Throughout his career, Robert Lowell showed an immense respect and admiration for T. S. Eliot. The friendship between the two writers and the importance of Eliot’s example as a poet are well documented in Lowell’s letters and essays, as well as in poems written under Eliot’s potent influence. Eliot’s rendering of speech, his ironic intelligence, his adoption of myth and symbol, and his liberal use of quotation and allusion all find their way into Lowell’s poetry. At the same time, as this chapter reveals, there are some significant diversions and differences of opinion. Lowell perseveres in writing a poetry that is impersonal in the manner prescribed by Eliot, while also drawing on subject matter that is candidly autobiographical. One of the key points in the chapter is that Lowell acknowledged Eliot as a "confessional" poet several years before the term was applied to his own compositions in Life Studies. Although the two poets have much in common in terms of their theological interests, they also differ profoundly in their views on questions of sin, death, and salvation.

In lectures and interviews, Seamus Heaney spoke candidly and revealingly about the influence of T.S. Eliot on his poetry and poetics. There was never an immediate or instinctive allegiance; rather, it was an acquired taste, a matter of having to ‘grow up’ to Eliot. Eliot’s essays shaped Heaney’s own prose writings in the early 1970s and Eliot’s idea of the ‘auditory imagination’ had a profound effect on his critical methods. Increasingly, Eliot’s example in Four Quartets gave sustenance to Heaney’s poetry. ‘Little Gidding’ came to be seen by Heaney as an exemplary instance of how the imagination might endure the destruction of war, while the mystical qualities of Four Quartets helped to shape the visionary poetics of Seeing Things. In the later work, Eliot’s presence is pervasive and subtly assimilated, often manifesting itself in Heaney’s adaptations of Virgil and Dante.

The ‘new bearings’ in English poetry that F. R. Leavis wrote about so positively and authoritatively in 1932 were essentially those established by T. S. Eliot in the poetry up to and including Ash-Wednesday (1930). Leavis is acutely responsive to a poetry that ‘expresses freely a modern sensibility, the ways of feeling, the modes of experience, of one fully alive in his own age’. The epilogue to New Bearings in English Poetry records ‘the decisiveness of Mr Eliot's achievement’ in revising and reordering the tradition of English poetry, but it also harbours reservations about the ‘great deal of discipleship of varying degrees of naïveté and subtlety’ that Eliot has suffered. The imitation of Eliot, he concedes, has ‘become a nuisance and even something of a menace’. Eliot's achievement has cleared the way for serious work, but it has also ‘beguiled a certain amount of young talent into something worse than waste of time’. The likeliest successors are William Empson and Ronald Bottrall, both of whom exhibit an intellectual sophistication and technical control derived from Eliot's example. In ‘Retrospect 1950’, however, Leavis ruefully acknowledges the failure of these poets to develop in any significant way, and he grudgingly observes the popular success of W. H. Auden and his near contemporaries. A general failure of ‘the function of criticism’ and an implied lowering of critical standards are offered as an explanation of ‘why the influence of T. S. Eliot, out of which a poetic revival seemed so likely to come, should have been so sadly defeated’.

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.

The Northern Irish Renaissance that brought Seamus Heaney and other poets to prominence in Belfast in the 1960s has been much debated, but another story might begin in Dublin in the 1960s with the meeting at Trinity College of Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Eavan Boland. As Northern Protestants, Mahon and Longley found confirmation of their own complicated sense of belonging in the poetry of Louis MacNeice, while Boland, as a Catholic in the Republic, sought space for her voice in a culture of female passivity and in a poetic tradition still dominated by W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. In the intellectual ferment in Dublin in the 1960s, the three poets would share a deep and sustaining interest in the classics and in modern European and American literature, drawing on these resources in ways that would reshape and redirect contemporary Irish poetry. This would be a well-travelled, international poetry. Mahon’s work would be written in London and New York, but also reflect upon his time in France and Italy; Longley would return to Belfast, but also draw inspiration from summers spent in Mayo and from memories of a visit to Japan; and Boland, having already spent part of her childhood in London, would eventually settle in California.

For Mahon and Longley, the replenishment of the imagination through the contemplation of isolated landscapes and seascapes became a salutary and necessary activity as sectarian violence disrupted any secure sense of attachment to Ulster. Poetry might be elevated and energised by a bold encounter with the ferocious political energies of the Troubles, but in such a precarious context it also ran the risk of exhaustion and extinction.

On 20 March 1942, aged nineteen, Philip Larkin wrote to his friend, Jim Sutton, excitedly announcing his admiration for D. H. Lawrence: 'I have been reading “Sons and Lovers” and feel ready to die. If Lawrence had been killed after writing that book he'd still be England's greatest novelist'. Larkin's own ambitions as a fiction writer came to fruition a few years later with Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). The two novels suggest a full alertness to the range of Modernist experimentation in the writings of Lawrence and such contemporaries as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Modernist fiction of the first few decades of the twentieth century encouraged Larkin to move beyond realistic depiction into a symbolist evocation of a less tangible subject matter, including obscure dreams and desires. A similar trajectory can be found in the poetry from the 1940s onwards. The sudden shift from downbeat empiricism into visionary symbolism, an opening out from the securely known into the utterly unfathomable, was to become a hallmark of his work, giving a complex charge to many of his best-known poems, including 'The Whitsun Weddings' and 'High Windows'.

Larkin's enthusiasm for the fiction of Lawrence and Woolf might come as a surprise to those categorising his work as avowedly anti-modernist. An even greater surprise awaits anyone looking back to Larkin's earliest poems, since these show beyond doubt that the dominant influence was T. S. Eliot. 'The Ships at Mylae' is a free-verse composition, echoing The Waste Land, in which Larkin addresses his mock-hero in the peremptory manner with which Eliot summons the enigmatic Stetson: 'Stanley! / You who serene from unsung argosies / Gazed on the mounting foam!'

It is tempting to linger over the early lyrics of W. B. Yeats and find in their yearning for ideal beauty the consummate expression of fin de siècle aestheticism and decadence. The poems of the 1890s, especially those which appeared in The Rose (1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), are everywhere infused with what Yeats himself recognized as ‘those faint lights and faint colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call “the decadence”’. Yeats, having a more progressive and dynamic view of cultural history than many of his contemporaries, preferred to think of the fin de siècle as ‘the autumn of the body’ because the arts were but sleeping and ‘dreaming of things to come’. This idea of decadence giving birth to new life is in keeping with the legendary account Yeats gives of his fellow ‘Rhymers’ – Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons and others – and his careful staging of ‘The Tragic Generation’ is designed, in part, to present his own work as a distinctive and emergent ‘new poetic’. In the modernist twenties, however, Yeats was still composing decadent lyrics like ‘Oil and Blood’, and happily proclaiming ‘We have returned of late to the mood of the nineties.’ Notwithstanding this surge of fin-de-siècle fervour, it is commonly accepted that the 1890s were essentially a time of transition for Yeats, a dabbling with the palette in preparation for the big canvases to come.

One familiar explanation of Yeats's poetic development has to do with Ireland.