A NEW GENERATION, or a sense of generation, is labouring to be born. In olden times such births were signalled with carefully-planted reviews, putsches on the metropolitan 'centres of power', anthologies. Oxbridge-dominated, London-based and largely male, they emerged - the 1930s poets, the Movement, the Group, the review group, the Martians and ludic poets. Generally there was a coherence of purpose - prosodic insistence, reaction to a previous 'generation' or to a lax critical orthodoxy, some formal mission, and a hostile rejection of immediate antecedents.

In this issue of P·N·Review two correspondents herald a new sense of generation. One defends Glyn Maxwell against a favourable review he received in these pages. The other identifies and defends the new generation by assaulting Christopher Middleton for having failed, in his 'Pasquil' in the last issue, to take the amazing youngsters on board. In May Bloodaxe Books will be delivered of the new generation's anthology, edited by our two Sheffield correspondents and by Michael Hulse, a much valued contributor to this journal.

The anthology borrows its title from Al Alvarez's book The New Poetry and seeks to supplant, or succeed, Blake Morrison's and Andrew Motion's Penguin anthology, now over a decade old. Unlike its predecessors, it is remarkably correct in gender and ethnic spread. This generational package is more diverse, more democratic, than those promoted in the past. But not quite as democratic as the editors would have wished: their first shortlist ran to 250 meritorious writers, and they whittled this down to 55. 55 is a big generation: what a fecund literary age we live in!

The anthology omits, in biographical notes on the poets featured, to specify their educational provenance. Is Oxbridge still dominant? One suspects that its hold, along with that of the white male, has loosened. Here at last is cultural and ethnic 'pluralism' defining a generation. The editors are identifying not a movement, a literary trend, but a political verity, assimilating into what they identify as the new main stream those radical, resistant cultural ingredients which have in the past drawn their vigour from existing in opposition, on the margins.

'The new poetry', the introduction declares,

emphasizes accessibility, democracy and responsiveness, humour and seriousness, and reaffirms the art's significance in public utterance. The new poetry highlights the beginning of the end of British poetry's tribal divisions and isolation, and a new cohesiveness - its constituent parts 'talk' to one another readily, eloquently, and freely while preserving their unique identities.

In this Protean polemic, the Irish element, so carefully separated out into 'British and Irish' elsewhere in the introduction, is re-assimilated. What are the consequences of such a party-time editorial approach? In the first place, a committee is likely to compromise; the unique and the rebarbative, the poet who does not 'talk', the poet who does not insist on a 'unique identity', might find him or herself excluded (and does). The poet who insists on unfashionable cultural antecedents will not find favour. The poet who believes that the word 'voice' means creating an available, not an individually distinguishing, idiom will find little favour. And the past is certainly too little with us in this new 'cohesive' configuration, 'its constituent parts' happily communicating together, without taking into account the continuum - unless that continullm is a hitherto 'marginal' culture, in which case it is acknowledged and celebrated.

Despite fashionable foolishness, wishful thinking and the short-change in plain English currency of its introduction, the new The New Poetry is welcome as a preliminary account of what is happening in a diverse literary culture. It may prove a profoundly conservative project, assimilating as it does radical, rebarbative and challenging alternative and sub-cultures that have invigorated 'the scene', to a 'dialogue' which, if they enter into it, will draw their stings. It fails, as would-be main-stream anthologies must, I suspect, to take account of whole areas of our current poetry - those which might be characterized as heirs to the A Various Art poets, and those very different writers who write a poetry without regard for political correctness, careless of generational cohesiveness and the considerable perks that go with it.

Implicit in this, as in earlier generational packages, is a rhetoric ungenerous as it is generous. The generosity is to the new (and newish - some poets represented have been quite visible since the 1970s), its promise and abundance. This is complemented by hostility towards those who resist the emerging orthodoxy. The two letters in this issue evince this ungenerosity.

One letter breaches political correctness with its patronising sexism and ageism ('granny'). It assaults a reviewer who has been a teacher and whose 'ignorance' of the media includes close involvement with the development of independent television in the South West. He's wrong on two counts at least. His insistence on media 'soaking' as a chief determinant of Glyn Maxwell's culture seems to under-sell that interesting poet as well.

The other letter misses the point of Christopher Middleton's 'Pasquil' which addressed a question of kind, a question often raised, in different terms, in these pages: the failure of transcendence in contemporary British poetry. The abundance which our correspondent adduces does not answer Middleton's case, though I believe there are poets who might. This correspondent forgets that Middleton is one of those rare British writers who knows, at first hand, as translator, critic and friend, many of the foreign 'influences' with which The New Poetry editors seek to legitimize their poets; Middleton knows how very little the British poets have learned from continental practice.

This kind of rhetoric destroys the very dialogue the new The New Poetry claims to be promoting. That 'dialogue' will be of little value unless it is inter-generational. The cohesive new 'British and Irish' generation, if it exists, has much to learn from the practice and observation of earlier, and later, 'British and Irish' generations.