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An Institutional Gateway An Institutional Gateway
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Movements and Counter-Movements Movements and Counter-Movements
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Standing on One Side of the Gulf Standing on One Side of the Gulf
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The Larkin–Davie Controversy The Larkin–Davie Controversy
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Select Bibliography Select Bibliography
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7 Two Poetries?: A Re-Examination Of The ‘Poetry Divide’ In 1970s Britain
Get accessHELEN BAILEY is a postgraduate researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Reading. Her undergraduate degree was obtained from the University of Durham in 2008 and she was awarded a Master’s degree from the University of Reading in 2009. She has written on 1970s British poetry, as well as various aspects of narrative theory in the works of Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Durrell and Laurence Sterne. She also presented a paper at the Bernard Spencer Centenary conference in 2009. Her doctoral research explores the connection between music and the concept of ‘spirit’ in the writing of Samuel Beckett.
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Published:16 December 2013
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Abstract
Through an analysis of the review section of the BBC’s The Listener, this article re-examines the frequently employed notion of a mainstream/avant-garde split in poetry of the 1970s. It explores the way in which the magazine and its reviewers formed a powerful institution, capable of determining the success or failure of poets. A number of debates in The Listener during the early 1970s reveal a deep-seated anxiety about the state of poetry. Concerned by the large number of published poets from various educational and socio-economic backgrounds, a number of poet-scholars, such as Anthony Thwaite, Donald Davie, and John Fuller, predicted the development of an insurmountable rift between two ‘rival camps’: avant-garde and mainstream. However, by following the heated and controversial debate that arose in 1973 after Davie’s particularly scathing review of Philip Larkin’s Oxford Anthology of Twentieth Century English Verse, a much more complex and individualized sense of fracture seems to emerge. As such, the article argues that this supposed ‘binary division’ forms a curious smokescreen, obscuring the chaotic and directionless wrangling that was really going on in poetry of the decade.
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