While this work offers a unifying theory of the poetry studied, I am cautioned by what has become increasingly clear to me after writing about (and writing) this verse for the last twenty years: the overriding virtue of its diversity. I am aware, therefore, that any theoretical approach needs to emphasize the particularity of this heterodoxy, to allow its otherness to speak.

This is partly why The Poetry of Saying is also a history. The story of this poetry has hardly begun to be told, particularly given the influence of an alternative narrative of a poetic orthodoxy that has dominated the period 1950–2000, and which is the focus of two summary chapters. The necessary context the larger story offers both supports and balances my choice of authors to whom whole or substantial parts of chapters are dedicated.

In this introduction, I argue that this poetry – I use the terms British Poetry Revival and Linguistically Innovative Poetry for its two, not entirely distinct, phases – may be seen with regard to a tripartite theory that informs my individual chapters. This work may be analysed at three levels: the technical, the social, and the ethical.

The technical level concerns techniques of indeterminacy and discontinuity, of collage and creative linkage, of poetic artifice and defamiliarization.

The social level concerns itself with a reading of the necessary dialogic nature of all utterance, including the kinds of poetry offered here. This builds on the technical devices described, ones which animate the reading process into necessary dialogue.

The ethical level of analysis extends from the first two levels into an understanding of the varieties of openness to the other implied by the techniques and social orientation of the work.

Technique: The Poetics of Form

At the level of technique the work of the British Poetry Revival and the Linguistically Innovative Poetry that followed, differs from that of the Movement and its dominant orthodoxy, one whose adventures I will summarize in Chapters 1 and 5. As an orthodoxy it operates as a variety of poetic unconscious, a socio-literary norm that does not exist in a pure form, but which has had a lasting and limiting effect on the world of letters (often through the polemic of the poetry anthologies I will examine in this book).