This article focuses onpoetry from theUnited Kingdom written in theEnglish language. The article does not cover poetry from other countries where the English language is spoken, including theRepublic of Ireland after December 1922.
 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "English poetry" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(November 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
The earliest survivingEnglish poetry, written inAnglo-Saxon, the direct predecessor of modern English, may have been composed as early as the 7th century.
The earliest known English poem is a hymn on the creation;Bede attributes this toCædmon (fl. 658–680), who was, according to legend, an illiterate herdsman who produced extemporaneous poetry at a monastery atWhitby. This is generally taken as marking the beginning ofAnglo-Saxon poetry.[1]
Much of the poetry of the period is difficult to date, or even to arrange chronologically; for example, estimates for the date of the great epicBeowulf range from A.D. 608 right through to A.D. 1000, and there has never been anything even approaching a consensus.[2] It is possible to identify certain key moments, however.The Dream of the Rood was written before circa A.D. 700, when excerpts were carved in runes on theRuthwell Cross.[3] Some poems on historical events, such asThe Battle of Brunanburh (937) andThe Battle of Maldon (991), appear to have been composed shortly after the events in question, and can be dated reasonably precisely in consequence.
By and large, however, Anglo-Saxon poetry is categorised by the manuscripts in which it survives, rather than its date of composition. The most important manuscripts are the four great poetical codices of the late 10th and early 11th centuries, known as theCædmon manuscript, theVercelli Book, theExeter Book, and theBeowulf manuscript.
While the poetry that has survived is limited in volume, it is wide in breadth.Beowulf is the only heroic epic to have survived in its entirety, but fragments of others such asWaldere and theFinnesburg Fragment show that it was not unique in its time. Other genres include much religious verse, from devotional works to biblical paraphrase; elegies such asThe Wanderer,The Seafarer, andThe Ruin (often taken to be a description of the ruins ofBath); and numerous proverbs,riddles, andcharms.
With one notable exception (Rhyming Poem), Anglo-Saxon poetry depends onalliterative verse for its structure and any rhyme included is merelyornamental.
With theNorman Conquest of England, beginning in 1111 the Anglo-Saxon language rapidly diminished as a written literary language. The new aristocracy spoke predominantlyNorman, and this became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. As the invaders integrated, their language and literature mingled with that of the natives: theOïl dialect of the upper classes becameAnglo-Norman, and Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition intoMiddle English.
While Anglo-Norman or Latin was preferred for high culture, English literature by no means died out, and a number of important works illustrate the development of the language. Around the turn of the 13th century,Layamon wrote hisBrut, based onWace's 12th century Anglo-Norman epic of the same name; Layamon's language is recognisably Middle English, though his prosody shows a strong Anglo-Saxon influence remaining.Geoffrey Chaucer is one of England's greatest poets. Other transitional works were preserved as popular entertainment, including a variety ofromances andlyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin inParliament and courts of law.
It was with the 14th century that major works of English literature began once again to appear; these include the so-calledPearl Poet'sPearl,Patience,Cleanness, andSir Gawain and the Green Knight;Langland's political and religious allegoryPiers Plowman;Gower'sConfessio Amantis; and the works ofChaucer, the most highly regarded English poet of the Middle Ages, who was seen by his contemporaries as a successor to the great tradition ofVirgil andDante.
The reputation of Chaucer's successors in the 15th century has suffered in comparison with him, thoughLydgate andSkelton are widely studied. A group of Scottish writers arose who were formerly believed to beinfluenced by Chaucer. The rise of Scottish poetry began with the writing ofThe Kingis Quair byJames I of Scotland. The main poets of this Scottish group wereRobert Henryson,William Dunbar andGavin Douglas. Henryson and Douglas introduced a note of almost savage satire, which may have owed something to theGaelicbards, while Douglas'Eneados, a translation intoMiddle Scots of Virgil'sAeneid, was the first complete translation of any major work ofclassical antiquity into anEnglish or Anglic language.
TheRenaissance period and therenaissance literature were slow in coming to England, with the generally accepted start date being around 1509. It is also generally accepted that theEnglish Renaissance extended until the Restoration in 1660.[4][1] However, a number of factors had prepared the way for the introduction of thenew learning long before this start date. A number of medieval poets had, as already noted, shown an interest in the ideas of Aristotle and the writings of European Renaissance precursors such as Dante.
