Poetry Notebook (11 page)

Fragments of high quality were everywhere, but a completely integrated poem was hard to find. ‘Seascape with Edwardian Figures’ came nearest, but even that one tailed off: when the
tide departed towards the moon, the poem went with it. There was a long poem, ‘Valley of the Kings’, about Egyptian tombs. Freighted with his curious learning, it could have rivalled
the stately march of ‘Largo’, but its points of intensity were scattered, like the momentarily illuminated wall paintings in the tombs themselves, and nothing held them together except
the darkness between them. Flaring moments slid away into shadow:

I talk about ‘Valley of the Kings’ in the past tense because it is no longer alive, and the same applies, alas, to the whole of his later achievement. There is just
too little of Samuel Daniel’s ‘It is mine owne’ and too much of Dunstan Thompson’s ‘I do not know.’ Throughout the book, Thompson’s talent – in the
complex sense that involves perception, precision, and musicality – is everywhere, but that’s just the trouble. It’s everywhere without being anywhere. The lesson, I think, is
that a talent might be the necessary minimum, but it will not be sufficient if it can’t produce a poem, or at least a stanza, assured enough to come down through time and make us ask,
‘Who wrote
that
?’

James Merrill (1926–1995), another gay American poet who came to prominence a little later, wrote a poem about his upbringing, ‘The Broken Home’, that would have ensured his
survival even if his every other manuscript had gone up in smoke. The poem doesn’t bring his sexuality into focus – other poems did – but it does illuminate his early life. This
single passage about his father would have been enough to prove that a masterful voice had arrived:

I quote the passage because it was the first thing I read of Merrill’s that made me realize I would have to read everything else. When I began to, I soon realized that the
assurance of his early formal patterns provided the warrant for following him when his patterns became more complicated and finally ceased to be patterns at all. In the twentieth century, this was
a not uncommon progression among revolutionary spirits in all the arts. Picasso had conspicuously mastered every aspect of draughtsmanship and painting that had ever been applied to the
recognizable before he moved on into the less recognizable, and the best reason for trying to follow what he was up to was that he had proved he could actually do what he was no longer doing.
Stravinsky composed melodies you could hum and whistle – I can still do my version of the major themes from
Petrushka
unless somebody stops me – before he moved on to composing
what could only be listened to, and the best reason for listening hard was your memory of the authority he had displayed when the listening was easy. In poetry, Eliot went on proving that he was a
master of tight forms even as he became famous for works that apparently had no form at all, and that was the best reason for supposing that those works still depended on a highly schooled formal
sense. So there was nothing new about Merrill’s progression from poems with apprehensible boundaries to poems whose lack of boundaries was part of their subject. It was in the tradition of
modernism. But it depended on an assurance that made paying attention compulsory. This compulsory quality was what Dunstan Thompson lacked even in his brightest moments. Thompson didn’t have
Merrill’s vast financial resources – which enabled Merrill to do pretty much what he liked all his life, including, commendably, helping other poets when they were short of cash –
but Thompson did have nearly all of Merrill’s technical resources. Exploiting those, he might have built an impregnable position for himself, but you can’t help feeling that he
didn’t really want to. His relocation from America to England need not necessarily have been fatal. Earlier in the century it had worked triumphantly for Pound and Eliot, and the only reason
that Lowell made a hash of it later on was that his intermittent psychic disturbance had become almost continuous, and had weakened his strategic judgement to the point where he failed to recognize
that he wasn’t getting beyond the discipline of his wonderfully self-contained early poems, but was neutralizing that discipline in the name of an illusory scope. And it wasn’t as if
Lowell lacked a welcome in London. (If anything, he was too welcome: the locals would print anything he gave them.) The possibilities of working on both sides of the pond were rich, as was proved
in the next generation by Michael Donaghy, who was born in New York in 1954 and died in London at the age of only fifty.

At the time of writing, Donaghy’s complete works are being published in Britain by Picador in two neatly matched volumes:
Collected Poems
, which contains all four of the collections
published in his lifetime plus a sheaf of previously unpublished poems uniformly excellent, and
The Shape of the Dance
, which amounts to his collected prose. I was asked to write the
introduction for the prose volume and was glad to do so, because I think Donaghy was an important critic, even a necessary one. But the reasons to think so would be crucially fewer if he had not
been so authoritative as a poet. Within the first few lines of any poem he writes, he has made paying attention compulsory. There are simply dozens, even scores, of poems by which this fact could
be easily demonstrated, but let’s make it harder for ourselves, by choosing a poem where the reader has to dig a bit to figure out what is going on. That we feel compelled to dig is, I think,
a further illustration of the quality of command that we are talking about. The poem ‘Shibboleth’ was the title poem of the first collection he published in 1988. Here is the poem
entire:

For anyone of my generation it is obvious that this poem is about the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, when a special SS unit formed by Otto Skorzeny penetrated the American lines
with a view to creating havoc. The SS men – most of them
Volksdeutsche
who had been brought up in America – wore American uniforms, carried captured American weapons, spoke
perfect English, and could be identified only by what they didn’t know, because they had spent the last few years in Germany. One could make an objection based on just that point: none of the
suspects would have shown an ‘ignorance of baseball’ in general. They just would have been ignorant about the latest scores. (And two of the Andrews Sisters have their names misspelled:
‘Maxine’ was really ‘Maxene’ and ‘Laverne’ was really ‘LaVerne’.) But Donaghy has a far wider audience in mind than just my contemporaries. For his
own contemporaries, the whole episode might not be in their frame of reference; and he has done very little to clue them in. They have to figure it out. The reference to ‘GI’s’,
to the Andrews Sisters, or perhaps to Tarzan’s friend Cheetah, would probably be a starting point to help them identify which war it was. Finally they will get it right, and thus find out
that the shaving narrator can’t be Donaghy, who, at the time, was ten years short of being born. He has put his narrator into a war that could be any American war in which infiltrators have
to be detected according to their knowledge of American culture. It’s a
Battlestar Galactica
scenario, with the Germans as the Cylons. The new generation, who are just coming to poetry
now, might have that as their first thought. Donaghy future-proofed the poem by cutting back on its context. He often did that; or, rather, does that – let’s put him in the present,
where he belongs.

