WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, LOUIS ZUKOFSKY, BASIL BUNTING, CHARLES OLSON, ROBERT CREELEY, DENISE LEVERTOV, ROBERT DUNCAN, J. H. PRYNNE, JOHN RILEY, VERONICA FORREST-THOMSON, CHARLES TOMLINSON
Like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams was at least two men in one: poet and successful doctor, a general practitioner with a leaning to pediatrics. He qualified as a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1906. Already he was writing poetry. He started suddenly, around the age of eighteen, never before having contemplated an artistic vocation. In his Autobiography he recalls that his first poem was “a bolt from the blue” and “broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence.” It was four lines, and it filled him with “soul-satisfying joy” stronger than the self-criticism that followed.
A black, black cloud
flew over the sun
driven by fierce flying
rain.
The real Williams seems to have been born with most of his skills about him: the terse lineation, the free verse (which he never agreed to call “free,” inventing the term “variable foot” to define his practice), the sense of clear image. About twenty years later, reviewing Kora in Hell (1921), Marianne Moore said: “Compression, colour, speed, accuracy and that restraint of instinctive craftsmanship which precludes anything dowdy or labored—it is essentially these qualities that we have in his work.” Before Williams got to Kora he had to work his way through Keats—and Shelley.
He became a close friend of H.D. and Ezra Pound. In 1909 he published Poems, which he later stigmatized as “bad Keats” laced with bad Whitman. There was hope, then: two irreconcilable voices were struggling with his tongue. He also traveled to London, stayed with Pound and met Yeats. He divided his life only half jokingly into a B.C., before Pound, and an A.D., after their friendship commenced. By the time of his second book, The Tempers (1913), he had taken giant steps in what was to be his own direction.
Europe—he studied at Leipzig—seemed rather too full of stale culture for him, despite the vivid world that spun about Pound. After study and internship abroad he returned home and took up a practice outside the city of Paterson, New Jersey, in Rutherford, where he had been born in 1883, and married his longstanding (and later long-suffering) fiancée, Florence Herman, the famous Flossie, in 1912. His own antecedents were English, French Basque and Jewish, and he was pleased to be in himself a melting pot. His father was a traveling perfume salesman and Williams was raised by his mother and grandmother.
He was a natural prey for Pound’s anthology Des Imagistes. He remained closer to the original Imagist practice than many of the other poets in Pound’s book, including Pound himself. He opposed abstraction (Pound’s GIFOA—go in fear of abstractions—was an article of faith for him) and romantic subjectivity staking an objectivist perspective: “no ideas but in things.” He was not, however, content merely with the small Imagist poem, and time after time attempted major works. He took a strong dislike to T. S. Eliot, that “renegade American” who had thrown in his lot with the old culture. The Waste Land was a “catastrophe” not only because of its stylistic choices but because it was so darned negative. Frost he found too homespun and hickish, a stage American rather than the real thing.
His hostility to Eliot coarsened some of his polemics, but it drove him vigorously to advocate and create an American poetry and idiom that had few points of contact with the traditional mainstream. He combined verse and prose and broke the iamb so thoroughly that his successors would never be able to put it back together again. He took surrealism on board for a time with as much and as little understanding of it as Hart Crane was to have. It was natural that, for political and poetic reasons, his influence should grow. Important books (he published voluminously) included Spring and All (1923), the Collected Earlier Poems (1951), Paterson (published in four books between 1946 and 1958, with a fifth in note form), The Desert Music (1954), Journey to Love (1955) and Pictures from Breughel (1962). Three substantial volumes brought together his definitive work in the 1980s: Collected Poems 1909–1939, Collected Poems 1939–1962 and a scholarly edition of Paterson.
He cast a spell not only on his contemporaries. Robert Lowell revered him, as did many of his generation. Allen Ginsberg regarded himself as a disciple (Williams wrote an introduction to Ginsberg’s first book). Charles Olson believed himself to have received from the master the divine fire and perhaps the apostolic succession. Adrienne Rich found his example enabling in her difficult and decisive transition. Most of his poems and his extensive prose—fiction, criticism, autobiography—is fully and unapologetically wedded to the contingent world, the very cliché from which Stevens distances himself. And yet by going into that world, Williams at his best achieves the “real” that Williams writes of and for, and Stevens himself could hear what Williams was doing and acknowledged it in an essay introducing Williams’s work. Two writers technically more ill assorted are hard to imagine, and yet both had America, both had careers as well as a poetic vocation. Both had Whitman in their blood, in different measures. “It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art,” Williams writes, “it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.” These words, like many others of Williams’s dicta, are not quite right for his own poems but better fit the verse of Stevens.
He returned to Europe in 1924, saw Pound and met Joyce, but for the most part he stayed in the Americas, pursuing his career and vocation and developing his enormous oeuvre. He wrote in the evenings or in his surgery between appointments, punching away at his typewriter. He tended to compose straight on the typewriter, rather than to type up poems written out by hand. Weekends he sometimes went to New York and met artists and writers. In 1931 he joined with fellow poets—his juniors—Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky to establish the short-lived “Objectivist” movement, the one club he helped to found (he was more of a fellow traveler with the Imagists). Their aim was to write poems that in their very form embodied the case they were making or representing: “The poem being an object (like a symphony or a cubist painting) it must be the purpose of the poet to make of his words a new form.” The terms are more abstract than those Williams was accustomed to tolerating from others. More to the point, he wrote, “Being an object, [the poem] should be treated and controlled—but not as in the past. For past objects have about them past necessities—like the sonnet—which have conditioned them and from which, as a form itself, they cannot be freed.” The objectivist set out “to invent... an object consonant with his day.”
A consistent liberal during the McCarthy period, in 1948 he was deprived of the post of consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, an affront that hurt him to the quick, given his devotion to a specifically American literature. That was the year he suffered a heart attack. Gradually he handed over his medical practice to one of his two sons. Small strokes continued to weaken him and by 1961 he could no longer write.
Paterson remains his most difficult work, an enormous and uneven, wholly American epic. The geography is that of the Passaic River; the history—including the geological history—is that of the place, the falls, the city. Paterson is the Doctor at the heart of the poem, a kind of Williams surrogate, “a man identified with the city,” and the voice of the city as well. The voice traces the city’s life and the poet’s; it encounters the multifarious Eternal Woman, symbolically a park in the city (woman as nature rather than nurture), but also incorporating Flossie and the numerous other women Williams had known. The first book is startling and magnificent, but each subsequent book loses energy. Marianne Moore’s list of qualities—compression, color, speed, accuracy and restraint—is reduced down to simply “color” and “accuracy.” The rest are only fitfully found. The combination of prose, lyric, letters, documentary, in a collage form, is ambitious, the apotheosis of the principle of juxtaposition of image, register and voice. It is an emphatically American adventure. “My whole life / has hung too long upon a partial victory.”
