It is a melancholy thought that poets of the 1820s and 1830s have often been defined by what they were not, by what they almost were, but failed to be. Keats died in 1821, Percy Shelley in 1822 and Byron in 1824 – and what then? Well, then of course there was a gap, before the early work of Tennyson. Arnold’s image of ‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born’ now seems perfect for the strained, stranded sensibilities of a poet like George Darley. The poets themselves could sometimes be gloomy about the prospects for their generation:

Beddoes is a harsh judge of the work of nearly all his contemporaries, and he does not spare himself. And yet, leaving England in 1825 for a lifetime of wandering in Europe, he gradually lost his feel for the contemporary literary scene, continuing to imagine English poetry in this post-Shelleyan limbo of the early 1820s, and mourning the absence of revolutionary prophecy well into the reign of Victoria. Beddoes always had a talent for anachronism. Yet his letters somehow make a ‘true’ epitaph for his generation, as the sensuous idioms of Romanticism reverberated into modernity.

In Book ii of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, when Pandarus sets out for Criseyde’s house to persuade her to reciprocate Troilus’s love, the narrator declares: ‘Now Janus, god of entree, thow hym gyde!’ Janus, the Roman god of entrances and exits, was commonly depicted with two faces, one looking forward and one looking back, an image which is suggestive of the poetic technique of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a poet who hovers on the threshold, glancing back at the landscape of his literary forebears, but looking determinedly forward into his own poetic House of Fame. Centuries later, when William Blake painted the Canterbury Pilgrims, he placed Chaucer, ‘the great poetical observer of men’, at the far right of the picture enclosed in the gothic archway of the Tabard Inn, about to set forth on the road ahead of him. Blake saw in The Canterbury Tales ‘characters which compose all ages and nations’; they represented the ‘physiognomies … of universal human life’. But in the fourteenth century Chaucer was venturing into new and potentially treacherous territory. He brought together characters and genres which had not shared the same poetic space before and he stretched the linguistic potential of the vernacular to its limits. Yet his apprenticeship for his role as ‘Father of English Poetry’, as Dryden was famously to dub him, began with dream visions in which he used contemporary dream theory such as Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio to explore what it meant to be an English poet.

At the turn of the twentieth century, English poets might have been expected to take note of the clamour for political and sexual reform, or to gauge the effects of a period of unprecedented urbanisation and technological change. However, when Robert Bridges succeeded Alfred Austin as Poet Laureate in 1913, his intricately crafted poetry appeared less preoccupied by the need to confront modernity than by his meticulous study of classical quantitative metres. If a younger generation of poets, launched in 1912 by Edward Marsh’s popular ‘Georgian’ anthologies, extended the subject matter and idioms of modern English poetry, their innovations were mild in comparison to the Modernist revolt inspired by the European avant-garde. Marinetti’s Italian Futurist manifestos, for example, proposed a complete break with the cultural past, the dislocation of poetic syntax and reverence for the machine age of cars and aeroplanes. Partly as a response to Futurism’s London publicity, the American émigré Ezra Pound organised an ‘Imagist’ manifesto, proclaiming a radical overhaul of the diction and metric of English poetry, followed by an anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). The radicalism of Pound’s Imagist school was overtaken by the profound cultural upheaval which accompanied the First World War, dispersing their group momentum.

It was another American resident in London, T. S. Eliot, who theorised a way forward for post-war reconstruction. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), he argued for an impersonal modern aesthetic that selectively re-appropriated those elements of the literary past that could be made to live in the present. Oddly, Eliot’s tradition needed to be actively fragmented before it could be inherited. Eliot rejected the extremist pure sound poems of Dadaism and what he perceived to be the debased romanticism of Georgian poetry, in favour of a return to the nervous and turbulent energies of seventeenth-century drama and lyric.

The writing lives of the Scottish poets Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas overlapped during a period of fifty years or so, from around 1460 to 1513, coinciding with the reigns of James III and IV of Scotland. The two younger poets – Dunbar was about fifteen years older than Douglas – came to maturity at the end of the fifteenth century in a literary milieu in which Henryson had been the great innovator of the previous generation, as they were to be the great innovators of theirs. They had all stopped writing by the end of 1513, it seems. By then Henryson had been dead for ten or twelve years; Dunbar simply drops from the records; while Douglas completed his translation of the Aeneid in July 1513 and wrote no more poetry.

