7 Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism wines 1485-1490 ANDREW CROZIER i fied of foc wrk Ared Gy Alen Contexts in canons 1f we want to ask questions about the context of poetry, with the idea, pethaps, that the broader our frame of reference the better our know. ledge, we should find ourselves at the same time having to ask the question: What poetry? Some modes of contextual criticism commonly ‘encounsered avoid this in practice. One, for example, wil point toself ‘evident social factors which can be exhibited ia standard choice of texts. Another infers a total historical and social reality determining al ocuctions uniformly, able without difficulty wo incorporate If even those productions that resist such determination: from this point of view the liverary productions of 2 given period are typical and more or less equivalent. Both these positions, even when adversary, treat poetry asan unproblematic unity, kknowable as such in a way largely independent of any comprehensive het position asks of itself why itartends to this poetry rather F 28 a result of an inclusive embrace of vext and context the in evidence is whatever is at hand, That other poetry might never have been written, Neither position interrogates its own context (is poetty not past of the context of criticism?) and thus must operate ‘with implicit commitment to unexamined and even disowned judge- isa quantitative phenomenon (which, incidentally, suggests ions of status and quality often have more to do with on and taste than judgement) that can put into proportion200 Saciesy and Literature 1945-1970 the question of what our critics refer to. It is not often enough remembered that in recent years, and maybe for much longer, poctry hhas been the art with probably the greatest number of practitioners ia this country: entrants to poetry competitions and participants in writers’ circles and creative-writing clases are a fraction of the tora. The mass of these poets are, of course, without ambition, and che private nature of theie ac at they are not concerned with y product; but this is not the poine. Not only do these poets hardly kaow what the quality productis; when its pointed out to them they tend not to recognize what makes itso very different from what they write themselves. Unless they are ambitious to win prizes, they certainly do not rush to buy it. IF we dismiss these poets as occupied, or as having old-fashioned standards of te do nor remove their significance. We have not justified the oceed from a general iuction of literature to aeomplaint about the ions unasked within a blanket notion of high art; nor are ques- tions abour the relation of criticism, as a mediator of contests, the ject allowed to be put. Yet everyone engaged in the academic stady of English knows how ciicism hs redesigned the tzadiion of English itera rt this century. Where recent erature iscon production, suc about ~ the stand «context operates in intimacy, through secondary discourse, with its production. Nor to proceed toa fase, therefore, we should beat in mind If is contextually produced, before being an ageney chrough which literature is determined. The cri values as cepresents cultural on and status of what is regarded as art ‘There isa notional admission that art dircets its own discourse, but most criticism, in the guise of artistic judgement, is doing no mote than affording Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 201 and socially apptoved modes of discourse. Present-day criticism of the poetry of the period 194570 has its origins, still, within the petiod itself: indeed, when we examine its origins we see how closely they were involved with a section of its subject. It would appear, specifically, that currently approved modes of discourse established themselves in poetry in the early and middle fifties. In order, therefore, to understand why the canon for our period rm in which it does, we need to consider it in relation to its formative critical context. Two points of focus ~ the canon as itis received today and as it emerged and was codified — provide the starting-point of this essay: superimposed, they provide an image of the self-consciousness, 0 to speak, of the canonical poetry of the period, But when we trace the terms by which the canon, ‘was defined it becomes apparent that they are also those by whic -d; controversy never infringed certain agreements, and these unexamined positions cover major exclusions of poetic i of the period the present-day problem cannot begin to be But what isthe canon? Do I make exaggerated claims for ts existence? ‘These are questions teaders may already have answered from their own, knowledge. In his monograph on Seamus Heaney (1982) Blake Mortison provides a current version, registering the status of his subject, placing him in the company of his pects, and marshalling an aay of established authorities to underwrite the orthodoxy he describes. Seamus Heaney is widely believed to be one of the finest poets ‘now writing. To call him ‘the most important Irish poet since ‘Yeats’ has indeed become something of a cliché. in Britain he is as essential a part of the school and university syllabus as are his post-1945 predecessors Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes; in ‘America scholarly articles reflect a growing incerest in his ‘of Latkin, Hughes and Heaney is assumed, and its as ‘one of the finest [Poets tow writing’ that Heaney belongs there. strategies of202 Society and Literature 1945-1970 this argument, from the notion of 2 canon of excellence any suggestion that the criteria involved might not be universal. First of al the argument is contained within an unspecified concept of quali ‘the Finest poets’. Ir accomplishes itself by means of ostensibly neu chronological markers (‘since Yeats’, ‘post-1945"); yet, while 1945 is an important date in social history (the election of 2 Labour govern- we end of the Second World War — although neither was, directly an event in lish history, sutely), “Yeats isa function of literary history. The notion of an autonomous history is implied by the concept of succession, YeatsHeaney. Larkin~Hughes-Feaney, yet is not simply chronological but is concerned wich authority and status and, it would seem, relations of descent: a version other words, though not that of Pound or chaps? Whatever the case, the argument detives its force more from its air of unassuming conviction than from anything it says about the poets in question, functions rather like chose ‘of radio interference used other signals, The message allowed to come through is the pecsuasive notion of major quite unbiased, simply the best. I is a salesman's message (secking in fact to develop the market for a series of primers on ‘Con- temporary Writers’), appealing to a variety of 2 vatiery of lrtes, but appealing above all to the taste for should be remembered that the appeal of quality is always towards idual consumer.) 