I agree, Robert. My PhD thesis was about this “stream” up until the year 2000.




From: "Hampson, R" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2018 14:22:37 +0000


I was thinking about the metaphor of a stream ... and then thinking of the tradition of 'English poetry' (whatever that means) in those terms: if the mainstream in that sense for the nineteenth-century runs through Wordsworth and Coleridge (and other Romantics) through to Browning and Tennyson and Yeats, and if the successors are then seen to be the poets of high modernism (Pound, Eliot, HD, Loy ...), then the successors of that tradition are the late modernists (in London, Cambridge and elsewhere) rather than the commercial poetry. (note the 'ifs' in all this.)