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English poetry

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Poetry & Opera

   Many regard William Shakespeare as the greatest English poet.
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   Many regard William Shakespeare as the greatest English poet.

   The history of English poetry stretches from the middle of the 7th
   century to the present day. Over this period, English poets have
   written some of the most enduring poems in European culture, and the
   language and its poetry have spread around the globe. Consequently, the
   term English poetry is unavoidably ambiguous. It can mean poetry
   written in England, or poetry written in the English language.

   The oldest poetry written in the area currently known as England was
   composed in Old English, a precursor to the English language that is
   not something a typical modern English-speaker could be expected to be
   able to read. In addition, there was a tradition of English poets
   writing also in Latin and classical Greek. Today's multicultural
   English society is likely to produce some interesting poetry written in
   a wide range of other languages, although such poetries are proving
   slow to emerge.

   With the growth of trade and the British Empire, the English language
   had been widely used outside England. In the twenty-first century, only
   a small percentage of the world's native English speakers live in
   England, and there is also a vast population of non-native speakers of
   English who are capable of writing poetry in the language. A number of
   major national poetries, including the American, Australian, New
   Zealand and Canadian poetry have emerged and developed. Since 1922,
   Irish poetry has also been increasingly viewed as a separate area of
   study.

   This article focuses on poetry written in English by poets born or
   spending a significant part of their lives in England. However, given
   the nature of the subject, this guideline has been applied with common
   sense, and reference is made to poetry in other languages or poets who
   are not primarily English where appropriate.

The earliest English poetry

   The first page of Beowulf
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   The first page of Beowulf

   The earliest known English poem is a hymn on the creation; Bede
   attributes this to Cædmon (fl. 658–680), who was, according to legend,
   an illiterate herdsman who produced extemporaneous poetry at a
   monastery at Whitby. This is generally taken as marking the beginning
   of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

   Much of the poetry of the period is difficult to date, or even to
   arrange chronologically; for example, estimates for the date of the
   great epic Beowulf range from AD 608 right through to AD 1000, and
   there has never been anything even approaching a consensus. It is
   possible to identify certain key moments, however. The Dream of the
   Rood was written before circa AD 700, when excerpts were carved in
   runes on the Ruthwell Cross. The works signed by the poet Cynewulf,
   namely Christ II, Elene, The Fates of the Apostles, and Juliana, have
   been assigned with reasonable certainty to the eighth century. Some
   poems on historical events, such as The Battle of Brunanburh (937) and
   the Battle of Maldon (991), appear to have been composed shortly after
   the events in question, and can be dated reasonably precisely in
   consequence.

   By and large, however, Anglo-Saxon poetry is categorised by the
   manuscripts in which it survives, rather than its date of composition.
   The most important manuscripts are the four great poetical codices of
   the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, known as the Caedmon
   manuscript, the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf
   manuscript.

   While the poetry that has survived is limited in volume, it is wide in
   breadth. Beowulf is the only heroic epic to have survived in its
   entirety, but fragments of others such as Waldere and the Finnsburg
   Fragment show that it was not unique in its time. Other genres include
   much religious verse, from devotional works to biblical paraphrase;
   elegies such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Ruin (often taken
   to be a description of the ruins of Bath); and numerous proverbs,
   riddles, and charms.

   With one notable exception (the aptly-named Rhyming Poem), Anglo-Saxon
   poetry is written in a form of alliterative verse.

The Anglo-Norman period and the Later Middle Ages

   With the Norman conquest of England, beginning in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon
   language immediately lost its status; the new aristocracy spoke French,
   and this became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite
   society. As the invaders integrated, their language and that of the
   natives mingled: the French dialect of the upper classes became
   Anglo-Norman, and Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition into
   Middle English.

   While Anglo-Norman was thus preferred for high culture, English
   literature by no means died out, and a number of important works
   illustrate the development of the language. Around the turn of the
   thirteenth century, Layamon wrote his Brut, based on Wace's twelfth
   century Anglo-Norman epic of the same name; Layamon's language is
   recognisably Middle English, though his prosody shows a strong
   Anglo-Saxon influence remaining. Other transitional works were
   preserved as popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and
   lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362
   it replaced French and Latin in Parliament and courts of law.

