Poets of the Fifties
By ANTHONY HARTLEY WHAT do most readers mean when they talk of ` modern' poetry ? Not the founders, not Eliot or Yeats. Not the more recent representatives, not Dylan Thomas even. The picture of the present-day poet was formed in the Thirties: a left-winger just back from the Weimar republic or Spain and aggressively introducing pylons or power-stations into his verse. When people speak of ` young' poets it tends, still, to be W. H. Auden (who already marks an epoch) or Cecil Day Lewis (who is Professor of Poetry at Oxford) that they mean. The hygienic Marxist- Freudian style represents for them the obscurity and the provocation which they have seen denounced in the popular Press. Of course, a few devotees may have carried the matter further, but what would they have found ? The neo- Romanticism associated with Dylan Thomas and the New Apocalypse, which was dominant during the war years, or the rather heterogeneous collection of poets who were around in Cairo during the Forties. Neither of these groups had the strength to replace the talents or the errors of the Thirties. The brand of poetry put forward by the New Apocalypse was too wild and whirling : apart from Dylan Thomas no poet of any stature was produced by this romantic reaction. As for the Mediterranean group, they were united purely by circumstance, and the,word ` civilised ' defines and limits their talents. In the eyes of the general reader it is the Thirties that continue to typify the modern movement in verse.
Now, however, there are signs that this twenty-year old domination is, coming to an end. New names in the reviews, a fresh atmosphere of controversy, a new spirit of criticism— these are signs that some other group of poets is appearing on the horizon. And this summer's publications from the Fantasy Press*.provide a convenient opportunity to form some opinion of the direction this new movement is likely to take. Of course, it has its roots in the Thirties. The attempt ail a return to romanticism which came between was essentially a sport. In the poems of William Empson and, to a lesser extent, those of Auden, the present generation of under or just' over thirties have found their masters, a development which first became evident in Mr. John Wain's essay on Mr. Empson's poetry in Penguin New Writing. This common influence is, no doubt, one of the main reasons for the impression of unity given by their work. Anyone reading the poems of writers so different as, for instance, Mr. Donald Davie and Mr. Thom Gunn is bound to be surprised by greater resemblances than he could reasonably have expected. Is this then a school of poets ?, Not in the French sense of the word : English poets have (unfortunately for the critics) always been hostile to the programme and manifesto. But there is some evidence that the present generation has been sufficiently affected by common influences and circumstances for a not too vague zeitgeist to be apparent in their productions.
The names of some of these young poets, mostly from Oxford or Cambridge, are already beginning to be known— Mr. Wain, Mr. Davie, Mr. Gunn, Mr. Amis—and many of them will be familiar to readers of the Spectator. What they have in common is revealed both in content and style. As to the first, what strikes the reader is their similarity of tone rather than of subject-matter. The subjects of their, poems are varied and are the usual ones : love, nature, literature— but the tone in which they are treated is peculiar. It might roughly be described as ` dissenting' and nor-conformist, cool, scientific and analytical. Here is how Thom Gunn deals with the legend of Helen of Troy :
Paris. He was a man. And yet That Aphrodite brought this want Found too implausible to admit: And po against this story set The story of a stolen aunt.
This is Writing which uses the subject-matter of myth, but it is not mythopoeic writing : it is critical and destructive of myth. (I hasten to add that Mr. Gunn can be mythopoci when he chooses. It is in the creation of myth that he shows his greatest originality.) The subjects of the poems in Mr. Davie's pamphlet speak for themselves: ' The Evangelist,' On Bertrand Russell's Portraits from Memory,' 1-kimage to William Cowper '—this is the poetic equivalent of liberal, dissenting England. A liberalism distrustful of too much richness or too much fanaticism, austere and sceptical. A liberalism egalitarian and anti-aristocratic. A liberalism profoundly opposed to fashion in the metropolitan sense of the word and in this and other ways displaying strong connections with F. R. Leavis and Scrutiny. George MacBeth sums up part of its credo:
Shop, therefore, criticise, be keen. Walk round the stall and ask the price Even of goods that look too green.
It is easy to see how this critical attitude produces the distrust of rhetoric, the attempt to convey complicated thought and moral feeling that mark the style of these poets. Theft intense preoccupation with a packed use of language is indicated by the very titles of recent volumes of verse with their careful ambiguities and conscious complexity : Fighting Terms, Mixed Feelings, A _Frame of Mind, A Form of Words. Obviously this owes a great deal to Mr. Empson's poetry and, more generally, to the thinking about language which has been carried on ever since Ogden and Richards's Meaning ot * Fighting Terms. By Thom Gunn. (Fantasy Press. 8s. 6d.) A Form of Words. By George MacBeth. (Fantasy Press. 9s. 6d .) Fantasy Pamphlet No. 19. By Donald Davie. (Fantasy Press. 9d Fantasy Pamphlet No. 20. By Jonathan Price. (Fantasy Press. 9d Meaning both by literary critics and by the logical positivist philosophers. It can also be regarded as a reaction against the loose romanticism current during the war years and just after, as an attempt to introduce meaning—and complex meaning at that—at a time when English poetry had been ravaged by the indiscriminate use of evocatory images. Typically, the line from which these poets start (developed from Mr. Empson), is apparently transparent but conceals other meanings beneath its colloquial flatness. An example is Jonathan Price's concluding lines in ` Verses for a Flirt ':
You hope it's heads you win, and tails I lose.
Forgive me It's a game I never play.
Here the simplicity of colloquial speech hides the point of the whole poem : heads and tails evidently have a physiological significance as well as the obvious figurative one. The trouble with this neo-metaphysical writing is that not everyone can manage a combination of simplicity of language with compli- cation of emotion and thought. Mr. MacBeth reverses the process :
When once proleptic of the kiss Their parted lips stood poised in air No stellar, parallax could tear Heart from heart in hendiadys.
This would send anyone rushing to the Oxford English Dictionary to decode it. The language wraps up the thought quite unnecessarily. This kind of ` wit ' writing only too often starts out to be Donne and finishes as Cleveland or some other minor metaphysical. Almost anyone can play upon words in such a way as to be amusing or even at times significant, but the real poet must find his own voice and in an age when wit is the fashion his talent will be measured by his deepening of that rather superficial norm. This once admitted, it is true that the handling of words and metre which metaphysical verse requires is excellent training technically; it is a good thing to see young poets once again paying attention to sheer virtuosity.
Complication of thought, austerity of tone, colloquialism and avoidance of rhetoric—these provide some common ground and common dangers. The dangers are those of elimination of richness, of dryness pushed to the point of aridity. Also some of these young university poets are hardly out of the pastiche stage. Literary achievement usually begins with pastiche (Mr. Empson was the obvious thing to go for), but the general reader is quite entitled to ask : ` What have these poets actually done ? Which of them arc likely to make the grade ? ' In this form the question is a difficult one; for some it is too early to answer and for others it will always be too late.
Some distinct personalities are, however, beginning to emerge. Among the poets whose volumes are under review Mr. Gunn has produced a style entirely his own, where strict metrical form is allied to a curiously unsensual passion and force of thought. He is a good poet already and will probably be a better one. His faults (such as a rather overdone tough- ness) are easily corrected and are being corrected. Mr. Davie too has found his own special amalgam : dryness is his formula, monotony his danger. Another more isolated tendency is represented by poets such as Philip Larkin and Philip Oakes who bring to their work a greater myth-making power and are less scared of emotion. But it is hard to prophesy the destinies of individual poets. All the poets here mentioned have displayed promise and more than promise. Their work is vigorous and full of interest, but the object of criticism at this stage of their careers must be to arouse attention— to transmit enthusiasm—and not to pick winners in a race that has still so far to go. The questions remain unanswered: what is certain is that, for better or for worse, we are now in the presence of the only considerable movement in English Poetry since the Thirties.
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