A History of English Literature

It came from somewhere beyond the corral.

A dwarf on stilts. Another dwarf.

I sidled past some trucks. From under a freighter

I watched a man sawing a woman in half.

Muldoon, who lives at Princeton, New Jersey, but revisits Ireland and Britain, is a
fertile and playfully imaginative poet who can do almost anything with language,
with poetic form, and especially with rhyme. His benignly aloof methods and his
linguistic twinkle can dazzle at first, but his poems are rarely stunts: each tells a story
or makes a point, and (which is not always the case with clever poets) has a human
interest.

Popular contemporaries

The most productive and widely read of English poets used to be Simon Armitage,
born in Huddersfield in 1963. His Zoom(1989) zestfully retold anecdotes from his
experience as a probation officer. His seven volumes show inventiveness and a wide
range of subjects. Armitage has recently turned to a modernizing kind of translation,
as in his Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In popularity he has been overtaken, since
her appointment as Poet Laureate, by Carol-Ann Duffy (1955– ), a skilled rhetori-
cal performer, mimic and ventriloquist, and endlessly inventive imaginer of other
points of view in well-crafted verse, often with strongly visual effects. Her work is
widely prescribed for public examinations. As Poet Laureate, like her predecessor,
Andrew Motion, she attends to events in public life rather than in the life of the
monarchy.
Poetry recalls its origins, and reminders of the continuing life of the long conver-
sation which is English literature have recently been issued in the English of Ireland:
in Heaney’s Beowulf(1999) and in Muldoon’s version ofCædmon’s Hymn, included
in his Moy Sand and Gravel(2002). His version of this poem, composed well before
700 and preserved in the margins of Bede’s Latin History(see p. 21) brings out its
triple structure.

Now we must praise to the skies, the Keeper of the heavenly kingdom,

The might of the Measurer, all he has in mind,

The work of the Father of Glory, of all manner of marvel,

Our eternal Master, the main mover.

It was he who first summoned up, on our behalf,

Heave n as a roof, the holy Maker.

Then this middle-earth, the Watcher over humankind,

Our eternal Master, would later assign

The precinct of men, the Lord Almighty.

nThe empire of fiction

How to deal with the thousands of novels published in the last thirty-odd years? A
long list,annotated with brief comments? A selective discussion, focusing on a few
nove lists and novels? A personal choice of favourite novels? A historian of a litera-
ture must, for reasons given in the Introduction, follow the second of these
approaches. In preparing this chapter, I have impartially read a great deal of well-
regarded contemporary fiction and selected for discussion what seemed the best or

THE EMPIRE OF FICTION 409

Some contemporary

poets

P. J. Kavanagh (1931– )

John Fuller (1937– )

Ian Hamilton (1938–2001)

David Harsent (1942– )

Hugo Williams (1942– )

Craig Raine (1944– )

George Szirtes, Hungarian

refugee (1948– )

Bernard O’Donoghue (1945– )

Wendy Cope (1945– )

James Fenton (1949– )

Paul Muldoon (1951– )

Andrew Motion (1952– ). Poet

Laureate, 1999–2009

Sean O’Brien (1952– )

Michael Donaghy

(1954–2004). US-born

but UK resident

Jo Shapcott (1953–)

Carol-Ann Duffy (1955– )

Poet Laureate 2009–

Jamie McKendrick (1955– )

Glyn Maxwell (1962– )

Kathleen Jamie (1962–)

Simon Armitage (1963– )

Don Paterson (1963– )

Kate Clanchy (1965– )

Alice Oswald (1966– )