The 1990s were, in many ways, a heady time for poetry in Britain. An increasing and increasingly diverse number of poets were writing and publishing poems as the century drew to a close, more frequently than ever within the context of newly established creative writing programs and workshops. Concomitantly, more and more poets took up teaching positions at colleges and universities, and poetry as a craft and product became wound more tightly into the institutions of higher education. Poetry prizes proliferated, with major awards like the Forward Prizes (established in 1991) and the T.S. Eliot Prize (inaugurated in 1993) coming with significant cash rewards and even, for a while, televised award ceremonies. A number of programs were launched to increase poetry's public profile, including Poetry on the Underground (1986), National Poetry Day (1994), and Poetry on the Buses (1998). Major individual honors also helped keep poetry in the news: Hughes's assumption of the Laureateship in 1984 (after Larkin declined the post), Walcott's 1992 Nobel Prize, and Heaney's 1995 Nobel. These achievements cemented trends indicative of postwar British poetry more broadly, with the two Nobels saying nearly as much about the advance of Caribbean and Northern Irish poetry and the reorientation of British poetry in the previous several decades as they did about the achievements of each poet individually.

Additionally, there were concerted efforts to sort and canonize the torrent of poetic activity, with a cache of anthologies sizing up the field and promoting its various encampments. This followed a familiar pattern of action and reaction, one that we've seen in previous chapters: Conquest's New Lines spawned Alvarez's The New Poetry, and Motion and Morrison's The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry irked into existence several anthologies eager to combat its limited scope. As the decade drew to a close, anthologies assumed the added burden of summarizing an entire half century's or century's worth of poetry. In The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1998), Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford presented a fairly conservative version of a still-evolving and highly debated canon that carried the additional prestige of historical sweep – each phrase in the volume's title asserts a different mode of authority.