William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter analyzes the language of seriousness in the poetry of Peter Porter. For instance, ‘Seahorses’, from 1969's A Porter Folio, a poem in which Porter recalls finding seahorses upon the beach ...
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This chapter analyzes the language of seriousness in the poetry of Peter Porter. For instance, ‘Seahorses’, from 1969's A Porter Folio, a poem in which Porter recalls finding seahorses upon the beach in the Australia of his childhood, includes the thought of how sometimes they were ‘like a suicide wreathed in fine /Sea ivy and bleached sea roses /One stiff but apologetic in its trance’. The poem ‘Seaside Resort’, from 1972's Preaching to the Converted, half mourns the passing of the Victorian age and the age of seriousness that succeeded an age of faith while Porter's collection The Cost of Seriousness brings questions of seriousness and its cost to a head.Less
This chapter analyzes the language of seriousness in the poetry of Peter Porter. For instance, ‘Seahorses’, from 1969's A Porter Folio, a poem in which Porter recalls finding seahorses upon the beach in the Australia of his childhood, includes the thought of how sometimes they were ‘like a suicide wreathed in fine /Sea ivy and bleached sea roses /One stiff but apologetic in its trance’. The poem ‘Seaside Resort’, from 1972's Preaching to the Converted, half mourns the passing of the Victorian age and the age of seriousness that succeeded an age of faith while Porter's collection The Cost of Seriousness brings questions of seriousness and its cost to a head.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ...
More
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.
