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apocalypse

Metakaluptical: The shared 40s project

or, The neo-Romantic Agony

January 2002
(this site is under construction)
(status: eager & scruffy research notes)
This area is meant really as an hommage to James Keery, after I got to understand his point about the continuity between the 1940s and the 1960s – especially through his wonderful essay ‘Schonheit Apocalyptica’. I hope to get James to release some material here. (“Schonheit” will be in the symposium on Prynne which Kevin Nolan is editing.)
My book Secrets of Nature (possibly to be renamed “Radical toxins and lingering hallucinogens”) is about the 1940s and the 1960s, and the origins of the underground. A shift towards the 1940s really meant the end of my contemporary poetry project, towards history and, inevitably, politics and ideology (both historical only). (Obviously, I don’t want to release my material from Secrets of nature before publication date.)

Other exciting work on the 1940s issues is by Andrew Crozier and Nigel Wheale. Tony Frazer is also reading through the back stacks of neglected books. No-one in this field is not grateful to John Pikoulis for his work on Lynette Roberts, culminating in an edition which was injuncted for rather extraneous reasons. Because so much new work is being done in this area, I am sure that there will be a symposium or a book to exhibit it – but I don’t know what form this will take. I think Keery’s work will culminate in a book, and Crozier has apparently written a book (perhaps on the whole period 1930-56). It seems inevitable that there will be a revisionist anthology – since the suppression of the New Romantics took place half a century ago, and there has been no dissident anthology since that time. James has expressed a wish, in particular, to print poems written in the 1950s which continued the style.

Issues
This area was opened up partly as a search for historical alliances against the hegemony of the Movement (as it was in say 1975), partly as an ancillary to radical shopping activities which discovered and captured incomprehensible artefacts from the 1940s. We learnt how to read these books. This gives us two issues: how to read 1940s poetry correctly, and where the “retrieval project” ends. I am afraid that this means a “double rejection” for some poets – turned down by the Resurrection men as well as by the Movement assassins. There is something obscene about this, but no-one could revive these poets wholesale without violating basic aesthetic principles.

A list of 40s poets would have to include:
Francis Berry George Barker Dunstan Thompson Terence Tiller Hamish Henderson
Charles Madge JF Hendry Roy Fuller Lynette Roberts WS Graham Joseph Macleod Douglas Young David Jones Henry Treece Vernon Watkins Sydney Keyes Alan Ross GS Fraser Norman MacCaig Dorian Cooke Dylan Thomas Edith Sitwell Edwin Muir Roland Mathias Edwin Morgan Christopher Middleton FT Prince George Campbell Hay Sydney Goodsir Smith Nigel Heseltine Glyn Jones Nicholas Moore Peter Russell Burns Singer Michael Hamburger Randall Swingler DS Savage TS Law Alex Comfort James Kirkup Kathleen Raine Lawrence Durrell Philip O’Connor David Gascoyne Ruth Pitter
And I suppose the basis for entering the game is just to read these poets. However marginal some of these figures, there is an “outer margin” of poets even more obscure (and, possibly, more extreme).
I would think ten of these names are significant and worth resurrecting. Another group wrote significant poetry after the 1940s (after a premature start in the 40s style). However, no-one in the project wants to have anything to do with Vernon Watkins or Henry Treece. Peter Russell has some claim to be the worst modern English poet (evoking usually the retort, “What, worse than Nicholas Moore?”). Andy Croft has developed an interest in Randall Swingler, has even written a book about him – but, if anything should be consigned to the archive room with no door, it is surely the work of R Swingler. I freely admit that a lot of New Romantic poetry published in the 40s justifies the attacks of its enemies. But, let’s be careful. I find the very existence of Nicholas Moore embarrassing, and digging up a whole book of his stuff was surely a blunder, but he wrote two excellent poems. These alone would justify a reconnaissance in depth.
Simon Jenner’s magazine Eratica did a special issue on the 40s, which included material (based on his PhD) on Drummond Allison, Philip Larkin, and Keyes. I don’t find these poets at all interesting. The issue also includes an interview with Martin Seymour-Smith, who was involved with these poets, back in the 1940s, as a schoolboy - his thing was to hang around in pubs listening to them. (He edited a couple of books of Poetry from Oxford for the Fortune Press, a few years later.) It’s a good interview.

Missing biographical resources, or, the neo-Romantic agony

This appears here on the Internet partly because the information isn’t available. What happened to all those New Romantics who were banned from publishing in around 1952? This is really a blank space – a hint that I would like someone to do the research and write a book on this.


The truly marginal
Paul Dienes published one book with Fortune Press, undated. One of the most exrteme poets of the century, to the point of delirium. Interesting for a mixture of Gnosticism, Hinduism, and synaesthesia. Could be considered as proto-psychedelic or late Symboliste.
Peter Yates not sure what happened to him after 1950. Wrote some good poems in the New Romantic style, appreciated by fans of the style. Cleaner and more effective than many of the well-known poets of the time. I like his book ‘The Expanding Mirror’, of which I have a copy. It is not as prone to autosuggestion as most NRs and also lacks the tone of religious angst. Actually, not a million miles away from Terence Tiller.
J Redwood Anderson also published several volumes with Fortune Press, to the excitement of those who are turned on by the distinctive Fortune design style. A trilogy on Iranian cosmology (have I got this right?), they fit in with the New Romantics only by extravagance and lack of realism. Actually they remind me of William Watson. I haven’t read them – I just skimmed through them. Anderson was a hangover from the First World War era. He was leaning away from poetry and towards esoteric religion – cf. Kathleen Raine. He (and Watson) can be seen as forerunners of Temenos. He was the kind of person who turns up in Anthony Powell novels. Fortune Press didn’t have a policy – they published anyone who paid them (which is fairly obvious if you get a bunch of them together). However, because Nicholas Moore worked for them, his friends did tend to publish there – a cluster of which Anderson is obviously not a part.
Geoffrey Matthews wrote war poems which by a publishing freak were published recently (in 1999?) for the first time (as “War Poems”). I think he wrote very few poems after the war. These are finished poems but not highly rewarding – he was a marxist and had got that alienated quality, that Roy Fuller has, off perfectly. An atmosphere of anxiety and detachment from “shared goals” points to sudden changes of behaviour in the offing; it could have tipped over into something more expressive if he had gone on. The poems don’t deliver any experience the poet truly participates in and it is hard to participate in the poems. We feel detached and uneasy. He went to live in Norway, which probably didn’t reduce his alienation very much. Academic life probably didn’t encourage the writing of expressive poems. It’s certainly interesting to see these poems emerge after half a century in the drawer. I think Fuller’s poetry suffers from the same problem.

