Chapter 2 - Continuing ‘Poetry Wars’ in Twenty-First-Century British Poetry

Summary

Any engagement with David James’s sense of the ‘recrudescence’ of modernism in contemporary literature as a whole must confront the legacies of the so-called ‘poetry wars’ in the 1970s. In this chapter I turn to the repercussions of the ‘poetry wars’ more widely, and their impact on the concept of enigmatical poetry. Sustaining a wariness towards what David Caplan terms these ‘simple oppositions’, I nevertheless register their critical efficacy in distinguishing between enigmatical ‘clowning’ and Don Paterson’s refutation of lyrical indulgence. Rather than vying to register the obsoleteness of these terms, I argue that the persistence of allusive and ellusive poetry in both ‘camps’ indicates that the poetry wars are continuing in a modulated form. The terms require recalibration: Geoffrey Hill’s poetry, like Carol Ann Duffy’s, would normally be described as ‘mainstream’, yet Hill rails against the latter’s version of democratic poetry in his fourth lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Whereas Paterson’s default position is of aesthetic conciliation, Hill’s enigmatical poetry allows our understanding to be challenged and, sometimes, to be defeated.