Notes on 50s Leftist art

Two elements of the 1950s Left

This is going to talk about a 1950 poem by EP Thompson and a 1953 film by Muriel Box.
The theme which is stirring me up is the question of whether art reacted to and celebrated the new welfare state. I think the answer is yes, and some art has been subject to selective memory just as poverty is written out of the past by selective memory. The 1951 general election saw a Conservative victory but also saw Labour getting 175,000 more votes than they did. This would suggest that the Welfare State was popular as well as expensive. That is heavily suggested by the fact that the Conservatives left it in being – going for a high tax policy which would have alienated their middle-class supporters. They have remained a high tax party. They remained in power for 13 years but did not demolish either the welfare state or nationalised industries (with a couple of exceptions – steel and road haulage). Policies which had recently been Left or even far Left had become consensual. I think this is is reflected by the art of the time – even if something consensual does not fuel intense conflict and debates. The context is essay collections (Declaration and Conviction), the first edited by Tom Maschler, in which Left intellectuals say how bored they are by the Left in the 1950s. The situation will stand a closer examination than those essayists give it. (Actually, some of the essayists are quite far Right.) Not everyone was equally bored by the Welfare State.
Thompson published a poem called ‘The Place Called Choice’. This was in a magazine, California Quarterly, emanating from the Marxist Left in America. The site is memorable while explaining why this poem was little-known in Britain until many years later. It is 14 pages long, over 400 lines I guess.

Old iron workings. Mica. Quartz. The monotonous peatbog,
Black roots, ling, harebell, the wet relics of a forest.
The gutted stannary. Scrub oak on the old encampment,
Brambles and St. John’s wort, among the chalkbits and pellets,
The droppings of rabbits, a sherd of pottery, a flint, a coin.


Or with more grace at Burford, integral with Cotswold stone,
Entering the ceremony of cottages, sweet william and crown imperial,
Buried among neighbours and labourers, the Leveller corporals.
Riding by night the Roundheads forded the river
(Fifty miles since dawn, Fairfax and Cromwell),
- this is very convincing descriptive poetry, clearly related to the documentary films which had been a feature of the previous 20 years (and which were still going in 1950). Another passage is:

Across the Piltdown gravel,
Over the Swanscombe skull, crunched among ammonites and shells,
Over the tiny Crustacea, the bric-a-brac of chalk,
First cousins to our father
Who lies crouched in the abandoned road of memory
Clutching in his stone fist a charm against the centuries:
Trawling the turfs of Fosberry with a net of shadows,
Vaulting the Countless Stones, the barrows, the temple to Mithras,
Bursting the hinges of Stonehenge and entering on Halifax,
Howling in the eyeteeth of the boar, through the saurian’s crutch,

I am eager to say how much I like the poem partly because my friend JE Keery turned it down for his Apocalyptics anthology. Thompson said the poem had “apocalyptic expectations”, which is why Jim was considering it. He was a bit bemused by the “saurian’s crutch” phrase. In the end, a long poem is not going to show well in an anthology. For me, this poem changes the balance of 1950s poetry. It is especially significant for 1950s Left poetry, but it is a vital part of the whole picture.

England, buried somewhere under bricks, oddments, worn tyres:
Under the shady transaction clinched in the flashy roadhouse:
Buried with Arnald and Lockyer, with Holberry, with Linell,
With the victims of anthrax: in the back courtyards of Bradford 
Where the applewood is black, bearing fruit by the oldest mills:
Stupefied in the smoke of Sheffield, sullen in Derbyshire, 

For the concept of roadhouse, let me quote Michael John Law (this is actually a summary of a paper I haven’t read):

In the inter-war Home Counties, the roadhouse, a sizeable country club style location of entertainment and dancing was an iconic destination of consumption and leisure aimed at the wealthier middle classes. These establishments were marketed in newsreels as exclusive and sophisticated but in reality were open to wider groups in a settings that offered anonymity by virtue of their suburban locations. Reflecting this, roadhouses were also used in literature and in cinema as a locus of transgression and danger.

The word “roadhouse” comes trailing a narrative of social aggression. This positions Thompson's poem – it provides sites which are not physical but embodiments of social myths. His poem is composed of pre-existing symbols and this allows it to make statements on the symbolic plain. All the sites in his poem are recognisable, and there are dozens of them. It follows that it has the freedom of abstract thought and yet its object is a shared social world, the one we live in. Thompson is always interested in the argument rather than originality. The poem takes us back to the real world at each point. Jim Keery pointed out that "Arnald" and the others were 17th C radicals, Levellers and so on.
(I doubt that roadhouses had the moral atmosphere which the commentator hopes they do. About 30 minutes’ walk from where I live is what I take to be a 1930s roadhouse, by the main road out of town and unrelated to what housing would have been around it when it was built. It was surely aimed at motorists. It is what we now call art deco – I find it beautiful rather than flashy. CAMRA says “The main entrance leads to an internal porch with a lovely timber and glass screen. Behind this is a lobby with woodwork that looks as though it would have been at home on an ocean liner or an up-market '30s cinema.” - the use of glass and chrome is what gets called “flashy”.) Thompson's poem is about commitment. That decision may be suspected of reducing the available interpretations to one, and throwing the evidence away, but his patient compilation of maybe 80 individual "shots" frees the imagination and makes it very likely we will start speculating and having chains of association of ideas. The impetus builds up and becomes irresistible.

Muriel Box directed 12 feature films during the 1950s and this is more than any other female director in Britain. She was a vocal feminist and spent much of her time, after her film career was over, advocating feminist ideas. I saw her 1953 film “Street Corner” on You-Tube. It is about policewomen. This is really a film about the welfare state as well as a feminist film. Despite certain artistic problems, it is a Left film which allows us to think about vital issues of Left art in Britain.
The initial problem with Box is that she has been forgotten. First, her films as a director have been abandoned by the “collective memory” of film fans. Secondly, she was a team player and without a distinctive visual style. Third, her films as director were part of commercial cinema, made for Rank Film, which means they were highly conventional and part of a period of cinema which virtually every film fan is eager to forget. (“her films were all shot quickly and relatively cheaply, with second-tier stars, aimed squarely at the mainstream of commercial domestic cinema.” - BFI) They would not have got made if they had stood out, at the script stage. Fourth, the great films she was associated with were her scripts directed by other people. “The Seventh Veil” and “Dear Murderer” are major films with stars and budgets which her films as director do not stretch to. “Seventh Veil” got the script Oscar and deserved to. So her filmography is a recovery project rather than a body of work accepted as classic, or which people can recall if you start talking about it.
‘Street Corner’ shows violence as undesirable and violent people as anti-social. I couldn’t help thinking, while watching this, about Sixties cinema presenting violent criminals as enviable and liberated. Really, it was as if the psychopath had taken control of the camera. My feeling is that I like films which enable me to think, and that the residue of such films may be a layer of moral sensibility which has sustained me and which has shaped the way I think about politics. Films which want the weak to be protected against the strong may not get discussed in high-powered essays, but they may have affected people's values. Box’s films are not remembered by film theorists, they did not produce posters which get stuck up on the bedroom walls of teenagers, but they are part of a whole realm of film narrative which has expressed values we live by. I am tempted to say that some films are unconnected to the life of society because they admire psychopaths, who are unable to connect, because they lack empathy. Films which connect you to society tend to draw social problems into the cinema, which interferes with fantasy, but they connect to you and you connect to them.
‘Street Corner’ is shot in documentary style and tells three stories, all of which concern the policewomen at an unnamed police station somewhere in London. The lead story has an 18 year old with a 15-month old baby, who is effectively thrown out of the house by a tyrannical mother-in-law, and takes up with a flashy young man whose economic basis, we find out, is as a jewel thief. He ends up getting nicked by two policewomen – somewhat surprisingly, but that is how the story works out. The young woman hangs out at a nightclub – we might think it would look like a flashy roadhouse, but it is in a cellar and glamour is in short supply. She gets to wear some nice clothes, but again the fantasy element (“I dress up in expensive clothes, stay up late, insult people, throw off restraints, and behave badly”) is constrained. A typical detail is bargaining with the fence – he offers the thief £80 for jewels worth £1000. Having read Ghost Squad I know that this is a good offer, fences were offering 5% of the real value for stolen jewels at that time. However, the point is that Box does not allow wishes to take over, the jewel thief is just as constrained by economic limits, by the stance of his employer, as a skilled labourer would be.
Peggy Cummins plays the 18 year old and had already made “Gun Crazy” in America. Date, 1950. Direction, Joseph H Lewis. This is probably a better film than ‘Street Corner’, but there are points on both sides. Cummins adds brilliant performances to both films.
So, we know that the character is 18 and has a 15-month old baby. These facts bespeak a sociological approach - her life situation is being described through events, rather than subjective wishes. She is frustrated, but not by by being a wife and mother- it is her mother-in-law who makes her unhappy. I said that Box does not have a visual style, but her artistic powers come out in other aspects of mise en scène, in the way she puts characters in a situation and gives them autonomy. The priority of the script is to give us information about the characters so that we know what their possibilities are and what decisions they are taking. Box takes great care about this, and it is obvious that this care corresponds to the ideas animating the Welfare State. Almost all the characters are female– this is a feminist and Left film and we can’t read it properly unless we build those ideas in. We are being asked to care and to think about the welfare of people. One feature is the idea of forgiveness – the story offers characters a way back in if they have stumbled, and this introduces the idea of being popular, of being approved by social opinion, as something indefinable which is of great importance to each individual. In fact, this idea is the collective. As follows, the film excludes the concept of pure evil – and the Peggy Cummins character goes to the bad but is clearly offered redemption, and shows repentance, at the end. The villains do not get the chance to express their hatred of society – this embracing of evil is significant in some films, but I just wonder if it is overrated. “Gun Crazy” is a good example, the Cummins character is brilliant with guns and has a complete fury against people who get in her way, but my feeling when I saw the film was that I wasn't enjoying this and the cruelty was not turning me on. I think Box’s patient interest in human character may get us further. Joseph H. Lewis had strong simple ideas for making cheap films (King Studios didn’t do expensive ones), but they aren’t necessarily great films. In ‘Terror in a Texas Town’, the sailor hero has a duel in which he has a harpoon and the bad guys have guns. This is a memorable idea, but it doesn’t make it a great film.

