BOOKS

American Examples

By THOM. GUNN

T USED to think it apt to divide modern poetry 'between Wild and Tame poets. But actually the classification is of little use in a discussion of the younger Americans, as we can see from look- ing at The New Poets of England and America* and doing some outside reading. There are no, Or practically no, good wild poets among them. Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti—the San Fran- cisco group—have received vast public atten- tion, but are very properly excluded from the anthology : without the benefit of either skill or rationality, their fashionable indignation has nothing to do with literature. As Dr. Leavis has said in another connection, 'they belong rather to the history of publicity.'

Nor are the best young poets tame. They arc modest, it is true, in that they have bothered to learn their craft before trying to get into print. But before sneering at the modesty as a sinister sign of 'conformity' or American academicism, it's as well to remember that learning the rules was a matter of course for any poet writing in English between Chaucer and Pound. To write poetry without knowing, for example, about the proper use of runovers used to be considered as impertinent as it would be now to,apply for a job as a truck- driver without knowing how to shift gear. It is true that being able to shift gear does not mean that one can drive straight or that one has the

necessary stamina to keep the job, but it is a pre- requisite.

At the very least, then, they have the proper equipment, which is not quite so common nowa- days as it should be. Apart from Lowell and Wilbur, who are hardly 'new poets,' I find the most interesting of those included in the anthology are Anthony Hecht, James Merrill, Louis Simpson, Edgar Bowers and Donald Hall, and of those not included Ralph. Pomeroy and Alan Stephens. I would like to discuss some of them so as to give an idea of the power and variety of the best poetry by the young Americans.

Hecht and Merrill are the two I am least sure about. They write in a style now slightly out- moded, which is usually known as 'dandyism.' I myself find it rather tiresome, because I am Often blinded to the meaning of the poem by such a dazzling display of dexterity. But each Possesses a really stunning rhetorical power, which we English may well envy. Examples of this may be found in Hecht's 'La Condition Bota- uique,' reprinted here, and in Merrill's 'Midas Among Goldenrod.'

Louis Simpson, on the other hand, is simple, but he is, like the early Blake, deceptively simple. The selection from him in the anthology (oddly, since he is one of the editors) does not show his full range. This is a poem of his not included, The Battle' : t Helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat Marched through a forest. Somewhere up ahead Guns thudded. Like the circle of a throat The night on every side was turning red.

"Thom Gunn has received the Soerset Maugham AWard for his book of poetry e of Movement, Published by Faber.

They halted and they dug. They sank like moles Into the clammy earth between the trees. And soon the sentries, standing in their holes, Felt the first snow. Their feet began to freeze.

At dawn the first shell landed with a crack. Then shells and bullets swept the icy woods. This lasted many days. The snow was black. The corpses stiffened in their scarlet hoods.

Most clearly of that battle I remember The tiredness in eyes, how hands looked thin Around a cigarette, and the bright ember Would pulse with 411 the life there was within.

1 know of almost no other poem about war which, soberly, without either hysteria or irony, is as convincing. The first three stanzas are factual— a description of things as they are—but the meta- phors are already working to prepare us for the end : the soldiers have become things, or passive animals. The feeling, which is considerable, is delayed until the last stanza (where the first person is introduced for the only time) and is then carefully revealed by the double reference of the word 'within' but at the same time con- trolled by the use of an apparently impersonal image which leads naturally from the scene de- scribed. The point to be made is that such control does not take from the feeling—it adds to it.

Ralph Pomeroy, who is not included in the anthology, is totally different from the others 1 am discussing : his poems are part of a Chasse spirituelle, and in them suggestion or symbol often bears the weight of the meaning. Neverthe- less, words cannot entirely abandon their common applications, and it is probably when Pomeroy combines the maximum connotative and denota- tive strength that he is most successful. His main weakness is at present a structural one, and like many poets of this kind he is not always able to tell his best writing from his worst, so that often the two may stand side by side in the same poem. But out of every hundred spiritual hunters, ninety-nine drink themselves to death, join a church, attend Writers' Conferences or in some other way refuse to admit that a tangible world exists; and the fact that Pomeroy does not make such a refusal, and does not look likely to, speaks well for his future.

Edgar Bowers does not run the same philo- sophical risks. The firSt lines of his bool4 are :

These poems arc too much tangled with the error And waste they would 'complete.

That is, unlike Pomeroy, he writes to 'complete,' to sum up, rather than to prolong and re-experi- ence. Implicit in his poetry is a full acknowledg- ment of the English and French traditions, in particular of the Elizabethan poets and Valdry. Considering both logic and feeling indispensable, he writes a kind of rich statement which is both difficult and exciting. I would call him, with Simp- son, the best of his generation, but he has already

* THE NEW NW Is nF ENGLAND AND AMERICA. Edited by Hall, Pack and Simpson. (Meridian Books, $1.45.)

t GOOD NEws nF DEATH. BY Louis Simpson. (Poets of Today, IL Scribner's, $3.50.) THE FORM OF Loss. By Edgar Bowers. (Alan Swallow, $2.00.)

produced poems more mature than any of Simp- son's. 'From William Tyndale to John Frith,' 'The Stoic,' and 'Grove and Building' (all in- cluded in the anthology) are three varied and excellent poems, but they are varied in a way that Simpson's are not, for they are all expres- sions of the same seriousness of preoccupation. It is, predominantly, a moral preoccupation —a preoccupation with the meaning of human action. The comments on action and the descrip- tions of it are always intimately involved through- out each poem. This is why it is difficult to find any short passage which, quoted, could be seen to contain all his virtues watertight. 'Grove and Building' opens with these lines :

When, having watched for a long time the trees Scatter the sun among their shaded places, You turn away, your face is many faces. Each formed by the resistance of the leaves.

Even this dislocated stanza gives some idea of the interpenetration of the sensuous and intellectual in Bowers's poetry.

The interest in experiment, in 'being avant- garde,' is as dead among the responsible writers in America as it is over here, but there it is replaced by a robust concern for both excellence of tech- nique and weight of subject. For the first, there is a curious clumsiness, almost a technical naivety, about many of the young (and not so young) English poets, including many that I ad- mire. And there is also among us a more disas- trous tendency, perhaps related to this: a reluc- tance to be in earnest (which is not the same as to be earnest): we go trampling on, tongues busily scouring cheeks, in the footsteps of Auden and Graves as if the wistful-urbane were the only way to write. A young poet like Bowers is almost inconceivable in a country which seems so determined to inflate the reputation of Graves's modest talent. It is time for the English, also, to return to the main tradition of English poetry, where adult matters can be spoken about in a tone which is both flexibleand firm.