Underground survival in the 1950s
This remains an open issue. James is very sanguine about an underground stream of brilliant poetry, continuing 1940s ideas. The magazine Ore seems to be a source for this kind of material – Eric Ratcliffe (editor) is keen on Druidism and Arthurian poetry, amongst other things. Ore ran from 1954 to 1996, which is pretty amazing. I haven’t seen the 1950s issues, but I did see an editorial in which Ratcliffe claimed to have been a second generation of New Romanticism. I think Ore was also a low-profile magazine which lacked any contacts with the original NRs. I did find poems by Ithell Colquhoun (in issues from the 1980s?) (and an Ore pamphet, “Grimoire of the entangled thicket”) which seem like a direct continuation of the 1940s; Colquhoun was a Surrealist visual artist in the 1930s. Her Surrealism led on to Celtic religious revivalism and to spiritualism. I think we would look to the organs of spiritualism, Jungianism, neo-paganism, etc. for the current of changes which neo-romantic poets of the later period absorbed, and which their readers were quite familiar with. That is, once we accept that the poetry is not primary, there is a huge corpus of evidence which we can draw on to uncover the later history of New Romantic ideas.
What seems to be the last gasp of the 1940s is Savage’s republication of EFF Hill’s prose writings during the 1980s. I remember going to Small Press Fairs (around 1990?) and seeing these things and being incredulous. It’s possible that DS Savage was behind the stall, selling them (to a sceptical audience). Hill died in 1955, but Savage was his literary executor, and printed his works (although only after 20 or 30 years). Hill wrote about the Apocalypse – no interest in poetry, this is just a mixture of Christian mysticism and politics. Poetry was not essential to this streak of apocalypticism.
David Wright’s anthology of Contemporary Poetry (1960?), for Penguin, is a striking example of an alternative taste – in violent contrast with the Movement hegemony. This is a valuable document of the sort of Fifties poetry which is still artistically retrievable today. Wright deserves whatever medals can go to an editor who obstinately explores outside the territory which the bien-pensants have decreed to be acceptable, without being paranoid or depressingly factional. He excludes all the Movement pets – but doesn’t this explain so much of the mutual hostility which has smouldered over the last 40 years, that the most influential people weren’t even going to get printed if someone concerned for artistic values was at the helm. They had to be good at discrediting people, didn’t they?

The Movement hegemony
Because I spent 20 years thinking about this every day, I now find it an utterly tedious subject. All the same it is the salient fact about British poetry from 1955 to 1980, if not longer. There now seems to be a very wide consensus that it was a bad thing, and that Movement poems are tedious, shallow, smug, sententious, emotionally dead, etc. Their successors in the mainstream retain most of these characteristics.
Wolfgang Gortschacher’s book on Little Magazine Profiles has essential information on the economics of magazines during the period. What his quantitative evidence shows is that there was a terrific dearth of magazines during the 50s – an impoverishment of openings which correlates with rigid and conservative poetry, and with the hegemony of a few people determined to exclude dissidents.

Connections with the Continent
Weores quote

Connections with painting and cinema
I tend to forget that there was a 1940s outside poetry, and that there was a whole world of style which throve outside the poetic groups, and which was much more publicly visible than they. What we remember about the period is that it came just before the arrival of a “new class” of educated people (of “nether origins”) brought along by the 1944 Education Act. This has no bearing on New Romanticism at all – quite unrelated to any strata of antique privilege.
We can name four strands of cinema as the melodrama of Gainsborough Pictures, the unique artistic style of Powell and Pressburger, the documentary line, now merged with wartime propaganda, and the war film. The Powell and Pressburger films (Michael Powell’s memoirs give a fascinating portrait of the times, where he emphasizes the team nature of the enterprise, and credits their two German art designers, Junge and Heckroth) can easily be classified as New Romantic, and lend themselves to comparison with the poetry. The Gainsborough films, on a much lower artistic level, equally lend themselves to a New Romantic rubric: their formula, once they’d worked it out, involved the clash of sexual urges (mainly) with the rules of the class system, full-blooded characters played by glamorous actresses, passionate conflict, and an aristocratic milieu under pressure from basic instincts. The saleable aspect was individualist freedom appealing to an audience living in considerable hardship because of the war effort. It is hard to watch these films without being reminded of the melodramatic nature of 40s poetry.
“Gone to earth” is a Powell/Pressburger film which steals most of the Gainsborough formula.
The films can easily be connected to the “aristocracy in heroic decline” theme described above.

