Books: Poetry in English: 1945-62

“What is poetry? Why, sir,” roared Dr. Johnson to his ever-attentive Boswell, “we all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is . . . It is much easier to say what it is not.”

Poetry is not, unfortunately, what most poets are writing in English today. In the last 20 years, the English-speaking world has produced no major poet and scarcely a score of those minor bards who assiduously tune the lyre of language till another great man is ready to take it up. But if quality is lacking, quantity is not. In the 16 years since World War II, more poems have been composed in the U.S.—last year more than 200,000 were submitted for publication-than were written in ten centuries between Beowulf and the Bomb; and in Britain, poetic production has approximately doubled in a decade. What’s more, sales of poetry on records are tuned to unprecedented volume. U.S. poetry buffs have bought 50,000 platters of Robert Frost reading Robert Frost, 400,000 of the late Dylan Thomas reading Dylan Thomas. And poetry readings have been box office in the U.S. for the first time since Oscar Wilde took lily in hand and plunged into the cultural night of Illinois.

The Revolution. Along with poetry’s popularity, and adding to it, has come a striking change in poetry’s style and content, a vigorous evolution that may yet become the second great poetic revolution of the century. The first revolution, which rolled over the language during the decade beginning in 1910, was an American revolution, a revolt of the vernacular launched by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost—all of them still alive and writing, but not writing much. In the early ’30s, the heirs of the revolution, led by Britain’s W. H. Auden, turned to what Poet Archibald MacLeish called the “invocation to the social muse.”

But as the ’30s stumbled toward catastrophe, poetry blundered deeper into obscurity and ambiguity, into the talented but precious minutiae of Wallace Stevens and William Empson, whose poems often suggest esthetic scrimshaw, a cathedral carved in a cherry pit. Poetry became a world unto itself, a self-sealing vacuum in which poets engaged in a conspiracy of mutual approval, safe from the embarrassing questions of the bewildered public, safe from what Poet Stefan George called “the indignity of being understood.”

Two events smashed this intellectual trade union: 1) a beery, gusty, word-wildered Welshman named Dylan Thomas and 2) World War II. Poet Thomas, with his golden rain of words and his great brass gong of a voice, reminded poetry of its origins in ritual and chant. And the war forced poets to face political, social and spiritual realities. At first, the horror of it all seemed to numb them; the war itself produced no genuinely great poetry in English. But such poets as Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, Richard Eberhart and Britain’s Henry Treece were moved to describe their military experiences in rough-edged verse that some did not like but all could understand. Suddenly the poets were communicating again, and the postwar generation of poets has kept right on communicating.

The Couth & the Uncouth. The postwar poets fall into two broad categories: the couth and the uncouth. So far the uncouth have not communicated much in the way of poetry, but they have come through loud and clear in the headlines. Dirty, noisy, loaded with banal aggression, The Beat Generation in the U.S. and the “Teddy-bards” in Britain have put poetry in the news for the first time since the ’20s. (“The Beats have taken poetry out of the academic study,” says one critic, “and put it in the subway restroom.”) And the success of the uncouth has encouraged the couth, who are slowly but inevitably developing a new poetic tone, a tone less clever than Auden, more direct than Eliot, more worldly and less personal than Thomas, a conversational but careful tone in which important things can be simply said.

The tone now prevails throughout the British Isles. Most of the new British poets seem more mental than emotional, more likely to lapse into prose than to burst into song. But Ireland’s Thomas Kinsella, a 33-year-old clerk in the Civil Service, who scribbles verses in his spare time, is an exciting exception: a lyric poet in a didactic age. His words are modern but his music is as old as Celtic eloquence. When the demon is on him, Kinsella sings with a wild Irish sweetness, as when he writes of love as

Something that for this long year Had hid and halted like a deer

Turned marvellous, Parted the tragic grasses, tame, Lifted its perfect head and came

To welcome us.

Or he can sing with singular purity of

timeless things:

Death, when I am ready, I Shall come; drifting where I drown, Falling, or by burning, or by Sickness, or by striking down.

Nothing you can do can put My coming aside, nor what I choose To come like-holy, broken or but An anonymity-refuse.

In the early ’50s, some British poets announced themselves as The Movement, a loose flock of low-flying larks (among them Donald Davie, Thorn Gunn, Kingsley Amis, John Wain) who sang in the same octave quietly. They favored a formal elegance, but at the same time retained the note of natural speech, the “neutral tone” of voice in which the British customarily discuss love, death and the weather.

It will be spring soon—

And I, whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom,

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling,

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter,

And starts to be happy.

