The setup, with its crushing consensus and its firm exclusion of originality in favour of the central, provoked fantasies of a secondary space which seduced a whole generation. Read this book and re-live the boredom and frustration which made new English poetry come out fighting. The essays don't give any composite picture, dropping down to a level of detail at which only about 5 poets reach the point of being discussed.
includes a list of "significant" works published during the decade, interesting to compare with the one in the previous volume because it shows how the radical poetry of the decade was thoroughly cut out of the mainstream world-view. This is an exhibit showing the narrow-minded, suppress the evidence, self-righteousness which everyone was complaining about at the time. Also interesting because it foretells what the policy of Carcanet was to be over the following 20 years.
(nn) Memoirs of a Modern Scotland, ed. Karl Miller. (1971) unsystematic but informative about the individual poets, who write well about their own experiences. The fact is that writing about Scottish poetry is quite thin in comparison to poet interviews or essays, so we should use the latter.
22-23 Grigson
G. was a promoter of Auden in the 30s and figured that what was good for Auden was good for him. He voted Auden as “best new poet” 40 years in a row. These essays say nothing at all about poetry post 1960, because G was too busy fighting it off in case it exposed Auden’s weaknesses. I refer to my essay on generational blanking in The failure of conservatism (unpublished). I find nothing in G about poets who began publishing later than 1939. I have just been hanging out with an American poet who was lamenting that poets 5 years older than him still didn’t read him even though he was now 60. G used his time-mellowed authority in a brutal and transparent way to damage any poets younger than himself. I have to say this; however, he is a fascinating essayist, genuinely interested in what he writes about and with a perfect sense of pace. This could not be said of many other writers on this list.
G made his living as a nature writer; basically, catching fish, killing them, eating them, and taking money for saying how beautiful they were. The analogy with his treatment of young poets offers itself; he was fonder of the fish. I am interested in the “paranoid” strain, which Grigson got from Wyndham Lewis (whose sword-bearer he was for a while). If you dislike everything, it passes for authenticity, because it is unlike advertisements; and conservatives like it; but actually it can also mean you have a disfiguring level of hostility. Ripeness is freedom from paranoia, and surely nothing is more pleasant. Culture is all about collusion; if you withhold collusion, culture vanishes. And what next?
“Everyone younger than me is callow and derivative” does not hold water as a theory of stylistic change. It tickles me to compare G’s attitude of rage and scorn with the identical attitude marketed by rock singers. Griggy and the Stooges? In an individualist culture, it’s hard to hold on to the blessed state in which you like other people. Every time the monthly bills come in, you give it up as an economy measure.
G was a kind of fishing parson figure, with very little curiosity for anything except botany and certain obscure by-ways of the 19th century. I can respect that. The situation where he had no interest in poetry since 1939, but was still taking money for writing authoritative surveys of modern poetry in 1980, says a great deal about the milieu. The search for poetry is a search for relationships, and it is likely to come to a standstill as it reaches its goal. With Grigson, the symbolic relationships were also actual ones, as he became friends with the poets he published (in New Verse, in the 1930s). The satisfaction of the appetite destroys the critic’s ability to respond. The sensibility of critics is as fragile as the talent of poets.
(25) Essays on decades (20s to 70s) in Akros, 1974. Highly informative as a source of generalisations. Not much analysis of institutions. Essays on individual poets followed in successive issues.
(26) Kathleen Raine The poet's journey. (lectures, to Eranos Institute 1968, and lecture to College of Psychic Studies 1976) astonishingly stupid woman. R’s position is based on two tenets:
1. she knows how to write great poetry
2. she knows further how to analyse this experience so as to derive general rules about what makes art good, and to issue decrees on the subject
She is wrong both times. Within these limits, her pronouncements can shed light on the illuministic and irrational strands of poetry. (I have written about this in my essay “Hyperreal”). The Eranos is a meet of Jungian psychoanalysts in Ascona (site of the “first counter-culture”, according to Martin Green’s illuminating book).
