A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Concise Companions to Literature and Culture
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 591

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This volume introduces students to the most important figures, movements and trends in post-war British and Irish poetry.

• An historical overview and critical introduction to the poetry published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century
• Introduces students to figures including Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Andrew Motion
• Takes an integrative approach, emphasizing the complex negotiations between the British and Irish poetic traditions, and pulling together competing tendencies and positions
• Written by critics from Britain, Ireland, and the United States
• Includes suggestions for further reading and a chronology, detailing the most important writers, volumes and events

Leseprobe

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction

Chapter 1: Poetic Modernism and the Century’s Wars

I

II

III

IV

Coda

Chapter 2: The Movement and the Mainstream

Chapter 3: Myth, History, and The New Poetry

Modernist Myth-Making

Empirical Historicopoetics

Existential Historicopoetics

Typological Historicopoetics

Textual Historicopoetics

Chapter 4: Region and Nation in Britain and Ireland

Northern Ireland

Wales

Scotland

Northern England and the Midlands

Chapter 5: Form and Identity in Northern Irish Poetry

I

II

III

IV

Chapter 6: Poetry and Decolonization

Imagining Decolonization

Alienation and Community

Chapter 7: Transatlantic Currents

Chapter 8: Neo-Modernism and Avant-Garde Orientations

Chapter 9: Contemporary British Women Poets and the Lyric Subject

The Lyric “I”

Reframing the Self

Lyric Strains

Chapter 10: Place, Space, and Landscape

Chapter 11: Poetry and Religion

I

II

III

Chapter 12: Institutions of Poetry in Postwar Britain

Acknowledgments

References

Index

Concise Companions to Literature and Culture General Editor: David Bradshaw, University of Oxford

This series offers accessible, innovative approaches to major areas of literary study. Each volume provides an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to gain an authoritative understanding of a given period or movement’s intellectual character and contexts.

Published

Modernism

Edited by David Bradshaw

Feminist Theory

Edited by Mary Eagleton

The Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Edited by Cynthia Wall

Postwar American Literature and Culture

Edited by Josephine G. Hendin

The Victorian Novel

Edited by Francis O'Gorman

Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Edited by Stephen Fredman

Chaucer

Edited by Corinne Saunders

Shakespeare on Screen

Edited by Diana E. Henderson

Contemporary British Fiction

Edited by James F. English

English Renaissance Literature

Edited by Donna B. Hamilton

Milton

Edited by Angelica Duran

Shakespeare and the Text

Edited by Andrew Murphy

Contemporary British and Irish Drama

Edited by Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst

American Fiction 1900–1950

Edited by Peter Stoneley and Cindy Weinstein

The Romantic Age

Edited by Jon Klancher

Postwar British and Irish Poetry

Edited by Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton

Middle English Literature

Edited by Marilyn Corrie

Terror and the Postcolonial

Edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton

Postcolonial Literature

Edited by Shirley Chew and David Richards

Realism

Edited by Matthew Beaumont

This paperback edition first published 2014© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A concise companion to postwar British and Irish poetry / edited by Nigel Alderman and C.D. Blanton.       p. cm. — (Blackwell concise companions to literature and culture)    Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 978–1–4051–2924–4 (hbk.) – ISBN 978-1-118-64694-61. English poetry—20th century—History and criticism—Handbooks, manuals, etc.2. English poetry—Irish authors—20th century—History and criticism—Handbooks, manuals, etc.I. Alderman, Nigel. II. Blanton, C. D.    PR603.C66 2009    8212.91409—dc22

2008033218

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Richard Long, South Bank Circle, 1991. © Tate, London 2008.Cover design by Design Deluxe

Notes on Contributors

Nigel Alderman is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, having previously taught at Yale University. He has published on British poetry from John Milton to Philip Larkin and has co-edited, with C. D. Blanton, Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism (The Yale Journal of Criticism, 2000). He is currently completing a book entitled, Transitional Forms, on British literature of the 1960s.

C. D. Blanton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, having previously taught at Princeton University. He writes on modernism and modern poetry generally, as well as aesthetic and cultural theory, and is currently completing a book on late modernist long poetic forms.

Stephen Burt is Associate Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. He is the author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf, 2009), The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and Twentieth-Century Poetry (Columbia, 2007), and Randall Jarrell and His Age (Columbia, 2003); and the editor of Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (Columbia, 2005). He is also the author of Parallel Play (Graywolf, 2006), a book of poems.

Eric Falci is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently completing a study of contemporary Irish poetry.

Romana Huk is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Palgrave, 2005), the editor of Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally (Wesleyan, 2003), and with James Acheson, of Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (SUNY, 1996).

Linda A. Kinnahan is Professor of English at Duquesne University. She is the author of Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse (Iowa, 2004) and Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser (Cambridge, 1994).

Peter Middleton is Professor of English at the University of Southampton. He is author of Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Alabama, 2005), The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (Routledge, 1992), and, with Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester, 2000). He is also the author of Aftermath (Salt, 2003).

Drew Milne is the Judith E. Wilson University Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. He edits the journal Parataxis: Modernism and Modern Writing (1991–) and is also the editor of Modern Critical Thought: An Anthology of Theorists Writing on Theorists (Blackwell, 2003) and, with Terry Eagleton, of Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996). He is the author of Sheet Mettle (Alfred David, 1994), Bench Marks (Alfred David, 1998), The Damage (Salt, 2001), Mars Disarmed (Figures, 2002) and Go Figure (Salt, 2003).

Jahan Ramazani is the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English and Department Chair at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990), Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001), and A Transnational Poetics (2009). He co-edited the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and the eighth edition of The Twentieth Century and After in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, and the MLA’s William Riley Parker Prize.

Vincent Sherry is Professor and Chair of English at Washington University in St Louis, having previously taught at Villanova University and Tulane University. He is author of The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford, 2003), James Joyce’s Ulysses (Cambridge, 1995), Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford, 1993), and The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (Michigan, 1987). He is also editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (2005).

Michael Thurston is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, having previously taught at Yale University. He is the author of Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (North Carolina, 2001) and editor, with Jani Scandura, of Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital (NYU, 2001). His current project is Going to Hell: The Underworld Descent in Twentieth- Century Poetry.

John P. Waters is Clinical Assistant Professor of Irish Studies at New York University. He works broadly on British and Irish Literature from the eighteenth century to the present and has edited Ireland and Irish Cultural Studies (SAQ, 1996).

