Noise and Solemnity

Deutsch, 10s. 6d.)

The Guinness. Book of Poetry 1958/59. (Putnam, 10s. od.)

A Critical Quarterly Supplement—Poetry 1960. ( I s.)

EDWIN Mute's book contains all that was in Collected Poems 1921-1951 with the addition of twenty-seven early poems, most of One Foot in Eden and thirty-eight poems written in the last few years of his life. Many of the considerable poets of the last hundred years rejected the accepted frameworks of philosophical and aesthetic beliefs and invented ones of their own —and an odd, ramshackle lot they mostly were— which were justified by the poems they made pos- sible, but whose validity, in the end, matters to no one but their inventors. They also7-partly, one supposes, because of this—were interested in tech- nical innovations of various kinds. In sharp con- trast, Edwin Muir had no need to invent a context in which his utterances might make sense; for although• he often explored his thenies in terms of Classical myths and Jungian psychology, he found himself able to accept, or unable to reject, ortho- dox Christianity—he was, in fact, a Christian long before he realised it, as he himself has said. Tech- nically, also, he was no innovator. One's interest is not centred on how he says a thing but on the thing that is said.

The familiar paradoxes and contradictions in the concepts of good and evil, time and eternity, innocence and guilt obsessed him his whole, life long. But he refused all the easy ways, or the spec- tacular ways, of sheltering himself from them, of resolving or denying them, because he knew no way of coming to terms with anything except by understanding it. Such understanding involves an initial acceptance, and such acceptance means suf- fering. And one of the things this book demon- strates is a steady progression from acceptance to understanding, from despair to hope, from doubt to belief.

Fortunately this was paralleled by a developing mastery in his use of language and rhythm and an increasing fertility in the invention of myths and parables, so that his latest and most profound poems are written with the extraordinary lucidity that always characterised his writing, in prose and verse. An obvious illustration of this is the dif- ference between the two poems called The Horses,' one early, one late. Another source of that lucidity is the nature of his imagery. It seems right that a man so aware of paradox and contradiction, who lived with 'one foot in Eden,' should write of themes which might seem forbiddingly abstract in words and images that are always concrete and precise.

Even the simplest of his 'parable' or 'myth' poems are not susceptible of the four-square interpretation of allegories. There are recessions of meaning which give them a density and com- plexity that allegory does not have. They have the simultaneous immediacy and irrationality of dreams, which compel the reader to accept the events they describe, contradictions and all—to share, for a time, the profound understanding of this fine poet, whose grave eloquence will carry farther than most of the noises that for so long kept him from being properly heard.

Since his first book, Ted Hughes has taken that exciting step forwards into his own country, where the landscape and the creatures inhabiting it speak his language and he, near enough, speaks theirs. Influences are in their proper distant place. His ancestry is in the palm of his hand. not on the tip of his tongue; and he has found things that he is e interested in saying and his own special way 01 saying them. It is a direct, tough, time-sparing. way (but not violent, which implies carelessness of aim and imprecision of feeling). Occasionally he packs his vocables, and thoughts, so tightlY that they jam. Occasionally his rhythms jolt and thump, short phrase tramping down after short phrase : more strenuous than strong. And they" are one or two poems here where compression Os created, I feel, unnecessary difficulties. That said, there is nothing bUt praise. For such a fault is the vice of a rare virtue. Consider the economy of this, from the poem 'Pike':

Three we kept behind glass.

Jungled in weed : three inches, four,

And four and a half : fed fry to them—

Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born wittl' He has a pithiness and dexterity which is toore than verbal. His thought and imagery have the same abrupt and packed truth—packed, but not musclebound. The 'Retired Colonel' has a 'face pulped scarlet with kept rage' and an otter from sea uth To sea crosses in three nights

Like a king in hiding.

Felicities of this sort are to be found in ever1.0 poem. But felicities are not enough. And h!s felicities are there for a purpose, as well as 01', themselves. Many of these poems are 'about animals. Hi does not see animals, as Edwin Muir does, as figurations of innocence, creatures which suffered -no Fall and remain aS emblems of a powerful innocence which we have lost He describes them, not only with a sensuous apprecia- tion of their shapes, habits and characters. but with a warm and instinctive compassion (more to do with wit than sentimentality) which recognises that their meaning includes a part of ours. It is as if they become spokesmen for the hidden and violent beings that we partly are, to be regarded with a kind of rueful honesty as obey- ing the laws of their nature, however much we regret the redness of their tooth and claw.

Peter Levi's book puzzles me. His lines move with an easy and graceful gait. His language is simple and natural. The atmosphere of his poems has nothing in it of the murky, the prophetic, the 'apocalyptic. And yet, quite often, I boggle at such imprecisions and implausibilities as:

Saturday Was the colour of his socks.

Or: the dead with suddenly sweating wrists cry out for birth.

Why wrists?

Does this seem niggling? If there is a note of petulance here, it comes from observing an obviously sensitive, unpretentious and honest mind just failing to create the poems of its inten- tion because of a fault that is exactly the one you wouldn't expect it to have. There is something wrong when one is continually questioning the words as one reads them.

Angels and pit-ponies are blind.

One assumption and one error in one wee line. There are complete poems which come off, quite a number of them. But I fancy Mr. Levi's next book will be a better one than this.

The third Guinness anthology—if a contributor to it may express his opinion—keeps up the high standard of its predecessors. One wishes there were, now and again, a gate-crasher in this civilised gathering, breaking the rules and the glasses, cut- ting a high caper even at the risk °flailing flat on its face. But the guests are intelligent and the con- versation, generally good, rises often enough to the level where good verses become good poems. The same might be said of the Critical Quarterly's supplement, Poetry 1960. There are fine poems by Graham Hough, Philip I.arkin and others.

NORMAN maccAto