The Columbia History of British Poetry (151 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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a counterpoint Hill characterizes as "an ornate and heartless music punctuated by mutterings, blasphemies, and cries for help." As in the third sonnet:
They bespoke doomsday and they meant it by
God, their curved metal rimming the low ridge.
Here the need to maintain the decasyllabic line of the blank-verse pentameter causes the exclamation to be broken at the formal division, heightening the force of the expletive. The aesthetic form applies an ascetic edge that serves to echo and amplify the primary violence of history, not to deny it. The same paradox generates the complex verbal textures of "History as Poetry," Hill's dramatic declaration on the subject. Its quatrains are rigidly syllabic, featuring nine counts per line, but the very strain of observing this ascetic formsyllabic measure goes against the stress rhythms natural to the physical body of the English languagefractures the language into phrasal fragments, orchestrating a music as abrasive as history:
Poetry as salutation; taste
Of Pentecost's ashen feast. Blue wounds.
The tongues's atrocities. Poetry
Unearths . . .
It is Hill's studied effort to handle language as verbal plastic, reshaping it as a material no less thickly resistant than the history to which the contemporary muse has called poets. The corporeal word is also the mark of Ted Hughes's achievement in
Wodwo
(1967). These poems witness a remarkable combination of acoustic density and representative immediacy, an effect that depends on the substantiality of the words themselves. Not onomatopoeia but a more individual and intricate art shows in Hughes's practice of loading his line with two sound patterns: an outcrop stone is "
wart
ed with
quart
z pe
bb
les from the sea's wom
b
." The repetition gives weight to the language, while the double pattern injects variety, a sense of suppleness, effecting all in all a kind of elastic substantiality. The poetic line moves like a muscle flexing, exerting a force equally compelling and disturbing when it is exercised on the subjects of recent historyas in "Out," on the two wars of the century.
It is the nerve and sinew of the world's body that Hughes is seeking to capture in words. In doing so, however, he is testing the limits of the
 
Page 590
(now old) New Critical compact. A sign of his opportunistic compliance with its rules appears in a now dominant stylistic mannerism. He frequently allows the tide of a poem to run into its first line: "Her Husband (Comes home dull with coal-dust . . ."); "Boom (And faces at the glutted shop window . . . "); "Bowled Over (By kiss of death, bullet on brow . . . "); "The Howling of Wolves (Is without world . . ."); "You Drive in a Circle (Slowly a hundred miles through the powerful rain . . .''). According to convention, the title works like the frame on a painting, both composing the verbal icon and providing distance on it. Hughes obliterates the distance he has invoked; the vantage is titillating in being precariousit exerts the excitement of a foothold being washed from under us. The old sense of absolute separation on which the artifact relies for its status as re-presentation now seems to be valued mainly for the sensation it conveys in being violated.
These tricks signal an exhaustion of the resources Hughes drew upon in his early career. Between 1963 and 1966, in fact, he wrote almost no poetry. This inactivity is not surprising, in light of Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963, but it also attests to Hughes's need for new points of poetic growth. His productivity revives strikingly in 1966, when he begins (with Daniel Weissbort) to edit
Modern Poetry in Translation
, and discovers the work of Eastern Europeans such as Miroslav Holub and Vasco Popa. Having grown up in the midst of World War II, these poets showed Hughes an imagination fired and hardened by the worst history had to offer. Thrown back on their primitive wits, negotiating grimly but jauntily with the void, their language sounds equally banal and hieratic, clichéd and secretly wise, displaying the same kind of heroism in minimal conditions that characterizes the best theatrical art of the absurd. Their compatibility with Hughes seemed natural, given his characteristic concerns, but it is fair to say that the English poet seems to be mimicking a sensibility too hard won to be imitated successfully. Their gallows humor, testifying to their own unkillable humanity, never quite assumes for Hughes the grace of the gratuity it represents in their world. In fear of rubbing away the horror in "Karma""When the world-quaking tears were dropped / At Dresden at Buchenwald"he tends to rub it in: "Earth spewed up the bones of the Irish." He fails the chance for redemptive laughter that Holub or Popa would seize with suitably somber gusto.
While Hughes's cultivation of this foreign influence betrays a stance alien to theirs, it is a mark of Tomlinson's major achievement that he
 
