Poetry in 1984 .

By C. B. COX

ANDALL JARRELL said that the contemporary DLpoet has a peculiar relationship with his public: it is unaware of his existence. Even among students, sad to say,, this is still by and large true. For many years I took part in inter- views of sixth-formers applying to read English honours at university. 'Which poets do you enjoy reading?' we would ask. 'I don't really like poetry.' was on several occasions the reply. In spite of the boom in English studies, most poets still count their sales in hundreds, not thousands.

It's now just ten years since Robert Conquest edited New Lines, and so established the Move- ment as the most influential development in English poetry of the 1950s. What has hap- pened since? A simple answer might be—in England, nothing at all. Philip Larkin hoped to attract the cash customers back to poetry, for 'if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every Sep- tember is no substitute.' But, in spite of Betjeman's and Larkin's personal successes, there are few signs that the cash customers are moving in in any numbers. And, in any case, English poetry since 1960 hasn't had too much to offer. Much as I admire individual poems written by the Group i Hobsbaum, MacBeth, Porter, Lucie- Smith, etc.). I don't think that any one of them has yet achieved the stature Larkin reached by the publication of The Less Deceived in 1955. The 1960s have been dominated by the Ameri- cans, particularly Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell.

The Poet Speaks* includes broadcast interviews with forty-five contemporary poets who discuss their attitudes to writing. Quite a few of them are young, so here we ought to find what the new generation is up to. Unfortunately, we don't. The interview with Sylvia Plath, the only Ameri- can represented, is outstanding. frightening, in the way it reflects on the feverish preoccupations of her late poems: 'My best friends when I was young were always doctors. I used to dress up in a white gauze helmet and go round and see babies born and cadavers cut open.' But the other comments are bewilderingly diverse. To questions about the genesis of a poem, one poet replied that he put himself in a trance, another talked of capturing images like butterflies, while Edmund Blunden answered : 'It's like digging in the sand and hitting a remaining landmine or something.' Influenced by everyone from Gibbon to Seferis, the poets answer the stereo- typed questions in contradictory ways. _Many of the poets we'd like to hear are not yepre- sented; only two of the nine poets in the original New Lines are included.

Asked whether they strove for clarity, for communication, most of the poets thought they did. In contrast, Christopher Middleton rightly challenged the assumptions behind this question. In his view, a poem can communicate without 'rational, discursive or prose intelligibility,' for it has its own laws, its own mode of conscious- ness. In Europe and America, poets have con- tinued to develop 'modern' attitudes to 'intelli- gibility,' in the tradition of Joyce and Eliot, • THE POET SPEAKS. Edited by Peter Orr. (Rout- ledge and Kegan Pant, 45s.)

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I Hart-Davis, I6s:

aware that recent developments in psychology and science necessitate revolutionary changes in language. Modern physicists find that it is im- possible to transcend the human reference point, that the structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all. These changes restore mystery to the universe, and allow the imagination to develop new forms for describing experience. Since the organisation of the Royal Society in 1660 we have tended to associate intelligibility with the use of logical, clear prose. Eliot, Joyce and Dylan Thomas, all in their different ways, challenge this assumption, and try to extend the limits of language beyond the bounds of rationality. Particularly in the theatre of the absurd, ways of communication have developed recently which accept that man can never fully comprehend his environment.

The Movement writers and many of the inter- views in The Poet Speaks reacted against such innovations, trying to re-establish an English tradition of good order and good sense. Instead of the chaotic insights of the apocalyptics, we were to have 'articulate energy,' the power of reason to understand and control its experi- ences. The question now is whether in the twentieth century such a programme, however admirable, stood any chance of succeeding. The urbane tone of the average Movement poem seems to depend upon withdrawal from the horrors of war into the quiet world of domesticity (nappy and bottle poetry, as Anthony Thwaite calls it). As A. R. Jones has pointed out, in the 'tranquillised 'fifties,' there appears to have occurred a psychological relapse, a return to Edwardian modes of art. Looking back, it's pos- sible to see now that Larkin is the best of the Movement poets because he so often deals with this problem. Beneath the balance of his poems, their wonderful technical accomplishment, we sense what he calls in `Ambulances' the solving emptiness that lies just under all we do.' He finds that he can preserve the integrity of the self only by withdrawal from experience, but knows that such withdrawal can be a form of self- extinction. His poetry contemplates the ensuing tensions in his own life.

