0:00:02 > 0:00:08This programme contains some strong language
0:00:08 > 0:00:12In the second half of the 20th century English poetry went through an extraordinary transformation.
0:00:12 > 0:00:14In the aftermath of war new kinds of poets emerged,
0:00:14 > 0:00:17who took poetry from a scholarly elite
0:00:17 > 0:00:19and turned it into an art form for everyone.
0:00:20 > 0:00:23They found a powerful new language
0:00:23 > 0:00:26and laid bare the torments of the modern soul.
0:00:27 > 0:00:30Poets from America brought a direct style of performance
0:00:30 > 0:00:32to resonate with a new audience.
0:00:32 > 0:00:38Yes! I am that worm soul
0:00:38 > 0:00:41under the heel of the demon horses.
0:00:43 > 0:00:47And as poets caught the public eye, the cameras of the BBC
0:00:47 > 0:00:50brought their work into millions of living rooms.
0:00:52 > 0:00:56From Philip Larkin, who captured the spirit of '50s Britain...
0:00:56 > 0:00:58Hatless, I take off
0:00:58 > 0:01:02My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
0:01:02 > 0:01:05..to Sylvia Plath, who gate-crashed the all-male club
0:01:05 > 0:01:06of poetry in English...
0:01:08 > 0:01:09Dying
0:01:09 > 0:01:11Is an art, like everything else.
0:01:12 > 0:01:14I do it exceptionally well.
0:01:14 > 0:01:16..to Seamus Heaney, the Irish farmer's son
0:01:16 > 0:01:19who found readers all over the world.
0:01:19 > 0:01:22There were new voices from outside the mainstream
0:01:22 > 0:01:24and prophets of the counterculture.
0:01:24 > 0:01:26I think everyone ought to take LSD
0:01:26 > 0:01:28and get rid of their violence and their colour
0:01:28 > 0:01:31and their identity and, like, get with it finally
0:01:31 > 0:01:34and stop making such a big, noisy scene.
0:01:34 > 0:01:38Together, they voiced what it was like to live in the modern age.
0:01:39 > 0:01:42This is how they did it in their own words.
0:01:43 > 0:01:51This programme contains some strong language.
0:01:53 > 0:01:55Britain in the 1950s.
0:01:58 > 0:02:00A country still recovering from war.
0:02:02 > 0:02:04A country rebuilding itself
0:02:04 > 0:02:06and ready for change.
0:02:08 > 0:02:11The ambitious elder statesmen of English poetry,
0:02:11 > 0:02:14such as TS Eliot and WH Auden,
0:02:14 > 0:02:17felt like giants from a previous age.
0:02:18 > 0:02:21I think poetry after the Second World War
0:02:21 > 0:02:23had lost a lot of its confidence.
0:02:23 > 0:02:29And I think that the sort of ground was open for voices to come in
0:02:29 > 0:02:31and be heard.
0:02:31 > 0:02:33There's been a great tradition in 20th-century poetry
0:02:33 > 0:02:35of issuing manifestos.
0:02:35 > 0:02:38Each generation comes along, issues a manifesto saying,
0:02:38 > 0:02:41"Those lot before us are rubbish. Now it's our turn."
0:02:43 > 0:02:45True to form, in 1956,
0:02:45 > 0:02:48a group of up-and-coming poets were all published together
0:02:48 > 0:02:50in a brand-new anthology,
0:02:50 > 0:02:54and became known, informally, as The Movement.
0:02:55 > 0:02:59Reacting against the obscure experiments of modernism,
0:02:59 > 0:03:04these writers used traditional verse forms and a wry everyday language.
0:03:04 > 0:03:06The early poetry of those writers
0:03:06 > 0:03:08was full of observation
0:03:08 > 0:03:09and anecdote,
0:03:09 > 0:03:12and often, observation and anecdote
0:03:12 > 0:03:14drawn from the daily lives
0:03:14 > 0:03:17of the poets, which meant the daily lives of the readers too.
0:03:19 > 0:03:23The Movement was made up of mostly male, white-collar workers,
0:03:23 > 0:03:25including librarian Philip Larkin,
0:03:25 > 0:03:28and university lecturer Kingsley Amis.
0:03:29 > 0:03:32When you have movements and generations and little collectives,
0:03:32 > 0:03:34there's always one person that stands out, really,
0:03:34 > 0:03:36and it's around them everything revolves.
0:03:36 > 0:03:38And in the case of those '50s poets, it's Larkin.
0:03:41 > 0:03:46Philip Larkin was affectionately known as the Hermit Of Hull.
0:03:46 > 0:03:48Though he won critical acclaim in his 30s,
0:03:48 > 0:03:50he shunned the limelight
0:03:50 > 0:03:54for a quiet career as a university librarian for over three decades.
0:03:56 > 0:03:59But, in 1964, he allowed himself to be filmed
0:03:59 > 0:04:03for the BBC's flagship arts programme, Monitor.
0:04:03 > 0:04:06Work and I get on fairly well, I think.
0:04:06 > 0:04:09Just these occasions when, um,
0:04:09 > 0:04:12one would like to prove it by not working for a bit.
0:04:12 > 0:04:13HE CHUCKLES
0:04:13 > 0:04:15When I bind up
0:04:15 > 0:04:17the library committee minutes at the end of five years,
0:04:17 > 0:04:19it makes a great fat volume,
0:04:19 > 0:04:22but it's not the same as a volume of poetry.
0:04:22 > 0:04:25Larkin was always described to me at school
0:04:25 > 0:04:28as "the voice of the man next door".
0:04:28 > 0:04:31He didn't sound like the man who lived next door to me,
0:04:31 > 0:04:35but I understand where that comment comes from.
0:04:35 > 0:04:40Uh, there's a sense of him describing the daily,
0:04:40 > 0:04:43the ordinary, the domestic.
0:04:43 > 0:04:47It was a language that came out of the bus stop
0:04:47 > 0:04:50and the newspaper,
0:04:50 > 0:04:52transformed through his poetic powers.
0:04:53 > 0:04:59When getting my nose in a book Cured most things short of school
0:04:59 > 0:05:01It was worth ruining my eyes
0:05:01 > 0:05:04To know I could still keep cool
0:05:04 > 0:05:06And deal out the old right hook
0:05:06 > 0:05:09To dirty dogs twice my size
0:05:10 > 0:05:13Later, with inch-thick specs
0:05:13 > 0:05:15Evil was just my lark
0:05:15 > 0:05:17Me and my cloak and fangs
0:05:17 > 0:05:20Had ripping times in the dark
0:05:20 > 0:05:22The women I clubbed with sex!
0:05:23 > 0:05:25I broke them up like meringues
0:05:26 > 0:05:28Don't read much now
0:05:28 > 0:05:29The dude
0:05:29 > 0:05:32Who lets the girl down before
0:05:32 > 0:05:33The hero arrives
0:05:33 > 0:05:34The chap
0:05:34 > 0:05:36Who's yellow and keeps the store
0:05:36 > 0:05:39Seem far too familiar
0:05:39 > 0:05:41Get stewed
0:05:41 > 0:05:43Books are a load of crap.
0:05:44 > 0:05:48The striking thing about Larkin's poetry is, in a way,
0:05:48 > 0:05:50it's eloquent ordinariness.
0:05:50 > 0:05:53You can analyse as much as you want his poetry
0:05:53 > 0:05:57in terms of...sort of the nerves it touches
0:05:57 > 0:06:02and the experiences of sort of welfare state Britain,
0:06:02 > 0:06:05life in the post-war world, that it illuminates,
0:06:05 > 0:06:07and that's all true but, in the end,
0:06:07 > 0:06:11it's his gift for memorable phrases and lines.
0:06:12 > 0:06:15He had the tendency to send himself up rather,
0:06:15 > 0:06:17so, when appears on camera,
0:06:17 > 0:06:18he is, in a way,
0:06:18 > 0:06:20playing a...kind of a part.
0:06:20 > 0:06:26I read that, you know, I'm a miserable sort of fellow
0:06:26 > 0:06:30writing a kind of welfare state sub poetry,
0:06:30 > 0:06:33um, doing it well, perhaps,
0:06:33 > 0:06:34but it isn't really what poetry is
0:06:34 > 0:06:37and it isn't really the sort of poetry we want.
0:06:37 > 0:06:41But I wonder whether it ever occurs to the writer of criticism
0:06:41 > 0:06:43like that, that, really, one agrees with them,
0:06:43 > 0:06:48that what one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is
0:06:48 > 0:06:51and the kind of environment one's had and has now
0:06:51 > 0:06:55that one doesn't really choose the poetry one writes,
0:06:55 > 0:06:58one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or can write.
