A New Major Poet ?
The Sinai Sort. By Norman MacCaig. (The Hogarth Press, 12s. 6d.)
EVEN if 'bliss' is perhaps an exaggeration of what it was in that dawn to be alive, anyone who grew up in the Thirties must feel gratitude to its poets, en bloc. But Mr. MacNeice has recently (while himself lumping a batch of poets of the Fifties together) spoken of the wrongness of judging the poets-of-the-Thirties as a group, whatever their similarities. And he is, of course, quite right. But how much do they really count, looked at as individuals? Read New Signatures now, and (apart from a poem of Mr. Eberhart's then thought of as reactionary and untypical) it is only Auden who comes off. All the dated properties, the feuding and freuding, seem not to matter in his verse, which just stands up as strong as ever.
And in the Fifties? Mr. Day Lewis, almost completely, and Mr. MacNeice, to some extent, have been accepted by the Establishment. This is not as damaging as it sounds. For the Establish- ment itself has long. ceased to stand pat on its old position—Philistinism indulging its sentimen- tality. Not, of course, that it has really abandoned this ideal, but it now holds it in a shamefaced and camouflaged manner and feels obliged to pay vice's proverbial tribute to virtue. Its uneasiness about Mr. MacNeice is understandable: though many of his present poems may be more or less neutralised, there are always signs that he might at any moment resume those qualities of clear- sighted irony and destructive high spirits so much disliked by Old Oily and his Milkmaids. And so he sometimes does.
Mr. MacNeice lilts agreeably. And Mr. Day Lewis lilts a bit too : light, easily digestible rhythms. His poems are metaphorical. But even if we accepted the proposition 'poetry is meta- phorical,' it would not necessarily entail the con- clusion 'metaphor is poetic.' And, oddly enough, the effect is often somehow prosy—the prose of the travelogue : 'Flowers open their eyes, rivulets prance.' Still, no one would expect a twelfth or thirteenth book to be all freshness and brilliance, and both Mr. MacNeice and Mr. Day Lewis are (usually) easy on the eye. And what a relief that is from so much poetry which, lacking the primary virtues, does not even have this secondary one to compensate.
Mr. Gunn, the best and youngest of this batch, can be as metaphorical as anyone; but he also Proves that the plain statement and the abstract word are equally good material for poetry. He is very much the poet of the malaise of the present- day young. But he is a poet who feels it, under- stands it and masters it. Unlike those who Whine about it, Gunn treats it as every true writer treats his particular view of the condition humaine. When he writes of young motor-cyclists or of Elvis Presley he neither identifies himself with them nor describes them from outside. With something of Yeats's power and technique, he often shows two other Yeatsian virtues—shame- lessness and arrogance. His characterisation of Cities suits his own verse : 'Extreme, material, and the work of man.' And in his best poems he reaches the highest and most difficult synthesis of any artist—passion without illusion. Energy, depth and technical skill have not come together in this way for quite a time, and my own feeling (though this book is too short and uneven ever to look like clinching it) is that in Thom Gunn we may have a major poet on our hands after all these years.
One must not hold it against Mr. Causley that Dame Edith Sitwell in an introduction (in which She says that he must 'in some previous incarna- tion have met and talked with Johnnie Faa, the gYPsy lad) puts him forward as her latest White Hope of English Poetry, a rather withered laurel once worn by Mr. Tom Driberg. Most of these Poems are in ballad form. And I think we might welcome such a thing. The trouble is that the ,thought is often neither simple, as in the true ballad, nor subtle either. For example : 'Draw your revolver, Banker,/Shoot him down like a dole./you may gird his loins with nickel coins/ But where's his immortal soul?' Cliché, sloppily expressed. Just the same, one hopes that his enrolment in the corps of court jesters is not Permanent. For some of his early poems show that he has it in him to make good as an unattached bard.
Mr. MacCaig was an original member of the inuch-abused 'New Apocalypse,' which has taken such a lot of the blame for the genetically un- Stn-ind mutants who shambled around in. the Lorties. He was always a much better writer than luost of his associates and his new book is full of genuine and unassertive symbolist verse, with r(3st of its difficult virtues, and few of its easy Though his very successes show the limita- tions of the method, we must admire this poetry's
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