Edward Lucie-Smith
I am finishing a book called “Travelogue”. The premise of the book is that nationalist-imperialist poetry stopped in the early 1920s and did not return. This is where we consider flaws in that idea – poems which are at least marginally nationalist and about the national identity or territory. I don’t think this affects the grand pattern significantly, but I also think that you don’t have “zero per cent nationalism”, and that cannot be proposed.
We will start with Lucie-Smith’s 1970 anthology (British poetry since 1945), which contains about 220 poems and can be considered as a valid reference for the period 1945 to 1970. It has a much wider intake than the usual anthology. Because it is a High Street anthology, it would not include sub-literary, badly written poems. These could also be a big slice of the total amount being written! Also, it is marked as a cultured anthology. Based on the overlap between the poets he selects and Allott’s 1962 anthology, it directly continues Allott, and so the “modernist line”. For example, Roberts’ 1936 anthology of modern verse left out Kipling. There is an area outside this formation of taste. Of course, Britain changed in the 1960s, and Lucie-Smith has a much more relaxed and inquisitive view of things than his predecessors. He was hedonistic where they were serious.
He starts in 1945 but has no poems about the Fifties wars in Malaysia and Korea. We can guess that this is because the poets were not interested, or not able to find a form in which to express their reactions – and perhaps not able to assess the meaning of international events at a reasonable pace.
In his book, there is a poem by Thwaite which we should consider as possibly nationalist, about national concerns. It is set in Libya, it connects to the years which Thwaite spent living in Libya, and it is about a Greek intellectual from Cyrenaica, around 400 AD. Synesius appears as the writers of twelve “Letters of Synesius” which Thwaite published. This one shows nomadic tribes appearing from the arid interior to wreck the agricultural society of the coastal strip, with its rainfall. This is a process which was taking place during Synesius’ life, and which probably ended his life. One level on which we could site the poem is as a commentary in abiding ecological and political structures of North Africa, the steppe versus the sown. The pastoralists will always come to loot and ransack the richer coastal people unless a State prevents them. Another level is to take the dismantling of Roman civilisation, strong in agriculture and trade, displaced by the subsistence economy of pastoralists. This could be a metaphor for the British Empire, evacuating the Arab lands in the twenty years before Thwaite’s poem. But another level is the threat of the counterculture in England (as in the West generally), dismantling the conservative academicism which came before it: “see where they squat behind the escarpment,/ Ignorant of metre, of faction and schism./ destined by favourless/Fortune to be the true/ Heirs of the Kingdom.” The society based on the empire obviously had to crumble into dust when the Empire was liberated. If culture didn’t express the new society, it was acting as a purely conservative factor.
Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Nostalgia – now threepence off’ lists and parodies the bric à brac of English culture, including some nationalist elements. Where he is interested in the nation as something that could emerge from underneath this bric à brac, he is interested in the nation and in national culture. Of course, his point of view is Left, his tone mocking. But if you are interested in politics you must have some interest in the community of citizens which is its subject matter. This is the closest to Kipling that this anthology gets.
Kingsley Amis supplies “The Last War”. This proposes that the next war will wipe out mankind and so be the last in the series. As one of the people who would be killed if such a war took place, I have to be grateful to Amis for pointing out that it would be a Bad Thing. This is about war but doesn’t connect to Kipling. He does list some categories of people who might appear in right-wing discourse: “Homicide, pacifist, crusader, cynic, gentile, jew/ Staggered about moaning, shooting into the dark.” He says they are unable to halt the war. But the sense of that could be that they are doing the right thing but not doing it energetically enough. The poem is close to the science fiction which Amis was involved with at the time, but presents more as a country house weekend murder mystery in which the characters are countries. This is too clever to have any emotional impact. It does not show a specific way in which the war might be started – he gives the Cold War a wide berth. By showing a world in which everyone is dead, he is showing us something on the big scale.
We have poems by Matthew Mead. Mead wrote effectively about the Cold War, seen from his home in Bonn, but the poems here are not on that subject. Mead appears in the other poems as someone nostalgic for a Marxist position but sharply aware that it has not worked out for Europeans.
We have two very good poems attacking the Vietnamese War. The poets did not get the vote in a US election, but they seem to have found US policy positions easier to dramatize, and to criticise, than British ones. I hope this was just a transient phase, but it seems as if the British case did not seize their imaginations. This could be the effect of too much empiricism, or simply disillusion.