   It was with the fourteenth century that major works of English
   literature began once again to appear; these include the so-called
   Pearl Poet's Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green
   Knight; Langland's political and religious allegory Piers Plowman;
   Gower's Confessio Amantis; and, of course, the works of Chaucer, the
   most highly regarded English poet of the middle ages, who was seen by
   his contemporaries as a successor to the great tradition of Virgil and
   Dante.

   The reputation of Chaucer's successors in the 15th century has suffered
   in comparison with him, though Lydgate and Skelton are widely studied.
   However, the century really belongs to a group of remarkable Scottish
   writers. The rise of Scottish poetry began with the writing of The
   Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland. The main poets of this Scottish
   group were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. Henryson
   and Douglas introduced a note of almost savage satire, which may have
   owed something to the Gaelic bards, while Douglas' version of Virgil's
   Aeneid is one of the early monuments of Renaissance literary humanism
   in English.

The Renaissance in England

   The Renaissance was slow in coming to England, with the generally
   accepted start date being around 1509. It is also generally accepted
   that the English Renaissance extended until the Restoration in 1660.
   However, a number of factors had prepared the way for the introduction
   of the new learning long before this start date. A number of medieval
   poets had, as already noted, shown an interest in the ideas of
   Aristotle and the writings of European Renaissance precursors such as
   Dante.

   The introduction of movable-block printing by Caxton in 1474 provided
   the means for the more rapid dissemination of new or recently
   rediscovered writers and thinkers. Caxton also printed the works of
   Chaucer and Gower and these books helped establish the idea of a native
   poetic tradition that was linked to its European counterparts. In
   addition, the writings of English humanists like Thomas More and Thomas
   Elyot helped bring the ideas and attitudes associated with the new
   learning to an English audience.

   Three other factors in the establishment of the English Renaissance
   were the Reformation, Counter Reformation, and the opening of the era
   of English naval power and overseas exploration and expansion. The
   establishment of the Church of England in 1535 accelerated the process
   of questioning the Catholic world-view that had previously dominated
   intellectual and artistic life. At the same time, long-distance sea
   voyages helped provide the stimulus and information that underpinned a
   new understanding of the nature of the universe which resulted in the
   theories of Nicolas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler.

Early Renaissance poetry

   With a small number of exceptions, the early years of the 16th century
   are not particularly notable. The Douglas Aeneid was completed in 1513
   and John Skelton wrote poems that were transitional between the late
   Medieval and Renaissance styles. The new king, Henry VIII, was
   something of a poet himself. The most significant English poet of this
   period was Thomas Wyatt, who was among the first poets to write sonnets
   in English.

The Elizabethans

   The Elizabethan period in poetry is characterised by a number of
   frequently overlapping developments. The introduction and adaptation of
   themes, models and verse forms from other European traditions and
   classical literature, the Elizabethan song tradition, the emergence of
   a courtly poetry often centred around the figure of the monarch and the
   growth of a verse-based drama are among the most important of these
   developments.

Elizabethan song

   A wide range of Elizabethan poets wrote songs, including Nicholas
   Grimald, Thomas Nashe and Robert Southwell. There are also a large
   number of extant anonymous songs from the period. Perhaps the greatest
   of all the songwriters was Thomas Campion. Campion is also notable
   because of his experiments with metres based on counting syllables
   rather than stresses. These quantitative metres were based on classical
   models and should be viewed as part of the wider Renaissance revival of
   Greek and Roman artistic methods.

   The songs were generally printed either in miscellanies or anthologies
   such as Richard Tottel's 1557 Songs and Sonnets or in songbooks that
   included printed music to enable performance. These performances formed
   an integral part of both public and private entertainment. By the end
   of the 16th century, a new generation of composers, including John
   Dowland, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelkes and Thomas
   Morley were helping to bring the art of Elizabethan song to an
   extremely high musical level.

