In the second half of the 20th century English poetry went through an extraordinary transformation.
In the aftermath of war new kinds of poets emerged,
who took poetry from a scholarly elite
and turned it into an art form for everyone.
They found a powerful new language
and laid bare the torments of the modern soul.
Poets from America brought a direct style of performance
to resonate with a new audience.
Yes! I am that worm soul
under the heel of the demon horses.
And as poets caught the public eye, the cameras of the BBC
brought their work into millions of living rooms.
From Philip Larkin, who captured the spirit of '50s Britain...
Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
..to Sylvia Plath, who gate-crashed the all-male club
of poetry in English...
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
..to Seamus Heaney, the Irish farmer's son
who found readers all over the world.
There were new voices from outside the mainstream
and prophets of the counterculture.
I think everyone ought to take LSD
and get rid of their violence and their colour
and their identity and, like, get with it finally
and stop making such a big, noisy scene.
Together, they voiced what it was like to live in the modern age.
This is how they did it in their own words.
This programme contains some strong language.
Britain in the 1950s.
A country still recovering from war.
A country rebuilding itself
and ready for change.
The ambitious elder statesmen of English poetry,
such as TS Eliot and WH Auden,
felt like giants from a previous age.
I think poetry after the Second World War
had lost a lot of its confidence.
And I think that the sort of ground was open for voices to come in
and be heard.
There's been a great tradition in 20th-century poetry
of issuing manifestos.
Each generation comes along, issues a manifesto saying,
"Those lot before us are rubbish. Now it's our turn."
True to form, in 1956,
a group of up-and-coming poets were all published together
in a brand-new anthology,
and became known, informally, as The Movement.
Reacting against the obscure experiments of modernism,
these writers used traditional verse forms and a wry everyday language.
The early poetry of those writers
was full of observation
and anecdote,
and often, observation and anecdote
drawn from the daily lives
of the poets, which meant the daily lives of the readers too.
The Movement was made up of mostly male, white-collar workers,
including librarian Philip Larkin,
and university lecturer Kingsley Amis.
When you have movements and generations and little collectives,
there's always one person that stands out, really,
and it's around them everything revolves.
And in the case of those '50s poets, it's Larkin.
Philip Larkin was affectionately known as the Hermit Of Hull.
Though he won critical acclaim in his 30s,
he shunned the limelight
for a quiet career as a university librarian for over three decades.
But, in 1964, he allowed himself to be filmed
for the BBC's flagship arts programme, Monitor.
Work and I get on fairly well, I think.
Just these occasions when, um,
one would like to prove it by not working for a bit.
HE CHUCKLES
When I bind up
the library committee minutes at the end of five years,
it makes a great fat volume,
but it's not the same as a volume of poetry.
Larkin was always described to me at school
as "the voice of the man next door".
He didn't sound like the man who lived next door to me,
but I understand where that comment comes from.
Uh, there's a sense of him describing the daily,
the ordinary, the domestic.
It was a language that came out of the bus stop
and the newspaper,
transformed through his poetic powers.
When getting my nose in a book Cured most things short of school
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size
Later, with inch-thick specs
Evil was just my lark
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues
Don't read much now
The dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives
The chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar
Get stewed
Books are a load of crap.
The striking thing about Larkin's poetry is, in a way,
it's eloquent ordinariness.
You can analyse as much as you want his poetry
in terms of...sort of the nerves it touches
and the experiences of sort of welfare state Britain,
life in the post-war world, that it illuminates,
and that's all true but, in the end,
it's his gift for memorable phrases and lines.
He had the tendency to send himself up rather,
so, when appears on camera,
he is, in a way,
playing a...kind of a part.
I read that, you know, I'm a miserable sort of fellow
writing a kind of welfare state sub poetry,
um, doing it well, perhaps,
but it isn't really what poetry is
and it isn't really the sort of poetry we want.
But I wonder whether it ever occurs to the writer of criticism
like that, that, really, one agrees with them,
that what one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is
and the kind of environment one's had and has now
that one doesn't really choose the poetry one writes,
one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or can write.
Living on the margins suited Larkin.
His writing captured a remote awkwardness
with the world around him.
He's always very keen to make us understand
that sense of separation, partly because we all feel it.
It's particularly powerful, I think, in Church Going,
where you get that self irony of him
taking off his bicycle-clips, because he feels there's something...
something about it that you just shouldn't be in a church
with bicycle-clips on, it's somehow disrespectful.
Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence
Move forward, run my hand around the font
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new
Cleaned, or restored?
Someone would know: I don't
Mounting the lectern I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce,
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant
The echoes snigger briefly
Back at the door I sign the book
Donate an Irish sixpence
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
When we want to go back
and look at what it was like to live in those post-war years,
Larkin's a very good place to go and find out,
you know, the flavour and the vibe of that world.
Although he wrote just four slim volumes of poems in his lifetime,
Larkin remains one of the greatest
and most popular poets of the 20th century.
If Larkin was the eccentric loner of The Movement,
writer and lifelong friend Kingsley Amis
was its very public face.
Frequently appearing on television,
he would become the most outspoken member of the group.
On the BBC, Amis voiced his disappointment
with the conservatism of '50s Britain.
I personally then was suffering from a good deal of depression
over some...quite a long time,
over the results of the 1951 election,
which seemed to me to say that the modest bit of social revolution
that the British might have been going in for
between 1945 and 1951 had now come to an end,
and the public had turned their back on that, and, um,
we're trying to reverse the process
which I found depressing.
Kingsley Amis was kind of associated with the angry young men.
He was never really angry I don't think, Kingsley Amis,
but he did like to provoke saying, you know,
Eliot and Picasso were rubbish
but it's...it's an act, you know, it's a pose.
Although Amis was most successful as a novelist,
most famously for Lucky Jim in 1954,
he actually began his career as a poet.
I think Kingsley Amis would see himself as a light verse poet,
he edited an anthology of light verse,
he enjoyed making people laugh.
Lucky Jim, how I envy him
Author, poet, fellow of Peterhouse Cambridge
Jazz critic, you ask what his name is
I say Kingsley Amis! ALL LAUGH
Well, the first poem is on an ever-interesting topic,
though you might not think so to start with.
There's a poem of his called A Bookshop Idyll, which sort of...
looks at the differences between what men read and what women read,
but, interestingly, the poem turns everything on its head at the end
and admits that, actually, men have got a softer side too.
Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart
Girls aren't like that
We men have got love well weighed up: our stuff
Can get by without it
Women don't seem to think that's good enough
They write about it
And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesn't strike them
Women are really much nicer than men
No wonder we like them
Deciding this, we can forget those times
We sat up half the night
Chock-full of love
Crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes
And couldn't write.
Having criticised his elitist predecessors,
Amis made a virtue of his lower middle class credentials,
seeing himself as a voice for the ordinary man.
But he and the other Movement poets
soon settled into the establishment.
If you look at the photos now, those poets from the '50s, you know,
then I'm afraid there's a good degree of tweed jackets.
They don't seem the sort of common men, um,
the ordinary chaps that...
At the time they did and as they saw themselves, um,
but they were certainly...cared about their audience.
It's just I think their audience, in the end,
was other chaps like them.
By the 1960s, Britain, to some,
seemed in danger of being left behind
by a new kind of poetry coming from America.
In 1962, the influential British critic Al Alvarez
published an anthology promoting American poets.
In an anxious world coming to terms with the holocaust
and potential atomic warfare,
Alvarez' The New Poetry
was a reaction against the safe, insular concerns of The Movement.
Instead, he championed a group of pioneering writers in the US
leading the way.
These poets started to feel that the British tradition was suffocating.
The kind of stylized and formalized language of the Victorians
really needs to be left behind,
and poetry needs to get to grips with everyday life,
and it needs to find the music in everyday life,
It needs to bring in
colloquial and idiomatic language.
John Berryman was part of this new set of American writers
who, together, were often called the Confessional Poets.
Haunted for life by his father's suicide,
John Berryman was a classically-trained
but troubled talent.
Alvarez went to meet him in 1967 for the BBC,
where he was writing his poems in a Dublin pub...
..which was apparently where he did most of his writing
and a lot of his drinking.
My feelings about Yeats were quite queer.
I didn't want to be like Yeats...
..I wanted to BE Yeats!
But that failed.
You can see why that failed. MAN LAUGHS
Berryman was talking about a nervous breakdown
and suicide attempts,
um, madness,
despair, alcoholism and so forth.
Sometimes it's exhilarating and exciting to read,
sometimes you don't know where to look.
And a lot of people were really turned off,
and horrif... They thought it was sort of vulgar.
I don't get very much fan mail...
..but I had a lot of mail after I published this song
in the United States.
