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1a. Encouraging features.

The encouraging features are the good poems that have been written; ultimately you can't measure cheerfulness about the 'scene' in any other terms. Late mid-century periods don't often seem good for English poetry, and this century is no exception. It proceeds in a series of gradual downward steps, from great poets to 'important talents': Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Empson, Dylan Thomas, Larkin, Hughes. America has been different: more consistency, the best work more evenly spread. Pound, Crane (maybe), Stevens, Ransom, Williams, Lowell—you can't so easily space them out in a recognizable procession, best at the front, others following in line. Yet mortality has struck at this group, leaving a situation much like the English one: Pound a reverend senior, and Lowell the only major voice—no visible prospect of worthy successors in the later generations.

In the last decade, then, given these circumstances of decline and decimation, the names and the books that have provided most hope that poetry would continue as a great and exciting art are the answer to the first part of Question I. Dreadfully simple: Larkin and The Whitsun Weddings (and one or two uncollected, evanescent poems like 'The Building' which have yet to get into a volume); Hughes and Crow (no, not much before that, because his verse had not fused its various elements into a scheme that made the random energy and violence acceptable (but not that Crow could be done again): Sylvia Plath and Ariel, undoubtedly; and Lowell and For the Union Dead and Notebook. This is to fine it down a lot, but it's an attempt to think of the last decade in terms of the very best that deserves to be remembered, anthologised say, a century hence, if a literary tradition persists. So to carry on, and add to the anthology names that would be represented by very good individual poems rather than bodies of work (and from whom, in cases where they are still alive and writ-ing, one might hope that an important, even a major poetry might still come): other 'encouraging features' are certain poems written by John Berryman, Stevie Smith, R. S. Thomas, Roy Fuller, George MacBeth, Peter Porter, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Martin Bell, Ian Hamilton (O.K. he is the editor, and that's not why he's included). Short of some surprising events, it's up to the surviving members of these first and second divisions to provide the important poetry of the next decade; which is anticipating Question 2.

1b. Discouraging features.
All the bad verse written. But then the mediocre are always with us, and the special, worst burdens require to be particularised. They are: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Rod McKuen, Simon, Garfunkel and all. Poets? Oh yes, so it would be agreed on all those campuses and in all those folk clubs where people gather to sing secular devotions to popular social and political causes as a substitute for doing anything about them. The poetry of modern 'folk' is one of the most depressing, effete—and commercially successful—strands in current culture. It is profoundly anti-intellectual, anti-modernist, and wet. All our submerged Georgian sentimentalism comes out in it at the mere drop of a noble social platitude. It is worse than the worst of Liverpool, a deader weight than the most opaque of Concrete, because they at least make genuflections to the idea of poetry as something complex and strenuous. And it could become modish with results more disagreeable than with Pop Art—because it is quite devoid of the ultimate, distancing irony which enables the Lichtensteins and Warhols and Hamiltons (Richard) to know that what they are doing is outrageous. I.e., Dylan thinks he's good.

Second discouraging feature, which accompanies the first and may indirectly derive from it: the gradual contraction of the area in which poetry is seriously and rigorously discussed, the widening of the area in which gossip, 'Briefing' chit-chat, and publicity values have taken over.

2. Hopes for the next decade.
(i) That more good poems should continue to be written: rather more than in the last decade. Without their being over-solemn about it, it is necessary for the better poets now writing to understand what is at stake: the very possibility of a serious poetry which has something to contribute to civilization in the late years of a century when technology—including the technology used by the artist—will tend increasingly to reduce that civilization to a marginal diversion, and when liberal humanist values will be draining out into the gulf between arid technological innovation and the fey, mystical anarchism in which progressive politics are getting bogged down.

(ii) Second hope: that somehow, somewhere, the rigorous critical discipline will develop which will enable us to weed out the worst and preserve the best. (When the first M.A. theses are written on the poetry of John Lennon as anything other than a phenomenon in the history of taste or publicity, the battle may already have been lost.)

(iii) Third hope, about the character of the poetry which could be written: that it should have a concerned grasp of social and political reality. For the moment at least, it is time to shut up the rag-and-bone shop of the heart.