Acknowledgments

The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

Excerpts from Simon Armitage, “Don’t Blink,” from ZOOM! (Bloodaxe Books, 1989) and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze: “sisters celebration” from The Arrival of Brighteye & Other Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2000). Reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Alison Brackenbury, “Agenda” from 1829 (Carcanet, 1995); Gillian Clarke, excerpts from “Curlew,” “Letter from a Far Country,” and “Lunchtime Lecture,” from Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1997); Donald Davie, excerpts from “The Nonconformist,” and “Life Encompassed,” from Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1990); and Peter Scupham, excerpt from “A Borderland” from Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2003). Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.

Ciaran Carson, “Turn Again,” from The Irish for No, reprinted by permission of The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland and Wake Forest University Press.

Excerpt from Robert Conquest, “The Classical Poets,” from Poems (Macmillan, 1955), reprinted by kind permission of the author.

Excerpts from “The Nonconformist,” and “Life Encompassed,” from Collected Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), copyright © by Donald Davie 1990, reprinted by permission of University of Chicago Press.

Excerpt from “Foreign” is taken from Selling Manhattan by Carol Ann Duffy published by Anvil Press Poetry in 1987.

Excerpt from “Mrs Sisyphus,” from The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy. Copyright © by Carol Ann Duffy 1999. Reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan and Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Excerpts from “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” and “Airs of Palestine, No. 2” in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, by T. S. Eliot, text copyright © 1996 by Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Excerpt from “Rite, Lubitavish, Glenaan,” John Hewitt, The Selected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Michael Longley & Frank Ormsby (Blackstaff Press, 2007) reproduced by permission of Blackstaff Press on behalf of the Estate of John Hewitt.

Excerpt from “Respublica,” from New & Collected Poems 1952–1992 by Geoffrey Hill, copyright © 1994 by Geoffrey Hill, and excerpt from “LV,” from The Triumph of Love by Geoffrey Hill, copyright © 1998 by Geoffrey Hill. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Respublica” from Canaan by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin Books, 1996), copyright © Geoffrey Hill, 1996, and excerpt from “LV” from The Triumph of Love by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin Books, 1999), copyright © Geoffrey Hill, 1998. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

Excerpt from Tom Leonard, “Just ti Let Yi No.” Intimate Voices (Galloping Dog Press, 1984). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.

Excerpt from Grace Nichols, “Of Course When They Ask for Poems About the ‘Realities’ of Black Women,” Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman and Other Poems (Virago, 1989). Copyright © Grace Nichols 1989 reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd.

Excerpt from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “River, with Boats,” from The Magdalene Sermon, reprinted by permission of The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland, and from The Magdalene Sermon & Earlier Poems, reprinted by permission of Wake Forest University Press.

Ezra Pound: “In a Station of the Metro.” By Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Excepts from Denise Riley, “Dark Looks” from Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986–1993 (Reality Street Editions, 1993). Reprinted with kind permission of Denise Riley and Reality Street Editions.

Reprinted by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.:

Excerpts from “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” and “Airs of Palestine, No. 2” in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, by T. S. Eliot, text copyright © 1996 by Valerie Eliot. Excerpts from “Guidebook, to the Alhambra” and “What’s Going On” from A World Where News Travelled Slowly by Lavinia Greenlaw. Copyright © 1997 by Lavinia Greenlaw. Excerpts from “The Beautician,” “Elvis Presley,” and “Tamer and Hawk” from Collected Poems by Thom Gunn. Copyright © 1994 by Thom Gunn. Excerpt from “At Toomebridge” from Electric Light by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2001 by Seamus Heaney. Excerpt from “Crowego” from Collected Poems by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Ted Hughes. Excerpts from “High Windows” and “Reference Back” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1998, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. “In a Station of the Metro” from Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound by Ezra Pound. Copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC:

Excerpts from “The Beautician,” “Elvis Presley,” and “Tamer and Hawk” from Collected Poems by Thom Gunn. Copyright © 1994 by Thom Gunn. Excerpt from “At Toomebridge” from Electric Light by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2001 by Seamus Heaney. Excerpt from “Crowego” from Collected Poems by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Ted Hughes. Excerpts from “High Windows” and “Reference Back” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1998, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Chronology

1945

German surrender; (UK) dissolution of War Cabinet under Winston Churchill, Prime Minister; Labour government: Clement Attlee, Prime Minister; Japanese surrender; United Nations (UN) chartered; beginning of Nuremberg trials; foundation of World Bank; beginning of wide-scale nationalization; Family Allowances Act.

Philip Larkin, The North Ship

1946

Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech; National Insurance Act; National Assistance Act; National Health Service Act; nationalization of the Bank of England; nationalization of coal industry; formation of British Arts Council.

Edwin Muir, The Voyage and Other Poems; Dylan Thomas, Deaths and Entrances

1947

Withdrawal of military aid to Greece and Turkey; announcement of Truman Doctrine; India and Pakistan become independent (partition); Jawaharlal Nehru becomes Prime Minister of India; UN partition of Palestine; Transport Act (nationalization of road and rail transport); nationalization of electrical industry; nationalization of Cable & Wireless.

1948

(Ire.) Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government falls in Éire: first Inter-Party government, John A. Costello, Taoiseach; bread rationing ends in Britain; arrival of Empire Windrush, rise in West Indian immigration; launch of European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan); Burma (Myanmar), Sri Lanka (Ceylon) become independent; end of colonial rule in Trans-Jordan (Jordan), British Palestine, Egypt (excluding Suez); British Citizenship Act; beginning of Berlin blockade, airlift; assassination of Gandhi.

T. S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize for Literature; W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety; T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture; Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos

1949

Republic of Ireland established, withdraws from Commonwealth; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); apartheid instituted in South Africa; India adopts constitution; nationalization of gas industry; devaluation of pound sterling.

1950

“Mother and Child Scheme” for public health care in Ireland fails; Britain recognizes People’s Republic of China, Israel; London dock strike; nationalization of iron and steel industry; end of fuel rationing; British troops sent to Korea.

David Gascoyne, A Vagrant, and Other Poems

1951

(UK) Conservative government: Winston Churchill, Prime Minister; (Ire.) Fianna Fáil government: Éamon de Valera, Taoiseach; Festival of Britain; Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defect to Soviet Union.

Keith Douglas, Collected Poems

1952

Death of George VI; Britain produces atomic bomb.

David Jones, The Anathemata

1953

Coronation of Elizabeth II; death of Stalin; London Conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers.

Death of Dylan Thomas; D. J. Enright, The Laughing Hyena and Other Poems; Louis MacNeice, Autumn Sequel

1954

(Ire.) Second Inter-Party government: John A. Costello, Taoiseach; end of food rationing in Britain; Independent Television Authority established.

