ABSTRACT
One 'community of letters' that as early as the mid-1950s was taking notice of Ted Hughes, even before the publication of The Hawk in the Rain, was the so-called 'Group', a loosely-organised assemblage of poets who met once a week to discuss one another's poems in an atmosphere of watchful sobriety, rigorously unsparing criticism. Peter Porter is in many ways the most successful of them, and his range and confidence have greatly expanded. Porter has said that from the beginning his poems 'have polarized about the art and life of the past and the everyday world of the present'. In his work the Holy Roman Empire, John Cage, Bach, the experimental-ridiculous, advertising slogans, Cluny, Carthage, Beverly Hills and the Black Country coexist, living parts of the continuous world of the imagination. Peter Redgrove has an imaginative richness which sometimes looks wildly eccentric, mystical and comic at once.