The introduction ofmovable-block printing byCaxton in 1474 provided the means for the more rapid dissemination of new or recently rediscovered writers and thinkers. Caxton also printed the works of Chaucer and Gower and these books helped establish the idea of a native poetic tradition that was linked to its European counterparts. In addition, the writings of English humanists likeThomas More andThomas Elyot helped bring the ideas and attitudes associated with the new learning to an English audience.
Three other factors in the establishment of the English Renaissance were theReformation, Counter Reformation, and the opening of the era of English naval power and overseas exploration and expansion. The establishment of theChurch of England in 1535 accelerated the process of questioning the Catholic world-view that had previously dominated intellectual and artistic life. At the same time, long-distance sea voyages helped provide the stimulus and information that underpinned a new understanding of the nature of the universe which resulted in the theories ofNicolaus Copernicus andJohannes Kepler.
With a small number of exceptions, the early years of the 16th century are not particularly notable. The DouglasAeneid was completed in 1513 andJohn Skelton wrote poems that were transitional between the late Medieval and Renaissance styles. The new king,Henry VIII, was something of a poet himself.
Thomas Wyatt (1503–42), one of the earliest English Renaissance poets, was responsible for many innovations in English poetry, and alongsideHenry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/1517–47) introduced thesonnet from Italy into England in the early 16th century.[5][6][7] Wyatt's professed object was to experiment with the English tongue, to civilise it, to raise its powers to those of its neighbours.[5] Much of his literary output consists of translations and imitations of sonnets by the Italian poetPetrarch, but he also wrote sonnets of his own. Wyatt took subject matter from Petrarch's sonnets, but his rhyme schemes make a significant departure.Petrarchan sonnets start with anoctave (eight lines), rhyming ABBA ABBA. A (volta) occurs (a dramatic turn in the sense), and the next lines are asestet with various rhyme schemes. Petrarch's poems never ended in arhyming couplet. Wyatt employs the Petrarchan octave, but his most common sestet rhyme scheme is CDDC EE. This marks the beginnings ofEnglish sonnet with 3 quatrains and a closing couplet.[8]
Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign ofQueen Elizabeth I (1558–1603).[9] In poetry is characterized by a number of frequently overlapping developments. The introduction and adaptation of themes, models and verse forms from other European traditions and classical literature, the Elizabethan song tradition, the emergence of a courtly poetry often centred around the figure of the monarch and the growth of a verse-based drama are among the most important of these developments.
A wide range of Elizabethan poets wrote songs, includingNicholas Grimald,Thomas Nashe andRobert Southwell. There are also a large number of extant anonymous songs from the period. Perhaps the greatest of all the songwriters wasThomas Campion. Campion is also notable because of his experiments withmetres based on counting syllables rather than stresses. These quantitative metres were based on classical models and should be viewed as part of the wider Renaissance revival of Greek and Roman artistic methods.
The songs were generally printed either in miscellanies or anthologies such asRichard Tottel's 1557Songs and Sonnets or in songbooks that included printed music to enable performance. These performances formed an integral part of both public and private entertainment. By the end of the 16th century, a new generation of composers, includingJohn Dowland,William Byrd,Orlando Gibbons,Thomas Weelkes andThomas Morley were helping to bring the art of Elizabethan song to an extremely high musical level.
Elizabethan poems and plays were often written in iambic meters, based on a metrical foot of two syllables, one unstressed and one stressed. However, much metrical experimentation took place during the period, and many of the songs, in particular, departed widely from the iambic norm.
With the consolidation of Elizabeth's power, a genuine court sympathetic to poetry and the arts in general emerged. This encouraged the emergence of a poetry aimed at, and often set in, an idealised version of the courtly world.
Among the best known examples of this areEdmund Spenser'sThe Faerie Queene, which is effectively an extended hymn of praise to the queen, andPhilip Sidney'sArcadia. This courtly trend can also be seen in Spenser'sShepheardes Calender. This poem marks the introduction into an English context of the classicalpastoral, a mode of poetry that assumes an aristocratic audience with a certain kind of attitude to the land and peasants. The explorations of love found in thesonnets of William Shakespeare and the poetry ofWalter Raleigh and others also implies a courtly audience.
Virgil'sAeneid, Thomas Campion's metrical experiments, and Spenser'sShepheardes Calender and plays like Shakespeare'sAntony and Cleopatra are all examples of the influence of classicism on Elizabethan poetry. It remained common for poets of the period to write on themes fromclassical mythology; Shakespeare'sVenus and Adonis and the Christopher Marlowe/George ChapmanHero and Leander are examples of this kind of work.
