Archival Encounters with the British Poetry Revival

In recent years, several PhD students in the UK have completed a range of theses on poets who came to first prominence during the British Poetry Revival (BPR). A notable proportion of current scholarship on BPR is therefore being produced by early career researchers, whose methodology often centres on archival research. This article offers reflections on what this archival turn in researching BPR could mean, on both practical and theoretical levels. It provides brief overview of poetic, historiographic, and theoretical accounts of the archive. These contexts are examined further through close readings of the sheets for Eric Mottram’s Pollock Record, an exemplar archival document that reveals certain conceptual challenges for archival study of the BPR. Ultimately, the article seeks to counter these challenges by drawing upon Walter Benjamin’s proposals in ‘On the Concept of History.’ In particular, the article suggests that Benjamin’s theorizations around ‘arrest’ and ‘monadic crystallization’ can offer a model of thinking about the archives of the BPR in connection to the legacy of that period within contemporary British poetries.