“A poem,” he wrote, “is a small (or large) machine made of words as [the poet] finds them inter-related about him and composes them—without distortion which would mar their exact significance—into an intense expression of his preoccupations and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses.” An enemy of orthodoxy, he did develop certain difficult theories of his own. If there was no such thing as “free verse” and he did not write in meter, what did he write in? The “variable foot,” instinctively apprehended and deployed, was his measure, which he could never define in terms sufficiently clear to make it generally intelligible, though it is probably the source for Olson’s “breath” theories, equally difficult to appraise and monitor. A poem’s measure, he declares, is the line, regardless of accent or syllable count. Each line counts one beat, and “Over the whole poem it gives a pattern to the metre that can be felt as a new measure.” Gertrude Stein might have said: vers libre is vers libre is vers libre. He invented the triadic verse, or three-stepped line, in effect a long line split into three and indented, a measure taken up by later poets, including Charles Tomlinson and Thom Gunn. He chose short lines, for the most part, “because of my nervous nature... The rhythmic pace was the pace of speech, an excited pace because I was excited when I wrote.” The recordings of his public readings make him sound cheerful, rather shrill, with continual pauses when he seems to laugh nervously, quietly, with himself, with his poems. His temperament never visited the Waste Land: he is an heir of Emerson and Whitman, not of Melville and Dickinson.
His prose is often wonderful, especially in In the American Grain (1925), which sets itself the task of re-seeing America by means of the lives of its explorers and writers. His account of the conquest of Mexico has no parallel in American prose. He “renames the things seen” and makes America more coherent in its diversity, more American, in the process. But it is the poems that concern us here.
Marianne Moore reviewed his Collected Poems (1934): “ ‘The senseless unarrangement of wild things,’ which he imitates, makes some kinds of correct writing look rather foolish; and as illustrating that combination of energy and composure which is the expertness of the artist, he has never drawn a clearer self-portrait than ‘Birds and Flowers’ ”:
What have I done
to drive you away? It is
winter, true enough, but
this day I love you.
This day
there is no time at all
more than in under
my ribs where anatomists
say the heart is—
What Williams does in poem after poem is, undeliberately, to achieve a particular kind of transformation. In his famous poem “This is just to say,” an apology to his wife for having eaten the plums in the refrigerator, for example, the entire poem is conducted in a tone of apology and in visual terms, until at the close there is a sudden switch of senses to taste and temperature. He has, as it were, changed key by changing sense register. Without that simple sleight of language the poem would be inert. The poems that affect us move forward by way of these transitions, the language as it were changing focus by changing sense register. Sight can lead to taste or smell, which may trigger memory, nostalgia, an expression of love; or an expression of love may find grace in the scenes and objects to hand. Transitions: It is not unlike the “betweens” of Edward Thomas, in which sense is revealed and released, not in a way we can lay hold of with prose, but in a way the imagination grasps instantly. In “The Red Wheelbarrow” there is the language of function and the language of image, which provide a context (the “white chickens”). It too is a love poem, for love and gratitude are elicited as much by objects as by people.
And he remains, for all his love of the literal, a literary poet. A fine poem in his triadic measure comes rather late in his career, “The Sparrow,” dedicated to his father; it is his attempt to reply to his once-beloved Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”; it is also a way of writing about his own sexual desires “man to man,” making peace with a father he knew too little. And how far we have come in poetry, that a language so plain should achieve such wry authority.
Practical to the end,
it is the poem
of his existence
that triumphed
finally;
a wisp of feathers
flattened to the pavement,
wings spread symmetrically
as if in flight,
the head gone,
the escutcheon of the breast
undecipherable,
an effigy of a sparrow,
a dried wafer only,
left to say
and it says it
without offense,
beautifully;
This was I,
a sparrow,
I did my best;
farewell.
The polysyllabic, poetical, highfallutin’ diction is the poet’s; the simple candid language belongs to the image, the no-longer-sparrow whose life and loves are the cheerful subject of the poem and whose after-existence as image is a source not of sadness but joy—it did exist, and in its existence it had meaning.
Williams’s association with the brief but sporadically influential 1930s movement of the Objectivists was a generally happy one. Zukofsky was the catalyst, himself spurred on by Pound, who persuaded Harriet Monroe to devote an issue of Poetry to the group, under Zukofsky’s editorship. There followed the establishment of the Objectivist Press, funded by Oppen and called To Publishers—it set its cap against commercial publishing, producing work by Oppen and Reznikoff before going out of business—and the publication of An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932).
The anthology admitted work by Williams, “Marina” by Eliot (since Pound was in the background more forcefully than Williams), “Yittischer Charlston” by Pound, and work by Basil Bunting. Lorine Niedecker, with her difficult, impacted “series” poems, and Muriel Rukeyser, with her sequences, though not included by Zukofsky, are also associated with this group. Gertrude Stein might have been admitted, since much that they were promulgating already existed in her books and her desk-drawer manuscripts. Zukofsky, for a time the group’s spokesman, produced a polemic, political in part (the group tended strongly, despite the presence of Eliot in the anthology, to the left and, despite the presence of Pound, was largely Jewish in composition). The “individual word” had been degraded “in a culture which hardly seems to know that each word in itself is an arrangement.” Getting back to the word (not to be confused with the Word) meant reconnecting with the world, breaking through conditioning and prejudice, stripping away nuance and semantic weight, finding a new beginning. Such a beginning affects not only diction but syntax, not only syntax but the formal disposition of language on the page, its visual aspect.
Objectivist poetry is very much on the page, despite its insistence on sound values. Reviewing Bottom on Shakespeare in 1964, Marianne Moore remarked, “Louis and Celia Zukofsky are talented in the device of interruption to make text emphatic.” In Objectivist terms, “interruption” was visual and semantic. In effect Zukofsky prefigures and sometimes preempts the activities of the Language Poets. There was the “spaced colon,” a colon with space on either side of it; there were found poems, documentary poems, the poetry that is already there in language (and human narrative: it was the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, the Depression) and only needs to be retrieved. The debts to Imagism are clear but limited. The Objectivist poem is not closed, is not arrested out of time but continues beyond even the small frames that Carl Rakosi, Oppen and Reznikoff sometimes use.
