What was Alternative poetry?

What was Alternative poetry?

The start point is a claim in Bloodaxe jacket blurbs that Ken Smith was “the godfather of the new poetry”. That obviously involves a belief about what the “new poetry” (of the 1970s and 1980s?) was.

The Association of Little Presses used to produce a Small Press Directory, and we had access to a copy of the issue for 1997. This lists all the publications of publishers who were members of the Association, and has the advantage of listing them in author order (as well as publisher order).
I photocopied half of the list to use as sample data. Crude total, for the whole list, is 1400 authors. Going through it entry by entry, to eliminate prose works, yields a projected total for poets of 602. Apparently, this is the total of poets active in the small press area – and can be used as a proxy indicator for the level of activity in the 1980s.
Great! But, a closer look at this data shows alarming problems. For example, Bloodaxe, Carcanet, and Arc were members of the ALP and some of their books are listed. It is difficult to see these books as Underground. In fact, Peterloo Press were also members – a publisher so conservative they made Poetry Review look modernistic. So the figure of 602 is unusable. So the list is not usable without further checks. Would this mean scrutinising authors one by one? Well, yes, but who on earth is going to scan those 602 people? The goal seems to be rushing away from us, but in fact the list does contain the names of 200 to 300 poets who can be seen as summing up the underground of that time.
The real count may be much higher. I suspect that quite a few micro-publishers were so small and anti-capitalist that filling in a questionnaire and writing a letter to join the ALP were not within their realm of activity. Ulli Freer’s set-up, Microbrigade, would be an example. Or Open Township. People who put out half a dozen pamphlets and moved on probably didn’t join the ALP.
The ALP catalogue was an attempt to sell poetry by post, to even up the odds. By definition, the Underground produced poetry which was unacceptable to the media and the retail world. It circulated more or less hand to hand. Its signal was weak. So it was likely that someone in (say) London would miss what was happening in Cambridge. The poets who are genuinely alternative are disparate. There were many of them and they were in many parts of the country. I suspect that the idea that they formed an organism in some way, or that they were visible to each other, is a retrospective projection. Only the diversity is genuine. It is clear that the “small press” world includes poetry of low quality, bumbling hedge-poets, grumpy old codgers, firms working as a sort of cottage industry which finds the modern world threatening. So, the professionals habitually write the sector off as being a haven for poets not good enough for commercial publishers. This judgement has also been applied to “alternative” poetry – because it lives in the small press world, it must be part of that amateurism and inability to produce for a market.
There is another figure, for the total of alternative poets over the history of the sector. I don’t have a way of making a list, but I guess 800 would be in the right ball-park.
I wanted to exclude Bloodaxe poets as being evidently conventional and non-alternative, but that offers us an argument, about the question “was Bloodaxe the future of the underground?” I can see that Simon Armitage (published by Slow Dancer) is not “alternative”, but the question is more difficult for quite a few poets. The blurred area is possibly larger than the clear area. Actually, in the opinion of the time Bloodaxe could well have been seen as Alternative poetry – anti-literary poets could be seen as a protest against educated poets, especially if they were anti-southern.
If we go back to Mottram's catalogue of the British Poetry Revival, it gives a fabulous list of poets in the New Poetry, at 1974. He omits Patten, Henri, and McGough. This was a key decision and was almost a protest against accepted opinion – at the time, the Pop poets were seen as a revolt against literary poetry, and wider opinion did not distinguish between Pop and the Underground.
