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Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945-1979

Online ISBN:
9781399519878
Print ISBN:
9781399519854
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945-1979

Luke Roberts
Luke Roberts

Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry

King's College London
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
31 May 2024
Online ISBN:
9781399519878
Print ISBN:
9781399519854
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

This book explores the relationship between poetry and radical politics in Britain between the formation of the welfare state and the advent of Thatcherism. Drawing on a diverse range of authors and traditions, it presents a series of case studies involving individual poets, activist groups, and political organisations. Part One focuses on the legacies of empire and the experience of exile in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J.H. Prynne and others, including poets associated with the African National Congress. These opening chapters critique the exclusionary category of ‘British Poetry’, and respond to Caribbean, Transatlantic, African, and Latin American contexts and traditions. Part Two follows the emergence of liberation struggles around gender, race, and sexuality across the 1970s. Each chapter is structured around critical close readings and new archival and contextual research. Alongside poets including Denise Riley, Anna Mendelssohn, Bill Griffiths, Lee Harwood, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, these chapters examine community writings workshops, radical journals such as Race Today, and prisoners’ rights activism. Taken as a whole, Living in History tracks the ambivalence between avant-garde poetic ambition and leftist political organising, and comes to focus on the carceral apparatus of the state as a site of antagonism and critique. The book’s concluding chapter and coda present a methodological account of ‘good enough history’, and restates the difficulty and possibility in bringing together the subjects and traditions of the preceding chapters.

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