Part of the problem with presenting any brief survey of the poetry of the British Isles in the 20^th century (which surely we must account an astonishingly energetic one for the art, even after compensating for our contemporary myopia) is that, as the century has progressed, it has become increasingly difficult to give a nonpartisan account of its evolution, and provide a straightforward list of its most important practitioners.

For one thing, developments since the 1960s have introduced serious disagreements over how the very idea of 'importance' should itself be defined. A further distortion is introduced by the national aspirations of the constituent nations of these islands; these have led to exhaustive and confusing surveys, often conducted at a degree of resolution too high for the pool of talent such small populations might reasonably be expected to support. To take any random sample of would-be disinterested accounts or anthologies of 20thc poetry, then, can feel like walking into a hall of mirrors; yet this very lack of a reliable guide reflects the sheer variety, invention and confused energy of the poetry of the period.  This short account should be treated with the same scepticism as any other.

Modernism did not, for the most part, present itself as the same revolutionary alternative in these islands as it did in the US, where a wholehearted embracing of the modernist vision has always been closely allied to declarations of cultural autonomy. In the British Isles, the assimilation of the  innovations and freedoms of  Modernism into the river of the poetic tradition has been, on the whole, a more organic and less self-conscious process, and thus one a little easier to chart, at least for the first sixty years.

There is however at least one serious lacuna in this narrative: the cull of the Great War mean that between the ‘Georgian’ or post-Victorian poets of the 1910s and early Modernism, there is no easy segue (amongst the former group we might include A.E. Housman, Robert Bridges, Walter De La Mare, Charlotte Mew and Elizabeth Daryush; also Bridges' oddly time-delayed release of that self-flagellant overstresser, Gerard Manley Hopkins, plus a great number of minor poets such as Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater).  The war claimed those poets who would have provided just that bridge between the past and the new freedoms won or claimed by those towering mid-Atlantic High Modernists, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot - among them Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and doubtless others whose names we shall never know. (Invoking Thomas Hardy as a bridge between the Victorian and the Modern eras still leaves us well short of Pound, and D.H. Lawrence's little impromptu psalms are too indebted to Walt Whitman to be considered representative of British practice at the time.) This perhaps condemned the generation immediately following Pound and Eliot to a greater self-consciousness of practice that they might have felt with that missing generation to smooth the transition: the lost dialogue between Edward Thomas and W.H. Auden, for example, is a huge gap in English letters.

In England, the most important group to follow Pound and Eliot were the generation of poets to emerge in the 30s - led by the chimerical 'McSpauday' – W.H. Auden, Louis MacNiece, Stephen Spender and C.  Day-Lewis (though the name of the  South African Roy Campbell should also be included here). Only the first two names, however, are now considered poets of the greatest significance. British poetry in the 40s in many ways marks a nadir in the century; the reasons are complex, but after the huge advances made by the Auden generation the poets perhaps felt wedded to a progressive paradigm, and obliged to push forward for the sake of it; unfortunately, they were particularly hampered by poor models - in particular Dylan Thomas and the American Wallace Stevens, both poets of genius who nonetheless often succeed despite their stylistic excesses - those excesses being, alas, the one bit that was easy to imitate. The result was the rather hysterical and affected ‘Apocalyptic’ verse of the likes of J.F. Hendry and Nicholas Moore, or at best a kind of vatic rumbling, characterised by the rhetorically impressive but often affected bluster of George Barker.

Prior to the emergence of the Movement poets, fine poems in a  Audenesque style were being written by Roy Fuller; the neglected poetry of Lawrence Durrell shows a number of interesting European influences. Stevie Smith is another unclassifiable maverick, half modernist-surrealist , half light-versifier, and her popularity still seems undiminished.

The so-called ‘Movement’ poets were united partly by an exasperation with what they perceived to be the mannered operaticism of Dylan Thomas and his epigones; they looked back to Thomas Hardy, in particular, as a way of re-embracing a more direct means of expression, and so re-addressing a general readership.  In this school the major poets were Philip Larkin, Donald Davie and Elizabeth Jennings, but we might also include Kingsley Amis, John Wain and to some extent the woefully neglected Cornish poet, Charles Causley. Thom Gunn, who began as a kind of hip formalist before moving slowly towards a more American open-ended sense of form and cadence, might be considered a bridge between this group and the post-Movement, Confessional-influenced poets of the sixties. The so-called ‘Group’ poets were a social, not aesthetic grouping, but they produced two important voices in Martin Bell and the Australian Peter Porter.

