SOURCE: "Appropriate Falsehoods: English Poets and American Jazz," in The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 17, 1987, pp. 46-61.

In the following essay, Lucas provides a historical account of popular and literary reaction to the growth and development of jazz music in England from the 1920s to the 1950s, also comparing poems by Kingsley Amis, Phillip Larkin, John Wain, and Roy Fisher on the basis of their insight into the roots and evolution of jazz.

He breathed in air, he breathed out light,
 Charlie Parker was my delight.

Adrian Mitchell's celebrated couplet defines a minority response, at least as far as English poets who claim an interest in jazz are concerned. They may not agree with Philip Larkin's even more celebrated anathematizing of the three Ps (Parker, Pound, and Picasso) but on the whole their devotion is given to the so-called traditional styles and masters, and for most of them...