The Columbia History of British Poetry (150 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 586
sion for sense activity, and its quasi-sacred quality accounts for the visual puritanism here.
To make verse a kind of painterly music is the ambition that accounts for a major body of work in Tomlinson's poems of the 1950s. Much of
The Necklace
(1955) extends the synthetic principle of "Poem," using the silence of the painter's space to edge a valid poetic speech, parsing and sharpening verbal music with the divisions and definitions special to the eye, as enacted by short plastic lines and radical enjambments:
Facts have no eyes. One must
Surprise them, as one surprises a tree
By regarding its (shall I say?)
Facets of copiousness.
By the early 1960s it was easy to see Tomlinson's turn to American modernism as a symptom and warning of the depletion of English poetic resources. The image of
The Stagnant Society
(the title for Michael Shanks's 1964 study first instanced the phrase) depicted the mood in the early years of that tumultuous decade. The 1950s had succeeded in stabilizing Britain, producing the limited triumphs of consensus politicsthe "middle way" of democratic socialism testified to the broad center of English political life, which witnessed the practical reconciliation of Tory and Labour interests. Its most notable achievements were the (by and large) peaceful contraction of the old empire and the establishment of programs in the new welfare state. These two developments were cited in Anthony Hartley's
A State of England
(1963), however, as an explanation for the current malaise: the waning of global power and the expenses of the domestic agenda conspired to produce a feeling of shrinkagefinancial, intellectual, spiritualin English national life.
This sense of enervation generated two poetic responses. On one hand there was the rejuvenation of art by mass culture, whose energies had been stimulated by the democratic programs of the 1950s and whose voices were heard most memorably in the pop poetry of "the Liverpool scene." The prospect of a huge audience for poetry certainly affected the work of the major poets, but they did not participate in that culture so much as respond to the whole social upheaval it seemed to symbolize; their reactions may best be assessed later, from the vantage of the end of the decade. The other response to stagnancy, integral to the ongoing work of these poets in the 1960s, was set out by A. Alvarez,
 
Page 587
in his now well known 1962 essay "The New Poetry, or Beyond the Gentility Principle." Identifying the misguided faith of the English in normality (the principle of good manners), Alvarez asked contemporary poets to open themselves to the awarenesses of modern history, both political and intellectual. "The forcible recognition of a mass evil outside us," he stated, ''has developed precisely parallel with psychoanalysis; that is, with the recognition of the way in which the same forces are at work within us." Alvarez called for a poetry written in the elemental clarity of these basic facts. These issues inform some of the most important English verse to be written in the 1960s, although not all poets resolve the problems in his terms.
The most interesting poems of Larkin's
The Whitsun Weddings
(1964) elude the blandishments of gentility and engage the crisis Alvarez definedfor Larkin a critical point at which poetry always finds itself. "At this unique distance from isolation," Larkin writes in an Auden-like discourse on the poet's social contingency, "It becomes still more difficult to find / Words at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind." The Old English style of litotes (negating the contrary) is a form of understatement, which here both concedes and defies the awful truth, affirming the humanist wish to resist it through the antithetical powers of poetry. These powers translate the subject of "MCMXIV," Larkin's poem on the outbreak of the Great War, into the unpronounceable silence of the Roman numerals in its title.
Unspeakable, these archaic letters provide a powerful coadjutor to the atrocity of mass war, and they promise an oppositional force in the English language of the verse that follows. How forceful is this opposition? "Never such innocence, / Never before or since," Larkin concludes, as he envisions that last moment, the climacteric of the premodern, with
                               the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a while longer:
Never such innocence again.
The very resistance of human language to the fury and mire of human veins causes the poem, in the actual fabric of its images, to lose touch with the dire reality, and, in its imaginative attention, to lapse into the single vision of golden age nostalgia.
 
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The limitations of Larkin's engagements appear as nothing less than dangerous delusions to Geoffrey Hill, much of whose work in
King Log
(1968) sounds a vital challenge to the humanist compromise. "September Song," responding to a Jewish child "deported" from the Reich, holds the art of
not
saying to a fierce rebuke. The negative constructions in its opening lines show the susceptibilities of poetic avoidance:
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.
"Not forgotten" reads here as an obscene euphemism for the all too powerful memory of the Nazi state, whose seizure (the Passover failing) of the child assumes the normality of a bureaucratic timetable"at the proper time." The humanist tendency to mark the atrocity as alien, thus to push it to the fringes of language and celebrate the normal, amounts to nothing less than appeasement. Atrocity is accepted (in the rhetorical fiction of the poem) in the pastoral elegy of the final lines, which assimilate the child's death to the beneficent cycles of the seasons:
September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.
This is plenty. This is more than enough.
Far from countering the horror, Hill suggests, such poetry enters into passive complicity with it, as revealed in the (strategically failed) apologia of "Ovid in the Third Reich," a poet who remained silent under Hitler. "I love my work and my children," this caricature of the poet-clerk protests, but "God / Is distant, difficult." And "Things happen."
Hill's own poetry of historical engagement appears at its finest in "Funeral Music," a sequence of eight sonnets that move freely through the political and intellectual circumstances of the Wars of the Roses, commemorating the deaths of three prominent aristocrats in particular. The nascent Neoplatonism of the period gives all three a touch of
contemptus mundi
, a diffidence that intersects oddly but engagingly with the momentum of worldly power they assumed with their birthrights. This contradiction goes to a formative paradox in the sequence. The sonnets combine a severe punctilio with a riot of sensations, a fastidious observation of rules with the densely sensuous sounds of history

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