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POINTING TO
EAST AND WEST:
BRITISH COLD
WAR POETRY
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••adam piette
I will be looking at two rival topics in British post-war poetry, the courting
of America and the engagement with poets from Eastern Europe, in order to
map the co-ordinates of a specifically British poetry of the Cold War. The anti-
Americanism and anti-communism of the Movement poets, the neo-Marxist
‘Trotskyite’ attachments of the Cambridge school, the Alvarez pro-American
cringe, the migration of poets to the States after Auden (notably Thom Gunn),
the engagement in translation as a means of solidarity with dissident poets in the
Eastern bloc (notably Hughes and Silkin), the deflected image of the superpowers
in the poetry of the Troubles: these are just some of the Cold War-inflected
matters crucial to a proper understanding of post-war poetry. The topics will
be focused through consideration of post-imperial, anti-American resentments,
nuclear anxieties, polarized political standpoints, the issue of CIA funding and
British poetry (Spenderet al.), and the ways in which definitions of the avant-garde
and of what constitutes ‘formal’ poetry were conditioned by Cold War assumptions.
The British Cold War was fought on a variety of fronts, principally at the new
Yalta frontiers of continental Europe (Vienna, Berlin) and at the decolonizing
periphery of empire—Burma, Malaya, Kenya, and so on—and was conducted as
a struggle for the hearts and minds of foreign powers who might misconstrue such