Raine has much invested in the idea that there has been no good poetry since the impact of 'The Waste Land' (except her own). We could divide the field between those who reject modern poetry after 1923 and those who accept it. The former are not really part of the scene, in the sense of reading, editing, or writing contemporary poetry. She identifies a fatal decline in the 1920s; the 1920s were the end of the old Western culture. (One implication might be that she has ignored all new aspects of Western culture since 1930.) Significantly, she equates the situation of 1976 with the mid 20s: nothing has changed for her in the interim, it is all one historic moment. This makes it hard to use Raine and her followers for style analysis. She identifies the decline, quite specifically, with IA Richards and Practical Criticism. Thinking about poetry is fatal. It is related to the "worldwide revolution" and "scientific materialism". She never mentions poets later than 1945.
It is quite true that the New Criticism was fighting against something, and it is reasonable to equate Raine's position of 1976 with this something that was fading in 1923: the Victorian belief in the spiritual, with vagueness and effusiveness of poetic detail, the creation of art by sublime souls, and a belief in the psychic powers of the gifted, as pendants. We should refer to recent studies of the Victorian taste for spiritualism to understand this fully. It seems plausible that Symbolisme was partly sustained by this anti-materialist current of 19th C thought. Raine's links with the New Age are obvious, and we can find dozens of such predecessor groups without much difficulty. Jungian books, magazines, and groups would be a convenient conduit for such material.
It follows from her attacks on textual analysis that she does not believe that the quality of poems resides in the way the words are put together. The thing which causes the result is not visible in the text, when you stop reading passively and look at it closely. Much follows from this in the daily workshop practice of poets: it’s clear you wouldn’t then rewrite poems, look at them closely, try to learn how to get rid of the weaknesses, think about why you find lines unsatisfactory, study the technique of other poets, and so on. There is a clear link between believing in the action of spirits and not believing that a poem consists of words. A doctrinal gap is summed up in the word “technique”: people who have studied literary criticism at university generally believe in “technique”, but there is another faction which doesn’t believe that technique exists, and imagines that poems express the spiritual beauty of the poet. We could speak of “reflexive” poets versus “spiritualists”.
However malevolent and confused, this thesis is no doubt the founding ideology of a whole sector of contemporary poetry, and indeed of a whole conception of what one's state of mind should be while reading. One should at least compare this ideology with its favoured artists (David Jones, notably) before writing it off. Prince Charles is probably the key figure who sums it up, for good or ill.
Something I don’t really want to get into is “deployment”; that is, defining works of art as assets in polemic struggle, so that Temenos wheels on Henri Corbin, writing about the symbolic geometry of Moslem architecture, as a way of invalidating their “materialist” rivals in the 1980s poetry scene. The side-effect of deployment is that you hate works of art which disprove your invested positions, and so can’t enjoy them. My impression from the survey is that many critics haven’t taken in events since 1960 because they are too preoccupied with partis pris and in defending positions which living art has washed away years ago. This deployment involves defence of poems by analogy: when you find a poem bad, the poet wheels on various mosques, Eskimo myths, ivory crucifixes, and so on, as if they were the evidence that proved you wrong. Surely the new critics were very useful in focussing the attention of poets on their poems: so that they realised they could “win” by rewriting their poems to make them better, rather than by engaging in windy polemic about the virtues of Moslem architecture. The process by which poets absorb world art and convert it into “rules” by which they write, justifying their works by analogy, is vital, but works side by side with an experiential process whereby the poet reads the poem they have just written and examines it as it is and without analogy. Close reading is more effective than the whole apparatus of ideological justification fielded by Temenos. Art is not for hitting people over the head with.