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appropriates the pyrotechnics of American modernism for the sake of praising and preserving a specifically British tradition. The challenge emerges in "Return to Hinton, Written on the author's return to Hinton Blewett from the United States" (1963), the first poem he composed in the three-step line of William Carlos Williams. How can that rhythm, reputedly shaped to the cadences of Williams's own regional speech, work to the advantage of the English tradition, as typified in the poem by the King James Bible lying open on the parlor table?
The American technique offers the English poet an externality of perspective, promoting a higher than usual self-consciousness in his presentation of British material and a speech rooted in that culture. This motive appears clear in light of "History," where Tomlinson depicts a provincial Englishman, entirely tied to his locale, as "the guardian / Of a continuity he cannot see." Tomlinson's is a characteristically modernist enterprise, for it turns on the central crisis of the modernthe perception that present and past are not continuous; that tradition, far from living on its own, must be consciously maintained and restored.
In technique as well as in spirit Tomlinson follows the lead of the modernists Pound and Williams, Olson and Creeley. The line is his focus of critical attention and poetic experiment. Returning in "Lines" to the original image (and etymological meaning) of verse (
versere
, to turn) as lines ploughed in a field, he attends specially to the moment of the turn, the hiatus between consecutive lines, "when, one furrow / more lies done with / and the tractor hesitates." The pause at the end of a line provides a point of heightened awareness, a kind of high ground from which we can see language as language, as the content as well as the means of artistic representation. Similar aims had been instanced in the work of Stevie Smith (b. 1902), who could present her own character-in-voicea rich compound of generic idiom and individual inflectionas the center of verbal attention. And while Tomlinson's initiative also aligns him with the poetics of avant-garde movements such as Dadaists and the language school, it works to essentially conservative purposes for him.
Displaying the language as well as speaking it expressively, Tomlinson can exhibit styles otherwise archaic or outdated. He recovers forms of traditional eloquenceregaining an Augustan decorousness and symmetry in isochronous lines, or reviving a Renaissance splendor in diction. In "The Picture of J. T. in a Prospect of Stone," for
 
Page 592
example, the irregularly enjambing line disrupts the Marvellian period, making its grandiloquence seem equally self-conscious and assured:
                                                but let her play
her innocence away
                    emerging
                                                as she does
between
                    her doom (unknown),
                                                her unmown green.
Renewed by experiment and invention, Tomlinson's traditionalism stands opposed to developments in contemporary literary culture, above all the pop-poetry and mass-reading scene of the later 1960s. Sharing the stage with crowd-pleasing poets in "A Dream, or the worst of both worlds" (1969), he feels no connection to their newly expanded audience. A nearly ascetic revulsion drives him back "to the sobriety of a dawn-cold bed, to own / my pariah's privilege, my three-inch spaces, / the reader's rest and editor's colophon." Asserting the stringencies of print-based literacy against the casual orality of the public muse, he is reacting to forces that have produced changes greater than a shift in poetic media. The freedoms of the new poetry were synonymous with the license of the new ''permissive society." Poetry drew a demotic brio from its expanded base, but its alignment with the idiom and sensationalism of rock music signaled a coalition aimed at ends more drastic and far-reaching than a removal of verse from the hands of an aging poetic clerisy. To numerous commentators the new permissiveness announced nothing less than the end of the old civic culture that had made Britain great. Old certainties undone, a sense of living at the end of history: these conditions inform much of the poetry written in the later 1960s and early 1970s. The most durable, like Tomlinson's, seems to have been conceived in opposition to mainstream developments, but these reactions vary in their quality and credibility.
The title of Donald Davie's "Or, Solitude" (1969) promises an obvious alternative to the mass compulsions of the 1960s. "A farm boy lost in the snow," who "is called 'alone,'" leads Davie to proclaim:
The metaphysicality
Of poetry, how I need it!

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