Stephen Spender on poetry with an Oxford accent
Philip Larkin's poems are characterised by vocabulary and technique as scrupulous as his ear and eye. One can be quite sure that whatever he undertakes he will carry out with great conscientiousness. Knowing this, it is not altogether surprising to hear that he took six years selecting the poems for this volume.* The fact that he has chosen work by 216 poets bears witness to the extent of his reading. Everything about this book points to a strategy and if one finds the result a bit disappointing, this is not through his lacking care and consideration.
He sets out his aims in a preface so brief that they can be conveyed by quoting a few lines:
In making my selection I have striven to hold a balance between all the different considerations that press on anyone undertaking a book of this kind. At first I thought I would let the century choose the poets while I chose the poems, but outside two or three dozen names this did not really work. In the end I found that my material fell into three groups: poems representing aspects of the talents of poets judged either by the age or myself to be worthy of inclusion, poems judged by me to be worthy of inclusion without reference to their authors, and poems judged by me to carry with them something of the century in which they were written. Needless to say, the three groups are not equal in size, nor are they mutually exclusive.
This states the anthologist's problem without, however, revealing his principles for selecting what he, and not the century, chose. Obviously the reader expects from an Oxford Book anthology that it should include much work accepted by a consensus of opinion as being representative of the century, regardless of the anthologist's predilections. You have to put in a lot of stuff which you may not like, because the 'age demands' it. Nevertheless 'the century ' is an abstraction, which one accepts only on account of the problem, which is real. What I find harder to accept is that Mr Larkin refers to his own judgement as though that were also an abstraction. On the one hand, the century chooses, on the other hand, he chooses. The age chooses because of the 'consensus of opinion' — good; but one would like to have some idea of the principles on which he made his own choice. Without having any such guide, one doesn't know whether some choices — such as long rambling poems by Francis Brett Young and J. C. Squire — are the century's imposition or Mr Larkin's taste.
Indeed the idea of the century's choice rather falls to pieces when one considers things that have been said by people who themselves had claims to represent the century at various times. For example, the Georgian Poets were regarded by Sir Edward Marsh and a good many others as a 'nest of singing birds,' to be compared with the Elizabethan song writers. But Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves have all expressed the view that the year 1910 marked a very low ebb in English poetry. In attributing his selection to a combination of the century's choice and his own undefined and unclarified judge ment, Mr Larkin gives us no idea of his own view of the century.
The answer to my querulous complaining is to be found surely — some reader is bound to protest — in the contents of the anthology itself. The taste of the pudding in the eating. But this is exactly where I am most baffled. The impression left by the anthology is that ours is an age in which a dozen poets — Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Kipling, Auden, Betjeman, Larkin, etc — wrote wonderful poems but in which there were also a great many minor talents interchangeable with other minor talents, minor poems interchangeable wit'n other minor poems. It may have been Mr Larkin's intention to make an anthology demonstrating this, but there is no means of knowing. Is it the century or Mr Larkin that prints six-and-a-half pages by Wilfred Gibson, nine-and-a-half by Sir Jolin Squire, one by Sir Herbert Read, one by David Gascoyne, fourteen by Sir John Betjeman (as again three by William Empson): none at all by David Jones, Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington, H.D., Sacheverell Sitwell, W. J. Turner, Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley and George Russell (A.E.)? One is left floundering, trying to guess which is Philip Larkin's own judgement. I suspect one aim may have been not to make a selection which replaces Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern English Verse. There is less emphasis in Larkin's anthology than in Yeats's on the ' modern ' and the French-influenced; on symbolists, imagists and myth-weavers. One is struck by the fact that Yeats's anthology looks more modern because it began in the 1890s when English poets were influenced by Arthur Symon's book on the French symbolists. The Georgians reacted against the Parisian fin de siècle towards the little Englandism which had perhaps the unconscious and moving aim of trying to define an England which poets who were killed in the first world war could be patriotic about. They chose English countryside dust. Letting the century choose certainly meant printing large quantities of Georgian Poetry and Poems of Today — some of which D. H. Lawrence reacted against with all the violence of a vitality which made a poem like Ralph Hodgson's The Bull seem slain forever by that toreador. However, it has staggered to its feet again here, filling its six pages. So have "Ye have robbed," said he, "ye have slaughtered and made an end," (Newbolt), Wilfrid Gibson, John Masefield, John Drinikwater, Edward Shanks, and, for good measure, Gilbert Frankau and Gerald Gould, though not Yeats's favourite, W. J. Turner, who was, in two or three poems, really inspired. The Georgians, when they are not being as good as Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, and sometimes W. H. Davies can be, are singularly lowering (as not only Ezra Pound rudely asserted but Robert Frost quietly observed, in 1912). The reason for this is I think that they are attempting a kind of real-nature true-to-life poetry which only works when it achieves an effect of observation undiluted and crystalline. The Georgians havered between a loose strictness and an inhibited free-ness. Here is an example of loose strictness: We ate our breakfast lying on our backs Because the shells were screeching overhead.