Irish poetry in the 20thc is dominated by the figure W.B. Yeats, whose influence extended (unlike the equally commanding figure of Hugh MacDiarmid in Scotland) over the whole of the British Isles. His example seems to have been intimidatory; between Yeats and the remarkable constellation of poets that emerged in Ulster in the 1970s – a list which would include Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley - perhaps only Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNiece (who we often think of as a really an Anglo-Irish poet of Auden’s circle) can be accounted poets of the first importance, though both James Joyce and Samuel Beckett also wrote some fine poetry in their second discipline, and Padraic Fallon, Austin Clarke and the Irish Gaelic poet Sean O’Riordain are all interesting voices.

In Scotland, the central figure is Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve), the most important Scottish poet since Robert Burns. While MacDiarmid was unquestionably a poet of immense gifts, like Burns whether his influence was entirely beneficial remains to be seen. Robert Garioch and William Soutar (although the latter was influenced by the early lyric MacDiarmid) both rejected MacDiarmid’s literary Lallans, and deliberately sought out a Scots tongue that was actually spoken. Both those voices now seem far more attractive to the contemporary reader that the somewhat academic Scots of Sydney Goodsir Smith, or the Marxist posturing of other minor poets in MacDiarmid’s coterie.  Another significant poet was Edwin Muir, who made more sober attempts to synthesise modern and traditional influences; his somewhat cold and monochrome verses can have a kind of heraldic power, but his poetic reading of Kafka's allegory is wanting that most Kafkaesque of qualities, humour.  W.S. Graham began as a florid modernist of the Dylan Thomas school, but in his later books found a remarkable personal language of great metaphysical force, and he has grown and grown in reputation. The group of poets who emerged between the 40s and 60s - Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown, Edwin Morgan, and the Gaelic poets  Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith (who also wrote in English) are all fine writers of equal importance, though MacCaig became the best known in Scotland through his adoption by the school syllabus. Their generation now seems defined by its near-simultaneous culling in the mid-nineties, leaving Morgan the last surviving major figure of that group (and in his irrepressible experimentalism, the perhaps the least representative).

In Wales, the first significant poet of the century was David Jones, an unclassifiable High Modernist whose influences took in Pound, Arthurian legend, Blake’s prophetic books, and the neo-Scholastic Jacques Maritain. Like Ireland and Scotland, however, Welsh poetry in the 20thc has been dominated by one figure. The reputation of Dylan Thomas has fluctuated wildly from decade to decade, though the rhetorical force of a poem like “Fern Hill” seems impossible to gainsay. Alun Lewis is another important poet, but in the 60s the landscape of Welsh verse is increasingly dominated by the powerfully austere lyric of R.S. Thomas.

By the 60s the picture muddies considerably; this is partly owing to a series of schisms that lead, ultimately, to the near-Balkanisation of the present scene, and partly down the canon-free muddle that we should precisely expect as we approach the contemporary.  Of the post-Movement poets, two names stand out: the fatal double-act of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, two poets of indisputable greatness whose noisy biographies nonetheless still continue to drown out any sober assessment of their work. But while the mainstream of British poetry can still be read on a kind of post-Movement timeline, two other groups reacted to the perceived bourgeois-domestic-subjective strategies of the Movement in two very different ways.  One was the group of poets who formed the so-called Liverpool Scene - a kind British take on the Beats; much of their output now seems naive and sentimental - but some of it had great political, if ephemeral, potency; the group were also highly adept at cross-breeding poetry with other media, and effected a  genuinely useful popularisation of the art that re-recruited some of the readership that High Modernism had alienated. Among the most important  poet-performers in this group were Adrian Mitchell, Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Jeff Nuttall, and the most important probably Roger McGough,  still one of the most popular poets in the country. This group was the forerunner of the vibrant performance poetry scene in the UK and Ireland.

The other was the strong emergence of a UK Postmodern avant-garde. Significant names to emerge in this period were J.H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, John Riley, Tom Raworth and Veronica Forrest-Thomson; besides their  disillusion with what they saw as a stale and unadventurous UK mainstream, they were also galvanised by the publication of Basil Bunting’s late-Modernist long poem Briggflatts, through their reading of the US Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, and the New York sprezzatura of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, as well as a lot of post -Heideggerian critical theory, European poetry and literary theory - and proposed a serious and concerted rejection of the practises of both the Movement poets, their “mainstream” successors, and the emerging popularisers.

Further notes on how these various strands have developed in the last thirty years can be found on the Contemporary Poetry in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland page.