The Columbia History of British Poetry (152 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 593
And yet it was for years
What I refused to credit.
Trading the movement poet's skeptical empiricism for transcendent principles and fixed assumptions, Davie's reaction to the convention-dismaying decade now ending seems complete but simplistic.
A more complex engagement sustains the book-length sequences of Ted Hughes's
Crow
(1970) and Geoffrey Hill's
Mercian Hymns
(1971), which proceed according to needs and aims similar to those explained, simultaneously but independently, in a set of lectures by George Steiner, published in 1971 as
In Bluebeards Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture
. Echoing Eliot in his subtitle but addressing other redefinitions of culture in the 1960s, Steiner places Eliot's idea of a centered, unified tradition in crisis. Drastic uncertainty in the present returns him to the roots of cultural identity: a story of origins. He directs attention to "the myth of the nineteenth century" and its "imagined garden of liberal culture"a secular, post-Enlightenment version of the Eden tale. Identifying the now widespread need to (re)claim the primary values of human civilization, Steiner provides context and rationale for the essential imaginative action of Hughes's and Hill's sequences, which return, variously, to myths of the beginning.
The title figure of Hughes's
Crow
belongs to the "trickster" type in primitive and folk literature. He engages in a game of wits with the creator, ostensibly attempting to improve nature and make it suitable for human habitation. No idealistic messiah, the trickster is usually greedy, oversexed, and perverse, but his actions spring out of a kind of unkillable biological optimism, seeking to ameliorate the first conditions of existence. This project brings Crow to the scenes of biblical Genesis. In "A Childish Prank," for example, God's work has left Adam and Eve in somatic stupor, which Crow attempts to cure by inventing human sexuality:
He bit the Worm, God's only son,
Into two writhing halves.
He stuffed into man the tail half
With the wounded end hanging out.
He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman.
The change hardly marks an improvement, however. "Neither knew what had happened" as "Man awoke being dragged across the grass"
 
Page 594
and "Woman awoke to see him coming." Failing to alter creation for the better (the high jinks generate no redemptive laughter), the sequence revisits the Eden topos constantly, expressing the protagonist's indefatigable energy but inscribing no new design worth changing the world into. Mired in the old Paradise, tied to scenes of contested beginnings,
Crow
has taken on the challenge Steiner defined, but it seems to have failed the task of rewriting the myth of origins credibly, satisfactorily.
This judgment should not miss another level of meaning in the poem, however, one which shows it participating in the conflicts of its own historical moment. While Hughes is responding to Steiner's perception that contemporary mass culture has disrupted traditional certainties, and is thus returning to the site of origins for the sake of clarifying first principles, the poem relies for its literary manner on the very stuff of the popular culture it is reacting against. The farcical logic of the absurd, Crow's miraculous comeback from spectacular deaths, and Hughes's denial of cause-and-effect sequence in the progression between episodes: these features align Crow with the durable comic-strip character, the rubbery cartoon hero of popular culture. Building a poem up to a final punch line, concentrating its effect on the sudden "Bang!" or reversal of expectation, Hughes shows a crowd-exciting touch that testifies as well to the compulsions of the new mass audience. And so Crow's attempt to restart the world out of the ruins of the old witnesses his historical contingency, revealing Hughes's own imprisonment in the circumstances he is straining so powerfully to counter.
While Hughes fails to rewrite a myth of cultural beginnings, he manages to inscribe a legend of the self, one which he generates out of his evident connection to the protagonist. Like Crow, Hughes is a survivorof the death of Plath, of the various holocausts that provide the sequence with its vocabulary of historical reference. Yet this self-enlargement also marks another reaction syndrome. Hughes is protesting the anti-individualist premise of contemporary history, specifically, the leveling tendency of commodity culture, swollen in the 1960s to previously untold proportions: the fate of art and artist in the age of mechanical reproduction is to have uniqueness annulled. Anticipating this reaction in the early 1960s, Hartley's
A State of England
proleptically denied the power of popular masses to generate culture and offered a fervent apologia for the primacy of the single, creative individual. A decade later, Hughes's defensive myth of the selfa fabulous
 
Page 595
figure pumped up to gigantistic proportionsrecords, in its very distortions, the assaults the private individual has suffered.
The same enterprise of mythologizing the self informs Geoffrey Hill's sequence of thirty prose poems (or versets)
Mercian Hymns
, which turns on a single dramatic conceit. Hill presents his own character as a child in Worcestershire, in his own native Mercia, in the likeness of its first king, the eighth-century Offa. The self-aggrandizement implicit in this scheme does not issue into the egotistical indulgence of
Crow
, however. Hill grounds the sequence in provincial history and local geography; he subjects his sometimes airy fantasy of the self to those elementary facts, a limitation that produces a tone of complex, modulating ironies:
Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground:
   my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced, sick on
   outingsI who was taken to be a king of some kind, a prodigy,
   a maimed one.
Hill's identification of king and child also allows him to transform the order of the political state into the rules of a child's game. In this way he follows the motive and plot of trickster literature: he revisits the origins of human society (Offa's is the
first
Mercian kingdom) and reorganizes it according to the paradigms of desire; of child's games. He follows the psychology of play in Johan Huizinga's
Homo Ludens
, which presents it as equally anarchic and regulated, spontaneous and disciplined, and Hill uses this vision in his redefinition of the original character of human society. In Hymn VII, for example, he balances the child's antic and disruptive behavior, his regal caprice, with the formal order of his imaginative domain, and he matches this complex in the tonality, which assimilates the child's violence to the decorous repetitions of ritual:
After school he lured Ceolred, who was sniggering
   with fright, down to the old quarries, and flayed him. Then,
   leaving Ceolred, he journeyed for hours, calm and alone, in
   his private derelict sandlorry named 
Albion
.
The ceremonial demeanor of
Mercian Hymns
extends from these local moments to its containing form, which ritualizes beginning and end. It opens with an invocation of the medieval king in the cadenced heroic catalogue of the Old English
scop
, and it concludes with a pro-

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