When it appeared in 1982, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was a cause of some controversy. Most of this was because of the anthology’s exclusion of a sufficient number of women and ethnic poets. While this is no doubt true, what interests me more is   Morrison and Motion’s claim that the largely descriptive poetry contained in the anthology is in some sense a continuation of the experiments of High Modernism. It is this attempt by Morrison and Motion to “rebrand” the anthology’s descriptive poetry as non-descriptive, in order to suggest that the descriptive aspects of the poetry are merely apparent rather than actual, that I will deal with here.

In their Introduction, Morrison and Motion claim that the poets in this volume ‘show greater imaginative freedom and linguistic daring than the previous poetic generation’. It is not clear, however, who is being referred to as the “previous poetic generation”. Is it the Movement poets, the Group, the British confessional poets (Hughes, Plath etc.)—or all of them? It is unlikely to be the Movement, as Morrison and Motion say: ‘The new spirit in British poetry began to make itself felt in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s and early 70s’. This is undoubtedly referring to the Belfast cell of the Group run by Philip Hobsbaum at Queen’s University.

We can be confident of this because several of this group’s attendees are included in this anthology: Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. The mentor of these three poets, Philip Hobsbaum, was critical of Eliot, Pound, and Modernism in general. Additionally, Heaney believes in truthfulness and clarity in poetic utterances. It is curious, therefore, that Morrison and Motion describe the majority of poets in the anthology as displaying ‘a literary self-consciousness reminiscent of the modernists’.

However, it is not apparent from the bulk of poems in this volume that this is actually the case. It would not be accurate to credit much of the poetry in the anthology as particularly exemplifying a literary self-consciousness (or a postmodernist playfulness, for that matter). In any case, the claimed for innovativeness of this is emasculated by Morrison and Motion when they qualify it by saying of the poets: ‘this does not imply that their work is frivolous or amoral’. With this caveat, we have an echo of the liberal humanist view of poetry as having to have 'worth', 'value' and so on.

The poets in this anthology are praised by Morrison and Motion for ‘making the familiar strange again’. But it should not be overlooked that the practice of defamiliarisation is dependent upon vision, as its aim is to refresh our perception of the world and to focus our attention on its objects. To this extent, it is descriptive. Another point worthy of praise for Morrison and Motion is the outlook, 'which expresses itself, in some poets, in a preference for metaphor and poetic bizarrerie to metonymy and plain speech; in others it is evident in a renewed interest in narrative—that is, in describing the details and complexities of (often dramatic) incidents. [These poets are] not poets working in a confessional white heat but dramatists and story-tellers'.

There are several points to be noted about this passage. Firstly, the term ‘poetic bizarrerie’ is left undefined by Morrison and Motion, who also fail to cite examples of it in this anthology. Therefore, I will regard it as a red herring. Secondly, a preference for metaphor is hardly novel, Ted Hughes was heavily dependent on it. Thirdly, metonymy is a legitimate poetic devise and one of the few that is non-descriptive; however, Morrison and Motion also fail to cite instances of it in the anthology’s poetry. Fourthly, the use of narrative and plain speech in poetry to describe dramatic events is something that conservative writers such as Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and Philip Hobsbaum would advocate. As an apologia for this anthology’s poetic operating procedures, this passage leaves much to be desired.

What is most telling about the anthology’s Introduction is its emphasis upon visual perception and the act of witnessing. Morrison and Motion point out that most of the poets have developed procedures ‘designed to emphasize the gap between themselves and their subjects’; and that these poets are ‘not inhabitants of their own lives so much as intrigued observers, not victims but onlookers’. The poet who most embodies this in the anthology is Craig Raine, whose “Martian” poetry typifies the poetic outlook of the anthology’s Introduction with regard to its championing of visual perception, simile and defamiliarisation.

Morrison and Motion apologise for Martian poetry by claiming that far from its being the cold, arid, visually-based entity that it is usually taken for it is in actuality imbued with emotion: ‘It would be wrong to think that the Martians’ ingenuity prevents them from expressing emotion: their way of looking is also a way of feeling’. However, like most of the assertions made by Morrison and Motion in this Introduction, it is not instanced by textual examples or any other evidence—it is to be taken on faith.

After 25 years, the vestiges of this anthology’s aesthetic are still evident in contemporary mainstream poetry. So invasive is the simplistic idea that reality exists outside of perception, and that the main function of poetic language is merely the delineation of material phenomena. This has resulted in critiques of individual poetic works based solely on this criterion. We, therefore, have a situation, today, in which the majority of celebrated poetry is being written because of, and for, this critical sensibility—and the publishing outlets that reflect it.

Copyright © Jeffrey Side, 2007

Notes on Contributors