Pigeonholing the poets

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.