American connections
James came up with some really interesting stuff on this (which see). Tantalising. We didn’t find very much in the end. Dunstan Thompson edited a magazine called Vice Versa, which I haven’t seen. Shipping and currency problems in the 1940s mean British libraries are not strong on little American magazines of this period. I did find an essay by Berryman in Partisan Review where he denounces the whole New Romantic thing as being sloppily written and out of touch with academic standards – which is fair enough, really. Probably the American end of “romanticism” (post Hart Crane) was more disciplined, closer to New Critical standards, and so looks very different from New Romanticism – and less exceptional. There was certainly a wave of anarcho-pacifism (and perhaps especially in Northern California?), but it had different results – the USA wasn’t really subject to wartime totalitarianism in the way that Britain was. Robert Duncan certainly had a crisis when conscripted, which led to his discharge from the Army on psychiatric grounds. It is fair to describe Duncan as influenced by British N Romanticism, it’s fair to describe him as a 40s New Romantic poet, but he was a cultured man who picked up and synthesized many influences. If he believed in esoteric symbolism, it is because he was raised as a Theosophist, with the usual cultural trappings of the Occult Revival as part of the household goods. He didn’t have the same publication ban that his British colleagues suffered. Rexroth was a classical Californian anarchist, visited Britain during the war to get in touch with anarchists and New Romantics, sponsored these poets in America, broadcast on the radio about them, but was very critical of their style. (see Rexroth interview in book on San Francisco poets) Actually, the political links were probably more important than the poetic ones. We did uncover a magazine called Phoenix, which was dedicated to the work of DH Lawrence and had as co-editor the English poet DS Savage. This is not “New Romantic”, and the bond with Savage was through pacifism and a wish to return to self-sufficient organic farming. Robert Symmes was living at the farm (in upstate New York) where the Phoenix group lived, and helping to print Phoenix – this is before he changed his name to Robert Duncan. This is a fact, but not a literary-historical one – Duncan’s style takes nothing from Phoenix, or Savage, or even Lawrence. Symmes edited an offshoot magazine called Ritual (advertised in Phoenix) –it sounds very interesting, from the ad, but we haven't seen any copies.
Rexroth edited the classic anthology of the 1940s, The New British Poets (1948). Oscar Williams also anthologised the period very sensitively.

New Romantic prose
This is a blank for me. However, reading Gwyn Thomas’ “All Things Betray Thee” was a landmark in my path towards accepting that New Romanticism might be of interest. This is simply a great novel.

Theatrical romanticism and a school of stage painters
New Romantic painting was much influenced by a school of stage painting led by Tchelitchew and Christian Berard (? and someone called Birman). This combination of imaginative freedom and uncynical reliance on the characters established by an older European court art produced something altogether more light-hearted than New Romantic poetry, which had a typical burden of anxiety and despair. It is a question why the poetry turned out this way – and it is worth searching for an alternative strand, theatrical and emotionally buoyant. Liberation from realism does not have to be pessimistic in flavour.
Sacheverell Sitwell is the literary equivalent of this dedication to the art of the past. He published no poetry in the 1940s at all.
To think of New Romanticism we must also think of the Sadler’s Wells ballet, Frederick Ashton, Leslie Hurry, and the origins of English ballet –or “music theatre”. Some of these designs were by Ayrton and Minton, significant New Romantic painters, who had got their painting style initially from the Parisian stage designers, on a trip to Paris when they were both still schoolboys. (Tch. was also E.Sitwell’s great love, chosen perhaps because he was gay.) If we stick to the theme of “non realism” manipulating “timeless figures”, perhaps we can see the myths of the poets as partly equivalent to the theatrical figures (Harlequin, the rake, Aphrodite, etc.) in the ballets. When a poem refers to a “marble statue”, we can see this as the injection of a piece of visual art into the verbal domain, and directly similar to the Classical figures which appeared in so many surrealist paintings (Delvaux and Di Chirico, for example).
If we go back to Tchelitchew, we find him as a continuation of the Saint Petersburg stage designers. That is, a milieu of court art, the last great court art of European history. So perhaps there is a link, after all, between his Parisian circle in the 1920s and the English culture of the 1940s.

