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It is, of course, very difficult to prove an absence.¹ However, let us suggest that although the contemporary discussion of contemporary poetry is complex and valuable, there is a tendency to avoid the technical. There is a disposition among commentators to talk of the contextual and the thematic, but not what one might call the formal or the technical aspects of poetry. Let us present some examples.

Here Martin Booth writes about Thom Gunn's poetry in British Poetry 1964 to 1984 (1985).

Gunn wrote with an urgency that was appropriate to the times. This gained him few readers. What got him far more and was to extend his reputation were his poems that were about matters close to the common heart. Lorry drivers, “rockers” in leather jackets, Elvis Presley, death and, in more recent books, homosexuality and drugs.

(226–227)

The topical focus (a correct one, surely, let it be noted) is evident here, as it is in Michael Schmidt's earlier A Reader's Guide to Fifty Modern British Poets (1979), in a comment on Roy Fuller's poetry.

His landscape is finally not Africa but suburbia where, as in the war poems, and sometimes with equal power, he celebrates arrivals, departures, the long ennui.

(250)

Here, however, justice compels one to note that Schmidt, elsewhere in this important study, alludes, if fleetingly, to formal aspects of texts. For example, he writes of Fuller's defense of “threatened forms and values” (245), and of Gunn's use of “strict form and literary idiom,” in contradistinction to his (Gunn's) poems' subject matters (378). One should also note Schmidt's ringing assertion in Reading Modern Poetry (1989):

The abiding meaning of any poem is a function of technical properties –whether deliberately or accidentally achieved – which give it life beyond its occasion and its “ideas.”

(56)

While the point could scarcely be made better, one is compelled to note that a lot of Schmidt's practice in his books is not much guided by it, at least not thoroughly or consistently.

Chapter 4 of David Kennedy's insightful and important book New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry, 1980–1994 (1996) deals, at least in part, with Peter Reading's engagement with meter and form (120–153), but such a technique‐oriented approach is not typical of the study. More representative is his Chapter 5, entitled “The Noise of Science,” which focuses on poets' engagement with scientific subjects and scientific lexis (which can be seen as part of a formal concern) (153–184). A representative quotation from Keith Tuma's Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (1998) is the following on Peter Riley's work. “The ontological concerns of Riley's poems,” Tuma writes, “might call for glosses from any number of modern philosophers,” such as Heidegger and Merleau‐Ponty (219). It is not our intent to suggest that such a perspective is wrong, but to note that it certainly does not seem to see the formal or technical properties of Riley's verse as meaning‐bearing or integral to any analysis or interpretation—or at least, not in any explicit manner.

The topical focus of much commentary on contemporary poetry is also apparent in Fiona Sampson's study Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (2012). For example, she writes the following about Carol Ann Duffy's poem “Prayer”:

“Prayer” […] offers a redemptive view of the suburbs. It suggests that their particular vision of the quotidian, evoked as a child practicing scales and the shipping forecast of the radio, could offer transcendence.

(123)

It would be hard to tell from this (and this passage is representative of the way Sampson discusses verse) whether the critic is dealing with a poem, an essay, or a short story (one only knows it is not a novel because the title is not in italics). Even when there is an acknowledgement that form is important, the reference is superficial. The following is a comment on the poet Ahren Warner. He is,

on the page at least, a brainy flâneur who seems to have emerged fully formed. Already fascinated by, and thinking through, broken poetic forms and continental philosophy when he was still in his teens, Warner is no scholarly postmodernist mumbling to himself. His is an engaged, boulevardier's voice. He may allude to philosophers and their ideas but […] does so simply because this material is within range of a well‐stocked mind. His light touch with such material can be deliciously witty.

(206–207)

What are these “broken poetic forms,” one wants to ask? One notes no mention of the substance of verse here—line length, line breaks, rhythm, meter, and sound. What is the use of this impressionistic insubstantiality? Such comments as mentioned earlier are more disappointing because Sampson insists that her book is concerned with the “craft” that “poem‐making largely involves” (280–281). It is not clear where the author deals with “craft” as we would understand the term. In justice, it has to be said that elsewhere Sampson does concern herself with something like “craft.” For example, in the special numbers of Agenda (Spring/Summer 2011) devoted to John Burnside's poetry, she does discuss rhythmic aspects of his verse, along with sentence length, stanza and line breaks, and phonological aspects of his texts (115–118). However, the conclusions she draws from such analysis are impressionistic and subjective, and opaque. Burnside's poetry has “an accelerated, slippery tunefulness” (114), and he belongs to a “school of expanded lyricists” (119). It is very hard to know what Sampson means by either comment.

There is no excuse for such ignoring of the technical. A wide range of approaches to formal and technical aspects of verse is available to the contemporary commentator. Indeed, some have been available for a long time. Geoffrey Leech's great A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969) is still very helpful in any discussion of poetry. Marina Tarlinskaja's English Verse: Theory and History dates from 1976. The first edition of Harvey Gross's and Robert McDowell's fine Sound and Form in Modern Poetry appeared in 1964 (the second edition dates from 1996). The following is just a selection of more recent texts that seem particularly useful in the matter of analysis and interpretation of poetry:

 Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm (1995)

 Philip Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form (1996)

 David Baker, ed., Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996)

 Timothy Steele, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing (1999)

 Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle, Meter in Poetry: A New Theory (2008)

 Martin Duffell, A New History of English Metre (2008)

 Christoph Küper, ed., Current Trends in Metrical Analysis (2011)

Not all of these are easy books to read, nor are the systems of analysis they propose entirely (or at all) compatible with each other. But they are there, and they propose ways of analyzing verse that pay due attention to the specifics of the poetic text. Gross and McDowell (1996) lay down the challenge to those who would talk about poetry:

We venture that rhythmic structure neither ornaments conceptual meaning nor provides a sensuous element extraneous to meaning: prosody is a symbolic structure like metaphor and carries its own weight of meaning.

(2–3)

Our view is that meter, and prosody in general, is itself meaning. Rhythm is neither outside a poem's meaning nor an ornament to it.

(10)

In his essay “A Return to Form” (2008), Derek Attridge notes what he sees as a return to formal concerns in literary studies, after a dominance of (useful and illuminating) historical and culture‐focused approaches to literature over the preceding 30 years. “Since 2005,” he writes, “the signs of a revitalization of formal study have multiplied” (565). Attridge has reservations about some recent returns to form (for example, those undertaken by Terry Eagleton, Tom Paulin, and Helen Vendler), on the grounds of lack of consistency and accuracy. But he welcomes a concern with technique, indeed, a concern with form, a renewed attention to the “formal analysis” (573) that is the poem. He argues that such an approach is ethically appropriate, but is also accurate, grounded, and appropriate in literary studies. One should note that Attridge is certainly not arguing for a disregard of topic or reference to extratextual context. He is, however, urging that a good reading is one that also considers textual configurations, shapings, and substances. Such an interest in technique and form is also illustrated by Angela Leighton's illuminating On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (2007), which charts some of the vicissitudes of formalist and neoformalist approaches to the literary text.