6 - Anthology-Making

Summary

The coming of the Movement may have been announced in the pages of the Spectator, but it was anthologies, above all Robert Conquest's 1956 Macmillan anthology New Lines, that consolidated the arguments and personnel of the Movement in the public mind. This was achieved through Conquest's clear taste and agenda, New Lines’ limited personnel of just nine poets and the generous selections from the poets’ work it contained. The formula may be contrasted to that of another anthology of the same year, G.S. Fraser's Poetry Now, from Faber and Faber, in which no less than 74 poets are represented. The contents list reveals Fraser to be acquainted with the work of many poets from all sides of the poetry world, and the introduction reveals him to be well informed on recent poetic trends. Along with poems from Fraser's own generation, including the dead war poets Keith Douglas and Sidney Keys, Poetry Now has poems by the New Lines Poets (Larkin is represented by ‘At Grass’ and ‘Lines on a Young Ladies Photograph Album’) as well as by George MacBeth and A. Alvarez in his Movement phase; it contains the popularly minded and worldly Christopher Logue and the religious and austere R.S. Thomas; it includes ‘Genesis’ by Geoffrey Hill. There are also poems by a considerable number of names that are now more or less forgotten. But an attempt to please everyone with many names from many camps may serve no poet very well and neither please nor serve the wider public. As Stephen Spender pointed out in the Listener: ‘One poem per poet representation may sound democratically just, but it gives readers little idea of the value of most of the poets, and does not add up to a total impression either’; Fraser's ‘lack of severer discrimination tends to reduce complexity to confusion.’

The effective response to New Lines came not from Faber and Faber or Macmillan, but from Penguin. This was, in itself, a significant development. Commercial poetry publishing in the 1950s was primarily based on the small print run mid-priced hardback aimed at poetry aficionados and the then well-funded libraries. Penguin, the biggest British publisher at that time, had become successful through specialising in high-volume, low-margin, cheap paperback reprints of reliable quality.