There is a brilliant essay on Box (by Josephine Botting and Sarah Castagnetti) on the BFI website: “After The Lost People, Muriel was set to make her solo directorial debut with a high-profile adaptation of Anthony Thorne’s bestselling novel So Long at the Fair – until star Jean Simmons insisted that she be replaced, foreshadowing similarly ‘unsisterly’ stances taken by Box’s subsequent stars Kay Kendall and Muriel Pavlow.“
I don't know the story here, but I suspect that the problem was Box wishing to show ordinary women working and fulfilling duties, as part of her vision of a society busy looking after people, and the actresses wishing to become Screen Goddesses (and go to Hollywood). I would make more of this, because it is part of a basic issue with Left cinema, and the imitation of reality is incompatible with the staging of fantasies, but after all I don’t have the basic stories. Box was not making “women's pictures” because she was not much interested in glamorising her actresses. (I have new information, from Box herself, interviewed on 16 January 1991, which partially disproves this: "she suddenly said to me - this was Kay Kendall - tears started to flow and she became very emotional, 'I've never been directed by a woman before!'" - so it wasn't about glamour, it was about not trusting women.) It may well be that feminism is incompatible with women’s pictures – which have largely disappeared since 1970. Jeanine Basinger codified the genre and ends her account in the 1960s. Box, in the interview, commented on how the studio always gave director jobs to men. So women were distrusted, and this was ”the intelligence of the system”. But, if you look at 100 male directors working in Britain in the 1950s, you really have to ask how many of them ever made a good film. And sifting through bad films lets you measure that ”intelligence of the system”. (The interviews project was set up by BECTU, the stage union, together with the BFI. I have to record that because people are so eager to record cinema union activity as damage rather than care and welfare. 700 interviews on this site.)
My feeling with Street Corner is that the film story does not allow the characters to sink into fantasy, and the way it is written does not allow the creator to give way to fantasy. Two of Muriel Box’s films which I haven’t seen seem to be about the nature of fantasy – (see next post).
The climax of Street Corner involves a police dog chasing down the villainous jewel thief. Reading up definitely shows it was a male dog… I feel this is a flaw, surely the film mission statement required a female police dog? Botting and Castagnetti give astounding details from preserved documents about the making of the film:
[producer] Sydney Box sought approval for Street Corner from the authorities well before filming began. As well as maintaining good relations, they needed police support to ensure accuracy and to keep the budget down by providing access to locations and equipment. 
Collaboration on Street Corner began in early December 1951, with the police commissioner laying out the conditions on which assistance would be given. One key stipulation was an involvement at the script stage, leading to protracted negotiations as the producer’s desire for lurid and melodramatic events came up against the police commissioner’s insistence on authenticity. Shooting didn’t start until the following September, partly due to “innumerable battles with Scotland Yard” over the production.
TNA’s file includes no less than four treatments and various script iterations peppered with comments from the Met’s public information officer, Percy Fearnley, and Chief Superintendent Elizabeth Bather, [...]
It is incredible that a film got made at all under these conditions. This is reminiscent of Soviet reportage, where the institutions or sectors being described could raise objections to how the story went. This is an under-discussed problem – by getting so close to reality, Box could deal with real social problems in a convincing way. But then reality actually takes over, the creative autonomy of the artist sinks beneath the waves, and the main problems in making the story have directly to do with the government and their PR offices. The quality of “Street Corner” clearly has to do with government interference as well as with its impressive authenticity and accuracy of observation. This is something which was still causing problems in the 1970s, I mean that the collectivist artist wanted to abandon the imagination and hand control of stories over to the collective. But when someone turned up who claimed to be the voice of the people - maybe not someone working for the Metropolitan Police, but someone - the story lost purpose and the project lost conviction.
The most interesting thing I saw while tracing Box over the swamps of the Internet was a still from a film set in an “approved school” for girls (i.e. they were sent there by a court after committing crimes) which shows a riot... an extraordinary thing, other directors were spending the money on colonial battles which Box spends on a huge scene showing rioting 13-year olds. The anarchic energy is almost unnerving – just get 100 13-year olds on camera and they will look like the end of civilisation, I suppose. The thing is, the rule of cinema is to get the female characters wearing as enviable clothes as they possibly can, and all these half-grown tearaways are wearing prison clothing which most teenagers wouldn't be seen dead in. This is Box staging a grand tableau – of a scene which nobody else would even want to film. (I think the film is "Good-time girl", 1948, which she wrote but didn't direct.)
There certainly were left-wing artists at work in the 1950s, it wasn't all self-centred pangs about losing commitment, and the art of the time can be analysed to shed light on the upsurge of Left art after 1968. That is, there is a collective which works on difficult questions and whose results individuals have used.

The academic taste 1936-98

Technical post with supporting data

Note. This is a piece of analysis necessary to support other posts. It is analytical rather than giving new information about lost or misunderstood poets. The theme is simply that the "British Poetry Revival" was a product of the (modern) system rather than something from an island wilderness somewhere.

Without re-running a rather angry debate, let me suggest that Eric Mottram’s values were academic, effortful, highly literate, meritocratic, and so forth. He detached poetry from Pop culture rather thoroughly. The question whether he is a breakaway or rather continuing the line of Allott which a generation had absorbed in the 6th form. Eric’s definition of the ”British Poetry Revival” could be the fourth standard-setting anthology, successor to Roberts and Allott. If we break poetry into academic poetry versus other kinds, the Alternative as defined by Mottram belongs clearly with the academic kind. His values are meritocratic and favour abstract ideas. It is possible to argue that he staked out a position which bypassed a large subset of the Alternative scene, and that the total legacy of the Underground includes values which meant nothing to Eric. Repeatedly he asked for poetry to need work, and for readers to invest the needed work and not be lazy. He had a vision of consumer culture as being completely relaxed and undemanding, and he rejected this altogether. This is a meritocratic approach to culture. He sounds quite similar to many other academics of his generation in worrying about leisure being effortless.
Let us look at what Roberts says in the introduction to his 1936 anthology. “... and a poem is equally confusing if it takes into account greater complexities of thought and intricacies of feeling than the reader has ever noticed. It unsettles the mind – and by the mind I mean more than the conscious mind; and the reader expends the energy he originally brought to the poem in trivial irritation with the poet. […] in so far as the poet is a good poet, the situation will remedy itself. [...]perhaps their recognition of the new element will be accelerated by his writing. But in either case they will welcome the way of speech which makes them articulate. […] Sometimes his writing is significant primarily for only a few of each generation as when it is evoked by some remote place or rare experience or an intricate thought which few can follow. [...] his writing has a value over and above that of its immediate appeal: he has added to the possibilities of speech, he has discovered evocative rhythms and image-sequences unknown before. In a good poet a change or development of technique always springs from a change or development of subject-matter. [so] we must also discuss content[.]”
This belief in innovation is obviously close to the criteria which Eric Mottram was applying. It is difficult to see a breach as having occurred between Roberts and the British Poetry Revival. Actually what Roberts evokes had become the main line of British poetry. We have to speak of editors compromising with a more colloquial style, rather than Mottram’s idea being an innovation or deviation. He could pick up 36 poets because the system had produced those 36 poets. Roberts starts by describing a crisis, the economic crisis present in 1936, which directly affects poetry. It brings about a crisis of self-awareness which draws with it a crisis of style. Taking on modern poetry also involves a personal crisis for the reader, or this is what Roberts implies. It is hard to see that there has been a crisis continuously from 1936 to 2021. I think the proposal is more “we only become conscious in moments of crisis, our normal state is one of serenity and routine thoughts”. This is interesting – maybe it is also true that “poetry is not at all points in a stage of wiping out its past and embracing the radically new, most years are ones of stability and serenity”.

A check shows that, of 36 poets whom Eric defined as the British Poetry Revival in 1974, 3 had studied at Oxford and 10 at Cambridge. This suggests that he was not reacting against the academic taste. It allows us to claim that his poets were innovative, that they were critical thinkers and oriented against literary and political doctrine, but not that they were “outside the system”. Sociologically, he was favouring male poets and highly educated poets, and the same arguments that can be levelled against Allott (in 1962) can be levelled against Mottram.
The question of what values opposed Mottram’s favoured poets to (some) other authoritative critics in the 1970s is not at all simple. I am going to bypass it, while observing that it is not as simple as “Left versus Right” or “Establishment versus Outsiders”. In fact, it is logical to see Mottram's roster as the successor to Roberts, Allott, and Lucie-Smith. It is anomalous to favour those three while rejecting Mottram’s choices. It is an inconsistency which the passage of time is likely to wear down and smooth out.

A point of departure for us was the observation that the majority of society is happy to consume poetry in the form of songs. Excluding song from poetry, by some act of definition, is an effort too great to be worth attempting. The anomaly is consuming poems without music. This is something which only a minority, in Western societies, undertake. A credible proposal is that the ability to do this involves cognitive practices, or preferences, which correlate with higher education –and that success in higher education is made possible by acquiring them.
Secondary proposals are that the development of 20th C poetry has been directed by a need to exploit this musicless space – both by developing the possibilities which are latent inside it and by avoiding the qualities which fall flat without music (and the atmosphere which music lends). And, that there is a line of four statements which track the history of this “high quadrant” of taste, namely Roberts, Allott, Lucie-Smith, and Mottram. Roberts defined a modern taste partly by eliminating 50 to 100 poets (who were otherwise popular) and the three successors did not resurrect any of the poets he had struck out – part of a consistency of line of a very dramatic nature.
The poetry in question is secular, fluent in abstractions, attracted to crisis, critical, and attached to Enlightenment values. Applying the findings of science to self-awareness is a particular feature of it. A belief in the value of acquiring knowledge is fundamental. This often involves dissolving inherited knowledge. It is reasonable to associate these values with higher education and with cognitive practices which are obscured by music. The distantation from music, or from song, is not accidental.
If I could inject just one example it may make things clearer. I have just been looking at a chat site where people were talking about films. The topic of “worst films ever released” elicited answers which mentioned “Zabriskie Point”. I really like this film. My guess is that the problem is because it shows exact documentary scenes in order to raise doubt about American society – the state of aperture in which one can have new ideas is the location of pleasure for the intended audience. But, some cinema-goers find that state anxious and frustrating. I am inclined to say that they equate entertainment with constant gratification, what you offer a fractious five-year-old child. So there is a wide separation between people who enjoy that state of doubt and people who find it unpleasant. This is a big clue to why poetry based on abstractions exists, and why some people don’t like it.

The 36 poets listed by Mottram are not all writing the same poem. The range of subjects and styles is immense. But it is possible to speak of fundamental, initial conditions. It is also right to speak of an audience formed by reading this poetry, and for whom the poetry exists. One initial condition is that the gap left by the abolition of inherited forms of gratification is huge. Poetry which goes halfway into the new space is going to fail, not filling this gap. The situation favours poets who take on the new emptiness wholeheartedly – who write poetry native to this realm rather than having nostalgia for conditions which cannot be found there. Developments are not random, they are adjustments to the laws of the new space. Often this involves an acceptance that abstract thought is central, and removal of finished ideas, of information (we could say), which would inhibit such thought by removing the objects it could have worked on. I said that the consistency between four major statements of the contents of the modernist realm was astonishing. This means that the differences are small enough to be peculiarly enlightening and to repay close examination.
Comparisons between Mottram and Lucie-Smith suggest that Eric just narrowed the scope, to produce a specialist anthology. After all, half (19/36) of Mottram's poets are already there in Lucie-Smith. If you look at the poets whom Mottram left out, it becomes obvious that Mottram was systematically favouring the academic taste – complicated, ambitious poems with insider knowledge of European styles, belief in critique, openness to abstract ideas. And, relatively, limited interest in biographical poems about personal feelings. Love poetry is not on the agenda. His preferences are meritocratic.
I suspect that the precision of these comparisons sustains the basic thesis – that, despite the profound differences between roughly 160 poets appearing in the four selections described, there is an underlying shape which guides the four editors. A shape which tolerates 160 different poets cannot be ultra-specific.

Lucie-Smith includes 30 of Allott’s poets – although moving on by a whole generation and losing the first 27 years of Allott’s time-span. Essentially, Lucie-Smith accepts Allott’s version of the post-war period. Allott leaves out Charles Causley, at his most productive in the 1950s. Lucie-Smith was surely right to re-enlist Causley. His similarity to a folk style (i.e. to traditional songs as they might have been sung by sailors, sober or not, at the time he was writing) makes him marginal to a modernist editor – so “good but it doesn’t really count”.

Of poets in Allott, I am amazed that Lucie-Smith left out Kathleen Raine – she wrote so many compelling poems. But, in the context of an overall tendency which is secular, it was consistent to drop her over the side. Raine went on to write a thorough critique of the modernist thing. Having been married to two modernist poets, she was in a good position to to do that. She had seen it being set up, in the group around the magazine Experiment around 1930, run by students whom she knew very well. Her definition of the entire set of what modernism had blanked out, subjected to unobserving, is useful for getting the geography straight, even if the theses, drawn from the Counter-Enlightenment, are unconvincing. It is understandable that Lucie-Smith should omit her. She would have omitted him. Empson, in the Experiment offices, had put stress on exact analysis of feelings, with a background belief in materialism, the chemical basis for what happens in the mind. This is intertwined with Close Reading of poems. The two have been responsible for a great deal of English modernism. And Raine rejected these ideas, even in 1930.

