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Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur added a chilly frisson to the Victorian age's bustling cult of novelty, with its melancholy consolation that it was all to the good that the latest thing would soon be replaced by the even more up-to-date, for ‘The old order changes, yielding place to new, / And God fulfils himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world’. Nowhere is this truer than of that movable feast we call the contemporary, which is ever bidding adieu as one poetic generation rapidly replaces another, as Eliot suggested, in a mere ten years. During 1993 and 1994, cultural circles in the UK witnessed a concerted and successful media drive, originating from the Poetry Society and its organ, Poetry Review, to establish the presence of a distinctive and significant ‘New Generation’ of young poets on the literary scene, a generation which, in its newness, would be the wonder of the earth. The campaign involved countless television and radio appearances, group readings and displays in libraries and art centres, bookshops and pubs nationwide. Even schoolchildren and somewhat superannuated politicians were called in to give their opinions in the special issue of Poetry Review devoted to the topic. There was also an international dimension, with readings in the United States and the Caribbean, appropriating to itself no doubt Simon Armitage's independently arranged ten-day US tour, and Glyn Maxwell's West Indian visit, in fulfilment of the terms of his Somerset Maugham Travel Prize, to both of which the Review alluded, while also recording its particular gratitude ‘to the British Council for buying copies for distribution overseas’ (p. 1).

It was, in fact, a promotion. And, indeed, an effective hype, efficiently orchestrated by the public relations company Colman Getty PR. During this period the attendance at poetry readings and the sale of slim volumes soared. But was it more than just hype? Was there, here, the hope of a genuinely ‘postmodern’ generation of British poets; or was it merely a happenstance, an accidental concurrence of diverse talents and literary destinies, opportunistically constructed, under the banner of the hyper-real, for marketing purposes?