I suspect that analogy is the intuitive way in which poets proceed; someone admires their own work because they believe it is like Prynne’s, and is surprised when other people don’t see the analogy. The whole process of internalising the recent artistic past is of the highest interest. By chance I discovered in a book by an American scholar a description of a 1926 essay by Edwin Muir about the impact of science on poetry which lays out point for point the arguments Raine was making in 1976. She must have read this, and IA Richards' book on poetry and science, as an undergraduate. (I wonder how many more discoveries there are to be made with more time in libraries.) Checking out, in the same library, a book edited by Abbs, I found an essay by Hughes on myth. The Temenos thing is so much based on hatred of Hughes and yet he is the great mythic poet and they are not. Holbrook hates Hughes, and yet reveres Lawrence; unable to admit that Hughes is the heir to 100% of the Lawrence estate. (And to 100% of the Muir estate too, I would think.) That book includes a long essay by Peter Fuller; it's hard to disagree with Abbs if he publishes great essays like that. His idea of New Metaphysical Art may be based on a lack of sympathy with contemporary poetry, but its theses and manners are not necessarily wrong.
80s
(27) Easthope, Poetry as Discourse
This is not a sequential work about history; since it treats the whole period since the rise of the individual poet and the decline of collective and anonymous composition as a fall from grace which we must suffer under until it is reversed by some historical shift, he views all modern poetry as corrupt and uninteresting, and a fluctuation in this graceless state is not mentioned. Easthope is Far Too Important to actually read poetry, filled as it is with the feelings and ideas of unimportant bourgeois people without authorisation. He is either living in a realm of High and Mighty Ideas, schmoozing at the table of the truly great, or else the hand of uncle Joe has squeezed his bowels till they are stony in texture and the size of three and a half gnats. Which is it, I wonder?
(28) Alan Robinson, Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry
Possibly belongs in a group with Kennedy and Gregson. Sophisticated, but the mismatch between the quality of the poetry and what he says about it is quite frightening. Perhaps he is trying to redefine the inauthenticity of mainstream poets as ambiguity and so as conceptual sophistication; an original variant on the "corruption of the mainstream" thesis. The author seems driven by the phantom of a saleable project, scared by the indifference of academic colleagues to almost everything; with the subject of the package being secondary. Related to Crawford's books and to the "conservative post-modernism" thesis, whereby poets like Andrew Motion and Paul Muldoon are defined as "post-modernist" and so as more advanced than the "modernists" like Fisher and Prynne.
(29) Weatherhead, The British Dissonance essays on 10 contemporary poets a variant of the Mottram thesis.
Wetherhead takes an anti-conservative line which foregrounds the innovative British poets as the significant ones, but does not break down the opposition between old and new into periods.
(30) Andrew Crozier, Thrills and frills a classic. Another statement of the "corruption of the mainstream" thesis. A careful description of "the poetry of domestic anecdote", which was the mainstream from the 1950s up to the 1980s. Or up to the present day?
(32) Riley, Spitewinter provocations a compelling read. A serious statement of why someone might want to write unconventional poetry, and of how conventional poetry seems to them. This gives much information about various aspects of modern poetry, but does not offer a chronology.
(nn) A country and a tradition Scottish interviews a variant on regionalism, the poetry of place and kindred. Unoriginal, but there are interviews with poets who don't usually get written about. Ian Abbot.
(31) Necessary Business (in Spanner) detailed essays on 3 poets: Prynne, cheek, Vonna-Mitchell. Two of these aren't really creative figures, but the light shed on the London aesthetic at that moment is precious. Spanner was the leading avant-garde magazine of its period, and the whole back run of it is precious for someone really interested in British poetry.
(33) Martin Booth
Booth is the kind of person who reads history and thinks about history, which is true of only three or four authors in this whole list. Because he asks “when” and “how much” all the time, he is enabled to ask “why”. For this reason, his book yields constant stimulation (I have read it twice) even when I disagree with its thesis. I have to point out that B talks about almost none of the interesting poets of the period, and that the poets he does talk about are quite uninteresting. I find it distressing that he enjoyed the “high period” of British poetry so much while having no interest in any of the intellectual poets of the period, whom we read today.
He has a straightforward story about time: poetry was in a wonderful state from 1964 to 1974, and then slid into serious problems from 1974 to 84. He has a material explanation for this, in the readings circuit, whose human energies sustained the poets touring the circuit; and which collapsed around 1974. He writes a history of the audience, and carefully draws links between this and the course of the poetry. He provides economic information which you will not find anywhere else. Booth is a believer in "oralcy" (possibly drawing on Hobsbaum's A theory of communication, which I have not read), but most of the poetry written for readings was very bad. He is against academic writing, but oral interaction is central to university life.
