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Knowledge of contemporary British poetry is of great importance when it comes to understanding the reigning trends of England. The 1970 s saw a fair amount of polemic concerning the discontinuities of the national "traditions, " most of it concerned with poetry, all of it vulnerable to a blunt totalizing which demonstrated the triumphant ability of "nation" to organize literary study and judgment -- as it does still, perhaps more than ever. It remains the case twenty years later that there is a strong hint of the majority of the english poets to rediscover their Englishness as a poet, and at the same time the presence of the various other cultures ensures that their remains a deep variety in the creative material. The temptation stubbornly to assert the coherence and power of national traditions is strong not only among cultural conservatives dedicated to the perpetuation of poetic practices associated with or promoting "little-england ism" but increasingly in other, less visible communities of readers as well -- and here I think especially of the small but vital communities of poets and critics dedicated to exploratory practices, where the pressures to locate indigenous varieties of Modernist and postmodernist practice are increasing. Now at this stage this would be notable that the English poetry of the present day had to come a long way before it achieved its present mould.
It includes the evolution of thought process from the likes of Yeats and Eliot and on to Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin and finally to the present day poets like Andrew Zawacki, Brian Patten etc. The poetry of the present day England is one that has many voices to it. There are various ethnicities, cultures and nationalities involved in shaping the face of the contemporary British poetry. But a walk down the memory lane and we find that the early poetry of the century acted as a melting pot to shape the face of the present day trend of the poetry scene. Since 1945 British poetry has moved steadily from what many regard as twentieth century parochial to a twenty-first century international. In the space of little more than fifty years the insular, clear verse of mainland English Britain has changed from being a centralist and predominantly male, seemingly academic practice to become a multi-hued, post-modern, cultural entertainment, available to all.
Some observers see this as a liberating. Others regard it as more of a descent into vernacular sprawl. But, as ever, reality cannot be so readily defined. When the war ended the new poetry which emerged still bore traces of the measured and uneventful thirties verse that had gone before it. Poets of what became known as the neo-Romantic movement, Vernon Watkins (1906 - 1967), W. S.
Graham (1918 - 1986), Patricia Beer (1919 -), George Barker (1913 - 1991) and John Heath-Stubbs (1918 -) and others, wrote as if the British world had not changed irrevocably. The influence of pre-war founder figures W. B. Yeats (1865 - 1939), T. S.
Eliot (1888 - 1965), Edwin Muir (1887 - 1959), Louis MacNeice (1907 - 1963), W. H. Auden (1907 - 1973), and Robert Graves (1895 - 1985) remained strong. The modernists David Jones (1895 - 1974) and Basil Bunting (1900 - 1985), with Hugh MacDiarmid (C. M. Give - 1892 - 1978) in Scotland, stayed outsider forces.
In Wales the Thomas, Dylan (1914 - 1953) and R. S. (1913 - 2000), made great marks on the map. But the poetry was not yet a true product of its times. The reaction came in the early fifties, and by the time Dylan Thomas died in 1953, The Movement as the new tendency was called had obtained a coherence. The work of its poets nurtured rationality, was inhospitable to myth, was conversationally pitched (although lacking the speech rhythms of American counterparts like William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963) and was deliberately formal and clear. Movement poets opposed modernism and had little truck with international influences.
They regarded themselves as a direct continuation of mainstream English tradition. There were few sparks and much temperate, slow reflection. Members, yoked together somewhat artificially, have not, however, all remained true to their first principles. Thom Gunn (1929 -) and Donald Davie (1922 - 1995) went on to encompass the whole gamut of American, open field and Black Mountain writing with Gunn using syllabic meters and Davie becoming an interpreter of Pound. But at the centre a tight stiff-lipped Englishness glowed in the work of Kingsley Amis (1922 - 1995) John Wain (1925 - 1994), Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985), D. J.
Enright (1920 -), and Elizabeth Jennings (1926 -). But on the fringes things were different. The Movement had its significant outsiders. Stevie Smith (1902 - 1971) was a total original who wrote "like William Blake rewritten by Ogden Nash" (Anthony Thwaites - Poetry Today, 1996, p 28). Other poets, less hostile to romanticism, were also steadily making their mark - Jon Skin (1930 - 1998), Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963), and two of Britain's greatest twentieth-century poets, Geoffrey Hill (1932 -) and Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998), all appeared during the formal English fifties. Hughes, the gritty Yorkshire Poet Laureate engaged the primordial struggle and won.
Hill's dense, formidable, poetry became, for some, the highest achievement of late twentieth-century English verse. As the fifties and sixties rolled over it was evident that the explosion was around the corner. After a brief dalliance with jazz and stage performances, British poetry took its vital left turn. Across the western world cultural values were shifting. The old order, knocked back by two world wars and the fall of empires, was finally teetering. In America the Beat Generation, who valued spirituality over formality, and freedom over regulation, carried the torch.
Here - starting with Mike Horovitz's celebrated Albert Hall poetry reading of 1965 - the Underground became, to some, the way on. Valuing open forms and producing an anti-hierarchical, anti-war protest poetry the Underground thumbed its nose at centralist values and took its own little mag, alternative route to the people. A poetry built on wild times, popular readings and independent distribution systems exploded across the UK. Led by the Liverpool poets Adrian Henri (1932 - 2001), Roger McGough (1937 -) and Brian Patten (1946 -) on the back of the Beatles, and aided by Adrian Mitchell (1932 -), Jeff Nuttall (1933 -), Tom Pickard (1946 -) and others, Underground poetry became verse's acceptable popular face. Poetry was removing itself from its male-dominated and often academic metropolitan centres. Mike Horovitz's Penguin anthology of the period, Children of Albion, sold by the cart load.
