The Estranging of the Mainstream

Resumen

At the end of my “Introduction” I suggested that the distinction between the mainstream and the margins has become increasingly difficult to maintain. There are a number of forces at work here but the most crucial is in the influence that postmodernism has exerted — not because it has swept all before it but precisely because of the stubborn and varied resistance it has encountered in Britain. At the end of my last chapter I pointed out the extent to which poets like John Ash, Peter Didsbury, and Ian McMillan have transformed the postmodernist modes which, at a superficial level, seem most to characterise their work. Until recently the kind of poetry written by these poets would almost certainly have marked them out as outsiders. But it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish at times between their work and that of poets who are broadly mainstream but have been influenced by postmodernist techniques and preoccupations. What I want to maintain in this concluding chapter is that the collision between postmodernism and realism in contemporary British poetry has produced instabilities so extensive that it is no longer possible to discern what the dominant mode of contemporary British poetry is — and that this has allowed various kinds of estrangement effect to enter by the back door.