Excerpt from New British Poetry

from the Preface by Charles Simic

New British Poetry is hopefully that kind of curative book. It introduces, to North American readers, thirty-six poets from England, Scotland, and Wales. To make it as current as possible, Don Paterson and I decided to include only poets born after 1945 who have had at least two books published. Aside from that constraint, our plan was simply to read a lot of poetry and pick out poems we like. Most of the time we were in full agreement since certain poets and poems clearly stood out and made it hard to lose sight of them. We also had occasional divergences of opinion. I’d complain that the style of some poem would be too familiar to North American readers or that its allusions would be incomprehensible to them. Inevitably, the question of what made British poetry different from North American poetry kept coming up. Is it the tone, the language, the subject matter, or the seemingly unshakable devotion to rhyme and meter? It is all of these and more. Without question, British poets are far more at home in their long poetic tradition than North American poets are and can ever be. For that reason, their use of language is more self-conscious, more varied, and more hedonistic. The great British and Irish poets are voluptuaries of words, and North Americans rarely are.

Emerson’s limitless faith in the power of the individual to make a new beginning, reinventing everything from his identity to the art of poetry, has had few takers in Britain. Consequently, their poets are less egocentric than ours, who love the first-person pronoun more than anything else in the world. American poems may probe psychological, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic issues, but they rarely show much awareness of history, economics, and politics. As a nation with a utopian bent, Americans prefer to dwell on the future rather than on the past. We are way of traditions, closed intellectual systems, and ideas that do not come from experience. Intellectually, we tend to be autodidacts. All our great poets – and that goes for Whitman too – have been loners in search of an audience. In contrast, the poets in this anthology assume that they are part of a tradition, addressing a community that may neglect them now and then, but is there nevertheless.

Good poetry has a way of eluding even the most credible generalizations and critical labels. Despite everything I’ve said so far, New British Poetry is still a book of distinct individual voices. It displays an astonishing range of styles and an equal number of ways in which a poem can succeed. The poems in this anthology prove wrong any dogmatic aesthetic position, formalist or avant-garde, which claims to be in the possession of the ingredients and the recipe out of which superior poems are made. Most of the poets here are scavengers, free to appropriate what they need from very different kinds of poetries. The eclecticism of American poetry probably had something to do with that since living with contradictions is our national specialty. Whatever the case may be, the originality and sheer mastery to be found in this anthology is bound to restore anyone’s belief in literature. If you haven’t read Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Michael Hofmann, Jo Shapcott, Alice Oswald, Christopher Reid, Gillian Allnutt, and Jamie McKendrick – to name only a few poets included here – your life, I’m tempted to say, has not been as interesting as it deserves to be. The purpose of this anthology is to remedy that without further delay.

Copyright 2004 by Charles Simic. All rights reserved.