One land, many voices...

"Since poetry has been written in every culture and era and, therefore, in many styles and languages, a “that’s the way to do it” belief that only one school of verse is artistically valid is clearly foolish. It’s also old-fashioned. The belief that literary practice is a chronological series of unified movements, each occupying the entire poetic foreground and sweeping away whatever came before, belongs with the early-20th-century idea of an avant-garde. When journalists ask, “What’s going on in contemporary poetry?” it’s often this story they’re looking for. Yet the modern-day context is infinitely more nuanced, even fragmented, than this."

--Fiona Sampson, "One Land, Many Voices: The Extraordinary Breadth and Variety of British Poetry"
The New Statesman