Poetry

Twentieth

century slump

Nigel Frith

With Philip Larkin's Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse sitting beside Helen Gardner's New Oxford Book of English Verse in all the bookshops, it is perhaps a good time to examine the former in the light of the latter. Can we claim that the verse of the twentieth century is a worthy successor to the verse of the previous eras? To my mind, no. Poetry in this century has suffered a slump. In almost all the fields of poetic art, its diction, imagery, subject-matter, style, versification and overall effect, it has proved to be shallow or narrow or weak or trivial.

The old Victorian style of diction, where heroes "doffed their dinted helms "instead of taking off their battered hats, was wisely reacted against in the verse of this century. Poets are at liberty — indeed they are almost duty bound — to use such words as' residue,' ' cul-de-sac," itch," etherised,' and so on. The Romanticway of talking has been thrown over. Nonetheless in seeking to avoid ostensibly poetic words, I feel modern poets have become unnecessarily mundane in their diction. T. S. Eliot, who is by far the greatest poet of this century, has moments when he sounds like a civil service memorandum. And among lesser poets, W. H. Auden's constant trick of tying words from ordinary social chitchat with natural or traditional things — such as the " expensive delicate ship" in his poem about Brueghel's painting — merely has the effect of trivialising his subject.

A similar movement was inaugurated against Pre-Raphaelite imagery. Most people had had enough of Swinburne's roses and nightingales by the end of the first world war, and it must 'have been refreshing to read in Eliot's early poetry of cab-horses, smells of steaks in passageways, and news papers in vacant lots. Indeed the imagery of modern poetry seems to me to be its finest achievement. Eliot is after all a master of the potent image. But the world of Yeats and Pound are also pretty lively. And Betjeman's suburbia-scapes, and Dylan Thomas's farmyard world of watery Wales, full of barley and cockerels, are both rich and evocative. But again with lesser poets, a compulsive desire to be modern or relevant, results in the bogging of a poem down in the trivial bric-a-brac of everyday life.

And this is the chief feature, I would say, of its subject-matter, of which it is obviously a symptomatic branch. The general trend of literature this century has been to prolong the realism in the novels of the last. The field of modern literature is mundane. Certainly no one has attempted the epic or heroic. In poetry this has also been the case. There has been hardly any narrative verse. There has been no awakening of gods or heroes.

With his diction full of ' bye-laws ' and ' extraordinary ' and his imagery taken from the surroundings of his own kitchen sink, you might expect the style of a modern poet to be a model of simplicity and colloquial directness. Not a bit of it. Never did Miltonian or Augustan weave such a complicated mesh of verbosity and weird syntax as the modernpoet with his humdrum thoughts. It is a strange but sure dictum that the style of modern poetry is as artificial and divorced from life as any style in English has ever been. Take Robert Graves's lines: Who on your breast pillows his head now Jubilant to have won The heart beneath on fire for him alone

This is far from being a bad case, but nonetheless no one could ever mistake it for a spontaneous utterance. The language of Wordsworth or Marlowe is nearer to our natural speech. Perhaps because so much of modern poetry is rooted to the floor, and there is so little opportunity for the poet to evoke a fantastic or epic world, his frustrated. sense of adventure bursts out in the elapora-;) tion of his syntax. At any rate it is a -lamen-., table state of affairs, since the style of modern poetry does not merely render it strained and artificial, but frequently incomprehensible.

Many critics today have an exaggerated respect for verse-technique. If a poet writes a sonnet successfully, he is looked on as a master-technician. This is symptomatic of our feebleness. Not since the time of Henry VIII have English poets been such amateurs. Auden is often praised for his versification. I am overcome with wonder whenever i see this done, for to me Auden is a typical example of a poet who cannot stay in his metre. Constantly in his poems the reader is set trotting oft in one metre — say that of iambic pentameter, only to be suddenly dumped by the wayside and fed on doggerel. Thom Gunn is the same. The Book of the Dead begins in routine iambic pentameter: ti turn ti turn u turn ti tum ti turn : "The blood began to waste into the clods," but at the sixth line of the poem it lapses into the style of the young man from Japan: "Blood fall down the diaphanous throat, slow, stay." This line has two spondees, one pyrrhic, one anapoest, and onlY one iamb — the metre it is supposed to be in. But such technical considerations are far from the whole story. A poem is a poem if it IS expressive, if it fires or if it moves. When Chinese poems are translated into English, we miss a great deal of their technical finesse, but what poems they are, and how theymove us! And Pindar too, who owes so much to metre, what thrilling sequences are his poems, in words he never chose and no metre at all! When the imagination of the poet is

vivid and powerful, it can survive any sort of technical Haw or halting. In the last lesort

therefore modern poetry must be judged for

the power of the world it evokes in our mind. Alas, this is its most depressing feature of all! For where true poetry expands and enrich ens, modern poetry narrows and makes shallow. The other day I read a heap of modern poems after a heap of old. Miserable succession.

After the garrulous and sparkling Chaucer, after the humorous and boozy Omar Khayyam, after the titanic and thundering Milton, after the ingratiating, golden and perfect Sha

kespeare, came a ghastly procession of weedY worried men.

If we consider modern poetry by comparing it with the old, and take the chance these two new books have given us, I think we can deduce some lessons from these years — years that but for Eliot and the flashes of the others have been all but completely barren of real

poetic talent. And the lessons I would say are these. Let us stop trying to be something dif

ferent from all other poets. There is nothing so special about the age we live in, that sets It apart from the humanity in the others. Let us also be humble and prepared to learn our craft. There are thousands of poets who are better than we are. Let us also forget trying to be absorbed with ourselves. What about the reader? The Muses are greater than any one poet, and the traditions of poetry are permanent. The world is also endlessly fertile. Let them mingle in greatness as they have done before. There are great men enough who have shown what can be done: Homer.

Virgil, and Dante, and Shakespeare. Who that has drunk their wells, would want to chew on dust?

Nigel Frith, a poet who has just completed a research degree at Oxford, is the 'New Renaissance ' candidate in the election for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford.