I think it's quite impossible to think in terms of mainstream and
non-mainstream before the 1960s. There were poets who were neglected and
sometimes this was because they connected to (mainly continental)
"modernism" and sometimes it was because they wrote perfectly ordinary
good poetry which for some reason nobody wanted, and sometimes it was
because they were absolutely terrible. Some of the most radical poets such
as David Jones and Lynette Roberts, were published, from their first books,
by Faber. In fact if anything the upsurgence in the 1950s, the rebellious
youth, came from the direction of Larkin, the Movement, all that stuff,
which at first appeared from small presses. This was what broke with
tradition, because the tradition was at the time liberal and prepared to
read poetry within the whole inheritance of "modern art", which Larkin
hated.
There were quite a lot more poets of a more-or-less radical tendency in
45-60 and earlier who remained unknown, not, usually, because they were
radical, but because they were extremist with it, or because they were too
young to have established their careers before all the publicity attached
to the Movement shoved their kind of writing out of sight, (like Burns
Singer perhaps) or for completely mysterious reasons.
I think someone like Rosemary Tonks wrote a poetry which would have gained
a response if the reading traditions of the 1940s which welcomed early
Dylan Thomas had continued, but by the time she was publishing (1960s)
people were asking different questions. Well they were mainly asking the
same question over and over again ---- "but what does it MEAN?"---- and
she got a lot of critical attack, and vanished. I think that period,
45-60 was a transitional episode which established a big divisiveness,
which later deepened and eventually became a widespread splintering. In
spite of many differences there was a sense before the 60s, that there was
room for a great variety of writing within the central zone of poetry.
There's a short anonymous piece in Parataxis No.4 (1993) called "Lost
Precursors" which lists seventeen poets, mostly from before 45-60 but many
of them would have continued writing through it. (The article seems to
contain a number of mis-prints which garble some of the statements and
names).
/PR
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