A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry

Notes on Contributors ix

Acknowledgments xii

Chronology xv

Introduction 1
Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton

1 Poetic Modernism and the Century’s Wars 11
Vincent Sherry

How the experience of continuous war and the collapse of liberalism shape modernist poetry and the twentieth century as a whole, focusing on Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones.

2 The Movement and the Mainstream 32
Stephen Burt

How the poetry of the Movement established a dominant and continuing mode in postwar British poetry, with discussions of Robert Conquest’s anthology New Lines, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw, Alison Brackenbury, and Peter Scupham.

3 Myth, History, and The New Poetry 51
Nigel Alderman

Discusses the reaction of the 1960s and later decades to modernist myth-making and Movement antimodernism, exploring the problem of formulating a historical poetics, with attention to Philip Larkin, A. Alvarez’s anthology The New Poetry, Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon.

4 Region and Nation in Britain and Ireland 72
Michael Thurston

Surveys the poetry of peripheral nationalisms and regionalisms, concentrating on the oscillation between commitment and irony in Northern Ireland (John Montague, Ciaran Carson, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon), Wales (R. S. Thomas, Tony Conran, Robert Minhinnick, Oliver Reynolds, Gillian Clarke), Scotland (W. S. Graham, George Mackay Brown, Iain Crichton Smith, Douglas Dunn, Raymond Vettese, Tom Leonard, Kathleen Jamie), northern England, and the Midlands (Tony Harrison, Ted Hughes, Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Roy Fisher).

5 Form and Identity in Northern Irish Poetry 92
John P. Waters

Charts three generations of poets in Northern Ireland, attending to the ways in which problems of identity have generated formal innovation, focusing upon Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, and Patrick Kavanagh; Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley; Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, and Medbh McGuckian.

6 Poetry and Decolonization 111
Jahan Ramazani

Addresses the emergent poetic forms produced by newly independent postcolonial nations and the reaction of poets in the newly post-imperial British state, including discussions of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols, Bernadine Evaristo, Louise Bennett, Okot p’Bitek, Philip Larkin, Noel Coward, Tony Harrison, Christopher Okigbo, and Agha Shahid Ali.

7 Transatlantic Currents 134
C. D. Blanton

Considers the resistance to and reception of American influence, focusing on the problem of cultural translation, from the modernists and the Auden generation to the Movement, the British poetry revival, and the contemporary avant-garde.

8 Neo-Modernism and Avant-Garde Orientations 155
Drew Milne

Surveys the complex array of avant-garde formations after modernism, tracing the multiple experimental tendencies of neo-modernist writing, with particular attention to the sites, groupings, anthologies, and critical languages of recent innovative poetries.

9 Contemporary British Women Poets and the Lyric Subject 176
Linda A. Kinnahan

Explores the reinflection of lyric conventions and subjectivities by recent women poets, including Gillian Clarke, Jean “Binta” Breeze, Grace Nichols, Carol Ann Duffy, and Denise Riley.

10 Place, Space, and Landscape 200
Eric Falci

Discusses the postwar recuperation of a poetics of place, with examples drawn from Grace Nichols, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Roy Fisher, Ciaran Carson, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

11 Poetry and Religion 221
Romana Huk

Traces the lingering importance of religious language and thought in an apparently secular era, considering T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, J. F. Hendry, Kathleen Raine, David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, Donald Davie, C. H. Sisson, Geoffrey Hill, Jon Silkin, Wole Soyinka, David Marriott, Brian Coffey, John Riley, Pauline Stainer, and Wendy Mulford.

12 Institutions of Poetry in Postwar Britain 243
Peter Middleton

Underscores the importance of the material contexts of poetic production to an understanding of the significance of a poem, with close attention to poems by Andrew Motion, J. H. Prynne, and Lavinia Greenlaw.

References 264

Index 285