It belongs to the social and the political world. This is a poetry without metaphysical speculation, though many of the poets associated with it did in time explore—to recover in their own terms—religious belief. But the political forthrightness of much of the work, Kenneth Rexroth’s for instance, kick-started a sensibility in American poetry that led to the political voice of the Beats. And politics has a sexual dimension, especially for women, one that poets at the time, and in the decades following, affirmed, writing into the open. Science and technology have a central place in this new poetry, displacing old mythologies with the gathering verities of poverty and violence on a new scale.
Though Oppen, Reznikoff, Rukeyser and Niedecker would eventually have found readers without the Objectivist program, I sometimes wonder whether Louis Zukofsky would have. He declared in 1948, “The test of poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection.” The kinds of pleasure his poetry affords, to which Pound responded, are very slow; in an age increasingly given over to an art that has rapid impact and is disposable, his place is not assured, though he is perhaps one of the major intelligences of twentieth-century poetry. I say “perhaps” because his critical prose can be almost as opaque as his verse. His clearest aphorism is “The best way to find out about poetry is to read the poems.” But how do we read his poems? One way in is through 29 Poems and 29 Songs, their relative conventionality alerting us to his experimental language, his music and themes. Robert Creeley comments, “It is a peculiar virtue of Zukofsky’s work that it offers an extraordinary handbook for the writing of poems.” But if we want to read, not to write, poems, what are we to do, moving on to his homophonous translations of Catullus, and finally to his enormous work, A?
His life isn’t much help. He was born in 1904 in Brooklyn of Lithuanian-Jewish parents; he studied at Columbia and took his MA in 1924. He taught English at the University of Wisconsin at the beginning of the 1930s, at the time of the Objectivists, traveled to Europe, then returned and settled in Brooklyn Heights, teaching, writing and editing, with his wife, the composer Celia Thaew. Paul Zukofsky, the violinist, is their son.
Pound, that supreme objectifier, is Zukofsky’s point of reference: “His objects are musical shapes.” As Peter Jones comments, Zukofsky’s sense of “objects,” “music” and “shapes,” and their relationship, are the crucial terms to understand if we intend to read Zukofsky’s work, an art of “omission,” in which sound takes precedence. We think of Swinburne, of Stein, but Zukofsky is like neither. His music is the poem as score rather than realization of score. It is a verbal score, not meant for singing but for the very different music that inheres in the voice. There is a puckish humor throughout, especially in the Catullus; but the closure of the poetry is such that by the time we get the joke it is no longer amusing. There is no imaginative center in A, no “panhandle,” as Frost would say, to get hold of. Zukofsky represents the new poetry that made Frost’s hackles rise.
Zukofsky died in 1978, the year after his work first appeared in England. The last decade of his life was not productive. Forty years earlier, in 1938—when the Objectivist exercise had foundered, Rukeyser had gone to Spain, the forces of fascism and communism were beginning to make common cause—Ezra Pound, deep in his polemics against Usura and its people, the Jews, dedicated his Guide to Kulchur “To Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting,” “strugglers in the desert.” Most readers will conclude that Zukofsky never got out of the desert, though many poets, like Creeley, will find in A and elsewhere a valuable resource.
Basil Bunting is another matter. He may have spent several years in Persia, on the edge of a real desert, yet the poetic landscapes he created are greener, often English—the England of his native Northumberland, with its history. “I hear Aneurin number the dead, his nipped voice,” he writes. Voice again, and “nipped,” suggesting Objectivist concision. But Bunting as an English poet could lend himself to a movement only in part. The rest of him was empirical, pragmatic; he trusted himself more than he trusted dos and don’ts. He might sit at Pound’s feet, but he never merely imitates Pound. Attending to the mature mastery of another writer, he sets out to find his own.
Legend has it that in his teens Bunting, il miglior schoolboy, “edited down” Shakespeare’s sonnets, rather as Pound was to do with Eliot’s The Waste Land, hacking out superfluous words, adjusting sentence structure, finding an essential poem under the accretions of convention. The volume in which he performed this surgery no longer exists, though later, in the 1920s, he showed Dorothy Pound how to do it. He was a born modernist, paring down Shakespeare at about the time that the Anglo-American modernists were formulating Imagist polemics and remapping the canon in London. He did not meet Ezra Pound until 1923. When he did he was not unprepared for Pound’s severe discipline.
Late in life he printed up a sheet entitled “I Suggest,” a positive version of Pound’s “A Few Don’ts”: “I. Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.” Poetry “lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life, just as music on the stave is no more than instruction to the player.” In Briggflatts he announces:
It is time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti
condensed so much music into so few bars
with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence,
never a boast or a see-here...
He regularly draws the analogy between poetry and music: “To me it seems that history points to an origin that poetry and music share, in the dance that seems to be part of the make up of homo sapiens, and needs no more justification or conscious control than breathing.” He adds, “The further poetry and music get from the dance and from each other, the less satisfactory they seem.” The points that follow from “I Suggest” are built on this governing principle.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
3. Use spoken words and syntax.
4. Fear adjectives; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape.
He adds a Horatian injunction, “Put your poem away till you forget it,” then:
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.
His final advice is of a piece with Eliot’s refusal to elucidate: “Never explain—your reader is as smart as you.” “Your reader” is not just any reader but the rare one with ears in his or her head.
Readers of Bunting’s work were rare indeed for much of his life. After decades of neglect, caused in part by a less than happy relationship with potential publishers (including Eliot), Bunting was “discovered” for general readers in the 1960s by Stuart Montgomery of the Fulcrum Press. Briggflatts (1966) and the Collected Poems (1968) made it impossible to overlook Bunting any longer. Critics hostile to modernism tried to find in him a further manifestation of dubious rhythms, sterile severity, distracting mannerisms, imprecise forms. Had he cared to, he could have pleaded “not guilty” on all counts. Nor was he a mere disciple or imitator but a natural modernist, the only British poet of whom this can be said.
He was born into a Quaker family in Northumberland in 1900. Northumberland provided him with a dialect he did not suppress, despite long exile. Quaker schooling encouraged his independence and distrust of institution and hierarchy. He spent six months in prison as a conscientious objector to National Service in 1918, and the next year went to London to become a journalist, studying for a time at the London School of Economics. In 1923, when he met Pound in Paris, he sub-edited Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review, then moved to Italy to work near Pound in Rapallo. There he met Yeats, who characterized him as “one of Ezra’s more savage disciples.” Pound put Zukofsky in his way and they became friends.