Scottish literature – that is, writings in the variety of English spoken in the lowlands of Scotland – begins later than south of the border, or at least has a different pattern of survival. There is very little earlier than Barbour’s Bruce, written in the 1370s, but a rapid flowering took place in the fifteenth century as knowledge of English writers – including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and the anonymous alliterative poets – spread into Scotland. The Kingis Quair, the first Scots philosophical dream-vision in the Chaucerian manner, was apparently composed in the late 1420s or 1430s by James I, who was held captive in England for eighteen years. Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat, written around 1448, is the earliest long poem of the alliterative ‘revival’ in Scotland; it is a ‘parliament of birds’ fable cast in the form of a chanson d’aventure. Nevertheless, the originality of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas is of a different order. They were all highly educated men who thought hard and came to different conclusions about what poetry is and does. Between them, they created Older Scots as a literary language.

The two poets treated in this chapter, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, have entered the cultural imagination as a fused type of the inspired Romantic poet who burns with self-consuming lyric ardour and dies young. Even before Arthur Hallam grouped them together as ‘poets of sensation’ in his review of Tennyson’s 1832 volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, they both enjoyed the editorial championship of Leigh Hunt, who fighted them, with John Hamilton Reynolds, a close friend of Keats, in his ‘Young Poets’ Examiner article of December 1816. Time meant Shelley and Keats to be allied, poetic incarnations of the same second-generation British Romantic Zeitgeist. Born three years apart, Shelley in August 1792, Keats in October 1795, they died in consecutive years, Keats in February 1821 and Shelley in July 1822. And yet the two poets were never exactly friends, and their work is fascinatingly different as well as alike.

Indeed, they can be and have been set against one another in credible if at times too sharply opposed ways: Shelley as a poet of intellectual beauty, Keats of the physical; Shelley of radical aspiration, Keats of liberal realism; Shelley of belief in Godwinian perfectibility, Keats of scepticism about ‘Godwin-methodist’ approaches to life, as demonstrated by his friend Dilke. Shelley may appear more mistrustful of language’s adequacy than Keats, more inclined to use similes that concede their final lack of correspondence with non-verbal reality: ‘What thou art we know not; / What is most like thee?’ – these lines, addressed to the skylark, embody Shelley’s grasp of language’s inability fully to embody and yet point towards its resourcefulness in his hands.

1599 was an important year in the after-life of Christopher Marlowe, as well as in the life of William Shakespeare. In As You Like It (probably written in 1599), the self-consciously Petrarchan Phoebe falls for Ganymede (Rosalind in disguise) and says: ‘Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: / “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”’ (3. 5. 82–3). Shakespeare, on whose writing thus far Marlowe had already had a considerable influence, here quotes directly from the erotic narrative poem, Hero and Leander (sestiad 1. 174–6), published in 1598, probably for the first time. Why should Shakespeare have called Marlowe a ‘shepherd’ and what might this say about Marlowe’s ongoing reputation as well as the relationship between the two poets?

1599 also saw the anonymous publication of Marlowe’s poem, ‘Come live with me, and be my love’ in an anthology called The Passionate Pilgrim. It became one of the most famous and influential of all Elizabethan love lyrics, provoking responses from, among others, Sir Walter Raleigh and John Donne. The poem was first published without a title but became known as ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ in England’s Helicon, published a year later. A generation of poets wrote lyrics inspired by it. Shakespeare, who had implicitly referred to Marlowe many times already, responded with a whole play rather than a poem. When Phoebe praises the ‘dead shepherd’, whose observations about love at first sight she is now experiencing at first hand, it is as if there is also a covert acknowledgment of the debt of gratitude Shakespeare owed his dead, and passionate, counterpart.

