This book offers a broad account of British poetry after 1945 – its major trends, its central figures, its key texts, and the contexts out of which it has emerged. Chapters progress both thematically and chronologically, adumbrating particular movements, styles, and topics as they unfold over decade- or decade-and-a-half–long overlapping spans. The first five chapters cover different aspects of the period between 1945 and the mid-1980s, while the final three pick up the story in the 1980s and work their way toward the present. This is not an airtight chronology, however, and there are moments throughout when I jump ahead or retrace earlier steps in order to extend a story, reframe a connection, or preview an upcoming topic.

Such an organization is meant to present a coherent picture of the field. But it also spurs the argument that buzzes beneath the book's surface of exposition, description, and analysis. By reading across British poetry at various moments, juxtaposing disparate but proximate texts, I hope to show the variety and capaciousness of the work that constitutes the field rather than to present each chapter as a thematic silo. Of course, there are many times in the following pages when I place like next to like, but I have also sought opportunities to place like beside unlike. A number of the accounts of postwar British poetry that exist, and even the most powerful ones, tend to adhere to the silo model, either pitting factions or formations against each other or remaining within a narrow band of poetic practice. Al Alvarez both identified and perpetuated this tendency in the famous introduction to his 1962 anthology, The New Poetry, in which he describes the “machinery” of English poetry “since about 1930” as “a series of negative feed-backs.” The explanatory force of this analogy is quite real, but it also sets into motion two distinct but equally limiting methods of argument about that poetry.

First, it proffers a linear approach that obscures the complex and often incongruent unfurling of formal possibilities that has taken place over the past seventy years. And second, it models a species of antagonistic criticism that continues to flourish.