Translations of classical poetry also became more widespread, with the versions ofOvid'sMetamorphoses byArthur Golding (1565–67) andGeorge Sandys (1626), and Chapman's translations ofHomer'sIliad (1611) andOdyssey (c.1615), among the outstanding examples.
English Renaissance poetry after the Elizabethan poetry can be seen as belonging to one of three strains; theMetaphysical poets, theCavalier poets and the school of Spenser. However, the boundaries between these three groups are not always clear and an individual poet could write in more than one manner.
Shakespeare also popularized theEnglish sonnet, which made significant changes toPetrarch's model. A collection of 154sonnets by Shakespeare, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty, and mortality, were first published in a 1609 quarto.
John Milton (1608–74) is considered one of the greatest English poets, and wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval. He is generally seen as the last major poet of the English Renaissance, though his most renowned epic poems were written in the Restoration period, includingParadise Lost (1667). Among the important poems Milton wrote during this period areL'Allegro, 1631;Il Penseroso, 1634;Comus (a masque), 1638; andLycidas (1638).
The early 17th century saw the emergence of this group of poets who wrote in a witty, complicated style. The most famous of the Metaphysicals is probablyJohn Donne. Others includeGeorge Herbert,Thomas Traherne,Henry Vaughan,Andrew Marvell, andRichard Crashaw.[10]John Milton in hisComus falls into this group. The Metaphysical poets went out of favour in the 18th century but began to be read again in the Victorian era. Donne's reputation was finally fully restored by the approbation ofT. S. Eliot in the early 20th century.
Influenced by continentalBaroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, Donne's metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or "unpoetic" figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", one of Donne'sSongs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. Theparadox or theoxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe.
Another important group of poets at this time were the Cavalier poets. The Cavalier poets wrote in a lighter, more elegant and artificial style than the Metaphysical poets. They were an important group of writers, who came from the classes that supported KingCharles I during theWars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–51). (King Charles reigned from 1625 and was executed 1649). Leading members of the group includeBen Jonson,Richard Lovelace,Robert Herrick,Edmund Waller,Thomas Carew,Sir John Suckling, andJohn Denham. The Cavalier poets can be seen as the forerunners of the major poets of theAugustan era, who admired them greatly. They "were not a formal group, but all were influenced" byBen Jonson.[11] Most of the Cavalier poets werecourtiers, with notable exceptions. For example, Robert Herrick was not a courtier, but his style marks him as a Cavalier poet. Cavalier works make use of allegory and classical allusions, and are influence byLatin authorsHorace,Cicero, andOvid.[12]
John Milton'sParadise Lost (1667), a story of fallen pride, was the first major poem to appear in England after the Restoration. The court ofCharles II had, in its years in France, learned a worldliness and sophistication that marked it as distinctively different from the monarchies that preceded the Republic. Even if Charles had wanted to reassert the divine right of kingship, the Protestantism and taste for power of the intervening years would have rendered it impossible.
One of the greatest English poets,John Milton (1608–1674), wrote during this period of religious and political instability. He is generally seen as the last major poet of the English Renaissance, though his major epic poems were written in the Restoration period. Some of Milton's important poems were written before the Restoration (see above). His later major works includeParadise Regained, 1671, andSamson Agonistes, 1671. Milton's works reflect deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebratedAreopagitica (1644), written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences offree speech andfreedom of the press.William Hayley's 1796 biography called him the "greatest English author",[13] and he remains generally regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the English language".[14]
The world of fashion andscepticism that emerged encouraged the art ofsatire. All the major poets of the period,Samuel Butler,John Dryden,Alexander Pope andSamuel Johnson, and the Irish poetJonathan Swift, wrote satirical verse. Their satire was often written in defence of public order and the established church and government. However, writers such as Pope used their gift for satire to create scathing works responding to their detractors or to criticise what they saw as social atrocities perpetrated by the government. Pope'sThe Dunciad is a satirical slaying of two of his literary adversaries (Lewis Theobald, and Colley Cibber in a later version), expressing the view that British society was falling apart morally, culturally, and intellectually.