His life became nomadic, taking him through Europe and to America. In 1927–28 he was music critic for The Outlook. He first sensed that poetry might be something he could do when he recognized that the order and movement of sound in a poem might itself create a cohesion of the underlying emotions—a recognition he came to through music, that entirely connotative idiom.
Pound put fifty pages of Bunting’s poems in his Activist Anthology; Zukofsky put him among the Objectivists. In so far as Objectivism attempted to rationalize and justify what was an instinctive approach to form, Bunting could go along with it. But a form that arose out of diction and was not imposed upon it? Bunting never developed the sort of diction from which form could follow (as Zukofsky, Pound and Williams did), and belongs at best on the fringes of the group.
In the Second World War Bunting joined the Air Force (it was a different sort of war from the First) and was sent to Persia. After the war he stayed on with the British Diplomatic Service as vice consul in Isphahan, where he married a Persian woman in 1948. He left, only to return later as a journalist for The Times, but was expelled by Mossadeq. Persian language and literature interested him—he had taught himself the language in Rapallo—and he used his years in Persia wisely. After his expulsion he returned to Northumberland and began to write once more. He produced his best work and emerged into a kind of celebrity, in demand on the international reading circuit and honored as the last modernist survivor, the one few had heard of before, a largely benign, occasionally curmudgeonly, dinosaur. He died in Northumberland in 1985.
Like other modernists’, his work does not represent a break with tradition but a reformulation of it. Those who insist on his debt to Pound tend to overlook a prior, and more than equal, debt to Wordsworth, to Tudor and Elizabethan models, to Yeats, to the French symbolists, and despite a settled personal aversion, to Eliot. He adds to the list others “whose names are obvious”: Dante, Horace; among the Persians Manuchehri and Ferdosi; Villon, Whitman, Zukofsky. His Collected Poems, even the revised and expanded editions of 1987 and 1994, constitute a concise oeuvre (he tended to destroy work-sheets and unsuccessful poems), but an essential one. He wrote, he declares, when he “could do nothing else.”
The first collection, Redimiculum Matellarum, was published in Milan in 1930. Poems 1950 was published in Texas. The sequence entitled The Spoils (1951) did not appear in England until fifteen years later, followed by Loquitur (a revision of Poems 1950) in the same year. There is a remarkable unity in this body of work, evident in Briggflatts and the Collected Poems. The themes are timeless: poverty, particular loves, departure, exile, return, regret, being misunderstood (that great troubadour and modernist sentiment), solitariness, social disgust, literary flyting, and so on. Innovation is rightly, with Bunting, a matter of making the familiar fresh, renewing perception and refocusing feeling by the ways in which the poetry speaks and sees. It is not a question of finding new subjects. The bias, from the outset in “Villon” (1925) through to Briggflatts, is antiscientific and antipositivist, that familiar modernism which is disenchanted with the modern and denies itself many a resource (which Williams and the other Objectivists were willing to employ). Antagonisms define Bunting as much as positive passions do, for he was a self-embattled poet par excellence.
In the preface to his Collected Poems Bunting says magisterially, “Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. The book is theirs.” Reading the first poem, “Villon,” might abash boys and girls alike. It possesses some of the asperity of Nashe in its presentation of the theme of death, and more than a small echo of Yeats. It is not easy. Bunting often uses series—of proper names, verbs or nouns—to create rhetorical effects. In “Villon” he writes:
Abelard and Eloïse,
Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne,
Genée, Lopokova, all these
die, die in pain.
The resonance of the passage comes from associations already attached to the names and from the Yeatsian rhythm (“Easter 1916”) in which they are conveyed. But Bunting uses rhyme and a variation on the eight-syllable line with his own cunning elsewhere, not tying Celtic sound-knots as Austin Clarke does, but achieving purity of statement, a universal rather than a particular voice:
The Emperor with the Golden Hands
is still a word, a tint, a tone,
insubstantial-glorious,
when we ourselves are dead and gone
and the green grass growing over us.
In such passages, with controlled but not exaggerated development of back vowels, Bunting achieves unprecedented effects.
“Villon” is a satire, an elegy of sorts, a love poem, a “translation,” an “autobiography,” a dramatic monologue. This multiplicity of genre is something we come to expect. “Attis: Or Something Missing” is more narrowly based, satirizing T. S. Eliot, who appears as a eunuch (the Attis of Catullus’s famous poem, who castrates himself in order to serve the goddess Cybele). Bunting claimed his target was Lucretius and Cino de Pistoia—in fact, it is an aging Prufrock, for Bunting’s affective aversion to Eliot was as intense as William Carlos Williams’s. Eliot never warmed to his verse, and every publisher knows that this is the unforgivable sin.
The Spoils, written when he had turned fifty, is Bunting’s first major poem. In the first of its three sections the four sons of Shem, Noah’s son and father of the Semitic peoples, speak from exile in Babylon, where his tribe leads a profitable, usurious life, rootless within an alien society, rich without contentment. The second section describes, with a nice historical sense, an ancient social stability darkly threatened:
Have you seen a falcon stoop
accurate, unforeseen
and absolute, between
wind-ripples over harvest? Dread
of what’s to be, is and has been—
were we not better dead?
Note how the syntax holds, tense with fear and unease. In the third section, against the antique durability of the historical setting unsettled by the sons of Shem (for there are elements of Pound’s politics embedded in Bunting’s social vision), a modern European war is enacted in Africa and elsewhere. The juxtaposition of the sections reveals cultural incompatibilities and continuities. The war occurs against an image—only an image—of unsettled and predatory exile (Part I) and cultural permanence (Part II).
Briggflatts is subtitled An Autobiography, and we immediately think of Wordsworth’s Prelude. But no, it is not to be read literally. The first part peoples a Northumbrian landscape with images and draws them into coherence. We meet Rawthey, the spirited bull, and the less spirited tombstone maker, tracing his new inscription with his fingertips. Rawthey embodies natural passion, music, life, and the mason represents death. Against or between these polar opposites two lovers come, watching “the mason meditate / on name and date,” and respond to the world about them. They go home and make love before the fire in a language that combines literal detail and painful coyness: He unties “tape / of her striped flannel drawers” and at last “on the pricked rag mat / his fingers comb / thatch of his manhood’s home.” The rhyme and the conceit intrude an academic poise, or poison, into an otherwise compelling and erotic scene. The lovers then fall into mutual blame, regret, but (near doggerel in these verses) what’s done can’t be undone. The lovers emerge into a landscape altered. Rawthey is no longer “sweet” but “truculent, dingy.” The carved stone is the headstone of dead love.
