Carol Ann Duffy has influenced a whole generation of poets writing or beginning to write in the 1980s, and brought an eclectic range of influences to bear on the contemporary poetry scene. Her contribution also reflects the beginnings of a change that has recently taken place in British poetry. This change is remarked on by the editors of Bloodaxe's The New Poetry as one that brings

It might be argued that Duffy is one of the key factors in this change. Her attempts to strip bare the linguistic devices of poetic language, and to explore some of the patterns and rhythms of everyday, non-standard English, have made her accessible to a wide readership. The snappy sentences, and apparent simplicity of her work, however, do not prevent Duffy from addressing complex philosophical issues about the function of language and the construction of the self, or from dealing with a wide range of issues, from the effects of sexism, racism, immigration, domestic violence, and social disaffection, to the complexities of love.

Although a non-British tradition, which includes the work of the French poet Jacques Prévert (1900-77), the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-73) and the black French-speaking poet from Martinique, Aimé Césaire (b. 1913), has been of obvious importance to Duffy, she can also, perhaps not surprisingly, be read as very much a part of a tradition of British poetry. We can trace the influence of Wordsworth (her interest in childhood and memory, and her desire to speak the language of the ‘common man’), of Browning (her use of the monologue) and of Auden (her interest in the vernacular and popular forms). We can see how the nostalgia and disaffection of Philip Larkin blend surprisingly with the surrealism of Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes; how her interest in language and the monologue corresponds with the interests of the Scottish poet W. S. Graham (1942-77). Importantly, too, we can see how the early influence of Eliot rubs curiously alongside that of the Beats, and the Liverpool poets with whom she associated in the 1970s.