Distraction v. Attraction 
Barbara Everett
This essay, in an earlier version, given as a paper at the conference on ‘Something We Have that They Don’t: Anglo-American Poetic Relations since the War’, organised by Mark Ford and Steve Clark under the aegis of the University of London.
Few 20th-century events, even in literary history alone, were at once important and relatively harmless. One was the rise and fall of Anglo-American literature. I use the term, in what may be too subjective a sense, to span the period from the birth of Whitman to the death of T.S. Eliot. It could be said that before Whitman, no American poet of real gifts wrote American literature; and after Eliot, none wrote anything else. Between these two points, two cultures, already to different degrees and in different ways interdependent, began to produce a fused, rich and ambiguous literature. This is a large subject, and I shan’t attempt to cover it. I want merely to offer some comment on three poets – Eliot, Larkin and Ashbery – who may all be said to throw different kinds of light on the phenomenon of Anglo-American culture.
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Barbara Everett’s books include Young Hamlet and Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin.
Other articles by this contributor:
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