In Part II the poet is embattled, accusing, out to show the bogus world what he’s made of. He succumbs to insincerity, degradation; he goes to sea and is forgotten. “Love is a vapour, we’re soon through it.” He goes to Italy, more tombstones and bulls, the bull here the Minotaur, approached in the transition of images between the music of birds and the complications of “Schoenberg’s maze.” Part III is tautly written documentary and description: what the poet sees and celebrates is vulnerable to exploitation, destruction. The war is approaching.
The Scarlatti passage is from Part IV, which begins with long lines. Bunting lets the cadence gradually dwindle. After a battle, after a flood, “I hear Aneurin...” The progression to the nipped statements of personal importance foregrounds the lines
Where rats go go I,
accustomed to penury,
filth, disgust and fury...
The fifth part is the most personal. He describes the new year, the change of seasons, men with their dogs. The past rushes on him, “silence by silence sits / and Then is diffused in Now.” Fixing his eyes on a star whose light has traveled fifty years to reach his “now,” he reflects on the love scene in the first part. The light of the star is poetically from that date, that past:
Fifty years a letter unanswered;
a visit postponed for fifty years.
She has been with me fifty years.
Starlight quivers. I had day enough.
For love uninterrupted night.
An oblique exorcism is enacted. “Starlight quivers” may be the star twinkling or a tear dilating on the poet’s eye. The “Coda” with which the poem ends is too deliberately poetic and conclusive: the objective world the poem has worked toward is dissipated in a wan pageantry.
Among Bunting’s other work are the “Odes”—in fact satires, love poems and meditations. His “Overdrafts” are translations of Latin, Persian and Italian, or of Zukofsky into Latin. He adapted Machiavelli in “How Duke Valentine Contrived,” retelling Machiavelli’s story in concentrated verse.
The most interesting exercise in this vein is “Chomei at Toyama,” written in 1932. He took Pound’s advice to young poets: translate, make the sense so it doesn’t “wobble.” “If ever I learned the trick [of writing poetry]... it was mostly from poets long dead whose names are obvious.” He prefers, he wrote in a review in the Criterion, “familiar comprehension” to “academic lucidity.” “Chomei at Toyama” is “a poem that, whatever its worth or worthlessness in itself, might have a useful influence: showing, for instance, that poetry can be intelligible and still be poetry: a fact that came to be doubted by the generation that took most of its ideas indirectly from Eliot.” “Chomei” concentrates and essentializes the Japanese original, Kamono Chomei’s prose Hojoki (“Life in a Dwelling One Jo [Ten Feet] Square”). He calls this “the most delicate contribution to the prose of the time” (i.e., 1153–1216), the Heian and early Kamakura period: the warrior caste held power; culture was not highly valued. A parallel with Bunting’s own time is clear. Chomei describes natural calamities rather than the fighting that ravaged the country. Other Japanese art similarly figures in natural detail the large events of the day.
Bunting brings into play other works by Chomei and other Japanese poets. But the English poem belongs not to Chomei but to Bunting. Part of the art of translation is assimilation of historical and geographical context. Another part is to bring the poem home, hence the curious anachronisms: Sixth Avenue, Riverside Drive, commuters. As in Briggflatts, there is stylized autobiography here:
I am out of place in the capital,
people take me for a beggar,
as you would be out of place in this sort of life,
you are so—I regret it—so welded to your vulgarity.
Bunting and Chomei know themselves from “the others.”
After the Objectivists—the Projectivists. The father of the movement is Charles Olson, a giant at six feet eight inches, who, in R. B. Kitaj’s crayon portrait, looks like a bespectacled, magisterial tortoise, a professorial tortoise, head as far out of its shell as it will go, and not likely to retract it, whatever the perils. Olson, who like Pound wanted all history and all human thought to be at his disposal, is credited with inventing the term “postmodern,” and much good and ill can be laid at his door. He was careless about himself, blundering like Doctor Johnson, leaving many projects and—in conversation—most of his sentences unfinished. At dinner parties he stuffed food in his pockets and once ate an oil rag. He was impecunious. In his later years he drank and drugged too much.
The son of working-class immigrants, Olson was born in 1910 in Worcester and grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a town north of Boston, on the sea. He studied at Harvard, taking his MA in 1933, becoming a substantial scholar and teaching there for a time. He worked for the Roosevelt government during the war, retaining from that period a profound optimism. Later he taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where as rector in the early 1950s he attracted creative artists and spearheaded the campaign against the New Criticism, which he and others found reductive and impoverishing. The college closed in 1956. In its short history (from 1933) a number of important artists and writers were associated with it: De Kooning, Kline and Rauschenberg, John Cage, John Dewey. Cid Corman’s Origin and Creeley’s Black Mountain Review were ambitious magazines, and featured the work of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ed Dorn, Gary Snyder, Jonathan Williams and people more directly associated with the school.
He later taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo but lived in Gloucester, his Paterson and the setting of Maximus. Olson is the father, Williams the grandfather of much of the radical formal experimentation of the last fifty years. He was more a theorist than Williams, more hands-on. He had no day job: teaching and poetry were for him a connected vocation, and one of the problems with the poems is the continual intrusion of the teacher into them.
At his funeral in 1970 Allen Ginsberg was of course present, chanting his Kaddish and getting in the way; carelessly (is it legend or fact?) stepping on a pedal that should have lowered Olson into the ground before the ceremony was quite ready for farewells. Ginsberg jammed the mechanism and the giant coffin hovered a little longer between worlds.
If he owes much to Williams, Olson also owes a debt to D. H. Lawrence, who impelled him to try to find an order in, or for, the “phenomenal world which is raging and yet apart.” Alfred North Whitehead, too, helped Olson define what the human in humanism might be, rather than what it was. Robert Creeley quotes Whitehead’s phrase describing the human: “ego object in field of objects,” getting the proportion right by reestablishing the “object” nature of “ego.” These mixed antecedents alert us to the fact that we cannot read Olson as a linear descendant of Pound or Williams, or Maximus as an unproblematic child of the Cantos and Paterson. They are themselves only remotely, and tetchily, related. What the three big poems have in common is that they are all unfinished and unfinishable.
