ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on five poets: George Barker, David Gascoyne, W. S. Graham, Lawrence Durrell, and Norman Nicholson. When he died in 1991, George Barker was noticed in several obituaries as 'the last Romantic', or at any rate the last of the Bohemians. He was always a problematical figure. David Gascoyne, who emerged precociously with his first book of poems when he was only sixteen, who pioneered Surrealism in England in the 1930s, and whose Poems 1937-1942 was one of the best books produced during the Second World War. W. S. Graham became an equally interesting figure, and one who continued to publish until his death in 1986. Durrell had a taste for what Anthony Burgess called 'the corruption of the exotic'. Norman Nicholson had no such inclination. His poems, from their beginnings in the 1940s, were almost totally absorbed in the landscapes, characters and ancestries of his native Cumberland, where he always lived, being born and dying in the same house.
