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“I can’t remember anyone writing anything I considered interesting in those days who didn’t have a well-worn copy on their bookshelf. It was a breath of air in a stifling room.”1

So recalls the British poet Tom Raworth of The New American Poetry, in an email to me. The stifling room was the scene of the 1950s, dominated by the Movement, a group of anti-Modernist poets who were essentially one half of the “academic” alliance of Anglo-American poetry, while what Raworth considered interesting was the beginnings of what Eric Mottram has called the “British Poetry Revival,” a loose avant-garde grouping of writers that eventually included Raworth, inspired by American and European experimental examples. For the sake of clarity, in outlining the nature of The New American Poetry’s reception in the Great Britain I will follow this opposition, as well as Mottram’s shorthand phrase for the British avant-garde and the prevalent but highly contested and occasionally meaningless term “academic.” The aim here, that is, is to show how Allen’s anthology gave impetus to poets searching for a poetry and poetics challenging a set of assumptions about class, history and aesthetic form that had crystallized in the British, in a way that could and did provide a model, a rallying point and a source of authority for a radical and vibrant British avant-garde. The absurdity of Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison’s contention that, after the demise of the Movement, in the 1960s and 1970s “very little . . . seemed to be happening . . . in British poetry”2 can be best illustrated through British poets’ reading of The New American Poetry.

Reviewed virtually nowhere in Great Britain, and certainly not in the mainstream literary press, and expensive at 14 shillings and sixpence (Al Alvarez’s 1962 The New Poetry was about a third of the price), The New American Poetry nonetheless remains the single most influential book on British avant-garde poetry. Though not instantly entering the poetry-reading public’s consciousness, or even its purview, the attentiveness of the margins of British poetry guaranteed The New American Poetry’s short- and long-term impact. In the most immediate terms, the book’s effect is easily sketched. Within five years of The New American Poetry’s appearance, almost all of the poets included, most of whom in 1960 were simply unheard of in Great Britain, had seen their work published in one form or another in the country. Many, including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Larry Eigner, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and John Ashbery had found British publishers for collections by the end of the decade, in some cases with mainstream presses, with the likes of Olson, Creeley, and Snyder even becoming “exceedingly available in British bookshops.”3 Even the British academy, though admittedly a marginal part of it, was inviting New American poets such as Ed Dorn into ranks.4 Many of the little magazines that sprang up in the 1960s were operated on the basis of making avant-garde poetry from the United States available along with the British poetry that was consciously following the its example.5 The viability of Better Books in the 1960s as “an astonishing resource for [The New] American poetry,” according to Eric Mottram,6 would have been impossible without the readership created by Allen’s anthology. Indeed, founder Tony Godwin had sought the assistance of a contributor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to help “bohemianize” the operation—the City Lights store manager was sent from San Francisco. Fulcrum Press, meanwhile, publishing the likes of Snyder, Dorn, Eigner, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, and Roy Fisher, routinely had first print-runs of 3,000 copies. Conferences and readings featuring American poets sprang up everywhere, the most notable being the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, which 7,000 attended to hear radical British poets read alongside the likes of Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Even The Times Literary Supplement, the establishment literary review par excellence, was forced to admit that “the whole scene has been transformed” by British followers of The New American Poetry like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gael Turnbull, Michael Horovitz, and Anselm Hollo, all of whom were included in the weekly’s “The Changing Guard” issue (August 6, 1964) and were “worth studying even if the standard is not always high” according to the editorial. “British Poetry” had been changed, or at least now had a competitor.

The New American Poetry was a reference point that previously disparate avant-garde British poets could gather around. Andrew Crozier, who presented an American poetry supplement to the wide readership of the Cambridge-based literary quarterly Granta just four years after The New American Poetry and clearly modeled on its example, echoed Allen’s preface in identifying the rallying-point of his own avant-garde anthology, A Various Art: “one of the means by which many [British Revival poets] identified each other was an interest in a particular aspect of post-war poetry, and the tradition that lay behind it—not that of Pound and Eliot but that of Pound and Williams.”7 Though it is clear that other vehicles prepared ground for the reception of such alternative poetries (the San Francisco issue of Evergreen Review, for example) none were so broad and comprehensive, or encouraged so much further reading than The New American Poetry. The volume’s selection of forty-four poets, especially along with a well-finished poetics, was a window, and an enticing one, onto poetic scenes that were evidently much larger. Though Peter Riley remembers that “very few of the poets in the book were set aside or ignored—almost every name was investigated,”8 eventually British poets tended to focus their energies on individuals, spurred by the strength of The New American Poetry’s varying styles, poetic philosophies and politics. A selective list of influences and relationships can be illustrative: Lee Harwood (New York School, especially Ashbery), John James (New York School, especially O’Hara), Peter Riley (Jack Spicer), J. H. Prynne (Olson and Dorn), Gael Turnbull (Black Mountain and Ginsberg), Andrew Crozier (Olson, back to the Objectivists), Barry MacSweeney (McClure), Tom Pickard (Creeley and Dorn), Chris Torrance (Spicer), Allen Fisher (Olson, Spicer, Barbara Guest), and Jeremy Hilton (Robert Duncan). When one considers that most of the American poets here, with some very notable exceptions, were completely unknown and unavailable in the United Kingdom, and indeed sometimes obscure and unpublished in the United States, the impact of The New American Poetry on the complexion of British poetry, even considered as a mere bibliography of the American avant-garde, becomes quantifiable.

Quantity is one thing, but looking into the precise qualities of The New American Poetry’s impact in Britain opens up questions not so easily answered by lists or publication histories. How was it that these poets, who had “already created their own tradition, their own press, and their public,” according to Allen,9 could talk to another tradition, to another, quite different, public? Why did so many British poets look to America in the first place? What specific forms did The New American Poetry and its poets take as a model? What has it meant for British poetry beyond the 1960s?