Olson urges his reader to take risks, and not only in the poem. Lawrence was a moralist, and so is he; the disruptions both propose are radical. The “first fact” of our existence is space, not time. This adjustment, half completed in Williams, sets Olson in a different world from Pound, despite Pound’s enormous scope, for what Pound conflates into the present poem is drawn from a hundred histories, and points to moments within those histories.
Olson’s poetic material is drawn from as many sources as Pound’s, though sources perhaps not so intensely possessed as Pound’s were. Pound’s voices are located, and their interplay with other voices depends on the fixity, the fact, as he sees it, of their location. Olson, for his part, enters the poem from all sides, bringing material from various places. What matters is not where materials come from so much as what they do when they arrive (the same might, mutatis mutandis, be said of Eliot’s approach, though to mention his name in this context is perilous).
In 1950 Olson wrote the essay “Projective Verse,” the manifesto of a school that would include in its intensive, informal seminar room Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley and many other figures, under the steady eye of Olson himself. Projectivism took its bearing from the writings of Pound (at a time when even mentioning Pound was an act of courage) and Williams. Poetry, Olson declares, is an “open field” through which the poet transfers energy to the reader—but only the reader who is prepared, and preparation is a discipline as much of opening the ear as of clearing it of the conditionings of more traditional verse and the prejudices of preconception. “Yes, yes, we must, must, must get rid of the drama, at all costs—I mean, even get rid of narrative—the temptation, you hear?” Thus he spoke, meaning it, in a manner of speaking. Guy Davenport declares, “A good half the time in the classroom his students didn’t know even remotely what in the name of God he could be talking about.”
The poetic unit is no longer syllable, stress, foot, line or variable foot, but the “breath” unit of phrases spoken, and the way the poem falls on the page—its visual aspect—is central to its effect. The art of poetry becomes at once fully aural and fully visual, an integration of the senses. The source of the poem is the body and being of the poet; the poem should engage the body and being of the reader.
Olson’s most important books of poetry are In Cold Hell, In Thicket (1953), The Distances (1960), the vast Maximus Poems (1960–68), which begin as letters and are eventually as varied as and more substantial than Paterson and perhaps more significant, and Archaeologist of Morning, published posthumously (1971). Of his prose books one is indispensible, Call Me Ishmael (1947), about Melville and about America, a volume in which an American critical imagination, of the kind that produced In the American Grain, reaches another high-water mark. Melville is Olson’s deeper conscience. His poem “The Kingfishers” is the best way into his work: Guy Davenport calls it “the most energetically influential text in the last thirty-five years,” composed in 1949 in response to the Pisan Cantos, the end of the war, the beginning of something—but what? Davenport calls it “a canzone that divides decisively modern from postmodern poetry, the theme states that when our attentions change, our culture changes.” It would seem that the Projectivist theories grew out of practice, the experience of writing this poem in the great darkness of Pound’s magnificently fragmentary “contrition,” a contrition we have already seen had a hubris of its own.
What does not change / is the will to change
He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He
remembered only one thing, the birds, how
when he came in, he had gone around the rooms
and got them back in their cage, the green one first,
she with the bad leg, and then the blue,
the one they had hoped was a male...
And then the voices change, there are the ruins, there is Cambodia, there is anthropology, lost cultures, lost value systems, inferred, flickering behind an alien language. A whole raft of cultures has been abandoned and new bearings are being found in continents where colonialisms almost erased the vital cultures.
...if I have any taste
it is because I have interested myself
in what was slain in the sun...
The Maximus poems Davenport regards as “variations of Keats’s nightingale ode,” an interesting if not a helpful observation. What stable Chinese culture is to Pound, the fluid Mayas are to Olson; what the arts and political craftinesses of the Renaissance are to Pound, geology is to Olson. “A movement is closed” by Maximus, Davenport says, “a movement that began with Thoreau and Whitman, when America was opening out and possibilities were there to be stumbled over or embraced. Olson is the other term of this movement. He is our anti-Whitman (like Melville before him).”
Olson’s impact had much to do with his openness to experience. He came to poetry from a wider world than many, from the political projects of the New Deal. He was a highly literate and scholarly man but not literary in the way of Pound or Stevens. He had the kind of tolerance that is intolerant of the less liberal, the authoritarianism of one who doubts the legitimacy of earlier cultural authority. So he invents his movement, and the laws are set out in capital letters. We mentioned breath. There is also “OPEN, or what can else be called COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form.” The poem has to be a continuous “energy discharge.” “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION... USE USE USE the process at all points,” etc. This is the counsel of the modern TV cameraman who allows not more than three seconds’ rest on any image. “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.” Everywhere physiology is privileged over psychology.
Readers of Olson, like readers of Pound, fragment him. He is too big for the beginner, too big for people well along the way. Even his friend and “heir,” Robert Creeley (b. 1926), essentializes him in a useful Selected Poems. Creeley is a fine advocate of Olson; he has been a fine editor, too. His recitals of his own poems inspire his audiences. Those who purchase Creeley’s books and take them home to a silent room find them very silent poems. There is a large body of work, much of it in a short measure, but the short line is not necessarily taut; the absence of semantic nuance gives a precision that requires precise and interesting objects. The plainer the language, the more short-breathed the rhythms, the more fascinating the subject matter must be. Those who learn their language from Williams and Pound set themselves a steep challenge. Much is left behind by both poets, deliberately, in the interests of going forward into new terrain with new instruments. The terrain is no longer so new. It is possible for a poet who works with the semantic richness of Pound, or Auden, or Larkin, to elicit through a play of ironies the latencies and the absences within the modern world. For Creeley, as for English-born Denise Levertov (1923–1998), who in the wake of Creeley went to Black Mountain College and was one of Olson’s few distinguished woman disciples, too much has been jettisoned without enough being put in its place. An enormously capacious mind is needed to bring off with any authority the refining challenges that Olson proposes.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Levertov’s fame in Britain was high: she was an English bridge (a complex one) to the Black Mountain and to an American poetry that promised new directions. But her removal to the United States and her establishment there of a highly successful academic and poetic career meant that she was occluded. Her formative years—she was educated at home by a Russian-Jewish father who converted to Anglicanism and became a priest and a scholar—gave her many of the metaphysical interests that her later work, and her sense of the poem’s mission, developed. She married an American G.I. in 1947 and moved to France, living near Robert Creeley, who became a friend and pointed her toward Black Mountain and the “great talkers,” Olson and Duncan. One of her rules: “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.” Vietnam changed that: she became a social poet who wanted to make a difference. She published more than thirty books.
