This isn’t a one-volume history of post-War British poetry. Given the mass of writing about the post-War period, Duncan says, “Generally, if you read ten books on recent literary history you do find that they do all say the same things. I intend to bang on until you complain about me including too much.”

• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chronology
• Introduction: A case that needs to be made
• The closing of the 1940s; and the prehistory of the underground
• Reflexivity and sensitivity
• A Various Art and the Cambridge Leisure Centre
• Precision and the influence of photography on the poem
• Objectivism and the self-investment with modernist legitimacy
• The cognitively critical tradition: Madge, Tomlinson, Crozier, Chaloner, Fisher
• Secrets of Nature: documentary, group feeling, and propaganda
• Avant-garde legitimacy, continued; Neo-Objectivism
• The procurement of the information in poetry
• West-bloc dissidents, or the history of ideas in poetry
• The dissolution of the horizon: New Romantic poetry
• Moral man in an immoral society: personalism and authenticity in the 1940s
• New Romantic poets
• In the land of the not-quite day; or, the frisson of ruins. David Gascoyne
• Bad science, pulp topography: Iain Sinclair
• Radical toxins and lingering hallucinogens: Counter-culture and New Age
• Apocalyptic foreglow, and origins of the Counter-Culture
• Peripheral nationalism and collective disloyalty
• The 1970s and Left versus Right in the Labour Party
• Decentralisation: the ideal of workers’ control
• Under the ground, into the Crypt
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

from Introduction: A case that needs to be made

I hope these quotations show that there is something alive in British poetry outside the toxic scorched-earth dump estates of Philip Larkin, pop poetry, and Bloodaxe Books. The poets quoted belong to a poetic archipelago, afloat in navigable reaches of magazines, events, and personal contacts, many of whose shores are in Cambridge. I would like to extend the accepted list of classic small presses – traditionally, Goliard, Trigram, and Fulcrum – to include Ferry Press and its paredros, Grosseteste Press. Exhibit Number One is A Various Art (edited by Crozier and Longville and published by Carcanet in 1987), effectively an anthology of Ferry Press (publisher A Crozier) and Grosseteste Review (1968-84, editor T Longville), and reflecting the situation up to 1975. By the Cambridge School we really mean contributors to Ferry and Grosseteste. AVA remains baffling, less in the detailed course of the poems than in the presuppositions, and in the path by which people reached this exotic and shared style. It seemed worthwhile, therefore, to treat it as a problem in intellectual history and in iconology.

The traditional society (the one which the 1960s are supposed to have ended) had a large category of things you shouldn’t say. This affected poetry a great deal; the moments of exclusion are themselves not on record, in an act of nihilation (to use a term from sociology) which forces us to reconstruct undocumented events. In the immortal words of James Jesus Angleton, I’m not privy to who struck John, but I can draw a few sketches. In speech, the line between the aesthetic, and the psychologically acceptable (in terms of politics, accent, social attitudes, ethnicity) cannot be satisfactorily drawn. I spent a long time going through the theatre programmes of the Festival Theatre, run during 1933-35 by the poet Joseph Macleod, who was silenced by its commercial failure. What good is a theatre producer with no theatre? Most of the programmes were advertisements; after hours of blocking them out, I underwent a figure-ground reversal and began looking at the ads. One for ladies’ underwear was in every programme; I reflected how much easier it was to “sell the space” if you had actresses who were obviously wearing expensive undergarments, and who were obviously (if not visibly) adorned by them; and how many more drinks and meals you were going to sell on the premises (also repetitively advertised) if you had a middle-class audience, and if you made them feel affluent, and if you staged sophisticatedly sexy scenes to make the gentlemen willing to show off in front of their girlfriends. Theatre was all about glamour in those days. The exclusion of real-life problems was (is) basic to the quality of sexy: because that depends on play, and play feelings disappear very quickly where there is anxiety and insecurity. Plays about poverty don’t make people feel affluent; plays about the decline of the bourgeoisie don’t help you to sell bottles of wine to the good old bourgeoisie. Such factors may have speeded the vocally left-wing Macleod (who was certainly filling quite a few of the special one-and-sixpence seats) out of his lease without anyone conspiring against him. Business failure is bad for everyone and the feelings of anxiety it leaves behind may influence people’s feelings and decisions without them being consciously aware of the problem.