0:07:02 > 0:07:06Living on the margins suited Larkin.
0:07:06 > 0:07:08His writing captured a remote awkwardness
0:07:08 > 0:07:10with the world around him.
0:07:10 > 0:07:14He's always very keen to make us understand
0:07:14 > 0:07:19that sense of separation, partly because we all feel it.
0:07:19 > 0:07:21It's particularly powerful, I think, in Church Going,
0:07:21 > 0:07:24where you get that self irony of him
0:07:24 > 0:07:27taking off his bicycle-clips, because he feels there's something...
0:07:27 > 0:07:30something about it that you just shouldn't be in a church
0:07:30 > 0:07:33with bicycle-clips on, it's somehow disrespectful.
0:07:35 > 0:07:37Hatless, I take off
0:07:37 > 0:07:40My cycle-clips in awkward reverence
0:07:40 > 0:07:43Move forward, run my hand around the font
0:07:43 > 0:07:47From where I stand, the roof looks almost new
0:07:47 > 0:07:49Cleaned, or restored?
0:07:49 > 0:07:52Someone would know: I don't
0:07:52 > 0:07:55Mounting the lectern I peruse a few
0:07:55 > 0:07:58Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce,
0:07:58 > 0:08:02"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant
0:08:02 > 0:08:04The echoes snigger briefly
0:08:04 > 0:08:07Back at the door I sign the book
0:08:07 > 0:08:10Donate an Irish sixpence
0:08:10 > 0:08:12Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
0:08:21 > 0:08:22When we want to go back
0:08:22 > 0:08:27and look at what it was like to live in those post-war years,
0:08:27 > 0:08:30Larkin's a very good place to go and find out,
0:08:30 > 0:08:33you know, the flavour and the vibe of that world.
0:08:33 > 0:08:37Although he wrote just four slim volumes of poems in his lifetime,
0:08:37 > 0:08:39Larkin remains one of the greatest
0:08:39 > 0:08:42and most popular poets of the 20th century.
0:08:47 > 0:08:50If Larkin was the eccentric loner of The Movement,
0:08:50 > 0:08:53writer and lifelong friend Kingsley Amis
0:08:53 > 0:08:54was its very public face.
0:08:57 > 0:08:59Frequently appearing on television,
0:08:59 > 0:09:02he would become the most outspoken member of the group.
0:09:04 > 0:09:07On the BBC, Amis voiced his disappointment
0:09:07 > 0:09:09with the conservatism of '50s Britain.
0:09:11 > 0:09:15I personally then was suffering from a good deal of depression
0:09:15 > 0:09:18over some...quite a long time,
0:09:18 > 0:09:20over the results of the 1951 election,
0:09:20 > 0:09:24which seemed to me to say that the modest bit of social revolution
0:09:24 > 0:09:26that the British might have been going in for
0:09:26 > 0:09:30between 1945 and 1951 had now come to an end,
0:09:30 > 0:09:34and the public had turned their back on that, and, um,
0:09:34 > 0:09:36we're trying to reverse the process
0:09:36 > 0:09:37which I found depressing.
0:09:37 > 0:09:41Kingsley Amis was kind of associated with the angry young men.
0:09:41 > 0:09:43He was never really angry I don't think, Kingsley Amis,
0:09:43 > 0:09:46but he did like to provoke saying, you know,
0:09:46 > 0:09:49Eliot and Picasso were rubbish
0:09:49 > 0:09:52but it's...it's an act, you know, it's a pose.
0:09:52 > 0:09:55Although Amis was most successful as a novelist,
0:09:55 > 0:09:58most famously for Lucky Jim in 1954,
0:09:58 > 0:10:00he actually began his career as a poet.
0:10:02 > 0:10:04I think Kingsley Amis would see himself as a light verse poet,
0:10:04 > 0:10:07he edited an anthology of light verse,
0:10:07 > 0:10:09he enjoyed making people laugh.
0:10:09 > 0:10:12Lucky Jim, how I envy him
0:10:12 > 0:10:14Author, poet, fellow of Peterhouse Cambridge
0:10:14 > 0:10:17Jazz critic, you ask what his name is
0:10:17 > 0:10:19- I say Kingsley Amis! - ALL LAUGH
0:10:24 > 0:10:26Well, the first poem is on an ever-interesting topic,
0:10:26 > 0:10:28though you might not think so to start with.
0:10:28 > 0:10:32There's a poem of his called A Bookshop Idyll, which sort of...
0:10:32 > 0:10:36looks at the differences between what men read and what women read,
0:10:36 > 0:10:39but, interestingly, the poem turns everything on its head at the end
0:10:39 > 0:10:42and admits that, actually, men have got a softer side too.
0:10:42 > 0:10:45Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
0:10:45 > 0:10:46Or squash it flat?
0:10:47 > 0:10:51Man's love is of man's life a thing apart
0:10:51 > 0:10:52Girls aren't like that
0:10:54 > 0:10:57We men have got love well weighed up: our stuff
0:10:57 > 0:10:59Can get by without it
0:11:00 > 0:11:03Women don't seem to think that's good enough
0:11:03 > 0:11:05They write about it
0:11:05 > 0:11:08And the awful way their poems lay them open
0:11:08 > 0:11:09Just doesn't strike them
0:11:11 > 0:11:13Women are really much nicer than men
0:11:13 > 0:11:15No wonder we like them
0:11:17 > 0:11:19Deciding this, we can forget those times
0:11:19 > 0:11:21We sat up half the night
0:11:21 > 0:11:23Chock-full of love
0:11:23 > 0:11:27Crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes
0:11:27 > 0:11:29And couldn't write.
0:11:32 > 0:11:35Having criticised his elitist predecessors,
0:11:35 > 0:11:38Amis made a virtue of his lower middle class credentials,
0:11:38 > 0:11:41seeing himself as a voice for the ordinary man.
0:11:41 > 0:11:44But he and the other Movement poets
0:11:44 > 0:11:46soon settled into the establishment.
0:11:46 > 0:11:50If you look at the photos now, those poets from the '50s, you know,
0:11:50 > 0:11:53then I'm afraid there's a good degree of tweed jackets.
0:11:53 > 0:11:57They don't seem the sort of common men, um,
0:11:57 > 0:12:00the ordinary chaps that...
0:12:00 > 0:12:04At the time they did and as they saw themselves, um,
0:12:04 > 0:12:07but they were certainly...cared about their audience.
0:12:07 > 0:12:09It's just I think their audience, in the end,
0:12:09 > 0:12:10was other chaps like them.
0:12:15 > 0:12:18By the 1960s, Britain, to some,
0:12:18 > 0:12:20seemed in danger of being left behind
0:12:20 > 0:12:23by a new kind of poetry coming from America.
0:12:25 > 0:12:30In 1962, the influential British critic Al Alvarez
0:12:30 > 0:12:33published an anthology promoting American poets.
0:12:34 > 0:12:37In an anxious world coming to terms with the holocaust
0:12:37 > 0:12:40and potential atomic warfare,
0:12:40 > 0:12:42Alvarez' The New Poetry
0:12:42 > 0:12:47was a reaction against the safe, insular concerns of The Movement.
0:12:47 > 0:12:51Instead, he championed a group of pioneering writers in the US
0:12:51 > 0:12:53leading the way.
0:12:53 > 0:12:57These poets started to feel that the British tradition was suffocating.
0:12:57 > 0:13:03The kind of stylized and formalized language of the Victorians
0:13:03 > 0:13:04really needs to be left behind,
0:13:04 > 0:13:07and poetry needs to get to grips with everyday life,
0:13:07 > 0:13:09and it needs to find the music in everyday life,
0:13:09 > 0:13:10It needs to bring in
0:13:10 > 0:13:12colloquial and idiomatic language.
0:13:14 > 0:13:18John Berryman was part of this new set of American writers
0:13:18 > 0:13:21who, together, were often called the Confessional Poets.
0:13:22 > 0:13:25Haunted for life by his father's suicide,
0:13:25 > 0:13:27John Berryman was a classically-trained
0:13:27 > 0:13:28but troubled talent.
0:13:29 > 0:13:33Alvarez went to meet him in 1967 for the BBC,
0:13:33 > 0:13:36where he was writing his poems in a Dublin pub...
0:13:37 > 0:13:40..which was apparently where he did most of his writing
0:13:40 > 0:13:42and a lot of his drinking.
0:13:42 > 0:13:46My feelings about Yeats were quite queer.
0:13:46 > 0:13:48I didn't want to be like Yeats...
0:13:49 > 0:13:51..I wanted to BE Yeats!
0:13:53 > 0:13:55But that failed.
