The past sixty years have seen a number of anthologies which attempted to be – and in a few cases actually became – key literary documents of their time. In New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933) Michael Roberts presented the young W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and William Empson as the new poets; and soon after, in his important Faber Book of Modem Verse (1936), Roberts set these poets (together with more recent arrivals, such as Dylan Thomas, George Barker and David Gascoyne) in the context of the whole century, beginning with Gerard Manley Hopkins (who, though he died in 1889, was not properly published until 1918). Roberts' Introduction to this anthology is still well worth reading as a very intelligent undoctrinaire essay on what later acquired the academic/historical label 'Modernism'.

Roberts' emphasis in the 1930s could be seen, not wholly inaccurately, as political and social. In the early years of the Second World War, the anthology The White Horseman (1941), appeared to represent and stress a different emphasis. As the flagship of the neo-romantic 'New Apocalypse', it set out to 'mount guard over the integrity of the imagination and the completeness of man', with gesturings towards Herbert Read, Jung, Dylan Thomas; but the book's aspirations were belied by its largely feeble and incoherent contents.

Ten years after the end of the war, the poets of the so-called 'Movement' had emerged. In 1956, Robert Conquest's New Lines tried to show that 'a genuine and healthy poetry of the new period has established itself; and the exemplary figures were Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin. But to some this was mere revisionism, too tame and too parochial. A. Alvarez's The New Poetry (1962, revised edition 1965) carried a preface which was a call for 'a new seriousness', defined as 'the poet's ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence', without taking the easy exits of 'the conventional response or choking incoherence', and eschewing what Alvarez saw as the deadly English condition, 'gentility'. In this, the confessional Americans John Berryman and Robert Lowell (and, after her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath) were presented as exemplary, and Ted Hughes's 'violent, impending presence' was contrasted with Larkin's supposed genteel nostalgias.

'Urgency' was one of Alvarez's touchstones; but twenty years later, when Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, this was regarded with scorn, and The New Poetry itself as 'a historical document'. The new exemplary figures, all prominently represented by Morrison and Motion, were Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn, James Fenton, Craig Raine and Christopher Reid. Larkin, reviewing the anthology, asked:

Yet The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry at its appearance in 1982 did indeed turn out to be controversial, in spite of what Larkin saw as its lack of a clarion 'message'. Although it copiously represented Northern Irish poets (not only Heaney but Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian), and gave a good deal of prominence to such unmetropolitans as Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison, it was seen in unfriendly quarters to be tainted by 'metropolitan' values. Morrison and Motion have held, and hold, important positions as literary middlemen (variously, on The Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, Poetry Review, more recently on The Independent on Sunday and in London publishing houses). Such provincial outposts as Manchester (home of the Carcanet Press and P.N. Review) and Newcastle (Bloodaxe Books) smelt conspiracy, London networks, 'elitism', in these supposed allegiances.

Every generation of poets wants to follow Pound's injunction 'make it new' – or, if they don't, there will be organisers there who urge them to do so, fielding teams and squads which are presented not only as exemplary but as salons des réfusés. So, in 1993, the three editors of The New Poetry (Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley), published by Bloodaxe, set out their own stall: 'what we believe to be the best poetry written in the British Isles in the 1980s and early 1990s by a distinctive new generation of poets'.

They created a self-imposed exclusion zone: they would not include anyone represented in the Morrison/Motion anthology, or anyone born before 1940. They also began their Introduction with the dubious opinion: 'Every age gets the literature it deserves', and went on with other opinions and phrases which were probably calculated to annoy. However, the central slogan seems to be no more exciting or inflammatory than anything in the Penguin Book: 'plurality has replaced monocentric totemism'.

As usual, the poets included seem less radically different from all that had gone before than the polemics suggest; nor can they be seen as struggling outsiders. By the time The New Poetry was published in 1993, one of the book's central presences, Peter Reading, had published fifteen books, beginning in 1974, and he had won several of the main poetry awards. Not only that, but all except one of his books had been published by mainstream commercial London publishers. Other poets included, though less conspicuously represented, could be seen as 'metropolitan' (or 'Oxbridge' – another mark of the beast) in their publishers or in the way they earned their livings: David Constantine, Bernard O'Donoughue (Oxford dons); Kit Wright, Selima Hill, George Szirtes, Sean O'Brien, Michael Donaghy, Michael Hofmann, Simon Armitage – all of them published by such 'establishment' firms as Hutchinson, Chatto & Windus, Oxford University Press, and Faber. An artificial dichotomy thrust between provincial/metropolitan (or North/South) looks opportunist rather than principled.

Even the anthology's insistence on making central those whose work had been 'marginalised' (through being women, or immigrants, as well as by being provincial) looks like a doubtful, indeed false, strategy. The most impressive woman poet in the book is Carol Ann Duffy, who from the beginning of her career in the early 1980s has never seemed in danger of being on the margin of anything. True, she has until recently stayed loyally with the small press (Anvil – actually a London firm) that published her first book in 1985; but this clearly hasn't prevented her from winning awards, prizes and fellowships, or from becoming one of the most widely travelled (and best paid) readers on the circuits.

The immigrants – or, more properly, those of immigrant background, since most of them are long-time British residents, if not actually born in Britain – include Grace Nichols, Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, Sujata Bhatt, Fred D'Aguiar, and Jackie Kay. Of these six contributors to The New Poetry, only Johnson can sensibly be seen as a conscious outsider, someone who uses pretty consistently his own transcribed idiom (more a matter of orthography than anything else) to insist his own separateness.

If it comes to that, one might make a case – though it wouldn't be one I would press – for the self-conscious separateness of some Irish and Scottish poets. Paul Durcan, the most extraordinary talent to have come out of the Irish Republic for many years, needs no such gingerly treatment; but Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is the solitary writer in The New Poetry who uses a totally foreign language – her three poems are in Irish, and those unskilled in the language have to rely on accompanying English versions by Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney (otherwise kept out of the anthology by the editors' exclusions, mentioned earlier). One wonders what accommodation the editors made for any Welsh-writing candidates. Further, W.N. Herbert has three poems which are entertainingly written in something one used to call Lallans – the Scottish literary/demotic grafted on to something which is just recognisably English.

All this vaunting attempt at 'plurality' perhaps seems to support the case that the editors of The New Poetry appear to be making about poetry in Britain in the early 1990s. Certainly their fifty-five poets range across a wide spectrum. But the opposition – 'monocentric totemism' – seems no more than a convenient bogey-figure, yet another way of characterising the endless story of the past being obliterated to yield to the new. Perhaps, indeed, it is simply a brash and unconvincing manner of saying what Jonathan Swift put more incisively and wittily about two and a half centuries ago:

A much more enigmatic member of this pre-1900 generation – those who were already adults at the time of the First World War – was David Jones, poet, painter and graphic artist, whose literary work and personality were as individual as those of Graves but who has attracted a cult-following rather than general affection and admiration. Jones was a 'difficult' writer in a way that Graves never is. Whereas Graves's interest in history, mythology and religion usually expressed itself in prose auxiliary to his verse (of a learned, capriciously scholarly, frequently polemical sort), Jones's involvement with the same subjects went directly into his creative work – In Parenthesis, The Anathemata, more recently The Tribune's Visitation and other more fragmentary pieces. The excitement to be gained from David Jones is of a kind that comes from a strange hinterland where eccentric scholarship, exalted code-cracking and the visionary gleam meet and merge. The setting of many of his later fragments is Palestine in the first century AD. The 'characters' are Roman soldiers, but – as was true of the Roman army itself – these include Celts and Greeks as well as native Romans. Thus a great deal of Celtic and Greek myth...