Contents
INTRODUCTION: THE DEMOCRATIC VOICE
Part 1
This books offers many kinds of enjoyment. It is the first
anthology to survey the poetry from Britain and Ireland which
was published in the half-century after the Second World War.
It seeks to present work of consistent quality and surprise.
Poetic vitality was our essential criterion. In an age of
electronic communications and information overload, the niftiness,
attentiveness and numinous vibrancy of poetry have become
more, not less, important. Poetry is language which delivers
its own promise, and which may often trip reader and writer
beyond the expected, into an otherworld potent with spiritual
experience. It is poetry's power which makes it for some people
embarrassing and unconfinable. Yet alxnost everyone has written
a poem at some time, and has known poetry as intimately important
- a source of delight, nurture and illumination that need
not always be po-faced. In assembling good poems this volume
aims to deliver some of that nourishment. At the same time,
the titles both of this book and of its Introduction announce
a philosophy and argument. The anthology gathers work from
a cluster of islands off the mainland of western Europe which
encompasses several nations and two states that share a common
language (though they also contain other minority languages
with a long literary history). Arguments about what is `British',
what is `English', or `Irish', or `Welsh', or `Scottish' run
through the period and sometimes energize its poetry, but
the existence of the two geographical entities, Britain and
Ireland, and their mutual awareness remains throughout unarguable.
In looking at the work of poets of these islands in the
period since the Second World War, we are alert to a shift
in poetry and in the perception of poetry, as well as to an
alteration in politics and history. World War II marks a fissure
in history and poetry in Britain as well as Ireland. Before
it, Irish verse is dominated by Yeats, his aristocratic stance
producing a voice which often makes him sound as if (as he
put it in 'All Things Can Tempt Me') 'he had a sword upstairs'.
In Britain, the brilliant, highly educated poetry of Eliot
and Auden held sway. Greek epigraphs guarded the portals of
Eliot, while readers marvelled at what Dylan Thomas called
'young Auden's coded chatter'. Whether it was written by William
Empson or Edith Sitwell, the most admired poetry was a bit
like an exam and often carried a mandarin tone - one heard
movingly, harrowingly in the music of Eliot's Four Quartets.
Yeats died in 1939 and Eliot slipped away towards the theatre,
where he attempted to catch a popular audience. The publication
of Four Quartets in 1942 is the high-water mark of
modernist poetry in Britain. After it came the delayed publication
of the biblioholically demanding late poetry of the Scottish
poet Hugh MacDiarmid (mostly written in the 1930s), the ambitious
and Eliot-supported myth-manoeuvrings of Welshman David Jones,
and the Pound-sponsored northern English modernist poetry
of Basil Bunting; but each of these seems something of an
isolated, if exciting, outcrop in the post-war geography.
Some of the established poets, such as Edwin Muir and Dylan
Thomas, continued on courses mapped out in the pre-war years,
though they registered (as would the generations that followed
in Britain) the shock of the war. Yet strikingly, after spending
the Second World War in the United States, Auden grew less
telegraphically compressed, less 'coded', more relaxed. The
short-lived, strained and clotted New Apocalyptic movement
of the early 1940s was sloughed off like a skin. The democratic
voice was arriving.
This voice's emergence was heralded and later schooled by
the Butler Education Act of 1944, which extended the educational
franchise, bringing about a movement in the constituency of
readers and writers. Where Auden in the early thirties wrote
from, and most immediately addressed, a public-school-educated
Oxbridge coterie audience, post-war poets as diverse as Philip
Larkin, Ted Hughes and Stevie Smith wrote subtle, accessible
and surprising poetry, communicating more directly with a
wider public:
Piggy to Joey,
Piggy to Joe,
Yes, that's what I was -
Piggy to Joe.
(Stevie Smith, `Piggy to Joey')
In the generation that followed, Douglas Dunn, Seamus Heaney
and Tony Harrison (none educated at public school or at Oxbridge)
wrote consciously as 'barbarians' from outside the traditional
cultural centre. Where T. S. Eliot, nicknamed 'the Pope of
Russell Square', had pronounced ex cathedra in Four
Quartets on the poet's mission 'to purify the dialect
of the tribe', more and more post-war poets delighted in the
impure 'mud flowers of dialect', as Heaney called them. Poetry
was possible after Auschwitz, but it was subtly different
from before. Largely rejecting pontifical tones, poets in
Britain and Ireland wrote as part of a shift towards post-imperial,
pluralist societies and communities. The notion of a hieratic
voice of authority (whether that of received pronunciation,
the BBC, the Irish Catholic priest, the Oxford don, or the
patriarchal male) was rejected, though poets' voices were
increasingly part of the public sphere.
Especially since the 1960s, poetry readings throughout Britain
and Ireland have become a popular phenomenon, while a wide
variety of spoken verse has been broadcast through (particularly
BBC) radio and, more occasionally, television. Though poetry
remains a medium of risk and exploration, it need not be at
odds with popular culture. If, at times, the mass media may
have lacked the courage to trust poetry, then there are also
instances where poets as different as Tony Harrison and Sorley
MacLean have had their work published in broadsheet newspapers,
filmed, and broadcast through radio, tapes and more modern
electronic media. It may have become easier in this period
to publish books of verse. Certainly, and often with support
from public bodies such as Arts Councils, important poetry
publishers have established themselves in such diverse locations
as Newcastle, Manchester, County Meath, Edinburgh, Belfast
and Mid Glamorgan. Though some of the most significant poetry
presses and magazines remain London-based, the strength and
range of publishing established elsewhere encouraged new readers
and writers, disseminating a proliferation of poetries. Some
of the voices that emerged were blokish, some consciously
female, some clearly un-English. All appear aware of existing
among a plurality of speakers and writers. The notion of 'the
democratic voice' is not intended to suggest that all post-war
poets sound alike or speak with one intonation - quite the
opposite. Continually, these poets display an awareness of
inhabiting one voice that is among others, part of a vernacular
community surrounded by further vernacular communities. The
democratic voice may speak Gaelic or English. It may be gendered
as male or female. It is unhieratic belonging to a culture
of pluralism, where its authority is both challenging, and
challenged. It is an allied self-awareness and bite that allows
Peter Reading to combine traditional poetic techniques, such
as couplets, rhythm and rhyme, with mixed colloquial and formal
English, reported speech, everyday expletives and a gravestone
epitaph, all within the piece:
Inside a shed with the Council's coat-of-arms blazoned
on it
there is a Flymo and spades. Here comes a gent with a pick:
`Wouldn't it make you want to dip your bread in the
piss-pot
- some of the bilge they write there? Fuckin daft sods' (he
opines).
Sweet peas are cunningly wrought in a huge pink crucifix
resting
fresh on damp just-replaced turf. Wet clay outlines a new
slot.
Biro-smeared sympathy cards blow about and one is signed
'Viv,
The Deepest Regrett Always Felt' (it shows a wren on a wreath).
On a diminutive gravy-hued sandstone wafer is chiselled
that which, despite mawkishness, prompts a sharp intake of
breath.
Aged 10.
Little Boy,
We Would Not
Wake You To
Suffer Again.
(Peter Reading, 'Ukulele Music')
1, 2, 3
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