In 1818 Byron was discomforted to find himself grouped by the Quarterly Review with ‘men of the most opposite habits, tastes, and opinions in life and poetry … Moore, Byron, Shelley, Hazlitt, Haydon, Leigh Hunt, Lamb – what resemblance do ye find among all or any of these men?’ Byron asked John Murray, ‘and how could any sort of system or plan be carried on, or attempted amongst them?’ Byron’s outrage was, as usual, slightly disingenuous. His own youthful poetic career had been inspired by reading Thomas Moore and Leigh Hunt and his friendship with them both meant that not only had he been trusted to make editorial suggestions on the manuscript of Hunt’s The Story of Rimini in 1813 (which was dedicated to him), but also that by 1818 he had already contemplated several collaborative writing enterprises with Thomas Moore. In 1812, Moore had written to Byron: ‘I have a most immortalizing scheme to propose to you … You & I shall write Epistles to each other – in all measures and all styles upon all possible subjects … in short do every thing that the mixture of fun philosophy there is in both of us can inspire.’ In 1815, Byron proposed a trip to Italy and Greece with Moore and in 1817 suggested that they compose ‘canticles’ together. Byron dedicated The Corsair (1814) to Moore; Moore dedicated Fables for the Holy Alliance (1823) to Byron. In 1822 Byron would join the production of the Liberal with Shelley, Hazlitt and Hunt after floating vague earlier schemes of a newspaper with Moore. Byron remained reluctant, however, to commit himself to any joint venture in the long term and the Tory press was gleefully aware that both Hunt and Moore viewed Byron’s literary relationships with each other as undesirable. Moore advised Byron to steer clear of the Liberal partnership; Byron said that he remained in it only to help Hunt out of a corner, but Moore did not quite trust Byron not to drag him in too and wrote to John Hunt specifically to request that any satirical poems that might have been included in letters from Moore to Byron should not find their way into the new journal through Byron’s sense of ‘fun’.

The best-known poets of the late Victorian period were quick to mythologise themselves. ‘Go from me: I am one of those, who fall’, Lionel Johnson wrote in his poem ‘Mystic and Cavalier’ of 1889. ‘The day is overworn’, Ernest Dowson declared ten years later, ‘And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown; / Despair and death.’ W. B. Yeats, encouraged by such utterances, would commemorate his literary friends of the 1890s as a ‘Tragic Generation’. Drink, drugs, sexual misadventure, melancholy and self-neglect did indeed bring some writers to early deaths or breakdowns, and experiences of this kind were often the topics of their poetry. ‘I think’, Yeats speculated, ‘that perhaps our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no relation to any public interest, gathered together overwrought, unstable men.’ An ageing monarch and a century approaching its end intensified this sensation of decay. After the title of a play by the French dramatists F. de Jouvenot and H. Micard had made the phrase fin de siècle familiar in 1888, it was eagerly adopted as the label for a variety of contemporary assumptions, all of them in one way or another pessimistic, disillusioned or morally antinomian.

The consequence has been a tendency to see the poetry of this period, either as a sinister dead-end, or as a mere ‘transition’ between the more significant achievements of the High Victorian and Modernist eras. At the time many writers understood it rather differently.

Looking back from between the two world wars, it might have been easy to forget that any of the poets considered in this chapter had existed. John Drinkwater omitted them all from his introductory study Victorian Poetry (1923). F. R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) regarded no late Victorian except Gerard Manley Hopkins. Revaluation (1936) did not go any further. ‘A study of the latter end of The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse’, Leavis said, suggests ‘the conclusion that something has been wrong for forty or fifty years at the least.’ Browning and Tennyson dominated Drinkwater’s conception of the period and he admitted he was sorry only to have missed Thomas Hardy. But Hardy was ‘post-Victorian in character’ anyway. That idea would become a category which would do criticism some service: turned the other way around, it gave to later twentieth-century writers a useful reason for rereading some late Victorian poets that the earlier period had set aside or explicitly disliked. It is true that Isobel Armstrong’s influential study Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) was nearly as silent on the poets in this chapter as her predecessors entre deux guerres. But, for others, John Davidson (1857–1909) and Michael Field (Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913)) were particular beneficiaries of the ‘post-Victorian’ argument. Or rather, not as ‘post-Victorian’ but as ‘pre-Modernist’, they could be integrated into a larger cluster of late nineteenth-century writers – George Gissing, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, Francis Thompson, even John Ruskin among them – and read as precursors of Modernist themes and literary practices.

By calling this chapter ‘Poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson’ rather than Jacobean or Stuart poetry, which might seem an appropriate sequel to what is often referred to as Elizabethan poetry, I mean to underscore a simple set of related literary observations: that John Donne and Ben Jonson were the two most original and influential poets writing in the earlier seventeenth century; that they were recognised as such by many, although not all, of their peers, which included other important poets of ‘the age’; and that, as a sign of their significance, at least some of these poets gathered together to help form the sizeable outpouring of elegies that appeared in the immediate aftermath of each man’s death: Donne’s in 1631, and Jonson’s in 1637.