If you dip into Bloodaxe propaganda, you see an image of what happened in the Sixties whereby it was the end of literary poetry and of the old middle class (and of reticence), where performance became pre-eminent over private reading and the immediate present became more important in poetry than learning and stored generalisations. This probably is what happened in the Sixties. However, there was also the acceptance that poetry could be about Ideas, the arrival of the New Avant Garde, the rise of higher education which meant that poets were expected to be intellectuals. All of this was happening. It is apparent that, in the 1970s, there was a split in the original unity of Sixties Poetry, and of the youth culture which produced it, such that pop poetry split off from intelligent poetry, and they became two different worlds. Bloodaxe only took on one of these. Elsewhere, you can see Mottram's definition of the British Poetry Revival, those 36 poets he listed, as being a way of making that split happen. He was defining a separate territory. The exclusion of the Liverpool poets from the poetry revival of the 1960s is almost incredible.
Mottram did include Jim Burns – it looks like a mistake but it also allows us to think about where he drew the exclusion line. Burns’ poetry probably worked when delivered live but it looks insignificant on the page. It has a sort of dry wit. He was a jazz fan but his poetry avoids any of the innovation or improvisation which that might suggest. It was similar to a great number of poets who did readings in the Sixties – he was less romantic, more pessimistic, than most. His pessimism about the possibilities of poetry is the striking quality. Anyway, it is difficult to claim that Simon Armitage was “conventional” if you are already claiming that Jim Burns was “alternative”. The gap between them is too narrow.
On the other side of the division, Bloodaxe did include one of Mottram’s choices– Ken Smith. He was probably their “house poet” in the first ten years. If that is true, we can locate the centre of Bloodaxe’s endeavour as being inside the British Poetry Revival. This looks odd today, but it exposes a genuine fact, viz. that Bloodaxe thought they were supplying an alternative poetry in the 1980s, and saw their line as rejecting the past – defined as academic and literary poetry and an atmosphere associated with the old middle class. New graduates, people who came from lower-class families but had gone through the State system to become a new middle class, were absolutely their staple. People who disliked the old middle class and liked the new middle class were Bloodaxe's ideal audience. That is the group they were identified with. A quick sniff around 'Poetry with an Edge' (1993 edition, not the original, I fear) indicates 54 British poets of whom only 7 had attended Oxford. A mere 13%. Apologies for what may have possible errors, but this does point to a new cultural policy. Lucie-Smith's classic anthology of 1970 still had 29% Oxford graduates. This admittedly rough proxy indicator is a telltale of a new attitude towards the poetic voice. Yes, everybody has a degree. They aren't romantic outlaws. But they aren't the southern elite.
(Actually, biographies are inexplicit and I can't check this – so maybe 13% didn't go to university, and maybe even more.)
So, in the flotsam of received opinions in the 1980s, the idea may have been current that Pop was the future of poetry, and Bloodaxe was the alternative to conservative academics and Cold War attitudes. This idea was not going to be disproved unless you actually read the poetry concerned. The counter-idea, that Pop had evolved into dumbing-down and had become conservative and conventional by about 1970, was a conceptual advance which circulated only slowly. Elsewhere, a lot of people thought “the future of poetry is dumbing-down”, end of story. That would apply to people who disliked modern poetry altogether, and to those who thought that Geoffrey Hill and Peter Levi, let’s say, were what really mattered, the Future Legacy. It could also apply to sections of the Left, where cultural differentiation was seen as a problem.
My feelings about Bloodaxe connect to negative feelings about Larkin. Larkin lived in a dour northern town, he was against cultural pretension, his poetry was obvious. He delivered Grumpy Realism. Bloodaxe poets also offered Grumpy Realism. I couldn't see this as having any liberatory charge. It wasn’t a break with the past, if you see the “central sound” in 1960-80 (roughly) as being ’The Whitsun Weddings’. Even many pages of it wasn't going to change anything. It was a sound developed by Oxford graduates, and the aim was at least partly to discourage optimism about political change. For me, if you list 50 significant new poets of my generation, so roughly 1975-90, none of them was influenced by Ken Smith. He may have been crucial both to Stand magazine and then to Bloodaxe, but his cultural plan had design flaws. There was a new poetry but Smith was not the godfather of it.