Henze
Hans-Werner Henze wrote a volume of memoirs called “Bohemian Fifths”. I mention this partly because I thought this was an utterly wonderful book, partly because it does shed a light on English culture of the 40s. Henze has mainly worked in a kind of “music theatre” which didn’t exist in Germany before the war, and which reflects what he was exposed to in the British Occupied Zone, in the 40s, where he saw English ballet, met Ashton, and was commissioned by him. Henze has been a lifelong anglophile, and the kind of England he is in love with is precisely the aestheticism of the 40s. One of the strands which runs right through New Romanticism is producing a culture which rises above war and provides consolation for its griefs, and this musical culture clearly supplied exactly that for northwest Germany when hungry, deprived, and exhausted by war.

Prose again; The Disappearing Castle
When I think of the prose of the 40s, I think of Brideshead Revisited, of Osbert Sitwell’s four volumes of memoirs, and of James Lees-Milne’s diaries (Caves of Ice, etc.) What seems to link these is the theme of aristocratic classicism in heroic decay – a gigantic exploration of anxiety in the face of the conversion of the electorate to Labour. The architecture which features so prominently in these books is the equivalent of the classical figures which appear in the painting and ballet of the time; a classical, Italianate, and aristocratic past, seen as it were back-lit by the flames which are about to engulf it. The architecture of the 40s was ruins – especially the ruins of great and ancient buildings, which were the most impressive.
The authors mentioned either belonged to the landed gentry or profoundly identified with it. The poets did not – they were like fish out of water, aware that the old European culture had died but uncertain about a new life-space which could shelter them. This explains their insistence on deciding things for themselves, and their deep anxiety.

One aspect of the 40s is the crisis of the European aristocracy – not something which occupies centre stage when the threat of physical destruction was so universal. But perhaps it is something important which we miss when we look back. Because the audience for painting, ballet, etc., was so small, these art forms were closely associated with the nobility, for whom it was part of tradition. Their international nature was related to the international sense of the nobility, their aspirations to French and Italian standards. The 1940s saw the destruction of the eastern European landowners as a class. In Germany, they lost their status under the strain of war – the rise of the Waffen SS was a symbolic move away from the aristocratic officer class of tradition. The British aristocracy lost financial and social power on a grand scale. The Italian peasants saw major advances in their status, a move away from feudalism despite fierce resistance. Survivals of aristocrats with their estates and influence in places like Sweden, Spain, and Portugal seem archaic. In this context (little less than a farewell to traditional European culture), the angst of the New Romantics can be interpreted as a sense of being pressed between the old noble cultural rules and the new, aggressive, communist ones. The third possibility was an educated bourgeois culture which has been growing at several per cent a year ever since.
We are thinking less of the culture enjoyed by the nobility than of the nobility as an object of fantasy – the subject of popular art on a mass scale. The change would involve the shift for actors from a mandatory West End accent to a far wider range of voices, approximating to the real country. Something similar happened across Europe at this time – perhaps everywhere. In Britain, the shift would be from noble subjects (or living, at least, in the West End) to American film stars with classless “democratic” appeal. The influence of aristocratic salons (classically, those of Sybil Colefax, Diana Cooper, and Lady Cunard) on artistic taste is hard to measure at best, but one should investigate the ascent, at this time, of groups of painters, composers, and concert musicians who achieved prestige without aristocratic sponsorship. Perhaps we need to take a look at the grim factors of economics to grasp why cliques that could deliver people with spare cash, who actually bought tickets, bought paintings, etc., were so significant for emerging new artists. Even symphony orchestras were bound by economics to fashionable hostesses. Painters do need to sell paintings occasionally. Patronage remains the basic question.
Perhaps there is a connection between John Piper and Madge’s the Disappearing Castle after all – Madge’s brilliant definition of the loss of a noble background for culture and Piper’s serial illustration of the scenery in which it had taken place. Piper’s interest in cataloguing and recording beautiful buildings exactly resembles Lees-Milne’s activity as an officer of the National Trust, preserving stately homes – with the precondition that the owners were going to die and that the families no longer had surplus wealth. The cataloguing was a preoccupation of the period, an act of loyalty to a way of life threatened by Communism and Fascism. As a rational and didactic activity, we can see it as the forerunner of the takeover of culture by academics. We can also see it as the successor to the Shell County Books, symptoms of a redefinition of the countryside and its precious objects as a leisure park for the “common man” as liberated by the motor-car. Aristocratic culture was thus drowned by a new psychological perspective changing all the tonal values of its battered objects.