These lines were written by the most talented of The Movement’s poets, 40-year-old Philip Larkin (The Less Deceived). Larkin has the happy faculty of rescuing the special tenderness or peculiar anguish of small experiences that everyone has had but no one has bothered to examine. At his best, he is a dwindled Wordsworth in whose ear the ghost of Rilke sometimes whispers. In this little poem, one of Larkin’s subtlest, it whispers of—death?

There is an evening coming in

Across the fields, one never seen before,

That lights no lamps.

Silken it seems at a distance, yet When it is drawn up over the knees and

breast It brings no comfort.

Where has the tree gone, that locked Earth to the sky? What is under my

hands, That I cannot feel?

What loads my hands down?

The neo-Augustan elegance of The Movement has been challenged in recent years by a hearty, animalistic poet named Ted Hughes, and by the “Teddy-bards” who call themselves The Group (Philip Hobsbaum, Edward Lucie-Smith, George Macbeth, Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove) and declare their dedication to a more accidental poetry, “straggly, diffuse, full of not obviously related particulars, beginning anyhow and seeming to end when the poet becomes naturally tired.” Typically, The Group writes about a giggling secretary with “beard-rash that twinkles on my thighs,” about an executive with breath “rank and vicious, like menstrual blood,” about teeth full of “blotched green mould.” Poet Macbeth’s imaginary report from a secret-police official achieves the nasty tone The Group is striving for.

But after that it was fine: tapes on Masks fitted, the legs well held . . .

And a nice simple injection—I always think Those gas cylinders are all wrong. The infusion Was one of the smoothest I’ve seen.

Evacuation Very decent. An infinity of freshness In a little diffusion of bitter carbolic.

Rather sweet.

It took about sixteen minutes to get the stories And not much mess . . .

One sees the intention, as Goethe said, and one is embarrassed.

The Beats. The Group’s bloody awfulness pales however by comparison with the work of U.S. “action poets”—known to other poets as “The Drip School” and to the nonreading public as beatniks.

Most beatniks despise money, work, the “creeping meatballism” of life in an affluent society. They prefer to wear beards and blue jeans, avoid soap and water, live in dingy tenements or, weather permitting, take to the road as holy hoboes, pilgrims to nowhere. Most of them adore Negroes, junkies, jazzmen and Zen. The more extreme profess to smoke pot, eat peyote, sniff heroin, practice perversion. They are, in short, bohemians; the squalor of their lives is reflected in their verse.

Action poets delight most of all in action. On the page their poetry often appears to have been composed by the timely explosion of a type font, and sometimes it reads that way too. Like the Dadaists of the ’20s, they like multiple exclamarks (“Gesture! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !”) and capital letters.

AND AND AND AND AND AND writes Michael McClure, and furthermore, WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP Most action poets profess to take religion seriously, “via crucis vicar son of a bitch render out with magnificat,” cries Ebbe Borregaard, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the wittiest of them, writes of a “wiggy prophet . . . gentle as the lamb of God/made into mad cutlets.” Many action poets describe “religious visions” induced by narcotics; conversely, one poet speaks of “getting a fix at the altar.” Even more important than religion to most action poets is sex, but more important than either is excrement. Excrement is sacrament. They sprinkle it around like holy water, they spread it like the Gospel truth.

The Abominable Snowman. In the work of Allen Ginsberg, the only projective poet who gives evidence of important talent, excrement is of the poetic essence. After eight years on the bum, Ginsberg sat down at 29 and wrote Howl, a sort of abstract-expressionist Waste Land that established him overnight as “the Abominable Snowman of modern poetry.” (Like that’s the most, man.) Howl is an astounding screed, an interminable sewer of a poem that sucks in all the feculence, malignity and unmeaning slime of modern life and spews them with tremendous momentum into the reader’s mind. Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison!

Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of Sorrows! . . . Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery ! Moloch whose blood is running money!

Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!

Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!. . . Moloch whose name is the Mind.

So far, the beats have not managed to set their dirty metrical feet inside the ivory tower of respectable poetic tradition. On the entirely tenable theory that a beard does not make a bard, the leading literary periodicals (Partisan Review, Kenyan Review, Hudson Review, Sewanee Review) have firmly refused to print action poetry. U.S. poetry is still unshakably dominated by the couth crowd.

