Double Lyric: Divisiveness and Communal Creativity in Recent English Poetry

Originally published posthumously in 1980, this book centres on 5 British poets – Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, Jon Silkin, Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson – and on the emergence in postwar British poetry of ‘double-lyrics’, poems which have, according to the author ‘become two persons, two ways of expressing and attending critically in dramatic divisive conflict.’ The nature and significance of the double lyric is first demonstrated by close readings of Silkin’s Defence, Tomlinson’s Promet...