Peter Porter’s “Death in the Pergola Tea-rooms” has a passage which might be from a right wing discourse. "Just out of reach and sound of cup clang,/ the old rationalist is dying in the Pergola./ Two Labour party friends and the doctor/ Rearrange his woven rugs.” This would sit with a denunciation of the intellectual Left, of a kind which the Daily Telegraph runs most days of the year. But the rest of the poem pretty effectively excludes that intent. The poem is more a farewell to the person who is dying, suggesting past intimacy. The poet is on the spot. The poem is part of an (imaginary) novel, not of a platform speech against the Left. Nationalism is not present. The rug may be handwoven, a hint of the arts and crafts sympathy of a relative – anti-capitalism at domestic level.
Heath-Stubbs gives us “The Last Watch of empire”, a poem (possibly) about Byzantium, the later Roman Empire. Poems about the Roman Empire are often allegories about the British Empire, so we have to consider this one as possibly relating to our own politics. My feeling is that Heath-Stubbs is fascinated by the alien society and by intricacies of language, and that gives sufficient motivation to what we see. The poem really is fascinating. If it has a political meaning, I can’t see what it is. The subject is a legend (undated) about the last emperor asleep for ages in a cave, ready to return when he is needed. “Where eleven hermits, as spry as wagtails, twitter,/ Raising their spare throats to the dawn’s cold beams.” It has elements of the Merlin story, where he goes mad after a terrible battle.
Logue gives us his translation of a book of the Iliad, about Achilles’ fight with the river Scamander. The fighting with the Trojans, which he also describes, exhibits his basic theme, of the arrogance of generals and the narcissism of the aristocrats. This piece was published in 1959, so not specifically directed at later wars in the Middle East -which it anticipates. The struggle was between the Greeks and the Trojans, so the idea of a Nation is silently present in every part of it. He is satirising nationalism.
My conclusion is that talking about the nation as a subject was not absolutely impossible in this period. There was no crushing taboo on it. And I could probably find nationalist poems if I looked in poets who were disregarded by Lucie-Smith, and by other people too. Poets were directed away from it by a disinclination to take a strong stand on anything – the preference for irony and privacy. They all disliked propaganda, and it wasn’t hard to find in the media around them. They were more interested by the framing than the message. Also, foreign affairs were hard to interpret in an era of rapid change. The shared values related to a situation which no longer, objectively, existed.
I think the question is better rephrased. I have looked at nationalist poetry and at privatised poetry, including personal myth. There is in reality a middling discourse, where people don’t think the details of their inner life, or that of their closest friends, are all-important. They are interested in public affairs, including levels of community much smaller than the nation as a whole. They have values which are shared rather than being unique and over-developed. They don’t have grand theories which belong to them and are not understood by other people. They don’t despair of State action. The way they write could be the basis for poetry about national politics, if the need arose. This middle area would account for at least half of the poems which Lucie-Smith has selected. Numerically, most elected politicians are not at the level of Westminster but at the level of wards, parishes, and boroughs. We might expect the distribution of poets to follow that pattern.
Privatisation is definitely an issue. It may seem to some participants to equate to value added. It guves an overall framework in which to think about these 210 poems. Heath-Stubbs’ poem has Cyril and Methodius, so missionaries from Macedonia sent by the Byzantines to convert the South Slavs. But this poem also has the theme of “saviour sleeping in a cave”, linked to Arthur or Frederic Barbarossa but not, I think, to an Eastern Emperor. The story about madness overtaking someone during a battle is found in an Irish tale, of Sweeny, and one taking place in south-west Scotland, where the original Merlin goes mad at the battle of Arthuret. The poem becomes more and more autonomous as we look at it. Its inner space becomes richer and more intriguing. I am uneasy about this, because the lack of external reference of the poem seems to go hand in hand with its development into something surprising and aesthetically developed.
Peter Levi’s poem may be the best in the entire book. It is obscure and seems like something radically personal. After some work on the puzzling parts, I can see that it is an attack on a Pope by a Jesuit, and that its theme is the failure of the Catholic Church to defend the Jews during the Second World War. Its intricacy is the key to how good it is. It deals with a large subject and develops great acuity. (I have already blogged about this.)
I have left out Welsh and Scottish nationalism, because my book also leaves them out. It is about the Third World, not politics within the divided island. Lucie-Smith leaves out such poems too. They could easily have been found. This is a classic anthology, but not so hot where the Welsh are concerned.
Thursday, 29 October 2026
Friday, 16 October 2026
Poetry Review as the out-group
This follows the previous blog, see label “Kenneth Allott”. I was reading 1950s issues of Poetry Review. “A little moment in Poetry Review for 1956 gives Ruth Pitter (quoted from a newspaper interview) saying this: Eliot contributed 'to a disaster to English poetry… by taking it away from the common man and making it the province of the few'. (p. 5)." This affects the book (Travelogue) because I am discussing why nationalist poetry disappeared and Michael Roberts is on the scene as someone who changed the whole landscape.
