Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945-1979

by Luke Roberts

Overview

Challenging received ideas about the British Poetry Revival, Luke Roberts presents a new account of experimental poetry and literary activism. Drawing on a wide range of contexts and traditions, Living in History begins by examining the legacies of empire and exile in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J. H. Prynne, and poets associated with the Communist Party and the African National Congress. It then focuses on the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Denise Riley, Anna Mendelssohn and others, in the development of liberation struggles around gender, race and sexuality across the 1970s. Tracking the ambivalence between poetic ambition and political commitment, and how one sometimes interferes with the other, Luke Roberts troubles the exclusions of ‘British Poetry’ as a category and tests the claims made on behalf avant-garde and experimental poetics against the historical record. Bringing together both major and neglected authorships and offering extended close readings, fresh archival research and new contextual evidence, Living in History is an ambitious and exciting intervention in the field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399519861
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2026
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Luke Roberts is Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry at King’s College London. He is the author of Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things (2017), which was nominated for the UniversityEnglish first book prize. His writing has appeared in ELH, Textual Practice, The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and elsewhere.He is co-editor, with Sam Ladkin, of the work of Mark Hyatt, including So Much For Life: Selected Poems (2023), and the novel Love, Leda (2023). He also edited Barry MacSweeney, Desire Lines: Unselected Poems: 1966–2000 (2018), and was co-editor of Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer (2014).His books of poetry include Home Radio (2021), and his poems have been published in Chicago Review, Ludd Gang, Cambridge Literary Review and many other little magazines. With Amy Tobin he edits the small press Distance No Object.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Living in History

Part I

1. Possessing the Landscape: Kamau Brathwaite in England, 1950–1955

2. Lovely, Flaring, Destruction: J.H. Prynne, Charles Olson, Edward Dorn

3. The Avant-Garde of Their Own People: Poetry and Exile, 1959–1975

Part II:

4. Driven Out of the Town: Homosexuality and the British Poetry Revival

5. Living in Feminism: Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford

6. Yout Rebels: Refusal and Self-Defence 1970–1979

7. Grave Police Music: Anti-Carceral Poetics

8. Fear of Retribution: Anna Mendelssohn

Coda: The Kind of Poetry I Want

Select Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Luke Roberts’s Living in History is an important addition to scholarship about British poetry after World War II. Deftly weaving together archival research, personal reflection, and fresh interpretations of poems, Roberts significantly broadens our sense of the relationship between post-war British poetry and the myriad political movements that shaped it.

Chris Nealon

The signal achievement of Living in History is indicated by Roberts’s subtitle: this is a study of Poetry in Britain, rather than British poetry, a demarcation that provides the book’s guiding anti-state critique of colonial heritage, racist border policy, sexist and homophobic legislation, and carceral capitalism. It is a compelling organizational strategy that ensures Roberts’s narrative flows with a freshness rarely afforded to the academic discussion of poetry. [...] Living in History is welcome not only in terms of its scholarly achievement, but in terms of its commitment to the ‘inexhaustible and intractable demands’ made by the poetry it cares about.

The Review of English Studies - Joe Luna

This clear and well-documented study of post-WW II British poetry also provides insights into the politics of this period. [...] This expansive discussion includes various US poets and British poets, including Kamau Brathwaite—a Barbadian poet and academic widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon—and feminist poets. Class, gender, and identity politics are central to his study, as are some major conflicts, such as the Balkans war, the Vietnam War, and more recent events, including the George Floyd uprisings and the protests over the war in Gaza. Social movements like Black Lives Matter are approached with parallel emphasis on literary movements, including the avant-garde. There are also many references to modernist poets such as Yeats, Eliot, Williams, and Pound. Roberts’s chosen poets all participate in what he calls “social antagonism” against capital and imperialist entities.

Summing Up: Recommended.

CHOICE - B. Wallenstein