To return to our count: I do think that some people in the 1980s saw Bloodaxe as being a poetic alternative. They would then belong on the ALP list. Not everybody saw alternative poetry as being the Mottram line – some people went on seeing pop poetry as being the Alternative. So if I count 500 “alternative” poets, that relies on a meaning of the adjective which excludes Patten – or Simon Armitage.
Marketing texts try to set up ideological communities and recruit you into them, and people writing about the sociology of art tend to do much the same. I should emphasise that the big patterns may not be all that important to the life of poetry. The influence of the moon on your local pond may be real but too small to notice – however big the moon is, it’s a long way away. Local forces may be much stronger. We are interested in the history of poetry rather than the history of marketing prose.

Muriel Box, scriptwriter-director

Muriel Box, scriptwriter-director (continuation)

If you read the classic work on British Cinema of the 1950s, they say that there is a 1951 film called White Corridors which is the best of the time because it continues the documentary style, and expands it into drama which also deals with the welfare state and the new society. It is morally mature and not rushing off into nostalgia and fantasy. But, the BFI decided to restore the very old and perishable negatives first, so they won’t get around to White Corridors for a long time. So it was a lost film, you couldn't see it. I posted about this several years ago. But – White Corridors is now on You-Tube. The first thing I noticed about it was that it was scripted by Jan Read, who wrote the story for Street Corner. Then – this is a great film. God knows how it comes to be on You-tube. It overlaps with “My Brother Jonathan”, if you like that kind of thing. And, yes, they are both films about the Welfare State, and explaining why it is a good thing.
Two of Muriel Box’s films seem to be about the nature of fantasy – so “The Passionate Stranger is a gentle satire on the conventions of the romantic novel and the perils of confusing reality with fiction. Directed in inventive fashion by Oscar winner Muriel Box, (sharing writing credits with husband Sydney Box), this hugely engaging comedy is made available here in a brand-new transfer...” and Simon and Laura [1955] “stars Peter Finch (in one of his first British lead roles) and Kay Kendall as an unhappily married couple who decide, for strictly financial reasons, to play idealised versions of themselves in a kind of quasi-fictional soap opera for the newfangled medium of television. The final act anticipates reality TV by around half a century, as a Christmas special broadcast live turns messily chaotic thanks to the machinations of mischievous child-performer Timothy”. This belief that fantasy is unreal is a sort of critique of conventional romance which sounds like the critiques you got in 70s feminism, or leftism in general. This is not to say that a Rank Film could ever be just like an essay in Screen, but the idea of staging the story in a pleasurable way while also analysing its remoteness from reality sounds like a brilliant solution to well-known problems. It sounds a bit familiar, as a lot of professional screen-writers want to tell a story which exposes screenplay conventions as brain-damagingly artificial. So Box accepted that fantasy had to play a role in film.
I now have a DVD of ‘Strangers’ and it is effectively unwatchable. Too much the Fifties Rank film. It definitely is a critique of romantic fantasy – and this is what we can connect with the Seventies. In the film, the female lead is a romantic novelist who has run out of ideas. A new chauffeur arrives, young and good-looking, she has the idea for a romance about an illicit love affair between a bourgeois heroine and a chauffeur. By accident the real chauffeur gets to read the novel. He tries to take her up on it. Just before this point the film shifts into colour and we see the novel story. The cleverest part is the adjustments the novelist (Margaret Leighton) makes to reality. She becomes a concert pianist – a few steps above silly romantic fiction. For her husband, the heightening invovles him trying to stop her from playing the piano – she is now in the right and has a Grievance. The maid, kind and demure in the scenes of ‘reality’, now becomes sexy, scheming and forward – heightening her role as Threat to the lead figure. All this is very good, exquisite even, but it is the kind of thing which appeals to writers rather than making for real cinema. The fact that the heroine has a total of three servants makes it difficult to take her seriously. Leighton has no personality. Patricia Dainton, as Emily the maid, produces the best and most contrasting performances- out-acting Ralph Richardson, in this case. She is also a lot prettier than Richardson. I admit to being an admirer of Dainton – although I am not sure she ever appeared in a good film. With “Passionate Strangers”, the content certainly involves the critique of art itself, the creative control certainly comes from a Left feminist – but the film is thoroughly conservative and reinforces marriage, wealth, and the status quo.
My conclusion, for the Seventies – if people in 1975 thought that a ton of reforms were inevitable and long overdue and utterly obvious, it is because popular art had been frozen for 20 or 25 years. It’s not that the new ideas were wrong, more that they had been available for a couple of decades and the business of popular culture had failed to do anything with them. Left culture was underdeveloped, although developing fast by 1975, because of funding problems – the culture industry conspired to block and repress it. ‘Strangers’ turns out to be pretty much a film about The Servant Problem.
Box’s film “The Truth about Women” may be the only feminist feature film made in the 1950s. I haven’t seen it and, frankly, it sounds pretty dire. But, as I suspect, every woman who graduated during the 1950s could have made a series of convincing and modern-sounding feminist arguments. It’s just that these weren’t seen as cinematic. Jill Craigie's 1950 short documentary about equal pay for women has got all the arguments, even if the Equal Pay Act took another 25 years. You could find ten Fifties films about the servant problem for every one about the Employer Problem. This is just not a reflection of reality.
An actress called Julia Lockwood played a teenage fantasist figure in two films, 'Please Turn Over' and 'No Kidding', where her fantasies are a significant part of the plot. I think this idea may have been copied from 'Passionate Strangers'.
“Muriel Box described The Truth about Women, at 107 minutes by some way her longest work, as “the film personally significant to me above all others”. It is a portmanteau affair in which an elderly aristocrat (Laurence Harvey) reminisces about the numerous ladies in his life, each episode making unambiguous assertions about gender equality and the wrongs of patriarchal oppression. The days of submissive spouses are over: a woman can and should be “an equal partner in the business of life”, as one character puts it.“
I really don’t much want to see this.