The Seven. Among the couths there are seven poets of proven powers. Richard Wilbur, 40, is a first-rate technician and has a dashing way with a phrase-almost too dashing; sometimes the reader can’t see the poem for the words. W. D. Snodgrass, 35, a less spectacular writer, is a clear, competent, solidly individual poet who may well become one of America’s best. William Meredith, 42, is a master of compression who has written half a dozen superb short poems. Adrienne Cecile Rich, 32, the most accomplished young poet of her sex, has a feminine charm that is coupled with a feminine shrewdness.

These are the secondary figures. Most of the best of U.S. postwar poetry has been turned out by three poets:

> Theodore Roethke, 54, a florist’s son from Michigan, who currently teaches English at the University of Washington, is perhaps the most richly gifted and certainly the most exasperating of the three. In much of his poetry he writes like a self-made idiot, a regressive pioneer who chooses to explore the primary ground of being. The ground is often boggy (“Bring me a finger. The dirt’s lonesome for grass./

Are the rats dancing? The cats are”) but Roethke’s rhymes often cast a runic spell.

The edge cannot eat the center . . .

The path tells little to the serpent.

An eye comes out of the wave.

The journey from flesh is longest.

A rose sways least.

The redeemer comes a dark way.

Roethke is a nature poet as well as a metaphysician, and the best of his poems celebrate the spiritual experience in a natural metaphor, as a sort of vegetation mystery. Cuttings is characteristic: This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life? I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it,—The small waters seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last.

When sprouts break out, Slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

> Elizabeth Bishop, 50, is the most limited and proficient of the three—indeed, the cool, eely slickness of her poems is some times repellent. They have little human warmth, no specific temperature. She seldom writes about people or their feelings.

She writes about things and places, but she sees them with a woman’s eye as keen as any since Virginia Woolf’s. Above all. she has a gift of imagery—pelicans, for in stance, landing on the sea. “crash like pickaxes.” A Cold Spring, dedicated to a friend whose farm she visited, shows her at her best.

A cold spring: the violet was flawed on the lawn.

For two weeks or more the trees hesitated; the little leaves waited, carefully indicating their characteristics.

Finally a grave green dust settled over your big and aimless hills.

One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine, on the side of one a calf was born.

The mother stopped lowing and took a long time eating the afterbirth, a wretched flag, but the calf got up promptly and seemed inclined to feel gay.

The next day was much warmer . . .

Four deer practised leaping over your fences . . .

Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer, and in the maple the complementary cardinal cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke, stretching miles of green limbs from the south . . .

> Robert Lowell, 44, who belongs to the same prominent Boston family that produced such poets as James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell, is probably the most distinguished American poet who has made his reputation since World War II. In Lord Weary’s Castle, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947, he revealed a driving religious concern and a nervously aggressive masculine line. In his later poems (Life Studies), Lowell has limbered his forms and strengthened a strong and even peculiar personal tone that sounds a little like cubistic Browning. Like Browning, he seems to lack or at any rate to disdain the gifts of melody and phrase; though now and then, as in his lament for the passing of the civic virtues that once made Boston great, he gets off a sizzling epithet :

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

Like Browning, Lowell relies on energy, intelligence, originality, erudition. His best poems read like vigorous, carefully patterned prose. They are more vivid than sensitive; Lowell looks out at the world more often than he looks in on himself. The sonnet, To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage, conveys the rude vigor of the late-Lowell style.

Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .

It’s the injustice. . . he is so unjust-whiskey-blind,

swaggering home at five.

My only thought is how to keep alive.

What makes him tick? Each night now I tie

ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . .

Gored by the climacteric of his want,

he stalls above me like an elephant.

Poetry & Life. Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Larkin, Kinsella-they are all good poets, but to say that they are the best of the postwar period is not to say much for a period characterized by a ferment without much effect, a prodigy promised but not performed. Among the couths, even the inconsequent are competent. “The level of technique in verse,” says Poet Auden, “is probably higher today than ever before.” But with all their skill, most contemporary poets seem to have little to say. To paraphrase Poet Jarrell: They are professional magicians who have nothing up their sleeves—not even their arms.

The poets themselves are partly to blame. Most of them seem radically disconnected from life, from the vital experience that stimulates vital creative work. All too many are perennial art colonists or “fellowship bums”; and nine out of ten teach school. Most poets, moreover, seem obsessed with poetry. Most of their friends are poets; usually even their wives are poets. Inevitably, most of them are scops without scope who write poetry about poetry and not about life.

Most, but not all. The big news and the great hope of postwar poetry in English lies in one crucial fact: a growing number of talented poets in this generation seem aware that readers outnumber poets, and seem willing to write something that might interest them. The poets apparently want to rejoin the human race. Nobody’s stopping them.