Here is the not-so-free free-verse style:
The brown-faced nurse has murmured some thing unintelligible And is clucking distressedly.
She is apparently perturbed because I have not eaten my dinner. Such writing jogs along on the level of everyday facts it deals with. I can see that Mr Larkin likes facts and thinks that Poetry should be filled with them. What surprises me a bit is that he should like (unless this is the century's fault) so much that is dull in a mode which is only tolerable when it achieves a hallucinatory Clearness as it does in the poetry of Edward Thomas, and of course, in Larkin's own Poetry.
Deducing (perhaps unfairly) Mr Larkin's taste from the evidence provided by the Poems, I should say that this is a loaded selection. Its bias is against the movement Which was started by Pound and the imagists. Pound is not here represented, for the reason which may seem sufficent, that he was an American. However between 1907 and 1916 he was so much part of the English poetic scene that his nationality was overlooked by W. B. Yeats when he made his Oxford Book of Modern English Verse and it is overlooked again by Dame Helen Gardner in her recent Oxford Book of English Verse. Still more striking evidence of the ' presence ' of Pound as an influence, is that Quiller Couch wrote asking him to contribute to his Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Of all these anthologies, the one in which there would be most justification for printing work of Pound is that now under review.
The imagist poetry written by Pound in the early part of this century really is part of the history of English poetry. Without its being represented a counter-influence thrown into the Georgian cow-pastures goes scarcely mentioned. Ten lines by F. S. Flint, as many by T. E. Hulme and one short poem by Herbert Read — in the absence of anything by Ford, Aldington and H. D. — do not fill the gap. And The Waste Land, is not so much an influence as a block-buster and as Keats might have remarked, a thing per se. What is lacking here is the presence of the reaction against the Georgians represented in much critical Opinion, as for example in Robert Graves's and Laura Riding's Survey of Modernist Poetry — and realised in some poetry as well.
The best things in this anthology are Mr Larkin's discoveries and his printing of unfamiliar pieces. If one regrets some omissions, one is grateful for several recognitions, especially, towards the end of the volume, of the excellent West Indian Poet, Derek Walcott. It is worth a lot that Larkin has picked up one of the most courageous and spirited light poems of the century, J. B. S. Haldane's Cancer's a funny thing,' written as Haldane noted, "to induce cancer patients to be operated on early and to be cheerful about it." I greatly like Robert Garioch (Robert Sutherland) whom I had not read before — terrible perhaps, my ignorance. The book is strong on light verse: Isherwood's 'On my Queerness,' Max Beerbohm's parody of Thomas Hardy, A. L. Rowse on his cat, Noel Coward's truthfully reminiscing The Boy Actor,' and poems by that excellent Once young friend of mine, Gavin Ewart. Larkin pushes his lack of with-it-ness to the Hammersmith Reaches of the light verse of A. P. Herbert, whose cheering us Up so emphasised the bleakness of the last World war. Of course there are all the great inevitables in great force: Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot, Graves, Betjeman, Auden, Dylan Thomas. One can quarrel sometimes with the poems not chosen from among the great — but that is a lovers' quarrel. My only real protest is at his choice from Housman, of whom Larkin has chosen the Wenlock edge, Roman-epigrammatic poetry rather than the terribilita of ' Hell's Gate.' The real Housman is the poet of the most embittered frustrated carpe diem ever snatched at on the verge of the blackest death-fall.
This book should certainly be read but it leaves one with some of the regrets felt in the presence of a lost opportunity. The lack of a much more explicit preface means the loss of half of what makes for the interest of a selection like the present one. The interest lies not only in the .material chosen but also in the attitude towards it of an editor who is himself a poet and critic of exceptional sensibility. This anthology ought surely to have been explicitly an act of criticism. Whether one likes or dislikes W. B. Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern English Verse, Mr Larkin's book makes one realise • that it was a landmark, just because in the preface Yeats expressed the attitude of a poet and critic of his generation and his distinction. Without his preface, Yeats's selection would have been merely eccentric; with it, it is a document of the time. In the absence of a full explanation of Mr Larkin's own position, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse is a compilation made by a selector who, apart from the material " imposed by the age," has great curiosity and intelligence and has included some unexpected and interesting items.
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