Thom Gunn, Fighting Terms; Jon Silkin, The Peaceable Kingdom

1955

(UK) Churchill resigns: Anthony Eden, Prime Minister; formation of European Union; Ireland joins United Nations, declines to join NATO; Bandung Conference; railroad and dock strikes.

D. J. Enright (ed.), Poetry of the 1950s; W. H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles; Austin Clarke, Ancient Lights; W. S. Graham, The Nightfishing; Elizabeth Jennings, A Way of Looking; Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived; Hugh MacDiarmid, In Memoriam James Joyce; R. S. Thomas, Song at the Year’s Turning

1956

Suez crisis; beginning of the Border Campaign in Ireland; Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow: Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech”; Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Robert Conquest (ed.), New Lines; Norman MacCaig, Riding Lights

1957

(UK) Eden resigns: Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister; (Ire.) Fianna Fáil government: Éamon de Valera, Taoiseach; Treaty of Rome (Formation of European Economic Community); Ghana, Malaya become independent; Wolfenden Report (on homosexuality and prostitution); Britain tests hydrogen bomb.

Donald Davie, A Winter Talent and Other Poems; Thom Gunn, The Sense of Movement; Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain; Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning

1958

Formation of West Indies Federation; Notting Hill race riots; London bus strike; opening of Preston bypass (M6, first motorway).

1959

(Ire.) de Valera resigns, elected President: Séan Lemass, Taoiseach; Singapore becomes independent; first section of M1 opened.

Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen; Elizabeth Jennings, A Sense of the World

1960

Cyprus, Nigeria become independent; Lady Chatterley trial.

Austin Clarke, The Horse-Eaters; Ian Hamilton Finlay, The dancers inherit the party; Ted Hughes, Lupercal; Charles Tomlinson, Seeing Is Believing (1958 in US)

1961

Construction of Berlin Wall; South Africa withdraws from Commonwealth.

Roy Fisher, City; Thom Gunn, My Sad Captains and Other Poems: Jon Silkin, The Re-Ordering of the Stones

1962

Commonwealth Immigrants Act; end of postwar National Service.

A. Alvarez (ed.), The New Poetry; Brian Coffey, Missouri Sequence; Thomas Kinsella, Downstream; Christopher Middleton, Torse 3

1963

(UK) Macmillan resigns: Alec Douglas-Home, Prime Minister; France blocks British entry into EEC; Kenyan independence; Profumo affair.

Death of Louis MacNeice; death of Sylvia Plath; Louis MacNeice, The Burning Perch; Charles Tomlinson, A Peopled Landscape; Rosemary Tonks, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms

1964

(UK) Election of Labour government: Harold Wilson, Prime Minister; Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Congo, Malta become independent.

Donald Davie, Events and Wisdoms; Elizabeth Jennings, Recoveries; Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

1965

Gambia becomes independent; unilateral secession of Rhodesia; Death of Winston Churchill.

Death of T. S. Eliot; George Barker, The True Confessions of George Barker; Basil Bunting, Loquitur; Sylvia Plath, Ariel

1966

(Ire.) Lemass resigns; Jack Lynch, Taoiseach; wage and price controls; England wins World Cup.

Basil Bunting, Briggflatts; Austin Clarke, Mnemosyne Lay in Dust; Roy Fisher, The Ship’s Orchestra; Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist

1967

Sexual Offenses Act (repealing laws against homosexuality in Britain).

Death of Patrick Kavanagh; death of John Masefield; Cecil Day Lewis becomes Poet Laureate; Eavan Boland, New Territory; Andrew Crozier, Loved Litter of Time Spent; Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Identikit; Thom Gunn, Touch; Ted Hughes, Wodwo; Tom Raworth, The Relation Ship; John Riley, Ancient and Modern; Rosemary Tonks, Iliad of Broken Sentences

1968

Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; students and workers riot in Paris; Race Relations Act; Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech against immigration.

Geoffrey Hill, King Log; Derek Mahon, Night-Crossing; Thomas Kinsella, Nightwalker and Other Poems; Edwin Morgan, The Second Life; J. H. Prynne, Kitchen Poems; C. H. Sisson, Metamorphoses; R. S. Thomas, Not that He Brought Flowers

1969

Riots in Derry; British troops sent to Northern Ireland; beginning of the Troubles.

George Mackay Brown, The Year of the Whale; Donald Davie, Essex Poems; Douglas Dunn, Terry Street; Seamus Heaney, Door into the Dark; Thomas Kinsella, The Táin; Michael Longley, No Continuing City; J. H. Prynne, The White Stones; Charles Tomlinson, Way of a World

1970

(UK) Election of Conservative government: Edward Heath, Prime Minister; dock strike, state of emergency declared; British Petroleum announces North Sea oil discovery; Tonga becomes independent.

W. S. Graham, Malcolm Mooney’s Land; Tony Harrison, The Loiners; Ted Hughes, Crow; Peter Porter, The Last of England; John Riley, What Reason Was

1971

Currency reform: decimalization of British and Irish pound; beginning of detentions without trial in Northern Ireland; Commons votes to join EEC; Qatar independent.

Death of Stevie Smith; Fleur Adcock, High Tide in the Garden; Elaine Feinstein, The Magic Apple Trees; Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Language Games; Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns; J. H. Prynne, Brass

1972

“Bloody Sunday,” thirteen killed by British troops in Northern Ireland; British Embassy in Dublin burned; Parliament of Northern Ireland suspended; pound sterling allowed to float on open market; miners’ strike.

Death of Cecil Day Lewis; John Betjeman becomes Poet Laureate; Donald Davie, The Shires; Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out; Thomas Kinsella, Butcher’s Dozen; Notes from the Land of the Dead and Other Poems; Derek Mahon, Lives; John Montague, The Rough Field; R. S. Thomas, H’m

1973

(Ire.) Fine Gael government: Liam Cosgrave, Prime Minister; Britain and Ireland enter EEC; World oil crisis; IRA bombing campaign begins; Sunningdale Agreement for power-sharing in Northern Ireland (collapses 1974); beginning of coal miners’ strike; Bahamas independent.

Death of W. H. Auden; D. J. Enright, The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood; Michael Longley, An Exploded View; Edwin Morgan, From Glasgow to Saturn; Paul Muldoon, New Weather; Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle, The Hermaphrodite Album; John Riley, Ways of Approaching

1974

(UK) Labour government: Harold Wilson, Prime Minister; Local Government Act reforms administrative map; Prevention of Terrorism Act; Grenada independent; Ireland allows sale of contraceptives to married couples.