Did the counter-culture end?

I found some notes (from 1994 maybe?) on Martin Booth’s Driving Through the Barricades. It is a history of British poetry from 1964 to 1984. I didn’t reproduce Booth’s argument in my book on the 70s because I regard his book as necessary – I don’t need to repeat it. His story focuses on live performances – they were what made poetry writing come back to life, so that written poetry became interesting again. Small magazines amplified this because they had a very quick turn-round and were super open to new work – they were “almost live”, and dialogic, and social. So he has a vast network of readings sites as his subject, and he describes many of them, and the kind of person who would go there. He must have been giving dozens of readings himself, exciting experiences which make you hypersensitive to audience mood. He describes a boom. Things were good. He wanders the land being applauded. More than that, he applauds the audience. He’s right. But he has a tragic view of this: Booth refers to "the end of the exciting era from approximately 1964 to 1974" and, "In Britain, poetry has gone from being largely sterile to immensely virile and has returned to sterility within a decade and a half." - that would cover 1964 to 1979. “It [Second Aeon] stopped and the decline and rot set into British verse soon after. It is justified to feel that the demise of Finch's astounding enterprise led to the slowdown of the art.” Finch probably was the most talented editor of the entire period. This shift took place in early 1974. Crucially, the readings circuit collapsed in the mid-70s. And, there is a 1974 MacSweeney interview where he also discusses the collapse of the readings circuit as an established fact.
I have a feeling that Booth regarded what he saw and heard as being History Itself. But, every Friday night when he was at a reading getting into the ambience, there were a dozen other readings happening elsewhere which he wasn't at. So he wasn’t seeing history. But, other people may also have mistaken their direct experience for being the whole story, over the whole country. We can’t use their results. My feel is that there was a collapse. But, this represents someone getting high in the foreglow of a future of total liberation, the overflow of equity, self-expression, personal relations. It was actually too much. But a high is followed by a comedown – a physical necessity. The bigger the high, the bigger the comedown. But I don’t think this happened simultaneously to everybody, in every city, on the banks of every river. I think getting politicised, or getting poeticised, was like falling in love – people were falling into it all the time. Everyone is 18 once and there are always more 18 year olds coming along, with stars in their eyes. The Comedown is one of the big stories of the Seventies– but it didn’t happen in a particular month. If you list publications coming out year by year, there is no halt point. It never took place.
I think Booth’s own career may have hit a ceiling – not crashed and burnt, just hit a ceiling. He couldn't get a deal with a major publisher. And he began writing much less.
If you look at the row at the Poetry Society in the first months of 1977, this is three years after Booth says the scene had crashed into the kerb. So it may be that the row, with Eric losing his job as editor of Poetry Review, 14 people resigning from the Poetry Society committee, was not a significant moment. It was emotional for those 15 people and some more who were their entourage, their supporters and advisers, but it probably came in a cultural depression which was already at full bore, and it probably didn’t change the situation for poets or audiences everywhere else – except at the fatal Earls Court building. Conflict around one magazine does not scale up into a historical turning point. Not when you can count 200 magazines.
Did it all go wrong at that point? Well, possibly it didn’t all go wrong at any point. I have yet to hear someone say that their ability to work collapsed after March 1977. So I am waiting for evidence that anybody’s work collapsed. And if the work kept on pouring out, what was there to complain about? that the Arts Council doesn't love you?
I think we are looking at this the wrong way. We argue about “when did the counter culture stop” because many right-wing journalists have declared that as an event. It used to be so great but now it’s just drug-taking. Etc. etc. This is quite like “you don't need feminism any more” or “you don’t need affirmative action any more”. Probably we should accept that the counter-culture never stopped, look away from the internal position, and look at the pressure being put on it from outside. That is what you can date, I suspect. Or, "there was a poetic avant garde in the Sixties but it stopped". Did it?
I find it hard to evaluate Booth’s poetry. He did get a full-scale book out with Bloodaxe in 1983 – but then he wasn’t included in their flagship anthology, Poetry with an Edge. (At least the edition I have.) So he had a gift but something went wrong. I read several of his books for ‘Suppressed’ but I didn’t think he had got there. I am sure he did lots of readings, but the problem with them may be that he simplified poems to make maximum impact in the live situation, so that the work seems shallow and obvious on the page. It is almost terrific, yes. He also writes prose as if history were what he personally experienced. It's exciting because he was always there whenever anything significant happened, and he always knows the story. But if you look for what he didn't see, face to face, he doesn't want to tell you about it. So when he says poetry fell apart in 1974, I don't buy it.

