Abstract
The aim of this introduction is to place the following essays into a polemical context. My basic argument is that an exclusive concern with politics is threatening to impoverish our understanding of poetry. It has led to an ignorance of tradition and a corresponding blankness in the face of poetry as art. And, if criticism is so desensitised that it cannot recognise or respond to a poem as a poem, then what possible credence can be given to its political pronouncements? It is only by reconsidering what is meant by tradition that we can revitalise our sense of poetry which will, in turn, make us demand more of our politics than that it confuse posture with action or achievement.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Powell Ward, The English Line: Poetry of the Unpoetic from Wordsworth to Larkin (London: Macmillan, 1991).
For a full account of the Movement see Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (London and New York: Methuen, 1980).
Robert Conquest (ed.), New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956)
and A. Alvarez (ed.), The New Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962).
Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion (eds), Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley (eds), The New Poetry (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1993).
Eric Mottram, ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960–1975’, in Peter Barry and Robert Hampson (eds), New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 15–50.
Concrete poetry uses words as sounds. Its exponents ‘gave recitals with tape recorders, sound effects and their own mouths’. Visual poetry ‘consisted of collages made of pictures, news cuttings, instant lettering sets, duplication machine smudges and blanked out text.’ See Martin Booth, British Poetry 1964–1984: Driving Through the Barricades (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 230–1.
Norman Nicholson, ‘Introduction’ to F.E.S. Finn, Poems of the Sixties (London: John Murray, 1970), p. vii.
James Berry, ‘Introduction’ to News For Babylon, ed. James Berry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), pp. i–xxvii, p. xxv.
Colin Nicholson, Poem, Purpose and Place: Shaping Identity in Contemporary Scottish Verse (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), p. xvii.
T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), pp. 182 and 179.
Chinua Achebe, ‘Colonialist Criticism’, in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–87 (London: Heinemann, 1988), pp. 46–58, p. 49.
Umberto Eco, ‘Reflections on The Name of the Rose’, in Mark Currie, Metafiction (Harlow: Longman, 1995), pp. 172–8, p. 174.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Practice (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p. 39.
Ezra Pound, ‘How to Read’, in T.S. Eliot (ed.), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), pp. 15–40, p. 21.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty’, in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W.H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 31.
For a full account of Heaney’s views see Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber, 1995).
Catherine Belsey, ‘Literature, History, Politics’, in David Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory (Harlow: Longman, 1988), pp. 400–10, p. 406.
Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 71.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Towards Standards of Criticism’, in F.R. Leavis, Anna Karenina and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), pp. 219–34, p. 224.
James Bone, ‘The Tendencies of Modern Art’, in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, Writing Englishness 1900–1950: An Introductory Sourcebook on National Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 160–1, p. 160.
Tom Paulin quoted by Sian Griffiths, ‘Battle for the Standard’, in The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 11 June 1993, pp. 17–18, p. 17.
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 45.
Frank Kermode, History and Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 133
See also Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), particularly the section ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, pp. 71–32.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans, and with notes by Alan Bass (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), pp. 3–27, p. 3.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Valuation in Criticism’, in Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays, ed. G. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 276–84, p. 282.
See William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London and New York: Routledge, 1978), pp. 143–212, p. 191.
Stephen Eric Bronner, Of Critical Theory and its Theorists (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), p. 191.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Tragedy and the Medium’, in F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp. 121–35, p. 132.
Frank Kermode, ‘The Common Reader’, in Frank Kermode, An Appetite for Poetry: Essays in Literary Interpretation (London: Fontana, 1990), pp. 47–58, p. 54.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 151.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1991), p. 168.
Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in Peter Keating (ed.), The Victorian Prophets (London: Fontana, 1981), pp. 186–213, p. 186.
John Milton, quoted by Coleridge in ‘Definition of Poetry’, in Coleridge: Poems and Prose, selected by Kathleen Raine (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), pp. 225–7, p. 226.
Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111–25, p. 117.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1997 The Editorial Board, Lumiere (Co-operative) Press Ltd
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Day, G. (1997). Introduction: Poetry, Politics and Tradition. In: Day, G., Docherty, B. (eds) British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25566-5_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25566-5_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-53281-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-25566-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)