Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945-1979

Challenging received ideas about the British Poetry Revival, Luke Roberts presents a new account of experimental poetry and literary activism. Drawing on a wide range of contexts and traditions, Living in History begins by examining the legacies of empire and exile in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J. H. Prynne, and poets associated with the Communist Party and the African National Congress. It then focuses on the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Denise Riley, Anna Mendelssohn and others, in the development of liberation struggles around gender, race and sexuality across the 1970s. Tracking the ambivalence between poetic ambition and political commitment, and how one sometimes interferes with the other, Luke Roberts troubles the exclusions of ’British Poetry’ as a category and tests the claims made on behalf avant-garde and experimental poetics against the historical record. Bringing together both major and neglected authorships and offering extended close readings, fresh archival research and new contextual evidence, Living in History is an ambitious and exciting intervention in the field.

Luke Roberts is Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry at King’s College London. He is the author of Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things (2017), which was nominated for the University English first book prize. His writing has appeared in ELH, Textual Practice, The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and elsewhere. He is co-editor, with Sam Ladkin, of the work of Mark Hyatt, including So Much For Life: Selected Poems (2023), and the novel Love, Leda (2023). He also edited Barry MacSweeney, Desire Lines: Unselected Poems: 1966-2000 (2018), and was co-editor of Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer (2014). His books of poetry include Home Radio (2021), and his poems have been published in Chicago Review, Ludd Gang, Cambridge Literary Review and many other little magazines. With Amy Tobin he edits the small press Distance No Object.