Lecture Notes

 1.Twentieth-century British Poetry              Cathy Coussens

                                                                                                Throughout the twentieth century, contemporary British poetry became increasingly diverse and inclusive, gradually moving away from the “centre” (the London, academic-orientated and predominantly masculine poetic scene) to encompass a wide range of poetry from Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and English-speaking countries overseas. As the British Empire shrank and Britain’s former colonies attained independence, the new immigrant populations began to develop their own cross-cultural, English-language poetry, using different versions of the vernacular, regional dialects or slang. Similarly, after the 1960s a growing number of poets from outside the mainstream (including working-class, women and regional poets) achieved recognition. Contemporary English poetry now embraces poets from diverse ethnic, class and cultural backgrounds. 
 
In his article, ‘British Poetry Since 1945’ (The Continuum Encyclopaedia of English Literature) Peter Finch traces British poetry’s progress out of “twentieth century parochial to a twenty-first century international”, and from an insular, English, male, centralist perspective into a “multi-hued, post-modern, cultural entertainment, available to all” (Finch 1). 
 
The Second World War: little impact on the British poetry scene
 
Looking back to 1945 Finch points out that despite the traumatic events of the Second World War British poetry retained the calm, non-experimental character of much 1930s British verse, such as that by Auden or Robert Graves. Although the British Modernist movement continued, with experimental verse by David Jones, Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDiarmid (among others), these were essentially viewed as “outsiders” by the poetic academy. By the end of the 1940s, uncontroversial poets who could be associated with the pre-war past were still being widely read (poets such as Walter De La Mare and W. H. Davies). These poets tended to look backwards, depicting a “vanishing rural and domestic” world (Finch 1). Neo-Romantics such as Patricia Beer, Vernon Watkins, John Heath Stubbs and George Barker in England, and R. S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas in Wales, still tended to recall a pre-war mythologised past. Irish poets (for example, W. B. Yeats) and Scottish poets (for example, Edwin Muir, Iain Crichton-Smith and Norman MacCaig) were also well-established and widely read, but remained broadly within the mainstream.
 
The 1950s: The Movement 
 
In the 1950s The Movement gave British poetry a new coherence, but failed to revolutionise it completely. The Movement poets rejected myth and romance, adopting a rational, conversational tone, straightforward poetic forms and a clear narrative progression (unlike Modernist, experimental poetry). Most of the Movement poets (for example, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis) can still be associated with British rather than international culture, and an essentially white, masculine, middle-class outlook (what Finch describes as a “tight stiff-lipped Englishness”, Finch 2). Other Movement poets include John Wain, D. J. Enright, Elizabeth Jennings and Robert Conquest. The Movement did include poets who developed in completely new directions later in the 1950s and 1960s. Finch lists Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in this group. Ted Hughes wrote poetry influenced by his native Yorkshire: he presents a wild, mythic and sometimes harshly primitive natural world. His first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath, wrote verse combining harrowing “confessionalism” with mythology and drama. After Plath committed suicide, activists in the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1960s claimed her as a martyr to male ambition and dominance.   
 
In the late 1950s and early 1960s The Group emerged, a loose poetic organisation who came together to discuss and develop their writing in workshops. This group included Michael Horovitz, Philip Hobsbaum, Edward Lucie-Smith, George MacBeth, Peter Porter, Alan Brownjohn, Martin Bell, B. S. Johnson and Peter Redgrove. These poets were not particularly unusual or innovative, although Michael Horovitz went on later to produce the slightly alternative Children of Albion (1969). 
 
The 1960s onwards: U.S. and Britain
 
According to Finch, English poetry was revolutionised in the 1960s: “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” (Finch 4). This impulse was most clearly seen in the United States with the Beat Generation, who favoured radical or alternative politics and lifestyles, and the Beat Poets who produced experimental, personal poetry. 
 
The development of an “underground” poetic subculture in America was paralleled by a more muted version in Britain. The Underground became a force representing the desires and concerns of a generation that was anti hierarchy, anti-establishment and anti-war. Its poets rejected the “Centre” (both political and poetic) and its values, seeking to reach a wider audience than aimed for by the traditional academy, partly by adopting open, unregulated poetic forms, and partly by disseminating their work through independent publications and live readings (Finch 4). 
 
Poetry and plurality: different voices
 
As interest gradually shifted away from middle-class, male, university-educated, London-based poets, the British poetry scene began to celebrate alternative working-class and regional subcultures. The Liverpool Poets emerged, writing informal, unregulated and distinctly popular poetry. Scottish and Irish poets also became more aware of their position outside the “centre”, and their alternative cultural traditions and political perspectives, rather than situating their work within mainstream British traditions. 
 