1e most compelling strategy of the argument as a whole isthe way it associates the authority of period and tra ch the generosity of| contrast and internal diversity. The canon, within limits, is able to evolve. Some years ago, before the decisive advent of Heaney, ic was usual co encounter the name of Ted Hughes owinned with thet of ‘Thom Gunn. Larkin and Hughes are frequently perceived as 2 cal, the one tame and insul elemental powers. Heancy available i the other barbaric and invokin ison has the merit of providing us with the canon in pure, con- centrated form: Larkin, Hughes, Heaney. But he appears somewhat halfhearted in hi it, and it might appear that the litical position ic embodies has become decadent, the terminology Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empinical lyricism 203 egy. If we look atthe canon nearer the moment rence in tone is stiking. In the next set ‘while proponents of the can: Donald Davie. for example, ‘moment of protest che‘ k that everyone knows, effective laureate of 0% what Larkin does wit co the landscapes and the weather of his own ose landscapes and that weather to recognize them? And thi recognize also the seasons of an English soul — the moods he expresses ate our moods too, though we may deal with them attached; even the question of Laskin's special distinction is placed in terms of a native lished these remasks in 1963, when Larkin’s reputation still effectively rested on a single book, published i ‘The appeal to Englishness may reinforce values placed on che indeed; Davie goss on 0 sy of poem by it cou concrete and specific (an: ‘Ted Hughes that its landse England but it mi azgument annexes poetic quality to an exclusive sense of cultural pos- the present-day canon, although its values are no less exclusive, is not possessive in quite this way. But vo what extent might Davie's praise of Larkin addres ‘whole? Does Movement poetry in fact elaborate and celeb Rition and enjoyment (however wistful) of common cultural property? In the next section ofthis essay Icon ‘arguments put into play following the theoretical and polemic initiatives of Robert Conquest’s204 Society and Literature 1945-1970 36). ut i will be as well ion of the quale thee logy of Movement verse New Lin reface that discussion with some cot ‘A recattent impulse of the poet asociated in Now Lines so spp hhend or, at least, allude to che discrete: this impulse centres both the is preoccupation with the discrete. Th ic reflection found by Davie in ‘A Head Painted by " modified and brought closer to contempor ‘we might expect) in Philip Larkin’s ‘Lines on a Young Lady’. graph Album’, In “The Minute’, by John Holloway, ‘He scarcely saw the moment when . . . make one bright / Minute: and then the thing vwas done.’ Such discrete occasions are partially seen as potential with expressive discourse; what they might say co the poet is aken up and considered in 2 poem. But — and this seems inevitable in view of the i even estrangement from, whatever itis ‘worlds of discourse to which they allude. It does quite the opposite, in fact. Occasions, however necessary they may be to poets, ae nor felt to be trustworthy. They are nor full with a world of realized experience ‘The components of the moment of realization in Holloway’s poem can, that experience of them was wryly deficient. In Enrigh Incerprete ¢cttics for whom the outside is a dreadful bore’ are condemned, while a reality of surfaces is esteemed, both the grass which covers a ‘senseless’ mess, and the ‘really’ meant. Good lord, if'a poet really meant what he said, we should all be out of a job — why on earth would he sing of the merely teal? - che papers have taken, up that chorus ~ “the agonies, the strife of human hearts’? ~ why, I do that for us. But the irony of Enright’s ‘merely real’, a realty that is exclusively from the allusion to Keats, for Enright’s Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 205 reality (‘the peasants look at their rotting cabbages, / 2 gang of clods are building a block of fla sonal emote ad diminished, In these poems we detect in the poet determi- sation of poste dlscourse and foreclesure of is intended audience. The discourse is emphatically singular ceases: the fi pronoun ‘I’ is characteristic, we notice, Larkins while ‘we’. stoup, and is far fi selves we do so by self-election. ‘How dare we now be anything but smumb?" concludes his ‘Rejoinder to 2 Critic’, a poem of casuistic argu ment in which Davie figutes the effects of ‘Love’ as the radioactive nullified response that communication tion, No, the discourse here is set, ty ‘can be imagined as sharing the moments of privileged contemplation such pocms envisage. ‘We’ isnot ‘us’, the English, but rather ‘you and ie and John Donne oetics of objects sites and moments poets of the Movement are to be understood in thi sume time they place themselves outside that demystifying its conventional occasions, by fin rothing below the surface. The profound or sublime are closed options. In ‘Neat Jakobselv’ Robert Conquest is able to contemplate the unfamiliar, alien landscape of an Arctic summer not with horror but in a mood bordering on complacency. Here, as elsewhere, the expressive discourse potential inthe occasion is found to reside less in the occasion ise than in its conventional status. This bifurcation ~ in which ostensible occasions are virtual fictions - is recognized and exploited by Kingsley Amis in ‘Here is Where Hete, where the ragged water Is twilled and spun over Pebbles backed liked beetles,206 Society and Literature 1945-1970 Bright as beer-bottles, Bur this izony, which becomes increasingly emph: place down dere, / There's nothing there’) cannot dence on the very conventions ic rejects. We mig! ute this ambivalence to the social origins of the Movement poets (reference Which is made, in passing, in the next sugg thac the c were not theirs by birth. B. ambivalence of this sort is likel between poetic occas pressure in need of containment. Ic is in these tezms, I believe, that the formal characteristics of Move ment verse, which Conquest makes prescriptive, are best understood, rather chan in a straightforward congruity of form and content. The high regard for regular rhyme and stanza displayed throughout New Lines does not engage notions of finish, of the polished object, the [poems are not discrete events in the sense that chey correspond as such cir discrete occasions, They are discrete, rather, in the way they ‘wrap around their author-subject. Theit occasions are for the most part treated with scepticism, and the texts distort and buckle as a conse- quence of inner tension, Traditional forms are invoked not so much for the fieedom they can confer as for support. Tey define the space in which the self can act with poetic authority, while at the same time, in the absence of assurances provided by conventionally felt poetic ex ence, they secure the status of the text. From our retrospective point of view our questions concern ot