The 18th century is sometimes called theAugustan age, and contemporary admiration for the classical world extended to the poetry of the time. Not only did the poets aim for a polished high style in emulation of the Roman ideal, they also translated and imitated Greek and Latin verse resulting in measured rationalised elegant verse. Dryden translated all the known works of Virgil, and Pope produced versions of the two Homeric epics.Horace andJuvenal were also widely translated and imitated, Horace most famously byJohn Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Juvenal by Samuel Johnson'sThe Vanity of Human Wishes.
A number of women poets of note emerged during the period of the Restoration, includingAphra Behn,Margaret Cavendish,Mary Chudleigh,Anne Finch,Anne Killigrew, andKatherine Philips. Nevertheless, print publication by women poets was still relatively scarce when compared to that of men, though manuscript evidence indicates that many more women poets were practising than was previously thought. Disapproval of feminine "forwardness", however, kept many out of print in the early part of the period, and even as the century progressed women authors still felt the need to justify their incursions into the public sphere by claiming economic necessity or the pressure of friends. Women writers were increasingly active in all genres throughout the 18th century, and by the 1790s women's poetry was flourishing. Notable poets later in the period includeAnna Laetitia Barbauld,Joanna Baillie,Susanna Blamire,Felicia Hemans,Mary Leapor,Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,Hannah More, andMary Robinson. In the past decades there has been substantial scholarly and critical work done on women poets of the long 18th century: first, to reclaim them and make them available in contemporary editions in print or online, and second, to assess them and position them within a literary tradition.
Towards the end of the 18th century, poetry began to move away from the strict Augustan ideals and a new emphasis on the sentiment and feelings of the poet was established. This trend can perhaps be most clearly seen in the handling of nature, with a move away from poems about formal gardens and landscapes by urban poets and towards poems about nature as lived in. The leading exponents of this new trend includeThomas Gray,George Crabbe,Christopher Smart andRobert Burns as well as the Irish poetOliver Goldsmith. These poets can be seen as paving the way for theRomantic movement.
The last quarter of the 18th century was a time of social and political turbulence, withrevolutions in the United States,France,Ireland and elsewhere. In Great Britain, movement for social change and a more inclusive sharing of power was also growing. This was the backdrop against which theRomantic movement in English poetry emerged.
The main poets of this movement wereWilliam Blake,William Wordsworth,Samuel Taylor Coleridge,Percy Bysshe Shelley,Lord Byron, andJohn Keats. The birth of English Romanticism is often dated to the publication in 1798 of Wordsworth and Coleridge'sLyrical Ballads.[15] However, Blake had been publishing since the early 1780s. Much of the focus on Blake only came about during the last century when Northrop Frye discussed his work in his bookAnatomy of Criticism. Shelley is most famous for such classic anthology verse works asOzymandias, and long visionary poems which includePrometheus Unbound. Shelley's groundbreaking poemThe Masque of Anarchy calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle ofnonviolent protest.[16]Mahatma Gandhi's passive resistance was influenced and inspired by Shelley's verse, and would often quote the poem to vast audiences.[16][17]
In poetry, theRomantic movement emphasised the creative expression of the individual and the need to find and formulate new forms of expression. The Romantics, with the partial exception of Byron, rejected the poetic ideals of the 18th century, and each of them returned toMilton for inspiration, though each drew something different from Milton. They also put a good deal of stress on their own originality.
To the Romantics, the moment of creation was the most important in poetic expression and could not be repeated once it passed. Because of this new emphasis, poems that were not complete were nonetheless included in a poet's body of work (such as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel"). This argument has, however, been challenged inZachary Leader's studyRevision and Romantic Authorship (1996).
Additionally, the Romantic movement marked a shift in the use of language. Attempting to express the "language of the common man", Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic poets focused on employing poetic language for a wider audience, countering the mimetic, tightly constrained Neo-Classic poems (although it's important to note that the poet wrote first and foremost for his/her own creative expression). In Shelley's "Defense of Poetry", he contends that poets are the "creators of language" and that the poet's job is to refresh language for their society.
The Romantics were not the only poets of note at this time. In the work ofJohn Clare the late Augustan voice is blended with a peasant's first-hand knowledge to produce arguably some of the finest nature poetry in the English language. Another contemporary poet who does not fit into the Romantic group wasWalter Savage Landor. Landor was a classicist whose poetry forms a link between the Augustans andRobert Browning, who much admired it.