0:13:55 > 0:13:57You can see why that failed. MAN LAUGHS
0:13:57 > 0:14:00Berryman was talking about a nervous breakdown
0:14:00 > 0:14:02and suicide attempts,
0:14:02 > 0:14:04um, madness,
0:14:04 > 0:14:06despair, alcoholism and so forth.
0:14:06 > 0:14:11Sometimes it's exhilarating and exciting to read,
0:14:11 > 0:14:13sometimes you don't know where to look.
0:14:13 > 0:14:16And a lot of people were really turned off,
0:14:16 > 0:14:20and horrif... They thought it was sort of vulgar.
0:14:20 > 0:14:23I don't get very much fan mail...
0:14:24 > 0:14:27..but I had a lot of mail after I published this song
0:14:27 > 0:14:29in the United States.
0:14:29 > 0:14:32I may say that the mail was entirely hostile.
0:14:36 > 0:14:40Life, friends, is boring
0:14:41 > 0:14:43We must not say so
0:14:45 > 0:14:46After all...
0:14:47 > 0:14:51..the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
0:14:51 > 0:14:54we ourselves flash and yearn
0:14:55 > 0:14:59And moreover, my mother told me as a boy...
0:15:00 > 0:15:01..repeatingly...
0:15:03 > 0:15:05"Ever to confess you're bored...
0:15:06 > 0:15:08"..means you have no
0:15:10 > 0:15:11"Inner resources."
0:15:13 > 0:15:16I conclude now
0:15:16 > 0:15:17I have no
0:15:17 > 0:15:19Inner resources.
0:15:21 > 0:15:24Berryman grew up in an age which saw a rise in the culture
0:15:24 > 0:15:27of psychoanalysis in the US after the war.
0:15:29 > 0:15:33Inspired by Freud, and often in therapy themselves,
0:15:33 > 0:15:36he and his peers were reassessing the world around them,
0:15:36 > 0:15:38but also the world within.
0:15:39 > 0:15:42I think especially of two books,
0:15:42 > 0:15:44The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life...
0:15:45 > 0:15:49..and The interpretation Of Dreams, in 1900.
0:15:49 > 0:15:52Uh, and nobody...
0:15:52 > 0:15:56In the first place, everybody has to have read those books,
0:15:56 > 0:15:59and in the second place,
0:15:59 > 0:16:04nobody's feelings about human experience
0:16:04 > 0:16:07are quite the same after reading those books.
0:16:10 > 0:16:13The Dream Songs was Berryman's Pulitzer prize-winning collection
0:16:13 > 0:16:17of poems, where an extreme alter ego called Henry
0:16:17 > 0:16:21lives out one nightmare of guilt and self-loathing after another.
0:16:23 > 0:16:25When he started out as a poet,
0:16:25 > 0:16:28he was kind of rather stiff and repressed in that '50s way.
0:16:28 > 0:16:30Then he discovers in The Dream Songs
0:16:30 > 0:16:33and through the creation of this character, Henry,
0:16:33 > 0:16:34a new way of writing,
0:16:34 > 0:16:37a new way of exploring himself, while wearing a mask.
0:16:37 > 0:16:43He takes one step back from his mania,
0:16:43 > 0:16:45his alcoholism,
0:16:45 > 0:16:50his suicidal tendencies, his impossible-to-live-with-ness,
0:16:50 > 0:16:54but just one step and sees himself,
0:16:54 > 0:16:57and so it's sort of objectified,
0:16:57 > 0:17:01but, at the same time, as a reader, we absolutely know that it's him.
0:17:02 > 0:17:03But...
0:17:06 > 0:17:10..never did Henry As he thought he did
0:17:10 > 0:17:11End anyone
0:17:11 > 0:17:14And hacks her body up
0:17:15 > 0:17:18And hide the pieces where they may be found
0:17:20 > 0:17:21He knows
0:17:23 > 0:17:25He went over everyone
0:17:25 > 0:17:27And nobody's missing.
0:17:28 > 0:17:31It was deeply appealing because
0:17:31 > 0:17:35it was so frank and honest and slightly scary.
0:17:35 > 0:17:38There's something wonderful about somebody saying
0:17:38 > 0:17:41something that you wouldn't dare to say yourself.
0:17:41 > 0:17:43Berryman had a pretty chaotic lifestyle.
0:17:43 > 0:17:46You know, there was heavy drinking,
0:17:46 > 0:17:48a lot of despair, a lot of unhappy relationships
0:17:48 > 0:17:50and it all ended in suicide.
0:17:51 > 0:17:56Something about writing in an orderly '50s way
0:17:56 > 0:17:59did not allow him to address that realm of experience.
0:18:04 > 0:18:09In 1972, after writing a total of 385 Dream Songs,
0:18:09 > 0:18:13Berryman killed himself by jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis
0:18:13 > 0:18:15during the middle of winter.
0:18:21 > 0:18:23The "confessional" generation of writers
0:18:23 > 0:18:26redefined a modern voice in poetry
0:18:26 > 0:18:30which could discuss any topic, no matter how personal or painful.
0:18:31 > 0:18:35Poetry has always drawn on autobiography
0:18:35 > 0:18:37but the notion of confessional poetry
0:18:37 > 0:18:40is the idea that these poets
0:18:40 > 0:18:44have shameful secrets that they're going to reveal,
0:18:44 > 0:18:47and that crosses a line for some people
0:18:47 > 0:18:51into the lurid, the tabloid,
0:18:51 > 0:18:54and revealing things that, really, it would be better to keep private.
0:18:56 > 0:19:00One Bostonian who took this frank form of poetry to its extremes
0:19:00 > 0:19:04was former model-turned-writer Anne Sexton.
0:19:07 > 0:19:10Sexton took up writing in the pre-feminist culture
0:19:10 > 0:19:12of America in the 1950s.
0:19:15 > 0:19:17Her work was shockingly honest
0:19:17 > 0:19:20and informed by her battles with mental illness.
0:19:21 > 0:19:23You know, though, I did get very manic once,
0:19:23 > 0:19:26and they told me I was psychotic, in the hospital,
0:19:26 > 0:19:28and I thought that was a riot cos I was still me.
0:19:29 > 0:19:32You know, I thought psychotic was some place else but I was still me.
0:19:33 > 0:19:35Sexton, more than everybody else,
0:19:35 > 0:19:39wrote about previously-taboo subjects in her poetry.
0:19:39 > 0:19:42She wrote about menstruation, she wrote about masturbation,
0:19:42 > 0:19:44she wrote about incest, she wrote about adultery.
0:19:44 > 0:19:45And she wrote about them in ways
0:19:45 > 0:19:49that suggested that she was not imagining them,
0:19:49 > 0:19:54that these were things she had intimate personal experience.
0:19:54 > 0:19:55Menstruation At Forty.
0:19:57 > 0:19:59I was thinking of a son
0:20:01 > 0:20:05The womb is not a clock nor a bell tolling
0:20:05 > 0:20:07But in the eleventh month of its life
0:20:07 > 0:20:12I feel the November of the body as well as of the calendar
0:20:13 > 0:20:15In two days it will be my birthday
0:20:15 > 0:20:18And as always the earth is done with its harvest
0:20:19 > 0:20:21This time I hunt for death.
0:20:23 > 0:20:25Poetry had always been pretty.
0:20:25 > 0:20:27It was supposed to be beautiful,
0:20:27 > 0:20:32and she was forcing in subject matter that was definitionally ugly.
0:20:32 > 0:20:35It was in the womb all along
0:20:37 > 0:20:39I was thinking of a son...
0:20:39 > 0:20:40You!
0:20:40 > 0:20:42The never acquired
0:20:42 > 0:20:44The never seeded or unfastened
0:20:44 > 0:20:47You of the genitals I feared
0:20:47 > 0:20:49The stalk and the puppy's breath.
0:20:51 > 0:20:53It was at the suggestion of Sexton's therapists
0:20:53 > 0:20:55that she began writing poetry.
0:20:55 > 0:20:58She was what we would now call bipolar,
0:20:58 > 0:21:00at the time called manic depressive,
0:21:00 > 0:21:04and it was suggested to her that poetry might help her
0:21:04 > 0:21:05in a therapeutic way.
0:21:05 > 0:21:10Um, many people have tried to write poetry in therapy,
0:21:10 > 0:21:11and Sexton wrote very great poetry.
0:21:11 > 0:21:14My psychiatrist suggested
0:21:14 > 0:21:16that I watch Channel 2.
0:21:18 > 0:21:21"You have an educational television there, why don't you look at it?"
0:21:21 > 0:21:24So, I did, and IA Richards was explaining the form of a sonnet,
0:21:24 > 0:21:27and I thought, oh, so that's a sonnet.