Allen’s contention that his poets were “already exerting strong influence abroad”10 was pre-emptive; even so, it is not quite true to say that The New American Poetry simply wrote its iconoclastic proclamations on the dead white skull of conventional British poetry. Just as The New American Poetry prepared the ground for a fundamental rethinking of the legacy and possibilities of modernism in post-war Britain, it did not itself come out of nowhere, and had the ground prepared for it by a number of enthusiasts and vanguardists. The two stories—British poets and presses laying the foundations for The New American Poetry and vice versa—are not always easy to separate, but the lay of the land can be broadly mapped out. Some British poets, indeed, were in the anthology, as publishers. Gael Turnbull was one, whose Migrant Press had published or distributed work by Creeley, Olson’s Maximus Poems and Ed Dorn’s What I See in the Maximus Poems before The New American Poetry. Turnbull himself, who lived in California from 1958 to 1964, was passing on the advice on the American avant-garde received from Cid Corman and others to important British poets. Roy Fisher remembers meeting Turnbull while he still lived in England: “I met Gael Turnbull and I was exposed in one day to Olson, Creeley, Bunting, Zukofsky, Duncan, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Ray Souster, and, most of all, William Carlos Williams.”11 Migrant Magazine, meanwhile, was a hugely important vehicle despite only running for eight issues from July 1959 to September 1960. Emerging from Turnbull’s home in Ventura and shipped around the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, Migrant was responsible for introducing Levertov, Eigner, Dorn, Creeley, and Olson to audiences both sides of the Atlantic (though they had appeared less regularly in other British little magazines of the 1950s such as Window, The Poet, Artisan and Nine). Olson himself had certainly “arrived” in Britain before Allen’s anthology, and would have made his mark without Migrant. Elaine Feinstein, as Olson’s “Letter” to her in The New American Poetry indicates, as well as other British poets including Turnbull and critics such as Ronald Mason were all well-enough acquainted with the poet’s work to be in correspondence with him about some serious matters of poetics. J. H. Prynne, who began a correspondence with Olson around the time of The New American Poetry’s publication, was also initiating what would be a long-term fascination with Olson at Cambridge University, itself soon to become a center of avant-garde poetry and poetics under Prynne’s leadership. Robert Duncan was another who was visible in the United Kingdom, if not widely understood—his work was being reviewed in establishment journals like Poetry Review early on in his career, but was being criticized for its “sprawl” and for “lacking in tension and rhythmic control.”12 Charles Tomlinson and even the habitually conservative Donald Davie, who called Olson’s “Projective Verse” “the most ambitious and intelligent attempt by a poet of today to take his bearings, and to take a future course,”13 were making efforts to introduce the range of American poetry to British readers at a time when even William Carlos Williams couldn’t find a publisher in the country. The Beats, of course, were well known for many other reasons. It is not clear what is meant by Agenda’s ambiguous remark in an editorial to its September 1960 issue that “without American poetry English poetry would be almost non-existent.”14 However, given that it was said in the context of introducing Williams’s “The American Idiom” essay, which was printed in the issue, we can guess that it saw Allen’s “Pound and Williams” tradition already emerging in Great Britain.

When it did arrive, The New American Poetry had intended and unintended consequences in Britain. One of the intentions of the anthology, which had an almost identical resonance on both sides of the Atlantic, was its militant anti-academicism. Indeed, anyone seeking a single “movement” among the anthology’s various groupings was told where to look: the poets have “one common characteristic,” according to Allen: “a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse.”15 Allen’s anti-academic offensive spoke to certain British poets because they had experienced the same decade of formalist, academic, conservative verse—in America it was the so-called Middle Generation, in the United Kingdom it was the Movement. The similarity between the two poetic scenes is not surprising—after all, American academic verse defined itself by looking to England, a point I will pick up shortly. The New American Poetry’s rival, the formalist New Poets of England and America, summed the scene up:

The problem of an audience—of a community of informed and open discussion and dissent, concerned and yet free from commercial or vested interest—is inseparable from the question of the vitality of art. In our time, the university, rather than literary cliques, the poetry societies, the incestuous pages of little magazines, is capable of nurturing and supporting such an audience.16

The Movement’s poetry of “academic principles [with] an intellectual backbone”17 represented a similar conception of audience. There were reactions to this institutionalization of poetry even in the academy’s ranks. Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry (1962) attempted to rid British poetry of the old, scholarly, Middle-England guard while keeping things firmly in the mainstream. It was clearly a dry well: Alvarez’s famous “Gentility Principle” introduction, with its posturing iconoclasm, was hypocritical. Lambasting the Movement for writing “academic administrative verse”18 was one thing, but the accusation lost its teeth when the anthology included generous selections from most of the Movement poets that were in Robert Conquest’s New Lines anthology of Movement poetry (1956). Alvarez’s strategy was to try to use four Americans at the start of the book as catalysts for English innovation. The problem was that it was hard to see how these Americans (Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath) were not “gentile” themselves, especially if you had just been reading Charles Olson or Allen Ginsberg. For many, the book did little to redeem British poetry because its poems were so rooted in academic standards. What Eric Mottram called “the 1950s Axis orthodoxy” was not so much challenged by attempts like Alvarez’s to rearrange the priorities of mainstream academic poetry, but repackaged with an emphasis on greater “emotion” and less scholarly subject matter.

The problem for the avant-garde, though, was the academic itself. In some cases this led to anti-intellectualism (as in the case of Jeff Nuttall), but it could also lead to a different kind of academicism (or so it was claimed) as with the Cambridge School. The 1960s counterculture objected particularly to the New Criticism’s removal of the author and, it seemed, individualism, as in Michael Horovitz’s “Afterwords” to his groundbreaking, Beat-inspired Children of Albion anthology (1968).19 Others responded to the elitism of a poetry scene so dependent on a critical apparatus, with Lee Harwood noting that the Beats proved to him that “you don’t have to have gone to a public school and Oxford and Cambridge before you can write,”20 while others still, such as British concrete poet Bob Cobbing, saw the very power structures of the British university per se as the problem, helping to run as he did in 1968 along with other British intellectuals like R. D. Laing, the London Anti-University. Whatever the nuances, the consensus among British avant-garde writers was that the academy was stifling creativity, excluding forms of experience and perpetuating reactionary politics—and that academic verse it was bad for poetry, bad for the imagination and bad for society.

