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This chapter describes the creation of a poetry group in the 1950s, whose members included Ted Hughes, Philip Hobsbaum, Edward Lucie-Smith, Australian bookseller Peter Porter, and BBC producer George MacBeth. The Group may be considered a forerunner to the contemporary poetry workshop, or indeed the first proper poetry workshop in England. However, Group meetings had a distinct flavour that would make them unfamiliar to most who attend poetry workshops today. Not only was there the bearded and forbidding Hobsbaum in the chair and a heavy Leavisite aspect to proceedings, there was also the structure of the evening: its first half would concentrate on new work by one writer; this would then be followed by a coffee break, after which members could share work they particularly liked and, increasingly in later years, new poetry of their own. The Group also perpetuated ideas and an ambience as well as a social network that started in Oxford and Cambridge, and brought its members into contact with poets who had been very much outside both.

This chapter describes the creation of a poetry group in the 1950s, whose members included Ted Hughes, Philip Hobsbaum, Edward Lucie-Smith, Australian bookseller Peter Porter, and BBC producer George MacBeth. The Group may be considered a forerunner to the contemporary poetry workshop, or indeed the first proper poetry workshop in England. However, Group meetings had a distinct flavour that would make them unfamiliar to most who attend poetry workshops today. Not only was there the bearded and forbidding Hobsbaum in the chair and a heavy Leavisite aspect to proceedings, there was also the structure of the evening: its first half would concentrate on new work by one writer; this would then be followed by a coffee break, after which members could share work they particularly liked and, increasingly in later years, new poetry of their own. The Group also perpetuated ideas and an ambience as well as a social network that started in Oxford and Cambridge, and brought its members into contact with poets who had been very much outside both.

At thirty-eight years old, W. S. Graham's poetry as well as his literary life appear to have been expressions of independence. However, his poetry, at least up to The Nightfishing (1955), was dismissed by some as too dependent on the voice of Dylan Thomas. Edward Lucie-Smith implies that Graham's independence is mere isolation and makes Graham's reputation excruciatingly dependent on the tides of literary fashion. This chapter examines Graham's indebtedness to Thomas and argues that it has been exaggerated at the expense of other influences. It insists that Graham is unusually alert to the writer's dependence upon language that may hinder as much as facilitate the communication sought by the writer. It also considers Graham's finest accounts of ‘dependence’ in his late, personal poems dedicated to his wife.