Death of Austin Clarke; death of David Jones; Allen Fisher, Place; Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Cordelia: or, “A Poem Should Not Mean, But Be”; Linton Kwesi Johnson, Voices of the Living and the Dead; Philip Larkin, High Windows; C. H. Sisson, In the Trojan Ditch; Anne Stevenson, Correspondences: A family history in letters

1975

Sex Discrimination Act, Equal Pay Act come into force.

Brian Coffey, Advent; Ulli Freer, Rooms; Seamus Heaney, North; Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, Beat, and Blood; Derek Mahon, The Snow Party; John Montague, The Great Cloak; F. T. Prince, Drypoints of the Hasidim; R. S. Thomas, Laboratories of the Spirit

1976

(UK) Wilson resigns: James Callaghan, Prime Minister.

Ciaran Carson, The New Estate; Thom Gunn, Jack Straw’s Castle; Trevor Joyce, The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine

1977

(Ire.) Fianna Fáil government: Jack Lynch, Taoiseach; (UK) Labour–Liberal pact maintains Labour government; Silver Jubilee.

W. S. Graham, Implements in Their Places; Ted Hughes, Gaudete; Andrew Motion, Pleasure Steamers; Paul Muldoon, Mules; Tom Paulin, A State of Justice; Denise Riley, Marxism for Infants

1978

Beginning of “winter of discontent.”

Death of Hugh MacDiarmid; Tony Harrison, From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems; Geoffrey Hill, Tenebrae; Ted Hughes, Cave Birds; Craig Raine, The Onion, Memory

1979

(UK) Conservative government: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister; (Ire.) Lynch resigns; Charles Haughey, Taoiseach; Irish pound joins Exchange Rate Mechanism; Scottish and Welsh devolution referenda fail; assassinations of Airey Neave and Lord Mountbatten; Warrenpoint ambush.

Fleur Adcock, The Inner Harbour; Douglas Dunn, Barbarians; Seamus Heaney, Field Work; Ted Hughes; Moortown, Remains of Elmet; J. H. Prynne, Down where changed; Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home; Jeremy Reed, Saints and Psychotics

1980

Steel strike; British Aerospace privatized; Zimbabwe becomes independent.

Eavan Boland, In Her Own Image; Linton Kwesi Johnson, Inglan Is a Bitch; Paul Muldoon, Why Brownlee Left; Tom Paulin, The Strange Museum; Jon Silkin, The Psalms with Their Spoils; Ken Smith, Fox Running

1981

(Ire.) Fine Gael–Labour coalition government; Garret Fitzgerald, Taoiseach; (UK) split in Labour party: formation of Social Democratic Party (SDP); British Nationality Act; Brixton riots; deaths of nine IRA hunger strikers in Maze Prison.

Douglas Dunn, St Kilda’s Parliament; Tony Harrison, Continuous: Fifty Sonnets from the School of Eloquence; Christopher Logue, War Music; Andrew Motion, Independence

1982

Falklands War; (Ire.) Haughey returns as Taoiseach, succeeded again by Fitzgerald.

Andrew Motion & Blake Morrison (eds), Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry; Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night; Medbh McGuckian, The Flower Master; Christopher Reid, Pea Soup

1983

(UK) General election returns Conservative government; escape of 38 prisoners from Maze Prison; mass demonstrations in London organized by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.

Jean “Binta” Breeze, Answers; George Mackay Brown, Voyages; James Fenton, The Memory of War; Geoffrey Hill, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy; John Montague, The Dead Kingdom; Andrew Motion, Secret Narratives; Paul Muldoon, Quoof; Grace Nichols, i is a long memoried woman; Tom Paulin, Liberty Tree

1984

Coal Miners’ Strike; Trade Union Act; privatization of British Telecom; bombing of Grand Hotel, Brighton.

Death of John Betjeman; Ted Hughes becomes Poet Laureate; David Dabydeen, Slave Song; Seamus Heaney, Station Island; Sweeney Astray; Medbh McGuckian, Venus and the Rain; Grace Nichols, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems; Craig Raine, Rich; Peter Reading, C.

1985

Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Death of Basil Bunting; death of Philip Larkin; Carol Ann Duffy, Standing Female Nude; Allen Fisher, Brixton Fractals; Tony Harrison, v.; Peter Reading, Ukelele Music; Christopher Reid, Katerina Brac; Denise Riley, Dry Air; Benjamin Zephaniah, The Dread Affair

1986

Riots in Brixton and elsewhere; London Stock Exchange deregulated; British Gas privatized.

Fleur Adcock, The Incident Book; Roy Fisher, A Furnace; Christopher Middleton, Two Horse Wagon Going By; Jon Silkin, The Ship’s Pasture

1987

(Ire.) Fianna Fáil government: Charles Haughey, Taoiseach; Single European Act; British Airways privatized.

Andrew Crozier & Tim Longville (eds), A Various Art; Ciaran Carson, The Irish for No; Carol Ann Duffy, Selling Manhattan; Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern; Kathleen Jamie, The Way We Live; Edwin Morgan, Themes on a Variation; Blake Morrison, The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper and Other Poems; Paul Muldoon, Meeting the British; Tom Paulin, Fivemiletown

1988

SDP merges with Liberal Party to form Social and Liberal Democratic Party; SAS shoot three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar; transatlantic flight bombed over Lockerbie (Scotland).

Gillian Allnutt et al. (eds), The New British Poetry; Jean “Binta” Breeze, Riddym Ravings and Other Poems; David Dabydeen, Coolie Odyssey; Medbh McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach; Jo Shapcott, Electroplating the Baby

1989

Opening of Berlin Wall; Release of Guildford Four; Iran places fatwa on Salman Rushdie.

Death of Samuel Beckett; Simon Armitage, Zoom!; Gillian Clarke, Letting in the Rumour; Selima Hill, The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness; George Macbeth, Collected Poems 1958–1982; E. A. Markham, Towards the End of the Century; Grace Nicholls, Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman and Other Poems; Iain Crichton Smith, The Village, and Other Poems

1990

(UK) Margaret Thatcher resigns: John Major, Prime Minister; Poll Tax riots; pound sterling joins Exchange Rate Mechanism; Nelson Mandela released from Robben Island; reunification of Germany.

Eavan Boland, Outside History; Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti; Robert Crawford, A Scottish Assembly; Carol Ann Duffy, The Other Country; Paul Durcan, Daddy, Daddy; Elaine Feinstein, City Music; Thomas Kinsella, Poems from Centre City; Glyn Maxwell, Tale of the Mayor’s Son; Paul Muldoon, Madoc: A Mystery

1991

Gulf War; release of Birmingham Six; Poll Tax replaced by Council Tax; official end of South African apartheid; dissolution of Soviet Union; Ireland agrees to sign Maastricht Treaty.