Courtly poetry

   Edmund Spenser
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   Edmund Spenser

   With the consolidation of Elizabeth's power, a genuine court
   sympathetic to poetry and the arts in general emerged. This encouraged
   the emergence of a poetry aimed at, and often set in, an idealised
   version of the courtly world.

   Among the best known examples of this are Edmund Spenser's The Faerie
   Queene, which is effectively an extended hymn of praise to the queen,
   and Philip Sydney's Arcadia. This courtly trend can also be seen in
   Spenser's Shepheardes Calender. This poem marks the introduction into
   an English context of the classical pastoral, a mode of poetry that
   assumes an aristocratic audience with a certain kind of attitude to the
   land and peasants. The explorations of love found in the sonnets of
   William Shakespeare and the poetry of Walter Raleigh and others also
   implies a courtly audience.

Elizabethan verse drama

   Elizabethan verse drama is widely considered to be one of the major
   achievements of literature in English, and its most famous exponent,
   William Shakespeare, is revered as the greatest poet in the language.
   This drama, which served both as courtly masque and popular
   entertainment, deals with all the major themes of contemporary
   literature and life.

   There are plays on European, classical, and religious themes reflecting
   the importance of humanism and the Reformation. There are also a number
   of plays dealing with English history that may be read as part of an
   effort to strengthen the British national myth and as artistic
   underpinnings for Elizabeth's resistance to the Spanish and other
   foreign threats. A number of the comic works for the stage also use
   bucolic themes connected with the pastoral genre.

   In addition to Shakespeare, other notable dramatists of the period
   include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson.

Classicism

   Gavin Douglas' Aeneid, Thomas Campion's metrical experiments, and
   Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and plays like Shakespeare's Antony and
   Cleopatra are all examples of the influence of classicism on
   Elizabethan poetry. It remained common for poets of the period to write
   on themes from classical mythology; Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and
   the Christopher Marlowe/ George Chapman Hero and Leander are examples
   of this kind of work.

   Translations of classical poetry also became more widespread, with the
   versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding (1565–7) and George
   Sandys (1626), and Chapman's translations of Homer's Iliad (1611) and
   Odyssey (c.1615), among the outstanding examples.

Jacobean and Caroline poetry

   English Renaissance poetry after the Elizabethan poetry can be seen as
   belonging to one of three strains; the Metaphysical poets, the Cavalier
   poets and the school of Spenser. However, the boundaries between these
   three groups are not always clear and an individual poet could write in
   more than one manner.

The Metaphysical poets

   John Donne
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   John Donne

   The early 17th century saw the emergence of this group of poets who
   wrote in a witty, complicated style. The most famous of the
   Metaphysicals is probably John Donne. Others include George Herbert,
   Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell and Richard Crashaw. John Milton in his
   Comus falls into this group. The Metaphysical poets went out of favour
   in the 18th century but began to be read again in the Victorian era.
   Donne's reputation was finally fully restored by the approbation of T.
   S. Eliot in the early 20th century.

The Cavalier poets

   The Cavalier poets wrote in a lighter, more elegant and artificial
   style than the Metaphysical poets. Leading members of the group include
   Ben Jonson, Richard Lovelace, Robert Herrick, Edmund Waller, Thomas
   Carew and John Denham. The Cavalier poets can be seen as the
   forerunners of the major poets of the Augustan era, who admired them
   greatly.

The school of Spenser

   The early 17th century also saw a group of poets who were interested in
   following Spenser's example in the area of long mythic poems. These
   include Michael Drayton, William Browne and the brothers Giles and
   Phineas Fletcher. Although these poets wrote against the literary
   fashion of their day and have since been much neglected, their
   tradition led directly to John Milton's great mythic long poem,
   Paradise Lost.

The Restoration and 18th century

   It is perhaps ironic that Paradise Lost, a story of fallen pride, was
   the first major poem to appear in England after the Restoration. The
   court of Charles II had, in its years in France, learned a worldliness
   and sophistication that marked it as distinctively different from the
   monarchies that preceded the Republic. Even if Charles had wanted to
   reassert the divine right of kingship, the Protestantism and taste for
   power of the intervening years would have rendered it impossible.

