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This article is taken from PN Review 169, Volume 32 Number 5, May - June 2006.

Black Mountain in England (4): Andrew Crozier Ian Brinton

In Granta, October 1963, Andrew Crozier, a Cambridge undergraduate studying English at Christ's College, reviewed both Robert Conquest's New Lines 2 and Five American Poets, edited by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. He suggested that the poets included in Conquest's anthology 'are our orthodoxy, not our rebels' and noted that most of Robert Conquest's poets showed a total separation of their form and their content: 'Maybe by ignoring form (in fact just accepting iambics, rhyme and periodic stanza patterns) they think they can pay attention to their content; but, their content is trivial.' Crozier went on to quote from section two of Charles Olson's Projective Verse:

It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way... For a man's problem, the moment he takes speech up in all its seriousness, is to give his work his ...


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