ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on eight poets: Vernon Scannell, U. A. Fanthorpe, P. J. Kavanagh, Alistair Elliot, Andrew Motion, Blake Morrison, Sean O'Brien, and Peter Reading. U. A. Fanthorpe is a self-confessed drop-out, someone who made a decision to leave her demanding job as a senior English teacher at one of the best-known independent girls' schools and work as a hospital clerk. Kavanagh has several times paid homage to Edward Thomas and Louis MacNeice: he is faithful to their example in the way he writes of natural things, in his discursiveness, and in his willingness to let himself be guided by tentative rhythms. The Introduction to their Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion said 'the poets included here do represent a departure, one which may be said to exhibit something of the spirit of post-modernism'. Fiction was the first of Reading's books to draw specific attention to this urge, followed by others which explored madness, cruelty, cancer, the homeless, terrorism.