Satire

   It is hardly surprising that the world of fashion and scepticism that
   emerged encouraged the art of satire. All the major poets of the
   period, Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson,
   and the Irish poet Jonathan Swift, wrote satirical verse. What is
   perhaps more surprising is that their satire was often written in
   defence of public order and the established church and government.
   However, writers such as Pope used their gift for satire to create
   scathing works responding to their detractors or to criticise what they
   saw as social atrocities perpetrated by the government. Pope's "The
   Dunciad" is a satirical slaying of two of his literary adversaries
   (Lewis Theobald, and Colley Cibber in a later version), expressing the
   view that British society was falling apart morally, culturally, and
   intellectually.

18th century classicism

   The 18th century is sometimes called the Augustan age, and contemporary
   admiration for the classical world extended to the poetry of the time.
   Not only did the poets aim for a polished high style in emulation of
   the Roman ideal, they also translated and imitated Greek and Latin
   verse. Dryden translated all the known works of Virgil, and Pope
   produced versions of the two Homeric epics. Horace and Juvenal were
   also widely translated and imitated, Horace most famously by John
   Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Juvenal by Samuel Johnson's Vanity of
   Human Wishes.479

Women poets in the 18th century

   Aphra Behn
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   Aphra Behn

   During the period of the restoration, two women poets of note emerged.
   These were Katherine Phillips and Aphra Behn. In addition to these two,
   a number of other women had plays performed on the London stage.
   Nevertheless, women poets were still relatively scarce and only two of
   them published collections during the first decade of the new century.
   By the 1790s, that number had grown to over thirty. It is evident that
   women poets had become more acceptable and this change is generally
   dated to the 1730s. Among the most successful of these women were Anne
   Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Elizabeth Thomas, Lady Mary Wortley
   Montague, Mary Leapor, Susanna Blamire and Hannah More.

The late 18th century

   Towards the end of the 18th century, poetry began to move away from the
   strict Augustan ideals and a new emphasis on sentiment and the feelings
   of the poet. This trend can perhaps be most clearly seen in the
   handling of nature, with a move away from poems about formal gardens
   and landscapes by urban poets and towards poems about nature as lived
   in. The leading exponents of this new trend include Thomas Gray,
   William Cowper, George Crabbe, Christopher Smart and Robert Burns as
   well as the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith. These poets can be seen as
   paving the way for the Romantic movement.

The Romantic movement

   William Wordsworth
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   William Wordsworth

   The last quarter of the 18th century was a time of social and political
   turbulence, with revolutions in the United States, France, Ireland and
   elsewhere. In Great Britain, movement for social change and a more
   inclusive sharing of power was also growing. This was the backdrop
   against which the Romantic movement in English poetry emerged.

   The main poets of this movement were William Blake, William Wordsworth,
   Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John
   Keats. The birth of English Romanticism is often dated to the
   publication in 1798 of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.
   However, Blake had been publishing since the early 1780s. However, much
   of the focus on Blake only came about during the last century when
   Northrap Frye discussed his work in his book "The Anatomy of
   Criticism."

   In poetry, the Romantic movement emphasised the creative expression of
   the individual and the need to find and formulate new forms of
   expression. The Romantics, with the partial exception of Byron,
   rejected the poetic ideals of the eighteenth century, and each of them
   returned to Milton for inspiration, though each drew something
   different from Milton. They also put a good deal of stress on their own
   originality. To the Romantics, the moment of creation was the most
   important in poetic expression and could not be repeated once it
   passed. Because of this new emphasis, poems that were not complete were
   nonetheless included in a poet's body of work (such as Coleridge's
   "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel").

   Additionally, the Romantic movement marked a shift the use of language.
   Attempting to express the "language of the common man", Wordsworth and
   his fellow Romantic poets focused on employing poetic language for a
   wider audience, countering the mimetic, tightly constrained Neo-Classic
   poems (although it's important to note that the poet wrote first and
   foremost for his own creative, expression). In Shelley's "Defense of
   Poetry", he contends that poets are the "creators of language" and that
   the poet's job is to refresh language for their society.

