"The Council of Heresy" by Andrew Duncan (Shearsman, 2009)

He writes that "The increase of information and distinctions has given rise to the balkanisation of the scene, bemoaned by Eric Homberger in 1977 in 'Art of the Real'. 22 years later, John Matthias … was saying something very similar. … It is balkanisation which leads us towards the overall shape of the period … which forces individual poets to mutate and differentiate ... Over decades, this differentiation necessarily implies incomprehensibility to the naive reader", p.16

He'd like to encourage mutual understanding. He feels he's well placed to do so. Between the "wild-eyed radicals" and the "repetitive conservatives" is a "zone of Normality centring on [the author]" (backcover). I know how he feels. He would like the "critics willing to ignore traditional boundaries" to re-evaluate poets and "end up with a set of common valuations, ones we could all share", p.111. In that spirit he states that "[Thwaite's] poetry is much better than Mottram's", p.111.

He looks in some detail at 13 poets. On p.114 he quotes a section from Tom Raworth's "Eternal Sections", offering a phantom text that the section might have been based on. Raworth's "forced to act/ ostensibly independent thought/ can never admit its disposal/ into a senseless gadget/ paid symbolic tribute/ by an appraising look/ forms of decadence/ exclude schematic parables" becomes "Turned to account, academic philosophy can never admit that it functions as an intellectual toy, on which the elite practice their discrimination; the critical process is in decay; commentary on politics is silenced". Duncan suggests that

• "The gap between the poem and the phantomatic prose text is one between non-finitude and finitude" (on p.117 he explains this - "Raworth's poetry contains almost no finite statements, tied to time, to a place, to specific individuals and their conflicts")
• "By eliminating the detail which forms the perceptual horizon of those playing games, attention is drawn away from the winners and towards the rules of the game and its nature as a game"
• "By refusing to make logical statements, Raworth draws attention to the distinctions of category embodied in language, which it cannot make statements about"
• "By failing to define who is speaking, he prevents us from writing off what is being said as particularist and native to a certain point on the social spectrum"

On p.115 he writes "In a sense, [Eternal Sections] can only be read by someone with a prior knowledge of British social structure, as a set of rules for dealing with situations and for classifying or recognising situations, and as a stock of narratives accounting for the system and its history, and describing the kinds of person in the system". On p.122 he produces an imitation of Raworth's "Eternal Sections" which looks too easily similar to its model.

Poets, like people, come in many varieties

• "People who are undistracted by analytical overlay may be superior at mimesis to people who do have such distractions ... Its role in art is controversial - a role fundamental and yet also primitive, resistant to conscious direction", p.25
• "There is perhaps a character-revealing divide between those who instantly abandon these procedures when they are exposed, and those who simply admire them", p.46

In this book the avant-garde as a grouping receive more attention than the mainstream

• "One of the themes of this chapter is the links of the modern avant-garde to Hellenistic and Imperial cults, of roughly 300 BC to 300 AD", p.200
• "Can we really separate the scorn, irritation, tribal pride, officiousness, and self-congratulation with which the devotees of the avant-garde treat anything which is not avant-garde enough from social hostility in general?" (backcover)
• "I think being intelligent and being bored are related conditions. It does explain why avant-gardistes can be poorly socialised and yet all seem to share the same values", p.55
• "Moves which lose you points in the avant-garde game include identification, expressivity, realism, imagination, appropriation, astheticisation, generalisation, pastoral", p.50

The focus is on British poetry

• "English poetry must appear to foreigners, if they possess literary culture, as one where people have forgotten how to express their feelings; where the linguistic arena is so fraught with mutual hostility that everyone is scared to speak subjectively; and every verbal gesture is a displacement activity", p.329
• "Britain did not know an avant-garde because the vital currents which produced it in a few European countries flowed, on this island, into visionary and personal Protestantism which felt no need to secularise itself", p.249

As usual with this author, several miscellaneous comments attracted my attention

• "Is truth what we realise after the philosophers have spoken, or what was there before anybody began to fabricate and distort it?", p.120
• "A poet can be a prime witness of what they want but they are not a privileged witness to issues belonging to a shared realm: for example, whether they are original, whether they are obscure, who they are similar to", p.8
• "The exploitation of narcissism has been one of the great technological breakthroughs of Western art in the last two centuries. Weighty arguments have also found this development starting with the Mannerist era, from around 1520", p.51
• "As we expect of lyric poets, her late work is of little interest", p.75
• "I find it embarrassing that the best British poetry of the period 1995-2005 has been written by two poets, Christopher Logue and Geoffrey Hill, who made their debuts in the early 1950s", p.92
• "it was hard for young poets to break through in the 50s, and the carnival of 60s culture drowned out the rather quiet signals that conservative poets were making", p.110
• "The modern poet is in effect building a musical instrument in order to find out what it sounds like. ... One can produce shapes either by copying them from the world, or by implementing formulae", p.164
• "most of the methods of poetry may have as their goal the removal of functional thought patterns and the lowering of resistance to suggestion and association", p.214
• "Because of this double surface where a body is simultaneously an object and a message communicating inner states and intentions, handling of objects gives away a lot about what a writer feels about his or her body, and about other people's bodies", p.245

At the end he classifies some poets. In the "Conservative post-modern" list is James Fenton, Glyn Maxwell, Andrew Motion and Paul Muldoon. Iain Sinclair and Ted Hughes are Neo-gothic. Edmin Muir is Neo-Platonist, Roy Fisher is in "The Epistemological Line". Amongst "Some acceptable mainstream books, 1960-2006" are "Carrying My Wife" (Moniza Alvi), "1829" (Alison Brackenbury), "Swimming in the Flood" (John Burnside), "The Bradford Count" (Ian Duhig), "Sky Nails" ( James McKendrick), "The Hollow Hill" (Kathleen Raine), and "Poems 1942-67" (Alan Ross).

Other reviews

• Tony Lopez
• Todd Swift
• Alan Baker

"The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry" by Andrew Duncan (Salt, 2003)

Heroes

He likes people to be aware of their language - "On one side stand W.S.Graham and J.H.Prynne; on the other, Peter Redgrove, Robert Graves, and Ted Hughes. One purifies language by striking out teleology; the other by bending poetic space till it becomes total teleology, curved air, rendering the poet's personality where objectivity is a constraint" (p.322)

• "With the exception of Eric Mottran, I have not found a single critic who has a distinguished record of writing about the poets younger than them", p.21
• "the magazines Spanner and Grosseteste Review between them published almost all the important writers of the decade", p.174
• "The White Stones by J. H. Prynne (1936-) is probably the most significant single volume of the 1960s.", p.118
• "Sinclair, Hughes, Catling and Jeremy Reed were not only the central poets of the Seventies but also very closely linked by the themes of "horror" and the "Gothic"", p.213
• "[Jeremy] Reed is obviously the most gifted poet of his generation", p.227
• "Wales has not produced any striking books in the 1980s, so far as I have been able to discover, except for the works of Peter Finch", p.253
• "Today [Maggie O'Sullivan] is my favourite modern poet ... I can't explain how these poems seem to be saturated in every dimension, and still flow with that dreamlike fertility and amplitude", p.267
• Alison Brackenbury ("Dreams of Power (1981), seemed to me a perfect example of mainstream verse", p.256) and Isobel Thrilling ("orthodox in every way", p.257) get honorable mentions.

Villains

He's not keen on poets who seem unaware of social and political influence, who write without intelligence or write poems using the language of essays. He's anti-Movement and dislikes repression - "Christians and conservatives seem to have redefined self-expression and formal experiment as selfish and narcissistic; poets who have accepted this have just wasted their lives" (p.193).

• "Writers who don't think about each poem are bound to be outgunned by readers who do", p.251
• "My assumption is that anyone who writes excessively simple poetry is an egoist and a failed priest", p.144
• "Larkin had no literary talent ... Larkin never managed to write a good poem", p.62-63
• "In 1969 came Children of Albion, Poetry of the Underground in Britain (Penguin, ed. Michael Horovitz); perhaps the worst book I have ever read", p.99
• "As the progency of Larkin and Roger McGough merged, it became easier to see those two writers as merely successive waves of anti-literary, desensitized, restricted-vocabulary, populism", p.173
• "Auden is popular not because he wrote good poems but because he wrote poems about a famous person, himself", p.295

Times and Places

I can understand how expansion of universities and changes in Arts funding might affect the use of poetry, but many of the political passages he covers seem less relevant. I'd say that poets are rather immune to such influences - reading a poet's lifetime work will tell you little about political change, though certain types of poets will be favoured by some political systems. After the high point in the 70s, he thinks that innovative poetry was pushed to the margins by institutions (p.290). Those who didn't toe the line were thought to be lacking in social skills (p.292), incoherent or neurotic (p.293) He makes many observations that I'd rather see dealt with by epidemiological study.