Robert Duncan (1919–88) worked with, and then in some ways against, what he learned from Olson. He gathered into his field of reference Gertrude Stein (who frees one from some of the strongest chains, herself chaining her followers with bands of humorous steel), Lawrence (whom he reads differently from Olson), Pound, H.D., Moore, Stevens, even Edith Sitwell. Everyone is invited except Frost and Eliot. James Dickey bridled at Olson’s postmodern. Dickey had a troublesome relationship with the work of Duncan, who, he said, had that “old pagan sense of the poem as a divine form of speech which works intimately with the animism of nature”; but he was “one of the most unpityingly, pretentious poets I have ever come across”: pagan and pretentious, divine and self-indulgent. What did Dickey make of “The Torso,” celebrating the male form, celebrating in a way more direct than Ginsberg does with his sudden affronts the fact of the male homosexual:
Most beautiful! the red-flowering eucalyptus,
the madrone, the yew
Is he...
So thou wouldst smile, and take me in thine arms
The sights of London to my exiled eyes
Is as Elysium to a new-come soul
If he be Truth
I would dwell in the illusion of him
His hands unlocking from chambers of my male body
such an idea in man’s image
rising tides that sweep me towards him
...homosexual?...
In later life Duncan never stopped talking. Earlier on, judging from the scale of his work, he never stopped writing. He is among the first poets to introduce in a candid and erotic sense his homosexuality into his verse, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. As early as 1944 he wrote his important essay “The Homosexual in Society,” blotting his copy-book for two decades. Yet if the poet’s body is at the heart of poetic articulation, that body should recognize and acknowledge itself. If the poem engages experiences of love, lust or arousal, surely part of that experience is in the nature of the person that elicits a response, and there are important considerations in being specific, which also entails being truthful. Truthfulness should not be offensive: Duncan’s essay is moralizing and, in the light of the emerging work of Frank O’Hara and others, narrowing. He was didactic and severely responsible, in ways that set him apart, during the Vietnam period, from writers like Denise Levertov, with whom he had shared part of an education. He is curiously noble in his consistency and his insistence on contrary clarities.
There is something cloyingly benign about the tone of some of his verse as about his delicacies. He does not indulge in “camp,” but he does at times deploy a language of effeminacy, of exaggerated delicacy, which cries out for a tincture, however slight, of irony. This is true of some of his erotic writing, where he mixes registers and tones from various periods to orchestrate a kind of universal experience. Even in the famous poems, it can sound silly. One of his great services was in helping to restore H.D. to the canon, and to do his best for Mary Butts and other writers who, in his view, had been written out of the century too casually. He was himself, in his early career, rejected not on the grounds of his poems but of his sexuality, quite explicitly, by editors including John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon Review. Other magazines followed suit. What did Pound make of him, Pound with his exceptionally harsh views about homosexuality?
Olson’s followers in Britain have chosen to make their own spaces, as though association with the conventional machines of dissemination—commercial publishers, the BBC, the “reading circuit”—would compromise and misdirect the work. Olson’s most intelligent and difficult English advocate is the Cambridge academic J. H. Prynne (b. 1936), who began in the wake of the Movement, writing tautly formal and rather “exquisite” poems, and found his way into Olson, on whom he has written. In his own poetry, with austere-seeming scrupulousness he sets out to trace the unedited, untidied ways in which the mind moves in a world of facts and ideas. Yet a certain tidying does occur, for no mind could move with the artful purity, the lateral coherences, of the poems he has written, developing a variety of formal strategies. Experience in his poems endeavors to be faithful to a source outside and a source within, to the “objective” and the “subjective” world. Without being discursive, his poems require discursive reading. An austere patristics encircles his work, yet it can be directly engaging. Some readers suggest an analogy between his poetry and that of John Ashbery, but Prynne’s later poems require elaborate exegetics for the reader to make even prosodic sense of them, while Ashbery’s, like the best poetry of any age, require merely imagination. Prynne is misread as a New York School poet by those unfamiliar with Pound, Williams and Olson. He is, like them, didactic, with the added austerities of the Leavisite Cambridge tradition.
Associated with his name are poets who have been his students or who have toiled in the vineyard with him. In 1987 Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville assembled an anthology of relevant work, A Various Art. One of the most accessible and rewarding of the seventeen poets included is John Riley.
I have brought it to my heart to be a still point
Of praise for the powers which move towards me as I
To them, through the dimensions a tree opens up,
Or a window, or a mirror. Creatures fell
Silent, then returned my stare.
Or a window, or a mirror. The shock of re-
Turning to myself after a long journey,
With music, has made me cry, cry out—angels
And history through the heart’s attention grow transparent.
By the time of his death, at the age of forty-one, Riley’s poetry had achieved an importance beyond the trends of the day. Significant though his poems were in the 1960s and after, their value goes well beyond the context in which they were formed, and which they helped to shape for others. His is a poetry of integrity and vision: precise observation and wit coexist with beauty of image and rhythm, beauty in a timeless sense. Born in Leeds in 1937, Riley served in the Royal Air Force from 1956 to 1958, during which time he began to learn Russian. He read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and became a teacher. In 1966, with the poet Tim Longville, he helped set up the Grosseteste Press, a primary vehicle for the Cambridge poets, and in 1968 the Grosseteste Review. In 1978 he was attacked and murdered near his home in Leeds.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947–75) was among the dazzling possibilities of a new poetry. She too died young. Her critical book, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry (1978), promised to draw together strands that had hitherto been distinguished by separation: Empson and Wittgenstein as well as the (in Britain) still new- and rebarbative-seeming forces of formalism and structuralism. Her mature poems, too, probe the nature of poetic statement in relation to a life lived in the world and in language. Some critics have been harsh on the awkwardness of her later formal writing, as though technical incompetence produced the rhythmic and syntactical problems. In my view the effects were intended, ways of apprehending and ways of distancing. In her early work her language of critical reading and her poetic language are close and natural; it was against this naturalness that her later verse moved, in the interests of a more rigorous and inclusive process. “With great brilliance and courage,” wrote J. H. Prynne, “she set fear against irony and intelligible feeling against the formal irony of its literary anticipations.”
