there's no longer an English literature. Talent has not been lacking, not at all; but, a center absent, talent collects for itself the materials of some unique cosmos. As never before, good poets are dispersed round the land; as never before, each commands a personal readership, including with good luck a perceptive critic (thus Hill stirs the eloquence of Christopher Ricks); as never before, no talk, however extensive, about any of them need cause you to mention another. You think of them quite separately, and that is a symptom. Larkin was perhaps the last poet whom ‘everyone’ had heard of, and the ‘Movement’ he was connected with soon didn't contain him. Nothing ever contained, or can account for, so disparate a quartet as Hill, Jones, Charles Tomlinson, Basil Bunting: nothing save a common devotion, in utterly disparate idioms, to the past of England. That's a symptom too, that need to reclaim – affirm – a past. Pasts are homemade now.