British Poetry in the 1990's and other stories

 Thirty years ago, and more, and some of it seems like yesterday. One is getting old when one can remember new titles by Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn being published, Betjeman being Laureate and Heaney being young. But the idea has been growing on me that the 1990's were a Golden Age. One can never tell at the time but it is as much history now as WW2 was in the 70's.

Not having been around at the time of Eliot and Yeats, of Auden, Dylan Thomas or the 1950's, I don't know what it was like then but I've been re-living the 90's with the additional benefit of some hindsight through the pages of a pile of Poetry Reviews. It's remarkable how much interest there is in them. Some names haven't remained as fashionable, some of the commentary is overdone (not much changes there) and, sometimes for the better, we didn't know then what we know now but it comes across vividly in a bright magazine as a period of energy, with lots of developing talent and I'm not sure the century and, in fact, the millennium didn't end on a high point comparable with almost any other decade you might care to mention. 

And so I have begun to set about saying so in what is very unlikely to be anything book length. It could be dissertation length since I see that 5000 words can count as that these days. It's 2000 words already, having set out the first chapter but it's from hereon in that it will test out the stamina to stay the distance. The problem is that it won't go anywhere, not see print, and so it doesn't really matter beyond providing me with a project. It could be a further pdf, I dare say.

It's the weight, as in extent, of the subject matter that becomes daunting. As soon as one's made half a dozen names essential to the period, another half dozen seem to want to ask why it's not them, too, and so on. There is no limit to how much one can write until one reaches one's own limit. But it's got a title, some sort of vague thesis and a first chapter. Nearly all of the required texts are here so let's see how far I can get with it. 

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It might be some time before the posthumous novel by Weldon Kees arrives from America so the Poetry Reviews came in useful to put off the return to Pushkin and the heavy biography. It's not that I'm not interested but I've got the gist of it and imagine that the last 250 pages will be much like the first 400. There are further stories of his to look at, I had promised myself a biography of Schubert and there is no shortage of re-reading available but that little run of one thing leading to another is at an end.

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Taking back the Larkin's Jazz box-set of discs from the lend they had been on, they are most welcome to a re-run through. I'd have been a trad man, too, had I been of the right generation and it's a great old world to step into, not having to know it all, just for the sheer enjoyment.