B was poetry critic for Tribune, the magazine of the Labour Left. B was part of The Group, and has obviously been much affected by the shared ideas which emerged from their discussions. In such a verbal environment, poems score “points” in a precisely measurable way, and succeed by the standards of judgment dominant in that room; it isn’t too hard to see that this dominance is due to social reinforcement, and so that the crucial thing is social suggestion, and that many many other “verbal standards” would work if there was a group which was excited by them and promoted them. What is admired, becomes admirable. Booth’s belief in “sensuousness”, concision, etc., is impressive, but comparative study makes it clear that the decisive instrument is “sensuousness as propagated as an idea by a group of psychologically significant and vocal people”, not “sensations” themselves. Poems are made of ideas, not sensations. It’s regrettable that Booth didn’t give an insider’s account of the Group.
The poem is a verbal object, and verbal objects are the product of groups. B identifies the real groups behind these verbal objects in a very satisfying way. However, just as the Group lost its influence (dissolving in the late 60s), so the sociality he describes also vanished, and more recent poems need to be considered in quite other contexts.
There is a crux of socialist theory here. Booth believes that the key to good poems is concrete details (because, I construe, the working class does physical labour and the world of ideas is dominated by bourgeois ideology and bad faith); for him, objects possess authenticity. This goes along with a belief that the world of the symbolic is full of deceit, and controlled by the educated. However, socialism is essentially part of the world of ideas and ideals, and cannot survive a withdrawal into mere tangibility. Elimination of psychological description was pretty much the Group style, and of course they did produce many good poems. Any of the Group poems I look at show an absence of literal truth; they have physical, anatomical details within a mythic and allegorical picture. Hughes, Redgrove, Wevill; they are not realist poets, but mythical ones with a grasp of anatomy and biology. If you have passive accumulation of detail without that passionate expressive and intellectual project, you will bore everyone into a coma.
That poets wrote exciting things because there were people listening to them and willing to be excited, is believable without problems; I think it must be true; society creates the culture it wants. That these poems were the product of physical sensations is much less credible, and that the physical world changed in 1974, accounting for the dropoff in poetic production, will not wash. For me, there is no proof that the readings circuit was the sector which initiated the decline around 1974; I believe that it did collapse, yes, but at the same time as the magazines collapsed, and as a function of a general loss of confidence which devastated radical politics and reached poetry as an afterthought.
I find it strange that his book is used so little. I suppose that he is unacceptable to the intellectuals (as he does not mention any of the poets they are interested in), and that the memory of the mainstream is so shallow that no-one looks back. He pays no attention to small press poets, is unaware of the existence of the Cambridge and London schools, and misses the avant-garde altogether; due to his fixation on The Group. But any thesis relating to the period 1964-84 needs to be tested against Booth’s book, which is a landmark.
(63) Sglefrio ar eiriau
(i.e. stumbling over words). Not all about poetry, but includes Menna Elfyn on feminism and poetry, and an essay on the series of "unofficial bards" (Cyfres y beirdd answyddogol) of Lolfa publishers. This fills me with a violent desire not to read them. This series did publish poems in English by my friend David Greenslade, which I did enjoy
(34) Davie, Under Briggflatts: British Poetry 1960-88 one of the catastrophic monuments of partiality and malice which make life seem not worth living. Davie lacks an external theory of change because he is only interested in the fate of the cluster of poets whose reputations were tied up with his, and only sees other groups as threats to this reputation. he does not discuss any poets who began publishing after 1960. (There are some very slight exceptions to this, and even then he withholds approval.) The thesis that no interesting new poets have arrived since 1960 is too disgraceful to be made explicitly even by someone who believes in it and tacitly seeks to prove it.
(35-36) Jeremy Hooker The presence of the past; The Poetry of Place classic statements of the regionalist thesis.
