Prologue: An Apology
It is just as well that I am not charging subscribers (and never shall) because those of you who have kindly subscribed would have been thinking that you had been getting very poor value for money from me. Substack has been an experiment. I am still not sure if it working for me (and you) especially as it turns out to be not solely the forum for independent essays I had hoped for but also – and I hadn’t realised this when I signed up – a fully-fledged social media Thing with all the apparatus of “likes”, chats, hyperbolic self-praise, and relentless garrulity that drives me mad everywhere I encounter it on social media.
So I will try again and see if I can measure up.
Anyway, enough of that metasubstacking…
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Pulling down from my shelf the other day The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982) I realised that it is 42 years since, like everyone else interested in that subject at the time, I went into a bookshop (no such thing as online purchases in those days) and got myself a copy for £1.95. The anthology, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, immediately attracted controversy as one might expect and as the editors will have expected, though perhaps the grounds for objection would not be the same today – more of that later.
Two faded press cuttings that I had lodged in the book more than forty years ago fell out. The first was a review in The Observer by Philip Larkin whose Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse had appeared in 1973. I was an undergraduate at Liverpool University in 1973 reading English when Professor Kenneth Allott (whose Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse had first appeared in 1950) strode into the lecture room clutching Larkin’s anthology. He shook his head sadly while explaining to us that he regretted finding in it the work of the Liverpool Poets (McGough, Henri, Patten). An old-fashioned highbrow, who had rubbed shoulders in the 1930s with Auden and MacNeice, Allott’s own anthology (sidestepping in its title the “English” versus “British” challenge) was my first introduction to a critical perspective on contemporary poetry. Each of his selections came with an informative critical headnote, often very direct and personal. He admitted, for example, that he couldn’t quite get Geoffrey Hill. From it I was disconcerted to learn that to be a poet it seemed one needed to have been at Oxford or Cambridge. Discovering it in a Liverpool grammar school in the late 1960s I wouldn’t have been aware enough to have noticed that one also needed to be a man: only four women appeared in this capacious spread of poets: Anne Ridler, Patricia Beer, Elizabeth Jennings and Sylvia Plath.
Larkin, having referred to two earlier key anthologies – Robert Conquest’s New Lines of 1956, a first edition hardback of which with the late owner’s bookplate [the Oxford philosopher Lord Anthony Quinton] sits on my shelf, and Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry (1962) with its famous excoriation of the “genteel” in post war English poetry – proceeded to dissect the new anthology. The first of his “small quibbles” was with the whole idea of these regular anthologies that sought to fix a particular moment: “Shouldn’t poets announce themselves rather than be presented as part of a typified group, and haven’t they in fact always done so?” He notes that the editors of the new anthology say: “This anthology is intended to be didactic as well as representative.” He questions how it can be both at the same time and thinks that the lack of cutting edge in this anthology has to do with their assertion that: “The new poetry is often open-ended, reluctant to point the moral of, or conclude too neatly, what it chooses to transcribe.” Larkin suggests tartly: “Not easy to make a slogan out of that.” In the end the Martian/post-modernist/ludic/Ulster assemblage doesn’t do it for Larkin: “these writers are (for the most part) serious, non-extravagant, carefully and even ingeniously observant, responsive to the real or imagined situation, but in the last analysis this is only to say that they are not very interesting.” Well, if you put it like that.
Perhaps now the anthology is chiefly remembered for having provoked a satirical response in the “standard habbie” form from Seamus Heaney who insisted that “my passport’s green” and therefore he was not at home in an anthology of “British” poetry.
My other cutting is a much longer piece, a whole page of the TLS by Hugh Haughton who notes that all of the anthologies that appear “offer soon-dated maps of the ‘contemporary’, validated by the tradition of the new, and provide the public with the latest identikit portrait of the poetic Zeitgeist”. Noting that the anthology had been widely challenged – he was writing a couple of months after it first appeared – Haughton argues that “what is at stake is the direction of our poetry, the terms of the poetic licence”. He judges that the actual poems presented don’t bear out the editors’ claims that their poets have generated “a new spirit on British Poetry” and show “a common purpose: to extend the imaginative franchise”. For Hugh Haughton: “Most are recognisably the kind of poems that have been turned out for decades, some of the best have a good deal in common with the work of the previous generation, and very few look like posing a serious challenge to the conventions under which poetry is written nowadays (poetic revolutions are nearly always marked by changes in rhythmical imagination, and I see none here).” In the end, he concludes, the anthology “misrepresents recent poetic history”.
And here we come, I think, to the heart of the matter. Anthologies are designed at worst to tell us what to think, at best to offer guidance, a map of the terrain. Inescapably, they highlight some poets and exclude others. It’s easy to see why Heaney, Muldoon, Mahon, Fenton, Reid and Raine are in the Penguin book because they were the bigger beasts but as the net widens the questions come. Why is X not there? Why is Y considered to be more eligible than Z? Forty years on, these questions have become more complex and it is unsurprising that there is no Penguin Book of Twenty First Century British Poetry just about to come off the presses. Can one imagine the hue and cry that would greet such a title? Compared with 1982 the current poetry scene lacks any consensus about who the 20 poets in any new anthology would need to be. The collapse of serious poetry criticism in newspapers and journals, the fact that most new books of poetry even from leading publishers are not reviewed at all except by their online friends means that any attempt to propose a new canon would be very risky and would be likely to be met with howls of protest. Poetry is today concerned with issues of identity, of historic disadvantages and exclusions that all good people want to be rectified, but to say that innovations in “rhythmical imagination” (whatever that means) are at the cutting edge of the question – formal matters in other words – is to ignore both the poems that are appearing in magazines and the grounds on which they are being praised or dispraised.
I was in touch last week with an old school friend and we were talking about the English teacher at our Liverpool secondary school who introduced us to poetry. We both remembered a little pamphlet that teacher gave us. It was put out by Critical Quarterly (undated but I would guess circa 1968) and described itself as “a group of the
best poems written since 1950”. I am going to stick my neck out and say that this little pamphlet succeeded in that aim. Yes, yes, no women, no poems by X, Y or the scandalously neglected Z. But I still remember the impact of this pamphlet that opened the door to contemporary poetry for me. Unlike the Morrison and Motion anthology it actually had a poet from that far country, Wales. My friend agreed. He added that he still read poetry every day but I know that fare would not include the sort of poems that I increasingly encounter in the poetry magazines and at the foot of the column in the posh literary journals. I would struggle to recommend to him a latter-day anthology that would help him to explore further, that would be the outcome of a passionate engagement with poems which the chooser felt animated and transformed by.
I wish that I didn’t have to struggle.