Lucie-Smith includes very few religious poems – although, of poems published in his period, they were surely a high percentage. Rhyme, religion, disbelief in abstraction – all these were features of women’s writing, in the lost mid-century era. So the poor showing of women in Lucie-Smith’s book is structurally given, it isn’t a question of individual preferences emanating from him. He includes Peter Levi's poem about a pope – but it is in fact critical of religion, subtly attacking Pius XII for not protesting about the Holocaust. It is critical and about politics, so avoiding the features of religious poems which secular people object to.

Evidently the poets whom Mottram collected, and the rest of the Alternative sector who came along a bit later, would not have accepted that there was a shared Alternative agenda. They would have defined themselves as in revolt against that, and other things.

Crisis theory sustains the idea of constant historical progress. In fact, it may be that the idea that “every year most of the art of the past collapses and loses all meaning” is incredible unless you believe that there is a constant, unresolved, social crisis. If you accept that consciousness is normally only there for a few minutes a day (as at least some textbooks say), then someone might induce a crisis in order to prolong consciousness – because they feel that they are so intelligent that they win if legacy knowledge is useless. Even if other people associate it with anxiety, frustration, discomfort, etc. Are we really in a constant state of crisis? Certainly modernist art does well in a situation of crisis, and certainly the idea that art itself is in crisis appeals to some people and not to others. Highly intellectual art possibly has handicaps, but also a competitive advantage during a cultural crisis. Peter Fuller wrote that book “The crisis in modern art” - once you accept the truth of the title, then you need to read the book. I must say, I wasn’t aware that modern art was in crisis in 1983. Crisis and the obsolescence of tradition are complementary ideas. Maybe they're both wrong.

I have been looking at Sean O’Brien’s anthology The Firebox, which covers the years 1945 to 1998. How does this relate to past anthologies? Well, And 29.4% of his poets went to either Oxford or Cambridge. I did a count of how many poets from Lucie-Smith’s roster re-appear in O'Brien's. The count is 29. Given that his book covers almost 30 years after Lucie-Smith’s book was published, and so closed, this is a strikingly high level of overlap. The conclusion is that he has accepted Lucie-Smith's version of the post-war decades – and so that the sequence is Roberts– Allott – Lucie-Smith – O'Brien. O’Brien does not rescue poets whom Lucie-Smith had thrown off the boat. This is in line with the acceptance path which goes from Roberts onwards. We are looking at a consensus.
What is this telling us? We spoke of a modernist quadrant which includes free verse, secular views, the rejection of English nationalism, Enlightenment values, a belief in social progress as those values abolish rigid tradition, and finally graduate poets. My impression is that almost 100% of O’Brien’s poets are graduates. The university link is fundamental, to a point where it is never discussed. It is true that he has cut down on Oxford and Cambridge – the educational apex has widened, dramatically so. The interest in montage, by contrast, has faded out. The role of cultural criticism has also weakened (although it may have been replaced by something more diffuse and more consensual).
Snippet biographies no longer reveal details of a poet's educational status – people are too anxious about the meritocratic system for this to be neutral. So I can’t tell if any of these 126 poets missed out on university. It would be interesting to see further information on this. Yes, maybe they aren't all graduates. They are pretty close on it, as a group. (Causley and Roy Fuller did not go to a university. Interesting – one was a teacher, one a lawyer. It is hard to think back to the 1930s when that didn’t imply graduate status. No, they required vocational training. So poets born before 1930 are relatively unlikely to have attended university.)

O'Brien's selection is even more secular than Lucie-Smith's. It is noticeable that he does not reinstate Kathleen Raine – my impression is that he has closed out the line of “New Age spirituality” which Raine founded, not everyone’s taste but surely part of the big picture. I am speaking about "university taste" while avoiding a definition of it. That offers difficulties. However, Barker, Raine, and Causley clearly represent what university taste dislikes, and that may be a glimpse of its boundaries. If we're lucky.
I have a note saying that in 1950 there were 25 universities in Britain. Rather obviously that expansion meant that the poetic world could no longer be dominated by two or three of them – and that the graduate world was going to grow so huge that it could take over the literary world almost in its entirety. The apex was going to grow much wider but also much stronger. I don’t think there is much doubt that the influence of Close Reading and so on has diminished – anything monolithic and doctrinal has been steadily criticised, if only because the number of people involved in higher education has made the unspoken assumptions too obvious for people not to be aware of them. Graduates used to be a group so small and envied that they were homogeneous, that just isn’t true when there are several million of them. However, if everyone has gone through the mill of writing essays about poetry, most of them for two years of A-levels and then three years of Eng Lit at university, that is bound to have an effect – producing shared assumptions and blind spots. The four anthologies discussed are a site where you can gather information on the blind spots. The key factor may simply be approval – certain reaction patterns are so rewarded by teachers, and locked into anthologies, syllabi, and so on, that they come to seem natural. And continue to carry their burden of pleasure. Pleasure, approval, empathy – these are the conservative forces. And someone who is weak in these areas is unlikely to get far in the creative arts.

Thoughts on study of history of taste

Thoughts on study of history of taste
After posting about the relationship between poetic taste and the institutions over the past ten years, I thought to summarise the results. The posts are under labels history of taste, exclusion, anti-modernism, statistics, among others.

summary of results.

We will start with the most basic figures and with the maximum position of sedition. This wins by being the most critical and having the most potential to change the set-up. We will consider later whether it is valid and livable.
One, poetry is a marginal art. Few people consume modern poetry. Response: if it is so unpopular, the people in charge don’t have the mandate to be in charge. It is like the committee of the MCC after losing a test series to Ireland.
Two, the developmental process and reinforcement. If we look at Allott’s Penguin anthology (1962 edition) and see that 39.5% of the poets included had studied at Oxford university, that gives us a strong hint that take-up of higher education is significant in the developmental process which led someone to write significant poetry. Young people are taught to write about poetry in a certain way, in sixth forms and at universities, and it is likely that this affects their aesthetic reactions too. So the dominant taste has institutional backing. It is hardly surprising if the young people who missed out on those classrooms, being the bulk of the population or of any year-group, should not share those tastes. Poetry would have to be obvious and self-explanatory, not just conforming to values which English teachers admire. Poetry is a game in which winning behaviour has been defined by institutional bias.
Study of the ”inclusion lines” of anthologies is generally rewarding. It recovers something which poets are fascinated by and which editors have invested great and enduring effort in. There is a basic ambiguity – the editor spends all day including people and the bar full of dissident poets wants to claim that they spent all day excluding people. This ambiguity is fundamentally unresolvable.
Three, the development of the dominant taste.
Shifts in time show that the dominant taste is not timeless and not directly linked to objective reality. Arguably, it is the outcome of struggles between rival groups, decided by a wider “response community” with interest and expertise. With a little effort, we can trace poets who were popualr but then disappeared. We can even trace “candidate cliques” who tried to stage a take-over of taste and failed.
Because modern poetry is largely consumed by the most educated group, other groups have to be considered as the excluded. A shift in the way poetry is presented (in magazines and on the radio, for example) would change the status of poetry by appealing to part of the non-participating audience.
Four, the status of outsiders. There is a central taste, and a large number of other ways of writing poetry are consigned to outsider status. In a different set-up (after firing the existing managers) these other styles would also be able to freely compete for centre stage.
Five, the role of empathy. People empathise with the poet, to read poetry, and so converge on existing poetry and on the existing people who read poetry. This sounds benign – perhaps poetry wouldn't work if empathy didn’t work. However, it is also conservative. Dissidents may have a bad time and simply disappear or fall silent. We surely want to recover dissident poetry – which may be the most interesting material, artistically.
The denser the solidarity of a culture-bearing group, the more variant trajectories there are which were never followed. The diversification of poetry since 1970 (to take an arbitrary point) is related to the coherence and conservatism of the literary world prior to 1970.

Six. Theory of a separate female taste. Specifically, the feminist version of the literary process says that institutional support imposes values quite different from the institutional ones, and that there is a separate, female and feminist, scale of poetic merit, which would inject a phalanx of female poets into the “top 100 poets”.

Seven, the idea of progress – that at a certain moment a new style arrives and every existing style becomes obsolete, provincial, fit for the junk shop. This sounds like the voice of a dominant group tearing up everyone else’s assets. It is the supreme moment of exclusion. If we see the proposal that “poetry plus Theory = good” and ”non-theoretical poetry = bad”, we are bound to suspect that this is a way to eliminate rivals. All the same, innovation is what we all want.

Now I plan to go through the same points again, in more detail.
One, poetry is a marginal art. Song lyrics have the status of poems by any reckoning. It is normal to listen to songs, in our society. If it is not normal to read modern poetry, the key must be the lack of music. Poetry without music is an economically marginal taste. Everybody else rejects printed poetry because it lacks music – this is very easy to analyse. It is the minority who enjoy print who ask for analysis. This would presumably take the form of “cognitive sociology” – some cognitive patterns are attractive to a minority, who are fluent in them. There is a background to this, presumably in terms of both innate ability and acquired skills. The aesthetic pleasure presumably follows that dual ability. I am hesitant about all this, because I don’t have the academic background needed to research this kind of issue, and I am not aware of available research that would hand me the results.

Two, the developmental process. Reinforcement.
If we look at Allott’s Penguin anthology, and see that 39.5% of the poets included had studied at Oxford university, that gives us a strong hint that the developmental process which led someone to write significant poetry follows and parallels the process which led them to take-up of higher education. (If we add in Cambridge, the figure is about 60%.) These are not two independent processes, they are strands in one more complex process. Since the dominant taste is the one supported by the English syllabus and the way exams are marked, it is reinforced by the management in 6th forms and at universities.
While we may be looking at poems written when the subject was aged 30, the process involves sensitive stages in adolescence: in order to pass exams at age 18, the subject had to follow a certain path from age fifteen on. That path must have included study and much reading, probably also attendance at a selective school, which involved contact with teachers who had the time to interact with pupils (especially gifted ones), and who themselves possibly had access to the elite culture. Quite possibly they were among the people who read modern poetry.
For an 18 year old, the act of writing a poem is likely to recall previous acts of writing school work for the approval of teachers. This is an aspect which people like to suppress, as part of leaving chilldhood behind. Actually, the teacher is the original reader, the original window through which you could see how other people reacted to your words. I am speculating that people who wrote poetry have positive memories of that experience, that the teachers generally had said to them “yes, very interesting”. Pupils are likely to reproduce the cognitive behaviours which teachers rewarded. I suspect that this is a buried stratum of verbal awareness, that learning how to be a poet reprograms it to almost non-existence. But approval is certainly motivating. It is not surprising if people who write good poems had earlier on been good at passing exams. Self-confidence may be the most precious resource. The system does produce 18 year olds with swelling self-confidence.
Successful pupils acquire a strong sense of approval for conforming to the dominant rules (which become dominant in this way). A completely different scale of values could be accessible if this reinforcement were interrupted, or if someone deliberately made an exit from them.

We can speak of an inside with no outside. That is the most pessimistic model. We could also speak of the memory of pleasure. As a reader you converge on the good poetry which actually exists. As a poet you congregate on the audience which actually reads poetry. These processes are profoundly pleasurable and pleasure is the most powerful reinforcement. Of course the prevalent system of values reproduces itself. Approval and pleasure are hard to separate – it is inorganic to separate them, at least completely. Consider someone who writes poetry, radically original indeed, which nobody enjoys. That is not very pleasurable. After a while, such poetry is likely not to get written. And this is where the bit about “an inside with no outside” might actually be true.