The influence of The New American Poetry’s “total rejection of . . . academic verse,” was to show the possibility of a serious poetry that was not academic, and an intellectually powerful art that did not need to be built on T.S. Eliot’s “historical sense” or New Critical tenets. While Lowell was busy working out the poet’s role in society in metrical patterns and vocabulary borrowed from metaphysical poetry, readers could find O’Hara describing poetry in the medium of sardines in the delightfully irreverent “Why I Am Not a Painter”;21 while New Criticism was insisting on the ontological autonomy of the poem, LeRoi Jones and Allen Ginsberg were placing it firmly in the political world; Olson even showed in “Projective Verse” how a poet could make use of Elizabethan prosody without limiting the engagement to academic discussions of anapaests, dactyls and “defective feet.”22 The lessons were well-learned in Britain: from Tom Raworth’s parodies of academic language to the irreverent, demotic or simply unofficial vocabulary of poets like Barry MacSweeney, a new “poetic diction” was being born; popular culture was also seen entering British verse with much greater frequency; there was a mixing of art forms that forced poetry far from university grounds. Overall, though, what was to replace “the academic” was not always consistent. British avant-gardists increasingly juxtaposed it to genuine experience in a way that challenged the New Critical separation of world and artwork: “Recently I read, “pain is a great incentive / to art.” / Which proves two things; / I’ve been reading again, / and you can not trust the printed word / until you have experienced that which it proposes.”23

The link between English departments and England itself was never far away from this anti-academy rhetoric, in a way that had unique potential for British poets. Like the Anglophobic The New American Poetry, which was a reaction to a formalist Anglophilia seen as both academic and conservative, for British poets the liberation from “Eng Lit” was a weapon to be used against the little Englandism of the Movement. Gael Turnbull’s critique of the Movement, “Now That April’s Here,” makes the link between the group’s parochial chauvinism and academic poetic practice clear:

It’s raining on the Brussels sprouts.

The fire is smoking in the grate.

Macmillan says he has no doubts.

Will Oxford beat the Cambridge eight?

Some bright intervals tomorrow.

Sixpence on a football pool.

Seven percent if you want to borrow.

Charles is settling down at school.

Put the Great back in Great Britain.

Write a letter to The Times.

Lots of fun with Billy Butlin.

It’s a poem if it rhymes.24

The poem seems to sum up the opposite of The New American Poetry for British poets as well as their own anathema: art that is uncritically formal, imperialistic yet parochial, unambitious yet chauvinistic, academic yet narrow-minded.

If The New American Poetry influenced British poetry, it was precisely because it did not address it. Even James Schuyler, who was no Anglophobe, displayed uncharacteristic vitriol in the book for “the campus dry-heads who wishfully descend tum-ti-tumming from Yeats out of Graves with a big kiss for Mother England.”25 The principal aim of The New American Poetry was to establish a distinctly American poetry that had not been seen in the United States since Whitman. In part turning to France, but mainly emphasizing the sufficiency of American traditions, The New American Poetry was unabashed, like avant-gardists in the other arts such as John Cage and Jackson Pollock, about “American exceptionalism.” The possibilities of the imagination were offered by the political traditions and geographic make-up of the country, whether as myth or felt reality. The strident nationalism of Olson’s “To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things” was eventually dropped as the volume’s opening poem in favor of “The Kingfishers,” but the volume nonetheless made its case for the vitality of a specifically American tradition. The wide open spaces of Olson and Duncan’s work re-introduced for the first time since Whitman the possibility of an American sublime, all kinds of Americana were made suitable subjects for poetry by the likes of O’Hara, Schuyler, and Ginsberg, while the “Statements on Poetics” section made the volume feel in some way self-sufficient. Even the book’s organization, with contents divided geographically, was clearly modeled on the localism of William Carlos Williams—with the major exception to the spread being Boston, because for Allen, Boston is not a local place but an Anglophile colonial outpost. The trend was noticed by The New American Poetry’s establishment detractors: by 1962, in the second edition of New Poets of England and America, Donald Hall would complain of the “uncritical Anglophobia” of a certain class of American poet. The English tradition that had seemed so inescapable in the 1950s was suddenly being thrown on the proverbial scrapheap by a group of uneducated parvenus.

Whatever has been the result of this cultural nationalism for American culture now, in 1960s Britain the implications were clear. Some observers would argue that, partly as a result of The New American Poetry’s efforts, “British poetry and American poetry [wouldn’t be] on speaking terms”26 for some years. A British anthologist wrote in 1962 of the results of American poetry’s “Chinese box of semantic ingenuities”:

American and English poetry is no longer homogeneous, though written in approximately the same language. Contemporary American poetry—which, thanks to the excessive interest taken in it by American universities, is now an industry rather than an art—seems to be wandering off in the direction of the decorative, where style and technique is all.27

Others, however, saw things quite differently. Nathaniel Tarn even suggests the book’s influence was greater in the United Kingdom than its place of origin. He reflected on how there was “an America in England and an England in America”28—the America in England being the avant-garde, and the England still existing in America embodied in poets like Wilbur, Nemerov, and Lowell. Dom Silvester Houédard (or dsh), a British concrete poet of the period, similarly observes:

EITHER you see the modern movement as happening to american poetry (whether written in GB or USA) OR you see it as happening to english poetry (whether written in USA or GB); in 1st case you restrict English poetry to victorian-georgian-neoelizabethan: in 2nd case you see wild zigzag life well f i (Whitman) Pound Stein Sitwell Cummings Eliot Auden Williams Spender Olson Ginsberg Corso Horovitz Heliczer Hollo & the jazzpoetry of now . . . 29

Roy Fisher, a major if not the major British avant-garde poet of the 1960s, would talk of his “exercises in de-Anglicizing England”30—exercises made possible from his models of Williams and Olson. In essence, The New American Poetry had initiated a choice for British poets that was national as much as aesthetic between a nationalistic Little Englandism on the one hand and a perceived American internationalism on the other. Eric Mottram refers to poets “who distinctly reject the Movement and all it stands for, and whose experience of American poetry has activated their work,”31 with implications that went far beyond the practice of poetry.

The appeal in Britain of a de-Anglicized American poetry over an “American poetry [that] seems to have all the traditional British virtues,”32 as John Bayley put it at the time, is best understood as motivated by four factors: two of which, namely issues of class and empire, are political-historical and two—approaches to the past and poetic philosophy—aesthetic. Clearly, however, that British poets looked to America in the 1960s in no way marks them out from political, commercial and other cultural areas of British society that had been increasingly viewing the United States as a model (and in many cases as a patron) ever since the beginning of the Marshall Plan. Successive British governments had eagerly taken up a junior-partner role to the new American superpower after the Second World War, switching from an independent nuclear power to one dependent on the United States for supply, and trying to act as the United States’ spokesperson in Europe (culminating in its humiliating rejection for membership of the European Common Market in 1963). Meanwhile Fordism, advertising, Hollywood, jazz, Abstract Expressionism, and many other forms of Americana were all having a huge impact on British culture long before The New American Poetry. Even in the academy, Britain went from a place where, as Charles Tomlinson writes, “A boy from the provinces, going up to read English at Cambridge in 1945, as I did, would have learned little of American poetry from his university teachers,”33 to one where the new subject of “American Studies” (which was promoted at arm’s length by the United States government) was available at many institutions, some of which had British Revival Poets like Eric Mottram and Roy Fisher teaching them.34

