Fulfilling the Silent Rules: Inside & Outside in Modern British Poetry 1960-1990

Why "silent rules"? Poetry is made of sound, in the form of speech, but is governed by rules which are not stated explicitly. As a help to readers, we try to tease out and make plain these silent rules. You have to perceive the structure of a work in order to read it. The subtitle is "inside and out" and becoming an insider involves knowing what the silent rules are.

So much of the staging of modern poetry has operated a kind of "stereo blindness", in which whatever is visible to observer A ...