ABSTRACT
Roy Fuller said that, whatever demurs and embarrassments English people in general feel when they are faced with poetry, they can and sometimes do acknowledge sheer technical skill, in poems as in, football. Fuller was thinking not only of Betjeman but of Robert Burns and of Rudyard Kipling. Without actually mentioning them, and not mentioning them because they are hardly household names, he might have been thinking in our own time of his son, John Fuller; of James Fenton, whom Roy Fuller admired at an early stage; and of Clive James, now an international figure, but not because of his poetry. Craig Raine and Christopher Reid were up to their first books published in late 1970s and early 1980s; yet they, too, were part of John Fuller School of Skill. Kit Wright has shown his admiration of Gavin Ewart's example quite openly, in his formal variety, his humour, and his refusal to make distinctions between 'good taste' and 'bad taste'.
