'Black British Poetry' in The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry 1945-2010, edited by Edward Larrissy (Cambridge University Press: 2015) (original) (raw)
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The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry 1945-2010
The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945–2010 brings together sixteen essays that explore the full diversity of British poetry since the Second World War, a period of signifi cant achievement in which varied styles and approaches have fl ourished. As a comprehensive critical, literary-historical and scholarly guide, this Companion offers not only new readings of a wide range of poets but a detailed account of the contexts in which their verse was written and received. Focusing on famous and neglected names alike, from Dylan Thomas to John Agard, leading scholars provide readers with insight into the ongoing importance and profundity of postwar poetry. In view of its influence on contemporary British Poetry, a chapter on Northern Irish Poetry is included.
The development of black British poetry across milestones
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As the body of British poetry is expanding, new forms of poetic expression come to life. The struggle of British society with its own multicultural reality is exemplified in the representations of black British poetry in the canon, which is still a decisive element for the lyrical evolution of British poetry. Since black British poetry is rarely incorporated in the canon, this text will investigate how black British poetry developed as a category with regard to its origins in relation with colonialism and the role of the Canon for its rise to recognition, as well as observe current trends of overcoming old challenges. By analysing the growing body of knowledge in existing literature, the thesis will illustrate the increasing interest that surrounds black British poetry from academics and the public and display the poets' commitment to change the status quo.
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The poets of the first half of the 20th century (or Eliot's generation) gave an exuberant of literature imbued with vigorous and energetic response to the war besides philosophical questions and spiritual quests following the consequences of the First World War. In comparison to Eliot's generation, the poetry of the second generation (after WW-II) is dormant, inert, and the poets seemed to recoil from the destruction, horror and disorder of the war years. While some of the poets of the 1940s adopted a neo-romantic attitude, the poets of the 50s, reacting against such attitude, made a conscious effort to focus on the real person and event. By choosing the real person and event, the poets of the 50s endeavoured to make poetry less scholarly, sophisticated and show the poet as the man next door communicating with man in the street. Consequently, most of the poets, apparently, failed to explore beyond the surface reality. But delving deep in their poetry, it is found that undern...
The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945–2010
The arrival in 1948 of the SS Windrush, a ship carrying more than 280 Jamaicans to Britain marks a foundational, if also a fetishized 1 place in any understanding of post-1945 Black British poetry. Whilst Windrush was not strictly the 'beginning' of black migration to Britain, the 1948 British Nationality Act did enable New Commonwealth and Pakistani citizens to enter and settle in Britain with greater freedom than ever before, and Windrush has become a convenient label for this fi rst post-1945 generation of black migrant writers in Britain. This generation's 'arrival', the accelerating endgame of empire, the rise of anti-colonial independence movements and the cultural activity and confi dence which accompanied them, created the conditions for an extraordinary period of literary creativity in Britain, as black and Asian writers came to England to work, to study and to be published. Mainstream presses showed unprecedented interest in publishing Black migrant writers and the beginnings of organized association between writers from different territories in Britain can be also traced to this time. An early forum was the BBC radio programme, Caribbean Voices , conceived by Una Marson in 1943 and subsequently edited by Henry Swanzy (and later V. S. Naipaul) between 1946 and 1958. Caribbean Voices broadcast weekly, live from London to the Caribbean and enabled regular cultural exchanges between Britain and the Caribbean, as well as forging a sense of common black literary endeavour in Britain. The next generation of writers (of the late 1960s and 1970s) 2 had different experiences, affi liations and concerns. The term 'Black British' was fi rst used in this era within intersecting public debates about race and immigration, education, unemployment and crime, nationalism, citizenship and the multicultural policies of the period; from the start 'Black British' was a volatile and much contested term. Much Black British writing from this time
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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 155 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.
Post War Disillusionment and English Poetry
The long shadows of two world wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 lay across the 20 th Century. The political consequences of the I World war were Communism in Russia and as a reaction against this, Totalitarianism in Germany and Italy. The Second World war split the world into two blocks-the East dominated by Russia and the West by America. The period between the two World wars offered the sharpest possible contrast to the serenity and complacency of the Victorian Era. The wars came as terrific shock to the society. The brutality of the extensive devastation of life T.S.Eliot in his note The established values totally broke down in the Post War period. Attempts were being made to search new values in Political thought, Psychology and Humanity. The society was in a state of degradation and poetry could become a true criticism only when it tried to express the horror and complexities of such a world. Contemporary criticism is strangely divided in the matter of its judgment on post war poetry. There are some who raise the modernist adventurers in English poetry to the heavens and hail them as the harbingers of a greater era of poetry, while there are others who cry them down as nothing more than pretentious mediocrities undeservedly much made of. The poets who had experienced the horrors of the two World wars were deeply influenced by the disillusionment and frustration. They attempted to show the reality as it was and continued their endeavor to search the values in their poetry. C. D. Lewis, one of the younger poets, says, succinctly summing the situation: came for poetry, in spite of Hardy and de la Mare, a period of very low vitality. The Georgian poets, a sadly pedestrian rabble, flocked along the roads their fathers had built, pointing out to each other the beauty spots...The winds blew, the floods came...one only rode the whirl wind: Wilfred Owen killed on the Sambre, spoke above the barrage and the gas cloud. The poetry is in the pity. When it was all over it was given to an American, T. S. Eliot, to pick up some of the fragments of civilization, place them end to end, and on that crazy pavement walk precariously through the wasteland. Postwar poetry was born amongst the ruins. Its immediate ancestors are Hopkins, Owen and Eliot and Yeats, the last in the aristocratic tradition, remains the most admired among living writers...a lesson to us in integrity." The wars saw an outburst of poetry. Some poets at their initial stages expressed the patriotic fervor and heralded the romantic concept of war. The Glorification of the nationalism, patriotism, freedom, liberty and martyrdom were to be seen at this stage. But as the bloodshed grew more appalling, the poets realized the reality and tried to shatter the illusion of the splendor of war by frankly projecting the realistic and devastating picture of the agony, suffering, brutality and futility of the war. They were aware of the fact that the values of the old cultivated middle class were dead beyond to recall and that it was necessary to find expression for a new sort of sensibility. The classification of poetry, as Pre War and Post War with reference to chronological sequence is only a matter of convenience. The process of evolution in literature is one and continuous, taking colour from the environments of a particular period, and shaped or misshaped by influences to which it may be subjected. The Georgian poets, the War poets, and the Imagist movement which was started just before the War, have all had their due share of influence in moulding the postwar poetic consciousness, and expression. The Georgians escaped into other worlds of experience with a reflex criticism implied of the existing scheme of things.
2019
Lest the title of my brief piece seem pretentious, let me hasten to point out in all humility that a writer, even as in the present case a very minor one, has to relate to the various traditions that have a bearing on his work on a one on one basis, largely without the mediation of academic criticism or theory. My aim, in other words, is modest-not to present a comprehensive, critically astute picture of British poetry but, rather, a memoir of my engagement with it.