Three, the dominant taste.
British poetry has evolved rather rapidly over the past hundred years, and for this to happen it was necessary for the scene-makers not just to teach people what literary values were, but to reform those values, periodically, and inculcate new ones. Anthologies are a convenient way of studying these shifts, although they are not the things which make the shifts occur.
If you look at the series of three widely read anthologies – by Michael Roberts in 1936 (the Faber Book of Modern Verse), Allott in 1950 and again in 1962, and Lucie-Smith in 1970 – it is valid to regard them as victorious in the struggle over taste; they both take advantage of the victors and consecrate them. It is simple to show that there were thousands of other poets who do not show up in their contents lists and did not reach a susceptible audience of school pupils or students through that medium. (I discussed this through looking at a 1938 book by Herbert Palmer which presents the case against modernism in some detail.) It is likely that those three anthologists shared the same heritage, the later two massively influenced by their predecessor (or predecessors, respectively). Roberts left out several dozen quite well-known poets, ones whom Palmer discusses. if you look at those moments where taste has been decisively influenced, it is hard not to think that the outcome could have gone in several different ways.
Looking at sociological categories finds that the victorious poets tend to be male and Oxford graduates, but tends to bypass a more obvious qualification, that the editors were looking for a certain process of intellectual liberation, of “mastery of language”, and that this is what the victors had actually delivered. This is a diffuse quality, but could include an appearance of having reached the outside of conventional knowledge. Or of filtering naive self-consciousness through the findings of science (possibly including sociology?). Or of freedom from prejudice and common sense.

Without re-running a rather angry debate, let me suggest that Eric’s values were academic, effortful, highly literate, meritocratic, and so forth. He detached poetry from Pop culture rather thoroughly. The question whether Mottram is a breakaway or rather continuing the line of Allott. Eric’s definition of the ”British Poetry Revival” could be the fourth standard-setting anthology, successor to Roberts and Allott.
Two obvious lines which Roberts rejected are nationalist poetry and the rhetorical style. These vanished from history. I investigate them in several posts. The conclusion is not that they should be resurrected. (I do not investigate the decline of religious poetry, arguably more important.)
UKIP as a form of anti-modernism. The attack on liberal elites which took off around 2010 (arguably), included a negative version of high culture, as the “liberal elite”, and this is a moment where the hegemony becomes visible. English Nationalist poetry had been part of the cultural hegemony between around 1890 and 1920; there are questions around its demise around 1920 and why it has never come back. This shift is a stain, a way of tracing of where the consensus is. I discuss this under labels “UKIP” “anti-modernism” “right-wing poetry”.
There is a question whether the modernist revolt, as canonised by Roberts’ 1936 anthology, is actually the same as the taste “institutionalised” by the rise of English Literature courses at universities (which didn’t exist prior to 1920). This is problematic. Certainly, Eng Lit students in the 1950s were expected to read Eliot and Auden. But the details are problematic.

2a, statistics. The posts include a series which argue about numbers. The initial project was to define selectivity: so if Lucie-Smith selects 85 poets it is of interest to establish that there were possibly 3000 published poets he could have taken on for his survey of the span 1945 to 1970.
Listing out all the poets publishing (in long spreadsheets) is tedious but does highlight how many people get left out. Most probably, there are gatekeepers and they do not read all the poetry published. Rather, they rely on advice from other gatekeepers, an intelligent system which is good at picking up talent. But it is easy for the system to miss poets, either because they don’t play the poem-submission game hard enough or by sheer accident. The shared values of the gatekeepers are the hegemony, in plain sight. If you find a list which shows 906 books of poetry being published in 1977, you have to ask: how would you design a system in which an “intelligent filter” would sift through all that poetry? when the people taking part aren't being paid to do it?

Three, links of poetry to higher education
I have not written about this because it is too pervasive. It is likely that the poetry audience consists mainly of graduates, that the number of poets active has increased in line with the number of graduates in the population, that the proportion of female poets has risen in line with the proportion of females in the total set of graduates. Further, that the proportion of poets from ethnic minorities (BAME) is increasing in line with the number of ethnic minority graduates.
In this concept, the poetry audience is necessarily changing because the demographics of the graduate cohort are changing. Much of the debate around poetry is actually about how fast the changes should be, and what its attitudinal or doctrinal implications are.
The Sixties saw an expansion of the elite, with a great increase in the number of students in higher education. Evidently poetry expanded too, socially and stylistically. What it did not do was get away from the predominance of university study as a “qualification” of its writers and readers. This is a statement which can be flipped over – I am aware that people have very firm opinions on both sides of the argument. It is true that publishing a book makes knowledge available to anybody who picks the book up. It is true that the point of universities was to share and disseminate knowledge. You can't find fault with that. However, if you measure it is also true that the new students tended to come from middle-class families –and that, during the Sixties, the great majority of them were male. If Allott did an anthology for Penguin, the product was a paperback on sale for a few shillings (6/- in 1963) which would be on the shelves of any bookseller. This must have been an example of making culture available to everybody. That is the only possible description. He spends many pages of the book explaining why each poem is good, and exactly how good it is. That is designed to heighten accessibility. It tells you what you are looking for, it shows you what you are missing. He tells you not every poem is unattainably great. This is frank and democratic. What is less certain is how many readers actually wanted to read rather sombre analytical prose en route to artistic pleasure – in fact, we can see this as a hurdle, a selection factor.

Four, the status of outsiders
essay on folk-song and poetry (label “folk song”). Actually a naive style being used by the educated. What we see is the excluded layers of language being recuperated by accepted poets. This process of recuperation was taking place throughout the 20th century – it is not something with unexploited potential. One proposal is that the unsophisticated poetry at any point is soaked in styles which had once been dominant and which the centre had defined as out of date.

The research led me to get very interested in vanity press poetry. If you look at all the books published in a given year, it becomes obvious that a large number of titles are produced by poets you have never heard of – and publishers who never get a book reviewed. You have found the vanity press world. If you ask why people don’t know how poetry is written, don’t know how to get publishers interested, don’t know why people would like their poetry – that might answer the question of how do (other) people find out how poetry is written, what style is possible in the year we are actually living in, what the poetry audience wants. That is, looking at the outside of poetry illuminates what the inside is.
Poring over spreadsheets with thousands of titles, I have noticed some exceptions to the rule that vanity press poets have no careers because they do not understand how the literary process works. I can see at least four poets who started with vanity (or, obscurely, “semi-vanity”) presses who went on to achieve some fame – and, to be egocentric for a moment, writing poetry which I am familiar with and enjoy. (names withheld). I don't have exact data on how some rather subterranean publishers operated– but my impression is that, in the four decades I am concerned with, 20% of titles came from vanity presses who made the author pay, and possibly rather more than that. Sending out poems to many magazine editors gives those people the chance to reject you and prove you wrong. Not all poets are up to this. Maybe we have to rethink, and maybe poets who use vanity presses are not so dissimilar from everybody else. Sending your poems to 100 magazines is rational, but maybe not all fledgling poets are that rational in how they go about things.

Five, the role of empathy
It is legitimate to ask “why is this good taste”. Poetry is a profoundly social activity, everything converges. It is likely that your taste has been influenced by your teacher at school, by your friends as a student, by the anthologies you read as a teenager, by the theorists you read. There is a lock and key arrangement here – you acquire the accepted taste and then you find yourself perfectly equipped to read poetry which actually exists. In fact, you may well converge on what exists – if only because converging on what does not exist is pointless.
This is most cogent when we ask why most of the educated audience ignores modern poetry. The real audience acquired taste by face to face contact, to some extent. People who missed out on this probably don’t have the poetry-reading habit. It follows logically that they have not been influenced or programmed. In theory they could, as a body, represent a hundred kinds of poetry that nobody is writing. This remains a theory because they do not participate and we cannot acquire information about their reactions.
Possibly 0.01% up to 0.03% of the adult population read poetry as part of their normal cultural intake. So, wondering about the people who seldom or never participate has a large area to wander through – although almost no data is available to support any speculation. It is natural to hypothesise that this 0.03% resemble each other – they are attracted to the social activity around poetry because they find it easy to converse with the people who are taking part in that activity. Further, we would guess, taking part in that life causes them to converge further – as they share the same experiences, they become more similar. Actually, the more empathetic people are, the more they become similar to the other people who they interact with – poetry demands empathy, and empathy makes you share feelings and attitudes.
There is a paradox here. Someone who is bad at empathy may find poetry irritating, for staking the whole game on empathy. They may be unable to enjoy it, because empathy delivers the information which could clause pleasure. So we may have a route-map in which people who lack empathy are missing from this territory, and people who are strongly empathetic come to share the dominant values because their inclination is to share and understand other people's feelings and wishes.

Six. Theory of a separate female taste. Evidence is lacking. I have never considered this. The question of a new aesthetic is separate from the question of political agitation and legal reform or equal pay, practical issues. I am uncertain how to approach this. Various posts describe female poets omitted by Allott and Lucie-Smith and argue for their restoration. Label “mid-century women’s poetry”.

Seven. The idea of progress in art, and of reflexivity making art the subject of art. See label “historicism”. Let us look at what Roberts says in the introduction to his 1936 anthology. “... and a poem is equally confusing if it takes into account greater complexities of thought and intricacies of feeling than the reader has ever noticed. It unsettles the mind – and by the mind I mean more than the conscious mind; and the reader expends the energy he originally brought to the poem in trivial irritation with the poet. […] in so far as the poet is a good poet, the situation will remedy itself. [...]perhaps their recognition of the new element will be accelerated by his writing. But in either case they will welcome the way of speech which makes them articulate. […] Sometimes his writing is significant primarily for only a few of each generation as when it is evoked by some remote place or rare experience or an intricate thought which few can follow. [...] his writing has a value over and above that of its immediate appeal: he has added to the possibilities of speech, he has discovered evocative rhythms and image-sequences unknown before.
In a good poet a change or development of technique always springs from a change or development of subject-matter. [so] we must also discuss content[.]” This belief in innovation is obviously close to the criteria which Eric was applying. It is difficult to see a breach as having occurred between Roberts and the British Poetry Revival. Actually what Roberts evokes is the main line of British poetry. We have to speak of editors compromising with a more colloquial style, rather than Mottram’s idea being an innovation or deviation.
Roberts starts by describing a crisis, the economic crisis present in 1936, which directly affects poetry. It brings about a crisis of self-awareness which draws with it a crisis of style. Taking on modern poetry also involves a personal crisis for the reader, or this is what Roberts implies. It is hard to see that there has been a crisis continuously from 1936 to 2021. I think the proposal is more “we only become conscious in moments of crisis, our normal state is one of serenity and routine thoughts”. This is interesting – maybe it is also true that “poetry is not at all points in a stage of wiping out its past and embracing the radically new, most years are ones of stability and serenity”.

Does progress take place? I don't find this question to be soluble. If you see an editor, or a little group, say that the poetry they favour is the definitive style of the moment, you are bound to suspect that this is simply a tactical weapon to shove every other kind of poetry off stage. However, innovation is always possible, and it may be that something vital is happening in a small area of poetry, in any given year. This possibility seems to have become much less prominent since the 1990s, as the diversity of poetry is just too apparent to everybody – people no longer believe in a “leading edge”.

*** I have tried to remove judgements from the above text. In this conclusion, I will relax that a bit. I want to point out the problems with poets rejecting external criticism, and how they will bend any line of argument to support their belief in themselves. It is now popular to criticise society, or the literary world, for not being perfectly set up to admire a particular poet, i.e. the poet who is speaking. So, “if history had run differently then you would have liked my work. Therefore it is my right to ask for re-programming to take place. Your right to enjoy your own taste or to dislike my work is thus removed, I refuse to accept it.”
I am not keen on this line of reasoning. Readers get into poetry to acquire an experience. If you invalidate the judgements of good and bad which are integral to that experience, you invalidate experience altogether. Nobody is going to bother with poetry in this climate of opinion. Taste follows someone’s biography but I am sceptical that you can invalidate either one. Poets need to accept the validity of public opinion and of the people who buy their poetry. When your poems are rejected, rather than criticise the hegemony, write better poems.
If there is some idea in linguistics which I picked up as a student in 1976, it may well be that someone disproves it in 2021. I can think of specific examples. So I could have been wrong for the whole of that time. I expect quite a few things which I read in 1976 were actually untrue. I don't think this applies to poetry appreciation in the same way.

