Australians and Others

Poems. By A. D. Hope. (Hamish Hamilton, 15s.)

William Empson Reading Selected Poems. (Listen Records, 39s. 9d.)

A. D. HOPE is an important writer. Probably his best-known poem is 'Imperial Adam,' an image of the first human coupling among the beasts in Eden, which has splendid moments but be- trays itself by a facile pay-off in the last line. In its insistent eroticism 'Imperial Adam' is typical of this whole collection, and more particularly of its first section, over which the shade of late and lustful Yeats broods very heavily indeed. A poem called `Pyramis or the House of Ascent' is com- pletely engulfed in that shadow. And 'Pasiphx.' for instance, is very plainly Hope's version of Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan.' At the level of verbal execution Hope's poem survives the com- parison; which is remarkable. But Yeats's poem has far more wealth of meaning. Hope's sensua- lity seems to get all its urgency from having to break through his inhibitions. When he writes of incest in 'Lot and his Daughters,' or of bestiality in Pasiphte,' his object is simply to compel his imagination to regard such matters with equani- mity, whereas Yeats's objectives were of course far more grandiose. Poems which probe eroti- eism more deeply. and discriminate as it were inside eroticism, are the fine 'Flower Poem' which marts the second section, and. in a cryptic, riddling way, 'Rawhead and Bloody Bones,' Which stands near it : Rawhead and Bloody Bones

Cuts himself another slice; Incest. Aquinas owns,

Is a form of avarice.

This Belly too commits,

By a strange and self abuse,

Chin-chopper's tit-bits.

Meat of his own mint, chews.

'Know thyself !' says Tongue's root-

in the bone sconce;

Belly loves its own fruit,

Sucks on three sins at once.

This is not Yeatsian. but reminds one rather of some Robert Graves, and of J. V. Cunningham In America; and Hope, it seems to me, risks going deeper than either of these

We read for a hundred pages before finding out, from the poems themselves, that Hope is Australian. And yet to an English reader it seems that with him Australian poetry 'comes of age.' This has nothing to do with subject, everything to do with style. Hope's style is very Conservative. It is for instance the quite un- Yeatsian rigour of his syllable-counting metres Which permits him to go so close to Yeats in other respects without losing his own voice. More generally Hope, who is a very literary Poet indeed, when he puts himself in touch with the English poetic past, is straightforward and unabashed about it, as no British or American Poet is. It may be that he is never so Australian as when he writes expert pastiche of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles. To do this naturally, and for serious purposes, requires technical sophistication but historical naïveté. And perhaps this naivete is just a personal pecu- liarity in Hope: but it will be well for Australian poetry if on the contrary it has something to do with being Australian.

Peter Porter, a younger man, is also Austra- lian. But with him this is a matter only of subject- matter, almost of local colour—and only in certain poems. In style. attitude and tone he is undistinguishable from much of the better British verse of the Fifties. One thinks of the first collection of Thom Gunn—but Porter is much shaggier, a much rougher workman than Gunn. His clumsy metres and approximate rhymes give an impression of violence and power, but the violence is only implied, not embodied as when Hope lodges his shocking images in smooth and rapid versification: so that before long we stop believing in Porter's violence as anything more than querulous rancour. All the same. he's a promising poet. especially when he names things, such as himself 'Eight years old drinking Schweppes in bed.' That comes from a poem called 'A Christmas Recalled,' which is spoiled by its pointlessness in gesturing towards a metri- cal and rhyming regularity which it can only approximate. Why bother? This sort of very interesting material would surely go much better into naked and jagged unmetred verse like Robert Lowell's in 'Life Studies.'

I am probably wrong about W. D. Snodgrass. All my friends think him a very good thing. but I can't get on with him at all. Just as I'm getting him into focus as a poet (and a very accom- plished one), there he is at my elbow, smiling his warm, brilliant, sad, understanding smile, plead- ing 'Judge me not as poet but as person. Am I or am I not the nicest, kindest, dearest fellow you ever met? Wasn't I the most devoted of Daddies, the most understanding of teachers?' And of course he's confident of my answer; though in fact, if 'the much anthologised 'April Inventory' is anything to go by (and it's singled out by Lowell in an exceptionally fulsome blurb), I'm puzzled and a little shocked at what goes on in Snodgrass's classroom, where he can't remember dates but on the other hand showed one child the colors of A tuna moth and how to love.

No, confound it, it's my friends who are wrong: self-pity, self-esteem, all sorts of self-regard, are fatal to poetry—and most of the poems in Heart's Needle are self-regarding. A poem is not the public parade of a private emotion; however smoothly executed, such paradings belong else- where than in the blessedly impersonal art of poetry.

Another recent venture by George Hartley of the Marvell Press, his record of Empson reading, is a brilliant success. His previous recordings, of Philip Larkin and Robert Graves, have been de- lightfully and . instructively idiosyncratic; one would not be without either disc, and yet it was always possible to think that one could read Larkin's and Graves's poetry better than the authors could read it for themselves. William Empson, though his style of reading is just as distinctive and doubtless just as inappropriate for most poetry, for his own poems gives obviously to my mind the one right reading. Until one has heard this recording one does not know how

Empson's poems should be read; having heard it, one rushes back to the text. As one speaks of a definitive edition in print, so one must say of this that it is the definitive edition of Empson's

poems in sound.

DONALd DAVIE