Like very few of these books, Hooker's books are beautiful to read, as well as describing poetic beauty.
Inevitable failures to perceive style accurately. This is the kind of vision which can inspire poets. (He probably has influenced "landscape poets" in south-west England.) He is not good on why poets could be attached to the past and to a place and yet write dull conservative poetry. One has to ask, is there dull conservative poetry which is not attached to place, the past, and traditional values. He does not ask how, when, why, how much, when looking at poems.
One is about Wales. Other is about history; deals with J Riley, Bunting, Hill.
Strong in coverage of Anglo-Welsh literature.
(37) Anthony Conran, The Cost of Strangeness
Conran's book is very carefully periodised in its discussion of the living conditions of the poets and the infrastructure creating an Anglo-Welsh audience, although he has little to say about technique. hard to talk about this, since I virtually based one chapter of my book Centre and Periphery on it (and Hooker). Full of knowledge and enthusiasm. The title is a pun on the word estron, and means roughly that the Welsh are foreigners within the united Kingdom and the Anglo-Welsh are foreigners within conservative Wales (also, that originality demands protracted effort). Another book (Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry) collects later essays. Together, these are close to a definitive work on Anglo-Welsh poetry; it's only fair, with this unexcelled critic, to admit that he leaves out Lynette Roberts, Peter Finch, and Roland Mathias. Conran is also a great translator.
It's a wonder (and I say this without parti-pris) that the coverage of Anglo-Welsh poetry is so much better than that available for English and Scottish poetry. Conran's excellence is related to his Left attitude, combining a firmly imagined community with a habit of asking questions and confronting problems. Most of the high spots of poetry criticism come from the Old Left. Now that being Left is so out of fashion, I suppose there will be no bright spots at all.
This is a most impressive book, as is Jeremy Hooker's book from a similar viewpoint and on the same subject, The Presence of the Past. Hooker writes frequently about the poet and history, but since he sees the poet's role as preserving identity, personal and ethnic, he is resisting change, in what he sees as structures raised above time, rather than describing it. There are some other books of similar approach, adding place as another timeless structure, which also add little to our story.
(nn) Essays on Scottish poetry in Cairns Craig, ed., collective work, Scottish Literature, vol 4, the 20th Century (1988), right on the money so far as I can see. I counted 8 chapters on poetry. There is some material on poetry in Scots which you really can't get anywhere else.
(38) Lucas, English poetry From Hardy to Hughes. Have not read this, but its thesis as advertised is that mediocrity is the English tradition, and anything else is unpatriotic and not really English.
(39) John Mole book reviews reprinted from the CIA-linked magazine Encounter. useful description of a pack of mainstream books you would never want to read. An attractive style. Mole didn't like a lot of the factitious "Martian" new mainstream emerging at this time.
(nn) MP Ryan Career patterns in contemporary British poetry (1980) not easily accessible, as a thesis, but there is a copy in the Poetry Library, which is where I read it. Completely absorbing and sheds light on everything it touches on. Includes or summarises long interviews with 30 poets.
(42) Edwin Morgan, Crossing the border essays on Scottish poets and Scottish nationalism
Discusses Graham, and in fact his own contemporaries. EM not really a great critic, but these are informative and pleasant to read. Not as compelling as EM on his own motives.
(nn) Jackaman, Course of English Surrealist poetry.
This is not confined to Surrealist poetry, but is really about any poetry which is imaginative, or even non-literal. Its line extends into the 1980s, but is much weaker after the early 50s. The stuff on the Apocalyptics and New Romantics is really excellent. Jackaman lives in New Zealand and is largely unaffected by the group hysterias of the English poetry sales force, its repressive loyalties and hormonal rushes. However, he is not well informed about small press poetry. His account of modern poetry is thorough, perceptive, conscientious, depressing for the mainstreamer. The second book is particularly damaging as an account of central practices of self-legitimation and artistic compromise. But yes, there is an alternative - which he does not touch on.
