Pages: How the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat

How the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat

I read Dominic Sandbrook’s wide-ranging political, social and cultural history, White Heat, partly to gain a sense of how the ‘British Poetry Revival’ as I understood it, had fared in the larger historical narrative, that is, beyond the specialist use of the term in specialist literary studies, as in Mottram, Juha Virtanen and myself. (There’s also a PhD in Russian on the topic if you Google hard enough.) The years Sandbrook focusses upon are 1964-70, the ‘swinging sixties’ that he proves were not at all swinging outside of a certain elite class. Might there be something there, perhaps about the June 1965 Albert Hall reading, which is a central event in the polemics and studies of Michael Horovitz, Jeff Nuttall, Barry Miles, Juha Virtanen, and – to a certain extent – in my own accounts? (See links below!) I was not looking for, didn’t expect to find, and indeed didn’t find, references to the little press world of the period, whose jaunty bibliographies offer specialist indeed speciality delights to scholars of the period. For example, the Blackburn magazine Poetmeat that included an editorial using the term ‘the British Poetry Revival’ for the first time. Sandbrook doesn’t use this term. Do any non-literary historians?

In Sandbrook’s chapter ‘Playpower’, taking its title from Richard Neville’s book, which gets a hard kicking, partly about the Oz trial, we find a lively, if ultimately dispiriting account of a supposed ‘counterculture’, which I won’t analyse in detail, since I want to pull out a few passages that deal directly with poetry and its world. The origins of this counterculture are partly literary: ‘The roots of this ‘alternative society’ went back to … students in the 1950s … [who were] keen on American beat writing and the French existentialists… they were attracted to jazz, impenetrable poetry, coffee bars, duffel coats, art-house films and CND marches’. (Sandbrook 522: 523) This accords with Lee Harwood’s account of Sam Wedges coffee bar in Soho rather well, in his piece on meeting Tristan Tzara. Note how the other items in Sandbrook’s inventory escape adjectival denunciation. The poetry is ‘impenetrable’. (Which is just what attracted Harwood when Roger Jones declaimed lines by Tzara in the jazzy coffee bar! ‘I’d never heard a poem like this before, never heard language used this freely, such leaps in what seemed a torrent of words and images. I'd never heard a poem that had this immediate force.’

Sam Widges

We are reminded, as we draw nearer to the counterculture’s exemplary ‘particular moment: the International Festival of Poetry, held at the Royal Albert Hall on 11 June 1965’, that ‘the great majority of British teenagers… far more interested in … pop music, football and Jean Shrimpton than in jazz, poetry and Jean-Paul Sartre.’ (Sandbrook 523). Nevertheless, the audience was 7,000 strong for the reading. Often taken as a central event, Sandbrook says, it is over-rated. After all, you get more at a football match (which seems to me beside the point). ‘The whole thing,’ we are told, was ‘badly organised’ (true, by most accounts!); ‘there was a general air of drunkenness and anarchy (which I’m tempted to say, sounds quite genial, if I think of Bob Cobbing’s writers forum afternoons in the 1990s!’ But the man who wrote the sixties down as it happened, Barry Miles, gets the last word on the evening in Sandbrook’s account: ‘awful bullshit and made the whole thing so boring’. It was a ‘dreadful reading… one of the worst poetry readings ever.’ (524). (Compare with Virtanen’s account, which I review on the link below). Note that Barry Miles is described as ‘a stalwart champion of avant-garde poetry’. (524). I can’t help but feel that ‘avant-garde’ functions with almost the same inherence of dismissal as ‘impenetrable’ earlier. (Sandbrook is happy to quote Larkin as the summarising poetic voice of the age.)

He is similarly dismissive of ‘happenings’. In Liverpool we like to think Adrian Henri, (a figure that, in the pubs I frequent, is referred to most nights), is the man who invented the happening as a performative extension of poetry (and art). After an account of Indica Bookshop, International Times and Oz, Sandbrook returns to the theme of the essential alienation of the working class from the aesthetic side of the British Poetry Revival:

It often seems that the somewhat bizarre style of the movement could have been deliberately designed to alienate working class opinion. In 1965, for example, the Cavern Club hosted a ‘multi-media anti-nuclear extravaganza’ devised by the local poet Adrian Henri. At the end of a four-minute count down the lights went out and a false ceiling made of paper came down on people’s heads, to the most deafening noise we could devise,’ he explained. ‘The cloakroom girls screamed and hid under the counter. In the darkness and confusion, strange mutant figures moved.’ This was all very well, but it was unlikely to convince most ordinary Liverpudlians that they ought to devote their weekends to marching against the bomb. (533-4)

And so on and so forth. (Looking at an adjective again: how does the word ‘local’ operate with ‘poet’? I’ve always thought it a put-down.) He curiously misses the point in ways like this. He is right, in that, although he idolises the Beatles and the Stones, he acknowledges that the most popular record of the 1960s was The Sound of Music. His source for this re-evaluation is Dave Harker’s essay in eds. John Seed and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Cultural Revolution, London and New York, Routledge, 1992, in which I also had an article on ‘The British Poetry Revival’ that might usefully have fed into his account of ‘impenetrable’ ‘avant-garde’ poetry. His accounts of value (in his otherwise wonderful insightful book!) depend on popularity. (So jazz isn’t accounted for at all, even though this period is recognised as a ‘golden age’ in recent jazz criticism: a clear analogy with the ‘alternative’ poetry of the period.) Henri wasn’t trying ‘to convince most ordinary Liverpudlians’ about the bomb! The artist can only affect those that receive the art (like Harwood in Sam Widges!). Also hasn’t Sandbrook picked the wrong target? Isn’t Henri part of a genuinely popular poetry from the 1960s (onwards)? (See Andrew Taylor's book on Adrian Henri.)

Jeff Nuttall is an important figure, but is not without his foibles and failings. (He is also remembered around the pubs of Liverpool, from his time as Head of Art here.) Bomb Culture is a useful source book on the era, but there is a lot of polemic. It was written in the moment (in contrast to Barry Miles who wrote after the events, though from having been inside the sixties, to borrow one of his book titles) and it does contain some perishable rhetoric of the time. Sandbrook focusses in on this! While Nuttall argues, ‘young people under various pretexts made war on their elders… the war continues’, Sandbrook argues, in a move that should be familiar now: ‘But this was nonsense. The vast majority of young people did not make war on anybody’. (543) They watched the telly that he prefers to analyse. However, what about that minority, those not ‘average citizen[s]’? (544) They must include the poets of the British Poetry Revival, surely? I agree ‘the spread of an ego-dissolving delirium’ and a ‘sense of health and beauty pertaining to the genitals and the arsehole’ may not be for everyone. (544).

In Sandbrook’s words, this alternative societal thinking, was irrelevant: ‘playtime was over’. (544)

Perhaps I could simply add ‘Poetry time has begun!’ if that didn’t afford too much valency to Sandbrook’s views!

23^rd August 2025

Other posts: An original set of posts on the British Poetry Revival begin here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other: Part two. This feeds off my book The Poetry of Saying which in turn fed off my PhD.

I revisited the subject to write ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960-1978’, in Görtschacher and Malcolm, eds. A Companion to British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015, Hoboken and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2021: 235-243, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Return to the British Poetry Revival 1960-78

And reflect on it here: Pages: My two pieces (British Poetry Revival & Harwood) & editorial exhibit in CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH POETRY, 1960 – 2015 Edited by Görtschacher and Malcolm

I began to review Juha Virtanen’s book Pages: Thoughts on Collaboration 13 or: review of Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect.