Approaching the present, the historian runs into trouble. He enters the teeming city of the almost present and present, and as at Seven Dials in London, several plausible streets lead off in different directions. Being one traveler, long the historian stands. His chronology has been crumbling for a century already. Omissions have occurred along the way, regrettable omissions, among them William Collins and Edward Young, Arthur Hugh Clough and Robert Bridges reduced to adjuncts of Arnold and Hopkins, respectively. Where are the hymn writers—Isaac Watts in particular? And Lear and Carroll, the nonsense poets?
Chronology must be abandoned. Why do so many more poets call out for attention in the twentieth century than before? Is it demographic, the huge harvest of poetries from lands once pink on the globe? Or have the “winds of history” not yet gotten round to their winnowing? Had this account been written in 1798, would I have felt compelled to include Sir John Denham, John Pomfret, George Stepney, Richard Duke, Samuel Garth, John Hughes, Elijah Fenton, Gilbert West, David Mallet and thirty or so others? Of the fifty-two poets in Doctor Johnson’s Lives, which deals with his century, only eight detain us here, two thirteenths of what he regarded as necessary.
Standing at Seven Dials, we could make forays down streets called Australia, Canada (a short street, that), New Zealand, India, Ireland, South Africa, the Caribbean, the United States or Great Britain. But English poetry is different from New Zealand or Caribbean poetry. New Zealand poetry may mean a great deal to the domestic readership but does not export. What interests us is poetry that is New Zealand poetry and English poetry. To follow national streets would go against the grain of this history.
Another strategy: Follow journalistic and academic fashions. The second half of the twentieth century has been lavishly preoccupied—when it claims to be preoccupied with poetry at all—with other things, with poetry’s context, its usefulness to a cause, its “witness” and moral probity construed in the light of shifting preferences and concerns. We could follow ethnic routes, gender routes, gender-preference routes. We could follow pseudo-generic routes: performance poetry, protest poetry, concrete poetry. We could credit the rhetoric of schools, regionalisms and groupings. It would be another way. But it, too, would break the governing principle of this account—to look at the development of form, prosody, the language of poetry, connections between poems and poets, rather than record political and literary fashions.
There are earlier periods in which, like today, critical attention has focused on the orthodox and ephemeral, the eyes of critics resolutely averted from inappropriate achievement and radical imagination—if by “radical” we mean those imaginations that refine and redefine the art of poetry, paying tribute to tradition by innovation and extension, and that distrust the conventions of the age. The eighteenth century was such an age, the fin-de-siècle after the Wilde trial, and the decorums and orthodoxies of the 1930s. Political correctness is not new in anything but name. Today there are multiple orthodoxies, which might suggest a relatively larger measure of poetic freedom, but they are not—like eighteenth-century orthodoxies—governed by poetic imperatives so much as by other interests.
It is by way of inappropriate achievement and radical imagination that poetry has developed since the eighteenth century. Advocates can be found, but often made partisan by anger at perceived neglect, so that they make shrill claims. Pound is surrounded by a hectic industry, by hedges of patristics. Stevens and Ashbery are increasingly encumbered. Even Larkin begins to enjoy a polemical palisade.
The emergence of Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham and other writers who missed the boats of youth can be seen as enabling to readers and poets today, but their absence from their own period, as Hopkins’s absence from his or Emily Dickinson’s from hers, deprive not only the author but the literature itself of crucial relationships and potential exchanges. It is possible for half a century to look in the wrong direction, or to look for the wrong things in the right direction.
There are about two hundred poets we might attend to in the remaining pages. It will be impossible to do even two thirteenths of that number justice. The first six centuries have accommodated only 130 writers in any detail. Now I shall choose poets whose work, rooted in a locality or in a particular “speech,” have had or will have the energy to cross seas and continents. Much that belongs to national literatures is excluded because its forms and the issues it raises are specific to a nation. The irruption of modernism in countries that rejected it first time round, the growth of the “postmodern” in literatures that were never shaken out by the modern: fascinating, even heroic phenomena, but their lineaments are already familiar. Poems in traditional forms that have not been brushed by the modern, that have not made their choices consciously rather than conventionally, also belong to their rather than to our culture.
