A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry

This volume introduces students to the most important figures, movements and trends in post-war British and Irish poetry.

• An historical overview and critical introduction to the poetry published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century
• Introduces students to figures including Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Andrew Motion
• Takes an integrative approach, emphasizing the complex negotiations between the British and Irish poetic traditions, and pulling together competing tendencies and positions
• Written by critics from Britain, Ireland, and the United States
• Includes suggestions for further reading and a chronology, detailing the most important writers, volumes and events

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

“Eminently readable, and thankfully largely free of socio-political posturing and theorising, it provides a measured historical overview and a critical introduction, and one can see that the overall approach aims to be integrative, charting what are described as intricate negotiations between the British and Irish poetic traditions, and marshalling rival tendencies and positions.” (Suite101.com, 17 February 2014)

“Written by critics from Britain, Ireland and the USA, this new paperback, A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry, edited by Nigel Alderman and C D Blanton (Wiley Blackwell, £29.99 / €36, January 2014), opens up many areas for literary exploration as it introduces students to the most important figures, movements and trends in British and Irish poetry since 1945.” (Allvoices, 17 February 2014)

Gives some sense of why poetry provides the sharpest of lenses through which to view the historical and social developments of the second half of the twentieth century, and will serve both as a useful source of reference and a provocative starting point for discussion." (English Studies, 1 December 2011)

"Engaging and uncluttered by jargon. The mix of formal and thematic issues with social and cultural contexts doubles the usefulness of this collection as a preparatory tool for students of the period." (CHOICE, December 2009)

Nigel Alderman is assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. He previously taught at Yale University where he was awarded the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities and the Sarai Ribicoff Award for the Encouragement of Teaching at Yale College. He has published on both Romantic and Modern poetry and is completing a book on British literature of the sixties.

C. D. Blanton is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches modern poetry. He has previously taught at Princeton University. He is currently completing a study of late modernist British poetry entitled Aftereffects, and together with Nigel Alderman he has edited Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism.

This Concise Companion introduces students to the most important poetic figures, movements, contexts, and trends in post-war British and Irish poetry, providing a much-needed reference point in a sprawling and often contentious field. Written by critics on both sides of the Atlantic and complemented by a general chronology detailing some of the most important writers, volumes, and events of recent decades, these essays provide contexts for critical reading, situating the central issues confronting post-war British and Irish poets within the wider framework of twentieth-century poetry.