Back to the land
This is something I failed to find anything out about. Savage spent the war on a smallholding (maybe two successive ones), the Phoenix group were into self-sufficiency, this correlates with anarchism because it rejects the commercial system. Bringing it all back to the body (you work with your body to produce food, the product of the bodies of plants and animals, it’s all visible and tangible) seems to correlate with Apocalyptic rejection of the “object-machine”. Non-mechanised farming seems to connect with organic imagery in poems. But I couldn’t find anything on the “back to the land” movement.
There must also be a link with the arts and crafts movement, or its descendants of the 1940s.

Horizon; fantasies of the Mediterranean
My image of the 40s was dominated by Horizon for many years before I developed any serious interest in the New Romantics. The volumes of selections from Horizon retain classic status for me.
One of their lines was nostalgia for the Mediterranean – nourished by despatches from people serving in the Middle Eastern theatre and trying to lead a cultural life. Cecil Beaton picnicked in the Western Desert and found a notice for picnickers saying Please leave the desert as you found it.
The cultural assets (architecture, paintings, sculpture) associated with nobility were largely of Italian origin. This combined with a hot, dry climate to produce a specific image of the Mediterranean, and a craving for the favours of that image. Poets writing about the Mediterranean in wartime include Lawrence Durrell, Terence Tiller, and Hamish Henderson.
Horizon’s reception of the NRs was very selective, and is a guide for us. They ran articles on English Romantic painters by Geoffrey Grigson, who was very much against New Romantic poetry. The rediscovery of Danby, Martin, etc., and indeed of Blake, was part of the atmosphere of the time. Martin’s use of apocalyptic scenes from the Bible reminds us of the roots of “apocalypticism” - in popular religion. If we look at the Biblical epics which Hollywood was still producing in the 1940s and 1950s, we see something occultly related to the Apocalyptics – the set designs for the prototype Towelhead Picture (the first “Ben-Hur” etc.) were based on Victorian Bible paintings which were generic descendants of John Martin’s canvases.

Continuity in Wales
A high proportion of the New Romantic poets were Welsh, and there was a classic anthology, Modern Welsh Poetry, edited by Keidrych Rhys, exhibiting a whole school. There was more continuity of the style in Wales than elsewhere. However, later currents proved much more influential on Anglo-Welsh poetry in general. The Rhys anthology is, distressingly, much better than later Welsh anthologies, in the era of grants.
Roland Mathias is, for me, one of the most interesting poets to emerge in the 1940s. His style, too, evolved. Note a “recovery issue” – there are a lot of poems in his early volumes which didn’t get picked up in his eventual Selected Poems. “The Roses of Tretower” (1952) can be considered as a variant of the Heroic Nobility theme – Tretower was the residence of the Vaughan family (as in Henry Vaughan), and is a classic building. Mathias’ ability to think about the past, rather than merely recount legends, is quite admirable.

The 1960s
One assessment of the 1960s would be that, whatever currents of “alternative” thought it picked up, it swept them all away and changed them irrevocably. So, it would be extremely stupid to look at recent years and expect to find elements of the New Romantic style original and untransformed. Their ability to transform is – what, a sign of life?