Our modern culture? For me it begins with Hardy and Pound, Eliot and Yeats, Williams and Stevens. It has been an absentminded culture, mislaying H.D., Isaac Rosenberg, Charlotte Mew, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Basil Bunting, Laura Riding, Sorley Maclean, Mina Loy, then rediscovering them. It has piously carried forward poets like Carl Sandburg and C. Day-Lewis, Rupert Brooke and Edith Sitwell—at last, regretfully, abandoning them on a very high shelf.
We can find continuities within a culture that seems riven between hostile camps. Thom Gunn in P N Review argues for a “spectrum” approach to modern American poetry, an approach that finds common ground between the experimental Language Poets and the radical traditionalism of Edgar Bowers, the old and new formalists. His approach—my approach—acknowledges diversity with commonality of resources. It insists on plurality as against faction and canonical closure, even if faction can be useful for poets finding their feet in a difficult “culture of reception.” My approach acknowledges ethnicity, gender or gender preference, when they affect the development of poetic language and form, the extension of expression, the opening of new space. It proposes stable points of departure, even as it exemplifies difference and identifies the new.
We have arrived at André Malraux’s and Donald Davie’s Imaginary Museum. Davie writes: “The chief advantage of looking at modern poetry from the point of view of the Imaginary Museum is that only from this standpoint do poetic styles as various as those of Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, of Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, appear as so many different (yet related) answers to one and the same problem—the problem of a radically changed relationship to the poetic past, a relationship which must be different from Tennyson’s or Pope’s.” The formation of “movements” and the writing of manifestos are attempts to reconstitute what is found now only in separation. A poet may have theories, but what validates the work is the work itself. Given the twenty-four-hour open access to the Museum, a franchise now extended through the World Wide Web, any poet can trifle with what is found there, or—as was the case with Pound, Eliot, Stevens and Yeats—can choose and integrate into their work elements that answer a thematic or formal need the poet has. Pound, in taking troubadour or Provençal poetry on board, takes on board the languages in which the poems are written, the history that animates them, where possible a sense of the original poets. Responsible borrowing from the Imaginary Museum means more than “I like that”: it means “I need to understand that. I need that.”
I consider poets who add resources to poetry and may influence the future growth of the art and the language, poets who please me or who make me take stock. Taste is one function, judgment another and they do not always run in synch. It is possible (if taste is to develop) for it to be led by judgment; there are poets in this book who puzzle me in a way that I believe will turn to pleasure in due course. I was puzzled by Bunting, Davie, Ashbery and Sisson; coming to terms with this puzzlement has been an education.
I ought to declare a bias. Since Langland and Gower addressed their very different audiences in the fourteenth century, there have been two kinds of poetry and two kinds of audience. One kind of poetry seeks to elicit a collective response. Its origins are in the popular Bible tradition, its most eloquent and acclaimed modern exponents are the performance poets. Their poems are political, wedded to a community of concern and an immediate period. There is another kind of poetry, differently rooted in the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, which elicits what one critic calls a “communal” response, a poetry to which each reader responds in an individual way and which is sufficiently capacious to accommodate a variety of needs and responses. The first kind of poetry engenders “solidarity” of a social and political kind; the second kind produces communion, an experience shared in different ways, to different degrees, to individual ends. I prefer the second kind. I am ill at ease with a poetry that has designs on me rather than on its subject and its medium. I prefer grace to compulsion.
Taking bearings from the modernists, I love Hardy and Frost; a taste for Murray, Larkin and Cope frees me from dogma. A reader who takes modernist bearings believes it is possible to find coherence in a large body of work from many corners of the world. A postmodern reader witnesses (gratefully) to incoherence, and a New Formalist reader might wish that Pound, Eliot, Lawrence and Williams had never put pen to paper.
I intend to steer the remainder of the way by the big lights of the first half of the century: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Hugh MacDiarmid, W. H. Auden, Yvor Winters, William Empson, Robert Graves and Laura Riding. Into their orbits I hope to draw other poets and then to infer directions, or by indirection find direction out.