In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton's Review was given over to a symposium on 'The State of Poetry'. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical document. The symposium's tone is embattled: it finds enemies and traitors on every bookshelf, with the whole future of English poetry threatened by sinister forces. 'American Poetry' is seen as the big, bad colonial influence by more than half the 35 contributors, few of whom bother to make it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. 'The Liverpool Poets' are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. 'The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,' wrote Roy Fuller. 'Infantile simplicity is all,' wrote Julian Symons.

LRB 23 July 1987 | PDF Download