The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry

The anthology which claimed to succeed Alvarez's The New Poetry was The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry of 1982, edited by the critic-poets Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion. Despite the bland inclusiveness of the title, it admits to being self-consciously ‘didactic’, and claims to exemplify the work and literary taste of a particular ‘poetic generation’. Older writers, and those included in Alvarez's collection, have been excluded. Its introduction several times draws comparisons with The New Poetry, which is characterized as ‘the last serious anthology of British poetry’ (CBP, p. 11). Taking over Alvarez's notion, but not his metaphor, of literary reactions and feedbacks, they comment that the 20-year hiatus had been a long one, ‘if the cycles of literary history in this century are anything to go by’ (CBP, p. 11). In the opinion of the editors, the intervening period had been barren; during ‘much of the 1960s and 1970s,’ they declare, ‘very little … seemed to be happening’ (CBP, p. 11). The summary history of Chapter 2 may be read as a contestation of this extraordinary statement. In much the same way as Conquest had suppressed the poetry of the 1940s, Morrison and Motion, both knowledgeable and knowing commentators, chose to disregard the poetry of the British Poetry Revival.

The anthology's didacticism consists in its claim to illustrate a ‘decisive shift of sensibility’, a fresh ‘cycle’, yet another ‘reaction’ (CBP, p. 11). One condition of such a revolution is that ‘young poets of very different backgrounds and temperaments may feel themselves, or be felt by critics, to be working along similar lines’ (CBP, p. 11). Perhaps the critics rather than the poets will write the manifestos of what ‘a number of close observers’ – and who could they mean but themselves? – ‘have come to think of as the new British poetry’ (CBP, p. 12).