The Columbia History of British Poetry (153 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 596
tracted liturgy for Offa's death. Formal closure and integral structure appear as well in the model sequences of English poetic modernism
The Anathemata
of David Jones (b. 1895) and the autobiographical
Briggflatts
of Basil Bunting (b. 1900)and these features tend to distinguish English examples of the genre from their modern American counterparts. Following the polycentric design of Pound's
Cantos
, contemporary American sequences seem to proceed in the fear that a rigid structure will choke the spontaneity and intensity of the lyric moment; they tend to leave their energies open-ended, pursuing a sense of form that is purely potentialist. The English poet who most notably varies and enriches this convention is Roy Fisher, who adds to the literature of the open-form sequence in
City
(1961) and
A Furnace
(1986).
City
assembles poems and prose in a discontinuous montage, which imitates the fluctuating intensities of urban perceptual life (in his native Birmingham) and its rhythms of mental fragmentation. Antidiscursive and antinarrative as his strategy may be, it adheres at least to a quasi-musical presentation, returning to motifs as figures in a composition. Evocative but dense and impenetrable images"the bell in the river, / the loaf half-eaten, / the coat of the sky"prove perplexing until they recur, when each appears, like a musical note or chord, as a moment of untranslatable, sensuous feeling. Drawing on his work as a jazz musician, Fisher combines a directness of emotional or imaginative experience with a sense of fluid artifice. He seeks not only to reach an intensity of lyric feeling but to stylize it, thus achieving the "mannerism of intensity" that he regards as the special virtue of jazz. Thus he can create a sequence that is "rigidly composed" but free, in his own nomenclature, of "an authoritarian centre," that is, ''a rule or mandate somewhere in its middle which the work will unfold and reach."
Fisher's resistance to this "authoritarian centre" expresses values equally political and aesthetic. More than a shift in structural tactic is occurring twenty-five years later, in
A Furnace
(Birmingham is again the site), which uses a single image as manifest center for the sequence: the double spiral, a whirlpool or vortex. Now, the avant-garde energies of the original vorticists (Pound and Wyndham Lewis, among others) led them to see artistic form as a vortex, a mere trace left by a force, and Fisher uses this figure to record the movements, alternately centripetal and centrifugal, in the history of a city. Yet the same shape suggested to Pound a model form and endorsement of authoritarian government (he
 
Page 597
linked that "form-sense 1914" to Lewis's own later "discovery" of Hitler's Reich).
It is this possibility that Fisher realizes sardonically in the fourth section of
A Furnace
, where he complements that central position with a dramaticsymptomatic, not expressivearticulation of the totalitarian principle immanent in the design:
We're carving the double spiral
into this stone; don't
complicate or deflect us.
We know what we're at
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Write sky-laws into the rocks. . . .
The static, programmatic form of the spiral, here appropriately cut into stone, inscribes an inflexible political order, its "sky-laws" imposed from above. This picture of formal authority and central power clearly warns that such developments are the susceptibility of any society like the one whose geography Fisher maps in this sequence. Yet he is responding as well to a development in British political history of the 1970s and 1980s, one which allowed his own socialist humanism to wane under the imperial standards of Thatcherite conservatism.
The currents that carried Thatcher into office were clearly gathering momentum in the early 1970s, when the Labour government had already outlived the energies of its mid-1960s initiatives. A growing disaffection with the idea of social welfare, an antagonism to Keynesian economics and the sense of government responsibility, emerged in her turn toward privatization and her emphasis on entrepreneurialism and technology. Asserting that "there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families," Thatcher not only denied the Tory-Labour consensus of the preceding decades. She departed sharply from one source of moral authority and value in traditional conservatism, the communitarian spirit in the old Toryism of the shires. By the mid-1970s these developments are already generating a poetic response from Hughes and Hill, whose increasing conservatism is sometimes misleadingly conceived as a collateral development to Thatcherism. Their main effort lies instead in a return to those lost locales of conservative value.
Season Songs
(1975) and
Moortown
(1979) present a Virgilian or practical-moral pastoral new to Hughes, a development which traces a parabolic return to the topography of an older, local, rooted Toryism. The
 