0:21:27 > 0:21:30So I sat down, tried to write one. It was a pretty bad thing.
0:21:30 > 0:21:31And that just turned me on
0:21:31 > 0:21:34and then I, you know...turned on!
0:21:35 > 0:21:38Eventually, it became impossible to separate Sexton
0:21:38 > 0:21:40from her intensely autobiographical work.
0:21:42 > 0:21:45She has a role she sees for herself
0:21:45 > 0:21:47and she insists on playing it,
0:21:47 > 0:21:49and I just got sick of it,
0:21:49 > 0:21:52the endless posturing, and just thinking,
0:21:52 > 0:21:56I don't want to go on any more about female stuff,
0:21:56 > 0:21:59I don't want to be wombing and entrailing all over the place
0:21:59 > 0:22:00and all that stuff.
0:22:00 > 0:22:03I just wanted her to go for a walk.
0:22:07 > 0:22:10I myself will die without baptism
0:22:10 > 0:22:12A third daughter they didn't bother
0:22:12 > 0:22:16My death will come on my name day
0:22:16 > 0:22:18What's wrong with the name day?
0:22:18 > 0:22:21It's only an angel of the sun
0:22:21 > 0:22:24Woman, weaving a web over your own
0:22:24 > 0:22:27A thin and tangled poison
0:22:27 > 0:22:28Scorpio
0:22:28 > 0:22:31Bad spider die!
0:22:34 > 0:22:37The raw immediacy of Anne Sexton's writing
0:22:37 > 0:22:41won her continued attention until her suicide in 1974.
0:22:42 > 0:22:46It may seem remarkable that so many of the important poets
0:22:46 > 0:22:50of the 20th century also had very troubled personal lives.
0:22:50 > 0:22:52Many of them, in fact, committed suicide.
0:22:52 > 0:22:55There's a sense that being a great poet in the 20th century
0:22:55 > 0:22:57is pretty hard to survive.
0:22:58 > 0:23:02But the most famous of the American poets from this movement
0:23:02 > 0:23:05would only be celebrated after her untimely death.
0:23:07 > 0:23:12And she would secure her lasting place in poetry back in Britain.
0:23:13 > 0:23:17What an extraordinary breakthrough Sylvia Plath was
0:23:17 > 0:23:21to all of us who'd never read any women poets really
0:23:21 > 0:23:24that shook us to bits.
0:23:24 > 0:23:27Along came Plath and, God...
0:23:28 > 0:23:32..who is this powerful, blazing woman?
0:23:33 > 0:23:36Sylvia Plath remains one of the most remarkable female poets
0:23:36 > 0:23:38of the last 100 years.
0:23:38 > 0:23:42She gave women permission to express certain kinds of
0:23:42 > 0:23:47emotions and experiences that had never been put into poetry before.
0:23:47 > 0:23:52In the autumn of 1962, at her home in North London,
0:23:52 > 0:23:54Sylvia Plath began to write Ariel,
0:23:54 > 0:23:57the collection of poems that would make her name.
0:24:00 > 0:24:02Stasis in darkness
0:24:02 > 0:24:04Then the substanceless blue
0:24:04 > 0:24:07Pour of tor and distances
0:24:07 > 0:24:09God's lioness
0:24:09 > 0:24:11How one we grow
0:24:11 > 0:24:13Pivot of heels and knees!
0:24:13 > 0:24:16The furrow Splits and passes, sister to
0:24:16 > 0:24:17The brown arc
0:24:17 > 0:24:19Of the neck I cannot catch.
0:24:24 > 0:24:28Those last poems in Ariel are just spat out,
0:24:28 > 0:24:31they come out at such a rate,
0:24:31 > 0:24:34and they're so intense and concentrated.
0:24:34 > 0:24:35This is really special.
0:24:37 > 0:24:39Plath never appeared on television.
0:24:40 > 0:24:43In this radio recording in her final months
0:24:43 > 0:24:46she stressed her preference for intellectual rigour
0:24:46 > 0:24:48over a poetry of self-pity.
0:24:49 > 0:24:52I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous
0:24:52 > 0:24:55and emotional experiences I have,
0:24:55 > 0:25:01but I must say, I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart
0:25:01 > 0:25:05that are informed by nothing except, you know, a needle or a knife
0:25:05 > 0:25:06or whatever it is.
0:25:06 > 0:25:11I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences,
0:25:11 > 0:25:15even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured,
0:25:15 > 0:25:16this sort of experience.
0:25:16 > 0:25:20And one should be able to manipulate these experiences
0:25:20 > 0:25:22with an informed and intelligent mind.
0:25:24 > 0:25:28Despite the dark and tormented subject matter of her writing,
0:25:28 > 0:25:30Plath led an outwardly traditional life,
0:25:30 > 0:25:32as a wife and mother,
0:25:32 > 0:25:34married to fellow poet Ted Hughes.
0:25:34 > 0:25:36A rare interview of them together
0:25:36 > 0:25:38captured a moment of domestic harmony.
0:25:39 > 0:25:41- SYLVIA PLATH:- I think our domestic life
0:25:41 > 0:25:43is practically indistinguishable
0:25:43 > 0:25:45from all the people who live around us.
0:25:45 > 0:25:46The only main difference is
0:25:46 > 0:25:49that Ted doesn't go out to work at nine and come home at five,
0:25:49 > 0:25:53he retires about nine to his room and works,
0:25:53 > 0:25:56but I certainly have a life just like all the other housewives
0:25:56 > 0:25:58and mothers in our district.
0:25:58 > 0:26:03Shopping, dishes, and taking care of the baby and so forth and...
0:26:03 > 0:26:07I think very few people have an idea I do anything at all
0:26:07 > 0:26:09except household chores.
0:26:10 > 0:26:14INTERVIEWER: Would you say that your temperaments are parallel,
0:26:14 > 0:26:16or do you think they're in conflict?
0:26:16 > 0:26:19- TED HUGHES:- I think, superficially, we're very alike.
0:26:19 > 0:26:22We like the same things, we live at the same tempo,
0:26:22 > 0:26:25but, obviously, this is a very fortunate covering for temperaments
0:26:25 > 0:26:28that are extremely different.
0:26:31 > 0:26:33In spite of the appearance of a happy marriage,
0:26:33 > 0:26:37Plath had struggled with depression from her late teens.
0:26:38 > 0:26:41Her mother, Aurelia, was interviewed by the BBC.
0:26:43 > 0:26:47I was constantly asking her to make choices,
0:26:47 > 0:26:51not to accept every opportunity that came along.
0:26:51 > 0:26:54I felt she was pushing herself hard,
0:26:54 > 0:26:59and I was always fearful, especially after her first breakdown
0:26:59 > 0:27:02that she was pushing herself and too demanding of herself.
0:27:02 > 0:27:05She had to be the perfect American housewife,
0:27:05 > 0:27:07the perfect, beautifully-groomed wife,
0:27:07 > 0:27:08the perfect housewife.
0:27:08 > 0:27:12She also had to be the most brilliant poet of her generation.
0:27:12 > 0:27:13And I mean, that's...
0:27:13 > 0:27:15Something's got to give, hasn't it?
0:27:15 > 0:27:16I mean, it's just tragic.
0:27:22 > 0:27:25In her poem Lady Lazarus,
0:27:25 > 0:27:28Plath reflected on her several suicide attempts.
0:27:28 > 0:27:30I have done it again.
0:27:30 > 0:27:33One year in every ten I manage it...
0:27:35 > 0:27:37Dying
0:27:37 > 0:27:40Is an art, like everything else.
0:27:40 > 0:27:42I do it exceptionally well.
0:27:42 > 0:27:45I do it so it feels like hell.
0:27:45 > 0:27:47I do it so it feels real.
0:27:47 > 0:27:50I guess you could say I've a call.
0:27:51 > 0:27:53It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
0:27:53 > 0:27:56It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
0:27:56 > 0:27:58It's the theatrical
0:27:58 > 0:28:00Comeback in broad day
0:28:00 > 0:28:04To the same place, the same face, the same brute
0:28:04 > 0:28:07Amused shout, "A miracle!"
0:28:07 > 0:28:08That knocks me out.
0:28:11 > 0:28:15In the early hours of the 23rd February, 1963,
0:28:15 > 0:28:17during one of the coldest English winters ever,
0:28:17 > 0:28:22Plath committed suicide by placing her head in a gas oven.
0:28:22 > 0:28:23She was 30 years old.
0:28:27 > 0:28:31Lines that have haunted me that were taken from Ariel,
0:28:31 > 0:28:33um...
0:28:33 > 0:28:35from the poem called The Elm...
0:28:35 > 0:28:37Just Elm, I think.
