New British Poetry Introduction

Let me begin this introduction to my selection of recent work by a few of the British poets I admire by going back to the last time The Kenyon Review looked across the Atlantic, in 1981, and touching on two points raised then. George Steiner made one of them, perhaps less familiar then than it is now: he suggested that it is possible that a kind of linguistic entropy has overtaken the poetry coming out of England in recent years, and that it may be that the future health and vitality of poetry in English will lie outside Anglo-Saxondom, in the hands of writers from Asia, Africa or the Caribbean. No one, as he said, can prove that “that tiny, history-weary region which runs from Hull to London and Devon” has finally run out of poetic steam, but where, he might ask, is the evidence to the contrary?

The second point was raised by author-publisher Michael Schmidt in “The Time and the Place” where he put forward a personal choice of poets ranging from Davie and Hill to Wainwright and Hooker. In making a distinction between American and British poets of the past seventy years he said, “Jarrell’s disillusion can be more poignant and potent because his illusions were greater; MacNeice’s illusions were curtailed from the outset,” arguing that varieties of innocence were still open to American writers to explore and use which accidents of history had removed from the reach of British poets (though he was not saying that he therefore preferred Jarrell).