Volume 44, Number 17 · November 6, 1997
Anglo-Celtic Attitudes
By Helen Vendler
Woman Police Officer in Elevator
by James Lasdun
Norton, 80 pp., $19.00
Rest for the Wicked
by Glyn Maxwell
Bloodaxe Books/Dufour Editions, 112 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Selected Poems 1968-1986
by Paul Muldoon
Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 153 pp., $12.00
The Annals of Chile
by Paul Muldoon
Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 189 pp., $10.00
Paul Muldoon
by Tim Kendall
Dufour Editions, 258 pp., $14.95 (paper)
When the United States became a superpower after World War II, Americans became less deferential toward English writers, with the consequence that, on the whole, postwar American readers knew little of the poetry being written in the British Isles and Ireland. Auden maintained a hold on the American audience because he lived here, and Dylan Thomas flashed briefly through the country, but apart from those two imports, modern British poets made almost no impression on the United States. We were content to let them (and the poets of the Commonwealth countries and Ireland) work in their separate sphere. This depressing situation was compounded by the gradual but widening divergence between British and American culture, and by the utter failure, in the service of a mistaken nativism, of American public (and even private) schools to keep British poetry, in a systematic way, in the elementary and secondary curriculum. The American presses that still publish poetry have tended predictably to favor American poets over others writing in English.
Review, 4539 words
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