The survival of poetry
An editorial in these pages on October 1 1954, entitled 'In the Movement', announced that -for years now there has been no coherence in the literary scene, not even the coherence of a mere fashion, a central mode to which conformist talents can conform and in opposition to which hon-conformist talents can form themse. Ives". The last two decades have brought little relief for us from those lean times, and that indictment still stands. English • Poetry has continued to go through a gradual but debilitating process of retrenchment It has met its expenses; it has kept its head above water; it has made both ends meet. It has been worthy, it has ?ccasionally been even astringent, but it as been ineradicably dull. The language of Eliot and Pound was never understood or appreciated, except in the most begrudging fashion, and over the Iast twenty years the role of the typically flglish poet has been that of the outsider L°0king in at politics, at society and even, God help us, at 'poetry' itself. The late Mr Auden started the rot with a showy social rhetoric which fatally weakened the language in any hands other than his own, and the line of English poetry since then has been a thin and tenuous one. There have of course been a number of wellPublicised but minor orators, like Mr Lowell and Mr Hughes, who have suffered, Waxed eloquent and all but died. Groups and movements have been announced, each one more narrow than the last, and We have now reached that point where our grandest poetic gestures spring from the Middle-class muse of Mr Fuller, Mr Thwaite and the rest of the gang. It is a matter for regret that even our, Younger poets have been imitating their elders (thus getting to be published by hem) and in their hands the language has come the blunt and prosaic instrument °Li certain forms of social expression. We nave got ourselves into a very deep hole With Audenesque meditations, or meretrielfts private rhetoric, or literary verse satires which must necessarily ape what they Mock. And it says a great deal about nr cultural situation that the modest `Yrics of Mr Larkin, pleasant though they are, should be hailed in the Sunday newsPapers as great poetry. No one would ever know, of course, that anything was wrong. The public relations machine grinds on relentlessly, and a select band of publishers still market two or three products a year which are designed not for profit but for what is coyly known as 'prestige'. The bureaucrats of the Arts Council still hold their gay parties and gaily distribute government largesse, apparently without reason and certainly without discrimination. Certain products, with the acceptable publishers' brand names of course, are awarded other publishers' prizes and are even mentioned in the Christmas gift lists of the Sunday press. The universities churn out their annual quota of research theses. And the poetry itself? To quote again from the editorial of 1954 (how times do not change!): "Gone. All gone. Utterly gone and vanished . . .". The language has died along with its inspiration. It has of course always been true that the established poetry and the established criticism look backwards, especially when a viable writing has vanished from sight. This has always been a Comfort to the 'general reader', who likes to be certain of his certainties, but it is still more of a comfort to the literary journalists and the literary academics who live in a New Observatory all of their own. Perhaps they have not noticed the corpse they are not, after all, paid to look very closely or it may be that they do not care. Perhaps they prefer the status quo, perhaps it is more reassuring. Certainly the literary press gives no inkling of change. The weeklies and the dailies remain as stubbornly unoriginal as ever and, if they ever care to think seriously about poetry (which is not often), all of their efforts are designed simply to keep abreast of current fashion. The dead hand of the Times Literary Supplement leaves a much fainter print nowadays and devotes itself to the pursuit of names, neither knowing nor caring about contemporary poetry. Encounter is fixed in those familiar patterns of fashion and friendship. The New Review, one of the more completely subsidised of our little magazines, is eclectic without being interesting, and parrots the assumptions of a "metropolitan culture" without examining them. Other journals, like Poetry and London Magazine, remain stubbornly peripheral, lost among the busy commerce of a false culture. A culture where inflation is rampant. But, beneath all of this fiddle, the language and our perception of language have been changing. There comes a time in any culture when new forms of language, imperceptible at first, create such a disturbance that the old terrain, as it were, of language is divided and eventually submerged. To quote once more from the 1954 editorial: "Many people in modern Britain, who believe that they have been living in the same place for a lifetime, wake up one day to find that they are in fact living in a different place. All the small changes have added up, in the end, to a transformation". It is no longer necessary to draw social parallels which at this late date seem faintly spurious, since a new poetry has finally come to England without public aid. And it's goodbye to nice poetry readings in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, it's goodbye to the directors of the Poetry Book Society and it's goodbye to the half hour 'slots' on Radio Three.
Over the last decade a different ,poetry has been emerging; it has not been publicised and it has not been given prizes, but it does not need them. The names of the poets themselves will therefore be unknown to the casual reader, names such as Peter Riley, John James and J. H. Prynne, but their reputation has been growing quietly and steadily. The poetry has come in loosely mimeographed sheets, it has come in small magazines with unlikely names from London and Cambridge and elsewhere, it has come from small presses like Grosseteste or Ferry. It does not amount to more than a handful of slim volumes, and a couple of critical essays, but its reach is far greater. It is part of our time:
What is this high street at night, in every direction the same as itself? As it will not change but pleads for its topical centre, rising to the cone of wind and ash: fields of pure inertia. He folds the stem of his two cheeks to this, he fans the servant with scented leaves. The two friends walk down the sandy track and we hold back the ends of the crescent. The future history of the air is glowing, with amity beyond the path itself; touched gently and brought to this stubborn wreck.
(from The Five Hindrances J. H. Prynne) This poetry speaks strongly in its own voice, with a resourcefulness which is very different from the versifying of our current notables. But it is not 'experimental' poetry: experimental poetry is incomplete poetry. It is rather a poetry that returns to the indigenous strengths of the language, with a syntactical fluency and strength of line:
In his youth he walked much.
Tears streamed down his unlined face, ' damping his shirt. Sleep glows in its beads, staring the wing blind.
Still the snow hums, fetching my life:
the pain to come, still the key
takes cover in the chamois case.
The key is the edge of our day.
(from Royal Fern, J. H. Prynne)
It is a poetry which will, in its own time, be recognised and it is also a poetry which will endure.
But perhaps poetry has become so devalued a currency in recent years that this analysis will seem parochial and unimportant. It is not. If our language is denied that fresh access of strength which only poetry can give it, it will become fatally weakened. And without a language, the people will perish of inanition:
Here then is the purity of pragmatic function: we give the name of our selves to our needs. We want what we are
(from The Kitchen Poems, .1. H. Prynne)
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