Lavinia Greenlaw, The Cost of Getting Lost in Space; Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things; Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tings an’ Times; Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers; Liz Lochead, Bagpipe Muzak; Michael Longley, Gorse Fires; Mebdh McGuckian, Marconi’s Cottage; Andrew Motion, Love in a Life; Sean O’Brien, HMS Glasshouse

1992

(Ire.) Haughey resigns; Albert Reynolds, Taoiseach; Maastricht Treaty signed; sterling crisis; Britain withdraws from European Exchange Rate Mechanism; Irish voters approve a loosened abortion law, guaranteeing access to information and travel abroad

Simon Armitage, Kid; Xanadu; Jean “Binta” Breeze, Spring Cleaning; U. A. Fanthorpe, Neck-Verse; Thom Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats; Glyn Maxwell, Out of the Rain; Tom Raworth, Catacoustics; Peter Reading, 3 in 1; Denise Riley, Stair Spirit; Benjamin Zephaniah, City Psalms

1993

Downing Street Declaration affirms right of Northern Ireland to selfdetermination; Maastricht Treaty comes into force.

Ciaran Carson, First Language; Gillian Clarke, The King of Britain’s Daughter; Carol Ann Duffy, Mean Time; Paul Durcan, A Snail in my Prime; Lavinia Greenlaw, Night Photograph; Jackie Kay, Other Lovers; E. A. Markham, Letter from Ulster and the Hugo Poems; Don Paterson, Nil Nil; Denise Riley, Mop Mop Georgette

1994

(Ire.) Fine Gael coalition government: John Bruton, Taoiseach; IRA declares ceasefire; Nelson Mandela becomes President of South Africa; privatization of coal industry; opening of Channel Tunnel; Church of England begins ordination of women.

Eavan Boland, In a Time of Violence; Roy Fisher, Birmingham River; Kathleen Jamie, The Queen of Sheba; Medbh McGuckian, Captain Lavender; Derek Mahon, The Yaddo Letter; Paul Muldoon, The Annals of Chile

1995

David Trimble becomes leader of Ulster Unionist party.

Death of Donald Davie; Seamus Heaney wins Nobel Prize for Literature; James Berry, Hot Earth, Cold Earth; Michael Longley, The Ghost Orchid; Derek Mahon, The Hudson Letter; Sean O’Brien, Ghost Train

1996

IRA bomb destroys Arndale Centre, Manchester.

Death of George Mackay Brown; Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level; Geoffrey Hill, Canaan; Grace Nichols, Sunris

1997

(UK) Labour government: Tony Blair, Prime Minister; (Ire.) Fianna Fáil government: Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach; Scotland, Wales referenda pass; control of Hong Kong transferred to China; death of Diana, Princess of Wales; Ireland permits divorce under certain circumstances.

Simon Armitage, CloudCuckooLand; Jean “Binta” Breeze, On the Edge of an Island; Lavinia Greenlaw, A World Where News Travelled; Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid; Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book; Andrew Motion, Salt Water

1998

Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement; establishment of Northern Ireland Assembly (First Minister: David Trimble).

Death of Ted Hughes; appointment of Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate; Seamus Heaney, Beowulf; Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love; Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters; Jackie Kay, Off Colour; Glyn Maxwell, The Breakage; Medbh McGuckian, Shelmalier; Paul Muldoon, Hay

1999

Scottish Parliament opens (Scottish Labour government: Donald Dewar, First Minister); Welsh Assembly established.

Carol Ann Duffy, The World’s Wife; Kathleen Jamie, Jizzen; Don Paterson, The Eyes; J. H. Prynne, Poems

2000

(Scot.) Death of Dewar: Henry McLeish, First Minister; last prisoners leave Maze Prisoner under Northern Ireland Peace Process.

Death of R. S. Thomas; Thom Gunn, Boss Cupid; Jo Shapcott, Her Book

2001

(Scot.) MacLeish resigns: Jack McConnell, First Minister; attacks on New York, Washington; US and UK attack Afghanistan; race riots in Burnley, Bradford.

Death of Elizabeth Jennings; Ciaran Carson, The Twelfth of Never; Lavinia Greenlaw, Mary George of Allnorthover; Seamus Heaney, Electric Light; Selima Hill, Bunny; Trevor Joyce, with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold; Sean O’Brien, Downriver; Benjamin Zephaniah, Too Black, Too Strong

2002

(Ire.) Fianna Fáil–Progressive Democrats government; euro introduced in Ireland; Irish voters accept Nice Treaty in second referendum; suspension of Northern Ireland Assembly following “Stormontgate”; Golden Jubilee.

Glyn Maxwell, The Nerve; Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel; Alice Oswald, Dart

2003

United States and Britain attack Iraq.

Ciaran Carson, Breaking News; Lavinia Greenlaw, Minsk

2004

Ireland votes to reform citizenship law.

Death of Thom Gunn; Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House; Michael Longley, Snow Water; Tom Paulin, The Road to Inver

2005

London transport bombings; Irish recognized as a working language by the European Union.

Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture; Jackie Kay, Life Mask; Derek Mahon, Harbour Lights; Alice Oswald, Woods, etc.

2006

Government of Wales Act gives Welsh Assembly enhanced legislative powers; St Andrews Agreement restores Northern Ireland Parliament.

Seamus Heaney, District and Circle; W. N. Herbert, Bad Shaman Blues; Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes; Robin Robertson, Swithering

2007

(UK) Blair resigns: Gordon Brown, Prime Minister; (Scot.) minority government: Alex Salmond (National), First Minister; Northern Ireland Assembly reconvenes: Ian Paisley, First Minister; Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister.

Edwin Morgan, A Book of Lives; Sean O’Brien, The Drowned Book

2008

(N. Ire.) Paisley resigns: Peter Robinson, First Minister; global financial crisis.

Introduction

Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton

The concise title of this collection is perhaps best taken quite literally. Both the volume and the dozen essays it contains are relatively brief, especially when weighed against the ever-thickening mass of British and Irish poetry written and published since World War II. Each piece proposes one possible angle of entry to that field, exploring a context of particular importance to poetry written over the past half-century and more, not to chart it exhaustively, still less to anthologize and account all the works and figures that define it, but rather to suggest ways in which the field might productively be encountered, by those beginning to read and teach this material, or merely hoping to reread it critically. Accordingly, each essay is designed to offer not a definitive set of readings or canonical judgments, but rather a survey and analysis of the tendencies, habits, and patterns that distinguish poetic production in Britain and Ireland over the past several decades. Together, they are offered as a rough, necessarily provisional, guide to a period that is perhaps still too close to view in a single historical glance, but one that is simultaneously receding from the recollections of simple memory into those of literary history.

