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.