Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton
1 Poetic Modernism and the Century¿s Wars
Vincent Sherry
How the experience of continuous war and the collapse of liberalism shape modernist
poetry and the twentieth century as a whole, focusing on Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W. H.
Auden, and David Jones.
2 The ¿Movement¿ and the Mainstream
Stephen Burt
How the poetry of the Movement established a dominant and continuing mode in post-
war British poetry, with discussions of Robert Conquest¿s anthology New Lines,
Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, Simon
Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw, Alison Brackenbury, and Peter Scupham.
3 Myth, History, and The New Poetry
Nigel Alderman
Discusses the reaction of the 1960s and later decades to modernist myth-making and
Movement anti-modernism, exploring the problem of formulating a historical poetics,
with attention to Philip Larkin, A. Alvarez¿s anthology The New Poetry, Sylvia Plath,
Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon.
4 Region and Nation in Britain and Ireland
Michael Thurston
Surveys the poetry of peripheral nationalisms and regionalisms, concentrating on the
oscillation between commitment and irony in Northern Ireland (John Montague, Ciaran
Carson, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon), Wales (R. S. Thomas, Tony Conran, Robert
Minnhinnick, Oliver Reynolds, Gillian Clarke), Scotland (W.S. Graham, George Mackay
Brown, Iain Crichton Smith, Douglas Dunn, Raymond Vettese, Tom Leonard, Kathleen
Jamie), Northern England and the Midlands (Tony Harrison, Ted Hughes, Jon Silkin,
Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher).
5 Form and Identity in Northern Irish Poetry
John Waters

Charts three generations of poets in Northern Ireland, attending to the ways in which
problems of identity have generated formal innovation, focusing upon Louis MacNeice,
John Hewitt, and Patrick Kavanagh; Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Derek Mahon, and
Michael Longley; Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, and Medbh McGuckian.
6 Poetry and Decolonization
Jahan Ramazani
Addresses the emergent poetic forms produced by newly independent postcolonial
nations and the reaction of poets in the newly post-imperial British state, including
discussions of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Linton Kwesi
Johnson, Grace Nichols, Bernadine Evaristo, Louise Bennett, Okot p¿Bitek, Philip
Larkin, Noel Coward, Tony Harrison, Christopher Okigbo, and Agha Shahid Ali.
7 Transatlantic Currents
C. D. Blanton
Considers the resistance to and reception of American influence, focusing on the problem
of cultural translation, from the modernists and the Auden generation to the Movement,
the British Poetry Revival, and the contemporary avant-garde.
8 Neo-Modernism and Avant-Garde Orientations
Drew Milne

Surveys the complex array of avant-garde formations after modernism, tracing the
multiple experimental tendencies of neo-modernist writing, with particular attention to
the sites, groupings, anthologies, and critical languages of recent innovative poetries.

9 Contemporary British Women Poets and the Lyric Subject
Linda A. Kinnahan

Explores the reinflection of lyric conventions and subjectivities by recent women poets,
including Gillian Clarke, Jean ¿Binta¿ Breeze, Grace Nichols, Carol Ann Duffy, Denise
Riley.
10 Place, Space, and Landscape
Eric Falci
Discusses the post-war recuperation of a poetics of place, with examples drawn from
Grace Nichols, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Roy Fisher, Ciaran
Carson, and Eile n Ní Chuilleann in.
11 Poetry and Religion
Romana Huk
Traces the lingering importance of religious language and thought in an apparently
secular era, considering T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, J. F. Hendry, Kathleen Raine, David
Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, Donald Davie, C. H. Sisson, Geoffrey Hill, Jon Silkin, Wole
Solyinka, David Marriott, Brian Coffey, John Riley, Pauline Stainer, and Wendy
Mulford.
12 Institutions of Poetry in Post-War Britain
Peter Middleton
Underscores the importance of the material contexts of poetic production to an
understanding of the significance of a poem, with close attention to poems by Andrew
Motion, J. H. Prynne, and Lavinia Greenlaw.
References
Index