Their impact was thus quickly recognised, their poetry much imitated, adapted and occasionally resisted. But in both cases, too, their achievement in verse, while differing significantly from each other in subject and manner – Donne is one of the great love poets in English, Jonson is England’s first important neo-classicist – was only a part of their larger cultural and artistic legacy. Donne would eventually become one of the most recognised preachers of his era once he rose to the eminent position of Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1621; and the notoriety of his early erotic verse, which circulated widely in manuscript, would combine with his later fame as a preacher to create a unique place for him in English poetry – a sort of poet’s corner of his own in St Paul’s, where his statue still stands.

John Dryden came into his own as a poet during the Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) and he maintained a superb pace of verse writing over the next several years. Absalom and Achitophel was published in November of 1681, The Medal in March of 1682, Religio Laici in November of that year; in 1684 and 1685 Dryden produced translations, miscellanies and occasional pieces; and in the early spring of 1687 he finished his longest poem, The Hind and the Panther. These works stand at the centre of Dryden’s contribution to English poetry and they display the ways in which politics engaged his imagination and emboldened his art; but they do not stand alone. The energy, refinements and ironies that characterise these works light up a number of other poems that continue to offer pleasure: his commemorative pieces on John Oldham and Henry Purcell, his send-up of literary rivals in Mac Flecknoe, his verse epistle to the young Congreve, his translations of Ovid, Horace and Virgil, and the country-life piece, To my Honour’d Kinsman, with its alluring touches of self-reflection.

What defines Dryden’s poetry and his poetic achievement and how might we best situate his work in a history of English poetry? To Dryden’s place in that history, we shall come at the end of this chapter. To matters of definition there are at least two approaches: the more obvious is in relation to his learning – his erudition, his technical knowledge, his capacity to act at once as disinterested historian and confident advocate. But Dryden’s poetry must also be defined by temperament, by Dryden’s uses of irony as a force-field within which he came to discover himself and to fashion a way of handling the world.

The opening of ‘Summer’ in James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) finds the narrator hastening into the umbrageous depths of ‘the mid-wood Shade’ in order to sing ‘the Glories of the circling Year’. Embosomed in darkness, he petitions the spirit of ‘Inspiration’ to infuse him with creative ecstasy. The effect of the passage is to announce a new manifesto for poetry, sharply at odds with the aesthetic principles upheld by most major poets of Thomson’s day. Pope, for example, in his Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735) justifies his own compositional practices on the grounds

Pope portrays ‘Fancy’ (or imagination) as a treacherous labyrinth into which any poet who forsakes truth and morality is all too easily lured, there to be undone. Not for him Thomson’s heady description of creativity in terms of heightened emotions and mental entrancement.

From ‘Summer’, the poem returns to the narrator in his nocturnal wanderings: ‘STILL let me pierce into the midnight Depth’ (line 516). It is only now that he enters the haunts, and feels the dusky presence, of ‘antient Bards’ (line 523), with whom he inwardly communes. These bards are not named, but may well be intended as Druids, who, in the terms of one popular poetic myth, had become identified as founding fathers of the British poetic tradition.

Philip Larkin’s place in the history of English poetry has been a matter of intense debate, but there is little doubt that Larkin was the most distinguished poet among that group of writers known as the Movement. Larkin claimed to have ‘no sense at all’ of belonging to a literary movement, but his work was widely regarded in the 1950s and 1960s as the most promising expression of a new set of thematic and stylistic preoccupations in English verse. Larkin’s poetry was anthologised with that of other Movement poets, including Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, D. J. Enright and Thom Gunn, and these poets were grouped together in critical essays and reviews. Although the existence of the Movement has been treated with scepticism by some critics, and sometimes dismissed as a literary hoax or a journalistic publicity stunt, there is enough evidence in the poetry and prose of these writers to suggest a strong and genuine compatibility of interests. Blake Morrison, in the most authoritative account of the Movement to date, offers a compelling argument that, despite some obvious divisions and contradictions, ‘there was considerable agreement and interaction, and out of these was established a Movement consensus’.

It was in the pages of the influential London periodical the Spectator that claims on behalf of a new movement in English poetry in the 1950s began to appear. In a controversial review article, ‘Poets of the Fifties’, Anthony Hartley detected in the new poetry a prevailing outlook that was ‘distrustful of too much fanaticism, austere and sceptical’, and a set of stylistic preferences that included an avoidance of rhetoric, a cautious and subdued tone and a conversational idiom.

