British Poetry Since 1945 [antikvár]

From the Introduction to the First Edition This book has a simple purpose. It tries to offer the reader a reasonably comprehensive survey of the poetry which has been written in Britain since the war: 'Britain', here, being taken to mean England, Scodand, Wales and Northern Ireland. My reason for dividing the latter from the rest of Ireland is that the most recent poetry to emerge from Belfast seems more greatly influenced by English models, such as Hughes or Larkin, than by indigenous ones, such as Yeats or Patrick Kavanagh. Inevitably a book of this kind is open to all kinds of objections. There are some poets whom I have quite unrepentantly omitted, for example. There are others whom I would have liked to include, but was unable to do so for reasons of space. My concern, throughout, has been to present a clear, concise and coherent picture of what has been happening in English poetry. Occasionally, my self-imposed limits have led to lacunae. I am, for instance, well aware of the influence which William Empson's work had on many poets in the 1950s, but he has published nothing of much consequence since The Gathering Storm appeared in 1940.* Nor am I inclined to underrate the impact which Auden's pre-war work has had on poets such as Peter Porter and Adrian Mitchell - but Auden's long residence in America seemed to make him an American rather than a British writer for the purposes of this book. The most controversial feature of the anthology is perhaps its system of categorization - not merely the decision to have a 'composed order', instead of some more mechanical principle (such as an order by dates of birth), but the kind of critical judgements which the categories imply. I recognize that, in many cases, a poet might have been put in one section just as easily as in another: Hugh MacDiarmid and W. S. Graham have been separated from the rest of the Scotsmen, for example, and the large section labelled 'Influences From Abroad' is a mixed bag indeed. I should not like it to be thought that I think of these * William" fimpson died in 1984