TheVictorian era was a period of great political, social and economic change. TheEmpire recovered from the loss of theAmerican colonies and entered a period of rapid expansion. This expansion, combined with increasing industrialisation and mechanisation, led to a prolonged period of economic growth. TheReform Act 1832 was the beginning of a process that would eventually lead touniversal suffrage.
The major Victorian poets wereJohn Clare,Alfred, Lord Tennyson,Robert Browning,Elizabeth Barrett Browning,Matthew Arnold,Christina Rossetti,Dante Gabriel Rossetti,Robert Louis Stevenson,Oscar Wilde,William Butler Yeats,Rudyard Kipling,Thomas Hardy, andGerard Manley Hopkins, though Hopkins was not published until 1918.[18]
John Clare came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self".
Tennyson was, to some degree, theSpenser of the new age and hisIdylls of the Kings can be read as a Victorian version ofThe Faerie Queen, that is as a poem that sets out to provide a mythic foundation to the idea of empire.
The Brownings spent much of their time out of England and explored European models and matter in much of their poetry. Robert Browning's great innovation was thedramatic monologue, which he used to its full extent in his long novel in verse,The Ring and the Book. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps best remembered forSonnets from the Portuguese but her long poemAurora Leigh is one of the classics of 19th centuryfeminist literature.
Matthew Arnold was much influenced byWordsworth, though his poemDover Beach is often considered a precursor of themodernist revolution.Hopkins wrote in relative obscurity and his work was not published until after his death. His unusual style (involving what he called "sprung rhythm" and heavy reliance on rhyme and alliteration) had a considerable influence on many of the poets of the 1940s.
ThePre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a mid-19th century arts movement dedicated to the reform of what they considered the sloppyMannerist painting of the day. Although primarily concerned with the visual arts, a member of the inner circle,Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a poet of some ability, whilst his sisterChristina Rossetti is generally considered a greater poet, whose contribution to Victorian Poetry is of a standard equal to that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Rossettis' poetry shares many of the concerns of the Pre-Raphaelite movement: an interest in Medieval models, an almost obsessive attention to visual detail and an occasional tendency to lapse into whimsy.
Dante Rossetti worked with, and had some influence on, the leadingarts and crafts painter and poetWilliam Morris. Morris shared the Pre-Raphaelite interest in the poetry of the European Middle Ages, to the point of producing some illuminated manuscript volumes of his work.
Towards the end of the century, English poets began to take an interest in Frenchsymbolism and Victorian poetry entered a decadentfin de siècle phase. Two groups of poets emerged, theYellow Book poets who adhered to the tenets ofAestheticism, includingAlgernon Charles Swinburne,Oscar Wilde andArthur Symons and theRhymers' Club group that includedErnest Dowson,Lionel Johnson andWilliam Butler Yeats.
Comic verse abounded in the Victorian era. Magazines such asPunch andFun magazine teemed with humorous invention[19] and were aimed at a well-educated readership.[20] The most famous collection of Victorian comic verse is theBab Ballads.[21]
The Victorian era continued into the early years of the 20th century and two figures emerged as the leading representative of the poetry of the old era to act as a bridge into the new. These wereYeats andThomas Hardy. Yeats, although not a modernist, was to learn a lot from the new poetic movements that sprang up around him and adapted his writing to the new circumstances. Hardy was, in terms of technique at least, a more traditional figure and was to be a reference point for various anti-modernist reactions, especially from the 1950s onwards.
A. E. Housman (1859 – 1936) was poet who was born in the Victorian era and who first published in the 1890s, but who only really became known in the 20th century.Housman is best known for his cycle of poemsA Shropshire Lad (1896). This collection was turned down by several publishers so that Housman published it himself, and the work only became popular when "the advent of war, first in theBoer War and then in World War I, gave the book widespread appeal due to its nostalgic depiction of brave English soldiers".[22] The poems' wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and the fact that several early 20th-century composers set it to music helped its popularity. Housman published a further highly successful collectionLast Poems in 1922 while a third volume,More Poems, was published posthumously in 1936.[23]
.jpg)
TheGeorgian poets were the first major grouping of the post-Victorian era. Their work appeared in a series of five anthologies calledGeorgian Poetry which were published byHarold Monro and edited byEdward Marsh. The poets featured includedEdmund Blunden,Rupert Brooke,Robert Graves,D. H. Lawrence,Walter de la Mare andSiegfried Sassoon. Their poetry represented something of a reaction to the decadence of the 1890s and tended towards the sentimental.
