introduction 7tendency ‘to read radical British and Irish poetics not as different but
as lagging behind American versions’.^15 Equally I am aware there is
a danger of reading global Anglophone poetries through the lens of
Anglo-American poetries. There is a similar pressure, as Rey Chow
observes, in world literatures which are held together by ‘investigat-
ing multiple literary traditions on the assumption that there ought to
be a degree of commonality and equivalence and thus comparability
among them... [yet] the assumption of parity/sameness is prem-
ised on a requirement of linguistic sameness/difference’.^16 The fol-
lowing outline of movements and tendencies emerging after World
War II is intended as a backdrop and introduction to the poetries
discussed in the subsequent fi ve chapters, and not necessarily as an
abiding framework for their interpretation.
NEW LINES, THE NEW POETRY, THE NEW AMERICAN
POETRY
Different approaches to developing a ‘new’ poetry are evident in
three key anthologies that appeared in the late 1950 s and 1960 s,
two in UK and the other in the USA. The fi rst is New Lines:
An Anthology ( 1956 ) edited by Robert Conquest, which grouped
together elements of a tendency which would later been known as
‘The Movement’ and included John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings,
Thom Gunn, Kingsley Amis, D. J. Enright, Donald Davie and
John Wain. These poets tended to see their work as continuing in
an English tradition. Peter Finch proposes that this impetus refl ects
something of ‘the English suspicion of modernism and insistence
on form, often at the expense of content, that has sidelined it on the
world stage’.^17 In his introduction, Conquest proposes that New
Lines is an attempt to restore ‘sound and fruitful attitude to poetry,
of the principle that poetry is written by and for the whole man,
intellect, emotions, senses and all’ (p. xiv). His ambition moreover
is to regain a form of empiricism in poetry, the poetry present in
the anthology ‘submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs
nor agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both
mystical and logical compulsions and like modern philosophy – is
empirical in its attitude’ (p. xv). Conquest adds that in terms of