The centre is impossible to find or define, since it is a paranoid fantasy of being controlled by a hostile and malevolent agency. How can you connect the government in Westminster, the electors who vote it in, the boards of multinationals, the shareholders of same, the City of London, the reviewers of poetry for the quality press, university teachers of English literature, the poets who are favoured by the reviewers, the Arts Council, the people who make television and radio programmes, the Americans who make cinema and much of what is shown on British television? Surely these are separate groups of people, with different interests and different sources of influence – even if each group is closed to outsiders, more or less. The embittered and pressured regionalist poet may wrap them all up together to explain why he (or she), his poetry, his whole region, have been cheated of their natural rights; but if a poet chooses politics as a theme, then the quality of his or her political analysis will be a restriction on the ultimate quality of the poetry. There is the possibility for someone of political acumen to link some of these maps of power together to make a really gripping kind of political poetry.

One of the weapons of the current promotional campaigns, deployed notably by Martin Booth and Neil Astley, seems to be hostility to people who studied at Oxford or Cambridge. I disagree with this; a few hours spent with one of those biographical reference books that list the site of someone's education have convinced me that some 40 of the modern poets I regard as good attended one or other of these old universities. It might have taken me a lot longer to count the bad poets who went there too, and so far the analysis of the promotional campaigners is good. But to understand the hostility, we have to consider the homogeneity with which Britain and the world regards those universities as the best; and how clearly the assets of culture, broad horizons, literary knowledge, command of language, which all poets covet, are present in ample quantities at them. The counter–values to education have been set as sensuousness, authenticity, emotional undividedness, communal loyalty.