I saw a piece in PR by John Bayliss, 1963, where he jovially refers to the story that ‘older members of the [Poetry] Society “were believed to roast admirers of ‘The Waste land’ over a slow fire’. He acts as if it were untrue. But can we believe him?
I counted, and found that Allott’s selection included a 60% share for people who had been either at Oxford or Cambridge. So, this 7% share of women connects to the relatively lower level of education for women up to 1960 (and even 1980, in fact). The link between education and poetry can be summed up as: the more you have of cultural capital the more able you are to generate cultural capital. For most of the 20th C, the domination of Oxbridge alumni and of men is the same data object, subject to the same laws of time and scale.
This connects with the figures I developed a few years ago showing that Allott’s anthology had roughly 60% people who had been to either Oxford or Cambridge. That social group also has a very low proportion of women (or, did in 1960). [ developed? – that makes it sound complicated] I find this very hard to take in. I sort of want to reverse the polarity and promote the 150 poets – but they are terrible, there is no way I can follow that up. Margaret Stanley-Wrench… give me a break.
We have spent so much time on Allott’s anthology. The Poetry Review data gives a whole new way of exploiting it, because it recovers (essentially) the poets whom Allott turned down. It frames Allott and recovers the negative space around his idea.
Why is it some figures are so emotional. They are just numbers.
I have already had a response about modernists not being hostile to women. I agree. But it is the proportions which count.
The gap between these two sets of figures is hard to blur away.
The question raised about the P Review data is what happens when it becomes a credible magazine, which we have read happened in the mid-1960s. I haven’t quite got to grips with this, but it looks as if the style changed when John Smith became editor in the summer of 1962. He raised the game, and Derek Parker went even further after he took over in 1966. So, the flagship magazine of English poetry actually starts running good poems (and intelligent reviews). This was a revolution. My speculation was that this also meant reducing the share of women poets down to about 10%, and to my dismay this is what the figures (from the contents lists) show. The 159 poets who were in the 1956-57 series just disappear. This is what reform means.
The last issue before John Smith took over has 32 poets of whom 14 are women. Two issues later, we have 17 poets of whom 3 are women. Three issues later, we have 20 poets of whom 4 are women. The ratio changes completely and it doesn’t recover for decades. In issue 57.1, 1966, we have 24 names of whom 4 are women.
I think it is credible that a large fraction of the members of the Poetry Society also got printed in the Society’s magazine. It was a club owned by its members, in that sense. So those 159 poets might represent 20% of the membership as things stood in 1956. I don’t have good data to support this, but I think that there was a good match between the beliefs of the Society membership and the magazine contents, and also that the magazine was written by Society members. John Smith’s reform may simply have been to seek material from people who weren’t Society members.
Where did the reactionaries go? I don’t know. The Poetry Society stopped supplying them, and presumably by 1965 its membership included a lot of people who weren’t anti-intellectual or anti-modern. Everything changed in the Sixties. But maybe not everybody?
My impression is that, in the 1960s, students and graduates came to a central position in the literary culture. They were, also, a male-dominated group. Only 20% were women. This led to a worsening of women's position in the poetry world, and especially in the innovative sector. I find it depressing that Lucie-Smith's 1970 Penguin anthology (covering the years 1945 to 1970) only includes 7% of women poets. The gender ratio was not changing fast in those years. However, everything has changed since 1970. Also, Lucie-Smith’s work is a classic source, both its poems and its prose. You can take it as a valid source of how unequal things were because it is so amazingly well-informed and well-designed.
My belief up to last week was that the 7% share in Lucie-Smith’s anthology just meant that women participated less in the poetry world as composers, in an autonomous role. But if you look at Poetry Review in the 1950s it looks more as if roughly 50% of the people trying to write poetry were women, and the problem instead was that they weren’t part of the world of modernism. That world is what is defined, helpfully, in anthologies selected by Michael Roberts, Kenneth Allott, and Edward Lucie-Smith. We need to consider what leads people to write unambitious and conservative poetry. My guess is that people with limited cultural capital, in a politically weak position, invest in weak forms which attract less criticism but which are almost bound to fail. In the 1950s, this involved affirmative culture (in the sense that Marcuse defined), piety (usually), adherence to rules which themselves go back a long way, avoidance of the whole set of innovations made in the 20th C, reliance on existing beautiful things like flowers, churches, and landscapes (at the expense of making forms out of language). This description applies equally to the 52% of male poets in (Fifties era) Poetry Review. All of them wondered why their poetry imitating great poetry of the remote past wasn’t also great. The attraction to weakness can be defined as meek – and perhaps the meek shall inherit the earth. Perhaps not.
