routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

486 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Andrew Motion, author of important biographies of Philip Larkin
and John Keats, quotes Stevie Smith in one of his own poems: Close,
in Love in a Life (1991). The title covers both the close escape and the
feelings for his family.
The afternoon I was killed
I strolled up the beach from the sea
where the big wave had hit me, . . .
Nobody spoke about me
or how I was no longer there.
It was odd, but I understood why:
when I had drowned I was only
a matter of yards out to sea
(not too far out – too close),
still able to hear the talk
and have everything safe in view.
Motion is a poet of contrasts, working with that kind of intimacy: he
also writes larger-scale, longer poems, such as Bathing at
Glymenopoulo, in Dangerous Play: Poems 1974–1984 (1985), and
Scripture, in Natural Causes (1987).
Basil Bunting, whose Collected Poems appeared in 1978, was for many
years the forgotten man of modern English poetry. He had been a disciple
of Pound’s in the 1920s, but his achievement was not widely recognised
until the publication of his lengthy autobiographical poem Briggflatts in