Anyone offering a single phrase to describe a specific period in the history of contemporary poetry risks delivering a hostage to fortune. But the 1982 Penguin anthology Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, took that risk, and has frequently been criticised for declaring that in ‘much of the 1960s and 70s … very little – in England at any rate – seemed to be happening’. Among the loudest critics of the Morrison/ Motion verdict were the poets of what is known variously as the ‘parallel’ or ‘alternative’ or ‘neo-Modernist’ or ‘experimental’ or ‘radical’ tradition, on which the present chapter concentrates. For these poets, the decade of the 1970s had been the heroic age, the high period of what came to be called the British Poetry Revival, during which, for six years, the Revivalists had taken over the National Poetry Centre and its journal Poetry Review. By contrast, the 1980s and the early 1990s, I will risk saying, was for them a period of demoralised re-grouping, when their secure oppositional identity had been undermined, when a number of publishing ventures had foundered, and when the new electronic media which revitalised the scene in the later 1990s had not yet come into being. Thus, the traditionalists, in the 1980s, seemed to have triumphed – in 1994 a ‘New Generation’ of such poets was launched by the Poetry Society and a consortium of presses with much fanfare – poetry, the publicists claimed, had become the new rock-and-roll.

Victorian versus Modernist

Critics concerned to locate Hardy’s poetry within literary history have often focused on rhythm and metre. Bernard Richards stresses the naturalness of Hardy’s rhythms and his nearness to Modernism: ‘Hardy was evolving the concepts of a poetry that should be based on the rhythms of conversational speech during our [contemporary] period.’ Dennis Taylor, in his influential study, presents Hardy as sharing a Victorian preoccupation with prosodic theory. Likewise, Donald Davie correlates Hardy’s skills as a metrist with Victorian engineering, with ‘the iron bridges and railway stations of engineers like Brunel and Smeaton’. He prefers Hardy’s less dazzling and more irregular works, comparing them to Imagism, to music and to craft as opposed to industry. In all three critics, Victorian and Modernist are starkly opposed and that opposition repeats others: between metre and rhythm, mechanical and natural. Similarly, Davie’s notorious reservations about Hardy’s modesty endorse a literary history favourable to Modernism. Hardy’s work, though, does not respond well to this polarised historical account. He is neither a Modernist who rejects mechanical repetitiousness for ‘moments of vision’, nor is he a failed Modernist who retreats from the high claims of the visionary poet and carries on as a modest artificer of verses. His technical self-awareness and expertise were certainly remarkable but Taylor’s elaborate cataloguing of stanza forms tends to give a distorted impression of extreme contrivance with its contrasting moments of ‘naturalness’.

The Victorian poetry fair

There is no style that Victorian poets share. One reason for this is that they had too many styles to choose from. Every Victorian poet was something like Tennyson’s ‘Soul’ wandering through the palace of art: to assimilate Victorian culture was to be presented with a compendium so extensive and so miscellaneous that it resembled a curiosity shop rather than a museum:

As a consequence, Victorian poetry, like Victorian architecture, was characteristically eclectic: it borrowed promiscuously from different historical periods and different poetic traditions. Victorian poets thought of themselves as ‘modern’ – the love they experienced was, in the title of Meredith’s great poem, Modern Love, the ill from which they suffered was what Arnold called ‘this strange disease of modern life’ (‘The Scholar-Gipsy,’ line 203) – but their modernity was of a special kind. It did not release them into a new life: rather they were modern in their awareness of themselves as experiencing an almost posthumous existence. As Isobel Armstrong notices, Victorian poetry was ‘overwhelmingly secondary’.

In 1550 The Vision of Piers Plowman was published (without author’s name) by the Protestant printer and controversialist Robert Crowley, and reprinted twice in the same year. Langland’s great poem had previously been known only in manuscript copies, and as a product of a non-courtly tradition never interested William Caxton, who printed the works of Chaucer, Gower and Malory (1478; 1483; 1485). The first literary critics to notice it were William Webbe (1586), who thought the poet’s ‘dooinges … somewhat harshe and obscure’ but judged him ‘a very pithy writer’ and George Puttenham (1589), who found his ‘termes … hard and obscure’, offering ‘litle pleasure’. Though read by Spenser, Marlowe and possibly Shakespeare, Piers Plowman sank from sight until Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81). Warton found the poet’s ‘extremely perplexed’ manner such as to ‘disgust the reader with obscurities’ but ascribed to the ‘imposed constraint’ of the alliterative metre his ‘constant and necessary departure from the natural and obvious forms of expression’. The poem’s arresting first lines, which Warton quotes, hardly bear this out, however; and though Langland is not as linguistically accessible as Chaucer or Gower, his ‘terms’ will hardly seem ‘hard’ by comparison with the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