An English poet of the generation before the Cambridge School, himself a graduate of Cambridge, belongs (a little uneasily) in this company: Charles Tomlinson. He comes from a working-class background in the Potteries—Stoke-on-Trent, “a land / Too handled to be primary—all the same / The first in feeling”—where he was born in 1927. He didn’t suffer the “soft oppression of prosperity”; he remembers seeing a reproduction of van Gogh’s Sunflowers in a dentist’s waiting room as a boy—an early epiphany. He takes nothing for granted; nothing is second nature to him. The worlds of nature and of art he holds in his hands, in his mind and in his language with heightened wakefulness. Even mist and dream become crisp and sharp in a poetry that refuses to blur. This refusal is an aspect of his prosody quite as much as of his diction. “The hardness of crystals, the facets of cut glass; but also the shifting of light, the energising weather which is the result of a combination of sun and frost—these are the images for a certain mental climate, components for the moral landscape of my poetry in general.” This is an early statement, but it holds true of his later, peopled and concentratedly political work. Hardness, cut, light, sun and frost; mental climate, moral landscape. Later he speaks of his poetry as being, like that of certain French poets he admires, a process of sensuous cerebration. In civic terms the values the poems propose are justice, balance, receptivity, a language that is moral and aesthetic at the same time.
He got to grammar school and then to Cambridge in the heyday of Leavis. Tomlinson was interested in film and the graphic arts and has made a secondary career of his graphic work. His own “presence” in his pictures, as in his poems, is often that of an editor: his paintings occur, the creative act is in essentializing them, in choosing which parts to cut out and preserve.
Donald Davie as a young man tutored him at Cambridge and they established a lasting friendship. Tomlinson taught Davie to see—architecture in particular; and Davie taught Tomlinson to read—syntax in particular. Tomlinson was hostile to what he saw as the narrowness of the Movement, with which Davie was associated. In poems like “No More Foreign Cities” he answers that narrowness (one of Kingsley Amis’s obiter dicta, that we want no more poems about foreign cities, was the provocation) from the exotic actuality of the wider world, of different cultures, climates and lights. He is repelled by fashions and reductive rules and maintains a lively interest in other arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, music—and in travel. He is a peripatetic poet, leaving his cottage in Gloucestershire for Italy, America, Latin America, celebrated abroad even as he is at times neglected at home. He travels in language, too, by means of translation. His versions of the Russian of Fyodor Tyutchev, the Spanish of Antonio Machado, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz (especially), of Italian and French poets, are a significant second body of poetic work. He edited the seminal Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (1980), which demonstrated the centrality of the practice throughout the history of our magpie literature, and how attitudes to translation and strategies of translation have evolved over six centuries.
Ezra Pound features in his anthology, and Tomlinson has found modern American poetry crucially enabling. Wallace Stevens was the star he initially steered by. In later work his guide has been Williams, also Oppen, Moore, Zukofsky; and he has an abiding interest in Pound over Eliot. His book Some Americans (1981) records personal debts to Williams, Moore, Zukofsky and others.
His verse is invariably fastidious. His images are seen not once, but at different times, from different angles; “eye” and “I” are gradually effaced by the full complexity of the thing, idea or story explored. He recognizes a romantic impulse in himself and opposes it, trying to write what is, not to personalize the world but to give it its own valency. Thus when he evokes in “Assassin” the scheming murderer of Trotsky in Mexico, he finds a whole voice for the man, gets inside his experience and lets a politics entirely anathema to him find articulation (ironized by the action).
In the 1970s he described his themes as being place and the return, almost in the spirit of Hardy. He quotes Lawrence: “All creative art must rise out of a specific soil and flicker with the spirit of place.” He adds: “Since we live in a time when place is threatened by the violence of change, the thought of a specific soil carries tragic implications.” The poems about the depredations of modern Bristol, where he was professor of English for many years, and about his own native landscape in the Potteries (poems written during the long final illnesses of his parents when his revisitings were painfully real and regular) touch on those “tragic implications.” He frequently contrasts the suggestive ruins of past civilizations with the deliberately ruined cityscapes of modern Britain. “The Way In” is one such poem, in which “the avarice and callous utopianism” of the 1950s and 1960s issued in damage as severe and more lasting than that inflicted by the Luftwaffe in the War.
It is not surprising that his first readership was in the United States rather than in England. The Necklace, his first substantial publication, made an impact only in America. He emerged at a time when British poetry was “in denial,” the austerities of the postwar reflected in a verse rebelling against the excesses of the 1940s and verbal comfort of any sort. Yet with the period he shares an English disgust with certain forms of excess, especially the confessional verse that emerged in the 1960s. In “Against Extremity” he rejects the willed extremism of poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. His third book, Seeing Is Believing, was published in America in 1958 and in England two years later. In 1963 A Peopled Landscape appeared, a title chosen deliberately to answer those who regarded his poems as coldly inhuman. His first major collections, The Way of a World and Written on Water, appeared in 1969 and 1972. In “Prometheus,” about the interplay between art and the world and the treacherous ideologies of Romanticism (his point of departure is Scriabin’s elaborate symphonic work “Prometheus” and the Russian Revolution, registered in provincial Britain over the crackling airwaves), and in “Swimming Chenango Lake,” Tomlinson’s two characteristic voices come into their own. One is intellectual, meditative, feeling its way through ideas as embodied in individuals and in art; the other, with all the physical senses, engages specific landscapes and images from the natural world. The poems on the French Revolution, its hopes and betrayals, taken together constitute an essay on romantic illusions, political manipulation and excess. There is in his work a third voice, in the free-verse poems he calls “bagatelles”—anecdotes, generally slight and witty witnessings to things that he has seen or heard on his travels. They relate to Lawrence’s more casual poems, without, as it were, imposing an “I” on the experiences.
In 1985 his first Collected Poems was published, and the variety of his achievement could be appraised. One would expect a poet of such meticulousness to be caustic and sparse, but there is abundance in his work—abundance of resource, thought and visual generosity. “According objects their own existence” was his purpose in the first book; the task throughout seems to have been to record the otherness of the world. Like Elizabeth Bishop, he begins in an attenuated symbolism, deploys synesthesia, draws analogies between the arts; in time, however, objects settle into being themselves. In “The Impalpabilities” he writes (in a version of Williams’s triadic triplets):
It is the sense
of things that we must include
because we do not understand them
the impalpabilities
in marine dark
the chords
that will not resolve themselves