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political significance of Hill's
Tenebrae
(1978) appears both more obvious and complex. His sequence of thirteen sonnets "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England" takes its epigraph from Disraeli's
Coningsby
(1844), a devoted apologia for the orderly echelons of Old England: altar, throne, country house, cottage. Like William Morris and Richard Oastler, Disraeli admired the hierarchy of feudal society as a community of reciprocal interests and shared responsibilitiesa kind of vertical socialismand Hill gives this archaic political ideal an appropriately complicated formulation. No less attractive than it is problematic, its values (seen in retrospect) do not mitigate its severities. Ultimately, the sequence reads like an elegy to a forgone order; its poignancy is sharpened, its images edged more clearly with resentment, in view of its immediate and local contextthe bogus conservatism (for Hill it conserved nothing) that had risen since the early 1970s:
it is an enclave of perpetual vows
broken in time. Its truth shows disrepair,
disfigured shrines, their stones of gossamer,
Old Moore's astrology, all hallows,
the squires's effigy bewigged with frost.
Nostalgia also enters the poetry of Tony Harrison, but from another angle: his background in the urban working class of industrial Leeds accounts for sensitivities strikingly different to those of Hughes or Hill. By 1970 his poems are witnessing a crisis of belief in the values that had defined the cohesive center of national postwar politicsliberal social welfare. The bind of Progress, the irony of advancement: the material circumstances of working-class life have been improved butin his elegiac presentationthe grainy strength of its soul has been lost. Harrison is not simply writing pastoral backwards, however; at his best, he avoids an inverted nostalgia for the starkly chastening force of poverty. He confronts a paradox, one which he focuses constantly, if obsessively, on the impoverishing benefits of literacy. His poems give literate speech to an underclass, and present a dramatic, searching analysis of the conditions of language and class in England.
The poems in
The Loiners
(1970; a "Loiner" is a citizen of Leeds) display a studied coarseness, a kind of street-ballad brio that Harrison stylizes sufficiently to suggest its claim on literature:
 
Page 599
In Leeds it was never
Who
or
When
but
Where
.
The bridges of the slimy River Aire,
Where Jabez Tunnicliffe, for love of God,
Founded the
Band of Hope
in eighteen odd
The hurdy gurdy rhythms and rigmarole music show the end rhyme exerting inordinate control over the language, whose subjection is otherwise witnessed in an excessive reliance on cliché. Predetermined, this is the speech of a class whose accent still determines its imprisonment.
This symptomatology is balanced by Harrison's ability to tap the expressive potential of class dialect, as in the final lines of "Allotments," where the Loiner, greeting the end of World War II from the privations it has enforced,
                                                                   cried
For the family still pent up in my balls,
For my corned beef sandwich, and for genocide.
Relying on Harrison's considerable metrical skill, these lines express the speaker's feeling of frustrated potential, at the crucial point, through those monosyllables' fiercely compacted energy. Yet this effect becomes credible mainly through the working-class character's perspective-invoice, where a corned beef sandwich and genocide vie for primacy of attention.
The ambitious task of Harrison's
Continuous
(1981), a sequence of fifty sonnets written in the sixteen-line form devised by George Meredith for
Modern Love
, is announced through an allusion in its first poem to the local Leeds lore of class strife. Like the "Enoch of Leeds," the iron sledgehammer used by Luddites to smash the oppressive frames made by its namesake, Enoch of Marsden, Harrison writes his sonnet against itself, clanging "a
forged
music on the frame of Art, / the looms of owned language smashed apart!" Harrison may have faked the conventional sonnet by writing it in dialect, thus destroying the privilege an ownership of literary language has traditionally sanctioned, but he has also forged a new and durable product of his own. He reclaims the Luddites's share of a common language and gives their speech the dignity and gravity of literature.
This project accounts for the major importance of
Continuous
, but the strenuousness of the enterprise should not excuse Harrison's tendency to lapse from it. Not only does he quit the struggle, falling into

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