It would clearly be naive to separate British poets from broader cultural, political and economic areas of the country increasingly looking to the United States. British avant-garde poetry had special interests within this, however, given its own specific politics and constituency, not to mention what it felt were the specific implications of this cultural shift for poetry as an art form. Foremost among the issues raised was class. When Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan declared in 1959 that “The class war is over and we have won it,”35 it was clear who the “we” was. The Movement was the poetic spokesperson of this misleading consensus politics, with Donald Davie in all his critical works and manifestoes for the Movement insisting on the necessity of “consensual” centrism against the radicalism of some trade unions and the counter-culture. “Political alternatives to social democracy,” according to Davie, “are too costly in terms of human suffering.”36 It was clear to those seeking alternatives to Davie’s “rational conservativism,” however, that all the Movement’s talk of democracy and consensus was a veil for a reactionary politics intent on perpetuating the class and wealth divides in British society. The relative prosperity of the 1950s had caused problems for the Movement, which had built its stoical poetic of common-sense following the post-war “age of austerity” (1945 to about 1951); the plea to “keep calm and carry on” in a continuation of World War II politics of class collaboration was wearing thin. Rightly or wrongly, British poets looking to America saw a classless society in the United States, or at least a poetry scene that was untainted by the conservative elitism of certain attitudes toward class. Tom Raworth wrote in a letter to Ed Dorn:

one day I found Evergreen 2 . . . the San Francisco scene one—with Howl and all which started me off reading more and more of the Americans . . . there are English poets still, over here, but “English” and “poets” . . . you know the sort of thing. It’s odd . . . poetry over here is, I think, still a “class” thing . . . There’s no flow, no use of natural language. The whole thing is so artificial and contrived . . . Nothing has the power to move.37

The “Movement” of course, had no ambitions to “move”—in aesthetic as in political terms, its aims were for quietism based on cozy resignation. “A neutral tone is nowadays preferred,” wrote Davie in his famous poem, “Remembering the Thirties.”

The snobbery of the poetry itself contrasts clearly with its American-inflected Revival counterparts, particularly in the limitations it imposed on subject matter. While its conservative sensibility allowed the Movement to conclude, absurdly, that “nobody wants any more poems on the grander themes for a few years,”38 its antidemocratic bent was anxious about “meagreness and triviality of subject matter”:39 the result was a middling poetry anxious to uphold thematic decorum without overstepping the mark into the ambitious. There are no poems about red wheelbarrows in Movement verse, but neither are there speculations on the meaning of the polis. If a book ever veered between these two extremes, and not always with consistency, it was The New American Poetry: for every Robert Duncan there is a Frank O’Hara among the anthology’s contributors. Olson, meanwhile, was a poet who could be seen swinging wildly from the quotidian concrete to the grand mythical abstract within a single poem—Ginsberg was another. J. H. Prynne, interrupting occasionally tortuous speculation on economic reality with all manner of assembled objects, and Allen Fisher, whose fragmented particulars were part of a revaluation of the concept of place, were just two poets who saw in the new American avant-garde as a liberation from poetic principles that were inseparable from conservative class politics. Stephen Spender, certainly not a poet Prynne or Fisher owed anything to, was to say in 1973 that, unlike British poets, American artists “express an American total-sum of present-day consciousness, not of a civilization confined to one class or to an elite. The American writer seems open to everything that happens in his country. His attitude is summed up in the idea of ‘projectiveness.’”40

This is not to say that class was not an issue in Britain, as it clearly was despite all the rhetoric of a society that had “never had it so good.” It is true to say, though, that poets looked to America in an attempt to transcend rather than abolish class distinctions that had a cultural element in Britain far more at odds with economic reality than in other countries. This is certainly in correspondence with the Emersonian democratic self of most of The New American Poetry’s poets, but was more evident in the volume’s poems that simply had no anxieties about such matters (and, in some cases, no anxieties about politics at all). What the New American poets were, above all, was classless: academic affiliation was a sign of respectability in British poetry at the time, but here were these Americans “living by clerking, surveying, gardening etc.,”41 “working on a tanker,”42 or enjoying the itinerant lives of freedom that had been mythologized in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. British poets suddenly felt comfortable addressing poems to an audience beyond petit-bourgeois academia, as in the Welsh poet John James’s Olson-inflected “An Open Letter to Jim Workman, Landlord, at the Rose and Crown, Withy Mills, North Somerset”:

your lame foot & stick

suggest pain

carry your

trunk, head, arms

hands, the drink in

your hand, a glass

mug, pint, bringing

it to us

& if I brought you a poem

what would you do with it?

what would your hawk’s nose,

your dry sniff, pulled down

corners of the month . . .43

This is not the attempt at “rescuing from silence the class into which he was born”44 that Tony Harrison and other left-wing British poets less associated with the American avant-garde were attempting, but rather a gesture toward the inclusion of broader forms of experience as a result of a liberation from the narrow class concerns of the Movement.

Attempts to reverse the imperial decline of Britain were accepted as part of the plan to perpetuate the class system. As one journalist, Peregrine Worsthorne, observed in 1959: “The Right is acutely aware that the kind of Britain it wishes to preserve depends on Britain remaining a great power . . . Everything about the British class system begins to look foolish and tacky when related to a second-class power on the decline.”45 The Conservative government of the time was intent on retaining British prestige: at times in the 1950s, military spending accounted for around ten percent of GNP, more than double that of its main competitors, while hospitals and schools went unbuilt. Britain was not, however, conducting itself in a manner altogether commensurate with a major world power. The decolonization of its empire had been farcically conducted at times; and there was the 1956 disaster of Suez, in which British forces invaded Egypt following the nationalization of the canal, only to withdraw in humiliation seven days later after the United States and United Nations exerted public pressure. The country’s international position was summed up in 1962 when the then-U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson said: “Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.”46 In 1969, however, with the dismantling of empire and the pacifist counter-culture in full swing, Philip Larkin wrote this:

HOMAGE TO A GOVERNMENT

Next year we are to bring the soldiers home

For lack of money, and it is all right.

Places they guarded, or kept orderly,

Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.

We want the money for ourselves at home

Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,

But now it’s been decided nobody minds.

The places are a long way off, not here,

Which is all right, and from what we hear

The soldiers there only made trouble happen.

Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country

That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.

The statues will be standing in the same

Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.

Our children will not know it’s a different country.