0:28:40 > 0:28:43"I am inhabited by a cry
0:28:44 > 0:28:46"Nightly it flaps out
0:28:47 > 0:28:49"Looking with its hooks
0:28:49 > 0:28:51"For something to love."
0:28:52 > 0:28:56Plath mythologized her personal life in her writing,
0:28:56 > 0:28:59investing aspects of her emotional biography
0:28:59 > 0:29:01with profound dramatic significance.
0:29:02 > 0:29:08When her final poems were published posthumously in Ariel in 1965,
0:29:08 > 0:29:10Plath became one of the most significant voices
0:29:10 > 0:29:12of the 20th century,
0:29:12 > 0:29:15not simply for poetry, but also for women.
0:29:17 > 0:29:18She gets classed as a feminist poet
0:29:18 > 0:29:20whether she'd like it or not,
0:29:20 > 0:29:23so we keep treating her as a feminist martyr.
0:29:24 > 0:29:28That's to uncomplicate a very complicated person.
0:29:30 > 0:29:32No-one could get it right with Sylvia.
0:29:32 > 0:29:35And the feminists would have been in just as much trouble
0:29:35 > 0:29:37as everybody else.
0:29:37 > 0:29:40I kind of wish that Sylvia had written a poem
0:29:40 > 0:29:44about feminists, in which she got truly stuck into them,
0:29:44 > 0:29:46but, of course, she didn't.
0:29:48 > 0:29:51Although often remembered as the super couple
0:29:51 > 0:29:53of modern English poetry,
0:29:53 > 0:29:54Plath and Hughes' styles
0:29:54 > 0:29:57were completely different from each other.
0:29:57 > 0:29:59Unlike his urban contemporaries,
0:29:59 > 0:30:03Yorkshireman Ted Hughes was unfashionably obsessed with nature.
0:30:06 > 0:30:12He wanted to re-engage with the elemental forces,
0:30:12 > 0:30:15with some fairly, you know, primitive notions.
0:30:18 > 0:30:20Who is stronger than hope?
0:30:20 > 0:30:21Death.
0:30:21 > 0:30:24Who is stronger than the will?
0:30:24 > 0:30:25Death.
0:30:25 > 0:30:27Stronger than love?
0:30:27 > 0:30:28Death.
0:30:28 > 0:30:30Stronger than life?
0:30:31 > 0:30:33Death.
0:30:33 > 0:30:36But who is stronger than Death?
0:30:36 > 0:30:39Me, evidently.
0:30:39 > 0:30:40Pass, Crow.
0:30:44 > 0:30:47Most other poets at that time were urban, academic,
0:30:47 > 0:30:52erudite voices of professors and newspaper people.
0:30:52 > 0:30:55In that context he was a kind of back woodsman
0:30:55 > 0:31:01speaking a kind of agricultural version of the Bible.
0:31:01 > 0:31:04And his mood and manner
0:31:04 > 0:31:09were at variance with what was going in the poetic community at the time.
0:31:09 > 0:31:12And I think for that reason they stood out right from the beginning.
0:31:14 > 0:31:18Nature for him was violent and dark and brutal
0:31:18 > 0:31:23in a way that no nature poetry had previously acknowledged,
0:31:23 > 0:31:26so he created his own natural universe.
0:31:30 > 0:31:33Pike, three inches long, perfect.
0:31:33 > 0:31:35Pike in all parts,
0:31:35 > 0:31:37green tigering the gold.
0:31:38 > 0:31:41Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
0:31:44 > 0:31:47They dance on the surface among the flies.
0:31:48 > 0:31:51Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
0:31:51 > 0:31:57Over a bed of emerald, silhouette of submarine delicacy and horror.
0:31:57 > 0:31:59A hundred feet long in their world.
0:32:03 > 0:32:05In comparison with a lot of other poets
0:32:05 > 0:32:10who were talking about bicycle clips and statues in churches,
0:32:10 > 0:32:15Hughes must have seemed rough and tough.
0:32:15 > 0:32:18Larkin, not to his face, described Hughes,
0:32:18 > 0:32:20as the Incredible Hulk.
0:32:20 > 0:32:22There was really no love lost
0:32:22 > 0:32:25between Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes.
0:32:25 > 0:32:26Larkin said in his letters
0:32:26 > 0:32:29that he thought Hughes' poems were embarrassing.
0:32:29 > 0:32:33And when Hughes turned up to give a talk at Hull University,
0:32:33 > 0:32:37Larkin says he was like a Christmas present from Easter Island
0:32:37 > 0:32:41because of this great hewn face of his.
0:32:42 > 0:32:46A charismatic presence, and eventual poet laureate,
0:32:46 > 0:32:51Hughes was a private person and very reluctant to appear on screen.
0:32:51 > 0:32:54But the relationship of poets to their audiences
0:32:54 > 0:32:57was about to undergo a dramatic change.
0:33:01 > 0:33:06The counterculture of the 1960s was transforming America.
0:33:06 > 0:33:09It was a time of free love, political activism,
0:33:09 > 0:33:11and experimentation.
0:33:18 > 0:33:20And poets were taking a leading role.
0:33:23 > 0:33:27There was a San Francisco explosion.
0:33:27 > 0:33:30It feels something new and exciting
0:33:30 > 0:33:33because they're prepared to write about taboo subjects.
0:33:35 > 0:33:37The poets of the Beat Generation
0:33:37 > 0:33:40whose leading light was Allen Ginsberg,
0:33:40 > 0:33:44enchanted and scandalized with their revolutionary approach to writing.
0:33:45 > 0:33:47The Beat poets made quite an impression
0:33:47 > 0:33:50on a lot of us at the time.
0:33:50 > 0:33:54I remember buying a book and there inside were all these photographs
0:33:54 > 0:33:58of all these different cafes in San Francisco and in New York.
0:33:58 > 0:34:01All these poets reading to enrapt audiences
0:34:01 > 0:34:04and I remember, cos the audience
0:34:04 > 0:34:07in the front row there were all these beautiful girls...
0:34:07 > 0:34:09like that, looking at the poet.
0:34:09 > 0:34:12I thought, "Ah, that's for me. I want to be a poet."
0:34:16 > 0:34:18When Ginsberg arrived in London,
0:34:18 > 0:34:22he was met with a storm of publicity never seen before for a poet.
0:34:25 > 0:34:28An openly gay intellectual and committed Buddhist,
0:34:28 > 0:34:31Allen Ginsberg was the most outspoken
0:34:31 > 0:34:33and political member of the Beats.
0:34:33 > 0:34:36Despite attacking America's conservatism,
0:34:36 > 0:34:39he believed in change through spiritual or peaceful means.
0:34:41 > 0:34:44During his visit, he took part in a discussion on violence
0:34:44 > 0:34:47for the BBC's Panorama programme.
0:34:47 > 0:34:50When you're in American and you see the negro problem
0:34:50 > 0:34:55in full spate with its non-violent and violent manifestations,
0:34:55 > 0:34:58how do you react? From your particular...
0:34:58 > 0:35:00I think everyone ought to take LSD
0:35:00 > 0:35:04and get rid of their violence and their colour and their identity
0:35:04 > 0:35:08and, like, get with it, finally, and stop making such a big, noisy scene.
0:35:08 > 0:35:12There comes a point in 20th century poetry where poets put themselves
0:35:12 > 0:35:14to the foreground, they reveal who they are,
0:35:14 > 0:35:18they do lots of interviews, they come on stage
0:35:18 > 0:35:21and do lots of stuff between the poems.
0:35:21 > 0:35:24The purists hate this because the poem is supposed to be sacred
0:35:24 > 0:35:25and stand on its own.
0:35:25 > 0:35:30But certainly for the last 30 or 40 years we've had poets
0:35:30 > 0:35:33who show all, and Ginsberg is somebody like that.
0:35:33 > 0:35:37Ginsberg's poems railed against the conformity of modern America,
0:35:37 > 0:35:40dealing frankly with taboo subjects like homosexuality
0:35:40 > 0:35:42and drug addiction.
0:35:42 > 0:35:47His most famous work, Howl, was a 30-minute outpouring of rage,
0:35:47 > 0:35:52which was put on trial after publication for obscenity.
0:35:52 > 0:35:55We all used to pass around Howl.
0:35:55 > 0:35:59A lot of people were influenced by it because it was a howl.
0:35:59 > 0:36:05It was a cry of pain, it was it was a cry of something or other about...
0:36:05 > 0:36:10It was seen to be drug-fuelled and daring,
0:36:10 > 0:36:12all these things that we weren't.
0:36:12 > 0:36:17I was never drug-fuelled and daring... If only.