90s
(45) Allchin, Praise above all, an intro to the Welsh tradition. A covert attempt to recuperate poetry for Christianity. Canon Allchin takes refuge in Wales without even asking whether the Welsh praise tradition may be due to a social structure which differs from England, and whether the lack of praise poetry in England might be referred to the prevalence of the "absolute nuclear family", as analysed by Todd or Macfarlane. Allchin's attempt to describe society without sociology is coupled with a denial of change in time. Allchin is not going to explain anything at all. However, the book is full of noble and beautiful thoughts. Useful for discussion of David Jones, Waldo Williams, and other Welsh figures. The problem of writing "panegyrics to poets" is quite similar to that of writing "praise poems to local landowners", and the critical tradition seems rooted in the whole English social system (if not necessarily in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland). One of the flaws going right through the material surveyed is the crevasse between "beauty - praise - the socially powerful - tranquillity" and "dissidence - intellectual excitement - disquiet & disorder". Systematisers have solved the flaw by deciding either that "modern poetry is not beautiful"or that "religious poetry is not beautiful", but both these proposals are untrue. Allchin doesn't discuss any poetry later than 1960.
(47-49) Robert Crawford the salient thesis is that regionalism, because not metropolitan, is the rise of the margins and so the overthrow of convention. He thus combines conservative views (pre-modern poetic attitudes preserved in working order on the periphery, linking of poetic scope with territoriality) with progressive and "liberation" rhetoric. Artistic liberty is not to be considered exclusively in spatial terms. He belongs to a group which claims that it's OK to write in an unoriginal way so long as you don't live in south-east England. Crawford is brilliant as a poet; as a deviser of marketing strategies, brilliant; as a committeeman and cultural manager, managerial; as a cultural historian, worse than mediocre. So many people today seem happy with the proposition that you are original and ground-breaking if you are unoriginal in rhythm; unoriginal in ideas; unoriginal in the construction of poems; unoriginal in the presentation of experience; unoriginal in the presentation of the self; unoriginal in any aspect of style; but come from somewhere that is not south-east England. How long can this mirage continue? Why should the boundary between Vice and Virtue lie on the Trent- Severn – Exe line?
Refusal to select a particular society prevents relating style to social events; traditional focus on individual poets prohibits any treatment of the chronology of style; tendentious version of intellectual history prohibits discussion of the textmilieu (except for decentralisation). The concentration on territory (and place) is a covert way of excluding discussion of temporal change.
(nn) S O'Brien Deregulating the Muse. has no strengths. O'Brien has odd views on poetry by Protestants, and regards poetry since 1960 as having fallen off from the high standards of Larkin. Related to Grigson in its manner.
(46) Poets on poetry see my review in Angel Exhaust 9. As an exposition of what the Cambridge scene is or was about, is about 99% disappointing. Good pieces by John Hall and Nigel Wheale.
(51) Huk & Acheson patchy collection of essays by academics, two or three of which are very instructive. See my review in Eratica, 1.
(54) Clarke, Millennial Shades & 3 lectures. Half this volume is poetry, rather exciting as it seems to me. The lectures are not specifically about English poets, but about "poetics", however the relevance to Clarke, Floating Capital, the London group, etc. is rather high.
Robinson, Instabilities in British Poetry; Ian Gregson, English poetry and postmodernism; David Kennedy
They give a consistent picture of recent poetry as losing its emotional self-confidence, abandoning realism for play, and becoming more diverse. A more detailed periodisation is not to be had; Robinson sees this happening mainly in the 1970s, the other two in the 1980s; none of them mentions the British Poetry Revival which started in 1960, or addresses the possibility that its products were more dissonant, more innovative, and more epistemologically critical, than the poets they discuss. Robinson discusses only the most conventional poets, such as Tony Harrison. Kennedy's book is confined to poets included in a radically compromised anthology and does not venture outside that.
Ian Gregson (57) adopts the BPR/ small press thesis but doesn't have the connoisseur's knowledge to make very much of it. Does have coverage of some small press poets. Would be preferable to have an insider's account of the scene. Salience of the term PoMo is very low. Use of a term familiar to all literary academics so as to avoid the effort of explaining modern poetry or devising terms adequate to it.
very boring. no interesting remarks. "retro modernism" refers to Middleton, Fisher, Tomlinson, thus demoted visavis the "postmodernists" who are supposed to be technically ahead of them. I don't believe a word of it.