All we can hope to leave them now is money.47

Tragic armchair general or swaggering chauvinist, Larkin was as out of touch with public opinion as he was with economic reality. If Larkin was “a citizen of some commonwealth” as Davie admiringly opined,48 then it was a commonwealth many young British poets did not want to be part of. Ironically, it was the American counterculture, which had recognized the imperial ambitions of its own country, which provided an example addressing the issue. Davie lamented that “impressionable sections of British society were swept by recurrent tides of sympathy for the mostly young Americans who were protesting at the nation’s warfare in Vietnam” leading to an “avid and responsive audience” for an American poetry that had not been “screened first by the New York and subsequently by the London literary establishments.”49

Lee Harwood is a case in point, in his early career mixing the self-consciousness of the New York School with the politics of Black Mountain and the Beats. The White Room (1964–67) is a major collection of poetry by any standards, but it also stands as a document of an American mode applied to the archetypal British issues of empire. The eponymous section of the book50 seems to be a complex parable of the end of empire, and opens with an apparently repainted room that “meant that the toy soldiers had to all be rearranged,” despite “the same flags still hanging” and “the “last words” / of an important general’s speech / talking of history, religion and tradition.”51 “The Doomed Fleet” explores the tension between an empire that has lost all meaningful purpose and power, but still has the ability to cause meaningless damage and pain. The poem begins:

The entire palace was deserted, just as was

the city, and all the villages along the 50 mile

route from the seaport to the capital.

It was not caused by famine or war—

“It was all my fault,”

The troops of desperate cavalry were ridiculous.

The naval guns could pick off

whatsoever their whim dictated,

but there was only one commander-in-chief.52

The reflexivity of the imperial regime, echoed ironically in the self-consciousness of the poem, seems to ensure its survival, whatever the circumstances, as empire seems to determine the vocabulary through which it is to be thought: “The men’s minds were set—/ they didn’t understand “pity.” The very word / had been deliberately deleted from all the books / scattered among the fleet.”53 The paradox of “soldiers in the castle who select the dance records” and a castle itself whose “walls were beyond all hope of restoration”54 causes subsequent poems to balance, as many of Ashbery’s ominous landscape poems of the same period do, precariously between observation and self-implication. Language itself, whether as “whim dictated” or “books / scattered among the fleet,” is dangerous in this context as a tool for setting “men’s minds.” Though “all the previous locations are now impossible,” there is still “the agreed colour in the atlas key”55 to be overcome. The application of New York School self-reflexivity to the menace of empire is an unexpected episode in the story of The New American Poetry, but one that would have implications for the survival of Black Mountain and especially Ashberyan modes in Britain.

However, The New American Poetry was probably an example for post-imperial Britain for its flexible approach to the past generally as much as anything else. The change from Eliot’s “Return to the Sources”56 to Olson’s Heraclitean “will to change”57 would have been obvious to any reader opening The New American Poetry:

I am no Greek, hath not th’ advantage,

And of course, no Roman:

he can take no risk that matters,

the risk of beauty least of all.

But I have my kin, if for no other reason than

(as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and,

given my freedom, I’d be a cad

if I didn’t. Which is most true.

It works out this way, despite the disadvantage.

I offer, in explanation, a quote:

si j’ai du gout, ce n’est guères

que pour la terre et les pierres

Despite the discrepancy (an ocean courage age)

this is also true: if I have any taste

it is only because I have interested myself

in what was slain in the sun

I pose you your question:

shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?

I hunt among stones58

Robert van Hallberg has said, “Olson is posthistorical man: the change he urges is the transition out of history.”59 An overstatement no doubt, but the claims to hunt among stones rather than classical texts is clearly a different approach to the starting-point of Eliot and his disciples like Lowell that “the poet should know everything that has been accomplished in poetry.”60 The change is partly a move from the literary history Eliot equates with civilization generally, and partly toward a more inclusive conception of the past—in Olson’s case, encompassing geological, economic, archival and many other elements.

The democratization of the past from a literary vault into an “open field” is part of the generally less oppressive force of the past in The New American Poetry compared to New Lines, New Poets of England and America, or The New Poetry. While Davie was lamenting that “Our poetry suffers from the loss, or the drastic impoverishment, of the traditional images of celebration,”61 U.S.-inspired poets like Michael Horovitz were praising the “NOW” of the new poetry.62 There were clearly many variations on this in The New American Poetry: Ashbery engaged deeply with the past, but inattentively, to shine a light on the present; Ginsberg’s ideas about orality and breath insisted on a kind of primordial, creative presence; O’Hara wrote a radical poetry of the present tense; even a religious poet like Brother Antoninus could be found praising God for “making” “most instantly, / On the very now”;63 many others simply rejected the possibility of an atemporal meditative space for poetry so typical of much “traditional” verse from Coleridge to Lowell. Clearly, there could be problems with this; as Marjorie Perloff observed in the 1970s: “the modesty . . . of [mainstream] contemporary British poetry has much to do with the poets’ persistent and perhaps burdensome sense of tradition, a tradition their American counterparts dismiss with what is all too often a frightening insouciance.”64 The consequences were equally varied within the British avant-garde. Perhaps the most significant development was the import of the “happening.” Horovitz wrote in his Children of Albion anthology: “We went on the road in spontaneous accord, to revive the oral traditions by which the word had resounded through the ages.”65 Horovitz’s Poetry in Motion outfit, which organized poetry readings throughout the country, was inspired by the possibilities of presence shown by the Beat and Black Mountain experiments in the communication of poetry. Some of the significant aural concrete poetry of the British Poetry Revival, such as that of Bob Cobbing, also came out of this. O’Hara’s chatty “I do this, I do that” poems were brought to a British milieu by John James and many others, while the twentieth-century tradition of fragmentation, carried mainly by David Jones in Britain hitherto, and largely cut off in its tracks by a reading of Eliot that emphasized Four Quartets over The Waste Land, also re-emerged, but gutted of its underlying mythical architecture. Inspired by the collage of James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Michael McClure and other poets, young British poets like Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, and Allen Fisher went on to become bricoleurs making their own poetry of the contemporary. Elsewhere, a kind of automatic writing reigned, but largely unconcerned with any subconscious and inspired by the kind of experiential mimesis demanded by Olson’s precept that “one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER.”66