only how best to read Movement verse but also howr to explain its success in determining and underwriting the emerging canon. Within the con- straints operating in Movement verse we would expect to find that individual poets wrote with different de ivencss. I would suggest that Larkin exploited Movement ambivalence ‘most fully, and was thus best able to retain the terms and formal procedures ofits discourse without exhibiting them as limits. Davie’s ing tural institutions around which they sustained their carcers rth disruptive i Thrills and fill: poetry as figures of empirical lyicizm 207 remarks, I think, imp! poinc another way, an English and itty recognized this, although I might put the Larkin’ s objects, sitesand moments are anything to Donald Ds ing away from the rectitude and seriousness of Davie. Yet, were I to mount 2 dispute, across almast two decades, berween rwo such op- ponents - in the knowledge, for example, that Davie’ s pri ‘of poetic discourse: a necessary response to actual pressutes a no doubt, but now very much a preferred manner. The Movement as controversial nexus We no longer see the Movement as a pressure group or a publ tment of the Movement fils line with quent claims that the term itself is a misnomer — that there was no member- ship, no push or ditection, no common programme ot genetal agree- ‘ment on principles. All this is quite helpful, even ifitstands in the way of any reconstruction of Movement networks and tactics we might wish to make, for if no Movement as such can be said to have existed, and we can only approximate the typical features of its poetry and not judge individual deparcues from a standard, the way is open to seeing the ‘work of a particular poet as typifying the poetry we think of, however vaguely, as being Movement. Many signs point to Philip Larkin as an ‘@ppropriate choice: not only does he figure largely in much. Movement documentation; his writing confirms and clarifies much of its polemic. In other circumstances J might not weat the Movement and Larkin asin some sense commutative, but here my concern is with the extent to which the Movement’s self-definition was set necpialy against the Doct ofthe previous decade, andthe concutence of ths Movernent Aiposiion wih polemits otherwise aiccred agaitst the Moventent Larkin's career, with its early, rejected affiliations with the chetoric of208 Society and Literature 1945-1970 fortes pocty, is exemplary in the wa such antagonisms. Tis not necessary to go into cccumst incorporates and stabilizes ourselves of his account of the Movement’ the Low Church and middle-class origins; and upward social mo! and the nostalgia for u 5: universities, All these bespeak a high de; complementary degree of personal iso also imply a social matrix largely made up of Movement provoked a number of squeamish reactio its posture of tough and aggressive ph m. alsoargued against the Movement thatthe refusal of ideas, the en derivation of poeity from exclusively personal experience, made socially conservative poetry, uncommitted and without dedi But if Larkin provides a standard for Moveme urates the canon of post-war English poctry, propaganda that Movement positions are generalized and made. ive, The Movement eff jemonstrated its existence to the general secader in 1956 with Conquest’s anthology New Lines. lewas reprinted within months, and again the following year. I: was sharply attacked by Chatles Tomalinson in a 1957 review article in Essays in Criticism, and provoked a counter-anthology of ‘poets unafraid of sensitivity and Mavericks, edited by Howatd Sergeant and Dannie Abse ended to demonstrate that the Movement did not have 2 1920, (Typical ‘mavericks’ were, ice Turner.) A, Alvarez's anthology The New Poetry (1962; -ngaged the Movement from a rather more up iluded five of Conquest’s nine poets. Conquest brought out a revised and updated New Lines ~ 11 (1963), with many more poets, ro ptoduce an even greater overlap between New Lines and The New Poetry. Both include Ted Hughes, Alvater's strongest anti-Movement contender. It has been argued that New Lines appeared after the Movement had shor its bolt, and that it should not be taken as definitive — both nice points which I would not try 10 dispute. Conquest claimed considerable achievement already for the poets in his first anthology, while noting that several of them had yet to publish substantial collections of their work. By any accounts the Thrills and fills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 209 [New Lines was able to teach a considerable and new audience, and most of the poets went on to establish careers for themselves, ifthey had not done so already ‘What we see in the sequence of response and reaction following the publication of New Lines is not, needless to say, the internecine feud- ing of small, conspiratorial groups of poets, let alone the successful dominance of a single group (the event feared by the editors of Marericks). Icis something much more like the establishment of a new kind of literary professo izing the cultural prestige of poetry retsties, the media, the secondary ina manner already established in the USA, with 3 role of cultural entreprencur. Asin any boom (the professionalism I describe was more a feature of the sixties than of the fifties, of course) such an economy forward under its own momentum, and Movement poets, unless they were especially recali- trant, found themselves merged with their succes e's 1963 remarks about Larkin, of his 196: The Review,! i which he advocat 1g of experience, can be seen as attemprs tc energy, of the Movement, although s unofficial name, Conquest's vwulgarize ideas put forward by Davie in his ove Panty of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Ene have a very generous appre (distinguishing Amis and W: y Lakin), but he provides the Movement wit frame of reference by asserting its newness, and in doing so the present-day canon attributed to finely made judgement. In 1956 Conquest starts from the journalistic p 0 (sornew disingenuous in hindsight) that each decade has its characteristic poetry, and stakes a claim to the fifties, asserting of New Lines that it Jepresents ‘a general tendency . . .« genuine and healthy poetry of the ppetiod’. But he claims more than this: not only is New Lines contem- otaty; fifties poetry, as represented by New Lines, is better than the octry of the previous decade. In addition, as ‘healthy’ might have “Warned us, even more is ar stake. Uncovering the pathology of the forties in terms of its ‘images of sex and violence’, Conquest remarks212. Society and Literature 1945-1970 tendency, pethaps of lesser talents’ Conquest is imy ies, represents a return to literary standards inscribed in social normality Conquest sets the poetty ofthe fifties in reaction to that of the fc through a series of binaty contrasts: empiricism versus theory, in versus feeling. The fortes poets gave the id too much of a say in things; they attempred to delete everything from thei writing except emotion and submitted to the ‘debilitating theory chat poetry mast be meta- phorical’, Even more than ‘technical and emotional gift", poets must have ‘integrity and judgement enough to prevent surrender to subjec- tive moods of social pressures’, What distinguishes fifties poetry is that ic ‘submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs not agglomer- ations of unconscious commands, It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and ~ like modern philosophy ~ is empizical in its ativude to all that comes.” Reference is also made to ‘reverence for the seal petson or event’ and ‘refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language’. None of this is argued through; pos as are afficmed as though their truth were self-evident. We might consider that any view of "oc resents them in an ed in response to ‘more than seck prestige For uncommitted tudes. The reference to rational structure, on the other hand, seems so echo the ideas of the American critic Yvor Winters (whose Thomist logic we might expect Conquest to disdain) to which Davie had responded with enthusiasin in the late fortes Ir need not concern us much that Conquest’s arguments in 1956 ‘were incoherent and question- begging; what matters is that he codified 2 successfully assertive group position based on exclusion and preju- dice, His arguments in the Introduction to New Liner ~ II show how the needs of the situation had changed. ‘The influences making for distortion in poetry ate now different from what they were seven yeats ago.’ It was no longer necessary to take up a position against the previous decade, nor to claim attention as representative of the ‘moment. (Ie was, after all, no longer the fifties, and part of Conquest’s intention now was to forestall new claimants.) In retrospect, Conquest Thrills and full: pootry as figures of empirical lyricism 213 importance of New Lines was not topicality but rather its 1 that '25 agains the wotk of the past few decades, a good deal of contemporary poetry had returned to the cardinal traditions of This disclosure of position, while it confiems what was implicit in the Movement’s beginnings, also serves co underline divergences within it at a point where poetry and criticism peel away from one another. The point might be pur thus: when the Movement lost whar- possessed, its polemic apparatus was ical commonplace ~ that the modern movement was over, the need for experiment no longer existed. ( His polemic in 1963 isdirected primarily at arguments put forward by Alvarez in his Introduction to The New Poetry. and the dispute is n0 longer becween generations (within the perspective of history) but taking pains aot to ide and by presenting his adversary’s position as that of a ‘modish) rather than an anthologist. Alvarez’s arguments thus appear as |= those of a depraved taste and its prescriptive criticism ~ 2s another ‘example of that systematic criticism which pretends to make its judge- ments ‘detive rigorously from the nature of the poem discussed! Gudgement, in other words, derives from the ctties, and we judge of attics by their taste.) What Conquest objects ‘Powerful feeling at che expense of ‘balance and proportion’, sugges- tions that ‘the circumstances of modern life .. . open up hitherto un- ‘Suspected psychological depths’ and the recommendation of European21d Society and Literature 1945-1970 and American poets as models for English poetry. Against these, Con- quest argues that the human condition from which the poetty of one country springs cannot be readily tapped by that of another. The British culture is receptive to imamigeation, if not to invasion: but it remains high! and for that no one el be a substitute. ‘The adaprability of Conquest’s polemic was its great strength; the cate not to identify too precisely what was argued agi instead a projection of the case in hand, pre-empted many possi- ics of disagreement. The assertion of an unspecified, native tra- ‘on underpinned claims to be authoritative and inclusive, so thar the most disabling argument against Alvarez. was nor that he sanctioned bad poets but that he might corrupt or mislead good ones, To disagree ith Conquest ~ co forestall, that is to say, the pos of any disagreement being reconciled and generalized by the inclusive. ness of the terms in which he argued — would have entailed taking issue with his version of history. Any disagreement about ‘modernism’, for example, would remain a matter of recuperable detail if i failed to his view of uadition. Yet this polemic strategy, so absorp- tively coercive, was so litle substantiated in deta ‘pretensions ly t0 have commanded notice. On che other hand, boch Tomlinson and Alvarez were ready, with Conquest, t0 write off the poetry of the forties as ‘vicious’ (Tomi English poetry... atits nadir’ (Alvarez). ‘The differences between Tor New Lines ate worth atte inson's and Alvarez’s opps claim to be representative). Furthermore, the particular qua ~ for Tomlinso® its ‘suburban mental ratio’, for Alvarez is, ‘gentility’ ~ are roughly identical. But although this pinpoints some- thing about Movement poetry in general there is no broader agreement between them. They do not share 2 point of view. Tomlinson considers the ‘myth’ surrounding the Movement the average man and write for a midi that they arc making for themselves ‘another cosy corne ‘watered down, democratic culture’, and that they thus hardly differ from the forties poets (he instances Tambimuteu’s edit Thrills and fils: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 215 Poetry London) who propounded an artistic democracy of the uncon- ochialism, failure of nerve, es the lack of ‘high and objec be taken for ‘a significant irerary jectivity, in self-awareness as much 2s in critical ns main concern, the key to all the Movements s. The poets in New Lines ‘show a singular want of vital ‘awareness ofthe continuum outside themselves, of the mystery bodied cover against them in the created universe’ Regard for the presence of the object, in Ton was the issue which prevented Davie and Alvarez reaching agreement in theit 1962 conversation. What Tomlinson objects asthe imposition ofa poet's ‘mental con imself (dheic suburban mental ratio” in the case of the New Lives poets) on “that which is be ‘might beseen, moreover, as the very thing argued for by Alvacez in The th the difference only that risk and extremicy ar “mental preferred to ger combination of the ‘psych Lawrence and the ‘tech: of the failure of the experim: jin England - both because it had been ‘an essentially American concern’ and because of the operation of a series of ‘negative feed- backs’. (By this he means, I thiak, that En ets reacted against ‘experimentalism, although to say this doesn’t tell us why they did so.) ‘Alvarez, with some circumspection, can justify experimentalism when it is able to ‘open poety up to new areas of experience’, but che implied between this and unj ‘experiment is not re wonder why such dist ish poetry closed to those “new areas of experience’) can be short-circuited without having to go back to Eliot: American poetry in the forties, unlike English poetry, had assimilated the experiments of the tweni sented at its best by John Berryman and Robert $ a ‘new seriousness’ English poetry sorely needs. on and Sylvia Plath to Alvarea’s model of the American vanguard. (It is worth while American influences on English poetry are in question, ivarez had no truck with many Ametican poets who emerged in216 Society and Literature 1945-1970 the fiftics. Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and Edwat of new experience, ing up as an advocate of experiment; nor need he, 125 not assimilated the experiments of poetry has. In an important sense, reernent with the Movement is less radi since although jot and the therefore, his led or manipu- realization of a che inadequacy of the self-image of the English poet (‘the post-war Welfare State Englsh- san’) rather than its aesthetic consequences. Gent lief that life is always more ot less ordé becoming increasingly precarious to maintais uncompromising forces of our time’, ‘forces of disincegration which destroy the old standards of civilization’. Alvarez, pointing to the scale of twentieth-century evils, concentration camps, genocide, the threat ‘of nuclear war, looks back 2s far asthe mass slaughter in trench warfare of the Ficst Wotld War. This might strike us as powerfully persuasive evidence were it in fact the ‘new experience’ he had in mind. What Alvarez isin fact impressed by are parallels between modern experience of these evils and perceptions derived from psychoanalysis, and ‘our recognition of the ways in which the same forces are at work ‘The forces of disintegration, that is to say, are not social, pol economic, but psychological (se also Chapter 4); but what this psycho- logical insight is made to require of poetry is that it treat all events 28 projections of che poet's psyche. ‘Dominant public savagery’, ‘the fall range of his experience’ ~ the import of such phrases reduces to the statement that ‘the writer can no longer deny with any assurance the fears and desires he does not wish to face’ Alvarez’s espousal of what is commonly termed ‘confessional’ poetry, his advocacy of personal risk and extremity, even suicide, are notorious but consistent with his argument that psychoanalysis con- stinutes an unavoidable new area of experience for poetry. His praise of Robert Lowell, particularly the Lowell of Life Studies, is understand- able, for Lowell is pre-eminently @ poet in whom the confusions and Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 217 violence of the age (these are question-begging notions, of course) are figured out in verms of his own disturbance. But, leaving aside any mis- savings this may provoke - for example, that in such poetry the poet takes rather too much (of our experience, sar) upon himself or herself ~ Alvare2's special pleading should not obscure the fact chat he shares ‘a broad agreement with Conquest about the proper mode of discourse of poetry. The agreement is so fundamental, in fact, as to be in danger of passing beneath notice. Both Movement and ‘confessional’ poetry share a discourse which operates through the personal lytic, often dramatic in its presentation, and employs an elaborate figurative language to draw cogether the self and is objects. The site of Coa- aquest’s disagreement with Alvarez, therefore, suggests th ‘English tradition’ is concerned less with any maintenance of tr wal poetic decorum than with an ideological preference among self-images. ‘When Alvarez contrasts Larkin’s “At Grass’ and Hughes's ‘A Dream of Horses’, in order to consider the ‘kind of success’ different styles allow, the distinctions he discovers ate less convincing if we pause to consider the similarities beeween the two pocms, Both arc surfeited with extended figurative devices which tie the things referred 10 ~ horses, in each case ~ to the speakers o thesspeaker isan implied observer whose presence jected q jons and reservations, ‘pethay Hughes's poem the speakers are a chorus of stable the horses are allegorized by the speakers’ double view of them: in Larkin’s poem racehorses retired to grass ae seen against after-images of their fame and glory on the course; in Hughes's poem the speakers dream of powerful, overwhelming horses unlike the pitiful hacks they ind. Both poems ae allegories of an absent falln Larkin, as we might expect, is the more ambival his conventional them ind ith the race meeting, the glories associated che horses, although approach- relations to their charges are that Hughes's horses, unlike . have a violent, impending presence’ may indicate a prefer- fence but is not very much to the point, What presence there is in218 Society and Literature 1945-1970 "Hughes's poem is a presence of dream images. But this is a minor issue. Both poems, as allegoties. ask to be read not for their presentational immediacy but for whac they say about life. What differentiates the ‘poems is theit approach to the nostalgia of diminished being (and here, femarks about suburban mental ratios and Welfare Stare smen have some bearing). Larkin suggests that although we may ‘experience such feelings we should not allow ourselves to be t00 affected by them, whereas Hughes, I take it, suggests that we can imagine or dream ourselves out of them. Neither poet questions the sourees or conditions of such feelings, but takes them for granted Arguably, however, the personal lyrics not a mode conducive to asking such questions; nostalgia is, so to speak, fully naruralized within the tmode, and irony the only restraint able to be applied again ‘Twenty years after Davie's recognition of Larkin’ effective custody of ‘our England! as poetic subject-matter, Larkin is being seriously can- vassed as the next poet laureate. The only cynicism such views admit is the suggestion that the laureate’s offical duties ate now excused. 's bestowal of laurels was, by comparison, tongue-in-cheek and rildly subversive. He was not looking for offical recognition of England's most distinguished poet. Ic cannot be disputed, surely, that isis how Larkin is perceived today — not only distinguished but ly English, insular almost, and not easily appreciated by lis common sense has moved from being that ofthe as Alvarez recognized it, to that of the political Rigi. nusness and the second-rate in their place. But these the terms in which his general esteem has been nego- in Larkin’s poetry is a torpid apprchen- His recognition of ‘our England’, pol goods, and relics of spiritual and national grandeur, the residual signs wit It is as though, if the landscape and are the dumb reminders of a better past ople, latent but unexpressed, elf cannot stand for either term of this transaction, chough for example, Thrills and fils: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 219 sshom a sacred edifice can have ile meaning, and 2 secular wit pays over his account ofa sightsceing vis in awkward reverence’, But, forall the ignorance he claims, or displays in passing some knowledge of church fitments — fn, plate and pyx. Such ambivalence disturbs much of the language of the pocm, which runs a gamut of plainness, sarcasm and portentousaess, so that we are uneasily aware of the incomplete adjust- iment of the po of his persona; at best we might fee ic isa form of discomfort. The poem appea nd an optimistic assertion of spiritual persistence, "someone forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious’, but ‘what that seriousness might mean, what itis chat is never ‘obsolete’, expressed in a frigid mixture of abstractions: ‘all our compulsions meet, / Are recognized, and robed as ¢ * Compulsion may cum into destiny, the profane become sacred, but the process seems to be + than discipline. The poem does note, affirming the ‘ot really typical ois work ints discursive procedures. Whats typical (and, as argue, is typical in one way 0 the canonical poetry of the perio “AtGrass’, the use of verbal figures as devices observer's position towards the objective relations perceived. (This is the same type of rollable, as the gram: not produces an effec of aloof witines another anthology piece, the mode is fully developed. The poem 31a train journey from the provinces to London, and this y might be considered as an emblem of the poem's .aseties of departing honeymoon couples seen off at stations by their weddi i all unremittingly ‘our . with a sense of hall heat and sun, and the ized through grotesque detail which is always on the 1g distaste, But the poem’s figures, starting Wi ‘passage of the train through the landscape, empha- size meeting and incorporation; the people observed may be coarse and220 Society and Literature 1945-1970 vulgar bur they are included within a figuce greater than chemsclves, ‘attiage is still ritual and sacrament despi Butonly the poet sees thi observe a formal di not only as observed ev London spread ou dispersal and unity (‘spread’, what exactly are sq Grains? Breakfast cereal?) Like “Church Going’ dings’ is expository, ye in this case the different stages o drawn together by the consistency of the figures. Furthermore, the figures accomplish the poct’s participation in what is observed. But at the same time we might feel that his participation is also imposition, a projection in the face of alterna appalling to contempl: nating smut; and then the perms, / The nylon gloves and jewellery-substicutes), Moreover, we might also feel that just as the escription of the ordinary, seculat life of these people ive (and adm es are somewhat worked up, sogramme ‘Philip Larkin 60" (The South Bank Show, TTV, 30 May 1982) Latki, appeating sls ascuffs and hands, took the viewer through his notebooks to show how, searching for an expression o ness’, he artived at ‘packed like like fields’ via ‘packed like fields’. Not that there ‘wrong with such a desivat show how Lskio's plhiness conerals a sudied ‘cxample also confirms the way the creative energy of the persona Iyic focused in its invention of figures; and the energy ofthe igus, he rewaiting o ‘made to guarantee the authenticity of the person, the ut such guarantees hold good only for the subject, not for his experience; we are asked to trust the poet, not the poem. Beyond controversy Sis 1945 the msjoc pot conuovenies, though which eurene etic concems have reccived their most effective public exposure, occurred within the decade bracketed by the publication of the fist ‘New Lines anthology and the revised edition of The New Poetry. By and large our sense of the situation of poetry today is conditioned by Thrills and frills: poetry ax figures of empirical lyricism 221 the arguments of 1956-66. The extent to which those arguments still determine our sense of poetic achievement since the war underscores the suggestion that, forall che differences and disagreements implied by those arguments, certain basic, undeclared ~ even unrecognized ~ agreements bound the controversilist together. Positions taken up on behalf of the Movement had the power and flexibility to absorb and merge with those of its successors; the non-partisan, individualist, strategies of Move ied them, when the time came, to transcend th i appare representatives of the old gua once it is conceded that the quali cated were not reflected in the work of its English poets, is New Lines thinned and agitated, ropasition that they ate our best poets, if pethaps we riate that Faber and Faber, with their prestigious back unreflected agreement that the poetry of the forties was an unmitigated disaster is also not co be taken a¢ face value? Should we noc question the notion of a homogeneous ‘poetry of the fortes’, and might we not also suppose that such 2 myth possessed advantages fe ‘Yet from what position, in relation to any view of what ‘we begin to ask such questions? What is the evidence to consider? At this pone] do no more chan propose 2 few materialsasa start ro answer- ing such questions, ‘The two most important events of the forties were the war and the Labour government which administered the retuen to peacetime con- ditions, As far as publishing was concerned, both books and period- ‘cals, it seems correct to see both these events as largely similar in their effects: the war encouraged an audience for the arts, and publishers, despice economy measures, were able to carry on their business. On the224 Society and Literature 1945-1970 and magazines either went out of business or found themselves forced to operate on a considerably reduced scale: Grey Walls Press, Falcon Press, Poetry London, Poetry Quarterly. The mass-market Penguin New Writing folded. \e was reported that Routledge could not con. tinue Geoffrey Grigson’s book-formar peri they overestimated sales by thousands, Depress seems to have lasted into the mid-fifties: Conquest makes the poiat, New Lines, that less poetry was published than formerly, and contributors to the anthology had, for the mast part, published only in pamphlet format with small presses. But if this eeminds us, parentheti- cally, that the Movement was an attempt to win recognition for ncw ets, it was an attempt upon virtually abandoned territory. Many poets who began theit careers in the forties had found themselves without publishers in che fifti feasons, 100, the Moverment’s ambitions met with little fany poets of the previous generation had stopped writing, it their literary careers on ice (While establishing themselves ia |, oF were in the process of remaking egory we might mention Roy Fuller s drastic than is sometimes suggested), Norman MacCaig or, rather later, W. $. Graham. In the former cat. ‘egories, not always possible to distinguish exactly, we might think of Charles Madge, Kenneth Allot., F. T. Prince, Nicholas Moore, David Gascoyne and J. E. Hendry. (An even earlier generation, that of Spender and MacN able to imperas. Arguabla, it was sufficiently well established to receive little effect from the wat of its aftermath.) The most prestigious career to terminate, however, in a way that seemed to mark the end of an 3 Dylan Thomas ‘The Movement, of course, held Thomas in particular disrepute, and thought his premature death a dese le combined. He and his ‘fol- company of scapegoats), and the mind it was held they stood, were made to bear jough the changes are the burden of respons forties. Leaving such j mote of less direce ways ~ in the concept of the ‘ordi- nary’ man, for example, of their tentative recognition of consumers’ pleasures ~ and repudiated any connections they may have had with the poetry of the forties, the poets of the forties were, forthe most par, Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 225 poets of the late thirties in the first instance, and responded to the wat date which serves us better. If we think in tetms of generations, how- possible co argue that poets born after 1920 (the thresh adopted for New Lines) were able to repudiate their war experience, that having had their careers delayed by wartime conditions they set out to make up for lost time. Donald Davie says as much of himself in his recollections These the Companions (1982). Poets born after 1908, on the other hand, but before 1920, would tend to stand in a very differ ent relation co the war. (And in many cases their regular careers were postponed not only by wartime but by pre-war conditions.) The post-1920 generation would all, in one important respect, begin as survivors. The poets ofthe earlier generation, on the othes hand, would hhave experienced war in part as a threat to survival, in part also as a prolongation and culmination of theit pre-war expetience. If, briefly. wwe can imagine Roy Fuller and Donald Davie as mess-mates (naval and Davie to Russia), then we might their wartime experience would be ‘ways having Bur this in to make a representation of the diminishing presence ofthis generation Of poes, is apid acceleration tomards vanishing-point in the fifties (ignoring, that isto say, the re-emergence of some ofits membersin the ‘Thomas's repucation after his death, and the publication of probably the last colleedon of fortes poetry inthe “bad sense, WS. Graham's226 Society and Literature 1945-1970 The Nightfishing (1955). In the same year Philip La Deceived was published by the Marvell Press in Fi impressions were very quickly called for. Graham, by then, seemed to Larkin's readers very much a back number. Movement took issue racket’, then pethaps we should see the Movement as, an academic literary racket but also the creator of a new a poetry, in schools and colleges and among teachers of En; ‘When we lol at the potty ofthe forties we fied that th and interlocutory manner of address which ne associate wit and the phras ng habir, are strong that these are modes of candour and generosity, but equally we might note that neither the mode nor the associated qual characteristic of Movement poetry. If we consider Ri example of such persistence, we might also not detach himself from his pre-war politics (Marx and to establish his themes they direct much of his subsequent catcer, of contrary experience and of an imagination cg0 its past. His best poems are those in which such confliets are played out. In Occasions, 1949) panic overtakes the poct while he teads in his garden Thear behind the words And noise of birds The drumming aircraft; and am blind Bur although his panic subsides ( they are gone’) the poet nal occasion of the poem to consider oue tenure fon peace ‘behind? is exact and anticipatory in its perceptual and moral ambiguity). hey have gone. as though the lease Of crumbling peace Had rum already and that life was as before.” But this is not the kind of forties poetry so powerfully objected to in th fifties and sities. Iemay be inesolute. aad it may end witha ope Thrills and fills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 227 “The gnawed incredible existence of a dream’) which seems persues- smality asa dream from which we will be woken, but When Robert Conquest des metaphorical’ he was being caus [Larkin and Hughes, as we have seen, rely on figu on metaphor and ) What Conquest was gesturing think, was the extensive use in forties poetry of images and the theory thar poetry must be , but not using his terms with any . cannot be empitically ve fied by appeal to a world independent of the poem ~ independ theory, though sanctioned in practice by the poet's warrant tha that real world, shared (bur at a distance) with the teader, to which the poem refers. Such verficerion requirements, w behind objec- tions to Thomas's poems, do mote than assume the incompatibility of Ianguage and reality; they requice that poetry observe the prevailing conteactual usages in language and hence that it be bound by the commonsense meanings of the times, (Alvarez's arguments, for all their radical posture, failed to addeess themselves to the preconditions ‘of poetic meaning, which involve the position of discourse wi language. Any language use, even the most unconsidered of apy ently nonsensical, entails some immediate seizure of reality.) Hughe: *A Dream of Horses’ observes a clear-cut distinction between real world and dream world; we may move becween one and the other, 28 we wake ot sleep, but we know which is which. (Such knowledge, of course, is not operative in both worlds and implies a confident demarcation of realty.) In Ful forhim and for ws, ismorein "Thomas, on the other hand, insisted that his poems should be at his word would be to commie a serious assume the need for empitical verification: ‘experience and expectations of the group implied or addressed. Hence the power of phrasc-making, the group acting as the poet's resonating board; hence, also, the tendency to semantic drift, commonly noticed in Auden’s pre-war poetry, for example. But ifwe see this manner asa ‘compromised attempt to restore to poetry a social reference without, at the same time, reintroducing the authority of che poet's subjectivity, 25 I believe we must, we can see other attempts to redefine the subject228 Society and Literature 1943-1970 matter of poetry which go in their displacement of the dis cursive centrality of the sel the work of the poets aso associated with the vices of the forties. The term broadly used to refer to the pocts influenced by Thomas, now has exclusively pejorative overtones. I will not begin to describe the Apocalypse as a movement, bu ‘passing that it emerged in anticipation of the ourbreak of war, and their critical writings can be said to sible for its programme dry, for example ~ tend to deny constitute a programme) ~ J. F ‘Thomas's influence to think of che Ay terms of a style and its practitioners, ring in mind Conquest's objections to what he though of as meta: treats the person as a site in which expe to be acted out as conflict. It presents 2 dense, often violent from which the guiding and cont n of the poem's range of reference ~ isexcluded. The self the poet) does not stand at the centre of and mediate the -ace of the poem, That which, in grammatical relation consigned to the cole of the predicated, defined and sub. of conventional rhetoric. (Henc ve, some of our experience of difficulty and obscutity when we read such poetry.) This theory does ch poems have written themselves, but rather thar the provided as part of the poem's interior, and instead to represent the whole person. Through such a mode the are not merely figura acting - an experi ligenee. In this passage ftom The Nigbifhing, for example (chosen both because it isa late example and because Graham stood somewhat on the fringe of the Apocalyptic movement, and thus illustrates the cing creature rather than 2 mastering Thrills and frils: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 229 diffusion of the manner), sea, fishing boat and fishermen exist in a sclation one to another of active resistance. See how, like an early self, leave Farsighted away fighting in its On cither bow, Up our be Its plaiting strands. This wedge driven in ‘water, we rode. The bow shores which are consequences o cs the self. We may chink are examples of po they are devices own sake, rather than means inct mode of discourse. In the poetry of jascoyne the commonsense data base of the empirical selfs eluded by less overly disruptive means, in particular by presentation of a non-au marginal or suffering, chow we can afford terms in which the Different examples In the pottic tradition now dominant the authoritative self, discours- ing in 2 world of banal, empirically derived objects and relations, depends on its employment of metaphor and simile for poetic vitality. ‘These figures are conceprually subordinate to the empicical reality of self and objects, yee they constinure the nature of the poem, Poets are now praised above all else as inventors of figures ~ 8 chetoricians, in fact ~ with a consequent mirowing of out range of appropriate ‘response. Poetry has been tusned into a reserve for small verbal t deing Lite Bil round the hem of somal dicouse: objecs and telations in the natural and social worlds have an unresistant, token250 Society and Literature 1945-1970 Presence; at its most extreme, they serve as pretexi for bravura display Ir does ‘o influence the reader's perceptions and feelings in the lived world: its t world is attenuated and transformation is confined ivancing depends on more substan 1. By way offucther example, there Heaney’s poem ‘The Bara’ (Deash ofa Sh deals with the transference ofenclosure the intimacy of one’s owa feclings. tion than has been provided fore, here are some lines fr Naturalist, 1966), a poem wl and menace ftom a building ¢ musty dark hoarded an armoury Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks ‘The figures ate applied in this opening stanza as an entchment of space barn itself to the speaker's affective ‘Then you felt cobwebs clogging up yout lungs And scuttled fa rard. tonights when bats were on the wing rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared of grain in comers, fierce, unblinking. figure is functional (‘the rafters of sleep, where’); elsewhere rojectthe speaker's terror. face-down to shun the fear above. ‘The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats." ‘The tropes proliferate and are uniformly highlighted, like consumer goods in a shop window, but they are uncoordinated (unlike Larkin’s, say); the effect is gratuitous and draws attention finally to the poet's shetorical ingenuity. Everything is of a piece, irrespective of what is being said. Our sense that the details bind together into a more com. plex meaning derives not from the figures but from the attenuated presence of autobiographical anecdote Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 231 By way of contrast, hece is an example of poetty ftom the middle of cour petiod in which figures play a minor role. The following lines aze from Chatles Tomlinson's ‘Geneva Restored’ (Seeing is Believing, stained description of the guage might be compatible Under the he farms in miniarure, until Wich is sheer, The Saleve h y Because it pretends to be nothing, and has shaken off seashore ~ compact, as the other is sudden, and with an clase roofs on a gravel height, 0 rock; the bied’s nest of a place jc half-cruths| ‘We might feel that the poet has his imagination reined in here; aterna- tively we might feel that his attention has been directed to good purpose. We might ied to ler his language become so identified with his material 2s to court the tisk of taurology, the repetition of ‘the Saléve’, coming as it docs at 0 its proper name into the present 5 intervention; they occur because the poet finds them ‘and they sustain the poem accordingly. ‘Tomilinson’s poem, highly literal, informed by respect for the pres- ‘ence and character of things, is one example ofa discourse unlike that of the dominant canon, But his is not the only one. Ia Thomas Hardy and English Poetry Dovald Davie, although from a somewhat exclusive ‘concern with landscape, writes about other poets, from the sixties, who ‘conduct thet writing in ways quite independent of the notms of theills an sures of empirical lyricism 23; 232 Society and Literature 1945-1970 Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism 233 , is Mich, nd Lindap, Gove (el). Bic Pry se 155: A canon eis comment onthe stones fou cic cule tat Schmit, Michal, and Lindon, Gree), Bid Poors such challenges have not been more fully recognized and taken up, Stanford, Derek. The Freedom of Poesy. London: Pacon Pes, 1947 ‘Thwaite, Anthony. Contemporary Emglith Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1959. Treece, Henry. How I See Aposeiypse. Londoa: Lindsay Drummond, 1946, son, in Essays st Ctctm, Howard Sergeant and Dannie Abse (c Poetry and Poverty, 1957), 6 A. Alvares(ed.), Tbe New Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962: rv 1966). Davie, These she Companions (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1982). 11 Kenneth Rexroth (ed.), The New Brats Poets (New York: New Direc: Epitepbs and Occasions (London: Joha Lehmann, 1949), W. S. Graham, The Nighifiohing (London: Faber, 195 Seamus Heaney, Death of « Naat es Tomlinson, Seeing i Believing (London: Oxford University Press, 1960) Farther reading Bedient, Calvin. Eight Contemporary Poets. London: Osford University Press, 1 Brown, Merle E. Double Lyre: Divitivemess anal Comasenal Creativity in Recent Exglish Pocty. London: Routledge, 1980 Davie, Donald. Thomas Hardy and English Poetry, Landon: Routledge, 1973 Dodsworth, Mastin (ed.). The Survival of Paetry. London: Faber, 1970. Poetry Chronicle. London: Faber, 1973 ty Press, 1980, Press, john. Rule and Energy. London: Oxford University Press, 1963, Raban, Jonathan. The Society of the Poem. London: Hazrap, 1971