Duffy wrote several poems about the state of the nation, which is a requirement of the role. Her first poem in this capacity was “Politics” (2009), a sonnet which addressed the MP expenses scandal. Her second poem was “Last Post” (2009), which was commissioned to commemorate the passing of the last British soldiers who fought in the First World War. “Twelve Days of Christmas 2009” (2009) covered a myriad of topics that concerned her during her first year as Poet Laureate, including the climate change conference in Copenhagen, the banking crisis, and the war in Afghanistan. “Achilles (for David Beckham)” (2010) concerned the Achilles tendon injury that the footballer sustained, which excluded him from the 2010 FIFA World Cup; also in 2010 she wrote “Vigil” for the Manchester Pride commemoration for those who have died due to HIV/AIDs. She wrote “Rings” for the Royal Wedding in 2011, although it does not include the names of William and Catherine, and she wrote “The Throne” (2013) to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.
Duffy has a number of anthologies due for release in 2023, including Elegies (2023), Nature (2023), Politics (2023), and Love (2023). Each of the anthologies is a collection of her personal favourite poems on the eponymous topic, both from her published oeuvre and from her unpublished archive. This indicates her continuing force as one of Britain’s foremost poets, characterised by her ventriloquism and timely commentary on politics and culture.
Abbreviations
Bees: The Bees (London: Picador, 2011)
FG: Feminine Gospels (London: Picador, 2002)
LP: Love Poems, (London: Picador, 2009)
MT: Mean Time (London: Anvil, 1993)
R: Rapture (London: Picador, 2005)
SFN: Standing Female Nude (London: Anvil, 1985)
Sincerity: Sincerity, (London: Picador, 2018)
SM: Selling Manhattan (London: Anvil, 1987)
TOC: The Other Country (London: Anvil, 1990)
WW: The World’s Wife (London: Macmillan, 1999)
References
Campbell, Siobhán, 2006. “In Search of Rapture”, The Poetry Ireland Review 85: 85-90.
Dowson, Jane, Carol Ann Duffy: Poet for Our Times (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).
Lochhead, Liz, 4 November 2011. “The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy – Review”, Guardian [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/04/bees-carol-ann-duffy-review, accessed 2 May 2023].
Judge, Shelby. "Feminine Gospels". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 June 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10540, accessed 02 May 2023].
Mullan, John, 18 January 2013. “Guardian Book Club: Love Poems by Carol Ann Duffy”, Guardian [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/18/guardian-book-club-love-poems-by-carol-ann-duffy, accessed 2 May 2023]
Nye, Robert, 13 February 1986. Bright New Panes Broken. Review of Standing Female Nude, Times.
Scannell, Vernon. 1987/1988. Review of Selling Manhattan, Poetry Review 77(4): 36–37.
4040 words
Citation: Judge, Shelby. "Carol Ann Duffy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 May 2023 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1337, accessed 28 January 2026.]
