Until Victorian times, poetry and poetic drama were the most highly esteemed
forms of English literature, but it has now to be recognized that verse, a literary art
almost as old as storytelling and just as popular throughout society, has become the
recreation and resource of rather few outside places of education. Explanations of
this shrinkage range from the difficulty of modernist poetry to the abandonment of
metre and rhyme, but not to a shortage of poets; many of us have tried our hand at
it. Whatever the causes, it is undeniable that poetry today, though paid cultural lip-
service, is no longer central to literature, and has lost its wider audience, certainly in
England. The audience for verse has declined gradually, since about the time of the
First World War, so that the fact of this decline, and the novelty of it, may not be
recognized. Yet this loss of interest in poetry is new, and significant.
A kind of deafness has spread through English society; this may be connected
with the spread of print and silent reading. Verse is at least as old as prose and until
the 18th century was the medium for drama, for satire, for narrative, and for the
exposition of theology and of natural history: Charles Darwin’s grandfather,
Erasmus, published in 1789 The Loves of the Plants, a lengthy exposition, in verse, of
the classificatory system of Linnaeus. Medieval literature was mostly in verse.
Shakespeare was a ‘poet’, the word ‘dramatist’ appearing only after 1660, and he
made a living out of being a poet for the theatre. Poets used to make money, and if
Paradise Lost, published in the reign of Charles II, earned its author only £10, that is
because its author had been the Commonwealth’s apologist for the beheading of
Charles I. Everyone knew of the poem’s importance. Dryden and Pope made a lot of
money out of verse, as did lesser figures such as Prior and Gay. Walter Scott earned
£10,000 from a single poem,The Lady of the Lake, and Tennyson sold hundreds of
thousands ofcopies. In the 20th century, although T. S. Eliot became a figure of
extraordinary cultural authority, the only true poets between Betjeman and Seamus
Heaney who have approached popularity are Larkin, Ted Hughes and Tony
Harrison, and their earnings will have been small. The readers of Ted Hughes’s
American wife, Sylvia Plath, were very few until after her suicide.
There have been many good English poets since 1955, and a fine anthology could
be made of their verse. But the centrality of verse has gone, and indeed the standing
ofliter ature itself has been weakened by the multiplying diversions offered by the
media,and the intense commercial competition between them. Literature of high
quality is a pursuit which normally brings in very little advertising revenue to the
owners of the media. It is therefore given less space in an increasingly populist press.
Technology changes social habits. Many in older generations used to spend an
ev ening reading. This happens less often, as television has been joined by DVDs and
computer access to films. Poets who require deep and sustained attention, such as394 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80
Leading British poets 1955–Stevie Smith (1902–1971) Charles Tomlinson (1927– )
Sir John Betjeman (1906–1984) Thom Gunn (resident in California) (1929–2004)
R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) Peter Porter (born in Australia) (1929–2010)
C. H. Sisson (1914–2003) Ted Hughes (1930–1999)
D. J. Enright (1920–2002) Geoffrey Hill (1932– )
Philip Larkin (1922–1985) Tony Harrison (1937–)
Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2002) Seamus Heaney (1939– )