Not that the Underground was poetry's only route forward. A British dimension to the world-wide concrete poetry movement appeared in the sixties work of Scottish poets Iain Hamilton Finlay (1925 -) and Edwin Morgan (1920 -), the Dominican monk Dom Sylvester Houedard (1925 - 1992) artists Tom Phillips (1937 -) and John Furnival (1933 -), as well as sound and found poets such as Bob Coming (1920 -), Peter Mayer (1933 -) and the London-resident French master Henri Chopin (1922 -). These "experimental" poets and their followers (Peter Finch (1947 -), Tom Leonard (1944 -), Paula Claire (1945 -) allied themselves with the Underground in their assault on the establishment. The ousting of the mainstream from the august London Poetry Society during the early seventies was a classic example of the new overwriting the old. The Poetry Review, the UK's longest-lived poetry journal (founded 1908) and an unstinting supporter of established values was taken over by Eric Mottram (1924 - 1995), a fervent supporter of expanded consciousness and alternative verse. In the eastern counties, loosely centred around the magazine Grosseteste Review, a group of poets, most of them attached to university English departments and enamoured of American models found themselves constituting what became known as the Cambridge School, poetry united by its non-metropolitan axis and its foregrounding of language over discourse.
Andrew Crozier (1943 -), John James (1939 -), Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947 - 1975), Douglas Oliver (1937 - 2000), John Riley (1937 - 1978), J. H. Prynne (1936 -), and Peter Riley (1940 -) were some of the leading practitioners. Outside these 'lunatic fringes', as they were derisively referred to by poets adhering to the traditional centre, the English mainstream continued, almost as if nothing else was going on. New poets, many based well away from London, began to add a regional veneer to the UK's Georgian gentility. Tony Harrison's (1937 -) hard-edged northern realism was supplemented by Douglas Dunn's (1942 -) well-wrought, working-class observations from Hull.
As the seventies turned to the eighties the experimenters became the neo-modernists. Modernism's apparent sterility did not prevent the emergence of a whole new tranche of writers ploughing the furrow initiated by Basil Bunting (1900 - 1985) and David Jones (1895 - 1974). Allen Fisher (1944 -), Denise Riley (1948 -), Barry Mac Sweeney (1948 - 2000), Lee Harwood (1939 -), Chris Torrance (1941 -), Peter Didsbury (1946 -) and others, often published by the Ferry and Fulcrum Presses, showed that British poetry was never to fall back on having simply one trick. In reaction, inevitably, the Empire struck back. In 1982 mainstream neo-Georgian Andrew Motion (1952 -) (later to become one of Britain's greatest successes as Poet Laureate, succeeding Ted Hughes in the role in 1998) and Blake Morrison (1950 -) produced the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, an anthology which makes its point more by who it left out than who went in. Pop poetry may have been doing well in the clubs while neo-modernists filled the small presses yet here was proof that formalism, structure, traditional meaning and outright clarity were not qualities that had left these lands.
The expected major voices of Seamus Heaney (1939 -), Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn were joined, among others, by Hugo Williams (1942 -), Michael Longley (1939 -), Tom Paulin (1949 -), Anne Stevenson (1933 -) Fleur Adcock (1934 -), James Fenton (1949 -), Carol Rumens (1943 -), Craig Raine (1944 -) and Christopher Reid (1950 -). These final pair also briefly had fame when they invented the Martian school of overblown metaphor. The centre once more held, although Larkin could not see what it was that glued them together. Steady immigration to the UK over a long period was by the eighties affecting its literature. Immigrants like Linton Kwesi Johnson (1952 -) drove in new, anti-authoritarian values, made non-standard orthography acceptable and, by allying himself with black music, produced a poetry that, in Britain, was pretty much like nothing else. Style and content were matched in importance by delivery.
Acceptability by academic institutions came well down the list. British black writing's best-known early exponent, James Berry (1924 -), edited the first anthology. The movement grew to include many, emerging, second-generation black Britons as well as more who had been resident here for a considerable time. Poets such as Benjamin Zephaniah (1958 -), John Award (1949 -), Grace Nichols (1950 -), Jackie Kay (1961 -), Jean 'Bit' Breeze (1956 -), and others readily crossed the racial divide by producing a verse whose values proved utterly beguiling to those, to use Norman Mailer's term, white Negroes who disliked prejudice, authority and the police almost as much as the British Caribbean Blacks. British Asian poetry, extant but minimal, has hitherto fared much worse. Continued assaults on the citadel of centralist tradition led, by early nineties, to somewhat of a poetry boom.
The media, whipping the storm, suggested that poetry might be the new rock'n'roll. Pop stars began to admit to liking it with the odd one or two to actually writing it. The trend of allying verse with songwriting set by Bob Dylan continued. The new poets of the period ranged from the many-talented and formally experimental Peter Reading (1946 -) to acceptable neo-traditionalists such as David Constantine (1944 -) Slim Hill (1945 -), Kit Wright (1944 -), Bernard O'Donahue (1945 -), Sean O'Brien (1952 -), Michael Donaghy (1954 -), Michael Hoffman (1957 -), Carol Ann Duffy (1955 -), Simon Armitage (1963 -), and Don Patterson (1963 -). The culture was becoming plural. For the first time since the pre-war days of Dylan Thomas the Celtic fringes were on the rise.
In the fifteen years since 1990 being an Irish or a Scots poet (yet curiously not a Welsh poet) has carried with it considerable advantage. British culture now values its parts more strongly than its, whole. As good post-Modernists the concerns of minorities, linguistic and sexual orientation, origin and gender have all become disproportionately significant. Much of t...
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Research essay sample on Poet Laureate Ted Hughes
