Radicals and realists: British poetry from Auden to Heaney

My dissertation examines the work of five postwar British poets: W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. I consider their poetry in relation to literary, social, and political developments from the late 1930s, through the postwar period to the 1990s. I have attempted to reconcile two different perspectives on recent British poetry---one that is aesthetically formalist, the other, socio-political---and, in so doing, I hope to have demonstrated that postwar poetry in Britain is written in the context of a humanist revival. My main concern, therefore, is with questions of historical experience, the identity of the poet, and poetic invention.The work of most British poets following the Allied victory in 1945 reflected the search for stability in the complex and changing world of postwar Europe. The era also saw a return to realistic social concerns as well as a revival of traditional aesthetic form. There was, in fact, no way for poets to avoid dealing with social history after the war. The concatenation of historical forces on a vast scale with individual human destiny was too great. Even when an escape from contemporary life was attempted, as in the work of Geoffrey Hill, it failed. The style and diction adopted by poets of the Movement, including Philip Larkin, reflected a desire to communicate with common men and women that was part and parcel of a renewed engagement with reality.Yet it is undeniable that in the work of each of the poets I have discussed, there is a romantic, radical undertow. A psychological contest takes place between the desire for escape, for evasion, and the prevailing norms of realism and respect for the social order. T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets that humankind "cannot bear very much reality," but, for British poets after Auden, there would be no returning to the romantic and radical strategies of aesthetic abstraction and hostility to the norms of "bourgeois" society that characterized the modernist avant-garde.