ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on five poets: Stevie Smith, Geoffrey Grigson, Roy Fuller, Gavin Ewart, and Charles Causley. Smith was always a poet concerned with death, and during her last years it had been her central theme, not really gloomy. The sort of pretensions Stevie Smith sometimes mocked were even more extensively and scathingly treated in some of Geoffrey Grigson's poems. When he was editor of New Verse in the 1930s, his activities with what he has called the 'billhook' cut down the pompous, the fatuous, and the obscurantist. Roy Fuller's poems began to appear during the 1930s, in such magazines as Grigson's New Verse. Gavin Ewart's poems fall into two long-separated periods. In Ewart, high spirits, low humour, black farce and affectionate melancholy all combine: sometimes one of these is in the ascendant, sometimes another. Causley's earlier brisk ballads sometimes seem a little too resolutely jolly, but he isn't the simple old-fashioned lyrical soul some people take him for.
