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.

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.
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.