A few months ago, the editor of Poetry Review shared with members of the Poetry Society a disturbing dream in which he had found himself defending the state of contemporary poetry against a ‘National Treasure and Public Intellectual’. With his shirt buttoned up tight, his neatly combed hair and his ‘little badge of cultural influence’, this nightmarish figure seemed intent on reducing poetry to a series of cartoon museum pieces, like artefacts in glass-cabinets: ‘Keats’ death mask, the cigarette ash of Auden, the underpants of Robert Browning’.

It was an interesting way of dramatizing a supposed internal argument between poets about Ancients and Moderns. But alarming that it involved identifying contemporary poetry as being somehow in opposition to the idea of the public literary intellectual. Raymond Williams once pointed out that uses of the word ‘intellectual’ in English have historically been associated with hostile ideas about elitism. While it would be hard to write a history of, say, France or Russia without attending to the role of the literary intelligentsia, their dynamic and changing relationship to power and to society, it would be much easier to write a history of anti-intellectual resentments in Britain. But these resentments have not, hitherto, been located in the world of poetry. And poets have not always been so far removed from public discourse.

Terry Eagleton observed a few years ago that ‘for almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet... prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life’. But who are the ‘eminent’ poets of ...