• "The dominant genres of [the sixties] are the Photograph (as domestic snapshot), the Interview, and the Advertisement. Every work of art is pressed by these hegemonic forces, which correspond in importance to Christian art in (say) the 13th century. All three are: domestic; (super-)realistic; and dominated by the Personality to the exclusion of other signifieds. I would argue that the 'high' art of the sixties and seventies was taken over by these genres", p.85
• "The 1970s have now emerged as the classic period of modern British poetry", p.173
• "This drama of past and future may explain why there are so few poets born in Wales since 1940 who can write good poems", p.191
• "Wales seems to have less room for eccentrics; the communalism of the prevailing political philosophies produces sociability, poetic affability, rich anecdotes, but also levelling down: it's hard to be experimental in Wales", p.253
• "The British resistance to modern art and ideas is tangled up with a nostalgia for the wonderfully and morbidly over-developed culture of childhood", p.303
• "There is a distaste in Britain for speculative philosophy. This may go back to the church settlement of 1662, when peace seemed to depend on theological compromise. There is a connection between weakness in building philosophical speculations, distaste for political innovations, and lack of imagination in poetry. Conservatism in government and the lack of propects for change, seem to have coincided with the decline of the imagination within poetry", p.305
• "The major topic of conversation over the past twenty years has been feminism", p.318

Misc

Sometimes the prose is interrupted by a sudden opinion or side-swipe, or an over-due summary. E.g.

• "I have suggested in a previous chapter that injecting indeterminacy into the microstructure of the poem was compensation for the seepage of possibility brought by the abandonment of lyric and narrative", p.280
• "I'd be glad if modern poetry weren't difficult, and much of this volume is an attempt to explain why almost all mainstream poetry is so bad, not to celebrate the fact. I find it depressing and alienating that the overwhelming majority of good poetry is on the "modernist" side and comes out from small presses ", p.258

At times I'm unsure whether he's putting forward his own considered views, putting words into the mouths of conservatives, or merely speculating. Assertions aren't always explained, and when they are, I'm not always convinced. The "There is a distaste in Britain ..." quote above shows how a chain of reasoning can run wild. Consider this from p.199

Evoking objects does not evoke human experience. Mail-order catalogues are not sensuous. For this reason, the greatest pleasure of sensuous poetry, including Freer's is not laborious descriptions of flowers and recipes, but its evocation of social and physical space. The organisation is in flakes ("a plague doctors costume/ crystal eyes a beak filled with perfumes/ pecking pecking/ at our string pearl hearts/ splitting precious knots") slight and flexible enough to pick out the contours of the real

The first sentence is a viable starting point for discussion, but the third sentence doesn't follow from it, and the example doesn't illustrate the point to me convincingly. His phrasing doesn't always help either: the following for example sounds messy to me

The suggestion that poetry has grown greatly in complexity since 1960 allows the historian a modest pride but needs some important qualifications. First, the previous state can be taken to be narrative. In narrative, the quality of uncertainty is built in; the whole appeal is that we don't know what is going to happen next. Lyric poetry has been blown up to fill the whole landscape

Whose suggestion? Which historian? What does "allows ... a modest pride" mean? What can be "taken to be narrative"? What has lyric poetry to do with the previous points? Is it being constrasted with narrative poetry and aligned with complexity?

Mainstreamers will welcome some of his opinions. He's not excited by Ashbery - his poetry is "akin to walking through a glass bead curtain for half an hour" (p.202) - and of fragmentation and indeterminacy he says

• disruption is a useful way to break old habits, not an end in itself. It's naive to use fragmentation as an attempt to somehow imitate modern society, but it should be noted that readers are changing. As he points out on p.250 "excess availability of symbolic data via TV, records, and so forth [make] children more sophisticated about the rules of editing and composition", "The complexity which a writer has to deal with is that of the reader's psyche, always threatening to abandon attention and move on to something else more interesting" (p.250) and "If the reader is quicker at spotting patterns ... then the writer can signal the framing regularities much more economically and lightly, leaving more room for the unpredictable variation which generates complexity" (p.251-2).
• "Indeterminacy on its own may be very boring and poor in possibilities. ... The poem has to engage [the subversive reader's] intelligence on every level, not simply to dissipate away to avoid confrontation. Associations follow from sequences of ideas, and if these are not well structured the reader will stop connecting anything with anything" (p.285)