David Kennedy (56) has a thesis about the continuing expansion of diversity in poetry since 1980, but relates this only to the conformist poetry of the period and not at all to the huge diversification of poetry which began in 1960. Has the diversification since 1980 occurred at all? It would be nice to know. book is tied to a Bloodaxe anthology and forbidden to discuss any poets not in it; has no value for the wider world of poetry. He has proposed a thesis that Bloodaxe poets are not simply a continuation of the mainstream of the 60s and 70s, but something new and unconventional; a thesis viewed with widespread incredulity.
The ideological plaster doesn't grip on the object of study and slithers off, embarrassingly, as you look at them. An example of a modern problem, whereby the dressing of a book to make it saleable and respectable is in deep conflict with its subject matter. Belongs to the era of spin.
(55) Keith Tuma, Fishing
The thesis is an attack on fanatically historicist linguistic militias in the USA who have narrow views of poetry and forbid any British poets. Tuma is attacking resurgent American nationalism in its cultural form. No attempt at an overview is made, and therefore no chronology is established. Possibly the thesis is that poets are either "modernist" (=good) or "not modernist" (=bad), and this reassuring criterion applies in very much the same way in around 1915 (for Mina Loy) and around 1998 (for cris cheek). The book offers a series of exceptions without linking them in a counter-history. Discusses Loy, Macleod, the Guyanese poet ER Brathwaite (who did visit Britain once), cris cheek. To be perfectly honest, these poets have nothing to do with each other.
(58) Bush, Out of Dissent see my review in First Offense 10. Basically an update of the Mottram thesis. Discusses MacSweeney, Mottram, TA Clark, Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, at great length. There is an introduction with some generalisations.
(59) Neil Corcoran. Thesis is that Northern Irish poetry is everything that counts. Large in extent, wide in inclusion, flawed in conception, and mediocre in detail. Related to the regionalist aesthetic. Takes no account of the BPR.
(61) Fietz and Ludwig, Poetry in the British Isles see my review in Eratica. collection of essays by academics, often about Wales and Scotland. Versions of the regionalist thesis. Indispensable, if inconsistent.
(62) Gortschacher see my exegesis in The failure of conservatism (unpublished), and review in Angel Exhaust. the most significant single source for anyone interested in periodisation. Full of numbers and dates. A complete survey of the relevant material, allowing, for the first time, valid generalisations.
(64) Tomlinson, essays in Penguin Guide. 1973 and 1983? Strengths in his style, and in recognising poets whose styles developed before 1960. It is sad that in 2001 students are still reading an essay formulated 30 years before, and which was distinctly conservative even then.
Much better are his essays in Poetry (Chicago), around 1962, which are brilliant and arresting as a portrait of alienation and a dissection of the mainstream scene he was alienated from. An early statement of the corruption of the mainstream.
(65) Sheppard, Far Language has useful discussion of certain poets close to Sheppard in the post-Mottram London School. Robert's essays in Bart Moore-Gilbert, ed. are generally similar reruns of the Mottram thesis. The limit of the book is that he is sure he knows what the question of modern poetry is and what the answer is, so that everything converges on a single point; which turns out to be a room with Sheppard, Clarke, Fisher A, Freer, Cobbing, and O'Sullivan in it. I was probably in that room too. Actually, my complaint is less the focus on the mottramite London Group than the lack of interest in equally gifted poets who were in the same rooms and in the same discussions; Seed, Gavin Selerie. They didn't fit. Because of the excitement about "theory", there is no discussion of chronology.
Sheppard is assertive and committed but lacks curiosity. The book is patched together from occasional reviews and from programmatic publicity statements about his own poetry. "Theory" seems not to be distinguished from "self-promotion": as long as it's not fact, it's theory. As if the act of conjecture, and of testing hypotheses, were completely unknown and uncanny. Any disagreement by other people who heard him present the arguments, in his poetry workshop and elsewhere, has been ignored. He is so much more "Yo-ho-ho!!" than "Well, I wonder why..."
