The Whitsun Wedding Video: a journey into British poetry

A hundred years after the publication of T S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ one of Britain’s brightest and sharpest poetry critics, Jeremy Noel-Tod, takes contemporary British poetry to task for its failure to match the ambition of the great modernists such as Eliot. This witty and incisive book ‘about how reputations have been made in modern British poetry and may be remade’ challenges received opinion about contemporary verse. ‘Rumours persist that excellent poetry is being written by poets who are not venerable names rehearsing old themes,’ the author reports in an essay certain to create controversy in the world of poetry. Jeremy Noel-Tod lives in Norwich where he teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Since 2000 he has reviewed poetry for a wide range of national publications, including the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New Statesman, and The Sunday Times. He is the editor of R.F. Langley’s Complete Poems (Carcanet, 2015) and was the revising editor of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013), previously published as the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (1994), ed. Ian Hamilton