So it is with anxious-making speech. The cultural managers (editors and bookshop owners, in particular) are prone to anxiety. Anxiety has a lot to do with money, or so I find. Five-shilling seats are a lot calmer than one and six pennies. Their jobs are hopelessly over-specified; to get publicity, they have to please the media, and the media are selling an atmosphere of affluence and conformism, which they are wonderfully careful of. Maybe I can recover some of the rules of what you shouldn’t say; and help explain the careers of so many poets, who when the curtain went up on the rich pageant of literature were mysteriously missing from the stage. Xed from the project. There’s nothing down for you. You are not suitable for this position. Macleod’s theatre became a costume warehouse. Although the documentation has not been kept, maybe I can identify who shortened the invitation lists.

The initial project – how long ago? – was to fulfil the accepted role of the critic, by locating authenticity in specified traits, and then finding these in the texts of poems whose fixedness and inspectability comprise their charm. Like everyone else who has set out on this Grail Quest, I discovered, after a while, that the factors composing an “authentic experience” were mainly in the mind of the reader, and that the sense of trust is given for arbitrary and fickle reasons (to be exact, reasons which are sociologically conditioned in a fickle way). The conscious efforts of both poets and readers are given over to scanning material records to locate this spiritual quality, or its absence; their success, constant and yet intermittent, is self-referential, their reach circular. It is possible, nonetheless, to find out what traits they are scanning and selecting for.

Most accounts show a kind of centralised cultural oppression in the 1950s and a prehistory of poetic radicalism in the 1940s. AVA is part of the British Poetry Revival, as defined by Eric Mottram in a classic and polemic essay some twenty-five years ago, which began in 1960 and destroyed all previous rules. We use AVA, the broadest and most significant cultural monument of the era, as a staging post where we can examine both an array of causes and an array of consequences. An overall revision of the history of the century’s poetry is too ambitious, let alone a journey back to other cultural complexes, of 1880 or 1850, to trace long-term forces and changes. The backward look follows a perception that nothing new has arrived on the scene since 1975, or perhaps slightly earlier; the stability of the present cultural conjuncture gives it a strength which makes its origins worth examining. Was there an alternative? Where are the points of instability? How were the alternatives discredited and contaminated by the stories of the culturally powerful? What are the social supports of various verbal styles? The 1940s offer us the nuclei of: epistemology; sexuality; reflexive and metaphysical poetry; Communist poetry; the underground; the poetry magazine; “celticity” and peripheral nationalism; oral and “performance” poetry; apocalyptic, prophetic, and Jungian poetry. They anticipate the British Poetry Revival even though they were quite unable to inspire it. These nuclei are significantly under-researched, and the complex seems worth description, not because the poetic results are fully achieved but because contemplating the long run of time may make a true awareness of the present arrive more swiftly.

The whole project has taken place within the force field of re-assessment of the 1940s by James Keery, Andrew Crozier, Simon Jenner, and Nigel Wheale, and contact with them (and with Martin Seymour-Smith, who gave me first-hand information on a scene which he took in as a poetry-mad adolescent) made the whole enterprise of reconstruction seem credible.

I found poetry hard to grasp but have gathered knowledge to make it easier; by “construction” from puzzling and inexplicit signs, no doubt much of it misconstruction. This is not the history of poetic activity for which someone should find the “prominent books” of each year (from various bibliographies) and simply read through them. Against this excess of primary data, I can afford to be subjective in offering only momentary flashes, shot at horizontal sections of great interest. I do not give a continuous history of English cinema, politics, propaganda, imperial policy, religious affairs, or political protest, although all of these appear in the book. Printed sources do not secure the information on which I rely, which was acquired by flashes of intuition, over the last twenty-five years, while dealing with poets face to face, listening to them read their work, or looking at someone’s personal, yet revealing, collection of books, or scanning the calculated fantasy of some publisher’s blurb. The moment when you realise someone definitely isn’t going to publish your poems, doesn’t even like them, and regards them as naive, is especially full of insight. The explanations I write down are not of “secret codes” but of why one person thinks that an emotion makes it a bad poem, and why someone else thinks an idea makes it a bad poem.?The same poetological idea produces bad poems with one person and good ones with another. Political events, too, are ambiguous, never exhaustively to be judged and described. But I have noticed that what I write about this nebulosity is firm and definite. I think the answer is that I detest vagueness so much that I only ever write about moments that can be firmly defined, and in fact that I have seized these moments, and stored them up, over decades. This method produces a selective and idealised view, while meeting my criteria of good prose.