Robert is very good at exclaiming at how good the London School is, not quite so good at explaining why they are good, hopeless at explaining why they are so bad. You see my point?
Results
This project started as a response to a demand that I, in my book, summarise and deal with my opponents' views. I found it difficult to identify my opponents or their views; this is perhaps not my fault, since poetics does not advance through formal contests of theses and contradictions. The problem is in getting my views onto the same map as someone else, not in justifying my difference from any or all other critics. Mostly, the critics in "opposite camps" from me write about poets I am not interested in, and vice versa. How then is summarising their views relevant to defending mine?
The most common view in the books polled is the BPR thesis. I have "signed up" to this, fortunately for me since it encodes the basic assumptions I have been thinking inside for the past 20 years.
Over 70 works, there is very little that amounts to a periodisation or an account of the conflicts and shifts of styles. I have taken this as my warrant to set up a timeline of styles from scratch.
A consensus about who the important poets of the era are is conspicuously missing. This combines with the close-reading tradition, which restricts books to dealing with 4 or 5 poets "in depth"; as a combination, they make an overall view very hard to construct, since it only seems possible to think "at that level" for a few seconds before descending into the walled depths of the specific. Simultaneously, it means that most of the books seem irrelevant to most readers, because they chose the wrong poets; as a surveyor, I was bombarded with data, abundant but of very narrow relevance, which I threw away almost as soon as I had read it. Because my background is in a discipline which deals with entire societies, I find it very difficult to put up with this convention where there is no view further than a few inches. Generalisations made by people who dislike thinking in general terms have an air of factitiousness, incompetence, and indifference. Studying the whole cultural field is important because there is no consensus about who the "master poets of the age" are. Could I guess (hoping I'm wrong) that critics believe in 5 or 6 "significant" poets because they didn't start by reading 100 or 200 poets? If you read a single poem, close reading produces hard & definite results; but if you put two different poems side by side and compare them, the result is confusion, discord, uncertainty, and conjecture. If we want to advance beyond A-level, we have to undertake comparisons.
There is no possibility of "compositing" the works cited, because their information is incompatible in every way. There is no composite picture to be constructed from them. Dissonance (cf. Weatherhead, Homberger) is the ring of the landscape. However, certain groups of works do sustain each other.
I hope these notes are of use to someone else studying the subject. I left out books on individual poets and books which aren't specifically about contemporary poetry. Of course, the theoretical ideas animating poets come to a very great extent from the latter. Given the bias of academic critics, most of what is in the books I have cited is essays on single poets with no wider relevance. Reviews in magazines, and introductions to anthologies, are good sources too. I omitted these because they seemed to have little to say about periodisation.
There are other precious sources. For example, I can imagine that compiling 500 "jacket texts" would be very instructive. Sorted by date, these would show changes in literary fashion; compared with the texts, they might show what "silent imperatives" poets were working to. The barrage of hype thrown at the intending purchaser must influence the consuming process. I think we see a competition over imaginary assets. Poets collect boxtops with which to contend in this competition.
I conjecture that there are two quite different strata to the reader's sensibility; one adult, measured, and able to face other people; one, infantile, compulsive, simple, disgraceful, based on straightforward envy, imitation, and greed, seeking gratification and repetition. Unfortunately, without the latter, culture is simply pointless. Formal critical writing has great difficulty dealing with this; publishers' blurbs are much closer to the little creature that goes shopping and says I WANT. Successful poetry appeals to both strata at once (and perhaps to other strata, too).
Many problems of the era stem from the experience of reaching into the sublime and finding that what comes out is the "little monster"; this is the theme of Hughes' poetry. The sublime ennobles power, often ennobling property, violence, authority, at the same moment. The geometry of imaginary space seems to be designed so that the sublime and the primary process converge. Attempts to reduce the imagination to the reach of the reality principle have produced some very grey poetry.