New Lines

The official literary history of the period 1950–2000 has also been the history of its most strident poetry anthologies. Their introductions supply a set of criteria for a uniform reading or re-reading of their selective contents, and some (in the words of one I shall examine in Chapter 5) claim to discern ‘decisive shifts of sensibility’. Often they present themselves as the petulant heirs to, and revisionists of, a previous anthology, with claims for a monolithic or diverse poetic of the decade or a particular generation. Some of these anthologies were produced in cheap editions by Penguin Books, which ensured maximum distribution of their contents; this alone could make such anthologies canonical, often via the medium of various teaching syllabuses. The extent to which extra-literary concerns impinge upon the reception of contemporary literature, and upon this analysis of the persistent orthodoxy of the Movement, should not be underestimated.

The orthodoxy itself is a literary-polemical construct from which individual writers can deviate, following the diversities of their individual sensibilities, only at the cost of leaving the confines of what is most acceptable. This is because innovation is narrowly conceived as mere modulation of its norm, a norm which has proved both persuasive and durable. Therefore full development is often sacrificed to the orthodoxy, and only partial readings of some poets’ works become acceptable; this summary history chapter and Chapter 5 deal with readings of writers’ works which, through the powerful media of anthologies, have come to consolidate both the reputations of the poets and the axioms of the Movement Orthodoxy, even when they are exceeded. The orthodoxy thus operates as an unlocatable, often denied, invisible, but pervasive, centre, a poetic unconscious of the age, which offers an often ideal model of poetic discourse and artifice. Its increasing flexibility enabled its survival until the end of the century, in diluted form.