Fiona Sampson has produced a vigorous and valuable guide to ‘the diversity and eclecticism’ of present-day British poetry. It isn’t a book for beginners but for those broadly acquainted, at the very least, with the work and influence of important poets of the last century — W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin — and perhaps rather confused and unclear about what is happening now.
Sampson herself is a notable poet, critic and editor who enjoys and admires a wide range of contemporary poetry, and Beyond the Lyric should assist any intelligent readers infected by her enthusiasms and wanting to update their knowledge.
Her title makes a reasonable assumption: that for many people, poets and readers alike, poetry essentially still means lyric poetry. She sorts current poets into 13 groups, of which three relate to this notion.
There are ‘the Touchstone Lyricists’, who write shortish, very personal poems and continue ‘in search of a universal register of Beauty and Truth’. The Welsh poet Gillian Clarke, and the excellent Michael Longley, with his faultless evocations of urban and rural life in Ulster, are among these seekers. But Sampson also detects a further batch of lyricists, those writing ‘the Expanded Lyric’ — wider-ranging writers like John Kinsella, John Burnside and Lavinia Greenlaw. And she sees still another cluster, of experimentalists, practising ‘the Exploded Lyric’, though the late Barry MacSweeney, J.H. Prynne, and similar avant-gardists might have fitted into her chapter on ‘Modernism’ — where Geoffrey Hill, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, is daringly situated because of his secure place in ‘the Eliot tradition’.
But 13 gangs of poets? That many, when the general reader tends to think of the 1930s as entirely the era of left-leaning social poets like Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender? Or the 1950s as the period, exclusively, of the Spectator-led ‘Movement’ which made the names of Larkin, Kingsley Amis (as a poet), D.J. Enright and Thom Gunn?
Sampson finds she can’t classify the Nineties or the Noughties in the same broad fashion, and in fact discovers a greater variety of achievement in these later decades. She argues with force, clarity and humour for each of her new, often surprising, categories, and there will be disagreements. But before poets complain about where she puts them they should pause and feel grateful for the attention they receive here, frequently with generous quotations from their work and an exemplary breadth of sympathy.
There is no attempt at a generation-by-generation survey of living poets born between the late 1920s and the 1980s, but instead a subtler chronological treatment of themes and tones in poetry. She begins with ‘the Plain Dealers’, including Dannie Abse, Anthony Thwaite and Fleur Adcock, who mostly happen to be octogenarians and whom she sees as bearing a postwar moral seriousness and authority. ‘Bards of public libraries and state education’, these are storytellers ‘producing clarity from the chaos of experience’.
Against their austere quality ‘the Dandies’ obviously react, wearing ‘linguistic fancy dress’ and setting off in pursuit of style. Craig Raine, labelled ‘Martian’ for writing about things on earth as seen by a visitor from Mars, certainly belongs here, as do Christopher Reid and Glyn Maxwell. But Hugo Williams, author of touching and offbeat love poems, might wonder why he doesn’t rank as a very special sort of modern lyricist.
The gulfs between the Plain Dealers, the Lyricists and the Dandies are unquestionably wide. But even wider gaps open up between all of those and elegant ‘Oxford Elegists’ like John Fuller (their presiding spirit and arguably the best poet now writing), Andrew Motion, and Alan Jenkins — not an Oxonian, but the elegiac nature of his ‘feelingful public verse’ gives him honorary membership. Gradually Sampson’s various categories begin to make sense, and the placing of well-known poets, with sharp and detailed characterisation of their work, becomes convincing. Or mostly so.
Afro-Caribbeans like Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah can clearly join the irrepressible Scot W.N. (Bill) Herbert in the ‘Free and Easy’ section, but it is difficult to see why Simon Armitage is there, rather than with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and the remarkable Paul Farley among the ‘Anecdotalists’, new and not so plaindealing storytellers.
Of course ‘the Iambic Legislators’, proponents of the Shakespearean blank verse uttered naturally by all good English speakers wherever they grew up, stand firmly apart from all of the above: Tony Harrison and Sean O’Brien (northerners), Douglas Dunn (Scottish), Peter Porter (Australian) and Gwyneth Lewis (Welsh). As do the ‘New Formalists’, sharing their sense of the crucial importance of strict form in poetry, the Scot Don Paterson being ‘their leading contemporary practitioner-advocate’. The practitioners of ‘Post-Surrealism’ (though there has never been a strong vein of surrealism itself in British poetry) together with the pursuers of ‘Mythopoesis’ — poets ‘developing a particular correspondence between poetry and myth’ — complete Sampson’s baker’s dozen of tendencies.
In the end the willing general reader still has a large, probably bewildering, choice of what to explore; though this is one of the book’s many virtues, because Sampson is generous and persuasive in her explanation of what all of these poets are about. The nearest she gets to severe judgments is in quietly missing out a few names, giving others merely a courteous nod, and emphatically stating what she can’t stand. She deplores the ‘featureless’ and ‘inert’ work produced by poets who don’t accept that ‘making a poem involves transformational effort’.
This is stern stuff, but worth declaring because a deal of limp and spiritless work must have landed on her editorial mat (or, these days, in her inbox) at the Poetry Review and been rejected — and nevertheless indulgently published elsewhere.
Sampson is too serious and passionate about poetry to put up with that recognisable kind of weak writing, and emerges as the best kind of guide: encouraging, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and thoroughly aware of which routes to avoid.
Comments