Poetry and criticism
Douglas Dunn
A Poetry Chronicle Ian Hamilton (Faber E2.95) Founding father of the 'Greek Street cenacle,' Ian Hamilton has been editing The Review and contributing to The Observer, TLS, London Magazine and other periodicals for just over ten years. The earliest of his collected reviews and essays is dated 1963, which could have been only a short time after he came down from Oxford with a traditionally indiffer ent degree. Somehow, somewhere, Ham ilton learned how to read a book of poems, and we are the better for it. A Poetry Chronicle presents a level of seriousness, pertinacity and insight which is well worth having and may correct the damaging reputation he has acquired for planning new books of verse before they have a chance to get clear of the publisher's warehouse.
Authority is easily enough got hold of through posturing in the right ways at the right times in the mirrors of fashion; or through the licence of credentials grubbed after in university examinations. Much more attractive, much more important, is the critic w'ho writes with flair. In his irreverent essay on The Waste Land, part of the gist is that Eliot's poem has been elevated and at the same time opened up to misunderstanding by 'academic tinkering.' Only a critic uncommitte4 to digesting libraries of critical exegesis, or presenting The Waste Land as the crucial modern poem, could ask of it, as Hamilton does: "To what extent can the poem be said to justify the claims that have been glibly made for it as an illuminating, massively inclusive, revelation of what modern life is really like? Are the ideas really transmitted into poetry, or are they just ideas? And are they good ideas?" Asking these questions, let alone answer ing them, sends a critic into a cold fright; but there is no mongering after critical sensations in A Poetry Chronicle.
Hamilton's fundamental position is that poetry is a serious, important and living art. He seems to have put his faith in Eliot's suggestion that a society concerned with poetry must first take seriously the poetry of its own time. However, there is nothing of Eliot's or Pound's belief that it is of importance to bring poets of the past into contemporary understanding. He goes no further back than Eliot, Frost, or Crane, and his only attempt to rehabilitate poets who have lapsed into contemporary misunderstanding is represented by his essay on The Forties,' where he asserts a new reputation for Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis and a contempt for the Apocalyptic poets, the reaction against them in t'he 'fifties having written off the rest of the decade with the same clichés.
Although one can detect something of Matthew Arnold in Hamilton's approach, he has had neither the time nor the inclination to formulate ideas on the Arnoldian subject of the poet in society. Randall Jarrell, an Arnoldian critic, is quoted a number of times, and Hamilton clearly admires him; yet there is nothing of Jarrell's 'taste of the age' criticism in Hamilton's writing. This •is a gap in the book which I consider important enough to point out; the nature of Hamilton's intelligence, the implicit beliefs on which his criticism is based, are enough to prove his qualifications for such a subject. Poetry and criticism are at present greatly in need of Arnoldian formulations.
Admirably written as his reviews are, a taste of journalism persists, like a residue. They are too well turned for a reader to get the impression that they were written to deadlines; but he is overfond of 'a sort of ...," "a kind of . . .," while, when he censures what a poet does least well, words like " naughty " or " limp " crop up too often.
Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin are the 'poets Hamilton is chiefly concerned with. He praises poetry in terms of "the personal allegiances that really matter," and generally nds little to sympathise with in poetry that assumes too great a sophistication or detachment from the actualities of modern life, or poems — like The Waste Land, or Crow — in which the poet's view of life seems unreasonably distorted by personality. In the case of Crow, his tolerance falters. While he seems almost, but not quite, willing to accept the way Eliot's inward obsessions conditioned how Ted Hughes looked at the world and 'other people,' the poet is scrutinised and conclusions are reached that more than imply the 'mmorality' of Crow. What a man is stuck with, he is stuck with; imagination works as it must, not as it ought, and even if it seeks objects that are painful, brutal, grotesque or negative, it cannot, as testament or vision, be 'immoral,' though men of goodwill may recoil from it in disgust. To believe otherwise is to be a philistine. Social kindness is, anyway, a peripheral motive in art, whatever else it may be in life — and it is often a tactic, or a lie.
Against flash rhetorics, against poetry that hangs by a mere theory or debilitating cleverness over the real abyss, against incoherence and pretension, against artlessness — it is perhaps inevitable that a critic dealing with the poetry of the last decade should seem less than positive about what he actually likes. Enthusymusy, however, has never helped a writer to be precise.
Over the same period of ten years, Hamilton's magazine, The Review, has shown itself to be the only literary magazine the decade could not have done without. Because it has been in deadly earnest, in each issue, on a subject that in recent years has become associated with social gatherings and the festivals of wellmeaning municipalities, its subscription list has been disappointing. A special Tenth Anniversary Issue consisting of a symposium on The State of Poetry' is still available.
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