I have been talking about three classic anthologies because it is certain they were influential. If we looked at badly constructed anthologies, the influence is less certain, and we might be scrutinising the stupidity of one editor, rather than seeing a real part of the cultural landscape. But, obviously, there are some pretty bad anthologies around. Poetry With an Edge is an anthology which does not convince, either by the quality of poets included or by the arguments and assertions about the quality of the poets. However, it only a sample from one publisher- it is not a standard anthology and nobody supposed that it was. The flaws it shows are not, straight away, flaws in the scene as a whole, rather than local ones. The underlying point of the contents list, that this publisher was signing more new poets than any other one, is convincing because it is true.
Gesturing towards that crowd of the rejected does not at all tell us that we want to read them all. Excursions into the Greyed-Out Material (the redacted names, you could say) highlight the act of exclusion but do not invalidate it. I think Roberts, Allott, and Lucie-Smith did incredibly well in finding the good poetry. Of course it is compelling to dig up poets they passed by. But mostly they got it right. It is interesting to see how Roberts left out Edward Thomas, but Allott, following Roberts scrupulously for the most part, put him back in – even though Allott’s anthology technically starts in 1918 and Thomas died from the blast wave of a shell in 1917. What I find difficult is “reversing figure and ground”, so that their choices would seem invalid.
If we suppose Lucie-Smith considered 400 poets to assemble his volume with 86 poets, the possible data about why each of the others was rejected is very voluminous. Unfortunately it is not on record. We could use it only after making it up. That is actually two problems, volume and invisibility. The process of criticising anthologies has to sail round these problems. It is certainly easier to look at the winning poems, which we can read – but that means leaving out the process of selection. Silence is too important to be passed over in silence.
When New Lines came out, crystallising the Movement as a standard of taste, there was a symposium in Essays in Criticism in response to it. That gesture shows how important the anthology was. But, if you read the symposium, nobody in it likes New Lines very much. So, the Movement was not the hegemony in 1956. There is a hegemony but it embraces a whole range of central standards and individuals, so that you can never look at it directly. If we consider that Allott was a “normative” editor, you have to take on the fact that he selected 86 different poets. They are extremely different from each other. He probably thought he was covering the spectrum, and this is what all gatekeepers think.
I have not read any vanity press publications, although logically that should be a source of information on the exclusion process. I mentioned four people whom I know to have used paid-for publications and who later emerged as significant poets – since I have read their work, that is useful, if low-grade, information about that greyed-out sector.

Sheenagh Pugh

Sheenagh Pugh (1950-)

I really can’t remember reading her selected poems, I think I liked them but didn’t find them outstanding. I have lost my notes. Upsetting. I am following up things I missed, and I have been reading some pretty weak poetry… have to say I enjoyed reading Pugh as a rest from that. It seemed worth getting the books again (both the Selected Poems, 1990 and 2009, this time) and investigating just to keep the record complete. The information I found was that she had a pamphlet out in 1977, Crowded by Shadows, and followed this up with a full book, What a Place to Grow Flowers, in 1979. Another dozen books have followed. The Anglo-Welsh thing is not a source of ideas in her work – she grew up in Birmingham and, although she has generally published with Welsh firms, she has ignored the Anglo-Welsh conventions.

A lot of the poems are in rhyme, which also implies (mostly) regular line lengths. I looked at rhyming poems in the 70s and 80s, it seemed to be an issue. Also it lends itself to counting, which could give you a indicator for change over time. A lot of them were assonating. I didn’t know if this was subtle and effective, or a compromise. Pugh seems to like off-rhymes.

Involve him wholly, and no other partner.
Circled in his arms, he acts out the caress
of the words; lets his hands wander on his shoulder,
under his shirt… step by step he betrays

all the trade secrets; make the audience watch
the truth about all those who love in rhyme.
There never is a partner you can touch;
whoever writes the words, they are for him.

I can't qualify this accurately. I am not sure the rhymes make any difference to the artistic impact. Then, they are weak: watch/touch doesn't really ring, neither does rhyme/ him. They are very unemphatic as a decoration. The rhymes are consistently weak, so this must be a conscious preference. After a while, full rhymes would clash with the verse. I think the pattern of near-rhymes must reassure the poet that the work is finished and organised. So the match betrays/caress is significant. It doesn't seem like a rhyme at all, but the context of many similar harmonies means that it must be counting as one. To sum up, s matches with a z sound (the voiced equivalent of s), and an ei diphthong rhymes with an e, the first component of the diphthong. There is no text-book that says this is a rhyme. There was a rapid decline of rhyme in the Sixties, so the use of rhyme was tied up with political (or theological?) disputes about the status of the new Sixties culture. People were fed up of rhyme at that point (notoriously, the same people who were irritated by rhyming poems enjoyed pop songs with rhyming lyrics). This is not necessarily a way of getting to the heart of a poet, or any poet. There was a revival of rhyme in the years around 1980 – as a way of restoring the past or maybe of fending off criticisms about jettisoning the artistic past. A lot of those restorative rhymed poems weren’t very good. The formalism wasn’t very expressive. With Pugh the method seems self-effacing… the lines are neat and the rhymes are easy to miss.

Because I have read the Faber Poetry Introduction volumes, I can see that there is a resemblance between Pugh writing a novel in a poem and some of the things in the 70s issues of those anthologies, where Andrew Motion’s “incomplete narratives” may have been the initial examples. (They are in volume 3.) David Harsent also wrote poems which which seemed to summarise novels. There is a sort of echo of George Mackay Brown in some of Pugh's poems (Brown was also taking sagas, a kind of early novel, and detaching events from them to make poems). This is the harvest from reading lots of 70s poetry, but the traces of these models in Pugh's poems are pretty thin, she is an original poet and her poems are highly finished. A poem I liked particularly was ‘Stonelight’:

Each stone happens
in its own way. One stands
true in a house-wall.

Anger quickens another : it flies,
fills a mouth with blood.

Shaped and polished, one shines
in the eyes of many.

One seems inert, earth-embedded;
underneath, colonies are teeming.

But the best are seal-smooth,
and the hand that chose them

sent them skimming, once, twice,
ten times over the ocean, to the edge
of sight, and whenever they bruise the water’s skin,
an instant is bruised

into brightness. The eye flinches. When they sink,
if they sink, the light they left

wells out, spills, seeds itself, prickling
like stars, on a field that never takes
the same shape twice.

This is all about objects, which may be a distraction for a poet so interested in people. Actually it refers indirectly to people, raising walls, throwing stones at each other, and so on. I like it partly because it is about stones flying and giving off light (on water they splash), which are not things you expect stones to do.
I could make an attempt to define the core of the poems. If you think about Flemish paintings, a lot of them are religious, and they show either martyrdoms or contacts with the divine, such as the annunciation. These moments are profoundly atypical, and that is the basis for choosing them as subjects of representation. If you think about Dutch paintings, you are typically seeing domestic scenes, which are realistic in the sense that what they are showing is present to the senses – not divine or lethal. The scenes are usually tranquil, and they are often typical – a scene which you could often have seen repeated. This opposition can shed light on Pugh – her poems are like Dutch paintings in the features just described. There is a moment when the critic Christopher Whyte remarks that Mackay Brown's work aestheticises violence – explanations for this vary but it is certainly violent death is at the heart of Brown’s idea of art, the way he selects moments to describe. Pugh very rarely describes deaths – although there are memorable instances for the sailor René Bellot, died searching for Franklin, and a soldier in Napoleonic service who was buried at Vilnius in Lithuania. So a death every hundred pages, maybe. Pugh’s poems are profoundly probable. They create a likeness of the world of the senses, and of the world that empathy discloses to us. They don’t deal with saints, heroes, hysterics. At the core, the poems consistently present a credible likeness of something, and that something is always probable.
My impression is that the poems do not imitate the voice of the characters and also do not imitate the voice of the poet – which would get in the way of hearing the characters. The function of establishing a situation and relationship between people is so central that expressive mimesis is forced to the edge. The qualities of lucidity and exposition reach alpha while the quality of expressivity stays at gamma. The voice is inventive but neutral. We don’t seem to get further as we go through 150 poems - we don’t have a fascinating personality to recover. There is no ideology (to use the terms of the time). However, the poet is more interested in writing about other people than in creating a monument to herself.
The density of output points to creative stability. The poems give the impression of stability and credibility and the continuity bears that out – underpinning the political judgements. A limited interest in experiment goes along with plausibility and conviction. Pugh does not have the casino belief of some people back in the Seventies, that in an immensely improbable event the familiar could be replaced by something completely unfamiliar, and that a radical discontinuity would erase present life to replace it with something which the participants could not foresee. That attitude went along with verbal paradoxes and sleights of hand, which Pugh does not deploy. Her poetry relies on what is probable: the scenes are easy to imagine because she evokes what is probable at each point. Her Left view of politics is convincing because we must find the probable more likely than the apocalyptic. Governemnt is based on data series, but not in the way a casino is.

If there is a central thing about Pugh, it is probably an interest in the autonomy of the characters she is describing – the priority is to satisfy our curiosity about them, but before that there is a valuation of them and an interest in their situations. An ethical stance is inevitably the point of departure for this, and this is the steady signal which we lock on to as we read. It could be annoying if the poet used the characters to make moral points – which would be what the reviewers picked up on, giving the poet marks for upholding conservative moral values. There was really a lot of that, in those decades, and poets tried to pass tests rather than to write good poems. Another feature which I could count, and graph, is the smug concluding quatrain. Pugh never writes one of those, as far as I can see. Pugh does not think she knows all the answers and apparently does not think preset answers actually exist. This was actually what was agitating conservatives, at the time.
The neatness may be an aesthetic in itself... I am not sure about this. All the poems are beautifully clear but the ideas didn’t seem to be enhanced by the regularity of form. Pugh didn’t spend the 80s talking about how dangerous radicalism was. Her poems are liberal and empathetic. She rarely sets up situations in which there are two possible outcomes and one is more just than the other– an elementary device of tension. This choice contributes to the stability of the poem; we empathise more because the situation seems real, rather than being a set-up to put over a pre-existing preference, political or moral. We focus more on the people as people. Yet, when Pugh talks about social arrangements, she always favours the powerless – tyranny comes over as widespread and evil. Many poets, in the 70s, saw society as unstable and about to lose itself in radical change – Pugh does not show Britain as being like that at all. The future is not an imminent and wonderful thing. But, this stability allows us, once again, to identify with the characters, and to see their predicament as deep and continuing. Pugh depicts the logic of events without seeing the outcome as admirable.

