Broken English/breaking English:

Broken English/Breaking English discusses the work of some prominent contemporary poets writing in English. It examines the challenges to a poetic discourse that was claimed in immediately post-Second World War England to be "pure" and "English." The study begins with a scrutiny of what Donald Davie called "Purity of Diction," and offers a contrary view generated earlier by emergent American (literary) English in the work of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. There follows consideration of the clash between Alfred Alvarez labeled "the Gentility Principle" and American-sourced "confessionalism," before the debate moves to the contemporary period. Successive chapters are devoted to women's poetry as offering a challenge to Davie-style "pure" English; to the new poetic dictions "breaking" in ethnicminority poetry in England; to work going on in English on the British geographical frontiers--Northern Ireland and Scotland; and to poetry written in ex-British colonies and dominions, specifically Australia. Rob Jackaman is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.