Very much the same kind of argument proves why R. S. Thomas remains one of the best poets in Britain today. Simple questions followed by simple statements, organised in tightly con- trolled verse forms, reflect his honest, disciplined searching into two central problems—his rela- tion to his flock and to God. He once said: 'I feel sorry for my parishioners that they should have- a poet for a parson,' and he wished they might have someone more fatherly and perhaps less intelligent: 'My nose is too sharp.' He wonders whether his trained mind can make any sense out of the peasants' bitter existence. But particularly in this latest volume, Pieta,t he has grown able to celebrate the mysterious dignity of Iago Prytherch : 'His hands are broken but not his spirit.' Man is born to suffer, to be crucified with Christ. 'In Church' describes the. quietness after the congregation has departed; the preacher alone listening to his own- breath- ing, 'testing his faith on emptiness.' But Thomas - finds mystery in man and nature, in God's

presence in 'The Moor':

I walked on, Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

I And broke on me generously as bread.

Thomas and Larkin (and also Robert Graves, from a different generation) are unique talents, but not necessarily good to imitate. Many new poets take over the Movement's concern with everyday life, with rational, conventional tech- niques, without understanding Thomas's or Larkin's personal complexities. The most impor- tant English writer to establish his reputation since 1960 is Harold Pinter, and I think there is more real 'poetry' in his plays than in most conventional verse today. One stock question in The Poet Speaks concerned the future of verse drama. Stephen Spender replied by attacking the dreary crusades of those who try to get audiences to like poetry. 'They think somehow that verse on the stage is a Good Cause. Even Eliot has been misled by this.' Pinter's language is highly original, its verbal interweavings and surprising, semi-comic imagery producing violent reactions. iiihter's The Lover had a considerable popular success on television, for there is a large, respon- sive audience for films and music. Bob Dylan's success is a case in point; the repetitions and semi-surrealist words don't achieve so very much, birt in association with his- music they convey a vitality and excitement that has attracted a hinge public. Pinter.himself is supremely con- scious of the irrational, and of the inadequacy of human communication. Through Beckett, his art derives from Joyce, just as Sylvia Plath's late poems, also responsive to the irrational, are close in their chanting quality to Eliot's Sweeney

Agonistes. •

These writers do not withdraw from twen- tieth-century horrors, but embrace them and achieve a kind of gaiety. The menacing forces in Pinter's plays are controlled by his art. In a review of Plath's Ariel, Robert Lowell wrote: `Suicide, father-hatred, self-loathing--nothing is too much for the macabre gaiety of her con- trol.' In The Poet Speaks Sylvia Plath says: 'I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured . . I think that the poetry of 1984 will only achieve greatness if it can satisfy such criteria, if it can engage and 6ontrol the totality of twentieth-century ex- perience.

Thus, Americans often picture Britain as a coffin sinking quietly in the sea off France; the traveller from overseas feels an imaginative sterility—particularly if he journeys to the north. After the war the typical Britain wanted to forget the hardships, to create a little area of security, to hang out -a sign : `Do not disturb.' And this retreat affected literature. One important excep- tion in the 1950s was Ted Hughes, who both in war poems and his famous bestiary represented the danger and fascination of violent energy. After a silence of a few years he's now publish- ing poetry again, and it's interesting that his style has become more experimental—less close to prose intelligibility. The energy is still there; 'a kind of explosive force that recreates language. As one drives on Britain's antiquated roads or views the dull stereotyped new university build- ings, one feels the need for the imaginative excitement great modern art can provide. Ted Hughes remains, in the tradition of Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Yeats, who believed that the artist possessed a 'gaiety transfiguring all that dread': • • All things fall and are'bnilt again, And those that build' thkkn again are gay.