   The Romantics were not the only poets of note at this time. In the work
   of John Clare the late Augustan voice is blended with a peasant's
   first-hand knowledge to produce arguably some of the finest nature
   poetry in the English language. Another contemporary poet who does not
   fit into the Romantic group was Walter Savage Landor. Landor was a
   classicist whose poetry forms a link between the Augustans and Robert
   Browning, who much admired it.

Victorian poetry

   The Victorian era was a period of great political, social and economic
   change. The Empire recovered from the loss of the American colonies and
   entered a period of rapid expansion. This expansion, combined with
   increasing industrialisation and mechanisation, led to a prolonged
   period of economic growth. The Reform Act 1832 was the beginning of a
   process that would eventually lead to universal suffrage.

High Victorian poetry

   Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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   Elizabeth Barrett Browning

   The major High Victorian poets were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert
   Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley
   Hopkins. Tennyson was, to some degree, the Spenser of the new age and
   his Idylls of the Kings can be read as a Victorian version of The
   Faerie Queen, that is as a poem that sets out to provide a mythic
   foundation to the idea of empire.

   The Brownings spent much of their time out of England and explored
   European models and matter in much of their poetry. Robert Browning's
   great innovation was the dramatic monologue, which he used to its full
   extent in his long novel in verse, The Ring and the Book. Elizabeth
   Barrett Browning is perhaps best remembered for Sonnets from the
   Portuguese but her long poem Aurora Leigh is one of the classics of
   19th century feminist literature.

   Matthew Arnold was much influenced by Wordsworth, though his poem Dover
   Beach is often considered a precursor of the modernist revolution.
   Hopkins wrote in relative obscurity and his work was not published
   until after his death. His unusual style (involving what he called
   "sprung rhythm" and heavy reliance on rhyme and alliteration) had a
   considerable influence on many of the poets of the 1940s.

Pre-Raphaelites, arts and crafts, Aestheticism, and the "Yellow" 1890s

   Dante Gabriel Rossetti: selfportrait
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   Dante Gabriel Rossetti: selfportrait

   The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a mid-19th century arts movement
   dedicated to the reform of what they considered the sloppy Mannerist
   painting of the day. Although primarily concerned with the visual arts,
   two members, the brother and sister Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
   Christina Rossetti, were also poets of some ability. Their poetry
   shares many of the concerns of the painters; an interest in Medieval
   models, an almost obsessive attention to visual detail and an
   occasional tendency to lapse into whimsy.

   Dante Rossetti worked with, and had some influence on, the leading Arts
   and Crafts painter and poet William Morris. Morris shared the
   Pre-Raphaelite interest in the poetry of the European Middle Ages, to
   the point of producing some illuminated manuscript volumes of his work.

   Towards the end of the century, English poets began to take an interest
   in French symbolism and Victorian poetry entered a decadent
   fin-de-siecle phase. Two groups of poets emerged, the Yellow Book poets
   who adhered to the tenets of Aestheticism, including Algernon Charles
   Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons and the Rhymer's Club group
   that included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and W. B. Yeats.

The 20th century

The first three decades

   The Victorian era continued into the early years of the 20th century
   and two figures emerged as the leading representative of the poetry of
   the old era to act as a bridge into the new. These were Yeats and
   Thomas Hardy. Yeats, although not a modernist, was to learn a lot from
   the new poetic movements that sprang up around him and adapted his
   writing to the new circumstances. Hardy was, in terms of technique at
   least, a more traditional figure and was to be a reference point for
   various anti-modernist reactions, especially from the 1950s onwards.

The Georgian poets

   The Georgian poets were the first major grouping of the post-Victorian
   era. Their work appeared in a series of five anthologies called
   Georgian Poetry which were published by Harold Monro and edited by
   Edward Marsh. The poets featured included Edmund Blunden, Rupert
   Brooke, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Siegfried
   Sassoon. Their poetry represented something of a reaction to the
   decadence of the 1890s and tended towards the sentimental. Brooke and
   Sassoon were to go on to win reputations as war poets and Lawrence
   quickly distanced himself from the group and was associated with the
   modernist movement.