The question of form in its narrowest sense is the most visible measure of The New American Poetry’s impact. Hard as it is to imagine, free verse, let alone experimental forms, had virtually disappeared from British poetry in the 1950s—those who could command a significant readership being largely limited to survivors of modernism like David Gasgoyne and David Jones. In terms of this, 1960 is a watershed moment. In 1961, the most successful post-war work of formal experimentation, Roy Fisher’s City was published, with other collections of the 1960s variously following the oracular versification of Ginsberg (Michael Horovitz’s 1963 Declaration: a poem in twelve parts, spelled out for the human voice), Olsonian lineation (J. H. Prynne’s The White Stones of 1968), or the prosaic non-style of Frank O’Hara (John James’s Mmm . . . Ah, Yes, 1967). The use of disjunctive or unconventional syntax, seen in the majority of poets in The New American Poetry, was also taken up by many poets, particularly in Cambridge. Davie’s insistence in 1952 that “to dislocate syntax in poetry is to threaten the rule of law in civilized community,”67 is easily ridiculed, but had mainly only received a different emphasis under The New American Poetry’s influence—that this was a good thing. Certainly the link would be realized more fully later in the United States with Language Poetry, but some poets associated with Cambridge such as Veronica Forrest-Thomson and especially Prynne had began to explore its implications.68

The way in which this formal experimentation was contextualized by a theoretical engagement with poetry was perhaps the biggest influence. The anti-philosophical sensibility of British poetry in the 1950s was thoroughgoing and far more pronounced in the United Kingdom than in the United States at the time—indeed, mainstream British poetry’s resistance to philosophy, relative to Europe and America, remains one of its major characteristics. The outlook of the British poets that dominated the 1950s was what it called “empiricism.” The Movement would describe itself as “empirical in its attitude to all that comes,”69 but in truth this attitude was far less an engagement with the thought of John Locke than it was an abdication of abstract thought and an appeal to so-called British common sense. The approach was clearly intellectually as well as politically conservative: though its principal aim was not to sully the waters of poetry with philosophy, its main effect was to create a stagnant, uncritical basis for poetry that was, in its own terms, unchangeable. Empiricism as a term did mean something, though, insofar as it signified an intention to accept the world as it appeared. Such acceptance was not part The New American Poetry’s project, politically or phenomenologically. Charles Olson specifically says in “The Human Universe” that “external reality is more than merely the substance which man takes in.”70 As the “Statements on Poetics” section of The New American Poetry shows, unlike British poets of the 1950s (who barely had a “poetics” between them), Olson and others, variously through readings of Martin Heidegger, A. N. Whitehead, and all manner of Eastern philosophies, were questioning reality. The philosophical preoccupation of The New American Poetry is epistemological, but the questions raised in “Statements” section are diverse: concerning, for example, the sources of creativity (Duncan),71 the nature of description (Creeley),72 the distinction between “disclosure” and representation (Spicer),73 and questions of sound and identity (Jones).74 Nor are these speculations limited to the statements appended to the book. Many of the poems themselves had the capacity to carry detailed considerations of large philosophical ideas: three of the anthology’s most impressive works, Olson’s “The Kingfishers,” Duncan’s “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,” and Spicer’s “Imaginary Elegies” define themselves by their capacity to question the intellectual assumptions that had made Middle Generation and Movement poetry alike seem so complacent and comfortable. Admittedly, these questionings were sometimes more mystical than rigorous elsewhere in The New American Poetry, but the figures behind the book—Stevens, Williams, Pound, and Olson himself—ensured that the questions themselves were never simply taken as read.

The British avant-garde’s antipathy to what Michael Horovitz called the “backwash of nineteenth-century materialism”75 had, therefore, an example of its transcendence. In this there is evidently a geist that goes beyond the individual poets picked up from The New American Poetry by British poets, which raises a key question about the anthology’s reception in the United Kingdom: did the British get an Olsonian poetics from the book? There are many reasons for thinking that they did. Firstly, the anthology invites such a reading anyway: Olson is the first poet and has about twice as much space as anybody else, he heads up the Black Mountain section of poems, which is the first and largest in the book, and the “Statements on Poetics” section. Various references to Olson, implicit and explicit, in other poems and prose pieces, give the idea of an Olsonian tradition. Olson’s own role in helping to edit the volume76 perhaps also played a part in furthering his specific ends. Many British poets, however, were predisposed to an Olsonian tradition and facilitated the reading of it into The New American Poetry. Firstly, more than any other contributor, Olson gave voice directly to the fundamental problems of mainstream British verse of the 1950s, the lazy empiricism that was providing “a p[iss] poor crawling actuarial “real”—good enough to keep banks and insurance companies, plus mediocre governments, etc. But not Poetry’s Truth.”77 Secondly, the ideas of “composition by field” had a democratizing element, as much as it liberated poetry from kind of fetishism of the past that Eliot and Pound had insisted upon. Thirdly, Olson was an internationalist, at least compared to the parochialism of the British poetry of the period, however much this internationalism had an imperialism of its own. There are other aspects: in “Projective Verse” one of the fullest theorizations of free verse hitherto seen, the unashamed relegation of English traditions from a privileged position of authority, the emphasis on the “high energy construct” over the low energy of common sense, and so on. Olson, indeed, seems to represent at both aesthetic and theoretical levels, most of what I have been talking about as motive forces behind The New American Poetry’s success in Britain, unified into a comprehensive and original poetics.

In the actual event, it is clear that Olson was the most influential figure for the heyday of the British Poetry Revival. R. F. Langley, another poet associated with Cambridge, equated American poetry and Olson in a way that was typical: “I didn’t start writing until I found out about American poetry . . . It was really Olson who convinced me that I might write something myself.”78 Immediately after The New American Poetry’s appearance, probably more British poets were in touch with Olson, discussing poetics and civilization generally, than any other American poet: J. H. Prynne, Tom Raworth, Peter Riley, Elaine Feinstein, Gavin Selerie, Nathaniel Tarn, Gael Turnbull, Andrew Crozier and Anselm Hollo could all be named among his correspondents. Certainly the most influential of these poets—Prynne and Crozier—were, though in different ways, committed Olsonians. As late as 1987, Crozier, who had produced an Olsonian American-poetry supplement in Britain twenty-three years earlier (“the spirit of Olson informs this whole collection,” it said), could be found introducing an anthology of British avant-garde poetry with an assertion that its overriding spirit was “the tradition . . . of Pound and Williams,”79 a coded reference to Olson. Even among detractors, Olson would often be the fall guy for the entire project of The New American Poetry. Furthermore, it should be noted that Olson not only influenced younger poets; the success of his example, it can be argued, prepared the ground for the wider acceptance of some older poets’ work on both sides of the Atlantic as well: Roy Fisher and Basil Bunting (whose Briggflatts was not published until 1965) being just two examples.