I may say that the mail was entirely hostile.
Life, friends, is boring
We must not say so
After all...
..the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn
And moreover, my mother told me as a boy...
..repeatingly...
"Ever to confess you're bored...
"..means you have no
"Inner resources."
I conclude now
I have no
Inner resources.
Berryman grew up in an age which saw a rise in the culture
of psychoanalysis in the US after the war.
Inspired by Freud, and often in therapy themselves,
he and his peers were reassessing the world around them,
but also the world within.
I think especially of two books,
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life...
..and The interpretation Of Dreams, in 1900.
Uh, and nobody...
In the first place, everybody has to have read those books,
and in the second place,
nobody's feelings about human experience
are quite the same after reading those books.
The Dream Songs was Berryman's Pulitzer prize-winning collection
of poems, where an extreme alter ego called Henry
lives out one nightmare of guilt and self-loathing after another.
When he started out as a poet,
he was kind of rather stiff and repressed in that '50s way.
Then he discovers in The Dream Songs
and through the creation of this character, Henry,
a new way of writing,
a new way of exploring himself, while wearing a mask.
He takes one step back from his mania,
his alcoholism,
his suicidal tendencies, his impossible-to-live-with-ness,
but just one step and sees himself,
and so it's sort of objectified,
but, at the same time, as a reader, we absolutely know that it's him.
But...
..never did Henry As he thought he did
End anyone
And hacks her body up
And hide the pieces where they may be found
He knows
He went over everyone
And nobody's missing.
It was deeply appealing because
it was so frank and honest and slightly scary.
There's something wonderful about somebody saying
something that you wouldn't dare to say yourself.
Berryman had a pretty chaotic lifestyle.
You know, there was heavy drinking,
a lot of despair, a lot of unhappy relationships
and it all ended in suicide.
Something about writing in an orderly '50s way
did not allow him to address that realm of experience.
In 1972, after writing a total of 385 Dream Songs,
Berryman killed himself by jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis
during the middle of winter.
The "confessional" generation of writers
redefined a modern voice in poetry
which could discuss any topic, no matter how personal or painful.
Poetry has always drawn on autobiography
but the notion of confessional poetry
is the idea that these poets
have shameful secrets that they're going to reveal,
and that crosses a line for some people
into the lurid, the tabloid,
and revealing things that, really, it would be better to keep private.
One Bostonian who took this frank form of poetry to its extremes
was former model-turned-writer Anne Sexton.
Sexton took up writing in the pre-feminist culture
of America in the 1950s.
Her work was shockingly honest
and informed by her battles with mental illness.
You know, though, I did get very manic once,
and they told me I was psychotic, in the hospital,
and I thought that was a riot cos I was still me.
You know, I thought psychotic was some place else but I was still me.
Sexton, more than everybody else,
wrote about previously-taboo subjects in her poetry.
She wrote about menstruation, she wrote about masturbation,
she wrote about incest, she wrote about adultery.
And she wrote about them in ways
that suggested that she was not imagining them,
that these were things she had intimate personal experience.
Menstruation At Forty.
I was thinking of a son
The womb is not a clock nor a bell tolling
But in the eleventh month of its life
I feel the November of the body as well as of the calendar
In two days it will be my birthday
And as always the earth is done with its harvest
This time I hunt for death.
Poetry had always been pretty.
It was supposed to be beautiful,
and she was forcing in subject matter that was definitionally ugly.
It was in the womb all along
I was thinking of a son...
You!
The never acquired
The never seeded or unfastened
You of the genitals I feared
The stalk and the puppy's breath.
It was at the suggestion of Sexton's therapists
that she began writing poetry.
She was what we would now call bipolar,
at the time called manic depressive,
and it was suggested to her that poetry might help her
in a therapeutic way.
Um, many people have tried to write poetry in therapy,
and Sexton wrote very great poetry.
My psychiatrist suggested
that I watch Channel 2.
"You have an educational television there, why don't you look at it?"
So, I did, and IA Richards was explaining the form of a sonnet,
and I thought, oh, so that's a sonnet.
So I sat down, tried to write one. It was a pretty bad thing.
And that just turned me on
and then I, you know...turned on!
Eventually, it became impossible to separate Sexton
from her intensely autobiographical work.
She has a role she sees for herself
and she insists on playing it,
and I just got sick of it,
the endless posturing, and just thinking,
I don't want to go on any more about female stuff,
I don't want to be wombing and entrailing all over the place
and all that stuff.