The typical Donaghy poem isn’t typical. Each poem has its own form and, remarkably, its own voice. Underlying this protean range of creative expression there is a critical attitude, which
is probably best summed up in a single essay contained in
The Shape of the Dance
. The essay is called ‘American Revolutions’ and it sums up his lifelong – lifelong in so
short a life – determination to make sense out of the twentieth-century conflict between formal and free verse. As a musician by avocation, Donaghy had no trust in the idea of perfectly
unfettered, untrained expression. He agreed with Stravinsky that limitations were the departure point for inspiration. Donaghy believed that a living poem could emerge only from an idea in
‘negotiation’ (the key word in his critical vocabulary) with an imposed formal requirement, even if it was self-imposed, and might be rendered invisible in the course of the
negotiation. The split between form and freedom, in his view, had begun with the difference between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. He favoured formality, to the extent of hailing Richard Wilbur
as the supreme phrasemaker. But he could also see that freedom had been fruitful. He was ready to welcome vital language wherever it came from, even if it came from the uninstructed. (This
readiness made him the ideal teacher of creative writing, even though he was suspicious of the very idea: there is a whole new cluster of young poets in London now who show the benefits of his
example.) Form and freedom: in all my reading about modern poetry – as opposed to my reading
of
modern poetry – I have not seen anything to equal Donaghy’s treatment of
this crucial matter for its extent, depth, and fundamental tolerance. As an underlying attitude for justifying the adventures of his own poetry, it could not have been better. But there is
something underlying even the attitude, and for that I can’t think of a better word than confidence.

Confidence is the attribute that can’t be taught. It can be damaged by circumstance, and encouraged when it falters, but the poet has to have it. Samuel Daniel, whose courtly music played
at the start of this disquisition, was confident enough to make a career out of his calling. When Thomas Campion questioned the need for rhyme in English poetry, Daniel set him straight. When
Daniel’s critics upbraided him for too much revising, he told them to get lost. If Gerard Manley Hopkins, a greater poet who was all calling and no career, had come back from the future and
accused him of being one of the founders of the deadly Parnassian measures whose default mode was an easy smoothness, Daniel would have known how to defend himself. He believed in his profession.
The same could be said for James Merrill, whose financial support for other poets – one of them was Elizabeth Bishop – was motivated by his personal experience of the consuming nature
of the art he practised. The same could be said of Robert Lowell, who was right in never questioning his mission to speak, even though, at those times when sanity was subtracted from his awesome
mental equipment, he so often spoke to his own detriment. The name we have to leave off the list, alas, is Dunstan Thompson. Auden once said that there are poets who have everything except the
desire to step forward. Thompson stepped forward in the beginning, but later he stepped back, and fell into the oubliette. Possibly there is such a thing as being so concerned with the self that
one loses sight of the poet’s privileged duty, which is to be concerned with everything, in the hope of producing something – a poem, a stanza, even a single line – that will live
on its own, in its own time.

Though a stanza might be the desirable measure by which we remember poets who write in stanzas, a more usual measure for remembering the greatest of all poets is the piece of a
verse paragraph. Shakespeare, in our memories, exists as phrases, lines and groups of lines, and just as often by the group of lines as by the phrase. Unless we are actors who must learn a part, no
other playwright, not even Marlowe, gets into our memories more than a phrase or two at a time; but anything by Shakespeare that we recall is always on its way to being a speech; and, as Camille
Paglia points out in her book
Break, Blow, Burn
, those compulsively memorable pieces from a Shakespeare play count as poems. Indeed they aspire to that condition. But they also aspire to
being the human voice overheard, and they are always hurrying past the listener’s ears. Some of the first listeners were professional copyists, sitting in the auditorium and writing down in
haste what the actor had just said. The result, for the printed editions, was a plentiful infection with distortion, error and ambiguity. In the epigraph of this book, there is a good case for
spelling ‘lightning’ as ‘lightening’. Which word was the word the writer meant is a matter for scholarship; a humanist activity which in the case of Shakespeare is almost as
endless as it is with Dante, and just as indispensable. Some tutors believe that the Arden edition should be the first text of any Shakespeare play that the student reads. From my own experience, I
would call that the right idea, but misplaced. Footnotes can be a forest, and there is such a thing as reaching a first acquaintance with Shakespeare without doing very much at all of moving the
eye-line down from the text to the notes crowding the bottom of the page. The distraction is least likely when there are no notes at all, as with the old Selfridge’s complete Shakespeare,
with a preface by Sir Henry Irving, that I carried with me on my travels until long after it fell to pieces. But eventually you will need the benefits of scholarship and commentary, or else bruise
your understanding from too much flying blind. There have always been learned poets who, fancying themselves as scholars of Shakespeare, think that they can provide a more pure and practical
analysis than the critics and professors. But usually they have overrated their intuitive powers. Not even Empson was clever enough to supersede the scholarly heritage, which was largely academic;
and it will always be advisable for the beginning enthusiast, once he has finished mocking the academic world, to make his peace with it, and learn something. One of the many attractive features of
the Shakespearean criticism written by John Berryman was that he was best pleased with himself when he sounded most like a scholar. There was not much he was humble about, but he was humble about
that.