Brooke and Sassoon were to go on to win reputations as war poets and Lawrence quickly distanced himself from the group and was associated with themodernist movement. Graves distanced himself from the group as well and wrote poetry in accordance with a belief in a prehistoricmuse he described asThe White Goddess. Other notable poets who wrote about thewar includeIsaac Rosenberg,Edward Thomas,Wilfred Owen,May Cannan and, from thehome front,Thomas Hardy andRudyard Kipling. Kipling is the author of the famous inspirational poemIf—, which is an evocation ofVictorianstoicism, as a traditional British virtue. Although many of these poets wrote socially-aware criticism of the war, most remained technically conservative and traditionalist.
Imagism is considered to be the first organizedmodernist literary movement in the English language.[26] This was an early, 20th-century, Anglo-American, modernist, poetry movement that favoured precision ofimagery and clear, sharp language, that marked the beginning of a revolution in the way poetry was written. English poets involved with this group includedEzra Pound,D. H. Lawrence,Richard Aldington,T. E. Hulme,F. S. Flint,Ford Madox Ford,Allen Upward andJohn Cournos.
A leading figure in Britishmodernism, influenced by imagism[27] was American bornT. S. Eliot, who moved to Britain in 1914, where he published in 1922The Waste Land and became a citizen in 1927. Other English modernists include the London-Welsh poet and painterDavid Jones, whose first book,In Parenthesis, was one of the very few experimental poems to come out of World War I, the ScotHugh MacDiarmid,Mina Loy andBasil Bunting.
The poets who began to emerge in the 1930s had two things in common; they had all been born too late to have any real experience of the pre-World War I world and they grew up in a period of social, economic and political turmoil. Perhaps as a consequence of these facts, themes of community, social (in)justice and war seem to dominate the poetry of the decade.
The poetic space of the decade was dominated by four poets;W. H. Auden,Stephen Spender,Cecil Day-Lewis andLouis MacNeice, although the last of these belongs at least as much to the history of Irish poetry. These poets were all, in their early days at least, politically active on the Left. Although they admired Eliot, they also represented a move away from the technical innovations of their modernist predecessors. A number of other, less enduring, poets also worked in the same vein. One of these wasMichael Roberts, whoseNew Country anthology both introduced the group to a wider audience and gave them their name.
The 1930s also saw the emergence of a home-grown Englishsurrealist poetry whose main exponents wereDavid Gascoyne,Hugh Sykes Davies,George Barker, andPhilip O'Connor. These poets turned to French models rather than either theNew Country poets or English-language modernism, and their works were a proof of the importance of later English experimental poets as it broadened the scope of the Englishavant-garde tradition.
John Betjeman andStevie Smith, who were two other significant poets of this period, who stood outside all schools and groups. Betjeman was a quietly ironic poet ofMiddle England, with a command of a wide range ofverse techniques. Smith was an entirely unclassifiable one-off voice.
The 1940s opened with the United Kingdom at war and a new generation of war poets emerged in response. These includedKeith Douglas,Alun Lewis,Henry Reed andF. T. Prince. As with the poets of the First World War, the work of these writers can be seen as something of an interlude in the history of 20th century poetry. Technically, many of these war poets owed something to the 1930s poets, but their work grew out of the particular circumstances in which they found themselves living and fighting.
The main movement in post-war 1940scontemporary poetry was the New Romantic group that includedDylan Thomas,George Barker,W. S. Graham,Kathleen Raine,Henry Treece andJ. F. Hendry. These writers saw themselves as in revolt against the classicism of theNew Country poets. They turned to such models asGerard Manley Hopkins,Arthur Rimbaud andHart Crane and the word play ofJames Joyce. Thomas, in particular, helpedAnglo-Welsh poetry to emerge as a recognisable force.
Other significant poets to emerge in the 1940s includeLawrence Durrell,Bernard Spencer,Roy Fuller,Norman Nicholson,Vernon Watkins,R. S. Thomas andNorman MacCaig. These last four poets represent a trend towards regionalism and poets writing about their native areas; Watkins and Thomas in Wales, Nicholson inCumberland and MacCaig in Scotland.
The 1950s were dominated by three groups of poets,The Movement,The Group, and poets clarified by the termExtremist Art, which was first used by the poetA. Alvarez to describe the work of the American poetSylvia Plath.
