The Filial Art: A Reading of Contemporary British Poetry

Abstract

It is a little-remarked feature of the younger generation of British poets that the relationship which most concerns them is not that with a lover or spouse, not with a particular place, nor with society at large, nor with God (those traditional concerns of poets) but rather the relationship with parents. By 'younger' here I mean the generation of poets which came to prominence in the I97os and early I98os, and which spans Tony Harrison (b. I937), Seamus Heaney, Hugo Williams, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Paul Muldoon, Andrew Motion, and Michael Hofmann (b. 1957). In the work of these writers parents have an unusual centrality and fathers seem to figure more largely than mothers. This overlap of concern tells us much about these poets as a generation; but so, too, the different ways in which they write about their parents are an insight into their distinctive achievements. By examining the filial art of each in turn, I hope to remove some popular misconceptions about the kind of writer each of these eight poets is, and also to arrive at an understanding of why this generation, more than any other one can think of, should be so obsessed with its parents. Certainly most poets of the early twentieth century were altogether more peremptory in this respect. Their common post-Freudian assumption was that we wrestle with our parents in order to win the space to be ourselves: out