0:36:17 > 0:36:21I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
0:36:21 > 0:36:24starving, hysterical, naked.
0:36:26 > 0:36:29Who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
0:36:29 > 0:36:31waving genitals and manuscripts,
0:36:31 > 0:36:35who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists
0:36:35 > 0:36:37and screamed with joy.
0:36:38 > 0:36:42Interviewed on the BBC's Face To Face several decades later,
0:36:42 > 0:36:45Ginsberg looked back on his scandalous work.
0:36:45 > 0:36:48It wasn't long before, in your poems,
0:36:48 > 0:36:53you were willing to make explicit statements about your sexuality.
0:36:53 > 0:36:54Yes.
0:36:54 > 0:36:58Wasn't that very difficult in what was, after all, McCarthy's America?
0:36:58 > 0:37:00Well, it would have been if I had intended it to be public,
0:37:00 > 0:37:04but to tell you truth, and as I've said before,
0:37:04 > 0:37:07Howl was written sort of in despair of writing poetry.
0:37:07 > 0:37:10I figured I hadn't succeeded in writing anything interesting,
0:37:10 > 0:37:13and so I said, "Well, I'll just write writings for myself
0:37:13 > 0:37:16"and I'll forget any idea of publishing poetry."
0:37:16 > 0:37:18When it got to my own,
0:37:18 > 0:37:22"Got fucked in the ass by handsome sailors and screamed with joy",
0:37:22 > 0:37:24rather than screamed with pain or agony,
0:37:24 > 0:37:26I realised how funny it was
0:37:26 > 0:37:28but knew that my father would not want to read that.
0:37:28 > 0:37:31So from then on I knew I wouldn't be able to publish the poem,
0:37:31 > 0:37:35so I was completely free to write anything I wanted.
0:37:36 > 0:37:38Inspired by Ginsberg,
0:37:38 > 0:37:43live readings had become a key part of the newly energized poetry scene.
0:37:43 > 0:37:47In the summer of 1965, the BBC captured a unique moment
0:37:47 > 0:37:51when poetry readings outgrew the coffee houses and book shops
0:37:51 > 0:37:54for London's Royal Albert Hall.
0:37:54 > 0:37:59And Ginsberg was the headline act, performing to 7,000 fans.
0:38:01 > 0:38:06Going to watch Ginsberg in the Albert Hall was one thing,
0:38:06 > 0:38:07and that was exciting.
0:38:07 > 0:38:10And there was marijuana smoke going around,
0:38:10 > 0:38:16and it was like California and New York comes to London, you know?
0:38:17 > 0:38:22Yes! I'm that worm soul under the heel
0:38:22 > 0:38:25of the demon horses.
0:38:25 > 0:38:31I am that man trembling to die in vomit
0:38:31 > 0:38:35and trance in bamboo eternities,
0:38:35 > 0:38:41belly ripped open by red hand of courteous Chinamen kids.
0:38:41 > 0:38:45Come sweetly now,
0:38:45 > 0:38:49back to myself as I was.
0:38:50 > 0:38:56Poets began to discover the shamanistic tradition of performance.
0:38:56 > 0:39:00If he became possessed, the audience would become possessed,
0:39:00 > 0:39:03there would be a transformation of some kind.
0:39:03 > 0:39:05All poets are interested in transformation.
0:39:05 > 0:39:08Will I be transformed by writing it,
0:39:08 > 0:39:10will the audience be transformed by listening to it?
0:39:10 > 0:39:15No, I've been home for months but not all of me.
0:39:15 > 0:39:20Somewhere beyond the seas, the spies in their spinach tin suits
0:39:20 > 0:39:25are watching the movies unwind with owlish X-rays.
0:39:25 > 0:39:28They're there on the screen.
0:39:28 > 0:39:34Blue light on the couch you sit smiling at me
0:39:34 > 0:39:39and stretching your arms and he couldn't make it!
0:39:39 > 0:39:42Ginsberg seemed to feel very strongly
0:39:42 > 0:39:46that if he acted as the shaman, as the prophet,
0:39:46 > 0:39:50then people would listen, and that would deconstruct America
0:39:50 > 0:39:54as this great military industrial complex,
0:39:54 > 0:39:57pursuing minorities,
0:39:57 > 0:40:02being racist and sexist and pursuing people who want to smoke dope.
0:40:02 > 0:40:04And so he raged against it
0:40:04 > 0:40:07and hoped people would join him
0:40:07 > 0:40:11in what was really a kind of poetic, shamanistic campaign.
0:40:11 > 0:40:17One of them grunting, one of them groaning out, "What a chick."
0:40:19 > 0:40:22A lot of people have been concerned about the rise in poetry,
0:40:22 > 0:40:24particular amongst teenagers.
0:40:24 > 0:40:28Slim volumes can now be bought openly in certain parts of the country.
0:40:28 > 0:40:32It's become fashionable for people to gather together in groups
0:40:32 > 0:40:34and be turned on by verse.
0:40:37 > 0:40:41If San Francisco was the vibrant heart of the Beat scene,
0:40:41 > 0:40:44in Britain, Liverpool was where it was all happening.
0:40:51 > 0:40:54Inspired by California's brand of direct performance poetry,
0:40:54 > 0:40:57a group of young men were about to play their part
0:40:57 > 0:41:00in the city's cultural revolution.
0:41:00 > 0:41:04When the Liverpool poets came out in the mid '60s,
0:41:04 > 0:41:06it was a breath of fresh air.
0:41:07 > 0:41:12Liverpool was the place of the Beatles and this brand-new explosion
0:41:12 > 0:41:16of working class culture into British life.
0:41:16 > 0:41:19They seemed to have incorporated
0:41:19 > 0:41:24something of the Beatles sense of irreverence.
0:41:24 > 0:41:26The Liverpool poets were geography graduate
0:41:26 > 0:41:28turned pop star Roger McGough,
0:41:28 > 0:41:33music journalist Brian Patten, and artist Adrian Henri.
0:41:33 > 0:41:36Together they would bring poetry like art and music,
0:41:36 > 0:41:39into the heart of '60s pop culture.
0:41:39 > 0:41:44The BBC filmed the group of pop poets on location in 1966
0:41:44 > 0:41:47at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre.
0:41:47 > 0:41:51But it was McGough who would develop as the main voice of the movement.
0:41:51 > 0:41:54Monika, the tea things are taking over.
0:41:54 > 0:41:58The cups are as big as bubble cars, they throttle round the room.
0:41:58 > 0:42:00The tin-openers skate on the greasy plates
0:42:00 > 0:42:02by the light of the silvery moon.
0:42:02 > 0:42:05The biscuits are having a party. They're necking in our bread bin.
0:42:05 > 0:42:08That's jazz you hear in the salt cellars
0:42:08 > 0:42:09but they don't let non-members in.
0:42:09 > 0:42:12The egg spoons had our eggs for breakfast,
0:42:12 > 0:42:14the sauce bottle's asleep in our bed.
0:42:14 > 0:42:18I overheard the knives and forks - "It won't be long," they said.
0:42:18 > 0:42:20"It won't be long," they said.
0:42:20 > 0:42:24In 1967, the hugely influential Mersey Sound was published
0:42:24 > 0:42:28and became Britain's best selling poetry anthology of the time.
0:42:28 > 0:42:31I remember finding Roger McGough's,
0:42:31 > 0:42:33"Let me die a young man's death,
0:42:33 > 0:42:36"not a clean and in-between the sheets holy water death."
0:42:36 > 0:42:40I remember reading it in the Sunday Times one Sunday
0:42:40 > 0:42:43and thinking, "Wow, I want to do that."
0:42:44 > 0:42:46I think any poet or group of poets
0:42:46 > 0:42:50who do something new or newish in poetry,
0:42:50 > 0:42:53they give permission to others to think,
0:42:53 > 0:42:54"Well, I could write like that."
0:42:54 > 0:42:56I think that's wonderful.
0:42:56 > 0:42:59I think that's the democratic pulse that runs through poetry.
0:43:01 > 0:43:07They were part of the new revival of poetry and poetry reading.
0:43:07 > 0:43:09And doing it out loud and making it make sense.
0:43:09 > 0:43:13They really were just the game changers.
0:43:13 > 0:43:16The Queen came up to Liverpool to dine at our town hall.
0:43:16 > 0:43:18In the evening, wrote to her husband,
0:43:18 > 0:43:20"Dear Philip, I'm having a ball.
0:43:20 > 0:43:23"I'll think I'll hang about. I mean, everything's happening here.
0:43:23 > 0:43:25"I'm beginning to dig the poetry scene
0:43:25 > 0:43:27"and the ale is bloody gear."
