With respect to accent, class and poetry, I remember a German who has long been resident in southern England saying that the English like their poets to have regional accents and their novelists to speak in RP. I can't recall how he justified the remark but I think it was to the effect that the English assume that RP is somehow objective and omniscient whereas, feeling uneasy about poetry, they need it to be gritty, local and therefore authentic. I'm sure he explained it better.
I could immediately think of exceptions in both fields, but still felt that his insight held a grain of truth.
Accent of course, especially in the north of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, is not a sure marker of class but that assumption remains. And there are reasons for that assumption that relate to education. The public school system (for readers outside the UK 'public' means its opposite) was devised among other things to create a class who had lost their affiliation with where they were from and accent is one element of that.
Class is not anyway such a clear category, which is a second reason why I'm hesitant to accept Tim's confident figures that 8/10 young poets had a middle class childhood. (A plumber earns more than a TEFL teacher so if income is any indicator then the traditional class ascription of these jobs would be reversed.) The first reason I'd want to know more about such figures is that I can't really see how they have been arrived at ("if you look into the backgrounds of young poets...")
What I agree with fully is Tim's final sentence "over the last 20 years there has been a shift away from the relative social mobility that I experienced when younger." The introduction of ever higher university fees has surely contributed to that.
Jamie
> On 3 Sep 2016, at 11:30, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> You don't get many of the 'middle-class snooty stiff-lipped in-charge type' around thee days, at least not in the circles I've encountered - these days it is very difficult to differentiate by listening to accents and such stuff, most of the young middle class look and sound the same as most other young people. But at the same time if you look into the backgrounds of young poets you'll find that these days around 8 out of 10 of them had middle class childhoods etc., - over the past 20 years there has been a shift away from the relative social mobility that I experienced when younger.
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> Cheers
>
> Tim
>
>
>> On 2 Sep 2016, at 17:54, Peter Riley wrote:
>>
>> Maybe not. I can only say that the majority of the successful (some big-scale) new young poets I come across up here or get to hear of (Kim Moore , Steve Ely, William Letford, Andrew McMillan... and a lot of others whose names I can't remember and didn't interest me) seem to be if not actual working-class (indeed I did use the term very loosely) very distant from the middle-class snooty stiff-lipped in-charge type which David mentioned. Maybe those who had local accents (which was all of them) gave me a distorted impression.
>> P.
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>> On 2 Sep 2016, at 16:33, Tim Allen wrote:
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>> How ever did you come to that conclusion Peter? It's not true. It's not even near the truth - I think you should have tried harder to 'make the distinction'.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Tim A.
>>
>>> On 2 Sep 2016, at 15:30, Peter Riley wrote:
>>>
>>> The tremendous outburst of young poets (some writing old poetry) in recent years has been dominated by working-class people insofar as you can make the distinction.
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