AMONG THE PAPERBACKS

Pomes Paperback

BY JULIAN SYMONS EMPSONIFYERS recalibrate, and from the sacred wood advance! Sorley, Drinkwater, Gurney, rise again. Your verstificates have been restored, you are needed! Porter, Amis, Fitz- Bracken, forward, your Penguins are ready. Pomes not penyeach but poundmore. So good have you had it? Never!'

So James Joyce's ghost, looking through the stylistic mist of Time, on the paperback revolu- tion in poetry. Before the war it would have seemed incredible that Penguins should publish selections from the work of poets under forty, some still of unsure reputation, three to a volume,' as well as a selection of Georgian poetry and another of modern verse. This is a revolution that one applauds with reservations. It is splendid, certainly it is, that poets should sell their books in thousands instead of hun- dreds, but some of the poets are unsuitable recipients of the honour done them, while much better writers (like Mr. George Barker and Mr. Roy Fuller, or, from a younger generation, Mr. Thom Gunn, Mr. Philip Larkin and Mr. John Wain) remain un-Penguinised, though Mr. Gunn has half a Faber paperback.' And really, it is deplorable that an attempt should be made to revive the Georgians' dreary drooling over an idealised 'Nature.' Mr. James Reeves, who has edited the anthology which appeared earlier this year,; is able to make a book only by a sleight- of-hand which amounts to cheating. If 'Geor- gian' means anything at all, it means the work that was contributed to the several volumes of Georgian Poetry edited by Edward Marsh. It is almost unbelievable, but true, that there are fewer than a dozen poems from these collec- tions in Mr. Reeves's anthology, and that he even has the nerve to include poems by Hous- man, who showed his distaste for this inert poetastry by refusing to contribute to Marsh's volumes. There is no point in making a 'Geor- gian' anthology which is not based on Marsh and which, in spite of Mr. Reeves's desperate endeavours, contains for the most part pretty tedious verse.

The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse' is a very different matter. First published in 1950, it now appears in an edition that has been very thoroughly brought up to date. Nearly a third of the poems are new, and 'four out of every

PENGUIN MODERN POETS, 1, 2 AND 3. (Penguin Books, 2s. 6d. each.) 2 SELECTED POEMS. By Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. (Faber and Faber, 5s.) 3 GEORGIAN POETRY. Selected and introduced by James Reeves. (Penguin Books, 3s. 6d.) 'Tim PENGUIN BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY VERSE, 1918-1960. Edited by Kenneth Allott. (Penguin Books, 6s.) JOHN BETIEMAN'S COLLECTED POEMS. Edited by the Earl of Birkenhead. (John Murray Paperbacks, 5s.) five of the new poems are by poets whose work was either unpublished or virtually unknown at the beginning of the last decade.' Given the limi- tation of such an anthology, the fact that a great number of poets has to be crammed in, so that there is room only for a taster from the

work of each, this is an admirable book. The editor, Kenneth Allott, is himself the most

neglected poet of the Thirties, a writer whose wit, verbal tact and sensibility have never been appreciated. They can be seen here in a couple of poems, from which I quote the opening of the brilliant 'Lament For a Cricket Eleven':

Beyond the edge of the sepia Rises the weak photographer With the moist moustaches and the made-up tie. He looked with his mechanical eye, And the upshot was that they had to die. Portrait of the Eleven nineteen-o-five To show when these missing persons were last alive.

Two sit in Threadneedle Street like gnomes. One is a careless schoolmaster Busy with carved desks, honour and lines. He is eaten by a wicked cancer.

They have detectives to watch their homes.

Mr. Allott is also an immensely sensible critic. He has provided a commentary on the work of

each poet which goes far beyond the usual short account of education and list of works. These commentaries explain the poet's attitude to his own writing, and attempt a placing of his im- portance. The best tribute I can pay to such audacity—for really it is extremely audacious to offer, and try to justify, short opinions about the work of eighty-six poets—is to say that I can respect and understand the process by which Mr. Allott arrives at his views, even when I dissent from them most strongly. His three pages on T. S. Eliot provide more searching and useful

criticism than half a dozen scholastic essays, and most of what he has to say about the 'Movement'

poets is fresh, interesting and acutely intelligent.

This anthology is inferior to Michael Roberts's Faber Book of Modern Verse (also, by the way, available as a paperback) in the sense that Roberts was able to include more and longer poems by each writer, but Roberts's collection

was published in the Thirties, and attempts to

bring it up to date have not been very success- ful. The Penguin anthology has the immense ad-

vantage that it offers a full view of modern poetry, by a critic who is in favour of 'the pipes and plumbling of reasonable meaning,' rather than the rich flux of incoherent rhetoric.

Mr. Allott is not only in favour of reasonable meaning—that is, in favour of Louis MacNeice

and Donald Davie rather than of Dylan Thomas and George Barker. He is also, like most of the latest poets, a reasonable, liberal man. It is out- raged liberal feelings, I think, that are responsible

for the only serious failure of sympathy and understanding here, in his critical remarks about Mr. Thom Gunn, whose great poetic vigour and fertility go almost unremarked. Mr. Gunn is accused of using 'notably nasty images' and of praising 'nihilistic young tearaways in black leather jackets'—as though there were no nasty images and feeling for violence in Yeats! In a long introduction analysing the poetry of the last forty years, Mr. Allott briskly dismisses the `characteristic insipidity' of the Georgians, points out the exaggeration of Eliot's statement in the Twenties that poetry 'must be difficult,' praises Auden as the creative force of his generation, castigates the blood-and-thunder romanticism of the Forties, and finally takes the 'Movement, to pieces. Although its members are extremely individual their work has, he says, a general flavour.

Something is said positively in well-turned phrases, the movement is sedately brisk, the air is hygienic. If some 'Movement' poems are unadventurous and inclined to be dull, at least they are not blowsy, raucous, or dishevelled. The new poets always take care to sec that their dress is fully adjusted before appearing in print.

What this analysis doesn't take sufficient ac- count of, I think, is the conflict between order and rhetoric or, to put it in social terms, between liberalism and extremism, that has marked poetry ever since the end of the First World War. It is a condition of the uncertainties of our society that in poetry as in painting we have now a fresh 'revolution' almost every decade. There is no settled style in the poetry of our time, but only changing fashions, and most of the Movement poets are simply in the current fashion. Only very powerful, obstinate, indi- vidual talents can survive permanently among the critical shifts which ordain that Edith Sit- well and Dylan Thomas are the poetic geniuses of one lustrum, William Empson and John Betjeman those of the next. If there are any Par- ticular poetic dangers at the moment they do not come from the disorderly rhetorical romanti- cism of which Mr. Allott and the Movement writers are so suspicious, but from the influences of Mr. Empson, the father of much scruffy near- intellectualism, and Mr. Betjeman,5 who has moved many writers towards a whimsical self- deprecating humour of the most distasteful and poetically uninteresting kind. Only such major talents as those of Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Graves, can successfully steer a way through these perils (as Yeats emerged from the romanticism of the Nineties, and Graves shook off Georgian pastiche), and the only recent writer with the mental toughness and verbal skill to be able to do so seems to me to be Mr. Thorn Gunn.