Throughout the twentieth century regional poets have produced poetry with strong connections to a particular place and its specific culture, dialect or accent and problems. Examples include Tony Harrison (northern English realism, Yorkshire) and Douglas Dunn (Northern England, Hull). Poets from the Celtic fringes, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, also became increasingly important. In the 1980s and 1990s live performance poetry also became popular. Alternative poetry readings by comedian poets like John Hegley and Attila the Stockbroker were an essential part of the London comedy club scene of the 1980s. 
 
The increasing visibility of ethnic subcultures among first and second-generation immigrants also transformed the poetry scene. Contemporary poets explore their own ethnicity and experience as migrants passing between two cultures. Poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson (born to a West Indian immigrant family) and Jackie Kay (black, adopted by white Scottish parents) explore both the political consciousness and personal experience of “otherness”, partly by using patois, slang or colloquial language. (Other examples include Benjamin Zephaniah and Grace Nicholls).
 
Women’s poetry
 
Wendy Cope’s Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis made fun of women’s traditionally subordinate position in poetic tradition. Cope’s pastiches of canonical poets (usually but not always male and white- like Kingsley Amis) draw attention to women’s position as “outsiders”, while making use of techniques established by male poets themselves. Carol Ann Duffy has become one of the best-known contemporary women poets in Britain, writing dramatic monologues which explore a variety of subject positions (for example, one poem is written from the point of view of Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations). While women’s poetry should not always be considered as a separate category, it is worth exploring the ways in which women poets present a variety of gendered subject positions. 
 
In the 1980s British poetry continued to be divided between experimental neo-Modernist poetry (represented by, for example, Denise Riley, Peter Didsbury, Peter Reading), and mainstream, generally uncontroversial poets like Selima Hill, and Andrew Motion (who became Poet Laureate in 1998).
 
The plurality of British poetry means that there tends to be no unifying characteristics. According to Finch, the 1993 anthology The New Poetry demonstrates this. More recent anthologies also demonstrate the difficulty of trying to unite such a diverse culture with no “centre” in the twenty-first century (Finch 8)

2. The Movement

 
 
  •  The term ‘The Movement’ was first used in a journal called the Spectator in 1954 (identified a poetic group with some things in common). 
  •  D.J. Enright edited Poets of the 1950s (1955)
  • The anthology Poets in the New Lines in 1956, edited by Robert Conquest, brought together the Movement Poets (it included 9 poems by Larkin; there was a new edition in 1963).

The Movement poets did not call themselves by this name: it was used by critics to describe them. Larkin did not see himself as belonging to any particular school of poetry although Larkin and Amis were close friends. ‘The Movement’ lasted just a few years, and is associated with the mid to late 1950s. 

What were the Movement Poets reacting against?
 
1) Modernism: Larkin objected to the obscurity of modernist poetry (e.g. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot), and the art of Pablo Picasso. He said modernist art ‘helps us neither to enjoy nor endure.’ It is just mystifying and outrageous. 
 
The Movement poets avoided experimentation, ‘high’ culture, use of myth, and returned to traditional poetic forms. 
 
2) Neo-Romanticism
 
Neo-Romanticism can be associated with the poetry of the 1940s and poets such as: Kathleen Raine, Patricia Beer, Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, John Heath-Stubbs, David Gascoyne, W.S. Graham, George Barker
 
Features of neo-romantic poetry: surrealistic imagery; myths, symbols, self-consciously poetic language 
 
  • Movement poets wrote for what they called ‘the Common Reader’: they deliberately made their poems intelligible, rejecting complex or obscure literary allusions or symbols. They therefore gained a wide audience of readers who were not normally interested in poetry. 
 Aspect of the poetry
 
  • Down-to-earth expression of thoughts and ideas
  • Colloquial and familiar style
  • Attempts to express the ‘truth’ about life: often comic or ironic
  • Insular (typically English and suburban), provincial, lower middle class or classless, rootless
  • Deliberately unpoetic language
  • Unromantic sentiments
  • Structure: orderly, rational, simple forms and straightforward narrative progression
  • Not normally politically engaged
 Why did the Movement happen at this time?
 
England had experienced a traumatic world war. The Movement poets are low-key, non-celebratory, sometimes emotionally restrained or ironic. 
 
After the war British people were still experiencing rationing, and much of London and other major cities was destroyed (war damage); in the 1940s all resources were scarce and concentrated on the war effort; therefore few books were published that were not in some way seen as useful for the war effort; poetry reflected a sense of restraint and anxiety after the war: poets no longer wrote about heroic events. Post-War Britain is described as austere, drab, dreary, and England is seen as diminished (sometimes called ‘The sick man of Europe’ and seen as having declined from its imperial past). There were widespread concerns about the loss of rural life and traditions. Britain was losing its central position as a colonising power. In 1956 Britain and France tried to gain control over Egypt’s Suez Canal; the attempt failed and Britain withdrew its troups. This event is seen as a landmark, signalling England’s decline as an international power. 
 
