No good English poets

[wasellajam]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

I used to like Eliot, but it's hard to buy the argument any more that a rational human being actually believed that the creator of the universe sent his son who is also him and another person, in a universe that's been around for at least 14 billion years, to be killed by a Roman provincial governor as a blood sacrifice for the first homo erectus eating an apple. Yes, yes, all that can be interpreted as literary allegory, but you can't base a faith around that. So all that strutting about in a suit and wearing a hat, taking a cab, smoking a pipe and sounding posh all amounts to nothing.
Larkin built his reputation on saying 'the world sucks' 11,345 times, when the main problem was that he lived on a damp island. All his poems have the same structure of saying something seemingly mundane yet profound about how the world is bad, and taking four stanzas in coming to the conclusion that things weren't going to get any better.
His is the template that a lot of modern poets seem to follow. Look at this one, for instance. The lines in green are marvelous, but try saying that in fifty other poems and you're basically just on a whinge fest.

Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass. 
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

I guess I'll spend the next few days specifically reading British poets. I won't be able to argue for a specific poet and I'm sure I won't be able to defend any of my choices at this point, but I like this one:

The Biting Point
by Catherine Smith

Thirty years dead and still curmudgeonly,
my grandfather is driving me through
the fog-numbed streets of Crystal Palace
at five a.m. He’s in the plaid dressing gown
he wore to die in, and he’s shaved,
badly, flecks of dark blood stippling his chin.
We’re the only Austin 1100 on the road;
he tuts, crunching through the gears,
he blames the damp, the bad oil,
the years it sat cobwebbed in a garage.
My grandfather slows for the lights,
not best pleased when the engine stalls –
it’s no part of his plan, I know,
to crank the key three time before
the damned thing fires – the times he’s told me
a good driver knows his car’s temperament
like the back of his hand. As a milk float
toots behind us, he mutters, frowns,
eases one foot off the clutch as
the other trembles over the accelerator.
Listen to that! He’s triumphant
as the engine warbles its surprise –
as though it’s found a new voice,
a different register, like a woman
suddenly discovering a talent for opera.
That’s known as the biting point, he says,
I’m just telling you so’s when you get
A husband, you’ll know what’s what.
We coast down Fountain Drive, the car
sighs and dreams, a purring baby now.
My grandfather’s bolt upright, sliding
the wheel under calloused palms
as the BBC transmitter winks in the distance –
the last thing he mentioned, the last fixed light.