BOOKS

Old Lines for New By JULIAN SYMONS THE trouble with the young is that they become middle-aged. The trouble with new lines is that they soon become old lines, blurred by copyisits, made familiar by anthologising, so that it is hard to remember what was once thought new about them. Of the nine poets represented in the first New Lines volume several have passed the forty-year landmark, and the revolt from a bardic tradition that linked them all is now an acknowledged fact. The characteristic verse of today is low-toned, distrustful of extremes and it seems sometimes of any sort of belief. A quo- tation from Jonathan Price conveys the tone:

'Where are these poets' hearts?' a reader cries. Not withered, but not worn upon the sleeve Of singing robes. Some things they choose to leave To bards who wield their pens between their thighs.

And another from Elizabeth Jennings the distrust of social merits :

Sign nothing but let the vague Slogans stand without your name. Your indifference they claim Though the issues seem so big.

Signing a paper puts off Your responsibilities.

Trust rather your own distress As in, say, matters of hive.

New Lines--11* is not likely to be met with the abuse which greeted its predecesSor, because ro much-of what those nine poets were trying to do with poetic language—to make it more con- crete, less 'poetic,' more closely related to subject- matter that Was 'common geound for most human beings--is now 'taken as a matter of course by readers of poetry. I don't suppose that Mr. Con- quest, who has edited both -of these anthologies, disagrees with this, but it is hard to be sure -because (as readers of this paper will know) he always comes out fighting even when there is nobody else in the ring. His long, militant intro- duction is full of ferocious right uppercuts (his left has been out of use for some time) directed against ghostly opponents. 'The poetry-reading public can be buffaloed for long periods, into accepting vicious methods . . . a great deal is still being Written which affects to be founded upon new, or at least different attitudes' (from those of the New Lines poets), there are 'leading critics' who create 'supposed systems,' critics whose ideas can fortunately be refuted -simply 'by their actual choice (sometimes absurd almost beyond controversy) among contempor- ary poetry,' there are verse writers who take these critics and systems seriously and gain repu- tations 'not indeed with people who like poetry, but with people who like criticism.' At the end NFW LINES-1I. An Anthology edited by Robert Conquest. (Macmillan, 21s.)

the ring is littered with unidentifiable ghostly figures. Who are they all? In one of the bodies

twisting on the canvas I seemed to recognise Mr. A. Alvarez and yet (here is a strange thing) many of the writers represented in New Lines—ll are to be found also in Mr. Alvarez's Penguin anthology.

The points at which New Lines differs from other modern anthologies are first in the very

intelligent exclusion of poets who had begun to write seriously before the end of the war (in- telligent, this, because the differences between poets immediately affected by the war, like Alan Ross and Keith Douglas, and those who missed army service is a real, even decisive, one) and in the way that the poems chosen here, with very few exceptions, are peculiarly representative of the spirit of their age. There is no need, Mr. Conquest says firmly, for poetry to 'reflect the age' by using violent themes or giving the effect cf yiolence to verse, but those are not the only ways in which an age may be reflected. Mr. Thom Gunn, writing about the anti-Hitler bomb plot, and 'The Annihilation of Nothing' and Mr. George Macbeth do reflect the age through violence, but the frequency of the cocked snook of Mr. D. J. Enright and the deliberate triviality of some other poets is also the reflection of a desperate human situation. Even to use, science fiction as a theme, as Mr. Conquest does often and Mr. Amis does sometimes, is to reflect the age. 'What lures us there is simpler versions of disaster,' Mr. Amis says. The fact is, surely, that all poetry which concedes human beings as first of all social animals, inevitably reflects its age. The important thing about most of the poems here is that they do so without being too fanciful, grotesque or silly, in a language which closely resembles that of current speech.

But if the introduction is sometimes disap- pointingly wild and its conclusion, that English poetry 'should be (a) English and (b) poetry' just as disappointingly tame, things are different when one comes to the actual selection of poems. There are times when Mr. Conquest seems very near to saying to the critics he disagrees with: 'My judgment is better than yours, I like the best poems and you don't,' and perhaps this is not far from the truth. He has that extraordinary flair of the good anthologist—it is something im- possible to rationalise closely—which enables him to choose poems which will work into a homogeneous whole, combined with a sensibility which ensures that the choice of poems is right for his own purposes. To make the point simply, some of Mr. Conquest's sixteen new contribu- tors, Jonathan Price, Hugo Williams, Laurence Lerner, Edwin Brock, Edward Lucie-Smith, look better poets to me here than they have seemed when I have read their work in the past, and this is partly, I suppose, because of the skilful choice made from their poems and partly because they gain something by being put next to each other in a book of this kind.

All the poetic revolutions of this century have affected language primarily, the subject-matter of poetry secondarily. The opening lines of The Love Song of I. Alfred Pruf rock were quite shocking, overwhelming in their modernity, when they were first published, and the gram- matical distortions and technical language of Auden's early poems had a similarly stunning effect. When, during and just after the war, Dame Edith Sitwell's work was admired, it was the semi-precious stones of her language that really dazzled susceptible readers. When one is asked what change in poetry has been effected by New Lines or through the poets who have contributed to it, the answer seems to me certainly that they have changed the language in which it is possible to write poetry.

The sort of change I mean is conveyed per- fectly in a poem of Philip Larkin's called 'Send No Money.' So far as subject-matter goes, this poem might have been written by Housman, or for that matter by Wilfrid Gibson. In youth the poet longs to know the truth about life, and he is granted this wish on condition that he does not participate, but merely watches. Half-way through life he realises that his youth has gone, he has learned nothing and has not, after all, escaped the blows endured by others. I am put- ting the theme as tritely as possible, to make the point that the language in which the poem is written, coarse and deliberately vulgar (Toy, there's no green in your eye,' Time booms in the second verse), redeems it from triteness and in the end makes it extraordinarily moving. Here' is the last verse:

Half life is over now And I meet full face on dark mornings The bestial visor, bent in • By the blows of what happened to happen. What does it prove? Sod all. In this way I spent youth Tracing the trite untransferable Truss-advertisement, truth.

There are six of Mr. Larkin's poems here, and all of them confirm that he is a wonderfully skilful, intelligent and original poet. Other poets are not so much in debt to him as those of the Thirties were to Mr. Auden, but the way in which he uses language has affected most of the contributors to this anthology. (Although I 'should like to know why Mr. Hilary Corke writes flow'd and not flowed and Mr. Richard Kell wrapt instead of wrapped.) Would Kingsley Amis's poems be quite as they are, tart, witty, sexy and ironical, but for Mr. Larkin? Or, to name some of the less-known contributors, Mr. James Michie (who has two very good poems, 'Girls' School' and 'The ostalgist') or Mr. Kell, Mr. Anthony Thwaite, Mr. Price, Mr. Wil- liams? A poet like Mr. Larkin fertilises a whole area of language and feeling which other writers can usefully exploit.

The limitations of this sort of writing are obvious enough in theory. When poets concern themselves so intently with commonplace material, a small child saying 'I love you,' the biography of a pool player, a girls' school, a Welshman's sex life, and treat it so determinedly in demotic language, there is a danger that they will be practising merely the art of sinking. The fact that this happens so rarely, that the poems are almost all so lively and some of them so moving, is a tribute to the vitality that a revolu- tion of the word can bring. How long this vitality will last is anybody's guess, but certainly this is the verse anthology most worth reading since the first volume of New Lines appeared seven years ago.