Subjectivity comes out in the choice of landscapes– in a whole series of poems set in the Arctic, related to the Franklin expedition. (Actually it is two sets, at pages 61-66 and 98-116 of the Selected Later Poems.) British poets have the habit of seeing such high latitudes as a product of the imagination, or as a scenery for imaginative expression. An early example is JF Hendry’s Marimarusa, not published until 1973 although it was composed around 1947. Another Forties poet, W.S. Graham, wrote about the Antarctic (probably) in Malcolm Mooney’s Land. The Franklin poems follow poems about Iceland in her 1979 book. It may be indicative for Pugh that she spends most time on Lady Franklin, Franklin's widow, who denied the status of widow in order to manipulate public opinion, back in Britain, to raise funds for search expeditions to find his crew and bring them back alive. Lady Franklin did not sail to Northern Canada. Pugh ignores spectacular polar landscapes in order to write about the character’s need to mix grief with practicality, and the need to market grief and convert it into a media story – unheroic but also original themes. Pugh seems at this point to be avoiding the transcendent, the superhuman scale.
The translations in the 1990 Selected are from German. One is from a poem by the Swiss poet JP Hebel, and deals with the idea that the city of Basel will one day be a ruin inhabited by wild animals. This reminded me of the modern Swiss poet, Hermann Burger, whose Kirchberger Idyllen are also an imitation of Hebel in some sense. I really liked Kirchberger Idyllen.
Conclusion? This is significant poetry and in an ideal world I would extend "Nothing is Being Suppressed" to include it. But, there it is. I couldn't write about all the significant poets writing in the 1970s. As for my notes, I think the Search function fails for a certain category of text files. And I have a few thousand files in that format.

metal detectorists

Metal detectors snouting and snuffling

I was very impressed by the story of the Staffordshire Hoard (of Mercian goldwork) being found by a metal detectorist, and archaeologists subsequently saying that they should co-operate more with detectorists and give them more credit. I saw a magazine for detectorists in WH Smith’s. OK, I thought, this should be interesting. They have limited education, they didn’t get free education at university, they work for a living, maybe they should be accepted as part of a wider intellectual community interested in the past.
Then, I saw a copy of this magazine on-line, on a site I subscribe to which has lots of books uploaded by people. 60 million documents, according to their write-up. So it’s like You-tube, only for books and papers. Anyway, I downloaded this issue of “Treasure Hunting”. I was expecting it to be full of articles about archaeology, and I was interested to see what questions they asked which made it different from a mainstream archaeology magazine. WH Smith has 3 of those, so you can buy those just by walking into Smith’s. But, I was amazed by what I found. The detectorist magazine has no interest in archaeology. The articles are about the first-person experiences of people who use metal detectors, and have no discussion of the meaning of the finds. It is completely about finding treasures, that is where the interest stops. So you would expect reviews of books and exhibitions ...but they don’t run any of those at all. This implies that their readership don’t want to read books, or even visit museums showing large numbers of “treasures”. No, they are too busy walking up and down muddy fields. It follows that the magazine has no actual archaeologists speaking in its pages at all – not even as book reviewers. One corollary is that the hobbyists are not attracted by how much professional archaeologists know, and they don’t. They don’t have to feel themselves as a sub-cultural minority, defined by ignorance. Another one is that there is no trickle of academic ideas into this anti-academic world – they are not even reading reviews of the books, let alone the books. But they don’t feel inferior to the academics. Their focus is incredibly egocentric – they aren't much interested in objects which other people own, because the focus is unswervingly on objects which they own.
It is important to read Paul Barford’s blog with its critical view of detectorists and other looters: http://paul-barford.blogspot.com

Barford refers several times to “object-centred archaeology”, which sadly exhausts itself detailing the history of objects rather than the history of a past society. This is also a way of thinking about the people who read ‘Treasure Hunting’ – they can focus on objects but their interest vanishes when you address any other topic, because they have no interest in abstractions at all. Barford is interested in using physical evidence to think about symbolic behaviour. A potsherd is part of a pattern. So, if someone asked “we have the very first coins in Britain, made for kings of south-eastern tribes and following Gaulish models, what does this tell us about social changes, moving from a society which doesn't need coins to one which needs thousands of them?” – but they wouldn’t be able to pose a question like that and wouldn’t understand the answer if someone pronounced it. As a consequence, they don’t feel that a Renfrew or a Hodder is superior to them. They aren’t interested in the things which intellectual archaeologists can do. They are playing a game in which developing ideas doesn’t count as winning – but finding Tudor coins certainly does. Detecting and collecting isn't even archaeology, it is several levels below “object-centred archaeology”. A coin is primarily a symbolic object, you would think. Or is it primarily a shiny thing?

OK, some of the people who buy “Treasure Hunting” might also buy “British Archaeology”, so their limits are not the same as those of the magazine.
The detectorist set seem to dislike abstraction. They are really happy talking about the details of their ground scanners, and like the objects they dig up – while becoming uncomfortable whenever the discussion moves away from solid objects. It is not simply distrust of the people who own abstract ideas, it is actual discomfort in dealing with ideas at all. So they don’t overlap with the ley-line gang, who have limited interest in physical evidence but are in love with imaginary ideas, and the spirituality of past ages. So they are both against “official archaeology”, but they possibly don’t overlap at all – they just don’t have the same interests. There must be a difference between people who believe everything, no matter how untrue, and people who don’t believe any abstract ideas at all, even if they are true. I couldn't find even one mention of an archaeologist – but there was a photo of a table where someone sat to identify finds, obviously an archaeologist but not named, he was there only to act as scorer, recording that a detectorist had won, and their find was really old.
I was impressed by a photo of finds. They included a broken part of a “Celtic” (Iron Age?) terret ring, in La Tène style – something incredibly beautiful even if it was only an inch across. The patterns just aren't ones you would find today. And there were several pages of photos from an antiques auctioneer, so paid for as ads but still worth looking at. I don’t know why the same ads don’t appear in British Archaeology, maybe their readers don’t want to own artefacts. So there was a photo of a La Tène sword – crunched into a sort of Z shape, but a real one, you could have it for about £5000. Amazing.

This looks to me like two completely different ways of consuming information. The cognitive practices which let someone process a largely abstract story, or data pattern, and enjoy it, are communicated by education, and there is a large pool of non-educated people who don’t share those practices, who regard them as effortful and unrewarding. They become pleasurable because you are fluent in them, you have a smooth experience with few stumbles. This is the “take away” for thinking about poetry – there are many different ways in which people consume information, and modern poetry is divided into factions based on the preferred cognitive patterns. If you don’t wish to own ancient artefacts, maybe you are parting company with a large number of other people. And maybe they can’t enjoy modern archaeology.

I have been reading about the early history of the Mormons, in particular Joseph Smith’s early career as a treasure finder. He had a kind of lens or mirror which would look through all the layers of the earth and find treasure hidden beneath them. So – an early model metal detector. His device came from German folk culture, the so-called “Erdspiegel” which was allegedly used by “Venetians” coming to South Germany to look for ores (or treasures?). Treasure hunting is actually older than archaeology.

The label here may breach rules about how to label. I have labelled this as "exclusion", because it belongs to a theme of which other parts deal with cultural exclusion. But the area involves also people who don't participate in culture because they dislike reading books and don't want to acquire abstract knowledge. The issue for poetry is "willing non-participants", isn't it, less than "failed participants". Even if low-prestige poetry has a physical existence and is easier to write about. I am interested by the distinction between "people who believe irrational ideas about the Past" and "people who don't read books or go to museums". I am not writing "a history of cognitive practices" but I can see that you can't write the history of poetic taste without getting into that area, big time.

Origins of Germanic

When writing arrives, we find Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, as discrete language groups. Since they undoubtedly started out as being the same, the question is what breaches of structure and origins of structure brought about the divisions. If you look at a page of German and a page of Russian, as they are today, they are certainly very different. Since there are three Indo-European groups in Northern Europe, we are entitled to ask why it is exactly three, and not one or eight. Peter Schrijver, a professor at Utrecht, has published Language contact and the origins of the Germanic languages (2014). This contains a set of radically original theories on the influence of bilingualism and phonetic interference, which I expect we will be debating for the next hundred years. For him, the breach between Indo-European and Germanic is the impact of a phase of bilingualism in which a Balto-Finnic language influenced local Indo-european.
Indo-European has no double-length (geminate) consonants but Germanic does have them. This is an innovation. Schrijver describes in Finnish a set of alternations in consonants depending on the level of stress of the preceding syllable. This can affect which consonant is heard, but is often also an alternation between a sound and zero. Finnish has in fact two sets of rules affecting consonants, rhythmic grading and syllabic grading. (The first affects odd syllables, so first and third ones.) Thus it has a rich set of variations in the consonants of syllables other than the first one. Schrijver takes this arrangement and points out that in Germanic we have some alternations which can be explained as grading:
*dūb- Old Norse dúfa ‘to immerse’
*dubb- Norwegian dubba ‘to stoop’, Middle Dutch dubben ‘to immerse’
*dūp- Dutch duipen ‘to hang one’s head’
*dupp- High German düppen, Norwegian duppa ‘to nod’
*duff- Faeroese duffa ‘to bob up and down (of a ship)’
*dump- Norwegian, English, Danish dump ‘hole, pit, pond’ East Frisian dumpen ‘to dive’

This word-group will be familiar to those who read substrate studies, in the journal NOWELE and elsewhere. (If I am not mistaken, this table was compiled by Frans Kuiper.) It is popular in discussions of the so-called “geminates language” and some of the words show geminates. The study of it was rather frustrated by the fact that it was definitely an Indo-European root (meaning “deep”, and instanced in Sanskrit) although its final consonant behaved in ways which were, strikingly, non-Indo-European. Schrijver has offered a good explanation for this – Germanic arose as the product of Indo-European being spoken, 3000 years ago, by a population which had Balto-Finnic speech habits. That means they had “old stock” words which were, however, subject to Balto-Finnic patterns of variation as concerned consonants at the end of syllables.
The other “geminate” group which keeps cropping up is (in English) stub-stump – stock (and, probably, “stem”). I don’t have a view on the rather puzzling variations within this group, but consonantal gradation seems to offer a solution.
The variation in consonants in Finnish is correlated with syllabic stress, and there is a biomechanical reason why unstressed syllables coincide with weakened consonants. This means also that vowel gradation would be, in an Indo-European language, occurring in the same pattern, so that different ablaut grades would appear with different consonant grades, in words from the same stem.
It is not instantly clear to me why the same word, in the same case, should end up in different (but related) languages with different grades and conditioned by different syllabic grades. I do not get why the words would not all have the same consonantal grade. However, this is a genuinely new idea and I feel that it will open up new routes for Germanic etymology. As appears from the back catalogue of substrate studies, this class of words is rather small. (Although one scholar claims the total is several hundred words, while denying that there is any substrate influence involved in the first place.) I would like to mention at this point the word dumble. This refers to the low ground around a stream and is used locally to me – for example, Lambley Dumbles, two miles away from me. It appears that this means deep in the sense of a hollow stream, which has worn a deep bed between high banks. (Or, low-lying pasture which is flooded seasonally.) Thus dumble actually means deep (or low). Dump is originally a pit – again, it means a “deep place”, and originally often meant a pit in a river bed, a patch of deep water. The contrast in the word ending between dump and dumble is the kind of thing which Schrijver is talking about.

Schrijver’s book also deals with Insular Celtic languages, as part of the structure within which he explains the shifts which differentiate Old English from closely related Continental dialects of Germanic. He states that Irish was identical with proto-Welsh as late as 150 AD and was the speech of migrants from Britain to Ireland at that date. “it seems safe to say that an Irish arrival in Ireland close to or in the first century AD is much easier to unite with the linguistic evidence than an arrival around, say, 500 or 1000 BC.”

Thus he posits Gaelic as the product of a late migration from Britain. As follows, the language which the Anglo-Saxons encountered, on disembarking, resembled Gaelic (as well as Welsh). But recently, Ranko Matasovic posited that there was a period of bilingualism around 400-600, connected with Irish invasions of Western Britain, which produced an assimilation between the two languages, so that the most obvious shared features between the languages (lenition and compound prepositions) are actually late, and their separation was much earlier. I am having difficulty balancing these two views. Matasovic does not propose a social mechanism for the spread of these features outward from the bilingual zone, on the Western shores of Britain, to the whole of Ireland (and the whole of Wales and Cornwall). It is certain that these features are not part of the inheritance of the Insular languages, so it must follow that the two languages innovated in parallel – attaching this to a bilingual zone is perfect. Since we actually have a credible bilingual zone, connected with Irish settlements on the “yonder” side of the Irish Sea, the theory is rather robust.

I am attracted to elements of Schrijver’s idea. If you look at the map, it seems unlikely that anyone would colonise Ireland directly from Spain, Aquitaine, Normandy, Holland, etc. Further, the Atlantic is a large and stormy sea. But, migration from England to Ireland looks easy, even for people with limited sea technology. Meanwhile, we have exactly two Celtic languages in the British Isles. It is attractive to link this duality with two large islands, separated by the Irish Sea. So, a pattern in which speakers of an ancient Celtic language started in Gaul, colonised Britain, and then colonised Ireland from there, and their language community split into two parts, separated by the sea, and the two parts evolved from unity into exactly two languages, sounds pleasing even if it is hard to find concrete evidence that it was like that.

