Trends in Conteporary British Poetry
TRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH POETRY
Knowledge of contemporary British poetry is of great importance when it comes to understanding the reigning trends of England. The 1970s saw a fair amount of polemic concerning the discontinuities of the national "traditions," most of it concerned with poetry, all of it vulnerable to a blunt totalizing which demonstrated the triumphant ability of "nation" to organize literary study and judgment--as it does still, perhaps more than ever.
It remains the case twenty years later that there is a strong hint of the majority of the english poets to rediscover their ‘Englishness’ as a poet, and at the same time the presence of the various other cultures ensures that their remains a deep variety in the crative material.
The temptation stubbornly to assert the coherence and power of national traditions is strong not only among cultural conservatives dedicated to the perpetuation of poetic practices associated with or promoting "little-englandism" but increasingly in other, less visible communities of readers as well--and here I think especially of the small but vital communities of poets and critics dedicated to exploratory practices, where the pressures to locate indigenous varieties of Modernist and postmodernist practice are increasing.
Now at this stage this would be notable that the English poetry of the present day had to come a long way before it achieved its present mould. It includes the evolution of thought process from the likes of Yeats and Eliot and on to Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin and finally to the present day poets like Andrew Zawacki, Brian Patten etc.
The poetry of the present day England is one that has many voices to it. There are various ethnicities, cultures and nationalities involved in shaping the face of the contemporary British poetry. But a walk down the memory lane and we find that the early poetry of the century acted as a melting pot to shape the face of the present day trend of the poetry scene. Since 1945 British poetry has moved steadily from what many regard as twentieth century parochial to a twenty-first century international. In the space of little more than fifty years the insular, clear verse of mainland English Britain has changed from being a centralist and predominantly male, seemingly academic practice to become a multi-hued, post-modern, cultural entertainment, available to all. Some observers see this as a liberating. Others regard it as more of a descent into vernacular sprawl. But,...