If Langland’s poetry is ‘difficult’, this is due not to his language but his thought, his disconcertingly labile use of allegory and his unexpected and (at times) startling imagery, which contrasts strongly with the ‘illustrative’ mode typical of medieval writing. In his famous description of divine love (B-version, Passus i.148–58), heterogeneous conceits tumble forth, catching the light of semi-understanding before rolling into the shadow of semi-mystery. Love is a medicine, a spice, the plant of peace, the most precious virtue; heavy, it falls out of heaven, but after ‘eating’ earth grows light as a lime-tree leaf; it is easy to carry but sharp enough to penetrate chinks in armour or the walls of a fortified city.

Wordsworth’s autobiographical Prelude traces ‘the growth of the poet’s mind’ from infancy to adulthood. Fuelling this growth in its various phases is an energy that Wordsworth most often calls ‘passion’, beginning with the infant’s attachment to the intertwined figures of mother and nature and taking other forms over the course of his life: the ‘troubled pleasure’ of the boy who intrudes upon nature’s quietness, the thrill of fear or conquest when he ventures to new heights or pushes beyond familiar boundaries. Passion drives the youth to depredations of nature and is redoubled by the sublime power with which nature’s reaction works on his imagination afterwards. Intense, unnameable passion also attends traumatic experiences such as the death of parents, the bewildering entanglements of sexual desire and revolutionary enthusiasm, the fear of betrayal. In these seemingly diverse realms of experience, passion is the energy that animates the dynamic interchange between the developing consciousness and the world. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth connects passion to ‘the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude and dissimilitude in similitude’. Pleasure feeds passions as diverse as sexual appetite and metrical language, a complex, sensitive instrument that not only expresses passion and registers its effects but also reacts to it, influences its direction and regulates its intensity. Metre is (to adapt Keats’s notion of the ‘pleasure thermometer’) a passion thermostat.

Forties poetry: definitions and defences

The political events of 1939 – the fall of the Spanish Republic, the Stalin–Hitler Pact and the outbreak of the Second World War – delivered a body-blow to the authority of the Audenesque style which had dominated thirties poetry. In January 1939 W. H. Auden (1907–73) himself had emigrated to the USA, and a shift from socio-political engagement to self-assessment and retrospection was discernible in his work as well as that of his followers. Those journals which had championed the Audenesque style, Twentieth Century Verse and New Verse, were wound up. Suddenly it was clear that events had outstripped even the direst prophecies of this poetry, insofar as these were cast in a realist style and rooted in a belief in the efficacy of rationality and collective action.

The sense of a sea-change in taste was confirmed by the publication of an anthology, The New Apocalypse (1939), edited by Henry Treece (1911–66) and J. F. Hendry (1912–86). Treece and Hendry spoke for a new poetic grouping (to which the anthology gave its name) which advocated an individualist, metaphysical, richly lyrical, anti-Audenesque poetic. Along with work by the group members, the anthology included poems by their chief inspiration, Dylan Thomas (1914–53), who, in Auden’s absence, soon came to be regarded as the leading young British poet. Journals sympathetic to New Apocalypse appeared, among them Wrey Gardiner’s Poetry Quarterly (1939–53) and M. J. Tambimuttu’s Poetry (London) (1939–49). It was felt that, in Cyril Connolly’s words, ‘The flight of Auden . . . is also a symptom of the failure of social realism as an aesthetic doctrine . . . a reaction away from social realism is as necessary and as salutary as was, a generation ago, the reaction from the ivory tower.’

From an early age William Blake showed a determination to make his mark in the contemporary scene, though it was not at first clear which field would claim his attention. He had some musical talent, and accompanied some of his early poems on the harp; he studied at the Royal Academy and his training was as an engraver. Had he lived a century later he might indeed have become an advocate of the ‘gesamtkunstwerke’ (‘total work of art’) as did Richard Wagner; but as it was, the possibility of combining the poetic and visual arts fascinated him particularly. In his time poetry found a ready audience, but the literary world in which he grew up produced very little in the way of new lyrical poetry – a fact which he lamented in fitting verse: