ABSTRACT
To ask ‘What was the poetry of the 1960s?’ and to ask ‘What is the poetry of the 1960s?’ is not to ask the same question. The first could be answered neutrally; a bibliography of all books classified as poetry during that decade. It could be assumed that the 1960s is a certain 10-year period, and not the shorthand for a zeitgeist, whether that is the ‘swinging sixties’ of the popular imagination or the period of gestation of much post-structuralist, feminist or Marxist modes of our current intellectual histories.