So, my original position has collapsed and I no longer know why Lucie-Smith only included six women poets in his standard anthology for the period 1945-70. I have been thinking about this for ten years so that must make me a slow learner. It is still an interesting question. We can certainly ask why he left Kathleen Raine out… I think I know but I dispute the decision in any case.
I admit that the figures oscillate a bit. M Shand Smith sounds like a masculine name but there is a letter in PR signed “Madge Shand Smith”, so there you are. The counts may be out by one or two at any stage. The story is not complete unless we point to the share of women poets again reaching parity, which may have been in the 1990s. Guess – I haven’t developed those figures, I don’t enjoy spending a day in Cambridge University Library knocking figures together. It is a bureaucratic process. As for cultural capital, I guess that, as the proportion of women in the graduates of any year reached 50%, the share of women in poetic debuts also rose, and eventually their share in Poetry Review, which would include people born over several decades, tracked that and also reached 50%. That sounds like smooth progress, but first-person participants never remember it as being smooth and efficient. Yes, there probably was some kind of a guerrilla war being fought against it, where the combatants never admitted to the actions they undertook, and led a daytime life of conformism and virtue.
My belief up to last week was that the 7% share in Lucie-Smith’s anthology just meant that women participated less in the poetry world as composers, in an autonomous role. But, if you look at Poetry Review in the 1950s, it looks more as if roughly 50% of the people trying to write poetry were women, and the problem instead was that they weren’t part of the world of modernism. That world is what is defined, helpfully, in anthologies selected by Michael Roberts, Kenneth Allott, and Edward Lucie-Smith. We need to consider what leads people to write unambitious and conservative poetry. My guess is that people with limited cultural capital, in a politically weak position, invest in weak forms which attract less criticism but which are almost bound to fail. In the 1950s, this involved affirmative culture (in the sense that Marcuse defined), piety (usually), adherence to rules which themselves go back a long way, avoidance of the whole set of innovations made in the 20th C, reliance on existing beautiful things like flowers, churches, and landscapes (at the expense of making forms out of language). This description applies equally to the 52% of male poets in (Fifties era) Poetry Review. All of them wondered why their poetry imitating great poetry of the remote past wasn’t also great. The attraction to weakness can be defined as meek – and perhaps the meek shall inherit the earth. Perhaps not.
So, my original position has collapsed and I no longer know why Lucie-Smith only included six women poets in his standard anthology for the period 1945-70. I have been thinking about this for ten years so that must make me a slow learner. It is still an interesting question. We can certainly ask why he left Kathleen Raine out… I think I know but I dispute the decision in any case.
I admit that the figures oscillate a bit. M Shand Smith sounds like a masculine name but there is a letter in PR signed “Madge Shand Smith”, so there you are. The counts may be out by one or two at any stage.
I saw a piece in PR by John Bayliss, 1963, where he jovially refers to the story that ‘older members of the [Poetry] Society “were believed to roast admirers of ‘The Waste land’ over a slow fire’. He acts as if it were untrue. But can we believe him?
I counted, and found that Allott’s selection included a 60% share for people who had been either at Oxford or Cambridge. So, this 7% share of women connects to the relatively lower level of education for women up to 1960 (and even 1980, in fact). The link between education and poetry can be summed up as: the more you have of cultural capital the more able you are to generate cultural capital. For most of the 20th C, the domination of Oxbridge alumni and of men is the same data object, subject to the same laws of time and scale.
This connects with the figures I developed a few years ago showing that Allott’s anthology had roughly 60% people who had been to either Oxford or Cambridge. That social group also has a very low proportion of women (or, did in 1960). [ developed? – that makes it sound complicated] I find this very hard to take in. I sort of want to reverse the polarity and promote the 150 poets – but they are terrible, there is no way I can follow that up. Margaret Stanley-Wrench… give me a break.
We have spent so much time on Allott’s anthology. The Poetry Review data gives a whole new way of exploiting it, because it recovers (essentially) the poets whom Allott turned down. It frames Allott and recovers the negative space around his idea.
Why is it some figures are so emotional. They are just numbers.
I have already had a response about modernists not being hostile to women. I agree. But it is the proportions which count.
The gap between these two sets of figures is hard to blur away.
The question raised about the P Review data is what happens when it becomes a credible magazine, which we have read happened in the mid-1960s. I haven’t quite got to grips with this, but it looks as if the style changed when John Smith became editor in the summer of 1962. He raised the game, and Derek Parker went even further after he took over in 1966. So, the flagship magazine of English poetry actually starts running good poems (and intelligent reviews). This was a revolution. My speculation was that this also meant reducing the share of women poets down to about 10%, and to my dismay this is what the figures (from the contents lists) show. The 159 poets who were in the 1956-57 series just disappear. This is what reform means.