What is certain is that the years between 1945 and now have witnessed a radical transformation in the cultures of the British archipelago and the larger global system in which they negotiate an often uneasy place. From the rise of the welfare state in the 1940s to its fall in the 1980s, from the proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1949 to the Good Friday Accords in 1998, from the dismantling of the British Empire after the war to the devolution of British power onto the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh National Assembly at the century’s end, the literal meanings of political terms such as “British” and “Irish,” of the “English” language that reaches across them and beyond, have fundamentally changed over the past half century and more. With those changes, sometimes slow and sometimes abrupt, the idea of an English literature has necessarily changed as well, entailing an interrogation of what poetry is or does that continues into the new century. In large measure, these redefinitions constitute shifting borders, blurred lines of demarcation not only between political entities but also among the various practices of language that circulate within and among them. As even the casual reader of recent verse will quickly note, the idea of poetry has often been contested and uneasy over the past six decades or so, spinning a literary history capacious enough to include the Movement lyric and dub beats, and spawning inevitable controversies in the process. Simple definitions have often proven elusive, either too indistinct or too partial. What seems clearer is that the question itself has remained charged, that an ever-expanding field of poetic writing has engaged and incorporated every shift of recent times. We have therefore attempted less to define what poetry is or what it means than to describe what it has been and what it has meant at crucial moments in a still developing literary history. To that end, each essay in this volume surveys one important corner of a larger map, gathering some of the figures and poems that have made it significant and summarizing the critical questions that have arisen in the process.

Accounts of postwar literature often adopt an apologetic or even elegiac tone, as if the historical loss of the triumphal certainties of earlier moments necessarily implied an aesthetic diminution. When coupled with the perceived marginalization of poetry more generally, such accounts can reduce the writing of recent decades to a rather melancholic affair. But historical melancholia need not imply simple poetic mourning. To the contrary, the very intensity and speed of recent historical shifts have often prompted striking reconsiderations of form and spawned larger questions that poetry is uniquely equipped to answer. Writing of the history of postwar Europe more generally, Tony Judt has recently observed that the years after 1945 have “now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century” (2005: 2). Much the same can be said of the poetry that sought to define a new sense of place and a new set of relations – political certainly, but also social and formal, sexual and economic, historical and existential – proper to the twentieth century’s latter half. Mindful then (in Judt’s phrase again) “that 1945 was never quite the fresh start that it sometimes appears” (2005: 6), this volume therefore takes the “post” in its title seriously. The turmoil and social upheaval that defined the twentieth century’s first half, between 1914 and 1945 especially, spared little in the realm of culture, imprinting traces across all the arts. But poetry in particular has proven an extraordinarily sensitive instrument to that history, whether recording the horrors of soldiers fighting on the Western Front, in the work of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, or registering the enchantments and disenchantments of those left, like W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, at home. The consolidation of new political orders after 1945 may have qualified some anxieties and introduced others, but it also left newer generations of poets to struggle with and re-adapt some of the same insoluble questions and forms that had vexed their predecessors.

The mere fact that we have no better term than “postwar” for a historical interlude already over half a century long, then, should already suggest the inevitability of a backward glance, toward those revolutions, disasters, and new beginnings that brought the postwar order (and its various disorders) into being. It should also suggest a fact discovered in different ways by many of the essays included here: that much of the energy generated by postwar poetry has been sparked by the need to sort out, break with, exorcise, criticize, escape, or reconfirm a host of contradictory legacies – or at least to make some sense of the immediate past. In all probability, every age is an age of criticism. What often seems to distinguish recent decades, however, is the degree to which the work of criticism – assessing formal debts, arguing over historical precedents, disputing the ways in which poems accrete meaning – has guided not only the ways in which poems are read, but also the ways in which they are written. The need to take stock of everything that the postwar follows, whether lying in the archaic past or in living memory, has often left the period to define itself by defining the larger history to which it forms an epilogue. (It is perhaps worth noting, in this regard, that the first such companion to postwar poetry was offered by Stephen Spender in a small pamphlet entitled Poetry since 1939. The year was 1946.)

But the other half of Judt’s parenthesis is equally important. If the postwar marks “an interim age,” then it also gestures forward, to our own contemporary moment certainly, but also to futures in the process of taking shape. In both present and future, that plural usage remains inevitable. The current Oxford English Literary History, for example, segments the twentieth century alone into no fewer than five volumes, the postwar into three (dividing period boundaries alternately at 1940, 1948, 1960, 1970, and 2000), and traces the transformation of English literature into a complicated international fact. Major anthologies overlap similarly. The recent Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry spans the entire century (Tuma 2001), while the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, published two years later, divides the century in half, imposing no national borders within English (Ramazani et al. 2003). Other important collections have chosen other organizing frames. Edna Longley’s Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry from Britain and Ireland (2000b), for example, concentrates attention on the continuity and development of the lyric, while Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford’s Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 locates the underlying story of postwar poetry, as of postwar society in general, in the gradual but implacable movement of democratization and the corollary achievement of a “contemporary culture of pluralism” (1998: xxii). For Armitage and Crawford, the postwar is largely defined by the transformation of England from “the widely acknowledged fount and centre of English language culture” to a tributary “anglophone culture within an English-speaking world” (xxiii), a world in which “apparent genealogies become disrupted” (xxvi).

All of these constitute so many provisional descriptions of a field not yet finished, signs that, as Armitage and Crawford put it, “a sense of belatedness grows, mixed with a sense of anticipation” (1998: xxxii). Inevitably, different accounts will attempt to impose coherent narratives on any such span of time. More often, they will be forced to acknowledge several. Against the largely optimistic story offered by Armitage and Crawford, then, might be placed Andrew Duncan’s more polemical account of the systemic “failure” of twentieth-century British poetry (2003: 2), measured largely in its apparent devotion to older styles and familiar subjects. What Duncan terms “conservatism” might as easily be characterized as a certain constriction of voice. Somewhat paradoxically, the persistence of a healthier public market for poetry in Britain and Ireland, less bound to the university system than elsewhere, has occasionally tended to stratify the poetic field, even as the proliferation of new technologies and the formation of new sub-cultures generate new poetic practices on all sides. A recent Arts Council study diplomatically notes what it terms “a high degree of concentration” (Bridgwood & Hampson 2000: i) in the book market, with a single imprint (Faber) responsible for over 80 percent of contemporary poetry sales (2000: 16) and two poets (Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney) accounting for the vast share of titles sold. Such a situation can be praised or deplored, but it forms an important underlying fact in either case, suggesting that postwar poetry is defined not only by its range of styles, but also by even larger disparities between large houses and small presses, popular and professional readers, mainstream and experimental sensibilities, continuous and discontinuous traditions. This is a pluralism of a different kind, one that underscores a larger critical question about what poetry does or can be expected to do in the early years of the twenty-first century: whether it looks forward or back, and whether it should.