World War I

   As already noted, the Georgian poets Rupert Brooke and Siegfried
   Sassoon are now mostly remembered for their war poetry. Other notable
   poets who wrote about the war include Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas,
   Wilfred Owen, May Cannan and, from the home front, Hardy and Rudyard
   Kipling. Although many of these poets wrote socially-aware criticism of
   the war, most remained technically conservative and traditionalist.

Modernism

   Image:Loy-Haweis1904.JPG
   Mina Loy and her husband Stephen Haweis at Académie Colarossi

   The early decades of the 20th century saw the United States begin to
   overtake the United Kingdom as the major economic power. In the world
   of poetry, this period also saw American writers at the forefront of
   avant-garde practices. Among the foremost of these poets were T.S.
   Eliot and Ezra Pound, both of whom spent part, and in Eliot's case a
   considerable part, of their writing lives in England.

   Pound's involvement with the Imagists marked the beginning of a
   revolution in the way poetry was written. English poets involved with
   this group included D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, T. E. Hulme, F.
   S. Flint, E. E. Cummings, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward and John
   Cournos. Eliot, particularly after the publication of The Waste Land,
   became a major figure and influence on other English poets.

   In addition to these poets, other English modernists began to emerge.
   These included the London-Welsh poet and painter David Jones, whose
   first book, In Parenthesis, was one of the very few experimental poems
   to come out of World War I, the Scot Hugh MacDiarmid, Mina Loy and
   Basil Bunting.

The Thirties

   The poets who began to emerge in the 1930s had two things in common;
   they had all been born too late to have any real experience of the
   pre-World War I world and they grew up in a period of social, economic
   and political turmoil. Perhaps as a consequence of these facts, themes
   of community, social (in)justice and war seem to dominate the poetry of
   the decade.

The New Country poets

   The poetic landscape of the decade was dominated by four poets; W. H.
   Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice, although
   the last of these belongs at least as much to the history of Irish
   poetry. These poets were all, in their early days at least, politically
   active on the Left. Although they admired Eliot, they also represented
   a move away from the technical innovations of their modernist
   predecessors. A number of other, less enduring, poets also worked in
   the same vein. One of these was Michael Roberts, whose New Country
   anthology both introduced the group to a wider audience and gave them
   their name.

Surrealism and others

   The 1930s also saw the emergence of a home-grown English surrealist
   poetry whose main exponents were David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies,
   George Barker, and Philip O'Connor. These poets turned to French models
   rather than either the New Country poets or English-language modernism,
   and their work was to prove of importance to later English experimental
   poets as it broadened the scope of the English avant-garde tradition.

   John Betjeman and Stevie Smith, who were two of the most significant
   poets of this period, stood outside all schools and groups. Betjeman
   was a quietly ironic poet of Middle England with a fine command of a
   wide range of verse techniques. Smith was an entirely unclassifiable
   one-off voice.

The Forties

The war poets

   The 1940s opened with the United Kingdom at war and a new generation of
   war poets emerged in response. These included Keith Douglas, Alun
   Lewis, Henry Reed and F. T. Prince. As with the poets of the First
   World War, the work of these writers can be seen as something of an
   interlude in the history of 20th century poetry. Technically, many of
   these war poets owed something to the 1930s poets, but their work grew
   out of the particular circumstances in which they found themselves
   living and fighting.

The New Romantics

   The main movement in post-war 1940s poetry was the New Romantic group
   that included Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W. S. Graham, Kathleen
   Raine, Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. These writers saw themselves as
   in revolt against the classicism of the New Country poets. They turned
   to such models as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane
   and the word play of James Joyce. Thomas, in particular, helped
   Anglo-Welsh poetry to emerge as a recognisable force.