Schrijver’s method is based on the shapes of phoneme structures. This reduces any language to 30 or 40 phonetic elements, which occur in rows and can be conveniently recorded or memorised. The sound which change in any period of history are even fewer. Patterns can be recognised in these simple datasets which are distinctive and rather objective. He relies absolutely on this method. Of course language contact also shows up in vocabulary, but he barely uses this as evidence. So, someone else will have the task of seeking the postulated chronologies in vocabulary, and seeing whether the ideas are confirmed by it. Of course vocabulary is very extensive and demands much more time and more pages.
He states that Irish is uniform in early manuscripts, whereas Welsh is dialectally differentiated. This is a basis for arguing that Irish was homogeneous in 600 AD (when manuscripts start), and so a recent arrival from overseas. I am very surprised to hear that there are dialect differences in the scant records of mediaeval Welsh, so far as I know the opposite is true and there is a “national” language for literature which blanks out any regional differences. To be sure, Wales is not all that large a place. The poems supposedly written by Taliesin and Aneirin, in a sub-Roman 6th century, have come down to us in a form indistinguishable from standard Welsh, although archaic; linguistic differences would be pure gold, to a scholar, but the editors of these texts do not point to any such differences. Of course we only have late and normalised manuscripts. No, my suspicion is that Old Irish is standardised because scribes were taught to apply rigid standards, and this is connected with the wish of the Church to see holy texts transmitted in a way which did not even suggest that human fallibility applied to them. They learnt to write Latin without personal variation and Irish without such variation. Of course literacy spread outwards from the Church, which initially used writing for Latin texts. It does not follow from consistency in spelling and vocabulary that Ireland was a linguistically uniform space.

Nothing is Being Suppressed

Scottish and Welsh poetry in the Seventies

I realise that having got to the end of a book about Seventies poetry I haven’t included a section on either Welsh or Scottish poetry. I am not clear why this is. Nor does anything clever occur to me now. I may owe the reader for this chapter. I haven’t written it. I have been working on a spreadsheet which shows 100 people writing good poetry during the 1970s-irritating because it just isn't possible to manage a book which marshals 100 different characters.

I am going to start with a comment about the geography of taste. Poetically, the ‘British Poetry Revival’ was much weaker in the north and western regions of the island (although this is partly the effect of local nationalist critics concealing the evidence). If you take the 46 names in Eric’s two statements on the “Revival”, then in 1974 24 were resident in the South and five in the North. (This needs qualifying – it is based on my personal knowledge, which may be wrong in one or two cases.) Similar figures, still for 1974, show Wales, four; Scotland, four. You rapidly come up with the conclusion that Modernity was mainly happening in the South. Game over. If you apply the values of Eric Mottram to Scotland and Wales, you find them to be backward – plucky amateurs who lost the game. My feeling is that we need to look at this a bit differently if we want to recover the real story of poetry in the Atlantic regions. There is a celebrated quote by Hans-Werner Henze where he reports a German music critic saying “Henze puts the clock back” about his new composition, and Henze is asking forcefully where is this clock and can it be put back at all. I am sure there is a clock – more accurately, dozens of clocks for different elements of the linguistic structure of poetry. And I do think poetry can be out of date, we can rapidly find poetry which is out of date and there is no appeal possible. But I also think that the direction of modernity has been different in different parts of the island, so that there is a geography of taste. That is even before we start to find out that the political basis, in terms of what the electorate cares about and wishes for, is different, and that the elements of language which poetry is, after all, based on, are different in Wales and Scotland from what they are in southern England. I just don't like this “game over” sound. To complicate matters, I don’t think that modernity was equally present in the North of England. I know there are famous exceptions, but they are thinly spread. I realise why people prefer not to discuss this – it is likely to arouse rage and resentment. You are talking about deprivation, about wonderful things being available to some people and not others. This is divisive. And, I can’t get very far with this because the spadework has not already been done, the data isn’t in order. But, if you accept that the “outlying“ areas were also the most Labour voting, and the most opposed to the ruling class as embodied in the city of London (and Whitehall and Westminster), then you might guess that dissidence was being expressed in the “periphery” – but that it was taking a different poetic form, and probably not the one sanctified by Eric and by influential commentators in the USA. So actually we are going to do better if we use a different clock, a different set of standards, in different regions of the country. Maybe I should have described the literary scene in half a dozen cities – evoked the conversations those people were having, the things they saw as threats, the issues they argued about and explored in compulsive detail.
One way of describing the radical surge of the 1960s is that nationalism moved from being a student craze, in Wales and Scotland, to become credible to the whole electorate, and mainstream in electoral politics. So it was much more successful than the counter-culture or New Left in England. This transition was taking place quite rapidly during the 1970s. There was a radical current throughout the Western world in the ten years 1965-75, connected with the collapse of European empires among other things. ‘Peripheral nationalism’ had been on the rise since the mid-sixties, and not just in Britain. The constitutional situation was unstable during the 70s due to the electoral success of nationalist parties, and this exerted a kind of gravitational attraction on writers. Radicalism in Wales and Scotland tended to take the form of nationalism rather than a ‘counter culture’ and the politics of the personal. Decolonisation was on the minds of students, if not of the political elite. The current among Welsh students and literati took the form, quite often, of linguistic nationalism which affected the Welsh university quite strongly. The experience of losing identification with the existing power structure, of no longer feeling protected by it, of becoming aware of collusion and malice and self-preservation as the classic behaviours of an elite at the top of society, of seeing economic interest behind canonised texts including works of history, of feeling illusions lose their grip, was felt by apprentice nationalists as well as by apprentice socialists or feminists. The basic course of learning how a modern society, essentially capitalist and more or less militarist and imperialist, works is one which could be followed in Bangor as much as in Camden or Leeds. It’s wrong to think that the peripheral nationalism of the 70s was simply an unreflective continuation of positions acquired in childhood, or that it did not involve intellectual excitement or genuine analysis. (After devolution, devolution became of much less interest to poets.)
Because the radicals were electorally successful in the “associated nations”, the gap between them and the average voter was not wide. The wish not to alienate the voters had the effect, arguably, of making the nationalist thinkers cautious about any more radical critique. Also, success was likely to resolve the problems which were inspiring people –devolution could be attained and so sink down to the level of fact. It may sound perverse to say that attachment to impossible ideals had a benign effect on the “outside” Left in England, but we may be seeing at this when we look at the most radical poetry in England. It did not necessarily have any counterparts in the ”associated nations” or even in the provinces. It could arrive at a point of rejecting society as it stands but being “autonomous” and removed from any really possible social order or social reform. Thus “politics” would be an element wholly inside the autonomous art work, to be manipulated in a way similar to rhythm or semantic fields.

Scotland

Scottish poets working in the Seventies would include WS Graham, Alexander Hutchison, TS Law, Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, David Black, George Mackay Brown, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Christopher Salvesen, Alistair Fowler, Alastair Mackie, Alan Riddell, Walter Perrie. I might have to list Kenneth White, Tom Leonard, and Liz Lochhead as well, although I would be happy not to read their poetry. I tend to forget Riddell, but when I got hold of a copy of his book of concrete poetry, Eclipse, I just said “wow”. Hard to anthologise but very high on the slopes of the poetic mountain. D.M. Black is on a high point, writing the mythical narratives which will peak with Gravitations. Kenneth White is an eccentric exile, writing in a way which is either cosmic or vacuous. Ian Hamilton Finlay is the captain of the concrete poets, both extremely simple and notably avant-garde. George Mackay Brown is at the peak of his powers, writing poetry which is naive and artificial at the same time, using the real Orkneys as a setting for his highly imaginative narration of an ‘archetypal’ view of history derived from Edwin Muir. Peter Davidson did a couple of pamphlets, embarrassingly enough I have never read them, but we have to mention them. JF Hendry published a book (Marimarusa), although it is doubtful that he was writing poetry. We should also mention the five poets selected in Macaulay’s anthology Nua-bhardachd Ghaidhlig: Donald MacAulay, Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, Derick Thomson, George Campbell Hay. This list of poets is overwhelming, and maybe that explains why I can’t make meaningful generalisations. At this point I will give up and quote parts of an essay called “Iodine and fish-boxes: an alternative theory of Scottish poetry”. This dates from roughly 20 years ago and would have accompanied an anthology, which after some effort simply veered off the road. Peter Manson and Rob MacKenzie had vital inputs into the project.

Being committed to the Scottish tradition is not uniformly a source of joy. Often it involves getting a parcel of books, by post, from the Scottish Poetry Library, and reading on to find all the books brain-damagingly bad: timid, monotonous, arrogant, predictable, populist, an insult to reason, sentimental, bullying, conservative, and in all humiliating for a patriot. […] We want to say that even if Gaelic culture has been oppressed it is still possible for someone writing in Gaelic to be artistically corrupt, milking the applause from the kind and indifferent audience. We want to say that a society which reduces its own symbolic realm to reality is losing one dimension of culture, and is eroding the possibility of freedom. That restricting the songs to the ones that everyone can sing is not the best thing for everyone. That there is a flavour of Blairism in Scottish cultural managers, saying: everything to the Left of me is immoral and has no right to speak.

We find a common reliance on limited-stimulus fields and on boundary-free spaces. A simple test of success would be the ability to combine these, and to produce something which simultaneously has a three-dimensional reality and embodies an abstract idea and the possibilities of thought. [...] An example of a limited-stimulus field would be an object, on which focus is kept, preventing camera movements. This might apply to one of Finlay's art objects, with its ultra-simple text. The field without boundaries could be the sea, moorland, the sky, virgin snow, falling snow, or the polar ice, for example. […] The boundless space is part of a "pair" with bounded space, it carries a memory of the political; in which its existence points to the alienated nature of daily division and struggle.

[…] With such a small literary audience (and no interest from outside Scotland), the Scottish poet suffers a pressure to converge on secure and identified tastes, to avoid disappearing altogether.
Every starting poet is faced with a landscape which is only apparently infinite (since it is full of objects which represent limits and powers of attraction), and only apparently frozen and fixed (since language and human psychology conceal immense possibilities).
A lot of the support for Scottish poetry has been predicated on nationalist positions. That is, the reader is doing the poet a favour by reading something he or she doesn't really enjoy, wants to use the poem as a weapon (to replace English influence?), and wants the poem to include "typical events" which are recognizably Scottish, which demonstrate Scottish superiority (to England), distinctiveness, and abidingness. It is a bonus if the poet uses no words or ideas which have arrived since 1707. Needless to say, no-one who follows these sullen imperatives has the slightest hope of artistic success or sociological truth. […] This border of the unstable and uncontrollable is a searching test for poets: they either switch the noise out, and turn inwards, or take it as a torrential source of information and therefore of verbal possibilities.

The concept of the avant-garde, and the whole theory of history, change, and prestige which accompanies it, fails to meet Scottish conditions.
The use of folksong in Scottish poetry has been uniformly disastrous; it's hard even to remember a time, back in 1800 or so, when the two could speak to each other. There are resources hidden in the folk culture. [...]We say this to give a context for saying that the folksong is the deadliest enemy of the Scottish poem, and that no-one who fantasises themselves back into a previous century is going to create anything worthwhile. There is room for a writer both to be Scottish and not an imitation folk artist. We wanted to exhibit the unused resources of the folk culture, and in particular to show its amorality, its preoccupation with sexuality and communal violence, its phantasmagorias, its word-plays, its liking for horror, the splendours of its language; but the material is too familiar, and too overlaid by orthodoxy and sentiment.
Prolonged contemplation of the simple, pure, and non-discursive forms of concrete poetry raises alarming memories of the simple, pure, and non-discursive forms of the folk song. It is unreasonable to define the one as sheer authenticity and the other as sheer inauthenticity (with the two exchanging places for different readers). Both are 'limited-stimulus fields'. Scottish concrete poetry has had a lot to do with the sea and fishing-boats. Owing to the deformations of national culture, modern Scottish poems are often missing a dimension–or even two.