Vanity presses

Vanity presses, exclusion, etc.

I have been looking again at Clifford's book on poetry publication, which includes price estimates from various publishers who could be interpreted as operating on a play-to-play basis. This exercise took place in roughly 1994. The prices varied from about £2000 to about £4000 for a book. There is a cheaper option available, he records. The figures are interesting because they show how you could have a successful business on that basis.
I searched the BL catalogue to get a count of how many books the publishers named by Clifford published during 1994. This raised a problem, because most of them did mainly prose. (War memoirs and interpretation of bible prophecies featured a lot.) I lacked the energy to disentangle which ones contained poetry. Less than 100 poetry titles, I believe.

My spreadsheets continue to grow and I now have a list of 7000 people who published at least 1 book of poetry during my chosen period, 1960 to 1997. This figure has limited use, since it certainly isn't complete. It is aimed at eliminating incorrect statements about the poetry business. It is a basis for a guess about the total – 8000 poets, I suspect. Of course that raises the question of whether there were another 5000 who didn’t get a book out and who were thronging round the entrances, unable to get in. I really don’t have that figure. The data can only answer certain questions and we don't get to choose which ones those are.
Data can exclude certain outlier theories. For example, theories about the poetry world being closed. This idea doesn't really run with a list of 7000 or even more names who did get included. The pattern is more like – editors turned down work they didn't like but there was a lot of work they did like and, also, there were a lot of editors. The industry did say “no” but you have to tune in to the 7000 yesses.
I can see in my lists several people who began with quite doubtful pay-to-play set-ups and then wrote excellent poetry which also came out from reputable publishers. With the vanity sector, I am thinking not just of artistic incompetence but also of people who lacked self-confidence and drive – and maybe wanted to focus on writing rather than on the door-knocking and marketing (and researching the labyrinths of stylistic loyalty). So a complete gap between vanity projects and “genuine” poets is just a theory and less real than most. I don’t feel like naming the people who made the crossover, but they are good poets and in a way that excludes naivety. I think poets as a group dislike rejection and a paying press is obviously going to spare you that part.

I don't want to start researching this, but I could quite easily list 1000 books which came out on a “pay to play” basis, and it is quite possible that some of them are really good. As, this is an area which the business traditionally overlooks. Also- a bet on poets being timid and avoiding difficulties is a winning bet. If there is a tier of ignored poetry, it is less because elitists all share the same prejudices than because some poets are astute enough to write the poem but not robust enough to send off dozens of submissions. I strongly suppose that if 200 magazine editors see a good poem, then one of them will publish it. In the negative case, evidently, it could be a bad poem. A bad sheaf of poems. But, I can't claim that a sensitive poet-thing can read 100 rejections without becoming hardened in a way which affects the reason why they started the journey.

I have just sent off for a copy of ‘Letter to Lao-Tze’, by John Smith, 1961. He wasn't obscure then, and in fact I know pretty well what this book is going to be like, but he is a writer who has been pretty comprehensively forgotten. This is my way of trying to remember.

