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The Angus Maude of Literature?

By EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH

IDON'T know whether to be stunned or amused. I little thought, when the SPECTATOR approached me for an article supporting the

candidate of my choice in the election for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford, that I should find myself the Angus Maude of literature. Mr.

Robert Conquest seems to have found my piece full of 'shrieks and gashings.' I can't see that I in any way rivalled the violence of my assailants. 'Degrading,' snorts Mr. Conquest, while Mr. James Reeves goes so far as to accuse me of 'smearing' the new Professor of Poetry.

But Mr. Reeves has not been alone in reduc- ing the contest at Oxford to a contest of per- sonalities which well deserved Mr. Conquest's

adjective. On the Wednesday before my article appeared, the Daily Express printed an inter-

view with Sir Maurice Bowra, Lowell's sponsor, in which he accused Dr. Enid Starkie of having 'cheated' him. It is interesting to speculate why the whole affair should have been conducted with so little dignity and so much bad temper.

One reason is, I think, to be found in some words which Mr. Conquest uses. He speaks of Lowell having been 'satisfactorily honoured.'

Indeed, there seems to be a general feeling amongst my assailants that the Professorship is a kind of medal to be pinned on the breast of some old campaigner, and not a responsibility to be fulfilled. Mr. Blunden clearly does not share this view. Since his election, he has spoken about the need to bring people back to poetry. I con- gratulate him for it. But this stubborn notion

that poets are subject to worldly honours, this outcry even at my use of the phrase 'minor poet' (surely a proud enough title)—these are symp- tomatic of the general condition of poetry in England, which is not all it might be.

The contest between Lowell and Blunden did, after all, raise some fundamental literary issues.

One of the issues was the question of absolutes in literature. Blunden, it seems to me, represents the kind of writer who aspires towards a fixed standard, set up for him by the great poets of the past. This kind of writer can be absorbed —I won't say digested—by an Establishment.

The Establishment works, not through con- troversy, but by slowly establishing a consensus. Lowell, and 1 realise this now perhaps more clearly than before, must always be a controver-

sial author. This is because he continually puts himself at risk in his poetry. In Life Studies a

whole personality is on the verge of disintegra- tion. Lowell's writing has, as I said, had a huge impact in England, but it is now evident that this was an impact of a certain kind. It had not, for example, reached many of those who chose to vote in last week's election. To them, Lowell was a bewilderment, an unknown quantity. Quite rightly, perhaps, they refused to vote for what they didn't know. But Lowell's fluidity, his refusal to conform to the previously accepted standards, are perhaps the things which most clearly guarantee his importance to English literature.

When I said, in my previous article, that 'it is little realised how immensely conservative a period English verse has been going through,' I was thinking about the period since the last war. The contrast I wanted to draw was one between the experimentalism, or deliberate 'modernism,' of Pound and Eliot, and the com- parative unadventurousness of the poets of my own generation and the one immediately before it. These poets have not, I think, in any way gone beyond the frontier which was established by The Waste Land. Some, indeed, have drawn the line a good deal short of that—the early Donald Davie once described himself as 'a pasticheur of late Augustan styles' (the current Donald Davie is, of course, quite a different person). It is perfectly possible to write good, even great, poetry, using received forms and a received diction—this, very largely, is what Pope set out to do in the eighteenth century. But— and here I know I enter upon an argument which is unpalatable in England—it seems to me that the whole development of the arts in the past sixty years has depended on a kind of dynamic of experiment. Camille Pissarro once remarked of English painting: 'It is always behind, and proceeds by fits and starts.' I think one can fairly apply this remark to the British poetry of the past two decades.

Let me hasten to add that I don't think that all poetry need necessarily be experimental. It is just that experiment opens windows, suggests possibilities, even to those who are tempera- mentally conservative. I must risk still further arousing English xenophobia by pointing to the flourishing condition of American poetry, quite apart from Lowell's work. Its great strength lies not in its 'modernism' but in its variety, in which experiment plays an essential part. American poetry ranges from the elegant traditionalism of Wilbur to the wild outcries of Michael McClure. But neither is wholly exiled or outcast; each has something to contribute to the mainstream of American literature. Unlike Mr. Conquest, I believe that 'inspiring examples' are worth a great deal. But then, he is the man who can't see the point of Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius.

When challenged on my support for Lowell rather than Blunden, I would like to say two things, and two only, in final justification. One is that it needs practice to read certain kinds of modern poetry. What seems ungrammatical and unintelligible (as indeed The Waste Land did to many of its early readers) can flower marvellously on further acquaintance. Lowell has genius with language—the genius which transforms. I could not and cannot find this transforming, invigorating power in Blunden's work. Nor can I find it in many other poets, which is why I ventured to say that no one has written better than Lowell in the past twenty years. One or two poets have written as well: Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Graves. Among younger writers, Ted Hughes, Larkin and Creeley have occasionally risen to the same height. But English

poetry is the poorer because it cannot show us a writer with Lowell's power. This judgment is something quite apart from the question of who got the chair of poetry. I wish Mr. Blunden luck, and I wish him well.