Anyway, the thought has just occurred to me, bringing the talk back to the original premise - i.e. this book - isn't it a bit early to name it like this? There's still a quarter of 2011 left yet!!!

There will be some brilliant poems written in the next three months, I'm sure. ;)

Interesting question. How would people who feel this way answer?

I think they would say something like "So *much* of it is really quite terrible. Imagine if you grew up liking strawberries. Ate them all the time. But then, farming methods changed, so that 95% of strawberries were bland at best, and often even wormy? You'd stop eating strawberries." ;)

It's a reasonable position. But very, very few people hold it. All this stuff about there being a divide between free verse and formalism is an invention in the heads of the formalists. They use it as an excuse, a strawman to blame, a scapegoat to torment and drive out of the village.

But life is tough all over. People who write rhetorical narrative blame other things, people who write symbolist lyrics still others, even the language poets have people they blame when no-one takes their work. It's like a bizarre round robin, a kind of circular firing squad. :eek:

Maybe there is a divide, but if there is, it's not what we think. Maybe it's the chasm between writing well and writing badly. Maybe Auden was right about all this after all... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

Stiff upper lip? I cry very easily and anyway I went to the wrong sort of school. I don't think English poetry is remarkable for its stiff upper lip. Larkin and Housman and that's about it. Shakespeare? Keats? Hopkins? Though he's welsh.

In answer to Jayne's question, I think we might look at how one was not allowed to paint representational or figurative paintings in art schools in the '70s. The latter half of the 20th century was marked by reactionary mayhem. But there has been a natural renaissance of form in both arenas (painting and poetry). The abstract and the formal will coexist...optimally within the same frame.

Fear not, citizens!

RM

You're having us on, John. Hopkins was a Londoner and English. He studied theology in Wales (having first had his doubts at Belmont near Hereford not far away) and learnt some Welsh, but that's about it.

Hopkins was a Catholic, which in late Victorian England was synonymous with being an outsider.

Duncan

There are plenty of people writing excellent poems who are not big names. There are also big names who have never written an excellent poem in their lives. That's the way it goes.

Jerome, I always thought the chap was Welsh. Well, there's another Englishman. And I might add Tennyson.

My daughter paints representational paintings. So did Lucian Freud. So does the great David Hockney. And lots of people my daughter has shown me.
So things are much better now. I expect Literature lags behind Art. It always did. Our time will come.

Hi Tim, winter, John et al.

Thank you all for the thoughts about The Best British Poetry 2011 edited by Roddy Lumsden and also about the current British poetry scene. I am leaving for the UK tomorrow for two weeks and will seek out a copy while I am in Blighty. :D

Isn't the title of the book and the timing of its appearance a publisher's marketing decision? Sorry to bring up financial issues here among us artistes/craftsmen/aesthetes/bohemians but the publisher knows a book dated "2011" will probably sell well this year but might not do as well in 2012 when it might appear dated with last year's date on the cover. Silly I know, but. . . .

More correctly, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a convert to Catholicism. Maybe as a writer and a priest he liked being an outsider.

Cheers

Chris http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3553/...f7f5973d_o.gif