53 - Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2

Summary

More than thirty years ago, in his lecture ‘Englands of the Mind’, Seamus Heaney broached the subject of specifically ‘English’ poetry in relation to Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill: ‘All three are hoarders and shorers of what they take to be the real England.’ In Heaney’s reading these poets all brought to a head contrasting strains of a plural, contested, national identity. Since then, the entity of the United Kingdom has taken steps in the direction of increasing devolution, with regional parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The poetry of these three regions has often alluded to its cultural, and sometimes asserted its linguistic, distinctiveness. Inevitably, what this difference defined itself against was England (and English), and a supposed cultural hegemony, and yet whatever characterised ‘English’ poetry remained undefined, certainly unanthologised. Within the so-called Scottish Renaissance, figures such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Iain Crichton Smith, Norman McCaig, Edwin Morgan, the Gaelic poet Sorley MacClean and later Douglas Dunn, showed how vigorous and various this independence could be. The last forty or so years have seen the emergence of two remarkable generations of poets from Northern Ireland – the first including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, and the second, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and Ciaran Carson. Whatever the forces that brought such a number of talented poets there to the fore, from the early 1970s onwards, the impact on British poetry has been momentous.

In the 1982 anthology, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, the effect was startling – so much over there and so little here! Though had Heaney’s triumvirate been included, comparison might have seemed more balanced. In speaking of an extended ‘imaginative franchise’ and ‘the ludic’ elements shared by their poets, the anthologists were bravely trying to bridge a chasm. On the English side of this divide were, among others, the ‘Martian’ poets Craig Raine and Christopher Reid (so-called after Raine’s poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’).