0:43:27 > 0:43:31So while she was having a castle built down in Castle Street,
0:43:31 > 0:43:36She had a look round Liverpool 8, found a pad there, small, but neat.
0:43:36 > 0:43:37She moved in with a few belongings
0:43:37 > 0:43:41Corgis, crown, a throne,
0:43:41 > 0:43:43and the blue blood in the neighbourhood
0:43:43 > 0:43:45really raised the tone.
0:43:45 > 0:43:50It seemed very near and seemed very approachable
0:43:50 > 0:43:51and yet when you look at it now,
0:43:51 > 0:43:55in some respects, of course, it was very formal poetry.
0:43:55 > 0:43:58There they are in little four-line verses, rhyming perfectly.
0:43:58 > 0:44:01So it was magical.
0:44:01 > 0:44:05Out of work, divorced, usually pissed,
0:44:05 > 0:44:07he aimed low in life and missed.
0:44:12 > 0:44:17But McGough's popular approach met a critical backlash.
0:44:17 > 0:44:19If you write about ordinary stuff,
0:44:19 > 0:44:22and if you write about things that other poets have written about
0:44:22 > 0:44:25in quite highfalutin ways, and you write about it in very ordinary ways,
0:44:25 > 0:44:28people will be treat you with disdain.
0:44:28 > 0:44:30There was still a lot of hostility towards the Liverpool poets.
0:44:30 > 0:44:32Poets found it unbearable.
0:44:32 > 0:44:36They do, if somebody comes along who is popular.
0:44:36 > 0:44:40I once read a review that was outrageous.
0:44:40 > 0:44:44It was as if somehow or other he had profaned poetry.
0:44:44 > 0:44:48He hasn't at all, he's done the opposite.
0:44:48 > 0:44:49He's kept it alive.
0:44:49 > 0:44:52What do you think the role of the poet is or your poetry?
0:44:52 > 0:44:54Um... I don't quite know, really.
0:44:54 > 0:44:57I think two things, I think, um... there's two reasons for writing it.
0:44:57 > 0:45:00I'm not quite sure why one writes poetry, it's something very personal.
0:45:00 > 0:45:03But then when you actually stand and read it to people,
0:45:03 > 0:45:06then I think it possibly can be entertaining.
0:45:06 > 0:45:08The choice of poems should be entertaining.
0:45:08 > 0:45:10But do you see yourself as an entertainer?
0:45:10 > 0:45:14Not in the sense of a show business sort of thing. Not really.
0:45:14 > 0:45:17I think it's all sorts of things.
0:45:17 > 0:45:20It can be serious, it can be entertaining, it can be funny.
0:45:20 > 0:45:24Entertaining tends to mean funny, that's the problem in people's minds.
0:45:24 > 0:45:27"He's behind you!"
0:45:27 > 0:45:29Chorused the children but the warning came too late.
0:45:29 > 0:45:31The monster leaped forward
0:45:31 > 0:45:34and fastening its teeth into his neck tore off the head.
0:45:34 > 0:45:36The body fell to the floor.
0:45:36 > 0:45:38"More," cried the children. "More."
0:45:41 > 0:45:44Poetry had become a familiar part of popular entertainment,
0:45:44 > 0:45:47and was reaching a wider audience than ever before.
0:45:53 > 0:45:57But in the mid 1970s, at a time of deep social unrest in Britain,
0:45:57 > 0:46:01more urgent, marginalised voices started to be heard.
0:46:05 > 0:46:09Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson was one of the first people
0:46:09 > 0:46:11to write about the situation for the disaffected
0:46:11 > 0:46:15Black British youth living in the inner cities.
0:46:15 > 0:46:18# Dem frame up George Lindo up in Bradford town,
0:46:18 > 0:46:21# But de Bradford blaks dem a rally round. #
0:46:21 > 0:46:23He was the only voice that was speaking to us,
0:46:23 > 0:46:25putting our situation under a microscope
0:46:25 > 0:46:29and not only just reporting and observing,
0:46:29 > 0:46:32but kind of offering direction and ideas.
0:46:32 > 0:46:34You know, you look at the body of his work,
0:46:34 > 0:46:37he sums up the '70s into the early '80s...
0:46:37 > 0:46:40What it was like to be Black in Britain like nobody else.
0:46:40 > 0:46:45# Madness, madness tight on the heads of the rebels
0:46:45 > 0:46:48# The bitterness erup's like a heart blas'
0:46:48 > 0:46:50# Broke glass
0:46:52 > 0:46:55# Ritual of blood an' a-burnin'... #
0:46:55 > 0:46:58Kwesi Johnson wrote in a Jamaican dialect
0:46:58 > 0:47:00and performed his poems over reggae beats.
0:47:02 > 0:47:03# Broke glass
0:47:03 > 0:47:08# Cold blades as sharp as the eyes of hate and the stabbin'
0:47:08 > 0:47:11# It's war amongs' the rebels. #
0:47:11 > 0:47:14One of the fibs about British poetry
0:47:14 > 0:47:16is that it's always been written in standard English.
0:47:16 > 0:47:19The point is many poets, both in Britain and America,
0:47:19 > 0:47:22have written in what you might call non-standard English or in dialect.
0:47:22 > 0:47:24So when Linton was writing in patois,
0:47:24 > 0:47:27people said, "Oh, well, I don't understand it."
0:47:27 > 0:47:28I think they were making a statement
0:47:28 > 0:47:30that they didn't want to understand it.
0:47:30 > 0:47:34Steel blade drinking blood in darkness
0:47:34 > 0:47:39It's war amongst the rebels, madness, madness war.
0:47:40 > 0:47:44Kwesi Johnson's unique style of performance attracted the curiosity
0:47:44 > 0:47:47of even the most traditional BBC programmes.
0:47:47 > 0:47:49You do use a Creole patois, don't you,
0:47:49 > 0:47:52which is very difficult for a White person to understand.
0:47:52 > 0:47:53I found while listening to some of them
0:47:53 > 0:47:56that I would have liked to have understood more than I did
0:47:56 > 0:47:59and you weren't actually reaching me as a White person.
0:47:59 > 0:48:04Well, perhaps it forces you, if you're really that interested,
0:48:04 > 0:48:06to try and penetrate the language and check it out
0:48:06 > 0:48:08and try to understand it.
0:48:08 > 0:48:10But would you not also like the White people to understand
0:48:10 > 0:48:13a little bit of what the Black people are going through?
0:48:13 > 0:48:16Sure. Um, and I think they...
0:48:16 > 0:48:20Some people do get some insights
0:48:20 > 0:48:23into our experiences from my poetry.
0:48:23 > 0:48:28We looked to our language as part of our rebelliousness.
0:48:28 > 0:48:31Our parents, when they came over in the mid '50s,
0:48:31 > 0:48:35the way the thought they'd succeed was by assimilating,
0:48:35 > 0:48:39which really meant trying to play the White man.
0:48:39 > 0:48:42I mean, Jamaican language, it's got a bass, man. You know what I mean?
0:48:42 > 0:48:44It's a certain power to it.
0:48:44 > 0:48:49# So slow, so smooth, So tight and ripe and smash! #
0:48:49 > 0:48:51You like, also, to perform your poems, don't you?
0:48:51 > 0:48:53Rather than to have people actually read them?
0:48:53 > 0:48:55Absolutely, because it's oral poetry.
0:48:55 > 0:48:59The emphasis is on the spoken word as opposed to the written word.
0:49:00 > 0:49:04And, of course, the spoken word has a greater immediacy
0:49:04 > 0:49:07and impact than the written word does.
0:49:09 > 0:49:13Published in the run up to the Brixton riots of the early '80s,
0:49:13 > 0:49:17Dread Beat An' Blood became Kwesi Johnson's politically charged anthem
0:49:17 > 0:49:21to his generation's struggle with police brutality and injustice.
0:49:23 > 0:49:27Dread Beat An' Blood is a really powerful piece of work,
0:49:27 > 0:49:29that's definitely informed by the times,
0:49:29 > 0:49:33and I don't think there's any better encapsulation
0:49:33 > 0:49:37of what the Black British experience was at that time.
0:49:37 > 0:49:39I mean, it certainly changed my life.
0:49:41 > 0:49:44The BBC Arts documentary strand, Omnibus,
0:49:44 > 0:49:48followed Kwesi Johnson's campaign for George Lindo,
0:49:48 > 0:49:52a Black British man who had been wrongfully imprisoned for robbery.
0:49:55 > 0:49:58The slogans that the demonstrators were chanting
0:49:58 > 0:50:00had a kind of a calypso tempo.
0:50:00 > 0:50:04Jail house in George house, jail house in George house.
