BOOKS
A Sense of Movements
BY THOM GUNN THE British Council pamphlets range from
serious and thorough critical essays to rather sweeping 'introductions' which sometimes appear intended mainly to help teenagers or reformed Mau Mau with their reading lists. Geoffrey Moores Poetry Today,* a sequel to a previous booklet on Poetry 1945-50, is necessarily an introductory survey. No one who is already interested in contemporary poetry has any need of it (unless for the useful bibliography), and so it is in relation to an audience wishing for simple information on the subject that I wish to discuss it.
Certain, problems face the writer of such a book. One is that its planning involves as much exercise of the critical powers as the carrying out : he has to decide how much space to give to each poet. Mr. Moore takes about fifty and spends an aver- age of three-quarters of a page on each. Most are fairly obvious choices, but he falls down badly once or twice : I would have thought that Donald Davie deserved more than a couple of brief men- tions when James Kirkup is given over a page. The next problem is of how, within his limits of space, he is to support the judgments that he necessarily makes. Mr. Moore wisely decides to quote a lot, Where possible whole short poems, and this seems an economical way of combining critical justifica- tion with an introduction to the poets. It is in the explicit judgments that Mr. Moore is most remarkable. The pamphlet is interesting, I suppose, as a symptomatic document, because being a popular introduction it is not only going to be influential but already contains the kind of summing-up up that its author expects to be accept- able to a large audience. The breezy journalistic style which I last came across a few years ago in the commentary to his Penguin anthology of American poets has grown a good deal more breezy and journalistic, the occasional useful, per- ception being weighed down by a mass of cliché. This makes it all the better for studying symp- toms: the cliché is usually a general and unsup- ported statement that can be remembered and repeated by a large number of people. Thus, Mr. Moore does not support his statement that poor Messrs. Spender and Bottrall write poetry which lacks inevitability.' No good poem is inevitable : that is why it is good. Being meaningless, the criticism probably does no harm; it is when he starts assigning labels that we get a glimpse of the kind of effect this book is going to have. For example, he speaks of 'the irreverent Graves and the knotty Empson' : and we see Graves and Empson taking their places beside the other one- characteristic poets of literary histories, the sensuous Keats, the malicious Pope, and Marlowe of the mighty line. Of Empson he says later : 'At least he makes you think—if that is what you Chiefly want from poetry—and that does 'seem to be the prescribed medicine for the fifties,' which, Patronisingly enough, labels the Fifties as cerebral' (a word Mr. Moore likes).
This leads into the problem of categories. One
* POETRY TODAY. By Geoffrey Moore. ('Writers and their Work' Series, Longmans, 3s. 6d.) of the most unpleasant literary phenomena of the century is the coercion of writers into schools, which are spoken of more and more glibly but are more and more difficult to distinguish between. Behind it is the newspaper view of writers as those unworldly artists who (like dress designers) are always in a flurry to change the fashion, rather than as men who wish with a certain urgency to make a communication to other men. 'The Move- ment' is a recent example. I am particularly interested in this business about the Movement, because I found I was in it before I knew it existed (Mr. Vernon Watkins had a similar experience with the New Apocalypse), and I have a certain suspicion that it does not exist. As Mr. Moore remarks at one point, the nine poets of New Lines have only 'a certain like-mindedness' in common; and this like-mindedness does not mean that they know each other personally or share the single- ness of purpose found among, say, the Imagists.
Early in the pamphlet Mr. Moore justifies his use of categories : I have felt it necessary to use on occasion, Such terms as 'the Pylon Poets' or 'the new romanti- cism.' This, I hope, makes for clarity, but it also entails over-simplification, and 1 have therefore qualified or extended such terms as I have used in so far as I have had space to do so. . . . I can only say that I believe, with Ezra Pound, that the perception of certain similarities and `family groups' need not, for the intelligent reader, obscure the fact that poets arc, first and last, individuals.
We can appreciate his difficulties, and are even prepared to overlook the fact that he classes Thomas Blackburn as a Maverick at one point. But unfortunately, having named the obviouS danger, Mr. Moore walks straight into it.
If you accept your categories so seriously that you are able, as Mr. Moore does, to set down John Holloway and Donald Davie as `neo- Empsonians,' you ultimately find yourself reading ;a poem for characteristics of its school rather than for what it is saying. And of course school- characteristics are very close to personality- characteristics, as can be seen from the 'Beat Generation poets' in San Francisco. Here are a lot of young men who write very badly' and who are being acclaimed as a school of which one should take notice, mainly because they share in a strained and over-publicised attempt to be Bohemian.
Sure enough, Mr. Moore emphasises person- alities. Here are four of his ten sentences on Kingsley Amis : Kingsley Amis is the most engaging of the `Movement' triumvirate [here Larkin, Wain, Amis]. Apart from being sensible (which they all are) he has the most sense of humour. He is the friendly chap next door, the one with the motor bike and the cow's lick. Only when you get to know him do you find out that he has a wit as sharp as a razor.
This would be more in place in the Daily Express. And personalities are again stressed by the port- folio of photographs in the middle. Here we are, looking so human. If you feel like reading poetry by someone with a kind face, there is Edwin Muir; or if you want to read someone who looks sensi- tive, try James Kirkup.
It's an easy and popular way of looking at literature, and it can save you the trouble of read- ing a poem. It means you read Auden only for the characteristics he has in common with Macspaunday and Larkin only for those he shares with the Movement, and naturally you do not get much of what Auden Or Larkin is trying to soy, except perhaps in some of their weaker poems. Why, for example, does Mr. Moore say that Larkin is 'unsentimental'? Because the Movement is supposed to be unsentimental. I admire Larkin as much as any poet of my generation, but the one fault I would have mentioned in his work is an occasional lapse into sentimentality.
Thus the categories and most of the labels are related : they are both ways of assessing a poet in some other way than by the body of his work. And I'd suggest that this booklet, though obviously written with the best of intentions, is going to be pernicious in its effect on the audience for which it is intended. While reading it through, I have had the rare and frightening 'experience of seeing the cliches about my genera- tion gelling into the form where I shall find them in ten years' time inside hard covers. This is how opinion is formed and literary history is written.
Previous page