I just wanted her to go for a walk.
I myself will die without baptism
A third daughter they didn't bother
My death will come on my name day
What's wrong with the name day?
It's only an angel of the sun
Woman, weaving a web over your own
A thin and tangled poison
Scorpio
Bad spider - die!
The raw immediacy of Anne Sexton's writing
won her continued attention until her suicide in 1974.
It may seem remarkable that so many of the important poets
of the 20th century also had very troubled personal lives.
Many of them, in fact, committed suicide.
There's a sense that being a great poet in the 20th century
is pretty hard to survive.
But the most famous of the American poets from this movement
would only be celebrated after her untimely death.
And she would secure her lasting place in poetry back in Britain.
What an extraordinary breakthrough Sylvia Plath was
to all of us who'd never read any women poets really
that shook us to bits.
Along came Plath and, God...
..who is this powerful, blazing woman?
Sylvia Plath remains one of the most remarkable female poets
of the last 100 years.
She gave women permission to express certain kinds of
emotions and experiences that had never been put into poetry before.
In the autumn of 1962, at her home in North London,
Sylvia Plath began to write Ariel,
the collection of poems that would make her name.
Stasis in darkness
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances
God's lioness
How one we grow
Pivot of heels and knees!
The furrow Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch.
Those last poems in Ariel are just spat out,
they come out at such a rate,
and they're so intense and concentrated.
This is really special.
Plath never appeared on television.
In this radio recording in her final months
she stressed her preference for intellectual rigour
over a poetry of self-pity.
I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous
and emotional experiences I have,
but I must say, I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart
that are informed by nothing except, you know, a needle or a knife
or whatever it is.
I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences,
even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured,
this sort of experience.
And one should be able to manipulate these experiences
with an informed and intelligent mind.
Despite the dark and tormented subject matter of her writing,
Plath led an outwardly traditional life,
as a wife and mother,
married to fellow poet Ted Hughes.
A rare interview of them together
captured a moment of domestic harmony.
SYLVIA PLATH: I think our domestic life
is practically indistinguishable
from all the people who live around us.
The only main difference is
that Ted doesn't go out to work at nine and come home at five,
he retires about nine to his room and works,
but I certainly have a life just like all the other housewives
and mothers in our district.
Shopping, dishes, and taking care of the baby and so forth and...
I think very few people have an idea I do anything at all
except household chores.
INTERVIEWER: Would you say that your temperaments are parallel,
or do you think they're in conflict?
TED HUGHES: I think, superficially, we're very alike.
We like the same things, we live at the same tempo,
but, obviously, this is a very fortunate covering for temperaments
that are extremely different.
In spite of the appearance of a happy marriage,
Plath had struggled with depression from her late teens.
Her mother, Aurelia, was interviewed by the BBC.
I was constantly asking her to make choices,
not to accept every opportunity that came along.
I felt she was pushing herself hard,
and I was always fearful, especially after her first breakdown
that she was pushing herself and too demanding of herself.
She had to be the perfect American housewife,
the perfect, beautifully-groomed wife,
the perfect housewife.
She also had to be the most brilliant poet of her generation.
And I mean, that's...
Something's got to give, hasn't it?
I mean, it's just tragic.
In her poem Lady Lazarus,
Plath reflected on her several suicide attempts.
I have done it again.
One year in every ten I manage it...
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout, "A miracle!"
That knocks me out.
In the early hours of the 23rd February, 1963,
during one of the coldest English winters ever,
Plath committed suicide by placing her head in a gas oven.
She was 30 years old.
Lines that have haunted me that were taken from Ariel,
um...
from the poem called The Elm...
Just Elm, I think.
"I am inhabited by a cry
"Nightly it flaps out
"Looking with its hooks
"For something to love."
Plath mythologized her personal life in her writing,
investing aspects of her emotional biography
with profound dramatic significance.
When her final poems were published posthumously in Ariel in 1965,
Plath became one of the most significant voices
of the 20th century,
not simply for poetry, but also for women.
She gets classed as a feminist poet
whether she'd like it or not,
so we keep treating her as a feminist martyr.
That's to uncomplicate a very complicated person.
No-one could get it right with Sylvia.
And the feminists would have been in just as much trouble
as everybody else.
I kind of wish that Sylvia had written a poem
about feminists, in which she got truly stuck into them,
but, of course, she didn't.
Although often remembered as the super couple
of modern English poetry,
Plath and Hughes' styles
were completely different from each other.
Unlike his urban contemporaries,
Yorkshireman Ted Hughes was unfashionably obsessed with nature.
He wanted to re-engage with the elemental forces,
with some fairly, you know, primitive notions.
Who is stronger than hope?
Death.
Who is stronger than the will?
Death.
Stronger than love?
Death.
Stronger than life?
Death.
But who is stronger than Death?
Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow.
Most other poets at that time were urban, academic,
erudite voices of professors and newspaper people.
In that context he was a kind of back woodsman
speaking a kind of agricultural version of the Bible.
And his mood and manner
were at variance with what was going in the poetic community at the time.
And I think for that reason they stood out right from the beginning.
Nature for him was violent and dark and brutal
in a way that no nature poetry had previously acknowledged,
so he created his own natural universe.
Pike, three inches long, perfect.
Pike in all parts,
green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
In comparison with a lot of other poets
who were talking about bicycle clips and statues in churches,
Hughes must have seemed rough and tough.
Larkin, not to his face, described Hughes,
as the Incredible Hulk.
There was really no love lost
between Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes.
Larkin said in his letters
that he thought Hughes' poems were embarrassing.
And when Hughes turned up to give a talk at Hull University,
Larkin says he was like a Christmas present from Easter Island
because of this great hewn face of his.
A charismatic presence, and eventual poet laureate,
Hughes was a private person and very reluctant to appear on screen.
But the relationship of poets to their audiences
was about to undergo a dramatic change.
The counterculture of the 1960s was transforming America.
It was a time of free love, political activism,
and experimentation.
And poets were taking a leading role.
There was a San Francisco explosion.
It feels something new and exciting
because they're prepared to write about taboo subjects.
The poets of the Beat Generation
whose leading light was Allen Ginsberg,
enchanted and scandalized with their revolutionary approach to writing.
The Beat poets made quite an impression
on a lot of us at the time.
I remember buying a book and there inside were all these photographs
of all these different cafes in San Francisco and in New York.
All these poets reading to enrapt audiences
and I remember, cos the audience
in the front row there were all these beautiful girls...
like that, looking at the poet.
I thought, "Ah, that's for me. I want to be a poet."
When Ginsberg arrived in London,
he was met with a storm of publicity never seen before for a poet.
An openly gay intellectual and committed Buddhist,
Allen Ginsberg was the most outspoken
and political member of the Beats.
Despite attacking America's conservatism,
he believed in change through spiritual or peaceful means.
During his visit, he took part in a discussion on violence
for the BBC's Panorama programme.
When you're in American and you see the negro problem
in full spate with its non-violent and violent manifestations,
how do you react? From your particular...
I think everyone ought to take LSD
and get rid of their violence and their colour and their identity
and, like, get with it, finally, and stop making such a big, noisy scene.
There comes a point in 20th century poetry where poets put themselves
to the foreground, they reveal who they are,
they do lots of interviews, they come on stage
and do lots of stuff between the poems.
The purists hate this because the poem is supposed to be sacred
and stand on its own.
But certainly for the last 30 or 40 years we've had poets
who show all, and Ginsberg is somebody like that.
Ginsberg's poems railed against the conformity of modern America,
dealing frankly with taboo subjects like homosexuality
and drug addiction.
His most famous work, Howl, was a 30-minute outpouring of rage,
which was put on trial after publication for obscenity.
We all used to pass around Howl.
A lot of people were influenced by it because it was a howl.
It was a cry of pain, it was it was a cry of something or other about...
It was seen to be drug-fuelled and daring,
all these things that we weren't.
I was never drug-fuelled and daring... If only.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving, hysterical, naked.
Who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists
and screamed with joy.
Interviewed on the BBC's Face To Face several decades later,
Ginsberg looked back on his scandalous work.
It wasn't long before, in your poems,
you were willing to make explicit statements about your sexuality.
Yes.
Wasn't that very difficult in what was, after all, McCarthy's America?
Well, it would have been if I had intended it to be public,
but to tell you truth, and as I've said before,
Howl was written sort of in despair of writing poetry.
I figured I hadn't succeeded in writing anything interesting,
and so I said, "Well, I'll just write writings for myself
"and I'll forget any idea of publishing poetry."
When it got to my own,
"Got fucked in the ass by handsome sailors and screamed with joy",
rather than screamed with pain or agony,
I realised how funny it was
but knew that my father would not want to read that.
So from then on I knew I wouldn't be able to publish the poem,
so I was completely free to write anything I wanted.
Inspired by Ginsberg,
live readings had become a key part of the newly energized poetry scene.
In the summer of 1965, the BBC captured a unique moment
when poetry readings outgrew the coffee houses and book shops
for London's Royal Albert Hall.
And Ginsberg was the headline act, performing to 7,000 fans.
Going to watch Ginsberg in the Albert Hall was one thing,
and that was exciting.
And there was marijuana smoke going around,
and it was like California and New York comes to London, you know?
Yes! I'm that worm soul under the heel
of the demon horses.
I am that man trembling to die in vomit
and trance in bamboo eternities,
belly ripped open by red hand of courteous Chinamen kids.
Come sweetly now,
back to myself as I was.
Poets began to discover the shamanistic tradition of performance.
If he became possessed, the audience would become possessed,
there would be a transformation of some kind.
All poets are interested in transformation.
Will I be transformed by writing it,
will the audience be transformed by listening to it?
No, I've been home for months but not all of me.
Somewhere beyond the seas, the spies in their spinach tin suits
are watching the movies unwind with owlish X-rays.
They're there on the screen.
Blue light on the couch you sit smiling at me
and stretching your arms and he couldn't make it!
Ginsberg seemed to feel very strongly
that if he acted as the shaman, as the prophet,
then people would listen, and that would deconstruct America
as this great military industrial complex,
pursuing minorities,
being racist and sexist and pursuing people who want to smoke dope.
And so he raged against it
and hoped people would join him
in what was really a kind of poetic, shamanistic campaign.
One of them grunting, one of them groaning out, "What a chick."
A lot of people have been concerned about the rise in poetry,
particular amongst teenagers.
Slim volumes can now be bought openly in certain parts of the country.
It's become fashionable for people to gather together in groups
and be turned on by verse.
If San Francisco was the vibrant heart of the Beat scene,
in Britain, Liverpool was where it was all happening.
Inspired by California's brand of direct performance poetry,
a group of young men were about to play their part
in the city's cultural revolution.
When the Liverpool poets came out in the mid '60s,
it was a breath of fresh air.
Liverpool was the place of the Beatles and this brand-new explosion
of working class culture into British life.
They seemed to have incorporated
something of the Beatles sense of irreverence.
The Liverpool poets were geography graduate
turned pop star Roger McGough,
music journalist Brian Patten, and artist Adrian Henri.
Together they would bring poetry like art and music,
into the heart of '60s pop culture.
The BBC filmed the group of pop poets on location in 1966
at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre.
But it was McGough who would develop as the main voice of the movement.
Monika, the tea things are taking over.
The cups are as big as bubble cars, they throttle round the room.
The tin-openers skate on the greasy plates
by the light of the silvery moon.
The biscuits are having a party. They're necking in our bread bin.
That's jazz you hear in the salt cellars
but they don't let non-members in.
The egg spoons had our eggs for breakfast,
the sauce bottle's asleep in our bed.
I overheard the knives and forks - "It won't be long," they said.
In 1967, the hugely influential Mersey Sound was published
and became Britain's best selling poetry anthology of the time.
I remember finding Roger McGough's,
"Let me die a young man's death,
"not a clean and in-between the sheets holy water death."
I remember reading it in the Sunday Times one Sunday
and thinking, "Wow, I want to do that."
I think any poet or group of poets
who do something new or newish in poetry,
they give permission to others to think,
"Well, I could write like that."
I think that's wonderful.
I think that's the democratic pulse that runs through poetry.
They were part of the new revival of poetry and poetry reading.
And doing it out loud and making it make sense.
They really were just the game changers.
The Queen came up to Liverpool to dine at our town hall.
In the evening, wrote to her husband,
"Dear Philip, I'm having a ball.
"I'll think I'll hang about. I mean, everything's happening here.
"I'm beginning to dig the poetry scene
"and the ale is bloody gear."
So while she was having a castle built down in Castle Street,
She had a look round Liverpool 8, found a pad there, small, but neat.
She moved in with a few belongings
Corgis, crown, a throne,
and the blue blood in the neighbourhood
really raised the tone.
It seemed very near and seemed very approachable
and yet when you look at it now,
in some respects, of course, it was very formal poetry.
There they are in little four-line verses, rhyming perfectly.
So it was magical.
Out of work, divorced, usually pissed,
he aimed low in life and missed.
But McGough's popular approach met a critical backlash.
If you write about ordinary stuff,
and if you write about things that other poets have written about
in quite highfalutin ways, and you write about it in very ordinary ways,
people will be treat you with disdain.
There was still a lot of hostility towards the Liverpool poets.
Poets found it unbearable.
They do, if somebody comes along who is popular.
I once read a review that was outrageous.
It was as if somehow or other he had profaned poetry.
He hasn't at all, he's done the opposite.
He's kept it alive.
What do you think the role of the poet is or your poetry?
Um... I don't quite know, really.
I think two things, I think, um... there's two reasons for writing it.
I'm not quite sure why one writes poetry, it's something very personal.
But then when you actually stand and read it to people,
then I think it possibly can be entertaining.
The choice of poems should be entertaining.
But do you see yourself as an entertainer?
Not in the sense of a show business sort of thing. Not really.
I think it's all sorts of things.
It can be serious, it can be entertaining, it can be funny.
Entertaining tends to mean funny, that's the problem in people's minds.
"He's behind you!"
Chorused the children but the warning came too late.
The monster leaped forward
and fastening its teeth into his neck tore off the head.
The body fell to the floor.
"More," cried the children. "More."
Poetry had become a familiar part of popular entertainment,
and was reaching a wider audience than ever before.
But in the mid 1970s, at a time of deep social unrest in Britain,
more urgent, marginalised voices started to be heard.
Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson was one of the first people
to write about the situation for the disaffected
Black British youth living in the inner cities.
# Dem frame up George Lindo up in Bradford town,
# But de Bradford blaks dem a rally round. #
He was the only voice that was speaking to us,
putting our situation under a microscope
and not only just reporting and observing,
but kind of offering direction and ideas.
You know, you look at the body of his work,
he sums up the '70s into the early '80s...
What it was like to be Black in Britain like nobody else.
# Madness, madness tight on the heads of the rebels
# The bitterness erup's like a heart blas'
# Broke glass
# Ritual of blood an' a-burnin'... #
Kwesi Johnson wrote in a Jamaican dialect
and performed his poems over reggae beats.
# Broke glass
# Cold blades as sharp as the eyes of hate and the stabbin'
# It's war amongs' the rebels. #
One of the fibs about British poetry
is that it's always been written in standard English.
The point is many poets, both in Britain and America,
have written in what you might call non-standard English or in dialect.
So when Linton was writing in patois,
people said, "Oh, well, I don't understand it."
I think they were making a statement
that they didn't want to understand it.
Steel blade drinking blood in darkness
It's war amongst the rebels, madness, madness war.
Kwesi Johnson's unique style of performance attracted the curiosity
of even the most traditional BBC programmes.
You do use a Creole patois, don't you,
which is very difficult for a White person to understand.
I found while listening to some of them
that I would have liked to have understood more than I did
and you weren't actually reaching me as a White person.
Well, perhaps it forces you, if you're really that interested,
to try and penetrate the language and check it out
and try to understand it.
But would you not also like the White people to understand
a little bit of what the Black people are going through?
Sure. Um, and I think they...
Some people do get some insights
into our experiences from my poetry.
We looked to our language as part of our rebelliousness.
Our parents, when they came over in the mid '50s,
the way the thought they'd succeed was by assimilating,
which really meant trying to play the White man.
I mean, Jamaican language, it's got a bass, man. You know what I mean?
It's a certain power to it.
# So slow, so smooth, So tight and ripe and smash! #
You like, also, to perform your poems, don't you?
Rather than to have people actually read them?
Absolutely, because it's oral poetry.
The emphasis is on the spoken word as opposed to the written word.
And, of course, the spoken word has a greater immediacy
and impact than the written word does.
Published in the run up to the Brixton riots of the early '80s,
Dread Beat An' Blood became Kwesi Johnson's politically charged anthem
to his generation's struggle with police brutality and injustice.
Dread Beat An' Blood is a really powerful piece of work,
that's definitely informed by the times,
and I don't think there's any better encapsulation
of what the Black British experience was at that time.
I mean, it certainly changed my life.
The BBC Arts documentary strand, Omnibus,
followed Kwesi Johnson's campaign for George Lindo,
a Black British man who had been wrongfully imprisoned for robbery.
The slogans that the demonstrators were chanting
had a kind of a calypso tempo.
Jail house in George house, jail house in George house.