What is more certain is that any attempt to characterize the postwar period in general will have to acknowledge all of these tendencies at once, taking occasionally discordant and often contentious critical discussions as historical symptoms in their own right. Where possible, this volume seeks to discern points of connection across competing camps, in order to isolate the larger critical concepts and basic cognitive equipment that organize the period at large. Similarly, it seeks to engage the broadest possible historical frame, noting the emergence of many pitches and tones that reverberate not only across the British archipelago but globally as well. Throughout the postwar period, it has become increasingly clear that poetry in English – even British and Irish poetry in English – arises from multiple tributaries and geographies, often originating well beyond the traditional centers of English literature. It is not possible, if it ever was, strictly to divide British poetry from Irish, or to separate either from the poetries of America and the former Empire, any more than it is possible to evade the differences. (It should be noted, too, though such traditions largely fall beyond the scope of this volume, that the British and Irish poetry of the era remains by no means exclusively Anglophone, that it exists vibrantly in the older languages of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as in more recent arrivals to a polyglot social order.) What is most important in the context of this companion is the fact that all of these histories quickly become part of the field they narrate from different points of view, indispensable components of the critical apparatus needed to read postwar poetry. It is thus more than mere millennial curiosity that requires a critical accounting of recent decades; such an accounting is also part of what the poetry of recent decades has done most compulsively. The contexts sketched here comprise a historical backdrop against which individual poems and the work of individual poets can be seen, to be sure. But they also constitute parts of a larger history of the period that poets have already begun to draft in real time, imagining pasts and futures still in formation.

Given the density of those pasts and the multiplicity of those futures, we have chosen to impose no single narrative arc on what follows. Instead, we have attempted to account for some of the movements, moments, and tendencies that have shaped postwar poetry across Britain and Ireland. Some chapters therefore concentrate on significant generations or chronological turning points, moments that either proposed or challenged significant orthodoxies. Others move geographically, considering sites and particular histories that have intersected or even redirected the larger course of recent work. Still others examine guiding concepts that have made themselves felt across larger sweeps of time and space, organizing or inflecting the work of more diverse groups of poets. We have sought to avoid segmenting the field too strictly, hoping instead that individual essays may recombine and reorder themselves in useful and even surprising ways. Canonical names like Eliot, Auden, Larkin, and Heaney have thus been left to recur in a variety of contexts, on the assumption that it is precisely their relevance within and across an array of frameworks that has guaranteed their lasting influence. But other names, often less familiar, have emerged regularly as well. Needless to say, the accounts offered and the suggestions made here are far from exhaustive, and much work of importance will remain untouched, even unmentioned, in these pages. For that reason, references to fuller accounts and suggestions for further reading have been included at the end of each essay, in the references, and in the accompanying chronology.

The volume’s first three essays move chronologically, tracing the sequence of generations that forms the central line of the century’s middle decades. Vincent Sherry’s “Poetic Modernism and the Century’s Wars” considers the two terms that shape the early years of the period most decisively: war and modernism. In retrospect, the pressure that gave rise to a modernist style in poetry seems inseparable from the larger tectonic forces that also produced the cataclysm of two world conflicts, ended European global hegemony, and unsettled the British Empire. Modernism, in this sense, was not merely a taste for aesthetic experimentation or an explosion of avant-garde energies, but also a cumulative response to a much larger set of social shifts, an ending as much as a beginning. Conceived as a kind of war poetry in its own right, in a war spanning several decades, modernism refracts the same underlying crisis that produced the war itself: the historical end of the progressive ideological certitude of Liberalism, with its attendant moral confidence in the structures of rationality. But in so doing, it also establishes the social and aesthetic terms with which succeeding decades will struggle, in an often desperate attempt to restore the breach.

Although resolutely skeptical of modernism’s occasionally apocalyptic strains and suspicious of its larger historical claims, a younger group of English writers acknowledge such a rupture differently. Stephen Burt’s “The Movement and the Mainstream” concentrates on the first major generation of poets to emerge after the war’s end, tracking the development of the precisely ironic lyric mode with which “The Movement” claimed canonical centrality and established itself as the predominant voice of a shrinking English culture. Shaped by the new circumstances of the Cold War and a diminished postwar state, the poets grouped around Philip Larkin sought continuity where their modernist predecessors had found none, more reconciled to the loss of ideological certainties. In the process, Burt demonstrates, the Movement not only formulated a new consensus in reverse – defined by everything it is not – but also provided a polemical target against which every succeeding counter-movement in English poetry would react. Nigel Alderman’s “Myth, History, and The New Poetry” traces the first such reaction, perhaps the most successful attempt to enact a workable compromise between modernism’s mythical methods and the Movement’s more orthodox meters. Alderman argues that the poets of the 1960s – figures like Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney – take myth as the ground of historiographical method, re-adapting poetry both to imagine and to control the contingencies of an altered political world. These three essays, then, follow the pendulum swings of reaction and counter-reaction that form so crucial a part of our current poetic vocabulary, delineating the most durable touchstones of later decades.

They also register an ongoing redefinition of the national social order. The slow collapse of that political consensus against which so many of the modernists strained, which the Movement wistfully sought to reclaim in diminished form, and which the poets of the 1960s attempted to reinvent as a new set of historical mythologies, left an abundance of poetic traditions rather than the vacuum that so many had feared: not one order but many possible ones. In large measure, the most striking tendency of recent years lies in a movement outward from the historical center and a perpetual rediscovery of heterogeneous poetic elements that a lost consensus had previously held in place. The next cluster of pieces accordingly turns from chronology to geography. Michael Thurston’s “Region and Nation in Britain and Ireland” examines the re-emergence of national and regional modes at the traditional periphery of the United Kingdom, exploring the flourishing poetic cultures of Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and the north of England. For Thurston, nationalist and regional desires reveal themselves as a series of “structures of feeling” that enable a complex variety of poetries, each committed to a previously marginal and subordinate tradition marked also by an inescapably ironic selfawareness. This oscillation between commitment and irony finds its correlative in wide-ranging topographies of places that must be continuously overwritten and renamed. John Waters’ “Form and Identity in Northern Irish Poetry” builds on Thurston’s account by concentrating on the remarkable but perhaps inevitably controversial renaissance of poetry in postwar Northern Ireland. Suspended for most of a century between the contrary national imperatives of Ireland and the British state, Northern Ireland has produced several generations of remarkable poetic work, at a prolific rate perhaps unmatched anywhere else in the English-speaking world, by poets both Protestant and Catholic, nationalist and unionist. It is here that poetry has most forcefully arisen as a privileged domain: where the informing categories, both aesthetic and political, of a broader culture can be considered and argued; where questions of identity can be either posed or evaded; and where, Waters argues, the question of identity itself becomes a central symptom of historical circumstances.

The seemingly entropic tendency of the British state toward a gradual dissolution or partial devolution at home is of course only the latest phase of a much longer trend, one that originates at a much greater distance. The logic that impels the cultural re-emergence of the smaller nations of the United Kingdom (including England itself) follows almost inexorably from the more systematic decolonization of the former British Empire. Jahan Ramazani’s “Poetry and Decolonization” continues the emphasis on naming and renaming, exploring the ways in which postcolonial poetries reoccupy the space of the sublime to unleash an enormous catalog of names, languages, traditions, and temporalities previously occluded and suppressed by imperial control. But the centrality of nomenclature also joins newly independent states to a newly post-imperial British state, increasingly redefined by its former colonies as a multicultural and hybridized society. The meaning of such naming, Ramazani suggests, always relates to difference, to both the difficulty and the promise of a poetic subjectivity that fluctuates in the interstices between solidarity and alienation, between community and isolation.

The following two essays, by C. D. Blanton and Drew Milne, continue to resituate the idea of a national literature within a larger frame. Both show how the various canonical and anti-canonical claims and counter-claims (most clearly revealed by the various polemical anthologies that litter the period) are in fact mutually constitutive. Blanton’s “Transatlantic Currents” focuses on the complex interrelations between the United States and Britain and on the inevitable political division of the English language and poetic tradition between them. Anglo-American poetry thus exists as a practice of translation within English, one that slowly shapes the work of poets constantly overhearing the charged static of American speech on global airwaves. Milne’s “Neo-Modernism and Avant-Garde Orientations” argues that the possibilities of late modernism and contemporary avant-garde work in British and Irish poetry need to be understood not as paradigms or fixed categories, but rather as what Alan Sinfield (1992) calls “faultlines” that reveal the system of differences across schools, traditions, groups, genres, forms, poets, and poems. Rather than fracturing the poetic field, experimental poetic practices thus constitute a mode of orientation toward the whole.

The volume’s final cluster of essays approaches the changes wrought by the postwar era through three of the most venerable topoi in English poetry: the lyric self, place, and religion. In “Contemporary British Women Poets and the Lyric Subject,” Linda Kinnahan analyzes the reoccupation of the lyric “I” by groups to whom it has traditionally been denied, at least in the canons of high culture. Noting the ways in which the lyric and its attendant self have been reframed and refashioned by the representational strain of newly visible identities (constituted through gender, nation, race, ethnicity, and sexuality), Kinnahan explores the ability of the “I” to offer both cultural authority and the opportunity for social intervention. In “Place, Space, and Landscape,” Eric Falci traces the obsessive return to the idea of place by poets seeking to unearth a deeper stratigraphy of sedimented historical and poetic counter-traditions. Falci links this spatial turn, with its twin excavatory and scopic drives, to a larger dialectical relation, one that paradoxically encrypts the global even within the sensory experience and reconstruction of the local. In “Poetry and Religion,” Romana Huk argues that seemingly anachronistic questions of theology have remained central to the poetry of the period, especially as it has wrestled ever more pointedly with the ethical questions raised by an increasingly various social world. By soliciting the otherness of the sacred and straining to maintain it as a function of language, she demonstrates, poets have recovered a religious logic that often survives religion as such, finding a means to represent difference in the capacity of religious thought to evade the snares of representation itself.

The last essay in the companion, Peter Middleton’s “Institutions of Poetry in Postwar Britain,” concludes by exploring the material contexts of poetic production – and the ways in which those contexts condition and alter the significance of a poem. In a crucial and defining historical shift, poems in the postwar period have been transmitted by a qualitatively different array of media (in performance, journals, books, small press pamphlets, anthologies, text books, or broadsheets; on radio, television, records, tapes, discs, or online, even on the tube). Middleton underlines what all of these essays stress: that larger historical claims need to emerge from attentiveness to the particularity of poetic form itself. Too frequently, surveys and assessments of postwar British and Irish poetry have repeated received opinion and perpetuated polemical categories; this companion seeks by contrast to demonstrate the fitful and often tense negotiations between old contents and new forms, old forms and new contents, that have arisen to gauge the historical pressures of the moment.

Chapter 1

Poetic Modernism and the Century’s Wars

Vincent Sherry

I

Writing from an internment camp at Pisa in 1945, where he was imprisoned for treason to the United States government, Ezra Pound turned his attention to another, better time. In the Cantos he composed during this moment his mind shifted insistently from the indignities the sixty-year-old was suffering at Pisa to the promises the young adult had cultivated in London – from the end of World War II, that is, to the period just before the start of World War I. This was the beginning, these the sap years of the movement for which he had been designated, at least by himself, as leader and agent provocateur. His recollection of artists gathering before that earlier war in the Wiener Café in the British Museum district (Canto LXXX), for example, locates a center of reference for the energy he shared with his companion talents; here, in effect, was the vortex and origin-point for the extraordinary force field that would become literary modernism in English. This group included those British and Irish and American writers Pound knew by first (and nick-) names – Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme, William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. “[T]hese the companions,” goes the invocation in the ritual memory of his first Pisan Canto (LXXIV), which is now, however, a wholly elegiac commemoration:

Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven   these the companions:Fordie that wrote of giantsAnd William who dreamed of nobility   and Jim the comedian singing …   are to earth o’ergiven.

        (Pound 1998: 452–3)

As Pound turns this opening line by repetition into a refrain and lament, does he concede the fading of the movement as well as the passing of the protagonists? Recognizing this fact but also resisting its truth, Pound inscribes the powerful counter-rhythm of this moment in his life as a poet – and in the history of literary modernism.

Writing from a London now besieged in the aerial campaign of World War II, in the fourth of his Four Quartets