Contemporary poetry is as unsettled in Britain as in America. Among the older generation, Larkin has stopped writing, Hill composes painfully slowly, and Hughes is increasingly a fecund eccentric, no longer influencing or intensifying his contemporaries. Among younger poets, only Seamus Heaney has been embalmed in general eminence. With the exception of the “Martian” school (named after the poem by Craig Raine), younger poets have not been drained off into movements; and British poetry at present seems to consist of divergent wrestlings with the poetic tradition. There are alliances but no manifestos. Even the poets of the “Martian” school have adopted such a diversity of strategies as to make the name only a convenience for journalists.

The poetry in this feature declares not its anxiety toward but its arguments with the tradition. If those arguments seem more within the encampment than without, they are only another mark of the Atlantic divide: the best British poetry is still composed from the constant play of a formal ingenuity rather than the exudation of emotional states. These generalizations won’t hold across the range of either poetry; but I admire the allegiance, among younger British poets, to mind before feeling. British poets have in the past been criticized, by A. Alvarez among others, for their reserve; but the reserve that seemed pale twenty years ago, compared with the emotional stringencies of Lowell, Plath, and Berryman, has in the next generation produced poets who believe that feeling is deepest when channeled by mind, not when mastering it.

I doubt that poets write because they urgently desire to mirror their moment. Rather, time calls into being conditions that force poets to represent them. The historical imperative in poetry, like some backwoods legislator, demands that the poet write what hasn’t been written. His resources are the conditions that have never before affected or effected poetry. Identical conditions, however, call forth individual responses.

What most intrigues me about these seven poets is that, though their solutions may be temporary, they prefer a seriousness cultivated by wit. The seriousness guarantees the absence of minimalist anecdotes, the wit of leached-out despair. From the working-class bark of Tony Harrison to the mordant flatness of Michael Hofmann, their lack of sentimentality allows a toughness rare in America. Missing from their poetry, not surprisingly, is a compulsive concern with the self.

I can’t account for the lack of interesting young women poets in Britain. The same generation in America has produced at least a dozen—among poets born after 1945, women are in the ascendance. The dearth may be partly the fault of a culture and an educational system more retrograde than America’s. In Britain the cult of the housewife and the pregnant woman approaches that of the tract suburbs in Fifties America. Forty-three percent of American teenagers will attend university; the figure is fourteen percent in Britain, and the government wants to reduce it to nine. A more telling difference may be the scarcity of workshops, still an anathema here (only one of the seven poets is a university professor, and he doesn’t teach creative writing). If the workshop has done nothing else in the last decade, it has given women access to the institutions of poetry, and vice versa. These desperate explanations don’t satisfy me, however; the imbalance in this feature may be due to my blindness, or the contemporary absence to chance.

Sharon Dunn and I agreed that none of the poems in the feature could previously have been published in an American literary magazine. It was therefore necessary to exclude “Thomas Müntzer,” a fine long poem by Jeffrey Wainwright, which appeared in The Iowa Review (6:3/4, Summer-Fall, 1975). For those interested in further reading, a list of the publishers’ addresses follows the poets’ biographical notes. Five of the poets, and fifteen others, are represented in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison, which may be published in America within the year.

Among the poets’ books, only Craig Raine’s The Onion, Memory and A Martian Sends a Postcard Home have been published in the United States, and those with the same muted fanfare that attends the issue of American poetry in Britain. Though many American university presses “publish” their books here, an American poetry book has no chance of review or attention unless issued under a British imprint. Most countries have little time for the young poets of other countries—time has not culled them. There are problems of translation, even from English into English. Whether these poets are a partial antidote to American fashions or merely of interest for their different timbres and attacks, their work deserves wider circulation because much of the best British poetry in the next decade will be written by them. In a later feature I’d like to present five or six young Irish poets of other tones and temperaments.

Cambridge, England
April 1983