Nimbus
A magazine of the 50s (1951-8?) which James came up with. It is of high literary quality.
Because the editor was Tristram Hull, and because RFC Hull appears in the magazine, I conjectured they were related. RFCH was the translator of Jung into English. The name of Tristram Hull just vanished from the scene, but this is a very good magazine.
Enthusiasts of the NR style should turn up Christopher Logue’s work prior to his 1959 book – poems which he has rigorously excluded from his volumes of Selected. He published in Nimbus, and is probably the most interesting New Romantic to emerge after 1950. It was not mainly a poetry magazine; and a strong left-wing element, liking Brecht and Neruda. Later issues show “New English Review” as a secondary title – the mag may have evolved into something no longer called Nimbus? Ominously, it also stopped showing an editor’s name – just a publisher (John Trafford).
What Nimbus shows us is the ideas of the 40s evolving – the discourse was changing without losing its basic direction. This is significant, because it means that if you are looking in the 1970s the succession to the 1940s is not going to look exactly like the 1940s. That is – poetry based on archetypes is itself subject to vagaries of fashion. “The White Goddess” changed everything which came after it (in that line).
The poetry editor was David Wright – an intriguing figure whose tastes we should investigate to track the flow of underground, anti-Movement currents in a time of apparent literary dictatorship.

The rise of academicism; the New Criticism

One of the images thrown up by older literati (by the old cultured class under threat?) was of people coming along and working very hard at culture and deriving no pleasure from it whatsoever – crossing a line between “work” and “pleasure” which has proved a problem ever since. If we look at Horizon, all the articles are quite short – raising the possibility that producing massive books quite literally missed the point of culture, burying it under tons of essentially tedious information. It would be nice if this wasn’t true, but the atrophy of poets who went into academic life seems to say it was – literature became work for them and ceased to be literature. They stopped writing poems. Wherever sensibility flees to, is where we have to go.
The eclipse of New Romantic poets by talentless academic critics is thus part of a larger and tragic story in which literati became unable to write poetry and new poetry ceased to play a role in the life of the reading public.
Academic life doesn’t have to be drudgery. I would like figures for how many academics were bored and exhausted and how many were having a good time. Otherwise I think these issues will remain open.
Lees-Milne disliked the advent of intellectuals in the life of the arts; but what his diary records is his own heroic efforts to get around the country to visit potential National Trust acquisitions, heroic because of the appalling weather, the breakdowns of his car, the rundown of the infrastructure while all resources were going to the war effort. Art had become a job for him even though his great terror was of art being reduced to a form of work. In sober fact he was immersed in paperwork, petty vexations, the management of repairs to the fabric, etc. – not in designing beautiful buildings or even living in them.
The relationship of the new bad poetry of the 1950s to the New Criticism is obscure. Essentially, I see it as a piece of crooked political asset-grabbing – you justify your bad poetry by “contamination”, linking it to an obvious classic. I don’t see how Cleanth Brooks’ criticism adds lustre to dismal Movement poetry. This was a hallucination. Meanwhile, relating the classic works of the New Criticism to mass classroom practice is too difficult, because the evidence is lost and would have to be available on a mass scale. I would like to cut my losses by observing, merely, that the New Criticism could justify any kind of poetry, and that the route from serious academic study to writing bad Movement poetry is opaque and obscure.
If I look at Northrop Frye, I find a strong interest in archetypes, myth, and religious experience – all of which would form an outstanding theoretical foundation for the New Romantics. I suspect the other classic New Critics mostly show a similar enthusiasm for myth and religion as the most privileged subjects of poetry. What comes next is the opaque and obscure bit.



Sources
Little has been written about the poetry we are interested in since 1950.
Nigel Wheale wrote about Roberts and cinema (where was this?). James has written about the 40s in issues of PN Review. Fundamental information on the Anglo-Welsh scene in Glyn Jones’ The dragon has two tongues.
The sources most used are the original books and the poetry magazines of the era. Poetry London and Poetry Quarterly at the forefront.
Jackaman, The course of Surrealist poetry in English, has probably the most serious account of the New Romantics currently in print.
ML Ryan, Career patterns in modern British Poetry, (1982 doctoral thesis), has a wonderful collection of interviews with poets, including many of interest to us. There is a copy of this in the Poetry Library. I don’t know of any more worthwhile books on the subject.
Derek Stanford’s Inside the 40s is an invigorating book of memoirs.