The story after the decade of The New American Poetry’s immediate reception is one of mixed fortunes for both the British avant-garde and the New American poetry it was using and promoting. The New American poets had inspired a vital and original movement in British poetry that had taken root and allowed some of the poets of The New American Poetry to take root in the country also. In The New British Poetry (1988), Ken Edwards speaks of the influence of Revival poets as disseminators of the American avant-garde and major figures in their own right: “[younger poets] have started by discovering the work of Prynne, Mottram, Raworth, Harwood, Cobbing or Roy Fisher, only then proceeding backwards through these to Pound, Williams, Olson, Ashbery or O’Hara, and then perhaps on to the current work being done in America and Europe.”80 If the former were still not taught at universities, meanwhile, the latter certainly were beginning to be, representing a challenge to New Critical orthodoxy and the “Great Tradition” on another front. By 1970 Great Britain had a poetic avant-garde that was evidently here to stay, that had common ground and a shared tradition, and that still exists, with many of its principles intact.

On the other hand, this avant-garde has been far less visible in Britain than the tradition sparked by The New American Poetry in the United States. The so-called “Poetry Wars” seem symptomatic of the problems that The New American Poetry could cause when transplanted to a British context. From 1971 to 1977, after the general council of the Poetry Society had been overrun with a group of avant-gardists (including Allen Fisher, Lee Harwood, and Barry MacSweeney) elected in 1970, Eric Mottram, elected as editor of Poetry Review, would unapologetically introduce radical British and American poetry to the most mainstream, middlebrow magazine of them all, culminating in a backlash that eventually involved the state itself. The publication of poetry by Americans was one of the major sticking points, with the eventually successful reactionary elements in the society standing on a platform of excluding American poets.81 Mottram’s “treacherous assault on British poetry” was similar to Allen’s attack on the then-mainstream American verse, but the lack of common ground between the two camps in the United Kingdom made audiences much harder to find for the radicals and absorption much harder to accept for the mainstream. This was largely caused by the different traditions they had come from: at least the poets of the Allen and Pack/Hall anthologies had Pound, and perhaps Stevens and Auden, in common—the British “Poetry Wars” pitched Olsonian or New York School-influenced poets against a mainstream that had mainly never heard of Olson or Ashbery, or at least did not recognize their legitimacy. Even where anti-experimental poets and critics were increasingly forced to take note of the New American poetry tradition, it did not necessarily lead to a healthy intercourse between self-appointed mainstream and avant-garde groupings: the way in which some British poets were emboldened by American examples was sometimes read as a unfounded arrogance by detractors then forced into defensive or rebarbative positions of their own, leading to little hope of reconciliation.82 By 1981 Stephen Pereira, the editor of the British poetry magazine Angel Exhaust, would lament: “The radicals have nothing to do with the Establishment and vice versa.”83 Eric Homberger had earlier noted that “The gap between academic verse and its opposite . . . became a permanent feature of the landscape, to the consequent impoverishment of both.”84 A series of further skirmishes were staged between the two in the 1980s and 1990s, though to smaller audiences. Though Thom Gunn’s appraisal of Allen’s attack on the formalist verse of the 1950s as “the academy against bohemia, metre against free verse, the considered against the spontaneous, or at its most desperate Howard Nemerov against Gregory Corso, a zombie against a buffoon,”85 was unnecessarily reductive, it seemed less so when applied to some of the battles raging thirty years later, when the various categories of avant-garde/mainstream, experimental/tradition and even, within the avant-garde, Cambridge/London, was fast becoming an alternative to reading. In the long run, The New American Poetry polarized British poetry in a way that was damaging to it, and to both sides’ attempts to find an audience. A question is posed by this story: was the United Kingdom ready for The New American Poetry? This cannot be answered in these brief concluding remarks, but needless to say that, as well as inspiration, The New American Poetry came with problems that were not always adequately addressed by British poets.

There are many aspects of The New American Poetry’s impact that should have been discussed here, but have not been because of space. The New American Poetry, probably because of its own lack of diversity, had little effect on minority poetries or ethnopoetics, and probably because of the pre-eminence of the phallocentric Olson, little interest for women. LeRoi Jones’s appearance in The New American Poetry as “The Negro”86 was at best mirrored in the British poetry the followed, as was Allen’s underrepresentation of women, both of which would not be righted until The New British Poetry, which dedicated half its contents to black and feminist poetry. Likewise, the geographical diversity of reaction to The New American Poetry, from Northumbria to Cambridge, and from Scotland to London, is also an important consideration that, with greater space, could have been detailed. The influence of the New American poetry on publishing practices has also been only briefly discussed here, though, as Jeff Nuttall noted at the time, the likes of Grove Press and New Directions were beginning “to demonstrate that the only thing preventing poetry becoming a mass commodity . . . was orthodox publishing.”87 The small presses and homemade editions, and Pack’s “incestuous pages of little magazines,” were doubtless inspired by The New American Poetry poets who had “already created their own tradition, their own press, and their public”88 in similar ways. The impact of The New American Poetry as an anthology was also to be significant: subsequent anthologists on the margins of British poetry, such Horovitz in Children of Albion or Crozier in A Various Art were given permission to include un- or under-published poets, to group together poets under common objectives but not within a single “school” or “movement,” by Allen’s pioneering example. The feedback, the echo of The New American Poetry through British poetry heard in America is also worthy of discussion: the 1965 issue of Sum, edited by Andrew Crozier as “Thirteen British Poets,” the 1971 anthology edited by John Matthias, Twenty-three Modern British Poets, and the 1982 Festival of British Poetry held in New York are just three examples of the cross-fertilization that The New American Poetry gave rise to.

It is finally hard to say what British poetry would have been like without The New American Poetry, but hopefully what is detailed here of its prevalence, its vibrancy and its rigor as a model for a new kind of British poetry in the 1960s and beyond has shown what is was like with it. Liberated from pre-war notions of class, able to encompass traditions beyond “English Poetry” and emboldened by a conscious project of poetics, the British avant-garde represented perhaps an even more radical divergence from its national poetry’s status quo than its American counterpart. The results were not always as successful, but they were enough to change the British poetry from a parochial backwater of formalism into a scene that increasingly and irreversibly had to take note of radical, questioning and diverse experiments in poetry, and a new conception of the poetic itself.

Notes

1. Tom Raworth, Email to author, July 1, 2010.

2. Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison eds. The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 11.

3. Donald Davie, Under Briggflatts (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), 49.

4. One can also see the book’s importance for individual figures in another way by surveying the reputation in Britain of poets who could have been included but, for one reason or another, were not. Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin, Cid Corman, Jerome Rothenberg, and especially Louis Zukofsky were all candidates in hindsight, but their non-appearance has perhaps been the primary reason for their relative obscurity in Britain to this day.