The last issue before John Smith took over has 32 poets of whom 14 are women. Two issues later, we have 17 poets of whom 3 are women. Three issues later, we have 20 poets of whom 4 are women. The ratio changes completely and it doesn’t recover for decades. In issue 57.1, 1966, we have 24 names of whom 4 are women.
I think it is credible that a large fraction of the members of the Poetry Society also got printed in the Society’s magazine. It was a club owned by its members, in that sense. So those 159 poets might represent 20% of the membership as things stood in 1956. I don’t have good data to support this, but I think that there was a good match between the beliefs of the Society membership and the magazine contents, and also that the magazine was written by Society members. John Smith’s reform may simply have been to seek material from people who weren’t Society members.
Where did the reactionaries go? I don’t know. The Poetry Society stopped supplying them, and presumably by 1965 its membership included a lot of people who weren’t anti-intellectual or anti-modern. Everything changed in the Sixties. But maybe not everybody?
My impression is that, in the 1960s, students and graduates came to a central position in the literary culture. They were, also, a male-dominated group. Only 20% were women. This led to a worsening of women's position in the poetry world, and especially in the innovative sector. I find it depressing that Lucie-Smith's 1970 Penguin anthology (covering the years 1945 to 1970) only includes 7% of women poets. The gender ratio was not changing fast in those years. However, everything has changed since 1970. Also, Lucie-Smith’s work is a classic source, both its poems and its prose. You can take it as a valid source of how unequal things were because it is so amazingly well-informed and well-designed.
My belief up to last week was that the 7% share in Lucie-Smith’s anthology just meant that women participated less in the poetry world as composers, in an autonomous role. But if you look at Poetry Review in the 1950s it looks more as if roughly 50% of the people trying to write poetry were women, and the problem instead was that they weren’t part of the world of modernism. That world is what is defined, helpfully, in anthologies selected by Michael Roberts, Kenneth Allott, and Edward Lucie-Smith. We need to consider what leads people to write unambitious and conservative poetry. My guess is that people with limited cultural capital, in a politically weak position, invest in weak forms which attract less criticism but which are almost bound to fail. In the 1950s, this involved affirmative culture (in the sense that Marcuse defined), piety (usually), adherence to rules which themselves go back a long way, avoidance of the whole set of innovations made in the 20th C, reliance on existing beautiful things like flowers, churches, and landscapes (at the expense of making forms out of language). This description applies equally to the 52% of male poets in (Fifties era) Poetry Review. All of them wondered why their poetry imitating great poetry of the remote past wasn’t also great. The attraction to weakness can be defined as meek – and perhaps the meek shall inherit the earth. Perhaps not.
So, my original position has collapsed and I no longer know why Lucie-Smith only included six women poets in his standard anthology for the period 1945-70. I have been thinking about this for ten years so that must make me a slow learner. It is still an interesting question. We can certainly ask why he left Kathleen Raine out… I think I know but I dispute the decision in any case.
I admit that the figures oscillate a bit. M Shand Smith sounds like a masculine name but there is a letter in PR signed “Madge Shand Smith”, so there you are. The counts may be out by one or two at any stage. The story is not complete unless we point to the share of women poets again reaching parity, which may have been in the 1990s. Guess – I haven’t developed those figures, I don’t enjoy spending a day in Cambridge University Library knocking figures together. It is a bureaucratic process. As for cultural capital, I guess that, as the proportion of women in the graduates of any year reached 50%, the share of women in poetic debuts also rose, and eventually their share in Poetry Review, which would include people born over several decades, tracked that and also reached 50%. That sounds like smooth progress, but first-person participants never remember it as being smooth and efficient. Yes, there probably was some kind of a guerrilla war being fought against it, where the combatants never admitted to the actions they undertook, and led a daytime life of conformism and virtue.
My belief up to last week was that the 7% share in Lucie-Smith’s anthology just meant that women participated less in the poetry world as composers, in an autonomous role. But, if you look at Poetry Review in the 1950s, it looks more as if roughly 50% of the people trying to write poetry were women, and the problem instead was that they weren’t part of the world of modernism. That world is what is defined, helpfully, in anthologies selected by Michael Roberts, Kenneth Allott, and Edward Lucie-Smith. We need to consider what leads people to write unambitious and conservative poetry. My guess is that people with limited cultural capital, in a politically weak position, invest in weak forms which attract less criticism but which are almost bound to fail. In the 1950s, this involved affirmative culture (in the sense that Marcuse defined), piety (usually), adherence to rules which themselves go back a long way, avoidance of the whole set of innovations made in the 20th C, reliance on existing beautiful things like flowers, churches, and landscapes (at the expense of making forms out of language). This description applies equally to the 52% of male poets in (Fifties era) Poetry Review. All of them wondered why their poetry imitating great poetry of the remote past wasn’t also great. The attraction to weakness can be defined as meek – and perhaps the meek shall inherit the earth. Perhaps not.