The Movement poets as a group came to public notice inRobert Conquest's1955 anthologyNew Lines. The core of the group consisted ofPhilip Larkin,Elizabeth Jennings,D. J. Enright,Kingsley Amis,Thom Gunn andDonald Davie. They were identified with a hostility to modernism and internationalism, and looked to Hardy as a model. However, both Davie and Gunn later moved away from this position.
As befits their name,the Group were much more formally a group of poets, meeting for weekly discussions under the chairmanship ofPhilip Hobsbaum andEdward Lucie-Smith. Other Group poets includedMartin Bell,Peter Porter,Peter Redgrove,George MacBeth andDavid Wevill. Hobsbaum spent some time teaching inBelfast, where he was a formative influence on the emerging Northern Ireland poets includingSeamus Heaney.
Other poets associated with Extremist Art included Plath's one-time husbandTed Hughes,Francis Berry andJon Silkin. These poets are sometimes compared with theExpressionist German school.
A number of young poets working in what might be termed a modernist vein also started publishing during this decade. These includedCharles Tomlinson,Gael Turnbull,Roy Fisher andBob Cobbing. These poets can now be seen as forerunners of some of the major developments during the following two decades.
In the early part of the 1960s, the centre of gravity of mainstream poetry moved toNorthern Ireland, with the emergence ofSeamus Heaney,Tom Paulin,Paul Muldoon and others. In England, the most cohesive groupings can, in retrospect, be seen to cluster around what might loosely be called the modernist tradition and draw on American as well as indigenous models.
TheBritish Poetry Revival was a late 1960s and early 1970s wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings that embracesperformance,sound andconcrete poetry as well as the legacy of Pound, Jones, MacDiarmid, Loy and Bunting, theObjectivist poets,the Beats and theBlack Mountain poets, among others. Leading poets associated with this movement includeJ. H. Prynne,Eric Mottram,Tom Raworth,Denise Riley andLee Harwood.[28]
TheMersey Beat poets wereAdrian Henri,Brian Patten andRoger McGough. Their work was a self-conscious attempt at creating an English equivalent to the Beats. Many of their poems were written in protest against the established social order and, particularly, the threat of nuclear war. Although not actually a Mersey Beat poet,Adrian Mitchell is often associated with the group in critical discussion. Contemporary poetSteve Turner has also been compared with them.
Geoffrey Hill, who died in 2016, has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation.".[29][30][31] Hill was first published in the 1950s. The last three decades of the 20th century saw a number of short-lived poetic groupings, including theMartians, along with a general trend towards what has been termed 'Poeclectics',[32][33] namely an intensification within individual poets' oeuvres of "all kinds of style, subject, voice, register and form".[34] There continued, crucially, an increased interest inwomen's writing, and in poetry from England's minorities (especially the West Indian community). Another important aspect of the 1980s and 1990s was the birth of key seminal poet-led organisations such as Torriano[35] and Blue Nose Poets/writers inc.[36] which, together, played a major role in establishing and disseminating the norms and etiquettes of grass-roots poetry workshops and readings one finds throughout the UK poetry scene today.Performance poetry includingpoetry slam continued to expand too, and are still active. Some poets who emerged in this period includeCarol Ann Duffy,Andrew Motion,Craig Raine,Wendy Cope,James Fenton,Blake Morrison,Liz Lochhead,George Szirtes,Linton Kwesi Johnson,Benjamin Zephaniah.Mark Ford is an example of a poet influenced by theNew York School.[37]
Bloodaxe Books'The New Poetry,[38] published in 1993, includedSimon Armitage,Kathleen Jamie,Glyn Maxwell,Selima Hill,Maggie Hannan,Michael Hofmann andPeter Reading. TheNew Generation movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, includedDon Paterson,Julia Copus,John Stammers,Jacob Polley,David Morley andAlice Oswald. A new generation of innovative poets has also sprung up in the wake of theBritish Poetry Revival movement of the 1960s and 1970s, notablyCaroline Bergvall,Tony Lopez,Allen Fisher andDenise Riley.[39] Throughout this period, publishing initiatives such asSalt Publishing and Shearsman Books promoted poetic diversity, while independent poetry presses such as Cinnamon press andEnitharmon Press have made available original work from (among others)Dannie Abse, whose first collection was published in 1948,Martyn Crucefix,Jane Duran, first collection 1995,U. A. Fanthorpe, whose career began in the 1980s,Mario Petrucci, first collection 1996, andKathleen Raine, first published in 1943.[40][41][42]
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)