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Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism edited by James Acheson and Romana Huk. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Pp. 418. $24.95.
Out of Dissent: A Study of Five Contemporary British Poets by Clive Bush. London: Talus Editions, 1997. Pp. 584. 15.
Knowledge of contemporary British poetry in the United States, in and beyond the academy, has been in a deplorable condition since the 1970s, when it last seemed possible to imagine that one might frame any question worth asking concerning American relations to recent British poetic practices. The 1970s saw a fair amount of polemic concerning the discontinuities of two national "traditions," most of it concerned with poetry, all of it vulnerable to a blunt totalizing which demonstrated the triumphant ability of "nation" to organize literary study and judgment-as it does still, perhaps more than ever. It remains the case twenty years later that American poetry, particularly varieties of exploratory poetry, still can provoke in England anxious or bullish, defensive or rebarbative commentary of the sort that one can hardly imagine English poetry provoking nowadays in the United States. The temptation stubbornly to assert the coherence and power of national traditions is strong not only among cultural conservatives dedicated to the perpetuation of poetic practices associated with or promoting "little-englandism" but increasingly in other, less visible communities of readers as well-and here I think especially of the small but vital communities of poets and critics dedicated to exploratory practices, where the pressures to locate indigenous varieties of Modernist and postmodernist practice are increasing. But, in the United States, except for a partly voyeuristic and cynical biographical fascination with a few supposedly representative figures, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin for instance, and the occasional book on Stevie Smith or Geoffrey Hill, recent British poetry just disappeared from critical discourse about poetry after 1979. When in 1987 Hugh Kenner wrote off most of the English twentieth century, rescuing a few writers such as Basil Bunting and David Jones (in a title that said it all, A Sinking Island), his judgments were uncontroversial because academic critical discourse and all but a few American poets pursuing selective affinities in Britain had already given up on British poetry. Even as postcolonial and anglophone studies began...