British poetry since 1945

by Edward Lucie-Smith

This revised edition contains new sections which recognize the increased influence of the Northern Irish and "university" poets, and, throughout, the commentaries render each poet - Larkin, Hughes, Porter, Heaney, Fenton, Raine, among others - immediately accessible. From the post-war movement to the post-expressionist movement, the poetic terrain is mapped out since the World War II.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

423 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith, known as Edward Lucie-Smith, is an English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster.

Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and, after a little time in Paris, he read History at Merton College, Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

After serving in the Royal Air Force as an Education Officer and working as a copywriter, he became a full-time writer (as well as anthologist and photographer). He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum in organising The Group, a London-centred poets' group.

At the beginning of the 1980s he conducted several series of interviews, Conversations with Artists, for BBC Radio 3. He is also a regular contributor to The London Magazine, in which he writes art reviews. A prolific writer, he has written more than one hundred books in total on a variety of subjects, chiefly art history as well as biographies and poetry.

In addition he has curated a number of art exhibitions, including three Peter Moores projects at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; the New British Painting (1988–90) and two retrospectives at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He is a curator of the Bermondsey Project Space.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

4 stars for content, 2 stars for editorial character assassination and professional jealousy. And demerits for the editor including FOUR of his own poems, which is three (?!) more than Dylan Thomas gets.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has lived on my poetry shelves for decades and is great for finding poems by poets - for example great to find three Stevie Smith poems after reading her novel recently. However although I shall keep it on the shelves I was very distressed to see there are only 6 women poets to 80 men poets and of the 10 sections that make up the book, most have none, shamefully the 'Scottish' section and 'New voices' have none. There also seem to be no poets at all from the Commonwealth, even in the section 'Influences from Abroad'. So I have read all the poems by women, all excellent and browsed a few of the others and it goes back on the shelf.

[Andrew Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginning with Edwin Muir and ending with Barry MacSweeney, a rangey and diverse slate of mid-20c British poets. I'm fond of reading anthology editions generations removed from their current issue (this collection was reissued in 1985 and 1991), to get a sense of the literature's moment and affect when it was contemporary and "young". Lucie-Smith's concise and useful introductions to each poet suggest a good deal of Movement-fatigue in the early-70s, and some skepticism of the lasting effects of loose agglomerations like the New Apocalyptics and the Group. I had overlooked the British scene from the 40s to the late 60s in my own education, stopping somewhere around Auden, Bunting, Empson, Gascoyne, and Dylan Thomas, and picking up again with Prynne and Raworth and the more experimental scenes covered in Caddell and Quartermaim's Other anthology and Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos. No Prynne or Empson here, but the latter's influence is clearly felt in places.

Complete surprises: Roy Fisher. Terrific! The early, philosophical poems of Alan Brownjohn. The gnomic miniatures of Spike Hawkins and Ian Hamilton Finlay. The fact that I'm actually pleasurably taken in by the careful craft of poets like Durrell, Larkin, Martin Bell and Peter Redgrove...despite the occasional bad politics or limited subject matter. That DJ Enright may be my favorite of the "Movement" poets. Reinforcements: yes, as before, I do like the poetry of W.S. Graham and Christopher Middleton. And others: Stevie Smith, Roy Fuller, George Mackay Brown.

No doubt there was some bad, drab and grey verse here, but this pocket collection was mostly a good education, and time well spent.

[Lucy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Has ever so much drivel been written about so much drivel....to be fair, there are some lovely poems near the beginning of this anthology, until he really gets into his full pompous stride with The Movement, The Post-Movement, The Group....somewhere along the line, poetry got very deeply buried under self-importance. But I suppose it gives a snapshot of how the great and good of the literary scene were thinking in the fifties and sixties.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

The high school English Literature text which dragged me into the genre of poetry. I treasure this volume. It's looking rather beaten up and ragged. All the better.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe down to the mood I was in but this didn't grab my imagination like I had expected it to