One of the poet-critics to think anew about the 1940s is Andrew Duncan, whose earlier work, such as the study The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry, is radically aligned with the poets of the British poetry revival (among other things, he identifies, and abhors, ‘anti-rhetorical Saxon glumness’). Duncan has recently written about the 1940s ‘oratorical poets’: ‘Poets such as Terence Tiller, Alan Ross and F.T. P rince stand as representatives of the positive potential of British poetry in the 1950s, while the living death of The Movement was occupying the public sphere’.

Duncan goes on to observe that: ‘They [Tiller, Ross, Prince] also represent the potentiality of a manner which has not abandoned syntax and verse movement, or the lyrical speaking subject; a humanism surviving amid alienation and shock effects. They seem to have largely been written out of the record’. Duncan's identification of these writers as the oratorical poets, with their retention of the lyrical speaking subject (emphasis on the lyric as much as the speaking), is another way of emphasising their appreciation of emotive rhetoric, that is, the sentimental classicism, the merging of the romantic and classical streams that is the hallmark of this Forties Style.

In conversation with the poet-critics Peter Porter and Anthony Thwaite, in which I was able to ask them questions about F.T. P rince, a portrait of the poet emerged. To these two poets, he was mainly the author of ‘Soldiers Bathing’. Bewilderingly, Prince had been adopted by ‘the Anglo-American avant-garde’ as ‘one of their own’. According to Porter, ‘there is nothing like the scent of neglect to arouse the avant-garde’.

Poetry canons are shaped by such small gestures of taste and decision (or indecision). There remain stories about British poetry, and Prince is one of them. His story is that of the poet who is not quite part of the story but, rather than being allowed to sink completely below the waves, is ‘rescued’ somehow, by a new, and different, set of poetic lifeguards—in this instance, the so-called ‘Anglo-American avant-garde’.