The Columbia History of British Poetry (147 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 577
Poetry in England, 19451990
Vincent Sherry
The anonymous leading article in the
Spectator
of October 1, 1954, "In the Movement," hailed the emergence of a new group of writers, a generation whose sensibility was "
bored
by the despair of the Forties,
not much interested
in suffering, and extremely
impatient
of poetic sensibility. . . . The Movement, as well as being
anti
-phoney, is
anti
-wet;
sceptical
, robust,
ironic
. . . ." This is a Movement manqué, it seems, for the reviewer defines its energy entirely by negatives. Again, in the polemical introduction to the first English anthology of Movement verse,
New Lines
(1956), Robert Conquest groups his poets under "a negative determination to avoid bad principles." And in a poem that now reads as a thesis piece for the movement, Philip Larkin's "I remember, I remember," the speaker lists the high moments in the life of the conventional poet as nonexperiences: remembering where his "childhood was unspent,'' including the garden where he "did not invent / Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits," he recalls how his uninspired juvenilia "was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read," and drifts (hardly drives) toward the proverbial wisdom that "'nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'"
While this sensibility appears (it is hard to think of it "flourishing") in the mid-1950s, its cartoonlike simplifications have prolonged its life among critics of postwar English poetry, especially American commentators. They can use it to label the imaginative project of a subsiding world power, whose poets, formally conservative and reactionary, battle the (putative) excesses of an energy they do not own, in particular the experimental and convention-dismaying verve of American
 
Page 578
modernists and postmodernists. The credibility of this caricature win be questioned, but the tendency to regard English poetry as behind the times derives from the reality of circumstances in postwar Britain. By 1946 it was clear that the chain of poetic generations had been brokenthe departure of W. H. Auden for America in 1939 was followed by the deaths of the best war poets (Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes)and this disruption of continuity helped to create the impression that English poets would never catch up. The war itself represented a hiatus in English cultural life, when intellectuals became people who sent messages to captive Europe.
Yet the duress that slowed the initial renaissance of English verse might also remain as a potent imaginative memory, a resource that supplies poetry with a sense of the reality of history and the truths of tragedy. The best English poets of the postwar periodLarkin, Donald Davie, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, and Charles Tomlinson, in the first generationengage those awarenesses, among other things, in ways that certainly challenge a critical stereotyping of their diminished force. The negativism of the movement writers, first of all, represents more than a justification of inertia: it is a response, sometimes predictable but in other ways searching and intelligent, to the intellectual and political culture of the recent war. In this context their poetry recovers some of its original strength and complexity.
Movement writers aimed their rebukes at the excesses of the major school of the preceding decade. The New Romantics or Apocalyptics, seeking to reach an emotionally and sensually charged awareness equal to that of war, had exaggerated the mannerisms of Romantics such as Dylan Thomas, and their extravagant surrealism was countered by the dour probity of the 1950s. More subtle and interesting are the connections the movement poets drew between those literary excesses and the calamities of history. Kingsley Amis, writing a Fabian tract on Romanticism, linked the ideological extremism of the war with the emotional and imaginative excesses of Romanticism, which leads one, he argued, to believe in causes which are not one's own, not subject to the approval of the individual's reason.
While the movement poets feared ideological commitment and the verbal inflation attending it, they had also gone through adolescence in the 1930s, a decade in which English verse had ostensibly regained its social commitment. Their sense of lost purpose emerges in a play whose energies are often likened to theirs, John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger
 
Page 579
(1956); the problems of its disaffected protagonistthe "angry young man" Jimmy Porterturn around the fact that there are "no great causes left." An understanding of this moment in literary history is properly thickened, then, in Donald Davie's 1955 poem, "Remembering the Thirties," which reads at once like a rejection of heroic intellectual causes and a lament for their passing: "A neutral tone is nowadays preferred," he notes, but then concedes, "it may be better, if we must, / To praise a stance impressive and absurd / Than not to see the hero for the dust.''
Another point of provocation for movement poets was the vatic posturing of the New Romanticsthe quasi-prophetic intensities of apocalyptic poets such as G. S. Fraser. On one hand the incomprehensibility of that verse allowed it to stand as the most recent examplea kind of terminus ad quemof the whole cult of difficulty in literary modernism. The phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s of coterie literature proved synonymous, a number of commentators agreed, with the destruction of meaning, the global nihilism of recent history. More specifically, Donald Davie linked the mysterious, irreducible images of Pound (and other Imagists) with the hieratic powers of fascism, claiming that the line of descent from aesthetics to politics was direct. Thus Davie's
Purity of Diction in English Verse
(1952) and
Articulate Energy: An Enquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry
(1955) attempted to raise the standards of intelligent lucidity and rational statement in verse to replace the coercive unintelligibility of the postsymbolists, modernists, and New Romantics.
The oracular difficulty of this verse fractured the old contract between writer and reader, complained Philip Larkin, who joined others in blaming it for the "decline" in contemporary English culture and society. The very dire nature of postwar circumstances, on the other hand, placed the poet in the role of a reformer, who may assume the mantle of moral authority, the character-in-voice of the social prophet. Thus their
rappel à l'ordre
comprises but exceeds the orderly surfaces of neo-Augustan verse, calling upon the latent strengths of the visionary. Davie's poem on the 1930s, for example, moves its grammar of discursive statements toward final images no less elemental, no more readily convertible into easy prose meaning, than the hierophantic figures of Isaiah:
For courage is the vegetable king,
The sprig of all ontologies, the weed
That beards the slag heap with his hectoring,
Whose green adventure is to run to seed.
 
Page 580
"Run to seed": degenerated, or passed on to the next generation? The phrase catches up divided attitudes to the social causes of the 1930s poets and, more crucially, to the value of prose clarity that its oracular ambivalence defies.
That the movement was nonprogrammatic but eclectic or even dialectical is suggested most forcibly by its youngest member, Thom Gunn, who combined its severe punctilio of prosodic form with the stagy machismo of the Angry Young Man. As in "Lines for a Book":
I think of all the toughs through history
And thank heaven they lived, continually.
I praise the overdogs from Alexander
To those who would not play with Stephen Spender.
Filtering his fantasies of sexual dominance through the traditions of poetic wit and the Renaissance school of magnificence, measuring the excitements of motorcycle gangs and rock-and-roll music to the decorous cadences of the heroic couplet, Gunn seemed to allow the elements of verbal and metrical control to hypostatize as themes. Thus he validated, unwittingly it now seems, the coarsest of masteries, producing a verse of fiercely intelligent brutality. His self-awareness in this regard coincided with his move to the United States later in the 1950s, where the influence of Yvor Winters both extended and modified his earlier formalism, and where his poetry developed in response to pressures different from those affecting his English contemporaries. Yet he remains the most visible register of the tensions and countercurrents at work in the popular and literary culture of the decade.
These conflicts enriched the more important poetry Larkin wrote through the 1950s. He overtly rejected by 1946 the hieratically Yeatsian manner of his earlier verse, but later (mostly unpublished) pieces witness its more than residual force. His most productive challenge lay in its accommodation to the plain-speech ethic of Thomas Hardy (the "neutral tones" Davie hears in the 1950s acknowledge a model in Hardy's poem of that title). Little accommodation occurs in "Church Going," however, one of Larkin's best known poems. Here the typically wry and sardonic English wit, the poet-clerk, asserts a poetics of common sense against the portentous absurdity of the poet-prophet:
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly . . .

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