After the middle of the 1950s conditions improved, but life was gradually transformed with the introduction of household gadgets, television, supermarkets, air travel and rock n’ roll. The establishment of the welfare state and lack of political conflict led to the cultural revolution associated with the 1960s.
 
Key poems
 
Philip Larkin: ‘Ignorance’; ‘Annus Mirabilis’; ‘An Arundel Tomb’; ‘Mr Bleaney’; ‘Church Going’
Kingsley Amis: ‘Should you revisit us…’
Elizabeth Jennings: ‘Acceptance.’

 

3. Focus on Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
 
Poetry collections:                        The North Ship (1945)
                                                   The Less Deceived (1955)
                                                   The Whitsun Weddings (1964)                                                         High Windows (1974)
 
The Less Deceived included ‘Church Going’
The Whitsun Weddings included ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, ‘Mr Bleaney’; High Windows included ‘This Be the Verse’, ‘Annus Mirabilis.’
 
Novels: Jill; A Girl in Winter
 
Edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973)
 
·        Philip Larkin is often seen as the most representative and significant poet of post-war Britain, expressing a sense of disillusion and anticlimax after the war - a lack of worthwhile causes. 
·        He worked in Hull university library for most of his career, and said he enjoyed boring routines.   
·        He had the reputation of a misogynist and never married or had children, though he was involved with several women. 
·        Anti-modernist; anti ‘high’ culture and insular: he emphasised his lack of interest in other cultures and languages, hated T.S. Eliot, Picasso etc.   
 
Perspective of his poetry:
  • Life is not good enough, and possibly meaningless; we will be destroyed in the end by time 
  • Fear of change
  • Fear of stasis
 Themes and subjects:
  • Englishness (what it was and is) and the decline of Britain
  • Loss of ideals and beliefs (about family, empire, religion, marriage etc)
  • Contemporary English life and customs: e.g. seaside holidays, pubs, country shows, weddings, funerals, train journeys, going to church, Armistice Day parades
  • The boring and mundane nature of daily life
  • Travel
  • Ageing
  • Dying
 
Place: urban landscape, suburbia and provinces
Attitude: melancholy, satirical  
Style: familiar, conversational, colloquial, ironic
 
Famous for writing/saying:
 
  • “[Before the twentieth century] literature used language the way we all use it, painting represented what anyone with normal vision sees, and music was an affair of nice noises rather than nasty ones. The innovation of Modernism in the arts consisted of doing the opposite.” 
  • “Books are a load of crap.”
  • “Life is first boredom, then fear, whether or not we use it, it goes…”
  • “People say I’m very negative and I suppose I am, but the impulse for producing a poem is never negative; the most negative poem in the world is a very positive thing to have done.”
 
4. Changing British culture: the 1950s and 1960s (main source: Peter Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry, 1999).
 
  • 1942: The Beveridge Report (Welfare State)
  • 1945: Landslide victory for Labour Party
  • 1948: Nationality Act 
  • Immigration into Britain from colonies and former colonies
  • Decline of Britain as an imperial power; decolonisation
  • 1957: The Suez disaster (marked the end of British colonial domination)
  • Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
 
1960s
 
  • Social and cultural revolution: interest in working class culture continuing to grow
  • Trades Unions become more powerful (using group action like strikes) 
  • Mass consumption: of music, television, drugs, advertising etc
  • Contraceptive pill and sexual revolution 
  • Emergence of assertive political and social ‘counter-culture’: e.g. ethnic groups, gay movement, women’s movement  
  • 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis
  • Cold War
  • Protests against Vietnam (U.S.) and peace movement (hippies)
  • Rise of American cultural hegemony and America as dominant world power
  • Mass entertainment industry: especially aimed at young people
  • Travel becoming much easier and more widespread (air, bus, train, cars)
 Poetry
 
  • Growing prominence of regional and working-class poets
  • Ironic comment on the theme of national decline: e.g. Larkin, ‘Homage to a Government’
  • Loss of belief (in social alternatives like communism or nationalism)
  • Loss of belief in organised religion: e.g. Ted Hughes, ‘Crow’ poems
  • Poetry commenting on the war years: e.g. Donald Davie, ‘Eight Years After’ (Hiroshima); Sylvia Plath, ‘Daddy’ (Jewish holocaust), 'Lady Lazarus.'  
  • Political satire, comments on the rise of capitalism and consumerism: e.g. Peter Porter, ‘A Consumer’s Report’; Michael Hamburger, ‘The Soul of Man Under Capitalism’
  • Fear of nuclear war: e.g. Peter Porter, ‘Your Attention Please’ 
  • Redefinition of British national identity: displacement, loss of traditional beliefs – what to replace it with?   
  • Redefining Britain in geographical and social terms: industrialisation/urbanisation/rural life/geography/legend/history