So, my original position has collapsed and I no longer know why Lucie-Smith only included six women poets in his standard anthology for the period 1945-70. I have been thinking about this for ten years so that must make me a slow learner. It is still an interesting question. We can certainly ask why he left Kathleen Raine out… I think I know but I dispute the decision in any case.
I admit that the figures oscillate a bit. M Shand Smith sounds like a masculine name but there is a letter in PR signed “Madge Shand Smith”, so there you are. The counts may be out by one or two at any stage.
Thursday, 8 October 2026
Michael Roberts and modernism
“The original Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), edited by Michael Roberts, was influential in forming the tastes of a generation and gave a concrete meaning to the phrase 'modern verse'. In order to keep the anthology a reasonably representative one containing poems written since 1936 there have been two revised editions - one by Anne Ridler in 1951 and one by Donald Hall in 1965.” - Faber’s anonymous and proprietary statement
Am stuck on providing evidence for the influence of Michael Roberts. I am trying to claim that there was a version of modern poetry which was defined by Roberts’ anthologies and which was cast in bronze by succeeding anthologies by Allott (1950, 2nd edition 1962) and Lucie-Smith (1970). This version gave people things to say and was taken up by the new breed of Eng lit Teachers, in sixth forms and universities, as the intelligent way to talk about modern poetry. Pupils who had seriously different views were likely to get low grades, not intersecting with the questions set in exam papers.
I am trying to find a literary historian who openly states this view, and this is proving difficult. I think it is a consensus view, but I would like to support that with quotes by qualified historians.
Three important facts emerge in the zone around this basic idea. One, there was a vital link between the developmental line or canon established by Roberts and the Close Reading method of talking or writing about poetry. Close reading in practice favoured modernism, even if in theory it was a neutral method. Two, accepting the value of modernism told you which poetry was important and intelligent. This allowed you to locate ways of being important and intelligent. The claim was never that all modern poetry passed this test; it actually gave you a yardstick which distinguished High from Low. Three, from what I can reconstruct there was a large group of people involved in modern poetry who neither liked modernist poetry nor accepted the scale of values of Roberts and Allott. This is obvious if you wade through back issues of Poetry Review for the 1950s. It is written for people who don’t like modernism.
Two more obscure facts emerge. One, people who are less cultured don’t perceive poems as being high or low. Two, chronology in poetry relies on style changing over time. That only applies to people who have the necessary group awareness, and are part of an artistic community. Other people may write poetry, but their style is abidingly out of date, unchanged by experiment or time passing. The missing link is evidently that out of date writers should be made available to out of date readers.
A little moment in Poetry Review for 1956 gives Ruth Pitter (quoted from a newspaper interview) saying this: Eliot contributed “to a disaster to English poetry… by taking it away from the common man and making it the province of the few”. (p. 5). Pitter’s lack of status as a sociologist means that we can’t take this as an oracular truth raised above any criticism. Instead, we have to ask why Eliot took over the scene if only a minority could understand him. Also, and not for the first time, why shouldn’t there be a venue where out of date poets meet their out of date audience and make each other happy. This venue actually was Poetry Review. The influence of Eliot and of the Faber Book are clearly much the same thing, and what Pitter says about Eliot would also apply to the poetry which Michael Roberts favoured. Am still struggling to find someone who defines the Faber Book as redefining the landscape, outside Faber’s own anonymous statements on the matter. However, reading significant historians is enjoyable in itself. My impression is that they don’t consider the “twilight” group whom Roberts left out (and Allott in his follow-up to Roberts). This would make Roberts simply a photographer, his ideas indistinguishable from reality. That also makes it hard to see what Roberts actually brought off.
A piece of concrete evidence may help here. The bound volume of Poetry Review for 1956 and 1957 has indices which show every poet who got published in the magazine over those two years, so greater than 100 poets. (I counted 108 names for 1956 and 144 names for 1957.) It is quite easy to compare this list with the inclusion list for Allott’s 1962 anthology. There are no overlaps at all. I think this shows (a) that Allott made a vital act of selection, which unambiguously follows Roberts’ ideas (b) the poets he rejected had a gathering place, the Poetry Review (and the Poetry Society which owned it) and a market.
It is only fair to record that Poetry Review updated itself in the mid-1960s (like everything else!) and that the reformed version had essentially moved towards the Roberts/ Allott line.
However, I am not going to plunge into a description of the “conservative” poets of P Review, because so far as I can see they are terrible poets and this would not be a good experience for me.
