The Long 1950s

Where poetry is dominated by amateurs, its key ideas are the ones that nobody owns. Underneath the glittering cavalcade of conscious and innovative art is another world of poetry without technique, protected from change. Can we find a history of what seems to be most inaccessible to time? Can we write a history of the unheard voices, articulate the unconscious and write a stylistics of the conventional? Most people who write poetry are untouched by theory and have no expectations of winning prizes. Is there a much deeper, inarticulate, pulse of style history, almost detached from reflexivity and concealed from view by an elite who write directly from theory? The 1950s now seem like a mystery, only remembered as the factory which produced all the rebels of the succeeding two decades. But its rejection of rhetoric opened the gates to the amateur poet, its existential preoccupation with authenticity gave the unknown poet a chit to justify writing for and about themselves alone. It seems