The Columbia History of British Poetry (139 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 549
humaneand perhaps, humanizingexperiences of powerful feelings to confront the dominant, patriarchal rationalism of the modern age:
The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But "nowadays"? it is now a reminder that he [man] has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family. "Nowadays" is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonored. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; race horse and grey-hound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to sawmill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as "auxiliary State personnel."
Like Wordsworth's "Preface" to
Lyrical Ballads
, which finds in old pastoral themes of the importance of nature and the simple life a basis for the renewal of the human spirit, Graves's "grammar" finds in old themes of the battle of the sexes, feminism and the relations of women and men, a new civilized beginning; it offers a vision of an ideal, the "golden age" of a matriarchal society, past and future, for which human beings should aspire. Wordsworth after long argument in his "Preface" states, "The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.'' In a similar vein Graves writes, "Certainly, I hold that critical notice should be taken of the Goddess, if only because poetry which deeply affects readerspierces them to the heart, sends shivers down their spine, and makes their scalp crawlcannot be written by Apollo's rhetoricians or scientists." Like Wordsworth, Graves is defending passion and ecstasy to a world dedicated to the cult of reason and death. He affirms the creative necessity of the female principle in society by asserting the mythology of the Goddess in response to what he perceives to be a dominant tradition of effete, masculine rationality. And he concludes: "The main theme of poetry is, properly, the relations of man and woman, rather than those of man and man, as the Apollonian Classicists would have it." If Graves's vision of culture were to prevail, art would be restored to its proper role and civilization would be revived by the love of man and woman.
Graves's concern, saving civilization, was the context for poetry of the English tradition between the world wars, and especially once the
 
Page 550
Great Depression began. John Masefield had known and reported hard times from the beginning of the century. An admirer of Hardy and of the Romantics, Masefield had made his own way in book-length narratives of the last age of the sea under sail and of country life when individual character still seemed to determine events. Renewal of the once enormous popularity of such pungent narratives as
Dauber
and
The Widow in the Bye Street
has never quite come off, although he left, for after times as well as for his own, "Sea Fever" in
Salt-Water Ballads
(1902)"I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky"and "Cargoes,'' a succinct history of shipping, in
Ballads and Poems
(1910). In an introduction to
Poems
(1925), he declared for "a school of life" instead of the "school of artifice" that had made disciples of Tennyson speak only to "a small comfortable class." With Binyon, Sturge Moore, and Gordon Bottomley, he strove against the grain of realism in the theater to revive poetic drama. They won respect, but not the later commercial success of Eliot and Christopher Fry. Masefield declined, as Byron would say, into Poet Laureate in 1930, and holder of the Order of Merit in 1935.
In Scotland a poet still more independent, and probably greater, wrote for a smaller audience than the Georgians and Masefield enjoyed. Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) brought into brief being a phase of writing poetry in Scots to replace the revival by Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns, and with it an intenser nationalism expressed in Gaelic verse. In several volumes of the 1920s MacDiarmid harnessed fervor and skill to counteract the romantic influence of Burns, with greatest success in the organic collection of poems
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
(1926). In the 1930s, declaring allegiance to Lenin as the best program for achieving the full development of the individual, and needing a scientific terminology lacking in Scots, he began to compose poems in English. With a sharp focus from the beginning on particulars, he now described in "The Kind of Poetry I Want" (in
Lucky Poet
, 1943) a poetry of fact: "A poetry full of erudition, expertize, and ecstasy /The acrobatics and the fly-like vision,""'wide-angle' poems, / Taking in the whole which explains the poet." David Daiches analyzed an earlier poem, "Ex Vermibus," on a worm conspiring with the bird that eats it to produce superior song"Gape, gape, gorlin', / For I ha'e a worm / That'll gi'e ye a slee and sliggy sang"to illustrate the thesis that MacDiarmid possessed at all stages "a rock-like apprehension of the sheer stubbornness of life."
 
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Meanwhile, W. H. Auden and the other "pylon poets" in his circle brandished aerodromes, speedways, power stations, Freud, and Marx as economic, social, and political emblems and cures for "a low dishonest decade." At Oxford or soon after, Auden gathered into this circlebriefly but with proclamations and redounding tributesStephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and in Berlin the novelist Cristopher Isherwood. Adept as a schoolboy in diction and prosody, he accumulated devices from Old English, Skelton, Hopkins, music halls, Hardy (rejections of Tennysonian melody), Wilfrid Owen (half-rhyme and near rhyme), and inevitably from Eliot. In his poems of the 1930s words of moral implication, pointed toward contemporary objects, speak obliquely of crises in British and European culture. Auden made the particular universal by mere omission of article: "Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench"; in nearly every poem, the shrewdly contrived understatement: "As for ourselves there is . . . a reasonable chance of retaining \ Our faculties to the last."
Colloquial in diction but chock-full of theories, Auden became, in C. H. Sisson's words, "the pedagogue or doctor advising others what truth is." He was to write with assurance in 1956: "My first Master was Thomas Hardy, and I think I was very lucky in my choice. He was a good poet, perhaps a great one, but not
too
good." Admired by academics and intellectuals who abhorred Hitler and welcomed a poetry of public commitment, Auden departed for the United States in January 1939 and announced, in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats (D. Jan. 1939)," that a poet's and poem's meaning is whatever diverse readers make of it, "modified in the guts of the living." He was to say, a little further on, that poets and poems make nothing happen. He renounced one of his best-known poems, ''September 1, 1939," because it had come to seem dishonest in a Christian to strive for the honesty or improvement of society. And in transition from near-Marxist to Christian, he composed one of his finest poems, "Musée des Beaux Arts," generalizing from several Brueghelsparticularly the "Icarus" seen in Brusselsthat art can elevate above the untidy banalities of life, where "the torturer's horse" scratches "its innocent behind on a tree."
Spender and Day Lewis had less to exhibit, although Day Lewis in the 1930s expressed in poetry and action views much more revolutionary than Auden's. Auden in America remained a poet and librettist. Day Lewis wrote detective fiction, served on committees of the Establishment, and issued poems as Professor of Poetry at Oxford
 
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(19511956) and Poet Laureate (1968). As a poet of Auden's school, Spender was notably personal, variable, and recessive, in Sisson's phrase, "disarming and disarmed"; in Francis Scarfe's, with the "hesitation and recoil" of a ''sensitive"; in Spender's own words,
What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away.
When he chose to honor, there was no "not
too
good," no "perhaps." After decades of disparagement, respect and praise for Spender's poetry of dilemma has revived, as in Samuel Hynes's
The Auden Generation
and Michael O'Neill and Gareth Reeves,
Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry
(1992). Accepting what has been often said, that Spender was to Auden as Shelley was to Byron, and aware of Shelley's intellectual subtlety, O'Neill and Reeves describe Spender's rare failures of fluency as deliberate.
The political, social, and psychological poetry of the Auden circle made mandatory poems about war from 1939 to 1945, but could not afford it competitive advantage. Poetry of the First World War had survived the pacifist years preceding the rise of Hitler and the Great Depression; poems both of patriotism and of outrage remained too well known for emulation. No certainties inflated hopes; with grim determination the conflict had to be engaged. Perhaps most inhibiting of all for soldiers at the front, destruction and deprivation struck unceasingly at home. Where could heroic or complaining rhymes find lodging? No poet in Britain could avoid the subject except in total silence, but those identified as poets of World War II are three who were killed in uniformSidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, and Keith Douglas. Poets somehow independent of Sassoon and Brooke they had to be; Linda Shires identifies Rilke as the single major influence. Both Keyes and Lewis emphasized boredom, rain, resentment that the subject needed to be combat, talk of girls. The subject came more acceptably to Douglas; angry, political, he had chosen a military role and honed his language to greet conscripted comrades with scorn. As if to acknowledge the supremacy of irony, the poem that spoke most poignantly for the besieged and for the era came from Laurence Binyon, in "The Burning of the Leaves" (1942), regarding things past with "Rootless hope and fruitless desire":

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