I think all poets are a mixture of delusion and scepticism and I doubt that vanity press poets are essentially different. We all share the same belief that our work is really important. To update that a bit, some people like to refer to the “products” of creative writing classes as a separate class of being, as if their love of poetry and their path towards stylistic maturity were actually different from anyone else’s. Now that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people who have spent time in those classes, you can see that there is no really findable division.

A follower of Spengler

A follower of Spengler

I chanced to look at an old text of mine, and this is something like a correction to what I wrote 30 years ago. The text is on my first website, www.pinko.org, and one section of it is about a poem by Alan Jackson, in his 1989 Collected. Part of it runs:

“Alan Jackson writes, in "West Man":

between iron and gold still hammered,
each living one of us,
keen to jingle and cleave,
in the west, that is, that I know of,
where the wind is red.

Jackson is taking on nothing less than the West, via a string of crimes: science, thinking, rockets, pollution, etc., and especially: "The word's still: 'On',/ which means to The End", which is the effort to excel. This poem has two good things about it. First, its sheer scale: a terrific release from domestic realism. Second, its forcing together of two incommensurables. [...] You can't have insight into that many people; unless you believe that they all have the same mind, and that this central reality is visible to the Poet. Getting from "character" to "history" is not as easy as Jackson thinks. [...] The poem is totally indebted to prose statements about ecological disaster, something so familiar to the reader that it needs little explaining; also, it's implicitly normative, dividing the world into Good People and Bad People, and this supports a claim by the author to authority and knowledge. It's not a very good poem.[..]
Jackson's certainty comes from his sources: whether it was the ecologist Barry Commoner or some TV documentary, he takes "the West-logic- imperialism- disaster" as fixed concepts, and there is no trace in his poem of how this knowledge was reached. Most of the poets published in the anthology have a childike worldview, in which knowledge is guaranteed by an authority figure[...] This lack of interrogation process petrifies the poems they write. One wonders if anybody in this whole network has the faintest idea what Western art has actually been doing in the past 50 years. Maybe the "inquiring" style came to be the Establishment (in visual art, at least), and ebbed away, without most of the arts public knowing what it was.”

So far so good. But, what I didn't get at the time (1992?) is that the source is actually Oswald Spengler. Where Jackson says "The word's still: 'On',/ which means to The End", the idea is clearly Spengler’s myth of Faustian Man. In fact, the idea that there was a cultural unit called The West, and that it was embodied in a “psychological type”, comes from Spengler. This poem is much better than Jackson’s other poetry, and this just shows the whole continuing mythic power of Spengler. I am tempted to use the phrase “pulp philosopher”, because his core ideas are so vivid and so remote from historical research. The idea of “defining the West” is so compelling that many poets have wanted to do it, irrespective of deep ignorance about other cultures (say, Far Eastern, Islamic, communist).
Jackson isn’t a very good poet (and when he was in Penguin Modern Poets, number 12, they put three bad poets in one volume, the others being William Wantling and Jeff Nuttall). It has a drop-dead beautiful cover photo by Alan Spain, quite similar to a lot of other volumes in the series. I remember these covers from 1971 or so... they were just great. It seems to be a wooden wheel in a tree, seen from beneath and silhouetted against the sky. Possibly two wheels. It's quite hard to locate which direction is up, but I feel sure the blue is the sky and not the surface of water. The credits page to that PMP records "he is working on a book about the interaction of myth, dream and imagery in his own life and in our time". I wonder if that ever came out. My essay was looking at that belief that "my unconscious is the deep tier of our society" and some of the consequences of that. It is possible that dreams are just "narrative white noise" and not a source of knowledge. The essay is not very good.
For me this shows how little I knew in 1990. Actually reading contemporary poetry was probably a good idea, but reading the history of ideas (including bad ideas) would also have been helpful. A poet who recycled Spengler motifs in the 1970s was Peter Abbs, and those poems are actually rather good.
If you work in the education industry, the question “how will Moslem parents react to this policy” is quite important. Good government also means good government as it affects British Moslems. Spengler’s version of Magian Culture has nothing to offer here, it’s more like a joke than real cultural sociology. The whole post-Spengler thing was a solipsistic way of thinking about the West, not a way of gaining understanding of people from (say) Turkey or Pakistan. A false start. Spengler’s book was more like a trashy but exciting work of science fiction than a work of sociology. It should have been made into a silent film. "The Twelve Dreams of Dr Spengler".

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.