5. See Roger Ellis, “Mapping the UK Little Magazine Field,” in New British Poetries: the Scope of the Possible, eds. Peter Barry and Robert Hampson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

6. Eric Mottram, “Poetic Interface: American Poetry and the British Poetry Revival, 1960–1975,” in Forked Tongues? Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, eds. Ann Massa and Alistair Stead (Harlow: Longman, 1994), 196.

7. Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, eds. A Various Art (Glasgow: Paladin, 1990), 12.

8. Peter Riley, Email to author, July 8, 2010.

9. Donald Allen, ed. The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1960), xi.

10. Ibid., xii.

11. Quoted in Simon Jarvis, “A Burning Monochrome: Fisher’s Block,” The Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies, eds. Kerrigan and Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 189.

12. “Review of The Opening of the Field,” Poetry Review 53, no. 1 (1962): 42.

13. Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 246.

14. “Editorial,” Agenda 3, no. 1. See inside flap for quote.

15. Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, xi.

16. Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, eds. The New Poets of England and America (New York: Meridian, 1962), 182.

17. Robert Conquest, ed. New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956), xvi.

18. Al Alvarez, ed. The New Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 23.

19. Michael Horovitz, Children of Albion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

20. Quoted in Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 41.

21. Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, 243–44.

22. See Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York: Thomson, 1988), 493–523.

23. David Chaloner, “Inspiration is Just a Guy Called Art,” in A Various Art, eds. Andrew and Tim Longville Crozier (Glasgow: Paladin, 1990), 55.

24. Gael Turnbull, Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman, 2006), 88.

25. Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, 418.

26. Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 184.

27. David Wright, ed. The Mid Century: English Poetry 1940–1960 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 17.

28. Nathaniel Tarn, Views From The Weaving Mountain: Selected Essays In Poetics and Anthropology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 58.

29. Horovitz, Children of Albion: 368.

30. Roy Fisher, “Interview,” Gargoyle 24 (1976): 95.

31. Mottram, “Poetic Interface: American Poetry and the British Poetry Revival, 1960–1975,” 165.

32. John Bayley, “New Poets of England and America (2nd ed.),” Agenda 3, no. 1 (1963): 9.

33. Charles Tomlinson, “Some American Poets: A Personal Record,” Contemporary Literature 18, no. 3 (1977): 279.

34. See Marcus Cunliffe, “The Growth of American Studies in British Universities,” The Guardian (1963).

35. Quoted in Steven Fielding, The Labour Governments 1964–1970: Labour and Cultural Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 63.

36. Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry: 172.

37. Quoted in Eric Mottram, “The British Poetry Revival 1960–75,” New British Poetries: the Scope of the Possible, ed. Peter Barry and Robert Hampson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 34.

38. Kingsley Amis, “Kingsley Amis,” in Poetry of the 1950’s, ed. D. J. Enright (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1958), 17.

39. Ibid.

40. Stephen Spender, “England and America,” Partisan Review 40, no. 3 (1973): 349.

41. Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, 432.

42. Ibid., 444.

43. John James, Mmm . . . Ah, Yes (London: The Ferry Press, 1967), 14.

44. Tony Harrison, “Interview with Peter Lennon,” The Times (1984): 14.

45. Quoted in John Seed, “Hegemony Postpones: the unravelling of the culture of consensus in Britain in the 1960s,” Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert and John Seed (London: Routledge, 1992), 17, 18.

46. Quoted in Lawrence J. Butler, Britain and Empire: adjusting to a post-imperial world (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 167.

47. Philip Larkin, High Windows (London: Faber, 1974), 29.

48. Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, 73.

49. Davie, Under Briggflatts, 49.

50. Lee Harwood, The White Room (London: Macmillan, 1968), 89–104.

51. Ibid., 89.

52. Ibid., 92.

53. Ibid., 93.

54. Ibid., 95.

55. Ibid., 101.

56. T.S. Eliot, “War-Paint and Feathers,” Athenaeum (1919), 1036.

57. Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, 2.

58. Ibid., 7.

59. Robert van Hallberg, Charles Olson: the Scholar’s Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 18–19.

60. Eliot, “War-Paint and Feathers,” 1036.

61. Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry: 72.

62. Horovitz, Children of Albion: 327.

63. Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, 122.

64. Marjorie Perloff, “The Two Poetries: An Introduction,” Contemporary Literature 18, no. 3 (1977): 264.

65. Horovitz, Children of Albion, 323.

66. Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, 388.

67. Donald Davie, The Purity of Diction in English Verse (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), 99.

68. Indeed, Edward Larrissy and Lawrence Kramer have both suggested that what originally marked British poetry’s development of the achievements of the American avant-garde was the expression of a radical distrust of language. See Edward Larrissy, “Poets of A Various Art: J. H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Andrew Crozier,” in Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism, ed. James Acheson and Romana Huk (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), 63–66; Lawrence Kramer, “The Wodwo Watches the Water Clock: Language is Postmodern British and American Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 18, no. 3 (1977).

69. Conquest, New Lines, xv.

70. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 161.

71. Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, 400–07.

72. Ibid., 408.

73. Ibid., 413.

74. Ibid., 424–25.

75. Horovitz, Children of Albion: 325.

76. See Alan Golding, “The New American Poetry Revisited, Again,” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 2 (1998): 185–87.

77. In “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, 399.

78. Quoted in Ian Brinton, Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry Since 1990. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 28.

79. Longville, A Various Art, 12.

80. Ken Edwards, “Introduction to Some Younger Poets,” in The New British Poetry, eds. Fred D’Aguair, Gillian Allnutt, Ken Edwards, and Eric Mottram (London: Paladin, 1988), 267.

81. See Peter Barry, Poetry Wars: the Battle for Earl’s Court (London: Salt Publishing, 2006), 50–51.

82. See especially Alan Brownjohn, “A View of English Poetry in the Early Seventies’,” in British Poetry Since 1960, eds. Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1972).

83. Quoted in Ellis, “Mapping the UK Little Magazine Field,” 83.

84. Eric Homberger, The Art of the Real: Poetry in England and America Since 1939 (London: Dent, 1977), 179.

85. Thom Gunn, “The Postmodernism You Deserve,” Threepenny Review 57 (1994): 6.

86. LeRoi Jones, Raise Race Rays Raze (New York: Random House, 1971), 25.

87. Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: Paladin, 1970), 162.

88. Allen, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, xi.

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