A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
and Irish poetry are hybrids, mostly sharing a similar genus, but which split off into species. Summarizing the various theories of the development of lyric as a genre in the introduction to the section on “Genre Theory” in their The Lyric Theory Reader, Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (2014, 14) register the inherent binary conflict in genre theory of the lyric between considerations of “whether the lyric is historically contingent and ephemeral or is dependent on norms and structures continuous across periods and cultures.” In order to define a specific genre of poetry, we need to consider whether we approach particular genres as having developed out of specific historical conditions and being subject to a whole range of cultural, social, and political developments, or whether we define specific genres structurally, by identifying formal features marking these genres as distinct.
A comparison of essays in The Lyric Theory Reader illustrates the clash between the contingent and the structural in genre theory. Cohen's conclusions, for example, are revised and refined by Jonathan Culler (2014) in a piece entitled “Lyric, History, and Genre.” Noting an element of defeatism toward the empirical classification of ahistorical characteristics of certain genres in Cohen's arguments, Culler uses the example of the lyric to show that identifying continuities in genres can be useful (he cites “apostrophe” as characterizing lyric's uniqueness). However, while Cohen and Culler differ in their relative emphasis on history and empirical classification, both describe the development of genres as an organic production of species or subgenres. “Even for Aristotle,” Cohen contends, “generic markers are not absolute; they indicate stages through which genre passes.” He continues:
A genre does not exist independently; it arises to compete or to contrast with other genres, to complement, augment, interrelate with other genres. Genres do not exist by themselves; they are named and placed within hierarchies or systems of genres, and each is defined with reference to the system and its members.
(55)
Cohen's model is one of organic and competitive development as well as cross‐fertilization and hybridity; all characteristics comprising poetry in Britain and Ireland over the last 60 years. Culler (2014, 66) defends a more structuralist position, but nevertheless also presents a dynamic model of genre:
A claim about a generic model is not as assertion about some property that all works that might be attached to this genre possesses. It is a claim about fundamental structures that may be at work even when not manifest, a claim which directs attention to certain aspects of a work, which mark a tradition and evolution, that is to say, dimensions of transformation.
Generic models and writing about genres relate to the task of capturing “fundamental structures” even as they mutate and transform. “[C]ertain aspects of the work” will mark it out as representative of a particular genre, but a critic must be aware of the processes of evolution (and thereby the transformations and shifts of species) at work. As Culler continues: “A test of generic categories is how far they help relate a work to others and activate aspects of works that make them rich, dynamic and revealing” (66). Genres of poetry, or species as I wish to call them, interrelate and reveal aspects of each other. Identifying genres is difficult, as individual works must inform any definition of genre or species. Yet, identification of “generic categories” will inevitably occlude the specificity of particular poetries, as well as exclude many others. Hence, the word species will be used here to capture the dynamism and change of poetic genera that both Cohen and Culler are eager to acknowledge. Thus, positioning itself between the categorizing instinct of poetics and historical and contingent acknowledgments of literary history, the rest of this chapter will examine the evolution of certain species of contemporary British and Irish poetry.
Urtext‐Species of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
Since 1960, poetry anthologies have abounded, accumulating like a series of reactions and counteractions in a petri dish, with each editor staking a claim to different histories. Robert Conquest's hugely successful anthology New Lines (1956) set the tone for the rest of the century. It solidified the reputations of Movement poets such as Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin; it led to the persistence of what Robert Sheppard (2005, 20) has dubbed the “Movement Orthodoxy” in contemporary poetry; it has been a touchstone for other anthologies since its publication, and sympathy with, or rejection of, its poets continues to be a badge of identification. There are many surveys of contemporary British and Irish poetry outlining the intricacies and specifics of contemporary anthologies. Notable among these are: Peter Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey (1999); John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950 John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950 (2000); Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents (2005); Fiona Sampson, Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (2012); and David Wheatley, Contemporary British Poetry (2015). Each of these surveys offers rich summaries of the editorial positioning of specific anthologies: Alfred Alvarez's reaction to the “gentility” of New Lines, with his The New Poetry (1962); The attempt of Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion to consolidate a new generation of poets after the Movement in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982); Iain Sinclair's answer to this latter with a collection of marginalized poets in Conductors of Chaos (1996); the collection of radical poets in The New British Poetry 1968–1988, edited by Gillian Allnutt, Fred D'Aguiar, Ken Edwards, and Eric Mottram; and Keith Tuma's attempt to show an American readership that more innovative poetry was being written in Britain and Ireland in his Anthology of Twentieth‐Century British and Irish Poetry (2001). Anthologies are a weapon of choice in what Corcoran (2007, 2) calls the “field of battle” over what constitutes representative contemporary British and Irish poetry. And the disputes continue in a recent argument between the poet and academician Andrea Brady and Don Paterson, one of the editors of an anthology designed for the American market called New British Poetry (2004).
Paterson's introduction to New British Poetry contains a bad‐tempered attack on what he calls “the Postmoderns” whose work he considers “incomprehensible” (xxix), and who apparently produce poems with “a special category of difficulty whose sensible interpretation or interpretations cannot be confirmed” (xxix—emphasis in the original). Their “monotone angst,” “effete and etiolated aestheticism,” and “joyless wordplay” (xxxii) offer Paterson little pleasure. His attack is also a defense of “Mainstream” poets who, in contrast to the Postmoderns, “still sell poetry to a general readership” (xxv), write “honest” (xxx) poetry of “real originality” (xxxi—emphasis in the original), “are engaged in an open, complex and ongoing dialogue with the whole of the English tradition” (xxxi), and do not “engage with the false and very un‐British paradigm of artistic progress” (xxiv) as the Postmoderns do. Paterson's introduction demonstrates an extreme anxiety tied up with a defense of one's poetic tribe against the apparent encroachment of un‐real poets and poetries. In a letter of response published in Chicago Review, Brady (2004) outlines the contradictions in what she describes as Paterson's “most hateful digression on experimental poetry recently bundled into print” (396) and the “violence of its assault on all nonconformist practices” (402). Paterson's attack on “Postmoderns,” his defense of the “Mainstream,” and Brady's searing response exemplify the ongoing disputes between mainstream and marginal or experimental poetries. Hence, Sheppard (2005, 27) (a “Postmodern”) offers these unattractive descriptions of Movement poetry:
The Movement favoured a poetry of closure, narrative coherence and grammatical and syntactic cohesion: a poetry of “backgrounded” form rather than a poetry of foregrounded artifice. Its emphasis on the demotic, upon “tone” and upon speaking voice, posited the existence of a stable ego, an author‐subject, as the unifying principle of the poem; its rhetoric operated at a social level.
Many of the poems in Paterson's anthology—those of Gillian Allnutt, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, and Lavinia Greenlaw, for example—exhibit such traits. Paterson's own poem in the anthology, “Imperial” (161), is a case in point. A single voice describes the sticky and jaw‐tiring seduction