An unsigned essay entitled "Breathing Words into the Ear of an Unliterary Era,"* published in
TLS on September 9, 1960, eventually gets to an analysis of casual or "spontaneous"-seeming poems by Philip Larkin and Robert Creeley (what a pairing). The example from Creeley is "I Know a Man" ("As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking--John, I / sd..."), and from Larkin, "Days" ("What are days for? / Days are where we live"). But first there's this bit of complaining:
An elegant handling of the spoken and written word used to be a primary social weapon in England. Today an observer who covers enough ground can watch the English language being steadily democratized, as perhaps the American language is already; airs are graces, little flourishes, little niceties are being ironed out for the sake of direct communication. A way of speaking or writing is ceasing to be, except in an old-fashioned and growingly rather absurd way, an assumption of or a claim for status." And so in poetry of the day "we expect less and less attention to be paid to the artificial, the formal, the purely 'literary' qualities of poetry; we expect a growing attention to be paid to a quality of raw directness, of speakabiliity. Left to himself a provincial undergraduate might read D. H. Lawrence's Pansies for pleasure; he would not read "Lycidas."
* p. xv.
An unsigned essay entitled "Breathing Words into the Ear of an Unliterary Era,"* published in TLS on September 9, 1960, eventually gets to an analysis of casual or "spontaneous"-seeming poems by Philip Larkin and Robert Creeley (what a pairing). The example from Creeley is "I Know a Man" ("As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking--John, I / sd..."), and from Larkin, "Days" ("What are days for? / Days are where we live"). But first there's this bit of complaining:
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
