sexual violence; her later plays became increasingly abstract. One tendency of
contemporary theatre is advertised in the provocative titles of the plays of another
Bristol graduate, actor, playwright and journalist, Mark Ravenhill (1966– ):Shopping
and Fucking (1996),Some Explicit Polaroids(1999) and Mother Clap’s Molly House
(2001).In 2012, Ravenhill became Writer in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare
Company. So Established Protest (see p. 386) is alive and well, and, in increasingly
obvious ways such as colour-blind casting and cross-dressing, affects the direction
given to plays from the classic repertoire, from Shakespeare to Sheridan.
nPoetr y
Contemporary poetry
The account of modern poetry in Chapter 14 (p. 394) traced a decline in its public
role. Its place in contemporary literature has also shrunk. Cyril Connolly, the lead-
ing Sunday reviewer of literature in the 1960s, often wrote about poetry. Not so his
leading successors, Anthony Burgess and John Carey. Poetry has its small niche in
the literary market place, but poets who mean to live by writing write fiction, scripts
for stage, screen, opera or musical, or advertising copy. It is believed that Eliot’s old
firm, the major publisher of poetry, is afloat thanks to the substantial royalties from
Cats(see p. 350), which enabled Mrs Eliot to buy a 50 per cent share and thereby
inject a large amount of capital.
The great achievements of modernist poetry were never of a kind to make it very
widely popular. Auden eventually, and Larkin almost immediately, wrote more
sociably and for a wider readership. In the 1960s the Liverpool poets, Roger
McGough and others, read their more casual performances aloud to a popular
audience. Poetry readings have changed since. Auden used to recite from memory;
at poetry readings, poets used to read poems written to be read privately to stand
up wel l to re-reading. But what goes down best at contemporary readings is
performance poetry, accessible, and informed by the personality of the performer.
The wor k of Harrison or Heaney, indeed of Wendy Cope, shows that simplification
need not mean undue dumbing-down. Yet it often does: as is seen in the poems
chosen to be read at readings – and in poems composed with performance in mind.
Performance poetry is not always verse. Poets make more money from sales at read-
ings than from bookshop sales, since few people buy a book of poems without
special reason. In a culture of celebrity, people come to see and hear the poet, and
poets are increasingly interviewed during literary festivals by names familiar to the
public through radio and television. Most poetry publishers now charge permission
fe es at a level which drastically restricts quotation, so that poems which were
quoted at length in the second edition of this book now have to be read elsewhere.
So poetry is priced off the page, the white contemplative space which it seemed to
need. The internet and the e-reader will become as familiar as the printed page,
changing the experience of reading a poem.
Greatness?
Hardy, Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Auden aimed explicitly at becoming great poets, and
trained accordingly. Such a life-plan is less likely for a poet today. Greatness (a
POETRY 407