A problem here. I counted 150 poets in those 8 issues of Poetry Review. 50% of them are women. Allott’s upscale anthology, compiled in 1960, has only 7% women. PR is conservative and low-end poets. Allott is modernist and ambitious poets. The contrast suggests that modernism was not benign for women - not in the period Allott covers, say 1920 to 1960.
I think the background has to do with education. At the time, girls were much less likely to go to university and also less likely to complete the sixth form years, leading up to that. It was the slope on which the whole system was built. The group of women writing poetry were less educated than the group of men writing poetry. The women had had much less access to higher-level teaching, to the methods of Close Reading and intricate analysis of texts. This would explain why they were clustered in the conservative area of style.
I don’t think I can go and redeem any of the PR poets. They just ran bad poetry, consistently. I am unhappy about this whole area. The figures remind me of figures for vanity presses, when I got to grips with those, in the 1960s. The proportion of women in the vanity press lists was much higher than in the legitimate publishing area. So, possibly, there were lots of women writing poetry and they were more frustrated than male poets. They had less access to publication but probably also to literary knowledge, to styles and theories and innovations. They were outsiders. But, in the 1970s, the story changes. Girls were getting into higher education at a much higher rate, and the proportion of women in the vanity press world decreases. The outsiders are now less into vanity presses and more into the small press world, where there is an outsider audience present. It is much more benign.
This isn't going in the book, because I am mainly interested in the fate of nationalist poetry and it has no bearing on that.
Completists will want to know that one poet, Peter Redgrove, was in Poetry Review for 1956 and later appeared in Lucie-Smith’s culturally high anthology. Also, one of the poets in that year of the Review is Lucie-Smith himself.
A check is afforded by a 1956 anthology, Poetry Now, edited by GS Fraser. This has 84 poets but none of them appears in that list of 150 Poetry Review poets. He includes 9 female poets, so roughly 11%. This supports the idea that women clustered in the conservative sector.
I have already had a response about modernists not being hostile to women. I agree. But it is the proportions which count.
So, supposedly High anthologies:
GS Fraser, 1956 11% female
Allott, 1960 7%
Lucie-Smith, 1970 7%
Gatherings of Bad Poetry untouched by modernity:
Poetry Review 1956 48%
Poetry Review 1957 48%
The gap between these two sets of figures is hard to blur away.
We have spent so much time on Allott’s anthology. The Poetry Review data gives a whole new way of exploiting it, because it recovers (essentially) the poets whom Allott turned down. It frames Allott and recovers the negative space around his idea.
I counted and found that Allott’s selection gave a 60% share to people who had been either at Oxford or Cambridge. So, this 7% share of women connects to the relatively lower level of education for women up to 1960 (and even 1980 in fact). The link between education and poetry can be summed up as, the more you have of cultural capital the more able you are to generate cultural capital.
I sort of want to reverse the polarity and promote the 150 poets from P Review – but they are terrible, there is no way I can follow that up.
Am stuck on providing evidence for the influence of Michael Roberts. I am trying to claim that there was a version of modern poetry which was defined by Roberts’ anthologies and which was cast in bronze by succeeding anthologies by Allott (1950, 2nd edition 1962) and Lucie-Smith (1970). This version gave people things to say and was taken up by the new breed of Eng lit Teachers, in sixth forms and universities, as the intelligent way to talk about modern poetry. Pupils who had seriously different views were likely to get low grades, not intersecting with the questions set in exam papers.
I am trying to find a literary historian who openly states this view, and this is proving difficult. I think it is a consensus view, but I would like to support that with quotes by qualified historians.
Three important facts emerge in the zone around this basic idea. One, there was a vital link between the developmental line or canon established by Roberts and the Close Reading method of talking or writing about poetry. Close reading in practice favoured modernism, even if in theory it was a neutral method. Two, accepting the value of modernism told you which poetry was important and intelligent. This allowed you to locate ways of being important and intelligent. The claim was never that all modern poetry passed this test; it actually gave you a yardstick which distinguished High from Low. Three, from what I can reconstruct there was a large group of people involved in modern poetry who neither liked modernist poetry nor accepted the scale of values of Roberts and Allott. This is obvious if you wade through back issues of Poetry Review for the 1950s. It is written for people who don’t like modernism.
Two more obscure facts emerge. One, people who are less cultured don’t perceive poems as being high or low. Two, chronology in poetry relies on style changing over time. That only applies to people who have the necessary group awareness, and are part of an artistic community. Other people may write poetry, but their style is abidingly out of date, unchanged by experiment or time passing. The missing link is evidently that out of date writers should be made available to out of date readers.
