Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
The anthology which claimed to succeed Alvarez's The New Poetry was The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry of 1982, edited by the critic-poets Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion. Despite the bland inclusiveness of the title, it admits to being self-consciously ‘didactic’, and claims to exemplify the work and literary taste of a particular ‘poetic generation’. Older writers, and those included in Alvarez's collection, have been excluded. Its introduction several times draws comparisons with The New Poetry, which is characterized as ‘the last serious anthology of British poetry’ (CBP, p. 11). Taking over Alvarez's notion, but not his metaphor, of literary reactions and feedbacks, they comment that the 20-year hiatus had been a long one, ‘if the cycles of literary history in this century are anything to go by’ (CBP, p. 11). In the opinion of the editors, the intervening period had been barren; during ‘much of the 1960s and 1970s,’ they declare, ‘very little … seemed to be happening’ (CBP, p. 11). The summary history of Chapter 2 may be read as a contestation of this extraordinary statement. In much the same way as Conquest had suppressed the poetry of the 1940s, Morrison and Motion, both knowledgeable and knowing commentators, chose to disregard the poetry of the British Poetry Revival.
The anthology's didacticism consists in its claim to illustrate a ‘decisive shift of sensibility’, a fresh ‘cycle’, yet another ‘reaction’ (CBP, p. 11). One condition of such a revolution is that ‘young poets of very different backgrounds and temperaments may feel themselves, or be felt by critics, to be working along similar lines’ (CBP, p. 11). Perhaps the critics rather than the poets will write the manifestos of what ‘a number of close observers’ – and who could they mean but themselves? – ‘have come to think of as the new British poetry’ (CBP, p. 12).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Poetry of SayingBritish Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000, pp. 125 - 141Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2005