The responsibility of a poet to as well as for his poem implies a radical shift in emphasis from the kind of responsibility elected so often in recent times by the poets themselves. The poets of the thirties saw their responsibility as being towards History (always capitalized), society, current events, Marx or Freud. The supposed romantic revolution of the forties placed the poet's responsibility at his own doorstep. The poet was to be responsible to the individual and thus, microcosmically, to encompass a greater responsibility towards society, which, in its organized forms, was abjured. All these forms of responsibility are, in a quite literal sense, outside, even physically outside the poem. When in W. S. Graham's Notes on a Poetry of Release, one finds a poet still in his twenties defining his responsibilities strictly in terms of his obligation to make words work in a certain way, one...