0:50:04 > 0:50:09And that simple chant gave me the inspiration to write this poem.
0:50:09 > 0:50:12Dem frame up George Lindo up in Bradford town
0:50:12 > 0:50:16But de Bradford blaks dem a rally round
0:50:16 > 0:50:19Maggi Tatcha on di go wid a racist show
0:50:19 > 0:50:21but a she haffi go
0:50:21 > 0:50:26kaw, rite now, African, Asian, West Indian
0:50:26 > 0:50:30an' Black British stan firm inna Inglan
0:50:30 > 0:50:31inna disya time yah.
0:50:31 > 0:50:34# George Lindo - im nuh carri do dagger
0:50:34 > 0:50:37# George Lindo - im is not no robber
0:50:37 > 0:50:40# George Lindo - dem haffi let im goh
0:50:40 > 0:50:43# George Lindo - dem betta free im now ! #
0:50:56 > 0:50:59From the streets of Brixton to the libraries of Hull,
0:50:59 > 0:51:02to the living rooms of suburban America,
0:51:02 > 0:51:05poetry had sprung from some unfamiliar places.
0:51:05 > 0:51:09And, over the course of the century, poetry had been transformed,
0:51:09 > 0:51:12no longer the preserve of a privileged few,
0:51:12 > 0:51:14but a diverse community of voices.
0:51:17 > 0:51:20At the end of century there would be one writer
0:51:20 > 0:51:22who would enjoy universal appeal...
0:51:24 > 0:51:28..and become one of modern poetry's household names.
0:51:28 > 0:51:32Like many of the poets of his generation, he was an outsider,
0:51:32 > 0:51:35growing up on a cattle farm in rural Northern Ireland.
0:51:37 > 0:51:41Seamus Heaney, or as he became known, Famous Seamus.
0:51:47 > 0:51:50There are two ways to look at Seamus Heaney's early poetry,
0:51:50 > 0:51:53and indeed English writers did look at him in these two ways.
0:51:53 > 0:51:56One, to think it's wonderful about nature.
0:51:56 > 0:52:00And two, to think it's rural, earthly.
0:52:00 > 0:52:03It's all about root vegetables and crops and so on.
0:52:03 > 0:52:06Both, actually, reactions are actually rather condescending
0:52:06 > 0:52:07to what Heaney was actually doing.
0:52:07 > 0:52:09Heaney's so-called nature poetry
0:52:09 > 0:52:12is actually dealing with a lot of other things.
0:52:12 > 0:52:14To do with identity, his own,
0:52:14 > 0:52:20to do with family, and tribe, and home, and belonging.
0:52:20 > 0:52:24It's not about just describing blackberries or potatoes.
0:52:26 > 0:52:28The coarse boot nestled on the lug,
0:52:28 > 0:52:32the shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly.
0:52:32 > 0:52:36He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
0:52:36 > 0:52:39to scatter new potatoes that we picked,
0:52:39 > 0:52:42loving their cool hardness in our hands.
0:52:42 > 0:52:45By God, the old man could handle a spade.
0:52:45 > 0:52:46Just like his old man.
0:52:48 > 0:52:50The cold smell of potato mould,
0:52:50 > 0:52:53the squelch and slap of soggy peat,
0:52:53 > 0:52:57the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head.
0:52:59 > 0:53:01But I've no spade to follow men like them.
0:53:02 > 0:53:07Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests.
0:53:07 > 0:53:09I'll dig with it.
0:53:09 > 0:53:13Heaney began his 45-year-long career
0:53:13 > 0:53:15writing about his modest farming background.
0:53:17 > 0:53:20His first collection, Death of a Naturalist,
0:53:20 > 0:53:23published in 1966, was an instant success.
0:53:31 > 0:53:35As a child, they couldn't keep me from wells
0:53:35 > 0:53:38And old pumps with buckets and windlasses
0:53:38 > 0:53:44I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells of waterweed,
0:53:44 > 0:53:46fungus and dank moss.
0:53:47 > 0:53:51One in a brick yard with a rotted board top
0:53:51 > 0:53:52I savoured the rich crash
0:53:52 > 0:53:56when a bucked plummeted down at the end of a rope.
0:53:56 > 0:53:59So deep you saw no reflection in it.
0:53:59 > 0:54:04The magic of poetry is that the individual can take an experience,
0:54:04 > 0:54:08paint in words and other people can see themselves in it.
0:54:08 > 0:54:13He's not about anything. There's no polemic in his poetry.
0:54:13 > 0:54:18Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
0:54:18 > 0:54:21To stare big-eyed Narcissus
0:54:21 > 0:54:24into some spring is beneath all adult dignity.
0:54:25 > 0:54:28I rhyme to see myself,
0:54:28 > 0:54:30to set the darkness echoing.
0:54:32 > 0:54:35He came from nowhere and nothing.
0:54:35 > 0:54:41There was no literary pedigree in Heaney's background,
0:54:41 > 0:54:47from a farming family in rural Ireland.
0:54:47 > 0:54:52I think it coincided with a more general movement in poetry
0:54:52 > 0:54:58through the late 20th century where those voices from the outside,
0:54:58 > 0:55:02the non-metropolitan voices, became more interesting.
0:55:02 > 0:55:06These were people who often hadn't had a voice.
0:55:12 > 0:55:15Heaney grew up in a rural community and that was his world,
0:55:15 > 0:55:18and the world he wrote about in his first two or three collections.
0:55:18 > 0:55:22But then he was living in Belfast at the time of the Troubles.
0:55:22 > 0:55:25Suddenly, the urgency of that matter was something
0:55:25 > 0:55:29he felt he had to address as a poet, to be a public voice,
0:55:29 > 0:55:32to be a political voice, to show solidarity with his own people.
0:55:34 > 0:55:37Interviewed on the BBC in 1973,
0:55:37 > 0:55:40at the height of the Northern Irish conflict,
0:55:40 > 0:55:44Heaney was forced to consider how he would play a public role.
0:55:44 > 0:55:47In your early years, your first poetry
0:55:47 > 0:55:51wrote what I'd call modern landscape poetry basically,
0:55:51 > 0:55:54and now that landscape that you're all too familiar with
0:55:54 > 0:55:58is torn by often arbitrary but certainly tormenting violence.
0:55:58 > 0:56:01Surely this must have some effect on the poetry you're writing now.
0:56:01 > 0:56:07My view and way with poetry has never been to use it
0:56:07 > 0:56:13as a vehicle for making statements about situations.
0:56:13 > 0:56:17The poems have more... they've more come up
0:56:17 > 0:56:23like bodies out of a bog of my own imagination.
0:56:23 > 0:56:25I want to wait, in a sense,
0:56:25 > 0:56:29until the violence comes out of the pores of my mind,
0:56:29 > 0:56:32and I think it does, in a way.
0:56:32 > 0:56:33But, um...
0:56:33 > 0:56:36Well, I notice a discernible movement in that direction,
0:56:36 > 0:56:40and a feeling of the symbols coming to which you're selecting.
0:56:40 > 0:56:44In the poem and dedication in your last book, Wintering Out,
0:56:44 > 0:56:47which I'll read...
0:56:47 > 0:56:49"This morning from a dewy motorway
0:56:49 > 0:56:53"I saw the new camp for the internees.
0:56:53 > 0:56:57"A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay in the road side
0:56:57 > 0:57:02"and over in the trees, machine gun posts defined a real stockade.
0:57:02 > 0:57:05"There was that white mist you get on a low ground
0:57:05 > 0:57:08"and it was deja vu
0:57:08 > 0:57:11"some film made of stalag 17,
0:57:11 > 0:57:14"a bad dream with no sound.
0:57:14 > 0:57:17"'Is there a life before death?'
0:57:17 > 0:57:20"That's chalked up on a wall downtown.
0:57:20 > 0:57:24"Competence with pain, coherent miseries,
0:57:24 > 0:57:26"a bite and sup.
0:57:26 > 0:57:28"We hug our little destiny again."
0:57:30 > 0:57:35I think it may happen in the future that, now that sadly he's gone,
0:57:35 > 0:57:39that his affability is not the thing he's remembered for,
0:57:39 > 0:57:41but actually the toughness of his language.
0:57:43 > 0:57:46It's always hard to know which poets will endure,
0:57:46 > 0:57:48which ones will speak to generations after ours,
0:57:48 > 0:57:50but I hope Heaney's will. I think it will.
0:57:50 > 0:57:53And in the meanwhile, in his lifetime it certainly spoke to us,
0:57:53 > 0:57:56and he was a also great ambassador for poetry.
0:57:56 > 0:57:58He took it out there into the world.
0:57:58 > 0:58:02And that's why he's such a huge presence at the end of the century.