Anthologies of contemporary poetry may not tell you everything you need to know about the state of the art, but they are bound to tell you something. That is their purpose. I bought my first such anthology in 1956. It was called New Lines and its editor, Robert Conquest, argued in his brief introduction that the work of the nine poets he had chosen for inclusion could be seen to restore 'a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry, of the principle that poetry is written by and for the whole man, intellect, emotions, senses and all.' And all what, we might wonder? We might also cavil at the phrase 'the whole man', especially as one of the contributors to the anthology was Elizabeth Jennings. Still, I do not want to score easy points against New Lines. I remain immensely grateful to Conquest for introducing me to work by poets I was ready to admire; and I was also excited by Conquest's determination to press the case for a particular kind of poetry, which entailed arguing that some poets were better than others. Conquest championed his poets on the grounds that their work exhibited a 'refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language, even when the verse is most highly charged with sensuous or emotional intent.' Even the nineteen year-old Lucas knew that Conquest was here alluding to the bad practice of those 1940s poets who took their cue from the bardic vapourings of Dylan Thomas. For that was how in the 1950s Thomas was commonly presented. Looking back, it is astonishing to realise how very nearly obsessed poets of the decade were with Thomas' supposedly malign influence. Nor was this confined to the contributors to New Lines. Charles Tomlinson, who savaged Conquest's anthology in a famous review in Essays in Criticism, soon afterwards published a long poem called 'Antecedents', a kind of Pound-out-of-Laforgue meditation on the plight of post-war English poetry, in which Thomas makes a key appearance as 'Rimbaud the incendiary/. . . the gentleman/. . . was dressed/In the skin of a Welsh lion ... //Last music/For the sable throne. (She comes, she comes!)'