Other 1940s poets

   Other significant poets to emerge in the 1940s include Lawrence
   Durrell, Bernard Spencer, Roy Fuller, Norman Nicholson, Vernon Watkins,
   R. S. Thomas and Norman McCaig. These last four poets represent a trend
   towards regionalism and poets writing about their native areas; Watkins
   and Thomas in Wales, Nicholson in Cumberland and MacCaig in Scotland.

The Fifties

   The 1950s were dominated by three groups of poets, The Movement, The
   Group and a number of poets that gathered around the label Extremist
   Art.

The Movement

   The Movement poets as a group came to public notice in Robert
   Conquest's 1955 anthology New Lines. The core of the group consisted of
   Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, D. J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Thom
   Gunn and Donald Davie. They were identified with a hostility to
   modernism and internationalism, and looked to Hardy as a model.
   However, both Davie and Gunn later moved away from this position.

The Group

   As befits their name, the Group were much more formally a group of
   poets, meeting for weekly discussions under the chairmanship of Philip
   Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith. Other Group poets included Martin
   Bell, Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth and David Wevill.
   Hobsbaum spent some time teaching in Belfast, where he was a formative
   influence on the emerging Northern Ireland poets including Seamus
   Heaney.

The Extremist Art poets

   The term Extremist Art was first used by the poet A. Alvarez to
   describe the work of the American poet Sylvia Plath. Other poets
   associated with this group included Plath's one-time husband Ted
   Hughes, Francis Berry and Jon Silkin. These poets are sometimes
   compared with the Expressionist German school.

The Modernist tradition

   A number of young poets working in what might be termed a modernist
   vein also started publishing during this decade. These included Charles
   Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull, Roy Fisher and Bob Cobbing. These poets can
   now be seen as forerunners of some of the major developments during the
   following two decades.

The 1960s and 1970s

   In the early part of the 1960s, the centre of gravity of mainstream
   poetry moved to Ireland, with the emergence of Seamus Heaney, Tom
   Paulin, Paul Muldoon and others. In England, the most cohesive
   groupings can, in retrospect, be seen to cluster around what might
   loosely be called the modernist tradition and draw on American as well
   as indigenous models.

The British Poetry Revival

   The British Poetry Revival was a wide-reaching collection of groupings
   and subgroupings that embraces performance, sound and concrete poetry
   as well as the legacy of Pound, Jones, MacDiarmid, Loy and Bunting, the
   Objectivist poets, the Beats and the Black Mountain poets, among
   others. Leading poets associated with this movement include J. H.
   Prynne, Eric Mottram, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Lee Harwood.

The Mersey Beat

   The Mersey Beat poets were Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger
   McGough. Their work was a self-conscious attempt at creating an English
   equivalent to the Beats. Many of their poems were written in protest
   against the established social order and, particularly, the threat of
   nuclear war. Although not actually a Mersey Beat poet, Adrian Mitchell
   is often associated with the group in critical discussion. Contemporary
   poet Steve Turner has also been compared with them.

English poetry now

   The last three decades of the 20th century saw a number of short-lived
   poetic groupings such as the Martians. There was a growth in interest
   in women's writing and in poetry from England's ethnic groupings,
   especially the West Indian community. Poets who emerged include Carol
   Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, James Fenton, Blake
   Morrison, Liz Lochhead, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah.
   There was also a growth in performance poetry fuelled by the Poetry
   Slam movement. A new generation of innovative poets has also sprung up
   in the wake of the Revival grouping. Further activity focussed around
   poets in Bloodaxe Books The New Poetry including Simon Armitage,
   Kathleen Jamie, Glyn Maxwell, Selima Hill, Maggie Hannan, and Michael
   Hofmann. The New Generation movement flowered in the 1990s and early
   twenty first century producing poets such as Don Paterson, Julia Copus,
   John Stammers, Jacob Polley, David Morley and Alice Oswald.

   Despite all of this activity, major publishers dropped their poetry
   lists and both young and established writers became increasingly
   reliant on small and medium sized presses, generally dependent on State
   funding. As of 2004, it appears that a still thriving literature is
   faced with an ever-decreasing audience.
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