MacAulay's Gaelic anthology includes five literary poets, sometimes known as the ”famous five” (an coignear cliuiteach). Arguably, one could describe the ‘modern’ poets as literary rather than oral. Donald Meek said ‘We need to remember that the traditional culture (dualchas) was behind everything, and that there were spiritual bards in the neighbourhoods all though the century: poets like Eachann MacFhionghainn in Bernera, and Catriona Domhnallach in Stamhain.’ The ground rule for the anthology we just mentioned was therefore that only poets who wrote in modern, 20th century, ‘European’ ways were included. Another anthology, An Tuil (The Wave), much more recently, ignores this rule and includes a mass of work by the poets of traditional or folk style. It is a large-scale book and is edited by Ronald Black. This may indicate a growing acceptance of folk arts by the reading audience. It is obvious why MacAulay (and others) picked out those five and left the “village bards” behind, but defining what the difference is is not at all straightforward.

Wales

I think we have to make the basic point that Wales is a country where poetry is important and England is one where poetry is unimportant. In Welsh-language poetry, we have the rise of several currents. First (and I did cover this in the book) you have the revival of classical meters, made institutional in the magazine Barddas and the society Cymdeithas yr Iaith. This is important, but we also have to notice the colloquial-sloppy-youth line, also made official by a series, Y Beirdd Answyddogol, from the nationalist press Y Lolfa. Thirdly, you have the line of Welsh free verse which is the most experimental thing around, and which although it tended to lose out to the nationalist-conservatives and to the colloquial students, produced a lot of the poetry which we find interesting and valuable today. It is baffling that there are three different currents to look at, but this is just a symptom of Welsh-language poetry being in an exceptionally vigorous state. I looked at one annual anthology, Cerddi 77, and is just a very good book. So none of the currents was, really, central.
For the Answyddogol, let me quote from a review (translated) of the retrospective anthology of the series, in 1998:
“The origins of the series, anyway, carry us back to the sunny days of 1976, the world of contemporary song in Wales was one infectious boiling and the national movement was facing the challenge of the referendum and the broadcasting campaign with eagerness. Truly, the poems chosen for the first volumes of the series are full of 'Lifeitis', that period Robat Gruffudd talks about, with the train of the revolution rushing past along the slopes:

Do you remember that night
when we raised two fingers to the world?
when we swore an oath
we would never confess...

But in the shadow of the explosion of 1979 the thick of the series is to be located. From the melancholic studies of Sion Aled (1979), to the challenging élan of Ifor ab Glyn (1991), we hear the echo of the painful attempt of Iwan Llwyd in his collection Gwreichion (sparks) to sing the new Wales into being in the face of the bankruptcy of the old Wales. And perhaps that one sign of the process reaching high tide is the decision of Robat Gruffudd to wind the series up? On the literary level, in any case, we have gone past the polarisation of standpoints which was so noticeable in the discussions of the seventies. Indeed, if polarising opinion, responses and standpoints was the effect of the series in the first place, there is no doubt that one of its chief after-effects immediately was leading to the destruction of poles of that sort in the world of poetry.” …
“After all, the series was militating all through its life against conventions like 'standards' and 'taste'. For this reader, it shows that a good number of striking poems have been dispensed with, especially so in the case of Lona Llywelyn Davies and Steve Eaves.“
(I couldn't determine who wrote this piece.) This makes the interesting point that the “centre” for these young poets was the lyrics of Welsh-language pop music (of the time), something which the English audience is unlikely to have a grasp of. This description evokes among other things why this movement is not to be described as avant garde or underground – although it was clearly a breach with inherited poetic values. The jacket of the anthology says “In the period 1976-1996 Y Lolfa published 25 volumes of “answyddogol” poetry, all of it raising two fingers to the Establishment in Wales: the KKK (the Welsh Arts Council, initials CCC) the royal eisteddfod, Barddas, the joint education council, and the Kremlin of Books. Not to mention the Labour party and the Tories, and the University of Wales – and many a trendy member of Plaid Cymru.” A spontaneous response might be that these are people who find adult life boring and comprehensible. (I think ‘Kremlin’ refers to the Books Council, Cyngor llyfrau.)
Llwyd's book on the sixties doesn't even see this movement coming. Answyddogol means 'unofficial' but is also a genuine mediaeval term, as the books on poetics refer to bards who have not passed all the bardic exams and so have not qualified. For the 1980s movement, the implication that metrical poems were official was close at hand even if inaccurate. Rather more basically, swydd means 'a job', as well, and the series could also mean the unemployed poets.  Y Lolfa represents changes in the scene but stands for a kind of poetry closely related to Brian Patten, Roger McGough, Danny Abse, Liz Lochhead, Adrian Mitchell, etc., rather than modernity of style. The assertion about ignoring literary standards is not merely a gesture but a literal summing up of what the series was intended to be.

The structural contradiction of the unofficials was that the only market which was interested in reading in Welsh was devoted to nationalism, but that the informal verse threw away the most distinctive feature of Welsh poetry and in so doing lost the feature which would allow it to compete with informal verse from England or America. Thus, these poets were writing against globalisation in a form which was unmistakably the product of globalisation.
I am having difficulty in talking about modernity in Welsh-language poetry, partly I suppose because the domain of freedom is so extensive once you wander into it. The major figure was Euros Bowen, with his highly complex and experimental variant on the traditional cynghanedd, and he is the single figure who is likely to attract international attention, with the experimental quality being the air travel ticket. However, it is noticeable that Welsh people are not wildly enthusiastic about his poetry. It is ambitious and in a way inorganic. He was moving to a simpler style during the 1970s. There was a group of non-traditional poets who were very productive during the decade.

There is a comment by Alan Llwyd on the formal renaissance of the 1970s, in the foreword to Trafod Cerdd Dafod Y Dydd, written 1982:
“This period is an exciting one in the history of the poetic art and in the history of Welsh poetry. Plenty is heard about the formal renaissance, excessively much indeed, until some of us have begun to hate the term. Since some critics and poets want us to be in the middle of a formal renaissance, at once people went ahead to put the 'new movement' to the test, for the sake of making it scarce. After all, if I may cynghaneddu a proverb, 'There is a reaction to every movement'. Wales is not fond of success, or splendour, or excellence; she is practised of old in being inferior, servile, and the pride and dedication of the poets of the renaissance are not at all to her liking. She is too fond of grumbling and complaining, often in the name of nationalism. Fake nationalism, or perverted nationalism, milk and water, is what this nationalism is that wants to drag everything good in Welsh down into the depths.“

What we seem to see is that the dumbed-down verse of the unofficials has, over time, been defeated and pushed aside by the neo-conservative revival poetry. What is reported is that the polarisation of the 1970s has died down considerably, and that Wales is unlike every other country in western Europe in the dominance of highly formal, regular verse.

Anglo-Welsh verse
Conventionally, Welsh poetry in English is divided into the First Flowering (connected to the magazine Wales as edited roughly between 1937 and 1945 by Keidrych Rhys) and the Second Flowering (starting around 1962 and supported by the newly arriving flow of arts subsidies). Doubts have been raised that this second wave actually produced good poetry. Certainly the political impetus was more significant than the artistic talent. They wanted ”typical” poetry which would promote nationalist views by praising truly Welsh values and yet showing that Wales under English influence was a degraded place full of diminished people. Unsurprisingly, this wish to be typical produced a literary dogma in which anybody who wrote differently was simply pushed off microphone. In the 1970s, you have a fairly distinct new generation of Anglo-Welsh poets who have nothing to do, artistically, with the Second Flowering. We could cite Peter Finch, John James, Paul Evans, Iain Sinclair, Ralph Hawkins, Phil Jenkins. You have survivors of the 1940s – Glyn Jones (b. 1905) and Roland Mathias (b. 1915) are no longer at their artistic peak. They do have formidable back catalogues, though. You have Emyr Humphreys, who produced Ancestor Worship, a really fascinating long poem which is not, I would say, behind the implication of worshipping ancestors, that you are following ancestral ways in a stupefied daze. Humphreys was a veteran of the 1940s but was a novelist who took to poetry late. You have the “second flowering” guys like Meic Stephens, Tony Conran, Raymond Garlick. They have limited artistic firepower. You have Robert Minhinnnick, a much younger poet who is writing at this time in a realistic and ”regionalist” style which he is very skilled at but which has built-in artistic limits. There is a wave of younger poets in a mainstream style, of whom we need to mention also Sheenagh Pugh, Mike Jenkins and Nigel Jenkins. You also have the magazine Second Aeon, edited by Finch, which is the top counter-cultural magazine in Britain. Also, you have a cluster of concrete poets, encouraged by Finch and published, often, by Second Aeon.
There is a Glyn Jones interview where he reports a count of the poets active in Rhys’ magazine Wales and says that by the 1970s only one third of them were still writing. (Or was it, one third still continued in the 1950s?) The point was about the dearth of resources and the simulating effect which an ambitious magazine had on people. I can't remember the details, it may have been MP Ryan’s interview. I suspect that the people who had given up are part of literary history, part of the evidence we have to collect to get the real picture. We can just mention Lynette Roberts as one of the poets who wasn't writing poetry in this decade. Conran produced a volume called Spirit Level which is very mixed, he was going through radical changes in his style and only parts of the book are successful. (Confusingly, this is credited as selected poems 1956 to 1968.) I do admire his willingness to experiment, but it is frustrating trying to describe a book like this. He produced another book called Life Fund which unfortunately I haven’t read. [I bought it and realised I actually had read it before] I suppose the fairest description is that he had a basic idea of what to write, which was poems for events like weddings, and this didn’t work; he abandoned it after roughly 20 years; and while he was having difficulty expressing what mattered to him, he got fascinated by ideas which were really peripheral, and put a lot of formal energy into them because he had spare energy. He had a cultural critique but didn’t at this time write culture-critical poems. One of the poems is called ‘Space’, and deals with the contrast between the equable grid of space with recession and perspective, linked by him with the Renaissance, and the space of folk art, in which each object has its own space (and there is no recession to show distance).

I LOOK THROUGH THE GRID. BLACK SPACES POUR INTO ME.
AND RIPPLE. SPIN. GLINT. DISAPPEAR INTO ME.
PEDANTRY EATS THE WORLD BETWEEN SLICED STEEL.
URGENCY IS A HOLE KEPT IN PLACE BY BARS.
OTHERWISE I SHOULD BURST. MY SIDES WOULD COLLAPSE.
TOO MANY SPACES POUR INTO ONE SWOLLEN EYE.
VERY WELL, I PARTITION MY EYE INTO TEN LEGION GULLETS.

The idea of writing a poem about this is intriguing, and his poem can be compared with Edwin Morgan. His poems are genuinely unpredictable. Take this poem about an ‘Hourglass’:

In the mutable sand
Where may hands build?
Palace and tower
Headlong topple,
Gulf and vortex
Ebb at the altar
Furnace and forge
Rust and flake,
Drilled to a gap
Of inflexible stars;
The loom is a cobweb world.
The cogwheel spins
In seething tides;
The bales are spilt,
The bullion taken
To coral banks
And lobster's yard.


This is clearly linked to Metaphysical poetry, it is not wholly modern, but it goes through twists. It may date from the 1950s – the labelling is not clear on that.

End
I seem to be owing the scene a chapter about Wales and Scotland, possibly also about cultural activity in the north of England. I can see that adding Northern Ireland to the story would give a fuller picture. I never started to do this, because I am doubtful about my ability to grasp Irish poetry (for various reasons I don’t have that feeling about either Scotland or Wales).