Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In the year that Joseph Paxton's monumental glasshouse was being constructed in Hyde Park, Wordsworth died and Tennyson published In Memoriam. When the Great Exhibition opened to demonstrate to all the world that England was the richest, the most powerful and the most envied among the nations, Tennyson could only compose The Daisy and Browning hardly distinguished himself with Christmas Eve and Easterday. After the middle of the century, in fact, there was a steady decline in the field of poetry in quality if not in quantity, and though Hopkins was writing, neither publishers nor the public knew anything about it, and would not have been any the wiser even if they had. If, then, we look for reasons why we should celebrate this year, we can at least point to the renewed vitality in literature, and poetry in particular, and the arts that began roughly in the second decade of this century, and is far from being exhausted, even though it may be argued that at the moment we are passing through a temporary lull.

It is tempting in a Festival number to indulge in solemn comparisons between the situation of Britain as it was in 1851 and as it is today. A good deal of printer's ink and broadcast programmes have already been devoted to this topic. Such comparisions are usually unprofitable and often disingenuous. In some respects we are very much worse off, in others better. We are to all intents and purposes at war with Russia, as we were a hundred years ago (and as we are sure to be, in a hot or a cold fashion, for many years to come). But in the course of these hundred years we have also succeeded in abolishing poverty in these islands together with many of the grosser abuses and vices of industrialism. We have lost much, but there have been solid gains. The meat ration may only be 10d. in the lb. (or whatever), but we are beginning to pay a belated homage to Ezra Pound, while immovably enthroned as our G.O.M. of poetry sits Mr. Eliot instead of Sir Alfred Austin or Robert Bridges.

What concerns us more particularly in this journal is the apparent lack of interest on the part of the public in poetry, or in new poetry, and the consequent disinclination of publishers to sponsor books of verse, about which there has been much discussion and lamentation of late. Certainly this is a serious state of affairs, which yet may prove a blessing in disguise if poets are prevented from rushing into print with sheaves of indifferent verse. The enthusiasm of the reading public in the 'thirties to purchase volumes of such verse was undoubtedly a curious phenomenon, and hardly conducive to the production of first-class work. It encouraged the making of reputations that today inevitably are looking somewhat hollow. No poet can any more acquire a spurious popularity with a few jejune ideas, mawkish sentimentalities about the sanctity of the proletariat and pious formulas for the new Utopia, as was the case some fifteen years ago. The bleak atmosphere of the nineteen-fifties will be a testing time, artistically, morally and intellectually. The emphasis in creative writing must be on technical mastery and depth of thought and emotion, in short on style and the recovery of tradition, as has been remarked before in these pages. And that does not mean a mere repetition of traditional styles of expression and modes of thought. Far from it. If the contemporary poet can survive the present wintry blast, he will only do so because of those enduring qualities. There may then be something of value to discover from the dome on the south bank.