A little moment in Poetry Review for 1956 gives Ruth Pitter (quoted from a newspaper interview) saying this: Eliot contributed “to a disaster to English poetry… by taking it away from the common man and making it the province of the few”. (p. 5). Pitter’s lack of status as a sociologist means that we can’t take this as an oracular truth raised above any criticism. Instead, we have to ask why Eliot took over the scene if only a minority could understand him. Also, and not for the first time, why shouldn’t there be a venue where out of date poets meet their out of date audience and make each other happy. This venue actually was Poetry Review. The influence of Eliot and of the Faber Book are clearly much the same thing, and what Pitter says about Eliot would also apply to the poetry which Michael Roberts favoured. Am still struggling to find someone who defines the Faber Book as redefining the landscape, outside Faber’s own anonymous statements on the matter. However, reading significant historians is enjoyable in itself. My impression is that they don’t consider the “twilight” group whom Roberts left out (and Allott in his follow-up to Roberts). This would make Roberts simply a photographer, his ideas indistinguishable from reality. That also makes it hard to see what Roberts actually brought off.
A piece of concrete evidence may help here. The bound volume of Poetry Review for 1956 and 1957 has indices which show every poet who got published in the magazine over those two years, so greater than 100 poets. (I counted 108 names for 1956 and 144 names for 1957.) It is quite easy to compare this list with the inclusion list for Allott’s 1962 anthology. There are no overlaps at all. I think this shows (a) that Allott made a vital act of selection, which unambiguously follows Roberts’ ideas (b) the poets he rejected had a gathering place, the Poetry Review (and the Poetry Society which owned it) and a market.
It is only fair to record that Poetry Review updated itself in the mid-1960s (like everything else!) and that the reformed version had essentially moved towards the Roberts/ Allott line.
However, I am not going to plunge into a description of the “conservative” poets of P Review, because so far as I can see they are terrible poets and this would not be a good experience for me.
A problem here. I counted 150 poets in those 8 issues of Poetry Review. 50% of them are women. Allott’s upscale anthology, compiled in 1960, has only 7% women. PR is conservative and low-end poets. Allott is modernist and ambitious poets. The contrast suggests that modernism was not benign for women - not in the period Allott covers, say 1920 to 1960.
I think the background has to do with education. At the time, girls were much less likely to go to university and also less likely to complete the sixth form years, leading up to that. It was the slope on which the whole system was built. The group of women writing poetry were less educated than the group of men writing poetry. The women had had much less access to higher-level teaching, to the methods of Close Reading and intricate analysis of texts. This would explain why they were clustered in the conservative area of style.
I don’t think I can go and redeem any of the PR poets. They just ran bad poetry, consistently. I am unhappy about this whole area. The figures remind me of figures for vanity presses, when I got to grips with those, in the 1960s. The proportion of women in the vanity press lists was much higher than in the legitimate publishing area. So, possibly, there were lots of women writing poetry and they were more frustrated than male poets. They had less access to publication but probably also to literary knowledge, to styles and theories and innovations. They were outsiders. But, in the 1970s, the story changes. Girls were getting into higher education at a much higher rate, and the proportion of women in the vanity press world decreases. The outsiders are now less into vanity presses and more into the small press world, where there is an outsider audience present. It is much more benign.
This isn't going in the book, because I am mainly interested in the fate of nationalist poetry and it has no bearing on that.
Completists will want to know that one poet, Peter Redgrove, was in Poetry Review for 1956 and later appeared in Lucie-Smith’s culturally high anthology. Also, one of the poets in that year of the Review is Lucie-Smith himself.
A check is afforded by a 1956 anthology, Poetry Now, edited by GS Fraser. This has 84 poets but none of them appears in that list of 150 Poetry Review poets. He includes 9 female poets, so roughly 11%. This supports the idea that women clustered in the conservative sector.
I have already had a response about modernists not being hostile to women. I agree. But it is the proportions which count.
So, supposedly High anthologies:
GS Fraser, 1956 11% female
Allott, 1960 7%
Lucie-Smith, 1970 7%
Gatherings of Bad Poetry untouched by modernity:
Poetry Review 1956 48%
Poetry Review 1957 48%
The gap between these two sets of figures is hard to blur away.
We have spent so much time on Allott’s anthology. The Poetry Review data gives a whole new way of exploiting it, because it recovers (essentially) the poets whom Allott turned down. It frames Allott and recovers the negative space around his idea.
I counted and found that Allott’s selection gave a 60% share to people who had been either at Oxford or Cambridge. So, this 7% share of women connects to the relatively lower level of education for women up to 1960 (and even 1980 in fact). The link between education and poetry can be summed up as, the more you have of cultural capital the more able you are to generate cultural capital.
I sort of want to reverse the polarity and promote the 150 poets from P Review – but they are terrible, there is no way I can follow that up.
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