In this guest blog post, Neil Bowen, Head of English at Wells Cathedral School in the UK, ponders the role of modern poetry in education
During my degree course, 25 years ago, the gamut of English Literature ran all the way back to Anglo-Saxon texts, such as Beowulf, and all the way up to about 1950. Literature, it appeared, stopped someplace shortly after WWII. About the most modern poets we studied were T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and perhaps a little Larkin.
During my teaching career many A-level exam specifications have featured post 1950 literary texts, especially modern novels and to a lesser extent plays. Occasionally one of the big hitters from the world of poetry sneaks on to a specification, a Heaney, or a Hughes or perhaps some Plath. But it is only recently, as far as I am aware, that exam boards have started to include anthologies of modern poetry on specifications. In particular, a couple of years back Edexcel exam board made the bold decision to feature a published anthology of modern poetry, Forward’s Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry on their new English Literature specification. Less radically perhaps, but still to their credit AQA also have an anthology of modern poems on their A syllabus, although in their case this is a selection of poems AQA have made.