ABSTRACT
This chapter spans the range of responses to history and society delimited by Barker and Dunn above, from enthusiastic engagement to ironic comment on national decline. My intention is to place postwar poetry and history alongside each other in an attempt to suggest how one is a measure of the other. Adorno writes that in poetry
various levels of society’s inner contradictory relationships manifest themselves in the poet’s speaking. I should repeat that neither the private person of the poet, his psychology, nor his so-called social viewpoint are to come into question here; what matters is the poem itself as a philosophical sundial of history.
(Adorno 1989: 164) The poem is a guide to history but society also throws its shadow on poetry – this is what I intend to show in this chapter and a range of poets will be cited; however, to give some focus to the discussion, Philip Larkin, the voice of postwar England for many critics, will be referred to often.