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 Silkins Defence, Tomlinsons Prometheus and Hills In Piam Memoriam. Further chapters focus on the impressive poems which have arisen out of the stress between ideological commitment and imaginative realization in Silkins work, the conflict between intuition and perception in the poetry of Tomlinson, and the split between the texture of Gunns language and the non-verbal experience evoked in his poems. Finally, Merle Brown presents the last phase of F. R. Leavis collaborative literary and cultural criticism as strikingly close to the poetic achievements of Hill, Silkin, Tomlinson and Gunn.