And that simple chant gave me the inspiration to write this poem.
Dem frame up George Lindo up in Bradford town
But de Bradford blaks dem a rally round
Maggi Tatcha on di go wid a racist show
but a she haffi go
kaw, rite now, African, Asian, West Indian
an' Black British stan firm inna Inglan
inna disya time yah.
# George Lindo - im nuh carri do dagger
# George Lindo - im is not no robber
# George Lindo - dem haffi let im goh
# George Lindo - dem betta free im now ! #
From the streets of Brixton to the libraries of Hull,
to the living rooms of suburban America,
poetry had sprung from some unfamiliar places.
And, over the course of the century, poetry had been transformed,
no longer the preserve of a privileged few,
but a diverse community of voices.
At the end of century there would be one writer
who would enjoy universal appeal...
..and become one of modern poetry's household names.
Like many of the poets of his generation, he was an outsider,
growing up on a cattle farm in rural Northern Ireland.
Seamus Heaney, or as he became known, Famous Seamus.
There are two ways to look at Seamus Heaney's early poetry,
and indeed English writers did look at him in these two ways.
One, to think it's wonderful about nature.
And two, to think it's rural, earthly.
It's all about root vegetables and crops and so on.
Both, actually, reactions are actually rather condescending
to what Heaney was actually doing.
Heaney's so-called nature poetry
is actually dealing with a lot of other things.
To do with identity, his own,
to do with family, and tribe, and home, and belonging.
It's not about just describing blackberries or potatoes.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug,
the shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
to scatter new potatoes that we picked,
loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
The cold smell of potato mould,
the squelch and slap of soggy peat,
the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Heaney began his 45-year-long career
writing about his modest farming background.
His first collection, Death of a Naturalist,
published in 1966, was an instant success.
As a child, they couldn't keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells of waterweed,
fungus and dank moss.
One in a brick yard with a rotted board top
I savoured the rich crash
when a bucked plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
The magic of poetry is that the individual can take an experience,
paint in words and other people can see themselves in it.
He's not about anything. There's no polemic in his poetry.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare big-eyed Narcissus
into some spring is beneath all adult dignity.
I rhyme to see myself,
to set the darkness echoing.
He came from nowhere and nothing.
There was no literary pedigree in Heaney's background,
from a farming family in rural Ireland.
I think it coincided with a more general movement in poetry
through the late 20th century where those voices from the outside,
the non-metropolitan voices, became more interesting.
These were people who often hadn't had a voice.
Heaney grew up in a rural community and that was his world,
and the world he wrote about in his first two or three collections.
But then he was living in Belfast at the time of the Troubles.
Suddenly, the urgency of that matter was something
he felt he had to address as a poet, to be a public voice,
to be a political voice, to show solidarity with his own people.
Interviewed on the BBC in 1973,
at the height of the Northern Irish conflict,
Heaney was forced to consider how he would play a public role.
In your early years, your first poetry
wrote what I'd call modern landscape poetry basically,
and now that landscape that you're all too familiar with
is torn by often arbitrary but certainly tormenting violence.
Surely this must have some effect on the poetry you're writing now.
My view and way with poetry has never been to use it
as a vehicle for making statements about situations.
The poems have more... they've more come up
like bodies out of a bog of my own imagination.
I want to wait, in a sense,
until the violence comes out of the pores of my mind,
and I think it does, in a way.
But, um...
Well, I notice a discernible movement in that direction,
and a feeling of the symbols coming to which you're selecting.
In the poem and dedication in your last book, Wintering Out,
which I'll read...
"This morning from a dewy motorway
"I saw the new camp for the internees.
"A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay in the road side
"and over in the trees, machine gun posts defined a real stockade.
"There was that white mist you get on a low ground
"and it was deja vu
"some film made of stalag 17,
"a bad dream with no sound.
"'Is there a life before death?'
"That's chalked up on a wall downtown.
"Competence with pain, coherent miseries,
"a bite and sup.
"We hug our little destiny again."
I think it may happen in the future that, now that sadly he's gone,
that his affability is not the thing he's remembered for,
but actually the toughness of his language.
It's always hard to know which poets will endure,
which ones will speak to generations after ours,
but I hope Heaney's will. I think it will.
And in the meanwhile, in his lifetime it certainly spoke to us,
and he was a also great ambassador for poetry.
He took it out there into the world.
And that's why he's such a huge presence at the end of the century.